The following letter to the editor was published in the Beach Reporter newspaper (TBRnews.com) on Thursday, March 15, 2012 in the Letters section. The Beach Reporter has a strict 250-word limit.
Long memory
I laughed when I learned Jan Cruikshank criticized Michael Robbins’ “Candidate Ranking” letter. I will be voting for Robbins’ three top-tier candidates: Carl Jacobson, Dave Atkinson, and Dave Burns.
It’s not surprising Cruikshank supports Robbins’ bottom-tier candidates – Cindee Topar, Cindy Mortesen, and Scott Houston. Houston is allied with the firefighter and police unions. He took police union money and their endorsement in 2010. He read a script almost identical to the fire union representative’s script at the Feb. 15, 2011 City Council meeting, pressuring the city council to enact Measure P into law without letting the people vote on it. And Topar was campaign manager for a firefighter.
Cruikshank was the firefighter union’s candidate back in 1992. The firefighters campaigned for her four times city-wide, door-to-door, wearing their “El Segundo Firefighters Association” union T-shirts.
Then a flyer went out listing the firefighters’ salaries. Lowest-rank firefighters were paid over $100,000 in 1992, during a recession, while aerospace engineers with less than half their salary were laid off. Cruikshank lost, and Carl Jacobson, Michael Robbins, and Dick Switz won.
Cruikshank was also allied with high-growth real estate developers, and with councilman J. B. Wise, who admitted during a council meeting that he put councilman Scot Dannen on his payroll at Wise Electric. Dannen switched his votes from slow-growth to provide the third vote needed by Wise and Cruikshank for their developer-driven high-growth General Plan. Councilmen Jacobson, Robbins, and Switz overturned their high-density General Plan the day they were sworn into office.
Mary Olinick
El Segundo
El Segundo Police Officers' Association (ESPOA) Exposed