“The potential spoiler in the Coast Community College board race involving public-pension hog Armando Ruiz decided over the weekend to abandon his own humble ambitions for the greater good. Don “Coach” Apodaca told me that based on my recent columns, he’s ending his campaign and supporting Ruiz’s main challenger, Lorraine Prinsky,” according to Frank Mickadeit’s latest column over at the O.C. Register.
Apodaca will still be on the ballot, but I don’t see how that hurts Prinsky. Because Apodaca has a Latino surname, he will take votes away from Ruiz, not from Prinsky. This election looks to be a sure thing. Ruiz will finally pay the price for what he did. And what exactly did Ruiz do to garner my ire as well as that of Mickadeit? Here is a reminder from the latter:
“Shortly before the 2004 election, he engineered a smarmy deal in which he got to “retire” from the Coast district’s board as if that job had been a full-time job paying exactly what he made at his real South County job. Then he ran for election to the Coast district board anyway. So he gets a pension upward of $108,000 a year, instead of what he really worked for – which might be a little more than half that – and he still gets to sit on the Coast board. Your tax dollars at work.”
A friend of mine called me recently to sayt that what Ruiz did was not all that bad. Except that it was. It is past time for Ruiz to get dumped by the voters!
“Because Apodaca has a Latino surname,”
Are you sure about that, Art. I always thought the name Apodaca was Basque. In which case Coach may still pull in some of the Basque vote.
Oh my God! That is a real case of pension spiking not the retirement formula that the public safety personnel negotiated. I’ll bet that greedy s.o.b. was one of those that are trying to bring down the defined benefit pension plans and make the public employees put their money in the stock market and watch it turn into some fat stock broker’s profit margin – after he got his.
Pinsky helped me this weekend to remember who to vote for in the Coast CCD contest: “vote for the three peas” (the candidates who’s last name starts with a ‘P’) its an easy memonic that will carry me through to election day November 4th when we will all vote and bring about the change we need.