• In the article “Little Town, big problems: San Simeon’s CSD loses general manager, struggles with board member appointments” that ran in the June 22 issue of New Times, we incorrectly reported how former San Simeon CSD Board Director Daniel De la Rosa parted ways with the budget committee. Director De la Rosa resigned from that committee, stating that he left after being dismissed from his role as budget committee chair. New Times regrets this error. Δ
This article appears in Jul 6-16, 2023.
The correction regarding former San Simeon CSD Director de la Rosa needs clarification. First a bit of history, prior to this year Director de la Rosa was not appointed to the budget committee. At the beginning of each calendar year, committee appointments are made by the board Chairperson and must be approved by a board vote. There is no record of his being appointed to the 2022 budget committee.
He did show up for one of the three budget committee meetings and asserted himself as the lead for that meeting. The problem is that the district’s policies require the committee chair to be elected by the committee at the year’s first meeting. That also did not happen. To summarize, he was not appointed by former Chair Kellas nor approved by the board to be a member of the committee, nor was he elected as budget committee chair.
Fast forward to this year. At the annual committee appointment meeting, he aggressively asserted that something was done related to the budget without his approval as the budget committee chair. Again, he wasn’t appointed to the committee or elected to be the chair of last year’s committee.
The new board Chair did proceed to appoint him to the 2023 budget committee. However, he could not have been the chair of this year’s committee because the committee had not held its first meeting when a new chair would be voted in by the committee.
Since he was never elected Chair of last year’s or this year’s budget committee, he could not have been dismissed as chair of either year’s budget committee. Further, the new board chair never said he was dismissed from anything.
Perhaps he is not fully informed of the district’s long-standing policies and practices related to committee membership and the election of each year’s chair at its first committee meeting. The policies are on the district’s website along with minutes of these meetings.
Comment supplement — Additionally after citizen complaints at the April 12, 2022, SSCSD board meeting, then Chair Gwen Kellas effectively retroactively appointed Daniel de la Rosa as a member of the budget committee and its chair. That is after he had attended the March meeting and asserted himself as the leader of that meeting. This was done in violation of district policy, invaliding that action. Only committee members can elect the committee’s chair. Not that it mattered anyway.
Subsequently, Director de la Rosa failed to attend the two remaining committee meetings of 2022. These were important meetings at which the draft budget was finalized, and a rate-setting study discussed. A reasonable person would assume that he had simply dropped off the committee as committee members do in our small town (not that he was validly on the committee anyway.)
In 2023, he resigned from the committee before the first budget committee meeting, meaning the 2023 committee chair had not been elected. Yet, he alleges that he was dismissed as the budget committee chair by the new board chair.