Cox's Mumble

Published: Friday, September 26, 2008 2:18 PM PDT

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Did anyone else following Chula Vista city politics and the recent firing of the city's manager, David Garcia, find this in the Union-Tribune as confusing as I did?

Mayor Cheryl Cox and Councilman Jerry Rindone voted "no" to reject the payment to Garcia, but Cox said that does not mean they supported paying him.

"It would be an error to jump to the conclusion that because Mr. Rindone and I voted to reject the settlement proposal that we would have voted to accept (it)," Cox said.

First off it's just plain confusing. Read the quote a couple of times, and you wonder if a word is missing. It all surrounds the question of whether departing City Manager David Garcia deserves any kind of severance payment after his employment was terminated.

But let's assume she's saying that just because she voted against not giving Garcia a severance, it's not to say she would vote for giving him one.

What a joke. This is the kind of muffled cover-your-ass double talk that a politician uses to try to not make anyone mad without realizing how weak it makes her actually appear.

It's obvious that Rindone and Cox had a little more sympathy for Garcia then their three colleagues did. Rindone, in fact, wouldn't have even fired him. This indicates that whatever the complaints about his behavior using the computer in his office, it was hardly an open-and-shut case. The list of urls logged on his computer was inconclusive about whether he had crossed a line or not. A few certainly pointed to some websites that no manager should look at while in the office.

If Cox believes that he deserves a severance package -- which would indicate he was fired for political reasons or managerial preference and not for egregious unprofessional conduct -- then she should proudly say so. If she believes he should have been fired for violating a serious city policy or ethics code, and therefore doesn't deserve a severance, she should proudly say so.

This isn't really something that someone who has seen all the evidence can be on both sides of.

-- SCOTT LEWIS