Rosie strikes again

Rosie Arreola Fernandez has no intention of resigning her seat on the Calexico City Council. She said so, even if she didn’t say it to us.

I’ll confess, I was impressed and even a bit envious Friday when I saw that Richard Montenegro Brown of the Calexico Chronicle had secured an interview with the embattled councilwoman following her arrest for allegedly driving under the influence July 6 and rear-ending a trailer being pulled by a pickup truck.

Honestly, I supposed Fernandez had followed the lead of El Centro Mayor Edgard Garcia and lawyered up quickly after her arrest, especially with it coming so close on the heels of her hit-and-run incident May 5, in which she was caught on video careening through an intersection, over a curb, literally through a stop sign and into a parked Mini Cooper, pausing only long enough to throw it into reverse and get the hell out of Dodge.

But I supposed wrongly, mostly because I keep underestimating this woman’s lousy judgment and lack of humility. Bear in mind this is the same woman who told our reporter last month people were making too much of her accident and hasty disappearing act in May.

“I was involved in an accident,” she said. “I took care of it. I didn’t do anything wrong. I have been in accidents before. Accidents happen.”

I love that quote, because it so perfectly captures a sense of entitlement and an absence of personal accountability or remorse.

But at least she admitted she did it, which is more than she did the first time we asked her about it and she denied it out of hand.

So Fernandez has been known, at least once, to fib.

Which leads to me to wonder how much of the account Fernandez gave the Chronicle was — strictly speaking — true. For instance, she said she does not believe she was inebriated at the time of the accident. She said she had ingested two glasses of wine and a dose of cough medication between 10 and 10:30 p.m. on July 5. She also admitted to being on antidepressants for some months.

So she would have the public believe she shoehorned two glasses of wine and a dose of cough medicine into 30 minutes of a Friday evening and several hours later was overcome with a sense of urgency to drive 70 to 80 miles per hour on a dark rural highway in the wee hours of Saturday morning (the accident occurred around 4:54 a.m.).

I’m not buying it, because, one, it doesn’t seem likely, and, two, she’s lied about this kind of thing before.

One thing that came out loud and clear in the Chronicle interview was that Fernandez once again doesn’t think she’s being treated fairly. “I apologize for my mistake,” she reportedly said. “We all make mistakes. Unfortunately, I’m out there trying to help people, but I’m the one who gets hurt.”

I can only suppose she was referring to the fact there was no one in the first car she hit and that the driver of the second was reportedly uninjured. Apparently her failure to kill or maim anyone makes her the victim.

Of course, I don’t know Rosie Fernandez, and in her book, that disqualifies me or anyone who has commented critically on her behavior from having an opinion. “I don’t know anybody who has criticized me,” she told the Chronicle. “I don’t know them, and they don’t know me. There’s not one person out there that I know.”

Maybe so, but I’ll venture another opinion about her, just the same. She should seriously rethink her position on resigning. She is giving all the wrong kind of attention to a city government that is battling back from drawing all the wrong kind of attention.

At best, Fernandez is a distraction. At worst, she’s a liar. In either case, the people of Calexico deserve better.