I can’t help myself

You may recall, Bolanos was the sheriff until, amid various controversies, he lost his reelection bid in 2022 to Christina Corpus.

“There are a lot of people who have asked me or encouraged me to get involved,” Bolanos said. If the board appoints a new sheriff and that person decides to run for the position in 2028, “I would want to see who it is … and whether to challenge. If there is a special election, my position is you can never say never. I’ll take a look at it and make a decision in the appropriate time.”

Bolanos could call his campaign the I Told You So Tour. “Obviously, I thought I was the better candidate,” Bolanos said. “I wasn’t surprised she had these difficulties but it exceeded my expectations.”

Here is some good news: The California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training has revoked Corpus’ law enforcement credentials, which means, at least, she cannot run for the office herself.

As I have said more than once, you just cannot make this stuff up.

Unfortunately, this is what the board is forced to do — figure out a way through unprecedented circumstances.

This is not the first time there has been a vacancy in the position of sheriff. But this time, no one wants Dan Perea, current undersheriff and Corpus butler, to “discharge the duties” of the office a day more than necessary. 

The board is going to hold at least one meeting for public input, and that ought to be a doozy. 

Expect a minimum of 172 additional options that will focus not on credentials, but on issue positions. The hazards of this were illustrated by Supervisor Noelia Corzo, who said she wants to make sure whoever gets the job promises zero cooperation with ICE. One can only imagine the additional list of demands that will be placed on an appointee. Not to mention Supervisor Jackie Speier’s apparent comfort with having the board oversee the office until all this is settled.

Meanwhile, the deputies and command staff would like someone with genuine law enforcement leadership experience as soon possible to bring stability to an office that has been reeling for two-plus years.

Supervisor Ray Mueller proposed appointing a sheriff who immediately resigns.

Mueller said, in essence, that he is unconcerned about appearances, which is an admirable position for someone, unless they are in elective office themselves, as the now-departed sheriff demonstrated.

Supervisor Lisa Gauthier wondered if holding a special election quickly — low turnout likely — would provide an unfair advantage to one candidate over another. Hello, Carlos Bolanos, who got more than 62,000 votes in his losing 2022 campaign, and more than 82,000 when he was elected in 2018.

The complications and attendant contortions seem only to compound. But perhaps it could have been expected, given the circumstances.

The board rewrote the rulebook, pushing for a county charter amendment that gave them the power to fire the sheriff, a power that remains in place, by the way, until the end of 2028.

That would seem to argue for a minimal amount of further screwing around with the process, and the most straightforward path would seem to be an election.

While there are those who think it should be otherwise, the job of sheriff remains an elective position. It ought to be restored to that status as soon as possible — not to meet a policy agenda or salve the worries of personnel, but to reassure the public that this is not a political process fueled by insiders.

I cannot let this pass. In her last public statement, made to a local TV station, Corpus said, “They don’t deserve me.” I could not agree more.

In a quasi-related matter, another local newspaper last week spent a huge amount of space on a self-congratulatory story about how they first “started asking questions” about Corpus and the credentials of the good doctor, Victor Aenlle. Interestingly, the story neglected to mention the front-page retraction the paper ran after its initial story about Aenlle.

Meanwhile, my friends have begun to wonder, as have I, how many more columns I might write about the Sheriff’s Office. They put the over/under at six.