CHULA VISTA, Calif. (KGTV) – It’s been more than month since the Chula Vista City Council District Four seat was officially declared vacant.
“You know what we’ve been through,” Cheryl Perez, a District Four resident, said.
This after former council member Andrea Cardenas resigned and later pled guilty to fraudulently getting a covid relief loan along with her brother.
Tuesday the city approving a special April 4th meeting to interview the eight applicants looking to fill district four seat until the term is up in December.
“It’s going to be 100 percent transparent,” Mayor John McCann of the City of Chula Vista said. “There will only be eight candidates that have been qualified. So those will be the ones that we will be able to select from. And we’ll take the input on the good and bad from the public on any of them.”
The interviews will be each of the appointed candidates will have a 10-minute interview at the April meeting.
Some people from the district and others voicing their concerns about the process.
“Ten-minutes to get to know the candidate; the person they’re going to vote to represent us for the next eight months? Doesn’t seem like much time,” Perez said.
“It should just plain stay vacant. The community deserves to select their representative. This other route they’re opting to go with - who’s going to pick them? Four, five people? That don’t even live in the district? It doesn’t seem quite fair,” Delia Dominguez Cervantes, a Chula Vista resident, said.
McCann told ABC 10News the goal is to appoint someone honest and ethical.
And it’s important to keeping the public’s trust that the council will do that with this process after all that’s happened.
“We want to make sure we’re getting everybody involved. We want both sides. We want people who support the city. We want who criticize the city. This is how democracy works,” McCann said.
While some have hope of what can happen, there’s still some skepticism.
“And give us somebody who is really new, fresh. None of this political stuff; own nobody any favors, that whole political circle. I think they could. Will they do that I doubt it,” Perez said.
Again, this is an interim appointment with the full-term district four seat here in Chula Vista is on the November ballot.
