Oceanside’s Tri-City Healthcare District board majority has been contending for some kind of gothic governance award for years, among other things for the way it treats two of its members who too frequently ask questions and express dissent. The crowning act of discipline has been to banish the pair from all closed sessions—not because they have leaked information from them in the past but because closed session is where Tri-City power is controlled and executed, and the majority apparently wants no witnesses as to just how. The exile is one of those flamboyantly despotic maneuvers that local government officials sometimes get up to because they think the victims cannot afford take them to court and because their attorneys guarantee them they’re acting lawfully in any case. The latest flail is not against the two directors themselves but against a lawyer who had the audacity to complain that they—the directors he had voted for—had been unlawfully stripped of key powers of office. First the story, then a veteran local columnist’s comment.
