To me, the local 2014 election contest boils down to one thing: whether our community’s life-saving emergency room reopens or not?
It was the closing of Palm Drive Hospital and the refusal of Sebastopol’s City Council to take any active role whatsoever in helping it reopen that compelled me to run for public office. But my City Council race is not the most important local contest this year.
Dennis Colthrust and Dr. Richard Powers are two outstanding candidates that are running for the Palm Drive District Board. Both strongly support the Palm Drive Foundation and its promising plan to reopen Palm Drive as a thriving hospital with an emergency room.
Jim Horn, their opponent in this race, is running to retain a three person Board majority that has been responsible for financially mismanaging Palm Drive, secretly deciding to close it, and refusing to support community leaders and doctors in efforts to reopen it. Jim Horn, who was appointed by this Board majority to temporarily fill a vacant position this summer, is running on tomorrow’s ticket. Horn has clearly emerged as the leading opponent to reopening a hospital with an emergency room. I spell out my reasons for believing this in my recent post here, Why Electing Jim Horn Will Doom Hospital.
I have spoken with hundreds of area voters during the past few months. More than 95% of them believe want to see an emergency room restored for our health, and the lives of our loved ones and neighbors.
If I am elected, I intend to transform the City’s role to help actively support the Foundation effort to reopen the hospital. My five point plan for doing so can be read here.
But my election will not determine whether or not a hospital with an emergency room reopens at Palm Drive.
What will determine this is whether Colthurst and Powers are elected or not. Virtuallty every doctor in West County agrees with this.
Yet every single incumbent on Sebastopol’s City Council endorses Jim Horn. As does Helen Shane and Richard and Brenda Nichols, leaders of Sebastopol Tomorrow, and Craig Litwin. Knowing the personal and family relationships of our local politicians and leaders of what has become our local political establishment, I believe this choice, of effectively endorsing the continued closure of our hospital, is being made by politicians who sadly place their personal political loyalty over our collective public welfare.
Tomorrow’s election will be about the people versus our political establishment.
And I hope, for the sake of us all, that We, the People, win this time around.