Look to your own house before attacking

By ROBERT KRYSAK

This letter is in response to Joe Zenovic’s letter of last week. Now Joe, has the clown season of electioneering started already? In July? I wonder who you are fronting for against potential water board candidate Ernie Garrett. I guess time will tell.

In your letter, you touted a self-congratulatory litany of so-called “achievements” you and your fellow board members have pursued during your 1.5 years on the water board. You tout that you are now, after a 1.5 years span, starting to look into a natural gas line to power the Poway Pump Station. Of course, this issue has been a major one since 2007. Glad you finally got around to it.

You tout that you have given up health insurance for board members and are finally addressing the inflow and infiltration issues at Santa Maria. This all after 1.5 years in office, just before election time.

It is amazing to me that after 1.5 years you can only address six items that you are proud of. Less than aggressive. Do I seem sarcastic? Perhaps a bit, mostly in response to your comment that “previous boards felt nothing was the thing to do.” You are either a victim of your own lack of experience in these matters or you are just being arrogantly condescending or deceptive on purpose.

As you know, I served 14 years on the water board, nine years as its president. I will not bore the readers or you with our litany of accomplishments over those years with members Doug Wilsman, Jim Robinson and Kit Kesinger. But perhaps because your meetings are so short (as compared to historic meetings with our board that usually lasted four to five hours), you do not intimately involved yourself with such mundane things as budgets, labor negotiations, aggressively promoting rate controls, negotiating contracts, overseeing major facilities expansions and repairs, and holding staff publicly accountable for all aspects of water district operations. I know how hard this would be in a 15-minute meeting.

Not content to attack all previous boards, you go on to attack Ernie Garrett, a citizen, who had the unmitigated gall to criticize something he felt the board should have done that it did not. I was privileged to serve for several months in intense negotiations with Ernie Garrett and Maggie Johnson and representatives of Spangler Peak Ranch which resulted in a historic agreement to share utilization of San Vicente Plant effluent which resulted in the San Diego Country Estates saving hundreds of thousands of dollars in potable water for its golf course. He is a truly involved citizen who has translated passion into substantive results for his neighbors.

Lastly, your recent efforts to in effect leave one-fifth of this community unrepresented by moving board meetings to a time in the day which not only precludes the working public from attending board meetings by also their representative, who works down the hill, is interestingly exclusive and damaging to those constituents.

Before attacking without foundation or knowledge previous hard working and involved board members and district staff, perhaps you should look to your own house.