Mark Fleming took an oath to represent ALL of Coronado. His letter attacking the Coronado Democratic Club doesn’t read that way.
Here are the facts. The Dem club has run candidate forums every election season for decades, with respected, local moderators overseeing them. These forums are open to the public. Membership-based forums like those hosted by Rotary or CREA, which are great organizations, are for their members only, not for the general public. Mr. Fleming was NOT at the forum he criticized in such detail. Fleming is describing an event he did NOT witness, based on a process he also gets wrong: the questions came from professional moderators, not the club itself, and audience members submit additional questions, as they do everywhere. He even made up some of the questions that were NEVER asked in his incorrect recollections of 2024.
None of this is complicated. A Coronado Civic Club that’s been around since 1888 (even older than the Hotel del), performing a public community service for free, with Coronado citizen volunteers, is admirable. A council member giving a false account of an event he skipped, then using his office to scold a civic group for doing this public service, is not.
Coronado has real work waiting: the sewage crisis, parking, or excessive divots at the golf course. I’d like to see Mr. Fleming’s next letter be about one of those.
VOL. 116, NO. 38 – Sept. 23, 2026