Chris Cox’s chief of staff steps down...

Chris Cox’s chief of staff steps down

Rep. Chris Cox recently announced the retirement of his chief of

staff in California, James Fournier. After more than 30 years’

service in the U.S. Coast Guard, Fournier became Cox’s first chief of

staff when Cox began his career in Congress in 1989, and Fournier

initially set up Cox’s Newport Beach office.

In a statement for the congressional record on Friday, Cox said,

“As my district representative and the chief of staff in my

California office, Jim Fournier has become a beloved figure to the

people who work for him and, more importantly, to the thousands of

Southern Californians whom he has personally helped.”

Replacing Fournier is Steve DiGerlando, who leaves the position of

deputy chief of staff and has worked for Cox since 1991, except for a

departure to work for an Irvine computer firm from 2000 to 2001. The

new deputy chief of staff in California will be Sarah Petry, who has

served as Cox’s legislative assistant in Washington, D.C., and has

been with the congressman’s office since 2002.

Phones return online after long outage

Restoring phone service to about 1,000 SBC customers in Costa Mesa

took a bit longer than expected, but workers had fixed a damaged

cable and were checking customers’ lines by 5 p.m. Tuesday, SBC

spokesman Corey Olfert said.

Customers in the Mesa Verde and states streets areas lost service

Saturday morning after a contractor accidentally drilled through an

underground phone line.

Residents who reported the outage to SBC’s website were told

service would be restored by Thursday night, a lengthy estimate of

the repair time, because the estimate is given by a computer that

logs calls for service, Olfert said.

“The larger the number of calls, the further out it pushes the

repair,” he said.