Signal Tribune Newspaper

BY NICK DIAMANTIDES
Staff Writer

Nick Dibs, who is hoping to replace Congresswoman Laura Richardson (D-37th District), has collected enough signatures to have his name on the November ballot. Dibs had collected 12,637 signatures during his petition drive. Last week the Los Angeles County Registrar’s office verified 7,997 of those signatures- 218 more than Dibs needed.
“I have volunteers helping me and am looking forward to getting more community involvement,” Dibs said. “This is a grassroots effort to unseat Laura Richardson.”
Dibs only recently began collecting contributions for his campaign fund. “The first effort was to get on the ballot, and now the focus will be to raise money and rev up a traditional campaign effort,” he said. “There are a large number of people in the 37th Congressional District who are very concerned and upset with the behavior of Laura Richardson. There is a significant interest in having somebody else represent the district in Congress due to her mismanagement of public and private funds.”
News reports published in the last two months described Richardson’s failure to pay her bills and her excessive use of benefits bestowed upon elected officials.
Dibs said that more and more voters are coming to the conclusion that, since Richardson is not able to manage her own finances, she cannot be trusted to make decisions with the taxpayers’ money. “She’s driving around in a $1,300-a-month car paid for by the taxpayers- the most expensive car lease out of 435 members of Congress,” Dibs noted. “Plus she has defaulted on three homes six times in the past four years, and not paid bills to local businesses that had done work for her until those bills were publicized by the news media.”
Dibs stressed that Richardson has a long history of documented abuse of power, abuse of taxpayer funds, and mismanagement of personal funds going back to the days when she was first elected to the Long Beach City Council. “I say enough is enough and obviously thousands of voters feel the same way,” he said. “I got my name on the ballot to provide the voters with a viable alternative to a person who has failed them on all fronts.”
Dibs is not the only one challenging Richardson in the November election. Cypress College professor Peter Matthews and former Wrigley Bulletin publisher Lee Davis have both announced their plans to run as write-in candidates. Both of them are Democrats who lost to Richardson by wide margins in the June primary.
Dibs noted that Matthews and Davis cannot even file the papers for a write-in campaign until the middle of September, and write-in campaigns are almost always doomed to failure. He insisted that he is the only viable option for the voters. “I am saying that we need to work together to unseat her,” he said. “If they are really serious about unseating Laura Richardson, they will join forces with me.”
See next week’s Signal Tribune for reactions from Matthews and Davis to Dibs’ invitation to join him in his effort to unseat Richardson. As of press time, Richardson had not returned a call the Signal Tribune made to her office.