KHTS Radio Santa Clarita Radio – Santa Clarita News
By: Bill Reynolds – Valencia Resident & Vietnam War Veteran
A few days ago I saw on social media that an unknown City Council candidate jumped on Assemblywoman Christy Smith’s skirt tails by exaggerating her support for installing our community’s Fallen War Monument back in 2017. Understand that Christy is running for Congress and she’s coming in 2nd place and this unknown, irrelevant, unengaged partisan city council candidate has no chance to win a seat but he apparently hopes to ride Christy’s modest popularity as far as he can. So I am setting the record straight right here.
As the Veteran and President of SCV’s Veteran Memorial, Inc., that spearheaded our monument project, I led the charge informing our community to gain moral support in order to convince Santa Clarita City Hall that this was an important project to our community. SCV is highly patriotic and our Veterans and active military personnel are treasured so, quite frankly, it was relatively easy for us to win support from our community. But then City Council threw us a curveball when they ultimately provided approval with a caveat that the granite monument must be community funded. So, I charged ahead though I had never before helped a fundraising program. I was stunned as contributions came rolling in hand over fist and within two months we had collected over $50,000 and we finally topped out at just over $55, 000, which covered all expenses. We had great volunteers such as Charlie Rasmussen’s construction company who contributed labor and expertise, Home Depot donated construction materials and Jim Coffey’s Electrical Company installed lighting at no cost, etc. Plus, the City of Santa Clarita was just great to work with. City Manager Ken Striplin assigned a wonderful project manager, Julia Regan who was incredibly helpful in navigating the city’s red tape.
Signal Newspaper owner at the time, Chuck Champion, along with Carl and Jeri Goldman of KHTS Hometown Station were solid proponents who constantly published project status articles. Those articles kept our community informed and were tremendously helpful towards fundraising. However, the driving force at City Hall was undoubtedly Councilman Bob Kellar who felt this project was vital to our community and he helped pave the way with his peers for project approval.
The one common theme throughout the entire process of project approval, fundraising and project implementation was keeping things apolitical. So I found it infuriating when I saw an unknown, who will go unnamed, city council candidate trying to gain support to a politician’s election campaign based on her very modest contribution to our wonderful monument. And by the way, that unknown, uninvolved council candidate with no positive platform and quite frankly no chance to win had zero involvement in our project. We certainly appreciated Christy Smith’s modest support but in reality, she was not at all an outspoken or proactive supporter, hence I decided I should set the record straight here.
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For more information about this “unknown city council candidate”, please go to WertheForSCV.com. Chris Werthe is a veteran and will work to make Santa Clarita a better place to live.
Can’t wait until all you racist dinosaurs are long gone.
You’re disgusting.
Mr.Reynolds never keeps anything apolitical. If he did, he would have invited the elected Democratic leaders who contributed to the project financially and who showed up to support the project when it was at risk of not being approved by city council. Furthermore, the social media post he references never exaggerated anything. We leave the exaggerating and plagiarizing to him since those are what he’s well known for.
Chris Werthe, an honorable and active military soldier and candidate for city council had every right to point out the politically biased approach Mr.Reynolds took with his project which SHOULD have been apolitical. He and Christy Smith both have my vote.
It’s interesting you’re bad mouthing a fellow vet who is running for city council because he’s not a member of your “party” by calling him a “no name”….I don’t know how that’s going to work out for you. Chris Werthe for City Council.
We all know the “unknown city council candidate,” is Chris Werthe who is also a vet and currently in the Army Reserves. Also, I see Christy Smiths name on the donor list. Where is Multi millionaire Mike Garcia’s?
https://signalscv.com/2017/02/fallen-warriors-monument-contributors-4/
Angel Rose, where is your name?
Angel, how do you know about Mike Garcia’s personal assets? Do you know That Christy Smith lives in a luxurious million $$’s home? Does that bother you?
This letter reveals the precise truth. The public at large was invited per our local media. It was suggested that our City Council Members unveil our granite monument but I recommended that our Gold Star Families handle that, which is exactly what happened. Christy Smith’s modest monetary donation was appreciated. The unnamed city council candidate failed to contribute. I would recommend that Christy & the unnamed candidate divorce themselves from the likes of CA25UP. They will lead you down primrose lane. Still setting the record straight.
Proudly just voted for this as you say “unknown city council candidate” who many of us (who have felt frozen out of local politics by the entrenched reactionary old guard) know personally as a lovely human, devoted father, faithful husband, emerging community leader, veteran and ACTIVE military serviceman. Sad that people like this author feel the need to spread hate rather than love while slyly tooting his own horn to get personal accolades for his work on the monument. Yeah, we see how ya slipped that in! Go to WertheForSCV.com to find out more about this man of integrity, inclusiveness and love.
Arlette, I spread honesty & truth. I don’t need tooting my own horn. Our project was supposed to be apolitical but once again 3 years after the event, once liberals just had to go political. It’s rather pathetic.
Irrelevant? irrelevant? What a pompous thing to say. Are you projecting some personal need of your to feverishly write mean and opinionated articles in order for you to be seen by other as relevant? Mr. Worthe is grande relevent because he is a decent man, husband, active duty vet who knows the local issues and takes on healthy position. He is running a clean campaign and not funded by blood money (NRA, weapons indusrty) and lock and step party positions (95% voting Trump) like that guy running for Congress. if you took the time to look at Chris Werthe’s platform instead of boasting about yourself while putting down others, you might the relevance.
Yes, Chris is a nice man & I appreciate his Army service. But here’s the rub: he’s associated with the radical liberal CA25UP group & he’s clearly a left winger. Democrats have been absolutely horrible for California while our fair city has thrived very well with solid conservative & rational leadership despite being on a red California island.
And by the way, Chris was completely disingenuous & dishonest saying Sacramento Smith was a driving force behind our making our Fallen Warriors Monument happen.
If you so vilify the Dems of CA for the ills they then get the credit for having CA be home to the largest GDP generator for the entire country. As a self avowed conservative isn’t that the highest benchmark you look at? And while we are at it we can also talk about how the Republican led states are the lowest in GDP in life expectancy but the highest in obesity…. but I don’t think you want to talk about that…
Reynolds proposed House Study Bill 185, which was introduced last week, is similar in spirit to the federal biofuel mandate which requires a certain number of gallons of renewable fuels like corn-based ethanol be blended into the nation s fuel supply.