I was handed one of Jim Dantona's campaign mailers and found his claim that he was hounded into bankruptcy by greedy credit card companies downright deceitful. I was one of the many small business owners that were left holding the bag for Mr. Dantona's irresponsible behavior and his failure to keep the financial commitments he made.

After weeks of trying, unsuccessfully, to get the money owed to my firm, I took Mr. Dantona to mandatory arbitration with the American Arbitration Association in Los Angeles County, per the terms of our agreement. I won the arbitration case against Mr. Dantona and was awarded the full amount of the claim, approximately $34,000. It was a simple case of Mr. Dantona's failure to abide to the terms of a lawful contract and to pay for professional services he approved and received.

Immediately after the arbitration award in my favor, I started collection proceedings against Mr. Dantona only to find out that he had filed for personal bankruptcy. I never saw a dime of the thousands of dollars Mr. Dantona owed me. My political consulting firm was a small company, not a large greedy credit card company, as Mr. Dantona claims in his mailers. Upon examining the long list of creditors who also never received money owned to them by Mr. Dantona, I noticed many other small business owners like myself who were stiffed by Mr. Dantona.

And Mr. Dantona's asserts in his campaign mailers that he is a committed single parent who cares about children rings hollow with me. I was a single parent raising my son at the time I was working for Mr. Dantona, and thanks to Mr. Dantona's unwillingness to meet his financial obligations, my son didn't get a new baseball glove that Christmas. Robert Rice Santa Barbara