‘Payback politics’ from the city council

If Chahe Keuroghelian is anything, he’s persistent, having emerged in every recent City Council race with the same message, the same voting bloc and the same results.

His candidacy is also typically marred by the same history — an incident in 2000 in which he brandished a gun during a domestic dispute, and his being dropped from the Glendale Police Department.

Time and again, his opponents seize on the past transgression to pound him back down. And yet, Keuroghelian rises, every two years.

This past week he arose again, this time as a nominee to the city’s Civil Service Commission, which oversees public employee issues. And once again, his former opponents, most notably Councilman Dave Weaver, used the same tired past to pop Keuroghelian back a notch.

Granted, nominating someone who’s been fired from a city department to a commission that oversees Glendale workers may have been a political blunder. But Weaver and others on the dais took it too far on Tuesday, allowing the strong stench of “payback politics” into the decision making process.

If a nominee isn’t qualified for a post, that’s one thing, but when it’s clearly more than that, let’s just call it what it is: political gamesmanship,