Indio Pulls Mike Duran From CVMVCD Board

I traveled down to Indio's city council meeting today to observe their discussion of their representative on the board of the Coachella Valley Mosquito and Vector Control District, Mike Duran, who has been president of the board. A motion was made to replace Duran with Councilmember Gene Gilbert who has served on the board of the Vector Control District before and has a background in law enforcement (hey, that could be helpful). Councilmember Mike Wilson had quite a bit to say, accusing City Manager Glenn Southard of a Brown Act violation for stating to the Desert Sun that Mike Duran WOULD be removed at tonight's city council meeting. Rather than argue, Mayor Lupe Ramos Watson asked the city attorney his opinion as whether such a statement had appeared in the Desert Sun and whether it was a Brown Act violation. How civilized. I felt like I was in the British Parliament.

The city attorney responded that he did not recall seeing that quote in the newspaper, and that even if it did appear there it would not be a Brown Act violation as the powerful city manager can pretty much speak as he pleases, and the city council can, by vote, direct him to do otherwise if it chooses. I don't recall seeing that quote either and can't find it on the Desert Sun's website now. In this Desert Sun article Councilmember Gilbert says "We thought it would be best to put an elected official in there." No similar statement is attributed to Southard. IIRC, City Manager Southard said that he had made no such remark and that eveyone knows that the Desert Sun gets things wrong.

Councilmember Wilson also requested a gag order be placed on all Indio city staff and elected officials on the subject of the Vector Control District. You don't need an attorney to tell that any such rule would have to violate some law, besides being totally stupid.

Councilmember Ben Godfrey (check out his pic, will ya!)

praised Mike Duran but said it was important to have an elected official on the board of the Vector Control District.

When the vote on the motion came (with one councilmember absent) the Mayor called it unanimously (4-0) in favor, removing Mike Duran and replacing him with Gene Gilbert. But I thought I saw and heard only 3 yes votes. When the mayor called for votes opposed, Councilmember Wilson seemed to have his attention engaged elsewhere. Not a good moment to be sleeping. But after the mayor announced the results, Councilmember Wilson requested to revise his vote to a "nay," so the end result was 3-1 in favor.

THEN we moved on to public comments. Hmm, didn't we just read that it's a Brown Act violation to do it in that order? Councilmember Wilson made no objection. The first two people to make public comments, Greg Jacob and Raymond Mejik (wild guess at the spelling), read identical comments directed at City Manager Southard asking him why he spoke to the Desert Sun as he did. It was a ridiculous act, revealing that they were just tools in somebody else's political game.

A few commenters later was Vector Board Trustee Doug Walker who was there to praise Mike Duran, citing his experience in the pest control business. Oddly, one thing that consistently pissed off Don Gomsi was the Desert Sun referring to the CVMVCD as a "pest control agency." So if the CVMVCD is very much NOT a pest control agency, then why would it be helpful to have a background in the pest control business? Trustee Walker went on to praise Mike Duran with many fine generalities: honest, hard working, bathes regularly, etc. He cited no specifics. He did not praise Mr. Duran for putting a stop to the sexual harassment at the Vector Control District. Didn't praise him for making the budget process transparent. Didn't praise him for uncovering waste and abuse of government time at the District. Of course he really couldn't praise him for any of those things since he didn't do any of them. What he could have praised him for was recognizing at the last minute the overwhelming public opinion opposing last year's unnecessary tax increase for the Vector Control District, reversing himself and promising he would never make a similar mistake again. If I had been a little closer to the lectern and a lot faster I could have slipped him a note suggesting that. Upon the completion of Trustee Wilson's comments there was an outburst of applause that came from every individual in a two-row section that included the two people who got up earlier and read their machine-generated comments. So these were Duran's supporters. I didn't recognize any of them from any vector board meetings.

A little while later I saw Vector Board Trustee Bruce Underwood outside the building in conversation with Trustee Walker, but I don't know if he had been inside at the council meeting.

I believe that this means Trustee (and Vice President) John Fuschetti will preside over the Vector District board meetings. He was president of the board last year. During those meetings he was hard to hear, often failed to complete his sentences, frequently lost track of the process and had to be assisted every step of the way by Attorney Copeland.

Now for my further observations on the Indio City Council meeting apart from the issue of Mike Duran:

First, despite the fact that their website says city council meetings start at 6 PM, you've got to get the agenda to find out the actual starting time. Tonight's meeting started at 5 PM. Getting that agenda may prove a bit of a challenge, too. If you go to this page and click "Current Agenda" you go off to a super-duper service that would probably make some sense if the city had to serve up hundreds of different documents. But they're using it for only current agendas. There are only seven bodies that put their agendas there and currently four of them are empty. The other three are hosting one document each. It would be so much easier to just put three direct links to the PDFs on the city's website. Instead you click, click, click until you get to tonight's city council agenda which the damn thing serves up one page at a time, each page too large to fit on my screen and the zoom buttons don't seem to do a damn thing. There is no print button among the icons (some inscrutable) there, so you're going to have to get the PDF itself to print it. There is an obvious PDF button there. When you click it you will get an animated icon for a half minute or so telling you that the PDF is being generated (that seems terribly inefficient). The capper is that it tries to give you the resulting PDF via a popup. Who does not use a popup blocker these days? Maybe a few foolish souls. So if you don't notice your popup blocker alert (and I didn't the first three times) you'll just land back at the useless view of page 1. Man, who decided to go this way?

At the meeting I couldn't help but notice that Indio's attorney conducted himself in a way not too different from the attorney for Desert Hot Springs. He was deferential to and respectful of the city council, trying to give fair answers to questions, interrupting only rarely and apologizing when he did so. Attorney Copeland (at the Vector Control District), as I have observed before, is anything but deferential, respectful or helpful at the board meetings and is seated directly next to the president of the board, allowing her to have private conversations with him throughout the meeting.

I found it very interesting that after public comments the mayor asked the attorney and the city manager to respond to certain comments. I don't think I've seen that before.

The council chambers are quite nice, but they seem to have fewer seats than little Desert Hot Springs does at its city council meetings. For the benefit of those outside the area, Indio is the biggest city in Coachella Valley. I was expecting something quite a bit larger. There seemed to be a couple of firebrands in attendance and some comments were delivered with great gusto. It looked to me like the citizens of Indio (Indionians?) had their democracy well in hand and I didn't need to hang around for further details, so I departed.

UPDATE: KESQ managed to capture a private conversation between Councilmember Wilson and City Manager Southard and has a transcript and video here. There must be some history between those two. Councilmember Wilson's behavior and some of his statements gave me the impression during the meeting that he was new and inexperienced, so I was surprised that his official bio says he has been on that city council since 1995! Over 12 years! Maybe he just needs to cut down on his coffee.

YET MORE UPDATE: I am so impressed! I've just received an email from Mayor Watson saying she will forward my remarks about the city's website to appropriate staff for them to consider. Now I wish I'd complained about the lack of cookies and milk. We always have cookies and milk at DHS city council meetings. I thought everybody knew that.