Gaylord’s Hitman: Eric Christen’s Bizarre Road to Chula Vista
By Jen Badgley
Gaylord and its allies have tried to portray their labor and environmental opponents as out of step with the Chula Vista community. But who are the real outsiders here – the union members and environmentalists who are living and raising their families in the area? Or the Nashville developer with a track record of running roughshod over local communities all across America?
Let’s take a look at Eric Christen — the man who has become Gaylord’s public face in the community.
Christen’s official job title is Vice President of Government Affairs for the Associated Builders and Contractors (ABC) of San Diego, but he’s really just an attack dog-for-hire, and he’s definitely proven that he’s more than willing to fight dirty.
Christen has a strange resume. When not taking his shirt off as a male model, he’s running for public office on extreme right-wing platforms and espousing eccentric ideas.
Christen, for instance, does not believe in global warming. He thinks it’s a crackpot theory dreamed up by environmentalists, whom he describes as “totalitarians” nearly as dangerous as “Islamic radicals.”
Maybe you’ve seen the blond and sculpted Christen preening on local TV or you’ve read his essays in the Union-Tribune. He likes to pose as a regular guy who knows what’s best for the people of Chula Vista, but he comes to us from Oregon, via Colorado. The people back in those states know what a hot-headed fringe character he really is.
When he ran in 1996 for the Oregon state legislature as a far-right candidate against a moderate Republican, Christen railed against “the increase in violent, senseless acts of crime.” But Christen failed to inform voters that he was, in fact, a convicted criminal. He was found guilty of criminal mischief after terrorizing a 17-year-old boy and attacking the teenager’s car in the previous year.
In Colorado Springs — where he got himself elected to the school board after running a pro-voucher, anti-public education campaign — Christen quickly created havoc, threatening mass firings of school district employees and verbally abusing fellow board members. “It’s been a long while since I’ve been around a public official who’s as rude as Eric Christen,” said the president of the local PTA.
In addition to alienating fellow school board members and school employees, Christen enraged the African-American community when he claimed that most black students who manage to graduate from high school will be functionally illiterate.” He also got in hot water with the Latino community when he insulted the Mexican holiday Cinco de Mayo. In another school board meeting incident, he joked that several students who had gotten a rash were on crystal meth. I’m guessing it wasn’t too tough to gather the 16,443 signatures supporting his recall.
If this guy is the public face of Gaylord, I can only image what’s lurking behind the curtains.
What prompted Gaylord and their friends at ABC, the developers’ lobbying group, to bring a loose cannon like Christen into our community? They must realize that they can’t ram their development plans down the community’s throat unless they go ballistic.
But Chula Vistans will make up their own minds about the bayfront. They don’t need to be told how to think by the developers’ bizarre boy toy.
Christen might not be able to go back where he came from. He’s been run out of Oregon and Colorado, where he’s been tagged in the media and by his colleagues as a “bombastic flamethrower” and an “excitable boy.” But maybe Gaylord’s execs can take him back to Nashville with them when they finally clear out of our community.
TrackBack
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://localjobsfirst.org/files-mt/mt-tb.fcgi/28
