Josie Gonzales steps up on drug testing
In light of the Bill Postmus controversy, Josie Gonzales, San Bernardino County's fifth district supervisor, tells me she has voluntarily taken a drug test and will report the findings as soon as she gets them.
County Treasurer Dick Larsen last week proposed random drug screening for elected officials, top administrators and executive staff after revelations surfaced that assessor and former supervisors chairman Postmus spent time in rehab and may have been addicted to meth.
The county's legal team quickly ruled that mandatory random testing would be illegal, but Gonzales said today the public needs to feel assured that their elected leadership takes this issue seriously.
Gonzales is the first supervisor to publicly step up on this. Earlier, Supervisor-elect Neil Derry said he supports random testing.
Comments
Congratulations to Josie for doing the right thing this time. However, as the Press Enterprise alluded to, whether or not Postmus is an addict is not the point of this latest episode of questionable behavior by the BOS. If members of the board knew there was a reliability problem with one of their own, why in the world was his new office given all that money to increase his staff and to rehab his building? And why on earth were there so many obstacles thrown up by this same board to hide Postmus' whereabouts and his calendar during the fire emergency? It's nice to know that Paul and Bradley ensured that "there was no interruption of county service", but if transparency is the goal of this board, I think they failed to obtain that goal. In any other business, if your CEO is unable to perform his duties, his subordinates take over and explain why to the shareholders. But in San Bernardino County government doing the right thing, ethical behavior, and explaining their decisions to the public, their employer, is a foreign concept. So , again, congratulations to Josie on her drug test, but when can your constituents expect anything other than window dressing by you and your peers?
Posted by: Alan Ennis | August 18, 2008 5:38 PM