CUSD Candidate Forum

On Saturday, September 17th the Coronado Democratic Club is hosting a candidates forum for those running for the CUSD Board of Trustees. The forum is in the Winn Room at the Coronado Library and begins at 2 pm. This is a nonpartisan, community event and everyone is welcome to attend. The moderator will be Professor Emeritus of Political Science Carl Luna from Mesa College. Nine of the eleven candidates have confirmed they will participate.

Since the Winn Room is limited to 115 attendees, the event will be live streamed. To watch from home, go to https://coronadodemocrats.com and then click on the Events Calendar at the top of the page. Once you are on the calendar, click on the event on 9/17 and the link to live stream the forum on YouTube will pop up.

Moderator: Carl Luna Short Bio 2022

Carl Luna is professor emeritus of political science at San Diego Mesa College and a visiting professor at the University of San Diego.  He has taught thousands of San Diego college students from every neighborhood and community of San Diego, providing courses ranging from American Politics to International Political Economy. In 2014 the Association of Community College Trustees recognized him as one of the 5 top community college professors in the country.   He is a frequent non-partisan commentator on politics, giving almost two thousand  interviews to local, national and international media including public radio and TV, CBS, NBC, the Associated Press  and the BBC.  Dr. Luna has provided extensive analysis of local and national politics for over 20 years for San Diego KPBS Radio & Television and has been San Diego Fox5’s political analyst for over a decade.  He has written and blogged extensively for the San Diego Union Tribune and San Diego City Beat Magazine and is a contributing author to the anthology of presidential biographies, Public Pillars, Private Lives and a revised volume on the presidency:  Imperial Presidents: The Rise of Executive Power from Roosevelt to Obama.   Dr. Luna is co-chair of Restoring Respect, a community initiative promoting greater civility in San Diego dialogue supported by a consortium of academic institutions and community groups. In this capacity Dr. Luna organized and conducted ten Restoring Respect conferences attended by hundreds of San Diego community members, students and local educational and civic leaders to participate in panels and discussions including  nationally recognized speakers In 2014 he became the first director of the Institute for Civil Civic Engagement, formed between USD and the San Diego Community College District’s City, Continuing Education, Mesa and Miramar Colleges. Over the past 30 years Dr. Luna has given dozens of community presentations on political topics ranging from citizen-initiative zoning to threats facing American democracy  to a wide variety of community groups and facilitated numerous community discussions and public debates across San Diego.  In 1999-2000 Dr. Luna  served as a senior Fulbright Scholar lecturing on international relations and economics at Nizhny Novgorod State University in the Russian Federation. Dr. Luna had a front row seat to the rise of Putin and the fall of Russian democracy, which has informed his academic and civic pursuits ever since.