Lucy Dunn is a longtime punching bag around the Weekly for her presidency of the county taxpayer fund-sucking Orange County Business Council and,
going way back, being the local face of home development next to the ecologically sensitive Bolsa Chica wetlands.
But it was Dunn's role as a California transportation commissioner that caught the attention of a Huntington Beach Police officer who pulled her over for distracted driving recently.
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As reported by California Police Chiefs News–which is also linked from the Huntington Beach Police Department Facebook page–the motorcycle cop saw Dunn looking down at her smart phone as she was stopped at a red light heading to a business meeting Thursday.
After the light turned green, the Coto de Caza 59-year-old was pulled over and informed she had been texting while driving. Dunn explained she had only checked to see if the phone was charging.
She went on to explain that, as a state transportation commissioner, she strongly opposes distracted driving. Nope, it didn't surprise us either that Dunn would drop the state government gig–courtesy of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Lucky for her the motorcycle cop didn't mistake her for Sarah Connor!
In Dunn's defense, she did not mention her CEO-ship of the Business
Council nor her son's job as a San Francisco
County sheriff's deputy. And exposing her CA transportation role only made the officer remark that was all the more reason he should make hers the 10th distracted driving citation he'd so far handed out that day. There certainly would have been beers all around at the HBPD's secret party bunker that night.
In the end, the cop agreed to let Dunn off with a warning in exchange for her posting on her Facebook page (1,301 friends!) that even cradling a phone while behind the wheel at a stop violates California's hands-free law. According to the police chief news site, Dunn dutifully obliged the next day.
However, the Weekly could find no sign of it when visiting her personal and Business Council Facebook pages. Then again, we're not among her Facebook friends (see “Lucy Dunn is a longtime punching bag around the Weekly . . .” in the first paragraph). Had it been located, this post could have ended by noting her post elicited 62 “likes” and 28 comments.
The only question is how many people read her post while driving.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.