The election for county sheriff is about ten months away (next June 7), so the chatter among the chattering class has started. Mark Simon at the Daily Journal did a full column on the potential of the race a week ago. His focus was money and race as seen in these couple of snips:
Even before his 2016 appointment by the Board of Supervisors to replace Greg Munks, who resigned in midterm for health reasons, Bolanos had begun raising money for the 2018 election, when he would appear on the ballot for the first time. He raised more than $100,000 in the first half of 2016. By the end of 2017, his campaign fund had more than $250,000 in cash on hand. In the months leading up to the June 2018 election, he raised another $135,000 and entered the last month of the campaign with more than $225,000 in cash on hand. He spent $212,000 for his election. He did little fundraising in 2020. But at the start of this year, as the next election neared, he raised more than $150,000. At midyear, he had more than $260,000 in his campaign treasury.
There may be some pride in the Latino community that the county’s top law enforcement official is also Latino, but Bolanos has carefully cultivated an image as serving the entirety of the county’s population. He is credited with effective work in the heavily Latino community of North Fair Oaks, but he is not prominently associated with that community.
That column prompted a letter to the DJ from B'game planning commissioner Ray Larios attempting to "clarify things" including asserting that fundraising equals "desperation" and
Mr. Bolanos indeed has raised a large sum of money. However, Mr. Simon omits that most of his campaign funding comes from private interests, retired judges and consultants who reside outside of our county lines.
I'm not going to bother to pull Bolanos' campaign financial filings for three reasons. First, even if factual, none of those sources of donations give me cause for concern. Second, building a war chest for a county race is hardly surprising--we are 766,000 people. Without some context of say a typical county supervisor's fundraising, spending $200K on a countywide race isn't out of line. Lastly, if any of the challengers could raise that much cash I am sure they would do it in a heartbeat. Larios finishes his letter with some serious bloviating
I leave readers with something to consider. Here is a woman who has risen through the ranks as an exceptional officer, commander and community leader in what has been traditionally a male-dominated career. Chief Corpus works twice as hard as her male counterparts and is not concerned about politics.
Christina Corpus is chief-in-title of the "Police Bureau" in Millbrae because Millbrae was too broke to afford its own police department and had to outsource it to the Sheriff's Department years ago. Bolanos is the one who has been promoting her. One wonders how a guy who lives in a different town (ours!) would know who is working twice as hard as everyone else? It's so ridiculous on its face that it begs the question of whether someone with such poor judgement should be in a position of responsibility on the Burlingame Planning Commission? With advocates like Larios, Corpus is going to need more than a chunk of cash, her gender and her ethnicity to win in San Mateo County.
At least we have ten months to assess the real issues of how the Sheriff's Department has been performing and what every candidate believes should happen in the future. Can't happen fast enough.
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