The Feb. 26 Fillmore City Council meeting could have been considered hilarious if the council members hadn't been so pitiful. Star Management President Mike Cirillo showed up, along with a handful of anti-rent control El Dorado Estates residents and a “pit bull� of an attorney, armed with a letter threatening to sue the city.
After the council members temporarily adjourned the meeting to talk in closed session for more than an hour about rent control, in violation of the Brown Act, they returned and confirmed their previous decision to take a vote in El Dorado and provide a rent control ordinance for their approval. That's when Cirillo turned his "pit bull" loose — and for well over 30 minutes. I've never gotten more than three minutes.
Cirillo's attorney attacked the council members with deceit, half-truths and intimidation. Mayor Steve Conaway lost total control of the meeting. Council members sat on their perches looking like cornered, whipped puppies as the "pit bull" ate ’em up and spit ’em out.
Conaway couldn't get a word in edgewise or stop the "pit bull" attack until the mayor called for a vote to "reject" a rent control ordinance. The vote was unanimous in favor of rejecting rent control for El Dorado Estates and accepting, unseen, Cirillo's terms for a new lease. No one has ever seen, much less read, Cirillo's new dictates of a lease, but City Council shoved it down the throats of every single El Dorado senior homeowner without even giving us an opportunity to read it. That's your City Council hard at work.
The only thing we have to look forward to is replacing most of these cowards in November. That's when we will ask City Council, once again, for a rent control ordinance for El Dorado senior mobile home park.
— David Reeves, Fillmore
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