In Anne Krueger's piece on proposed East County water rate increases in yesterday's Union-Tribune, she quoted the La Mesa Mayor's reaction:

La Mesa Mayor Art Madrid questioned why Helix [Water District] is proposing a rate increase now when the district's water costs won't increase until September or January.

“It will be a significant impact on residents and businesses,” Madrid said. “This is the time when you really have to be sensitive to the needs of your ratepayers.”

Clearly there is truth to the saying, "There is no honor among thieves." While there is merit in his opposition to the rate hike, Madrid has hardly been a fiscal conservative himself. In fact, he made his statement about the water issue only one day after La Mesa raised its sales tax to 9.5%, the second highest in San Diego County. The Mayor himself led the push to pass Proposition L, the ballot initiative that enacted the tax increase when it passed last November. In the process of promoting higher taxes, Madrid et al. used $130,000 of taxpayer funds to pay for a mailer that, among other things, threatened cutbacks in police and fire department protection if the initiative did not pass. The money is actually being used to pay civil servants' salaries and fund their generous pensions.

Moreover, given his "green" pretensions, one would have expected Madrid to support Helix's proposal. The proposed rate schedule is designed to give residents an incentive to conserve water under drought conditions. Of course, the water shortage is a man-made drought -- due, in part, to a Federal judge's injunction to protect a small, evolutionarily challenged fish (the Delta smelt) from extinction. Never mind that its numbers were already small because it cannot tolerate any disturbance in its mating ritual. In California, fish are more important than people.

Reacting to Madrid's statement, Craig Maxwell, owner of Maxwell's House of Books in La Mesa Village, stated, "Evidently, the same reasoning [about "ratepayers"] doesn't apply to taxpayers." He added, "The quote . . . is one of the most inadvertently hilarious things I've read in a long time -- almost as funny as the last time Art solemnly bestowed a 'DUI Officer of [the] Year Award' while gravely lecturing us about how seriously the city views drunk driving."

Maxwell, a candidate for La Mesa Mayor in 2006, obliquely referred to the 2008 incident in which La Mesa police officers discovered Madrid and Trisha Turner, a young female City employee, unconscious, apparently due to alcohol intoxication, on a public street in a La Mesa subdivision. According to the Union-Tribune, "Turner was behind the wheel of Madrid's SUV, the engine running. Madrid was lying on the sidewalk. Police drove them to Madrid's home but did not cite them or give them sobriety tests." Turner was later charged (via a mailed citation) and convicted of misdemeanor reckless driving. An outside consultant hired by the City opined that the police officers involved "did not violate department regulations or the law on the night they drove an apparently intoxicated Mayor Art Madrid and a city employee to the mayor's home." The contents of the consultant's report were not released to the public. There was no investigation of Madrid, nor were any charges ever filed against him.