CCWD director sends anonymous hate mail to HMB planning commissioner

HMB Review editor Clay Lambert says that Coastside County Water District director Chris Mickelson is the author of an anonymous letter sent to Half Moon Bay planning commissioner Kevin Lansing [HMB Review]. The letter was mailed to Lansing the day after he had filed a written complaint with the CCWD about Mickelsen’s behavior.  The anonymous note reads:

Wrong CCWD, you dumbshit! Guess that PhD from UCLA didn’t do you much good…besides that crappy dead end job at [Lansing’s employer]. Guess reading isn’t requiered (sic) at your loser position!

The letter, in an envelope mailed from San Francisco with no return address other than "Your Pal", was scrawled on a copy of document that Lansing had enclosed in his complaint to the CCWD: the code of ethics of the Contra Costa Water District.

Lansing’s complaint to the CCWD [pdf] said that at the Planning Commission meeting on August 24, 2006, which Mickelsen attended as a representative of the CCWD, "Mr. Mickelsen stood at the back of the room (off camera) and proceeded to extend his arm and finger to make a motion of shooting me with a gun. He then raised his hand in an obscene gesture." Lansing filed a complaint with the city of Half Moon Bay four days after the event on August 28, 2006. He says that after the city said it could do nothing about the incident, the wrote to the CCWD on August 23 of this year, so that the complaint would be filed within a year of the incident.

The anonymous letter was postmarked from San Francisco the next day.

Review editor Clay Lambert wrote today in his blog, "Mickelsen confessed, admitting to me that he wrote the profane missive." Lambert described the letter as "Much ado about nothing". The event has echoes of a 2004 event in which Mickelsen confessed to the Review that he bought an anonymous attack ad in that year’s campaign for the Cabrillo Unified School District board.

Lansing has submitted a new complaint to the CCWD regarding the anonymous letter [pdf], as well as to the Half Moon Bay Coastside Chamber of Commerce of which Mickelsen is a board member and past president [pdf].

We attempted to reach Mickelsen at his business this afternoon, but he has not returned our call.