Carol Rudat Is NOT Running For Orange City Council
Posted by: Jubal | 08/11/2008 11:25 AM
The City of Orange dodged an expensive bullet when candidate filing closed Friday evening and Carol Rudat failed to return her candidate papers.The strange part is what took place the final two days of the candidate filing period.
On Thursday, Carol Rudat walked into the city clerk's office to take out candidate papers on behalf of Richard Siebert, a former Huntington Beach councilman and long-time Orange Park Acres resident who ran for orange council a few years ago. She had some sort of authorization from Mr. Siebert allowing her to do this. Given that Carol Rudat is generally doing the pushing rather than being pulled, my hunch is she recruited Mr. Siebert in hopes of electing (with Rudat-funded independent expenditures) a council ally who would support a Rudat run in 2010 when there is an open seat (there are no open council seats this year). Which is a unsettling thing for Rudat to do, considering Mr. Siebert's wife passed away very suddenly about three weeks ago.
By the next day, however, Richard Siebert decided this wasn't the right time to run. Word never got to Carol Rudat, though, who then failed to return her own papers.
The hand of Rudat showed itself elsewhere. She had been diligently working to recruit a candidate to run against Denis Bilodeau for re-election to the Orange County Water District. And she succeeded: a Bill Nelson took out papers on Thurday, August 8 and returned before the deadline the next day.
Over in Area 6 of the Orange Unified School District, front-runner Arianna Barrios (who has drawn overwhelming bipartisan support, including my own) drew an opponent in Mark Wayland, who also entered late in the game -- on the last day of filing, as a matter of fact.
Wayland is a retired Orange firefighter, and a friend of the Rudats (Dave Rudat was a career Orange firefighter who rose to fire chief before becoming city manager) who endorsed Rudat's costly carpet-bagging 2006 council run.
There's a pattern here: Rudat is trying to create a political organization to support a future council run. An doomed and inept effort perhaps -- Denis Bilodeau and Arianna Barrios are virtual locks to win -- but present nonetheless.
Mr. Ayer registered as a Republican to be electable in an interim election with no incumbents. He did...
It is ridiculous that Rudat is trying to turn Orange into a political playground for her juvenile vendetta against our city leaders. Does Siebert care about the City? Does Wayland care about the schools? Does Nelson care about water? No, they're all just Rudat supporters who have fallen in line behind her because she'll likely to bankroll their campaigns.
She got pummelled two years ago when there was an open seat and now she's trying to be the puppetmaster over Siebert, Wayland and Nelson.
Here's to hoping that Dumitru, Smith, Bilodeau and Barrios crush the slate of Rudat's marionettes dancing on her strings.
I agree that she is controlling the campaigns of Nelson and Siebert but regarding Wayland you are mistaken. I happen to know that she is supporting one candidate for OUSD and it is Jerry Winant. I spoke with Mark Wayland and found out that he is running for other reasons which I will leave for him to discuss.
Both Mark Wayland and his wife were listed among the handful of Orange residents who actually supported Rudat in '06. He worked with Dave Rudat at Orange Fire Dept. And perhaps most bizarrely, even though their own son was running for City Council, they endorsed and supported Rudat. Strange since there was for all intents and purposes only one seat that was competitive (Mark Murphy had a lock on one City Council seat... only Biolodeau's seat was considered competitive).
Although you say Rudat isn't pulling Wayland's strings, if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck... well, I'll be very interested to find out what those "other reasons" are.
As an aside, why in the world would Rudat - ostensibly a Republican - support Jerry Winant, who - until he decided to run against her - endorsed ultraliberal Florice Hoffman?
Instead of just assuming that Carol Rudat had anything to do with Wayland running for the school, why not just call Rudat and ask her? I know for a fact that Wayland has not talked to the Rudats in over a year, Dave or Carol. No one is pulling his strings, but like most people that write on these things, the truth is not really important, but it does make for interesting reading.