Heir of the Dog

GO FIGURE: Sometimes, seeing is believing. Most of the time, it works the other way around. But after witnessing the Montecito Water Board in action Tuesday evening ​— ​at a standing-room-only extravaganza ​— ​I’m still not sure I can believe my eyes and ears. Ultimately, medical tests will be required to determine whether the board’s action inflicted soft-tissue trauma to my neck. But in the meantime, I’m submitting all medical bills to the district.

I showed up fully expecting an unruly mob of angry citizens armed with pitchforks and rakes. On the table was yet another water rate increase, an insulting if necessary “reward” for the great job normally profligate Montecitans have done conserving water. So incensed was the Montecito Association that it dispatched an email blast urging members to protest the rate hike. The water board was sending dangerously mixed messages, they complained. Conspicuously lacking was any long-term planning or coherent message. In other words, the district couldn’t find its ass with either hand. That same jeremiad was prominently posted in the pages of the Montecito Journal.

Under the rules of the rate-hike game, if a majority of rate payers oppose the increase, it’s dead in the nonexistent water. Prior to the meeting, there had been a few theatrical whiffs and sniffs about a possible recall of water boardmembers. There was some allusion to that at the meeting, but mostly it was 200 exceedingly well-behaved people crammed into exceedingly uncomfortable seats at the Montecito Union School’s auditorium, gazing upon a blizzard of charts and graphs displayed on a 94-inch TV monitor. One speaker ​— ​the putative ringleader of the opposition movement ​— ​suggested perhaps unkindly that any person in the room was smart enough to do the job of the five elected boardmembers. And although the word “recall” did escape his lips, it was more as a hypothetical possibility than actual threat. It was never clear what exactly his beef was.