Bob Cuddy: Pismo council bulldozed Bill Rabenaldt

They’ve been playing in the sandbox again in Pismo Beach, and I don’t mean under the pier.

I mean the sandbox that looks like a City Council dais but somehow elicits behavior more appropriate to a first-grader than to people allegedly running a city.

Last week, the mayor and three council members picked up their shovels and threw sand on their fifth playmate, Bill Rabenaldt, who often does not play the way the other kids would like.

They took away Rabenaldt’s laptop and city credit card after he communicated independently with the California Coastal Commission.

Mayor Mary Ann Reiss and the other council members forbade Rabenaldt from representing the city at conferences.

There’s no word yet on whether they’ll make him sit in a corner and wear a dunce cap at future meetings.

The censure came after Rabenaldt sought information from the Coastal Commission about a city plan to charge for parking downtown.

In addition, a Rabenaldt newsletter, which goes to hundreds of people, included an e-mail exchange with a city staffer saying the employee may have his head in the sand on the parking matter.

This was enough to send Reiss into high dudgeon.

She may have had grounds for indignation (although not censure) on the first point. Rabenaldt is a councilman, and it seems bad form for him to go off on his own. He says he was just gathering information, adding, “I’m not trying to make a pact with them (the Coastal Commission).”

But if criticizing a city employee is grounds for censure, they’d better start printing censure documents by the truckload. Fair or not, we all get to criticize people on the public payroll.

What really rankles is the way Reiss pulled off her censure. Before Tuesday’s meeting, she got on the phone with Mayor Pro Tem Shelly Higginbotham.

Psst, psst, whisper, whisper. They buzzed like grade school bullies planning to take down the class nerd. “Don’t tell Billy.”

When Rabenaldt arrived at the meeting, they—and two other council members — pounced.

“I was blindsided,” Rabenaldt says.

To make it worse, Reiss declared the censure an “emergency,” which kept it from being publicized before the meeting. Not coincidentally, it also kept Rabenaldt’s supporters from showing up.

I tried to reach Reiss for this column, but we couldn’t connect. But she insisted at the time that the censure couldn’t wait. Her fellow council members went along. Rabenaldt calls them “sheep.” It’s hard to disagree.

There is so much wrong with this caper that it’s hard to know where to begin.

The council censured Rabenaldt for matters that don’t deserve censure. It rushed the censure through (Emergency? Are you kidding?). It never asked Rabenaldt directly to change his behavior.

“I didn’t think it was important to call him.” Reiss said about informing Rabenaldt before the meeting.

Instead, the council members chose to ambush him at a public meeting, deliberately keeping him in the dark.

This is petty. It is the behavior of children.

On the other hand, it’s also the Pismo Beach City Council. Hey, janitor! More sand!