Voice of the People: A Spectacular Fall

Wait just a cotton pickin’ minute! Red lights and sirens! Less than a month after a $75,000 election that nearly ripped the heart out of our comfortable bedroom community of Grand Terrace, checks and “other funds” totaling upwards of $572,836 were resting secretly in the city manager’s desk drawer un-deposited? Mayor Stanckiewitz publicly termed the city manager’s strategy of “once bitten, twice shy” justifiable in light of a couple of million dollars foolishly received by the city that was intended for other coffers. Learning curve, maybe, but in the middle of a full-blown, thermonuclear financial melt-down, is deliberate deceit the best course of action? Well, it’s a good thing that 61 percent of those who voted on Nov. 5 had the common sense to question authority. How would it have looked if, in addition to the $735,530 in net annual receipts to the general fund the city received beginning in January of 2013, and continuing for the foreseeable future, Measure C would have passed and a projected $1,200,000 would have been shoveled out of the starving pockets of the citizens and into the general fund every year? Well-timed indignant public reaction at the city council meeting aside, does the mayor really expect us to believe that his beloved city manager, who has been in lock-step with him for a solid four years and makes more salary than the real city manager San Bernardino hired to oversee the business of a population greater than 20 times that of Grand Terrace, didn’t divulge she was sitting on more than half a million dollars while she spent more than six months verifying the money belonged to the city? After all, how do you justify locking up parks, cutting the seniors off at the knees, losing a highly-skilled community development director and increasing police response times if there was “no financial emergency”? The city manager’s contract wasn’t renewed in October. Like the ISON comet, her tenure with Grand Terrace has more than managed a spectacular fall into the sun, rumored to be visible to the naked eye sometime in February.