EDITORIAL – Madera’s Ron Montoya is back on the attack. This time he is attacking Madera Unified School District Athletic Director and CIF President Marty Bitter. He has already harassed the school board, city council, school site councils, and our mayor. Now he is taking on a school administrator who is only trying to provide an equal playing field to all students throughout the district. He is attacking another good man with false accusations.

Montoya’s latest ill-informed rant is comparing full-time district employees to walk-on coaches. He seems upset that Madera South Varsity Football Coach Matt Johnson is a full-time employee for the district with a job unrelated to his football duties. Coach Johnson was hired by the district to operate a program at Madera Unified for at-risk boys. This is the same successful program he ran at Edison High School for Fresno Unified a few years back. For that job, Johnson receives a salary from the district.

Johnson also receives a stipend from the district for being the varsity football coach, around $4900 a year. Montoya complains that the Madera South Varsity Soccer coach does not also receive $100,000 for his job as a coach, but not even Johnson receives that much to coach. All of the coaches at Madera Unified are paid on the same sliding scale based on their time in service to the district and whether or not their sport is income-generating (football and basketball are, tennis and golf are not). If the soccer coach was an employee of the district (PE coach, teacher, counselor, administrator, janitor) his paycheck from the district would be much higher. But he is not a full-time employee like Coach Johnson.

“Why didn't Marty Bitters give the MSHS Varsity soccer coach a $100.000.00 raise after winning the state championship?” My question for Montoya is what high school in the valley is paying anyone over a hundred thousand dollars to coach high school sports? And again the Madera South Soccer Coach does not have a career in coaching; it’s something he does in his off time away from his real job, for the love of the game and the kids he works with. That would be the same for any coach in the district; not one of them is coaching for the money. I am sure that the soccer coach at Madera South is embarrassed if he had a casual conversation with Montoya (a parent) that turned into another Montoya campaign of tilting at windmills.

Each person I have spoken with that Montoya says he is “Standing Up” for has told me they wish he would stop using their names when he speaks and they never asked for his “help”. This includes teachers, coaches, and his neighbors he claims are barely scraping by to pay their bills. So now when I get an email from the guy about coaches asking for his help, I wonder if he ever really talked to these folks. Why does this guy make himself out to be a self-appointed defender of people that wish he would just be quiet?

In his latest email, Montoya is now claiming this all has to do with the race of the coaches and students. Wow…..

The problem with the man is he does not do his homework. His biggest complaints about Madera are the property taxes he has to pay. But when he bought his house in Madera, he never read his escrow papers which laid out the fact that his home was built in a Mello-Roos District. Had he or his wife read these legal documents, or hired an attorney to read the papers for them, they would have known what his property taxes were going to be. How do you spend over $200,000 on a house and not read the legal documents?

You might be wondering what Montoya’s ultimate goal is with all of these public rants? Well, last summer the man met with leaders of the California Democratic Party seeking their support to run this year against California Assemblyman Frank Bigelow. Meetings were set up at a restaurant in Fresno County. In the first meeting, Montoya failed to show up. So he asked the party to reschedule, and they met with Montoya two more times.

While the party leaders knew Montoya would be nothing more than a sacrificial-lamb with absolutely no chance of beating Bigelow in November’s general election, Montoya told them, “This is the greatest honor anyone has ever given me.” In the end, two things kept the social worker from putting his name on the ballot, Madera City Councilman Santos Garcia refused to endorse him and Montoya’s wife told him he could not run.

Thank God his wife can control this guy. We do not need another politician in Sacramento that refuses to do their homework and has no grasp on the issues. We already have a President that governs based on what “People tell me”. Do we need more of the ill-informed representing us? Have not we already gotten ourselves in enough trouble electing the misinformed?

So Montoya has sent out another unsolicited email to the Central Valley coaching community and people around Madera. The most common response to this e-mail is, “please take me off your list”. Are you on Mr. Montoya’s email list? Have you also tried without success to be removed from that list? BVN has a suggestion on your next step.

Maybe it’s time to call his voice of reason, his wife Renee, since she may be the only person left to exert any control over his bullying behavior. Surely his behavior has caused his kids some embarrassment at school, but this has not phased him. Seems that many of those he claims to be ‘helping’ are also embarrassed about his actions, but again it has not caused him to rethink his communications. Since he backed out of actually running for office, the voters have also not been allowed the opportunity to send him a message about his actions being out-of-line. It occurs to BVN at this point that perhaps the next best way to pressure him to stop this behavior is by calling his ‘mommy’.