Norine Sigafoose steps down

Let's hope/demand they have an election. Potential names anyone?

Thanks for the fun times Norine, best of luck!

[...]
The owner of a small waterfront hotel, Sigafoose set records for campaign spending when she was elected to the City Council in 2004. She didn't have a lot of name recognition when she started, and said that was why she had to pour money into her campaign.

She spent $52,000, mostly her own money ---- a figure that at the time was considered shocking, but was exceeded last year by the city's mayor.

During the 2004 campaign, some argued that if Sigafoose was elected, she would become part of a three-member voting bloc along with Councilmen Matt Hall and Packard. But that hasn't turned out to be the case. Instead, Sigafoose has been considered by some City Hall watchers to be a bit of a maverick.

In a community where city leaders have prided themselves on public displays of consensus, Sigafoose repeatedly expressed dissatisfaction with the way Carlsbad was handling last year's controversy over the future of the strawberry field region along Cannon Road.

She called for independent investigations into several issues related to the Cannon Road controversy, including asking for an outside attorney to assess whether the city had followed state and federal laws when city employees met privately multiple times with the company that was planning to develop the Cannon Road region. The developer later dropped its plans, and voters in November approved a city-sponsored ballot measure that declared that the area should remain as open space.

Sigafoose also was the lone council member voting against spending $30,000 on voter pamphlets that aimed to explain the differences between the city-sponsored Proposition D option and the citizens' group Proposition E. She argued that the city was crossing the line into advocacy by funding those brochures.

Before the Cannon Road controversy, Sigafoose was known for support of tourism and beach preservation issues and for her opposition to the $70 million municipal golf course construction project. She argued long before the project's price tag increased by $10 million that it was costing far too much money.
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