Maurice Goodman has a tough row to hoe

Being near any of this is political poison. There is a distinct and persistent aroma of incompetence wafting over the entire three-campus operation. Which makes last week’s decision by Maurice Goodman to run for Assembly something of a head-scratcher. 

He’s a member of the district’s hard-pressed Board of Trustees, the same entity that’s dealing with an ongoing county investigation into the behavior of key officials, both current and long gone, among other troubles. 

What’s more, that same board is responsible for millions of dollars in financial settlements, courtesy of the taxpayers, granted to some of those employees in the wake of revelations related to allegations of fiscal impropriety. 

Goodman has been on board for much (but not all) of this ongoing mess, important aspects of which have yet to be settled (the legal fate of the former chancellor, Ron Galatolo, for one, is still hanging out there). Yet Goodman has chosen this point in time to announce his candidacy for a local state Assembly seat.

It almost feels like a desperate attempt to bail out on his part, to do just about anything to get away from the crushing weight of the regular drumbeat of bad news emanating from dysfunctional district headquarters in the western San Mateo hills.

For Goodman, the obvious dilemma is too blatant to ignore: No matter how hard he might try to separate himself from his district’s ongoing ration of bad news, he can’t. He’s stuck. He’s part and parcel of it, even if a damning portion of it occurred prior to his arrival on the board.

He’s sitting there now in full view of the voting public with a huge albatross hovering over him. And that’s bad enough. But his opponents for that Assembly seat probably can’t wait to confront him on all of this, fairly or not. It’s an ugly picture.

TIM KAWAKAMI SCORES: Still on the subject of timing, both good and bad, it’s appropriate to tip our cap to Tim Kawakami. The Mills High School alum and his colleagues apparently have scored this month. 

He’s the top Bay Area editor and one of the key early hires of The Athletic, an online subscription sports website that is being sold for the princely sum of $550 million to the New York Times Company. That’s a lot of cheddar.

Kawakami, a former sports columnist for the San Jose Mercury News, has led the way locally at The Athletic for the past five years as the digital operation brought in several hundred staffers overall and accumulated a reported 1.2 million paid subscribers. A year’s subscription to the informative ad-free site costs $72.

Significantly, media accounts indicate that The Athletic has actually not been profitable up to this point. But it doesn’t seem to matter, certainly not to the planners at The New York Times.   

DI NAPOLI CLOSES IN SOUTH CITY: South San Francisco has lost a well-established downtown dining option. The Di Napoli Pizzeria and Ristorante on Grand Avenue shut its doors for good on the last day of 2021. One of the better Italian specialty restaurants in the North County, Di Napoli had been a fixture in South City’s old business district since 1990. The outfit’s signature pizzas had a devoted following but the pandemic, along with rising operating costs, finally forced the closure, according to social media posts. 

WAI WOO CALLS IT A DAY: Also ending a long/productive tenure on Dec. 31 was Wai Woo, a Burlingame/Hillsborough mail carrier for the U.S. Postal Service. He had worked delivering mail to residents for 42 years. His career was marked by a friendly devotion to customer service and daily reliability. Postal workers are too often targets for criticism these days but Wai Woo most assuredly wasn’t one of them. 

You can get in touch with John Horgan by email at johnhorganmedia@gmail.com.