Cypress City Council candidate Terry Miller’s messages describe his plan to earn the trust of a guarded, cash-heavy, inner circle and “blow the whole thing apart.”
Many Cypress residents recently received mailers prominently featuring photos of city council candidates Bonnie Peat, Terry Miller, and Scott Minikus, paid for by an outside group called Safe Neighborhoods PAC. Additional advertisements including “Election Digest” and “California Public Safety Newsletter and Voter Guide” feature the same three candidates.
The appearance of Peat, Miller, and Minikus together on mailers or signs throughout the city may give voters the impression that the candidates are a like-minded group, running as a slate, with the hope of winning all three seats up for election in this cycle. But in conversations with many Cypress voters (myself included), Terry Miller has painted a very different picture.
In a series of messages sent during the campaign, Miller describes his efforts to infiltrate a guarded group of elected officials, city staff, and business interests that includes Mayor Paulo Morales, current council member and school board candidate Jon Peat, former council members Doug Bailey and Rob Johnson, City Manager Peter Grant, as well as representatives of Bonnani Development, Bowman Real Estate, and Valley Vista, the city’s trash hauler. In one message Miller states that he is “playing a very complex game to ensure that I am slowly trusted over time” and that he intends “to blow the whole thing apart.”
Miller refers to the city’s elected leadership as orchestrators of corruption, and characterizes their embrace of him as a strategic misstep, born out of a greater fear of other candidates. He states that Jon Peat has “screwed things up” with “inflammatory” behavior. He also references backdoor cash behind Bonnie and Jon Peat.
The relevant messages are shown below so that readers can form their own opinions. I feel obligated to share these messages so that Cypress voters have a more complete picture of one of our local candidates.
Kathryn Shapiro,
Cypress resident and voter