Mayoral Candidate Lothian Denies Accusations She Fabricated an Eyesore

Laura Lothian denies creating an eyesore by artificially piling up trash in a vacant lot Monday as part of her clean-up-La-Mesa pitch for mayor. And to deal with other accusations now being dubbed "Trashgate," she and some helpers Wednesday morning cleared the lot—minutes before Mayor Art Madrid arrived at the site.

Reports on La Mesa Today and SignOnSanDiego.com quoted witnesses at Jason's Auto Garage at 7643 University Ave. as saying Lothian and her camera crew pulled trash down from the embankment to hang over a brick wall "to make the matter appear even worse" than it was.

An email from Jason's manager, Michele Tackett, was quoted as saying:  "[Lothian] had them film her for several minutes and then jumped into her BMW and drove away. Now I am sitting here at my desk overlooking the piles of trash, as well as my customers in our waiting area that [has] 4 large windows that face the lot.

"If this was her way of showing how she CARES for this community, she failed miserably. Her and those two men could have spent maybe an extra three minutes and truly made a difference by disposing the trash instead of kicking it around into heaps for filming.''

Wednesday morning, Tackett of Jason's garage said, "She got the message loud and clear," saying she saw Lothian clean the lot and embankment above it. Tackett said Lothian's crew of eight to 10 young people came around 10 a.m. and was followed by Madrid a half-hour later.

Tackett said she had sent a note about Lothian's photo shoot to Madrid on Tuesday morning, which later was forwarded to news media.

After returning home from the cleanup, Lothian wrote: "My daughter, sister, some good friends, significant other and I just cleaned up the trash at the University lot, have photos and video. Art showed up five minutes after we got there. Someone [must] have told him we were there. Looking like he might have wanted to help out, he picked up a rake but it was too late; the job was finished."

Earlier Wednesday, her 49th birthday, Lothian responded to media inquiries with a note saying:

"Every day I drive by that lot and am sickened by the level of garbage that just gets worse. I take photos of it almost every month and can show you a chain of e-mails from when I send photos to people. A photo of that lot with all that garbage has been on my website since August."

Lothian says she took a shot of that corner over the weekend before the rain "and you will see the same garbage as the current shot on my website."

"As this photo is bright and sunny, and it has been rainy and cloudy since the video shoot Monday," she wrote, "that should prove to anyone who suspects we brought in trash or staged the trash that the trash has been there all along."

Lothian insists that no trash was brought in and no trash was picked up from one spot and piled into another.

"The only movement of trash was some nudging with our feet if the trash was too flattened by rain or covered in mud," she wrote.

On her website, Lothian says:

"This trash-filled lot on University Ave. is a half mile from La Mesa City Hall. Not only does this blight hurt La Mesa's image, property values and revenue for neighboring businesses, it also attracts crime as evidenced by the copious amounts of graffiti near this lot.

"Worse, this eye sore is a glaring symptom Art Madrid is so complacent in his five terms as mayor, he either doesn't see this when he drives past or he doesn't care."

The lot in question is seven-tenths of a mile west of City Hall, as measured by La Mesa Patch.

Wednesday afternoon, while attending the ribbon-cutting at College Prep Middle School, Mayor Madrid said he and members of his longtime "Kitchen Cabinet" had planned to clean the lot about noon—but learned that Lothian had gotten there first.

Madrid suggested that Lothian deserved the bad publicity she got, saying: "You reap what you sow" and there was more to La Mesa "than trash and graffiti." He said other issues are more pressing—"not this superficial stuff."

(This story was updated early Thursday morning.)