Mr. Todd Strong’s Letter to the Editor on May 10 was another example of how one side sees the Peninsula Community Planning Board election. It was heavy on rhetoric and short on the facts.
The public voted in “some new guy?” His name is Darrold Davis. Cynthia Conger did not shout any objections. She simply asked Mr. Davis if he had ever attended a board meeting prior to running.
Mr. Davis did not answer for a long time until someone got the bright idea of calling the candidate forum, held the night before the election, a board meeting.
The forum consisted of the candidates sitting at a table in front of an audience, answering questions from the public about themselves and what they wanted to do as a part of the board.
A board meeting consists of an agenda, public comment, approval of the prior meeting minutes, committee reports, reports from the City Council representative, reports from the Planning Department and action items that require discussion, motions and votes.
None of this occurred the night of the forum. To call the forum meeting a board meeting is simply idiotic.
Cynthia Conger is not power hungry. If Mr. Strong had any idea of what the board does, he would know that we have no power. None. We are only an advisory board.
What Mrs. Conger is, Mr. Strong, is a committed, concerned citizen who has devoted thousands of hours to community service with no other desire than to help preserve the quality of life Mr. Strong enjoys.
Despite his sarcastic attack, even Mr. Strong has benefited from her work. I wonder how many hours of community service Mr. Strong has put in, or if he has any idea of anything Mrs. Conger has done.
It is this kind of intransigence that forced this issue into the hands of the city attorney, who has now decided we have to conduct another election.
It was the kind of thinking in this letter, and a refusal to compromise with those of us who wanted to seat Darrold Davis and Mrs. Conger to end this mess, that now will greatly inconvenience the voting public, who will see us all as fools. Some of us tried to prevent all of that.