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March 18, 2012 Editorial by Bruce Ross:
“Given the 100-year flood of signatures calling for the recall of Shasta Lake City Councilor Dolores Lucero, it seems all but certain the voters will turn her out of office.
More than twice as many voters lent their names to the recall drive late last year as voted for Lucero in the first place in 2009. Behind that lopsided arithmetic, many if not most of Lucero's former supporters have abandoned her. They've come to realize that — despite stray fine words about accountability and transparency in government, and the need to mind the citizens' interests — her actions do nothing to advance her stated goals.
She is combative beyond all reason. She is immune to persuasion when the facts or the law don't fit her preconceived opinions. She is quick to fling accusations of criminality with only the slightest if any evidence beyond paranoid hunches. She has become a force of distraction and destruction on the Shasta Lake City Council.
We trust she'll be recalled, but for the undecided or the unpersuaded, it's worth recapping just a bit of her history on the council.
In 2010, after a Shasta Lake city employee wrote a letter to the editor of this newspaper critical of Lucero, she responded in part by running her own shoddy background check and started calling him a felon around City Hall. Unfortunately, she had confused two men with the same name.
Later that year, Lucero voted against a city move to shift council elections to even years as part of a countywide drive to consolidate voting and cut election costs. There's not a thing wrong with her disagreement, but she didn't just vote no. She also accused her fellow councilors of criminal conflicts of interest and filed complaints with the Fair Political Practices Commission seeking censure — for what was a perfectly legal and by-the-book cost-saving measure that wasn't even anyone in Shasta Lake's idea in the first place. The FPPC, naturally, found no merit whatsoever to Lucero's complaint.
Last year, she publicly accused the city of Shasta Lake of failing to file financial documents with the state controllers' office — without realizing three of four red flags raised by the state applied not to the city of Shasta Lake but to the Shasta Community Services District. (And the city, in any case, had already filed its documents.)
This winter, she said in a KCNR 1460 radio interview that the controller's office was auditing the city's books and would release a report any time. This appears to be pure fantasy. The state controller's office says it has conducted no audit of the city and has no report pending.
And of course lately, moving from belligerent to bizarre, she sued the city and county in a futile attempt to stop the recall, to override democracy, and called for her fellow councilors to resign — as if they're the problem.
The city's voters can drop the curtain on this show by recalling Lucero April 10. They should not hesitate.”
