HMB City Council interviews are likely to be a charade, says McClung

The Half Moon Bay City Council will be interviewing candidates for the at-large positions on the city’s planning commission on Monday, March 20 at 7pm in the Adcock Center.  It could be fun. Or it could be ugly. Or it could have all the drama and unpredictability of a meeting of the Brezhnev-era Supreme Soviet.

A couple of weeks ago, the city council discovered that the majority’s decision to vote on candidates without interviews was in violation of its own procedures.

Bonnie McClung voted against reopening the nominations, reports the County Times.

"I don’t want these interviews to become a charade. There’s a good chance the result will end up the same," said McClung. "If the results are different, I would be pretty embarrassed. I don’t want to jerk people around."

McClung said she would have preferred to suspend the resolution for a month in order to seat all seven planning commissioners.

"I feel like we made a good decision and we have a balanced group of people," she said. Gorn agreed with McClung that the interviews were likely a foregone conclusion, but only because she, Fraser and Patridge would see to it that they got who they wanted.

"Everyone in town knows there won’t be any change in those two at-larges," said Gorn. "They’ve made no secret of the fact that there’s a (council) majority, and the process be damned."

Of the 17 people who originally applied for the positions, only eight have said they will be there next Monday.  One of those eight is Mike Ferreira, whose nomination by Jim Grady and rejection by the majority without an interview or discussion led to current ill will among the members of the city council.