I was quite tickled to see the response to the Sun’s recent reporting on the Lompoc City Council (“A house divided”) and my rant on the matter (“Loopy in Lompoc”) in our Sept. 14 issue. We had multiple comments, contributions to the Opinion section, and an unprecedented amount of engagement in our online opinion poll.
Actually the engagement on our online poll wasn’t just unprecedented, it was literally unbelievable.
There’s a small but vocal cross section of Lompoc residents who care deeply about what’s going on with the city’s government, but I’m pretty damn sure it’s not 13,000 strong. That many people didn’t even vote for Lompoc’s City Council last go-around. Our poll saw more than 10,000 votes within a day, all scrambling to answer the question: “Who on the Lompoc City Council is most out of line?”
It pays to be a beady-eyed bird like me and apply some skepticism to the situation. We’re lucky to get more than a few dozen voters engaged in our online poll, let alone thousands. A preliminary inquiry to our webhosting company found that just one IP address was responsible for those votes, the overwhelming majority of which selected Mayor Bob Lingl as the answer.
A lot of the initial voting could easily be chalked up to the warring factions of Lompocians who support either Councilman Jim Mosby or Mayor Lingl. They were pretty much neck and neck before the tsunami of Lingl votes poured in.
I have just one question for whoever did this: How stupid do you think we are? Well, if some of the recent behavior from Lompoc City Council members is your barometer for stupidity, I understand the assumption.
This is just another sad, dumb chapter in Lompoc’s city politics. I’ll admit my feathers are ruffled that the Sun got pulled into it, but these childish tactics are nothing new for the council. From finger guns to removing city staff from the dais, the actions of Lompoc’s council have been the subject of much debate.
Some say that the more business-minded members of the council—that’s Mosby and Victor Vega—are bullying the city manager, Patrick Wiemiller, and are overstepping their bounds. Others think that Mosby and Vega are trying to keep the city’s budget responsible, and that Mayor Lingl is the bully, pointing finger guns and siding with Wiemiller, who is insubordinate.
Residents like Justin Ruhge have even gone as far as to point the finger at former Lompoc Mayor John Linn, who Ruhge says is manipulating the council through Mosby, Vega, and the swing voter, Dirk Starbuck.
I’m always skeptical of claims of “shadow governments” and such conspiracy theory, but it was odd that the very first email the Sun received regarding the article came from Linn himself, who argued that Wiemiller was definitely insubordinate* and questioned why Lompoc went from a budget surplus to a deficit under Lingl.
But you know, after this whole fiasco with our online poll, I’m a little more inclined to call conspiracy on the likes of Mosby and Linn. I mean, is it a coincidence that these thousands of fraudulent votes were all to make Lingl look bad?
I may be a bird, but I’m no birdbrain.
The Canary loathes conspiracy theory. Send your thoughts to canary@santamariasun.com.
* Editor’s note: This story has been edited from the print version.
This article appears in Sep 21-28, 2017.