PacifiCare Loses Its CIO; Why Lincoln Club Snubbed Fuentes

Another change at troubled PacifiCare Health Systems: Chief information officer Jim Williams is leaving the company after six and a half years to become president and CEO of Salt Lake City-based Schimatic Cash Transactions Network.com, dba IC One. The move is effective March 6. Senior VP Ron Davis will oversee the info systems team until PacifiCare finds a replacement for Williams Susan Deemer Schaben says John Martin’s Culinary Adventures is looking for two more sites,for a third Chimayo Grill and for a second Sorrento Grill. He said one will be in San Diego and the other in the South Coast Plaza area. That would bring the group’s restaurant count to seven. The group’s “killer” restaurant, in terms of sales and profits, is year-old Chimayo at the Beach, along PCH in Huntington Beach, Martin said Here’s the story on the Lincoln Club’s rejection of embattled OC GOP chairman Tom Fuentes’ annual request for funds. The decision, on a close vote of the club’s ruling board after heated discussion, was another sign of dissatisfaction among big donors, at a time when Fuentes’ control of the central committee is being challenged by the executive-led New Majority. A year ago, the Lincoln Club attached conditions to the $30,000 it gave Fuentes, including that the money go to fund a new precinct director position. When Fuentes came back this time for another $30,000, some club members complained that the party’s operations were in disarray. It didn’t help, the Insider is told, that Fuentes had failed to inform Lincoln Club prez Mike Capaldi that the precinct director recently left. Lincoln Club members first voted to table the funding request until after the March 7 showdown with the New Majority, to defuse a campaign issue. But Fuentes backer Curt Pringle then moved to have the club make a reduced payment of $15,000. That motion lost The deals must go on: The New Majority’s Tom Tucker has a piece of the action in CUShopper. His JenStar Partners is part of a consortium led by J.H. Whitney that has put $16.6 million into the Burbank-based online play of the Credit Union Member’s Shopping Network Forest City Enterprises has unveiled plans for parks, houses, schools and offices on a 4,000-plus-acre former airport site. El Toro? No, Stapleton, Denver. Wonder if there’s room for a Sportstown, too? Pro-El Toro airport consultant Dave Ellis, on the new Times poll showing anti-airport Measure F winning 56% to 18%. “That’s about where we were at this time in the 1996 election.” Anti-airport Measure S wound up going down in flames. But nobody thinks a turnaround will be as easy this time Busy times for Aissa Wayne, daughter of Pilar and the late John Wayne. She’s opened up a law practice in Costa Mesa, and she’s joined the cast of the CHOC Follies, March 31 and April 1 at El Toro.