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Joel Anderson was hoping to join the San Diego County Board of Supervisors years before he did.
Since he was sworn in on Jan. 4, it seems as though he’s been making up for lost time.
The longtime East County Republican has launched several initiatives, held a handful of news conferences and issued a flurry of press releases.
He has teamed up with members of the board’s Democratic majority when they have shared matters of concern, yet has voted opposite them when they don’t.
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None of that should come as a surprise. He may be a freshman at the county, but Anderson is a seasoned public official who has served at the most local of levels, such as on the Padre Dam Municipal Water District board, and in the state Legislature, as a member of the Assembly and Senate over a dozen years.
Twelve percent of the state s population [owe] this $1 billion of utility debt, said Glenn Farrel, director of government relations at the San Diego County Water Authority. That s a lot of people living at the edge.
Farrel estimates that there is $50 million of water bill debt locally due to COVID-19. Numbers reported to the state by water districts in San Diego show almost 70,000 accounts were delinquent as of October 2020. We have a major problem, said Farrel.
There are 24 members of the SDCWA, including the Padre Dam Municipal Water District, which serves a large portion of East County, from Alpine to El Cajon. Carlisle said only 0.5% of water bills are delinquent typically, but during the pandemic, that figure has risen to 3.4%.
Supervisor-elect Anderson plans to prioritize homelessness, transparency [The San Diego Union-Tribune]
Joel Anderson first ran for elected office in 1998. He didn’t have much experience with politics, but he ran for State Assembly at the encouragement of some friends.
He didn’t even make it out of the primary, falling to fellow Republican and future two-term Assemblywoman Charlene Zettler by more than 10 percentage points.
But Anderson, 60, says losing that race turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to him.
It taught him several lessons about effective campaigning and the power a candidate has to help residents, as well as helped him better understand and appreciate voters, he said.
Print
Joel Anderson first ran for elected office in 1998. He didn’t have much experience with politics, but he ran for State Assembly at the encouragement of some friends.
He didn’t even make it out of the primary, falling to fellow Republican and future two-term Assemblywoman Charlene Zettler by more than 10 percentage points.
But Anderson, 60, says losing that race turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to him.
It taught him several lessons about effective campaigning and the power a candidate has to help residents, as well as helped him better understand and appreciate voters, he said.