Campaign contributions called into question
I think people might be interested in where Mary Salas, candidate for Chula Vista City Council, gets her campaign money. So far, we have her financial data for January 1 to September 30 of this year — we do not yet have the data for the portion of 2011 in which candidates could first raise money.
So far in 2012, she has raised $68,015. Of that, more than $17,000 (26%) came from developers, more than $8,000 (12%) came from mobilehome PARK OWNERS, $4,750 from real estate people and attorneys, $2,300 from Allied Waste, and $1,700 came from Chula Vista’s cardroom. Have you ever wondered why Allied Waste’s requests to raise your rates are always granted? Have you ever wondered why the cardroom was allowed to move to much larger quarters on our bayfront??
Mary Salas is the poster girl for Special Interests. In just the last four years of her previous tour as a Councilwoman, the Reserves of the city of Chula Vista dropped from 23.5% to 9.7%. Even in those boom years of 2000-2004, Mary and the Council spent money faster than it was coming in — plus, incurred bonded indebtedness that we will be paying on for decades (new police station, new city hall, new city hall complex, etc.).
Is this someone we want on our City Council — again?
Peter Watry
Chula Vista
Chula Vistans have a golden opportunity to help clean up the culture of corruption that has permeated City Hall by voting for Larry Breitfelder. He is an honorable individual with a track record of fighting government waste and advocating that your tax dollars go to the city services that benefit us all.
Pamela Bensoussan on the other hand has held police protection and other services hostage by threatening to cut basic services if Chula Vistan voters did not support the sales tax increase to help pay for the pet projects pushed by the very developers that contribute to her campaign.
However, the most egregious case of opacity and corruption from the part of Bensoussan is her backroom dealing with David Malcolm, a former port authority official who was convicted of $20,000 a month in kickbacks. She has spent over $200,000 in taxpayer money to cover his legal fees for him to negotiate the transfer of pollution cleanup responsibility from Dynegy Inc to the City of Chula Vista, potentially costing taxpayers tens of millions of dollars. I personally find it ironic that a person like Pamela Bensoussan, who runs on an environmental platform, would push to take the responsibility for pollution cleanup from the energy company who assumed it and saddle working class families with the potential cost.
Glen Thor
Chula Vista