[Editor’s note: for some reason, WordPress.com – which powers this blog — isn’t displaying author’s names on their posts. So we’ll do it the old-fashioned way here with Anaheim Blog’s new contributor, “Anaheimocrat,” and have him insert a byline until this wrinkle is smoothed out. – MC]

By Anaheimocrat.

I’m pleased to be a contributor to this blog, which is a new experience for me. My politics are middle-of the-road, but have been leaning more to the right in recent years. I’m using the name “Anaheimocrat” because I look at the candidate, rather than the party he or she belongs to, and what they will do for Anaheim. Anaheim is a wonderful place to live. I feel like Anaheim arrived at some cross-roads, and the choices we make will really shape what kind of city this is, and not necessarily for the best. I believe this election is one of those cross-roads.

I’ve learned that Supervisor Shawn Nelson has endorsed John Leos for city council. For me, that is not a reassuring endorsement. Nelson represents the Anaheim flatlands as the 4th District Supervisor, but he has not been a friend to the city. Since taking office, he has done everything he can to kill the city’s top infrastructure project, the ARTIC project. ARTIC is a long-term investment in the future of Anaheim that will support economic and population expansion for years to come, and will help maintain Anaheim as Orange County’s center of gravity.

From what I have learned, Supervisor Nelson has done everything in his power as a member of the OCTA Board of Directors to pull the plug on ARTIC and shift those resources to his home town of Fullerton.

And since Leos is so closely entwined with the county and Anaheim employees unions, endorsing him must have been a real political leap for Nelson, who has been a vocal critic of public employee unions.

When an Anaheim council candidate is endorsed by someone who has been so adversarial to Anaheim, it is cause to be suspicious of the council candidate’s suitability to govern Anaheim. That goes double when Nelson has to risk undermining the anti-public employee union credentials he’s worked hard to build up, by backing someone who has been as involved in OCEA politics as Leos.

John Leos comes off as a sincere man, if a bit opportunistic and too union-oriented for my tastes. But if Leos is able to attract the endorsement of our anti-Anaheim supervisor, it’s hard to give him the benefit of the doubt.