Rum, Romanism and Rebellion

I have been writing a great deal about Kathleen Dunbar’s actions during this campaign and how they demonstrate a lack of respect for opinions and views other than her own. She seems to think that large segments of the community should just be ignored, and if they are still going to express themselves, that they should somehow be silenced. Luckily for democracy in our community, she is so clumsy about the silencing, that she just makes a fool of herself.

Let me give you an example of an incident from several years ago.

I sit on the city’s Citizen Sign Code Committee. This means that I sit on a committee that suggests to Mayor and Council changes in the city’s regulations regarding signs for businesses. In most communities, this would be handled by a land use or zoning committee, but for some special reasons involving a Life magazine photo from the 1970’s (I’m not making that up!), it is handled by a separate committee.

Anyhow, I am at work one day and I get an e-mail from the secretary for the committee. She is actually a city employee, and not a member of the committee. The e-mail was actually a reply to an e-mail that I didn’t see, but the reply was “cc’d” to me. It said, if I remember right:

No, Ted is not an elected official, are you Ted?

Of course, this seemed very strange. It was only “cc’d” to me, the actual recipient had a city government address.

I wrote back and pointed out that other than being a precinct committeeman, I was not an elected official. I told her that my brother is, and that may be why there is confusion. I asked why there was a question about this.

She wrote me back and said that there was a question from Kathleen Dunbar’s office as to whether or not I could legally serve on the committee because they thought I was in the State Legislature. She also said that the staff member that e-mailed her was a bit miffed that she communicated with me. This whole matter, the staff member said, was supposed to be “discrete.”

Of course, the height of discretion would have been to, I don’t know, check my first name. As it turns out, members of the legislature can apparently serve on city committees. They don’t because few of them would want to cut out in the middle of session to hang out in a basement meeting room to discuss the number of days a grand opening banner can be up.

A couple of months later, my term was almost up. I received a letter in the mail thanking me for my service and telling me that I was ineligible for re-appointment because of term limits. I thought, okay, I’ve been on for a while, I was even chairman for a year. I’ll move on.

Then, I got a call from José Ibarra, the councilmember that appointed me. He asked me if I wanted to get re-appointed. I told him that I didn’t think that I could. He said, don’t worry about it. Turns out, there are term limits for these city committees. But, the statute says there is an exception for “technical committees.” The list of technical committees is right there, at the top is the Citizen Sign Code Committee.

I found out later that the city clerk’s letter was sent at the behest of someone in Dunbar’s office.

The thing that makes this most bizarre is that I am in the minority of most of the votes of the Sign Code Committee. There are two other “pro-neighborhood” people on the committee, but they often cannot make the meetings, meaning I can’t get a second to most of my motions. What grand danger am I causing by being on the committee?

Just the fact that I expressed an opinion was enough of a reason for Dunbar and her supporters (both incidents were prompted by a member of the committeee) to think that I needed to be silenced. It is amusing in some ways, given how obscure the sign code is and how low the stakes seem to be, but also frightening.

NB - This incident prompted the best retraction of all time. The Tucson Weekly wrote an item in the Skinny poking fun at Dunbar for confusing me with my brother. But, they messed the names up too. The next week, the ran a correction and said, “I guess we are as stupid as Kathleen Dunbar is.”