EDITORIAL

Who can you trust?

It’s an interesting question in the Newport-Mesa community of late, as

there have been two very high-profile examples in as many weeks of a

publicly recognized figure having his past catch up with him.

First we learned that Alan Michael Meyers, the former executive director

of the Costa Mesa Senior Center, is being investigated by police for

allegedly presenting false information to the center’s board to get

hired.

Authorities believe Meyers, who was hired in August 1999, is the same man

who served time in a federal prison in the 1970s for allegedly attempting

to strangle a doctor he was impersonating. Meyers was also arrested as

recently as December 1999 for allegedly embezzling funds from a nonprofit

group in Oregon, and also has been convicted of bigamy in Stanislaus

County.

And this week, it came to light that Newport Beach Mayor John Noyes was

wanted by the law for nine years in the late 1970s and early 1980s on

kidnapping charges, after he had snatched his daughters, then 6 and 7,

from the legal custody of their mother.

In Noyes’ case, there was no way citizens could have known the

information before voting him into office, unless he had voluntarily

disclosed it.

But Meyers’ case is a different story.

We read time and time again about people with sordid pasts being hired

for positions they had no business holding.

One example of the consequences happened in Torrance in 1998, when a

state investigator responsible for protecting minors in group homes was

charged with molesting a 17-year-old boy in his care. The state Division

of Community Care Licensing, a unit of the Department of Social Services,

did not perform a criminal background check before hiring Efrain

Villarreal III, and police records showed he had been convicted on lewd

conduct charges four years earlier.

How many times does a community have to go through this before we learn

that extensive background checks are an absolute necessity these days?

Granted, these extreme cases don’t come across the hiring desk every day.

However, it is obvious no public agency is immune from it.

So this time, let’s learn our lesson.