Knowing health care district board member Ernest Rivas refused to step down and do the right thing immediately following his 2010 battery conviction and sex offender registration, it comes as no surprise he has declared candidacy for reelection and chosen to further embarrass himself.
Police arrested him in July 2009 – days after a 16-year-old girl reported that Rivas, 58 at the time, had taken her on a motorcycle ride in Tres Pinos and kissed her with his tongue.
Rivas, first elected to the hospital board in the fall of 2008, accepted a plea deal in April 2010. It lowered an initial molestation charge to a misdemeanor battery count that required his registration as a sex offender because the judge ruled he committed the crime for “sexual gratification.”
He served 90 days of home confinement and is serving three years of probation.
Unfortunately, state laws do not bar sex offenders from running for public office, from vying to be community leaders and role models. Unfortunately for San Benito County residents over the past two-plus years, Rivas has decided to put his ego before the interests of his constituents and has remained on the board of the health district, which oversees Hazel Hawkins Memorial Hospital.
Sex offenders, of all people, are vastly inaccurate representations of the people they serve. There is no place in public office for someone who committed such a sick, selfish act – let alone someone who is on probation for doing it and maintains sex offender status. Public officials are held to higher standards, and Rivas falls far short of meeting the lowest of the low.
At this point, the only explanation for such self-imposed scandal is that Rivas, who has refused to address the conviction in public, remains unremorseful. How else could he continue brushing off reality and characterizing himself as an upstanding citizen, a leader? If anything, it hammers home the point that Rivas is a poor decision maker.
Even though state laws do not go far enough and expressly bar sex offenders from elected office – felons who are still on parole remain the only group of criminals disqualified from the ballot – Rivas will likely finish a distant last among four candidates seeking three open seats.
He, like other naïve candidates before him, has underestimated the will of the public. Certainly an apathetic electorate at times, local people always pay attention when they feel something personal is at stake.
This is, most certainly, personal and offensive to anyone who cares about the integrity of the people representing them.
Now it is up to voters to do their job and recognize they have been continually humiliated by their own misjudgment in electing Rivas for his first and – we expect – only term.
