‘Deceptive & Unauthorized!’ This Brea School Board Mailer Using Ed Royce Was So Wrong That Royce Himself Had to Denounce It!

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“Don’t believe everything you read,” the saying goes. With this mailer, don’t believe ANYTHING you read!

(1) Ed Royce’s Good Name Commandeered by Broomstick-Wielding Pirates

We teased a story on Monday morning about Ed R0yce renouncing a political mailer that had used his name without permission.  It is reproduced above.  Ignore the arguments; they’re bogus.  Just take in its overall aroma.

Do you get the sense that Royce opposes the incumbents on the Brea School Board?  Royce thinks that you probably did — and he’s pissed.

Measure K is the product of extensive negotiations between a wide swath of political interests in the city — and it’s pretty popular.  Royce’s Congressional opponent Brett Murdock — who lives in Brea and supports Measure K and the school board incumbents — has reason to be pleased at this appropriation and backstabbing of Royce by the “North Orange County Business Coalition.”

The what?  Who is that group?  It should be easy enough to find out!  Let’s check the Internet!

(2) The North Orange County Business Coalition (not to be confused, except they hope by voters, with the Orange County Business Council)

(… Let’s check the Internet!)

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OK, it’s not as easy as I’d thought.

The City of Brea’s page has a link to a 460 form from 2014, but it is not accessible online:

Brea resident Glenn Vodhanel said the lawsuit was filed on behalf of the North Orange County Business Coalition, of which he is a member.

The coalition, he alleges, found a number of errors during the review.

“We plan to present 42 provisional ballots for which the required declaration was not signed by the provisional voter,” Vodhanel said in an email Friday. “Further, when we look at the signature comparisons that have been allowed, after reviewing a small sample of the vote by mail and provisional ballots, we have identified hundreds of signatures that a reasonable person could not identify as similar to the signature on the voter registration card.”

I’m told that, politically, Vodhanel is these days associated most closely with would-be “Boss of Brea” Dwight Manley — the driving force behind the overall turnover of the Brea City Council in 2014 which (as intended) garnered him a majority of Council members who would support the city’s giveaway of roughly $10 million (more or less) for a new parking structure that would improve the rentability (and thus property value) of his extensive Downtown Brea holdings.  Manley and his (let’s presume) personally dominated “business coalition” thus solved the “income” part of the equation for his no doubt highly complicated personal finances; now, by controlling the School Board, he can keep the property taxes on his vast real estate holdings nice and low.  (Yes, your kids suffer, but that’s not his problem.)  The bond proposal may not be perfect, but it is far from irresponsible, which makes it as good as they come.

(3) Ed Royce Breaks Out His Slim ‘Chastising Wealthy Donors’ Stick and Swings

About 20% of the mailer is about Measure K, which Royce opposes even though he is not from Brea and likely doesn’t know much about it other than that it’s a school bond proposal and the OCGOP opposes it.  The OCGOP (which I’m not sure contains anyone from Brea itself) opposes it because it’s a school bond proposal and opposing them is part of its brand.  (The views of many Republicans who worked hard to craft a good proposal probably got short shrift from the OCGOP — if they got any shrift at all.)  So yes, Ed Royce does nominally oppose Measure K — probably without taking a sounding of Brea Republicans’ opinions about it — and it was fair for the Manley-Vodhanel coalition to say so.

And that brings us to the other 80% of the flyer.

Reading the flyer, you’d think that Ed Royce is so upset about Measure K that he has decided to take on the entire School Board that promoted it.  This would be uncharacteristic for Royce, especially since the incumbents (and more importantly, their supporters) include people who have been quite supportive of Royce in the past, and — in this treacherous year where he is tied to Trump — he would like their help in staving off a surprisingly media-savvy challenge from “Seniors Advocate” Brett Murdock.  (Really!  Look it up on your vote-by-mail ballot!)  So, Royce went public with this message:

“DECEPTIVE AND UNAUTHORIZED! DO YOU HEAR ME?”,  he did not add.

Well, that was a satisfactory response from Royce, but it needs improvement — which averages out to a C-.  Because, let’s face it — a LOT more people will have seen those mailers at home  than will have seen his retraction online, potentially putting Royce in the political “sweet spot” of having conveyed a moderate message to the sort of high information voters who actually check his Facebook page at the same time as a strong ideological message the the lower information voters who just see the mailer and associate his face with a particular cause.

Royce doesn’t want to be accused of trying to have it both ways here.  He ought to make a much stronger public statement.  First, recognize that the people behind this flyer — Manley, Vodhanel, whoever — are the only reason that the challengers in the School Board race are running at all.  They deserve to be penalized, not just distanced-from.  So, he should:

• endorse the School Board incumbents
• attach a sign indicating that endorsement to his existing signs in Brea (yes, filing for an IE), and
• publish, delivery, and copy to the media on his PR release list a cease-and-desist letter to the North Orange County Whatever Bogus Name group — and he’s in a great position to find out exactly who that is — and tell them to send out a corrected mailer clearly indicating that he endorses the incumbents and to never steal his good reputation for their personal gain again
• If legal action is still warranted — whether with the FPPC or in the Superior Court — take it!

Then he clearly would not be trying to have things both ways!

But will he do it?  Or will he have Chicken-Ed out?

THEY STOLE YOUR REPUTATION, ED!  PULLET OUT AND RESTORE IT!

Hopefully he’ll have clearly set the record straight before the voters go to the pollos in two weeks.