Oceano board appoints ex-official and newcomer to vacant seats

A ROAST AND A TOAST TO THE NEW OCSD BOARD MEMBERS

If you listen to people talk in Pismo Beach and Arroyo Grande, you’d think they were doing Oceano a favor by offering to buy the town’s water. Oceano is to the Five Cities what the Clampetts were to Beverley Hills.

People know less about the town than they do about its characters, so when you mention Oceano to anyone who has lived here less than 20 years, they say either, “Oceano? Where is that?” or, “Oceano? Oh, that!” referring to their image of those scruffians you see being hauled out of the shrubbery at the intersection of Grand Ave. and Hwy. One. At seven in the morning, and still looking sleepy, they are made to sit on the curb in public view –when everyone else is on their way to work;– while the Sheriffs take their time righting up tickets for sleeping in the plover habitat and other crimes…

Like pissing down a well, for example. This was one of the issues raised by the husband of District Director Lori Angello, during district discussions about raising the water bill. With righteous indignation, Mr. Angello urged the board to muster the financial resources to put a lid on the well (Oceano has five water wells), and for once, this suggestion was met with unanimous approval.

Before leaving the podium and the bright lights of the televised proceedings, Mr. Angello hiked up his blue jeans with pride (which was good, because the locals sitting behind him began betting amongst themselves that if he lifted his tee shirt, they could see his “crack”, and they weren’t talking about the earthquake fault.)

Oceano’s wealthier residents say the town has “an image problem” which should be “cleaned up.” At the last meeting of the board, suggestions ranged from planting palm trees, to using the town’s “excess ground water” to build public showers for the homeless. But no matter who gets elected or appointed to the district board, Oceano’s image remains that of a town populated with the “land rich and dirt poor.”

For a while, bureaucrats banished from positions in County government were able to lend their neo-metropolitan “air de prestige” to the town’s Community Services District. That is, until their pasts caught up with them, –as it usually does in a small town. At this point, in deference to all who have crawled out of the local bar on all fours at two in the morning, I must digress, if only out of humility to the fallen.

When I was in my twenties, I used to worry about whether people liked me or not. It seemed that nothing I did made people like me. But a barmaid at Camozzi’s once told me, “In this town, if you do something wrong, you might as well own up to it, because everyone is going to know about it. And if you do everything right, people are gonna’ resent you and make stuff up about you, anyway. So you might as well live your life the way you want to and enjoy yourself, ‘cause life is just a temporary problem anyway.” Yep, I’ve lived here long enough not to worry about such things—character assassination appears to be the local pastime; so much so, it’s enough to make you believe in reincarnation….

Take Mitch Cooney, the OCSD’s former General Manager, for instance. Before he came to the OCSD, Cooney was the clerk supervisor of San Luis Obispo Superior Court’s Civil Division. Cooney ruled the roost until three of his female coworker’s complained that he sexually harassed them, whereupon he left San Luis Obispo, and took up his seat of authority at the OCSD. That lasted for a number of years, during which time he gave himself an $18,000.00 dollar a year raise–in one fell swoop– with the approval of District Directors. Then, to keep Oceano’s Fire Dept. on the cutting edge of the fight against terror, Cooney championed the purchase of a piece of “fire-fighting equipment” which could purportedly “see through walls in an emergency.” As it was explained at the district meeting, it was useful in a case “where the smoke was so thick that the inhabitant could not be seen with the naked eye.” The cost was $35,000.00. But that did not seem to deter the district board, who wanted to do their part for “homeland security,” after 9/11. They okayed the purchase.

As for me, I could only imagine Cooney driving around half-tanked with his fellow Kiwanis Club coharts (these included the Davis’s who used to be in charge of water billing and maintenance at the water yard; and former Sheriffs’ substation commander Martin Basti,) beaming his new toy at the walls of houses to see if the new equipment could make out the details of unsuspecting females in their underwear, getting ready for bed. The locals held court over beer at the Eagles, discussing whether those four government employees conducted more official business at the Kiwanis Club than they did at work.

Cooney got run out of Oceano for attempting to condemn private property so he could then sell the property to a 501(c) (3) private non-profit. But he met his match when he went up against the property owner, Pamela Dean, a thirty-year veteran employee of the State of California. Cooney’s plan was defeated when Dean decided to run for the district board and won. During the same election, Jim Hill won a seat on the board after promising his voters that he would televise the district meetings and bring new transparency and accountability to the district’s operations. Hill came through on his promise. And change was in the air.

But Oceano was still “in of the soup,” as surfers like to say when they refer to that place between the shore and the breakers, where the rip tides can be the strongest. It’s the place where you can’t get in, and you can’t get out. New transparency shed light on years of fiscal mismanagement, but it would take some time to get out of the soup.

After several months, Cooney was asked to resign. But a second banishment did not deter Cooney’s blazing, bureaucratic trail. From Oceano, Cooney went on to Pismo Beach to administer the town’s new parking plan. Cooney shortened the hours of free parking, put in parking meters and kiosks and hired Mark Koppas at $80,000.00 a year to be the new parking czar of Pismo Beach. In addition to being the sole person in charge of parking enforcement, Koppas’ job duties include collecting the coinage, ticketing cars, and handling the parking appeals—a direct violation of the Vehicle Code. But who cares? That’s Pismo Beach. If you ever feel like visiting Koppas, his office is located in the same building as Pismo’s Chamber of Commerce.

If politics were a “science”, then going to an OCSD board meeting would be like passing through a “black hole in space” only to emerge into the world of “anti-matter,” and a parallel universe (so the theory goes,) where everything we know appears backwards and turned upside down. Politics at the OCSD is the opposite of science, it’s a crap-shoot.

So, it seems only fitting that the only persons who expressed any interest in being appointed to the two empty seats on the board include a gambler, an alcoholic, a convicted sex offender, and an academic whose rap sheet bears more testimony to her political experience than her graduate coursework. These are candidates who truly represent the character and spirit of Oceano. In order to protect what is left of their reputations, I shall omit the names for the sake of a candid rundown of the candidates.

Though the gambler was eloquent and well versed, the board settled upon two candidates who appeared to best suit the town’s needs—the alcoholic and the convicted sex offender. The good news is, the board not only reflects the local character of the place, but the local needs of the town as well.

I first met one of the candidates while making calls to residents on behalf of the Democratic Party. I was quickly taken in by this person’s willingness to discuss politics, which many of my fellow voters seemed reluctant to do. She told me that she had considered running for the OCSD board but had not yet come to a decision. I encouraged her to take the step because she seemed enthusiastic about political grass roots action. She said she had spent many years working in the bureaucracy, and when I asked her which branch of government she had been in, she admitted that she had worked in Corrections, in Vacaville and at the California Men’s Colony. My unbridled enthusiasm came to a dead halt. I had been played. How could anyone with a soul spend thirty years keeping the human animal inside a concrete box?

We had a frank discussion about what it was like to work in the prison system and “how hard it must have been,” especially since my “voter” was not just a female in a workforce where the ratio of men to women was 10:1, but a woman of color. I asked her how she managed to survive the power plays and she frankly admitted that she had entered the field of corrections at the age of twenty-two, as a new mother with a child to feed. “I had to do what I had to do.” she said. But she was clearly proud of the fact that she had stuck with it to retirement. This was an achievement, but of what kind? How can you tell someone that thirty years of this kind of work is anathema? I tried to stay positive. But I felt like we were each on our own board, bobbing on the waves in morning haze watching each other drift further and further away….

As the conversation progressed, I could hear the ice clinking in her glass, and her voice got more fervent. She began to sound more and more like a politician. “If you’re good, then we aren’t gonna’ have any trouble. But if you break the law, I’m gonna’ arrest you. If you break the law, I’m gonna’ arrest you!”

(It is poetic justice to think back on that conversation and know now that the seat she won on Oceano’s board of directors will be shared with a former district director who was arrested for paying for a prostitute.)

Her words became slightly slurred. Yeah, you’ve got the authority, you’ve got the persona, I thought. But you probably watched a lot of innocent people get convicted while working your way to a nice retirement.

And now, you’re newly appointed and in charge again, in Oceano. So, now you’ve got a chance to make up for your crimes, your abuses of power which went unchecked because you knew you could get away with them. How will you respond when you have to chose between what’s best for you, and what’s best for the people of Oceano? You’re not outta’ the soup, honey. Don’t lose your board and don’t lose sight of where you are.

Now that I’ve got that off my chest, I’m looking forward to the next district meeting, which promises to be a history making event for the town of Oceano in many ways. Of the five members on the board, two are men and three are women. Two directors are of Spanish descent, one is of African American descent, and two are of Western European descent. (“White” is, after all, a state of mind.) The candidates who didn’t make the grade this time around included a woman who is a native New Yorker from Brooklyn, and a man who is a native Hawiian. And no one is admitting their age.

Just as physics posits a parallel universe that exists like a mirror opposit to the world as we know it, scientists are now discovering that these opposits–matter and anti-matter,– have similar qualities. What is even more startling is the fact that the subatomic particles which hold our universe in place can change their charge as they pass through time and space. When I read about it, I thought they could be talking about the OCSD…

“Neutrinos, elementary particles generated by nuclear reactions in the sun, suffer from an identity crisis as they cross the universe, morphing between three different “flavors.” Their antimatter counterparts (which are identical in mass but opposite in charge and spin) do the same thing.”

Anne Trafton, MIT News Office

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/neutrinos-0812.html

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