• City Council Meeting August Special Meeting

Very brief meeting followed by a workshop that lasted about an hour. 

The meeting had one item of  "special business," which was to decide whether to hold city council elections in districts 1 and 3 with just one name on the ballot. If you blinked two weeks ago you missed the close of the nomination period for a name to be put on the ballot.

This is an election year where the terms of three city council seats were concluding. That's districts 1, 3, and 5.

There was only one non-incumbent, Pedro Magdaleno, who went to the trouble of meeting with the city clerk (takes about an hour), getting the necessary signatures (twenty), and turning them in before the deadline (literally done in the last hours of the final day)... but has never been to a city council meeting to weigh in on any topic —ever. 

Not even to introduce himself as someone looking to represent the city. 

I'd like to know why he thinks he's a better option than incumbent Ashlee DePhillippo, who has done an outstanding job representing the residents of our town. 

Oh, he didn't submit any contact information or even a ballot statement along with the nomination papers. Call me jaded if you want, but how can I be expected to take this as a serious candidacy? 

One more factoid of interest with the challenger for District 5, his wife works for the city... can you say "awkward!"

No photos of challenger Pedro Magdaleno were submitted to the city or found after an internet search. 

The estimated cost for placing the uncontested city council races on the ballot was said to be $30,000. 

One reason for having an uncontested seat on the ballot is to make room for a write-in candidate. 

I asked if voting for Mickey Mouse would be counted (*historically, Mickey gets votes in nearly every election throughout the country), and the answer is that such votes may be kept unofficially, but they don't show up in the official box score.

For example, in the 2024 County Supervisor race, there was a write-in candidate. He got 9 votes out of 102,279 cast. With these facts in mind, I made a motion to adopt option 1: appointing nominees for districts 1 and 3 in lieu of an election on November 3rd.

•

Long-Range Service Plan Community Workshop

In lieu of a recap, I'll summarize the four minute comment by the city manager that touched on the point of this endeavor. I'll leave a cued up link to his comments if you'd like to hear them as they were uttered (I'd suggest doing so). 

A slide from the presentation. Use the link to access the full 13 slide presentation.

Link to slides

Wildomar City Manager Chris Mann said the quiet part out loud at last night's meeting. The city is basically 18 years old now, and in his words, it's "coming into adulthood."

That's not just a nice line. He walked everyone back through the rough early years after incorporation. The state yanked Vehicle License Fee funding. Parks got fenced off after a ballot measure failed. Public safety staffing was thin, to put it kindly.

Fast forward to today and things look different. Voters passed Measure Z to get the parks reopened. Measure AA added a one percent sales tax. The economy grew. Property tax revenue eventually replaced what the state took away.

Add it all up and the city has a structurally balanced budget. Mann says it can probably stay that way, as long as everyone stays careful with it.

But here's the catch. Balanced budget doesn't mean Wildomar has caught up to its neighbors.

The city just doesn't have the land to build the kind of big shopping centers, logistics hubs, or auto malls that pump serious tax revenue into cities like Murrieta or Temecula. Economic development still matters, Mann said, but it's not going to close that gap on its own.

On top of that, Wildomar inherited a rough road system from the county. A lot of it was never even paved. And there are still big open questions hanging out there. A community center. A senior center. Equestrian space, ball fields, a skate park, maybe aquatics. Plus long term staffing for deputies and fire stations.

So what's the move? 

Mann put it back on the community. Wildomar can keep taxes low and settle for more modest amenities. That's a real option, and a fair one.

Or it can chase the kind of services and amenities Murrieta and Temecula offer. But that path isn't free. It means new revenue has to come from somewhere.

What the city can't do, according to Mann, is keep drifting without a plan. Build one thing, expand another, and wake up one day having missed the stuff that actually mattered most.

That's the point of the process happening right now. Get everyone rowing toward the same roadmap, so decisions get made on purpose instead of by accident.

Wildomar Rap opinion time

I've always been a realist, but the condition has become more pronounced as the decades have rolled by. 

I can appreciate the efforts of the staff to put together such a presentation, even if the staff in this case are an outside agency contracted for "not to exceed $55K," but not really see the ROI (Return On Investement). 

I've seen very many similar workshops (a parks masterplan of 2014 comes to mind, where, in reality, the only differences today are things that did NOT come from that past effort). 

Blog about the 2014 workshop

There was another parks visioning workshop about five years later... 

Blog about 2018-2019 workshop

We voted to save $30,000 tonight by removing uncontested city council seats from the ballot, if it had been up to me, this event would have never made it out of the talking stage. 

Minimally, I would have wanted to push this as far as possible before seeking outside help. I get it, I'm the one who taught Thomas how to doubt, but I've yet to see the Warner Bros. frog sing, for all the promises made before the show started. 

Michigan J Frog, at your service

Instead of belaboring this, I support the effort since the city is spending money on it, but understand that once the hoopla is over and done, it'll get filed away into the memory hole of yesteryear and never get brought up again. 

Remember, there's an even more expensive study (a specific plan for a new historic downtown). If you missed my rants about it, and haven't already had your fill of my brand of reality, here's a link to what the city is budgeting more than $450,000 for that beauty. 

I wrote a blog about that one too

Bottom line

We are fiscally hemmed in with very little wiggle room for any additions to anything in Wildomar. That's simply a fact that can't be papered over or workshopped around.

In the City Manager's opening remarks, he said in less direct wording, we can have anything if you're ready to pay higher taxes to get it. 

The question you have to ask yourself is if you think 67% of the voters in Wildomar are ready to take on a higher tax liability to get things like a community center, develop the parkland we've had on the books for years, and many other basic things most other cities have... my read of the community is that there isn't a groundswell to take on significant debt to pay for such amenities. 

If you have opinions about it, let's hear what they are!

•

A word on Mickey Mouse as a write-in candidate since WWII

I asked AI Claude to weigh in... Mickey Mouse really is the reigning champ of unqualified write-in votes. He shows up in basically every county's discard pile, election after election, decade after decade. One political scientist quoted in a piece about it put it well: Mickey Mouse is often called the most reliable "guest star" among fake write-in candidates, showing up on discard piles alongside Donald Duck and "None of the Above." The American Prospect

A few data points on scale:

• In Orange County, Florida alone in 2016, Mickey Mouse pulled in 1,103 write-in votes across races including president, senator, congress, state attorney, tax collector, and property appraiser. Spectrum News
• In 2020, Orange County voters wrote him in 391 times for property appraiser and another 555 times for sheriff alone. Spectrum News
• Election workers seem to expect it at this point. A Georgia election official said flatly that if Mickey doesn't get votes in an election, it's a bad election. The American Prospect

So the honest answer to "is it Mickey Mouse" is: yes, by reputation and by the sheer number of elections and jurisdictions he shows up in. But here's the important caveat — there's no single national tally of unqualified write-ins. Every state, and often every county, handles this differently. Some (like Maryland) don't track them at all unless the "candidate" has formally filed. Florida counties, by contrast, have released detailed spreadsheets in response to records requests, which is where most of these Mickey Mouse numbers come from.

So Mickey doesn't have one all-time record number, he's more like the most consistently popular fake write-in across time and geography, which is probably the more interesting story for your purposes anyway. Runners-up worth a mention if you want to have fun with it: Donald Duck is a perennial close second, Jesus Christ shows up constantly, and depending on the election cycle you'll see everyone from Harambe the gorilla to the Flying Spaghetti Monster to "U R Mom." The American Prospect