Mettee-McCutchon ready to run for supervisor, insiders say.

Cat’s Out Of The Bag: Tight Lipped: Marina Mayor Ila Mettee-McCutchon wants endorsements, but she won’t tell the press she’s running for the supervisor.

Mettee-McCutchon ready to run for supervisor, insiders say.

By Jessica Lyons

Thursday, November 8, 2007

Although she continues to play coy with the media, Marina Mayor Ila Mettee-McCutchon will run for a seat on the Board of Supervisors, political insiders tell the >>Weekly.

Mettee-McCutchon reportedly told local elected officials and business leaders that she would seek office at a meeting last week with Gov. Schwarzenegger’s appointment secretary. Mettee-McCutchon didn’t return several calls for comment. Recently, she said she is “seriously considering” announcing her candidacy.

Jane Parker, associate director of ACTION Monterey County, also plans to run for the District 4 post in the June election. Parker lost to sitting Supervisor Jerry Smith in 2004. Smith, who is battling cancer, won’t run for reelection.

Should Smith’s illness force him to resign, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger would appoint someone to fill the seat. But, says the governor’s appointment secretary John Cruz, that’s “absolutely not” why he was in Monterey last week.

Cruz says he visited “at the request of someone who is a resident of the area, Maria Giuriato. I tried to give some information about the appointments process.”

Giuriato, a former Salinas councilwoman, is currently an appointee of the governor as the executive director of the Health Profession Education Foundation. She says the invite-only crowd included major players from the agriculture and tourism industries, and local elected officials.

Dave Potter, who chairs the Monterey County Board of Supervisors, wasn’t at the meeting. In fact, he was the only member of the five-person panel who wasn’t invited. “Leaving the chair of the board out of the discussion seems a little out of the norm,” Potter says. “From my understanding of the people who were in attendance, it did not look like a broad cross-section of the community. It looks like a special-interest group.”