Change always wins

What it’s really all about is the status quo versus change.

Here’s a late-breaking bulletin: Change always wins. Maybe not right away, maybe after the status quo puts up a nasty right, but eventually and always.

This comes to mind in the wake of some pretty unsettling comments about Amourence Lee, the appointed member of the San Mateo City Council seeking election for the first time. She has not been shy about speaking out on race, as a representative, as someone who sought out an ethnically diverse neighborhood in which to live and as someone who is, indeed, a person of color. 

Speaking out hardly makes her unique — city councilmembers up and down the Peninsula openly have supported the Black Lives Matter movement. Many councils have had long and intense and unusually frank discussions about the fuller nature of our communities and the practices, policies and social structures that are in place, officially and unofficially.

The main difference, it appears, is that Lee is up for election. The unsettling comments have neither been initiated by her opponents, Lisa Diaz Nash and incumbent Councilwoman Diane Papan, nor have the comments engendered any response by either of them. Maybe the debate among the three candidates will take the more customary form of honest disagreement over growth and development. Maybe the source of the comments is so widely known as a brash grouch that it’s not worth even the attention it has been given here.

But what strikes me most about this is the accusation that Lee has made race an issue. What we should have learned by now is that when it comes to America, race is always an issue.

PERPETUAL MOTION MACHINE: For the fourth time, that fascinating public agency, the San Mateo County Harbor Commission has rejected a claim by soon-to-be-former Commissioner Sabrina Brennan that she is due all kinds of money because someone has harassed her in a manner uniquely evident to her.

If there are new boardmembers — including Brennan’s mom, Lemoine “Lee” Fernandez — elected to the commission, could we expect the new majority to vote in favor of giving her the money she is so desperately and consistently seeking? The word is that it could be in the range of six figures, and Brennan already has cost the district more than a $750,000 in investigating her various complaints and grievances against board members and district staff. No claim has been upheld.

That’s not the item, however. The item is a proposal from Brennan for a new policy regarding sexual harassment. The wording is such that if it had been in effect, she would have violated the policy in her now famous diatribe back in April in which she repeatedly shouted three words that won’t be repeated here, but were graphic references to female genitalia. 

Mark Simon is a veteran journalist, whose career included 15 years as an executive at SamTrans and Caltrain. He can be reached at marksimon@smdailyjournal.com.

 Editor's note: Two sections of this column, one referring to Kirsten Keith as hand-picked by Brennan, the other referring to her ballot designation as incorrect, were removed because of inaccuracies.