A brick – the Civic Sleeping Sickness award – to the citizens of Solana Beach for failing to inspire so much as one – one – challenger to run against the three City Council incumbents seeking re-election in November.
Who are these sitting council members – the political equivalents of Jesus, Mary and Joseph?
Granted, there appears to be something in the air, a sort of malaise.
The overall number of candidates in North County council races appears to be down dramatically this season.
San Marcos, for example, has just one insurgent running against two incumbents; Del Mar has an incumbent and two challengers running for three open seats. (You have to like those odds.)
Nevertheless, the free ride to re-election in Solana Beach suggests that the torpor is especially heavy in that coastal town.
It's not as though there aren't issues, as well as incumbents, to kick around.
You would have thought the Machiavellian undermining of the Cedros Crossing downtown development might have charged up a pro-growth candidate or two.
On the other hand, a pro-environmental candidate might have set his sights on Joe Kellejian, the lone member of the council who was four-square in support of Cedros Crossing, which many in Solana Beach thought too massive.
In the past, sea walls and sand replenishment have been rich fodder for a political argument.
As it is, the council now must wrestle with the weighty issue of whether to spend 10 grand for a beauty contest or save the money and simply appoint the three incumbents – Lesa Heebner, David Roberts and Kellejian.
The arguments for going ahead with the election? I can think of only one:
It offers the winner of the most votes to preen as the fairest of the other slam dunks.
The decisive arguments for wholesale appointments?
Well, there are 10,000 of them.
A bouquet – the Good Old College Try award – to the three candidates who have stepped up to challenge the three incumbents running for re-election to the board of the MiraCosta Community College District.
Once called “MiraCozy” for its collegial governance, handsome salaries and quiet, often uncontested elections, MiraCosta has been turned into a battleground campus, the Ohio of North County board elections.
As a result of a trumped-up palm tree scandal and botched investigation, the college's accreditation is up in the air.
Attorney Leon Page, a watchdog with smart teeth, has filed a lawsuit over the board's granting former President Victoria Richart a mind-blowing $1.6 million severance package, much of which Page persuasively argues is a gift of public funds.
Given the campus unrest, it's fitting that each of the incumbents faces a stiff challenge from a resident in her geographical area. The only regret is that just one of the board's pro-Richart majority – current board chairwoman Carolyn Batiste – is on the firing line.
As for the other two incumbents – Gloria Carranza and Jacqueline Simon – they, too, deserve to be held accountable for their effectiveness (or lack of it) in the series of events that culminated in Richart receiving her questionable ransom in an almost hysterical early-morning vote.
A withered bouquet – the White Elephant for Rent award – to the Escondido City Council for bowing to unforgiving financial realities and voting unanimously to end its role as Daddy Warbucks, ever ready to bail out the Californian Center for the Arts, Escondido, at the end of the budget year.
Aspiring to be the cultural center of North County, the gorgeous center at Grape Day Park was from its conception an expensive, finely tuned economic engine, an $85 million Ferrari in a city with a Chevrolet base of support.
As the council signaled, it's too early for a eulogy. The arts center is too valuable an asset to write off as a loss. It may be a conceptually flawed diamond, but it's still a diamond.
Nevertheless, the latest cost-cutting strategy – renting the performance space to production companies, thereby ceding control of programming – must sound like a faint death knell to the center's hopeful founders.
In the 1980s, they dreamed of a first-class cultural magnet pulling in strong support from patrons around the region. Fortune, the thinking went, favored the daring.
How long ago those heady days seem.
Only we gray elephants remember.
Logan Jenkins: (760) 737-7555; logan.jenkins@uniontrib.com.
