City Life: A response to trustee’s commentary about my columns

Had school board member Karen Yelsey known that the response to her recent Daily Pilot commentary would generate so many negative comments, perhaps she wouldn’t have submitted it (“Smith’s generalizations about Newport-Mesa are wrong,” Feb. 8).

The commentary read like the type of memo we write when we’re mad, let simmer overnight and reread after we’ve calmed down, only to trash it.

When she ran for a school board seat in 2006, Yelsey was quoted as saying: “I think there are a lot of issues, but basically we need new voices. We need to be more than a rubber stamp, meaning we need some fiscal oversight and accountability that has not been there.”

I couldn’t agree more, and for the past five months I’ve been holding the school board accountable and providing some fiscal oversight, so I don’t understand her beef.

Sending the commentary wasn’t bad judgment. It was a product of the bubble in which six of the seven board members have been operating for years.

Bad judgment is when you encourage leniency in a letter to the judge deciding the sentence of former Supt. Jeffrey Hubbard, as some trustees did before he was sent to jail.

Really bad judgment is sending that letter in an election year, but that’s what school board President Dave Brooks and Trustee Martha Fluor did. Trustee Walt Davenport also sent a letter, but he won’t face reelection until 2014.

Last week, I emailed Yelsey, as well as trustees Dana Black, Judy Franco and Katrina Foley, and asked why they did not send letters to the judge. Only Franco and Foley responded, saying they were not asked to write.

Yelsey is not alone in misreading the community’s tea leaves.

In his letter to Judge Stephen Marcus requesting leniency for Hubbard, Brooks wrote: “[Hubbard] may or may not have been popular with a small, vocal minority, but he is effective in administrating very complicated school districts.”

If Hubbard was unpopular, it wasn’t because of his skills as a superintendent; it was because of the board’s handling of his employment, save for Foley.

Residents in Newport Beach and Costa Mesa are outraged that he was given months of paid leave to work on his court case and that his contract was manipulated to provide him with additional compensation and years of extensions that violated the spirit of a typical employment arrangement.

Only Foley voted against the paid leave; she was not on the board when the contract was negotiated or extended year after year.

In fairness, others have argued that the paid leave was necessary to protect the district from further liability if Hubbard sued and to comply with an interpretation of the state education code.

Brooks is right about the presence of a small, vocal minority, but they’re Hubbard’s supporters, not his critics.

In another example of bad judgment, Brooks, Fluor, Davenport and district Deputy Supt. and Chief Business Official Paul Reed “wrote letters of support, calling Hubbard an ‘upstanding individual’ and describing him as ‘transparent,’ ‘compassionate,’ ‘knowledgeable’ and ‘possessing a keen sense of justice and honesty,’” according to the Daily Pilot.

Yes, this is the same “upstanding individual” whom Brooks, Fluor and Davenport — plus their four colleagues on the board — fired only a few hours after his felony convictions.

Hubbard is not an upstanding individual and he does not possess a keen sense of justice and honesty. He is a convicted felon who misappropriated tax dollars and deserved to go to jail.

But instead of working on Costa Mesa’s schools, these folks are sending letters supporting him.

Brooks, Fluor, Davenport and Reed should have done nothing — no letters, no public statement of support, nothing — until Hubbard expressed remorse for his crimes, made restitution and atoned for his actions.

But it’s hard to exercise good judgment when you’re in the bubble.

Yelsey and I, and many others in Newport-Mesa, are in agreement on at least one plank from her 2006 campaign platform. In the Daily Pilot edition of Nov. 12, 2006, Yelsey advocated “instating term limits for trustees.”

Great idea.

STEVE SMITH is a Costa Mesa resident and a freelance writer. Send story ideas to smi161@aol.com.