If you want to be the next member of the Colma City Council, there’s still more than an hour to rush over to City Hall and fill out an application!

The town is looking for someone to fill out the remainder of Larry Formalejo’s term, which expires in November. Formalejo resigned March 13 after an investigation found that he committed several ethical breaches while in office.

The forms must be filled out and returned by 5 p.m. The council will interview potential replacements at a meeting Thursday.

Here’s a brief quiz to see if you have the right stuff to serve.

Your son is arrested for driving on a suspended license and allegedly violating his probation for a drunk-driving conviction. Should you:

a) Bail him out of jail and give him a stern lecture.

b) Continue reading to your other children from their favorite bedtime story: the Colma General Plan.

c) Call the police sergeant who supervised the arrest and ask if he can make some of the charges “go away.”

d) Contact a magician to see if he can literally make the record of the incident disappear.

If you chose “a” or “b,” you may be a strong candidate. If you chose “c” — as Formalejo did, according to Linda Tripoli, an attorney hired by the town to investigate the former mayor’s alleged improprieties — then you should probably take yourself out of the running.

If you picked “d,” please call former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, who would like to know if you have any referrals.

Here’s another one. True or false: Lucky Chances Casino, the local card room, is an appropriate place to use your town-issued credit card.

Give up? Well, Formalejo chose “true,” according to Assistant City Manager Laura Allen, who recounted the incident to Tripoli. (The city went with “false.”)

The point here is that it wouldn’t be hard to do a better job on the council than Formalejo, from a civics standpoint, if Tripoli’s report is to be believed.

It’s hard to decide what aspect of the Formalejo affair was strangest. How about the fact that even before he quit, Formalejo’s colleagues on the council didn’t see fit to censure or punish him? Or that he still doesn’t think he did anything wrong? (He said he resigned for health reasons.)

But the richest part of all this may be that Formalejo’s philosophy regarding his town credit card was so out of kilter that his former colleague on the council, Phil Lum, allegedly had to rein him in.

Lum, you may recall, is currently serving an 18-month prison term for failing to report gifts he received from the owner of Lucky Chances. But when Formalejo allegedly tried to bail his son out of jail after that 2006 arrest using the town credit card, Lum had to step in and be the voice of reason, according to Tripoli’s report.

Tripoli could not determine whether that allegation is true, because Formalejo refused to speak to her. Lum was unavailable, she said, as he is sitting in a federal prison roughly 30 miles southwest of Bakersfield.

Mr. and Mrs. Insider paid a visit to the Carolands Chateau on Friday, at the invitation of Burlingame attorney Joe Cotchett, to attend a campaign party he threw for former state Sen. Jackie Speier, who is running for the congressional seat occupied by Rep. Tom Lantos until he died in February.

Roughly 100 to 150 people circulated around the second-floor of the mansion — which is a succession of rooms off a central atrium — sipping white wine and cocktails (no red wine allowed, for fear of stains) and munching on hors d’oeuvres.

Among those the Insider spotted at the party: San Mateo County Supervisors Mark Church and Adrienne Tissier; San Mateo police Chief Susan Manheimer; former county sheriff, and current member of the Sequoia Healthcare District Board of Directors, Don Horsley; and Robert Foucrault, the county coroner.

Speier herself, wearing a red dress with a black sash, posed for photographs with supporters in the chateau’s ridiculous wood-paneled library. Sometime after 7 p.m., guests were ushered into the ballroom for the evening’s presentation.

Cotchett spoke first, thanking the chateau’s owners, Ann and Charles Johnson (who bought the estate in 1998 and spent millions refurbishing it). He said the Johnsons were “equal opportunity employers,” since they hosted a Republican fundraiser with President Bush in late January in the exact same room.

Cotchett then introduced the emcee for the night, former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, who interrupted a tour hawking his memoir, “Basic Brown: My Life and Our Times,” to be there for Speier, a friend and colleague from their years together in the state legislature.

Brown said he owed many votes on “family values” issues to Speier, who would cast his votes for him when he was absent from the state Assembly. The Insider isn’t sure whether he was being serious, or if the practice he described is legal, but there you have it.

Brown also joked about being mortified that he was selling his books at Wal-Mart, which has become a major book retailer that helps authors get on best-seller lists, and encouraged anyone in the audience not to attend a book signing held at one of the stores.

Standing as he was within one of the Peninsula’s symbolic seats of wealth and power, Brown may have forgotten that tens of millions of Democratic voters nationwide shop at Wal-Mart because it’s what they can afford. That Willie Brown is a real champion of the working class, isn’t he?

Rep. Anna Eshoo, D-Palo Alto, also took a turn at the microphone before Brown turned the stage over to the evening’s main attraction, celebrated actress and singer Carol Channing.

As a member of Generation X, the Insider is not overly familiar with Channing’s oeuvre, but the stories and impressions from early in her career were pretty funny; and the fact that she’s still performing at the age of 87 is impressive.

One thought that came to mind following the party was that Stanford professor Lawrence Lessig proved how smart a guy he is by deciding not to enter the race against Speier, despite the pleas of online supporters.

Because the roster of Jackie-ites Friday in Hillsborough was further evidence that whoever steps in front of the Speier juggernaut this spring will be squashed like a bug.

So where did it all go wrong for Barack Obama on Tuesday? He appeared to be gaining in polls of California voters leading up to the election, the Bay Area seemed to be a receptive environment for his campaign and he even looked to have run a better grassroots campaign in San Mateo County.

Meanwhile, the campaign of Hillary Clinton appeared to skirt the county, focusing on San Francisco and then skipping down to Palo Alto and Silicon Valley. For example, a listing of local events on Clinton’s Web site on the weekend before Super Tuesday contained multiple entries for Santa Clara County and not a single one for San Mateo County.

Several things appeared to have been at play. For one, we learned all over again that polls are fallible. In particular, a Zogby poll that showed Obama surging into the lead statewide turned out to be flat-out wrong.

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So Bay Meadows began what is probably, almost certainly, most definitely going to be it’s last full season of racing on Wednesday. (In the photo above, shot by Times photographer Mathew Sumner, Oakland resident Bill Jones, 86, makes his picks Wednesday afternoon.)

Track officials have declined to completely rule out the possibility of racing continuining into 2009, but demolition of the track is presently scheduled to begin sometime this fall.

So, anyway, we thought this would be a good time to post the rather lengthy item from Saturday’s print Insider column on Bay Meadows’ involvement in the fight over Props 94-97 and the Indian gaming compacts for those who didn’t see Saturday’s paper.

Here it is, with just a couple small edits to update the chronology:

The battle over four Indian gaming compacts got a bit nastier last week, when a union supporting the agreements filed a complaint with the state attorney general against the owner of Bay Meadows race track.

In a letter dated Jan. 29, the California Statewide Law Enforcement Association urged the attorney general to investigate whether Terry Fancher, whose real estate fund owns both Bay Meadows and Hollywood Park in Inglewood, made false statements to the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, which has invested $177 million in the fund.

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[Updated at 7 p.m. Wednesday. See below.]

One and a half hours until the polls close in California, so how is it looking in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination? Will Barack Obama, pictured above, complete his come-from-behind surge, or will Hillary Clinton hold him off?

Early exit polls show Clinton with a slight lead, but then this piece in Slate tells us to disregard exit polls in California because they’re skewed by the large number of absentee voters.

One poll released just before voting started today showed that Obama had not only erased Clinton’s lead, which was in the double digits a couple weeks ago, according to some polls, but was in position for a convincing win.

We’ll see. Democratic insider and famed trial attorney Joe Cotchett told us Friday for our election preview that he’s seeing a big shift to Obama by Edwards supporters, especially trial lawyers. He pointed to Assemblyman Keith Jones, D-Sacramento, who is head of the Judiciary Committee, by way of example.

Incidentally, we’re hearing that voter turnout is insane tonight. San Mateo County Elections Manager David Tom is now predicting turnout as high as 65 or 70 percent.

UPDATE: Well, so much for Obama’s surge. Clinton dispatched him with relative ease. Tomorrow we’ll take a close look at Tuesday’s result and empty the old notebook, so come on back.

When Rudy Giuliani paid a visit to Broadway Grill in Burlingame last spring, he was the frontrunner in the race to capture the Republican nomination and riding high in the polls. (This poll from April 2007 gives a sense of his status at the time.)

As of Wednesday, he was out of the presidential race, his campaign having suffered a collapse of historic proportions.

There are lots of theories as to what happened, chief among them Giuliani’s unusual strategy of focusing on Florida rather than some of the earlier contests.

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[Updated Thursday at 4 p.m. See below]

The Hillsborough Police Department was keeping mum on President George W. Bush’s visit today, but we’re hearing the dinner he’s attending this afternoon will take place at the Carolands Chateau.

“The only thing we are saying right now is he is visiting Hillsborough and we’re referring questions to the Secret Service,” Hillsborough police Executive Assistant LeAnn Thornton said this morning.

The San Francisco office of the Secret Service was swift to inform us that they don’t talk about the president’s schedule (which is understandable). But we’ve learned that, by the looks of it, something big is afoot up at the Carolands.

Bush is to participate in a Republican National Committee dinner that is closed to the press. His visit will be brief. Air Force One is scheduled to touch down at SFO at 4:30 p.m. and depart at 7:05 p.m.

UPDATE: The GOP soiree was indeed held at the Carolands. Republican insider and Hillsborough resident Katherine Boyd declared Thursday that the dinner, which raised a reported $1.5 million for the RNC, was “absolutely wonderful.”

Boyd said Bush spoke briefly and then took questions. She said she’s “never seen him better” and he looked “very relaxed.”

Despite all the turmoil that’s gripped his unpopular administration over the last several years, Bush’s life would appear to remain pretty comfortable.

The scene around the chateau Wednesday afternoon was quiet. No protestors and not too many gawkers. Just a bunch of cops posted at pretty much every intersection near the estate and a bit of snarled traffic surrounding the president’s arrival and departure.

Foster City Mayor Pam Frisella learned firsthand last week that you’ve got to pay the cost to be the boss.

Frisella got a number of emails from aggravated Foster City residents after the foghorn on the San Mateo Bridge malfunctioned once again.

Speaking from Sacramento, where she was attending a League of California Cities conference with City Councilwoman Linda Koelling and City Manager Jim Hardy, Frisella said last week that she’s already learned something about her new position: When you’re mayor, people take their comments directly to you, even when you can’t fix things.

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The ruling last week against Friends of Bay Meadows by a state appeals court panel centered around 36 signatures that were collected in 2005 for a petition to save the Bay Meadows race track from demolition.

The group tried to argue that the signatures in question, which were collected from people who needed assistance in filling out the form, because of infirmity or for some other reason, should have been counted.

The 2005 petition campaign fell just short of the number of signatures needed to challenge a City Council decision approving the redevelopment of the track.

But the panel upheld the 2006 ruling of San Mateo County Superior Court Judge Mark Forcum, who found that the signatures were not accompanied by a second signature in the margin by a witness to the act, as required by law.

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San Mateo County Supervisor Rich Gordon got called up to Sacramento earlier this week in his capacity as president of the California State Association of Counties, a group that represents the interests of all 58 counties statewide.

Gordon, who was elected president of the organization in November, met with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger along with other officials for a sober discussion of a projected state budget shortfall for the coming year of roughly $10 billion or more.

Schwarzenegger is considering across the board 10-percent reductions for all state departments for the coming fiscal year. Gordon said it’s not yet clear what this will mean for the county budget, which is already in trouble.

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