Lakeshore Gardens Candidates Forum

We’ve just returned from our first Carlsbad City Council Candidates Forum held this morning at 9 AM in the club house of The Lakeshore Garden’s Mobile Home Park on the southwest corner of Poinsettia and Avenida Encinas.

As we mentioned on our Twitter feed our first reaction was horror. But there is more to it than that. First off, it is amazing to us that the candidates actually show up for these meetings. There were maybe 55 people in the audience (most well over 60 years old) and most were residents of the Lakeshore gardens.
The candidates were already rolling through their opening statements when we arrived and while it’s nearly impossible to get a handle on what the candidates are about in three minutes, this is a little of what we picked up:

We missed Thomas K. Arnold’s statement but from what we heard later he wants to be on City Council because he believes he will do a good job. He said he runs a $7 million magazine business and knows that businesses, like City Councils, can not be run by one person so he will build a team. He buried both of his parents this year and he cares very deeply about the elderly. He also mentioned being a former columnist for San Diego Magazine.

Glen Bernard is undoubtedly the outsider independent candidate. For his statement he moved out onto the floor to be closer to the audience. After mentioning that he is one of the people responsible for bringing the Poseidon Resources Desalination Plant to Carlsbad he spent the rest of his time (and more) passionately discussing trees: trees destroying sidewalks, branches falling on his car, and the city wasting money to repair the sidewalks and driveways damaged by these trees. He also mentioned something about Norine Sigafoos, and a lawsuit the city filed against him.

When we looked around the room, however, the audience was earnestly and politely listening to what sounded to us more like a personal complaint letter to the City Manager, than a candidates position statement.

Keith Blackburn is a Carlsbad Police Sergeant (watch him in action in this video) who loves this city. After attending a street fair here as a visitor he loved the Village so much that he and his wife immediately began checking home prices and eventually moved to Carlsbad. He is also for a strong police and fire-fighting force and thinks we have the best of the best who just last night responded to two major accidents in the space of a couple hours.

Farrah Douglas wanted the audience to know that above all she is a longtime business owner and member of Rotary International where the motto is “Service before Self.” She says she has dedicated her life to serving Carlsbad most recently as a planning commissioner. She also wanted to reassure residents that there are no plans to change the zoning on the mobile home park and that the City was not interested in taking away their homes and that if they did the residents would know about it before hand. (This topic seemed to be the main theme of the entire forum).

Mayor Pro Tem and incumbent City Council person Ann Kulchin dove right in. Sometimes she can’t believe what she hears out of the mouths of the other candidates, she said. Her comment obviously directed at Glen Bernard and his desalination claim. As everyone knows, she and the Mayor have been behind the desal plant all along.

She then reprimanded Thomas K. Arnold: “When you join City Council you don’t build a team,” she said. “You join a team. And the captain of that team is the Mayor.”

It was entertaining to see Carlsbadistan’s good ‘ol girl of city politics step up to the mic and take charge of the proceedings. Ms. Kulchin went on to say that she is endorsed “by everybody” and that after 28 years on City Council she knows everything that’s been done and not done and why it’s been done or not done.

Her tone and demeanor suggested that she was rather put out by even attending the forum, let alone sitting on the panel with candidates who she believes don’t have a ghost of a chance at taking her seat or getting on the City Council at all. And while she’s clearly right, seeing the established power network in action was a little unsettling.

Evan Delaney Rodgers, the 19-year-old college student, got lost on her way to the forum, but it allowed her to get a better understanding of Lakeshore Gardens and how beautiful the neighborhood is. She wants everyone to know that she has not taken endorsements nor contributions from anyone. There is no special interest pressure on her campaign. She is running most of her campaign from her website Cleancarlsbad.com where she has a list of ideas that will help the community. The website has been visited over 20,000 times from every continent except Antarctica, but she says “There’s still time.”

In a race that she said is “setting spending records” she plans to run her entire campaign on less than $100.

With that the meeting was turned over to questions from the audience. Questions ranged from the barely intelligible rambles to the concise “Why do you want to be a City Council member.” And while none of the audience’s questions nor answers from the candidates were all that memorable it was enlightening to see the candidates sitting at one table and interacting with the public.

If more people attended these forums we think the election outcomes could be very different. On Thursday, October 23rd at 6 p.m. at the Dove Library, 1775 Dove Lane we’ll all get one more chance to see the candidates as the Carlsbad Chamber of Commerce sponsors a candidate debate.

We’re guessing that debate will be even stranger than this one.