On the day that Nicolas Dibs, a virtually unknown public school substitute teacher, has officially become a little-bit-better-known candidate to replace Congresswoman Laura Richardson, the city of Sacramento has declared Richardson’s home a public nuisance.

The home is one of three on which Richardson has defaulted several times—the others are in Long Beach and San Pedro—as part of a style of personal financial mismanagement that came to light shortly after she completed a meteroic rise from the Long Beach City Council to the State Assembly to the 37th Congressional District seat in little more than a year. Richardson’s style also included a trail of unpaid bills to local merchants, such as her Signal Hill printer and car mechanic.

Dibs was offended and provoked by Richardson’s reckless financial escapades—and the fact that she was running unopposed for re-election. So last month he set out on a signature-gathering campaign to get his name on the ballot as an independent candidate in the Nov. 4 general election. Looks like he made it.

Dibs tells Press-Telegram reporter John Canalis that he has gathered the necessary 7,759 signatures. In fact, he says he and a team of volunteers and a few paid workers collected12,367 signatures, and that 7,977 of them have been verified as those of voters in the 37th District. That’s over 200 more than he needs.

It’s an impressive accomplishment. Dibs had collected barely 1,000 signatures when The District’s Theo Douglas interviewed him at a Kiwanis luncheon—where he collected four more—less than one month ago [to read it, click here].

Dibs’s longshot campaign gets an immediate and unexpected boost from the news out of Sacramento, reported in today’s edition of the Los Angeles Times. The Code Enforcement Department in Sacramento declared her home a “public nuisance” and threatened to fine her as much as $5,000 a month if she doesn’t fix it up.

The city action was prompted by a request from police, who were twice called to investigate reports of a suspicious person in or around the house, perhaps a homeless squatter. Officers called the Code Enforcement Department, which boarded up a broken door. Code enforcement inspectors visited the house twice in July, finding “junk and debris” in the driveway and “rotting fruit on the ground in the rear yard which creates rodent harborage,” according to department documents quoted by the Times.

The neighbors in the upper-middle-class area have apparently been complaining, too. They say sprinklers are never turned on and the grass and plants are dead or dying. The gate is broken, and windows are covered with brown paper.

But the demographics of the 37th District are so overwhelmingly Democrat that Republicans didn’t even run anyone against Richardson in this spring’s primary and Richardson beat her only Democratic opposition, the perennial Peter Mathews. She was officially unopposed, until today, when Dibs became an official candidate.

Tags: Add new tag, laura richardson, Nicolas Dibs, The District Weekly, Theo Douglas