Hold your nose and vote on Tuesday, November 6, 2007

[mithriltabby]

The Sunnyvale candidates are covered in the Sunnyvale Sun and the Palo Alto Daily News. All the incumbents are endorsed by the Sunnyvale Sun, the San Jose Mercury, the Santa Clara County Democratic Central Committee, and the Sunnyvale Public Safety Officers’ Association (PSOA) [endorsement in PDF]; all of the challengers are endorsed by Tim and Yolanda Risch. There is discussion that Sunnyvale has fallen from the fifth safest city in the country to #38, but this is largely statistical in nature; there’s an uptick in burglaries and robberies lately, but Sunnyvale is still a very safe place to live.

Campaign finance is getting attention in this electoral cycle, as the incumbents are getting a lot of donations from developers who can benefit from their favor— Special Interest Watch (run by Tim and Yolanda Risch, who definitely have an axe to grind— their table of council attendance fails to note that Melinda Hamilton was pregnant for many of the meetings she missed, and the PSOA flyer notes other inconsistencies) is pointing out the play that campaign contributors are getting for their pay. I’m including links to their pages for each candidate’s contributions, but note that they come with biased opinion text along with the data. They note that the PSOA are doing a lot for the incumbents, and that the Sunnyvale Political Action Committee (SUNPAC) are also financially motivated. The incumbents all chipped in together to send out a “Voter Information Guide” to endorse themselves, which merited a complaint in the Sunnyvale Sun.

One letter writer in the Sunnyvale Sun notes slanted coverage against the challengers in a supposedly factual story.

I consider this an accountability moment for the failure of the incumbents (other than Melinda Hamilton) to show any support for electoral reform, so I’m strongly biased against Swegles and Chu. Just in case I haven’t already bored you with discussions of it, please learn about ranked-choice voting (and local efforts) and public financing of electoral campaigns (and local efforts); I believe that those reforms will make it easier for citizens to clean up our democracy. I consider the former as replacing a duopoly with a free market and the latter as a way for candidates to demonstrate that they aren’t beholden to financial backers.

You may also be interested in the candidates’ records (or lack thereof) on the environment.

• Member, City Council Seat 4: SmartVoter
  • David Whittum: SmartVoter. He did not respond to the questionnaire from Planned Parenthood Advocates Mar Monte. He is refusing special interest money and supports public financing of electoral campaigns and instant-runoff voting. I’ve talked with him about climate change; his doubts stem from knowing from his physics experience how hard it is to model much simpler systems, so he doesn’t want claim confidence he doesn’t have, but he still believes that reducing CO₂ emissions is worthwhile while we’re trying to make a more accurate assessment of the risks. Regarding the Mayors Climate Protection Agreement, he has quibbles with a couple of bullet points, such as wanting to include nuclear power (such as in use in Japan and France) as an option, but doesn’t want to throw the whole thing away.
  • Dean J. Chu: SmartVoter. He’s taking a lot of money from developers and real estate. He has the endorsement of the Santa Clara County chapter of the League of Conservation Voters. Planned Parenthood Advocates Mar Monte says he’s pro-choice. I don’t like the way he answers questions about pay-for-play from lobbyists and special interests: he starts by muddying the notion of whether one person’s “special interest” is another person’s “general constituency”, or whether anyone who contacts him is a lobbyist.
• Member, City Council Seat 5: SmartVoter
  • Otto Lee: SmartVoter. He’s getting a lot of special interest money, too. He has the endorsement of the Santa Clara County chapter of the League of Conservation Voters. Planned Parenthood Advocates Mar Monte says he’s pro-choice.
• Member, City Council Seat 6: SmartVoter
  • Ron Swegles: SmartVoter. Planned Parenthood Advocates Mar Monte says he’s pro-choice. He’s rolling in the special interest money and voted against IRV and clean elections.
  • Dixie Carney: She did not respond to the questionnaire from Planned Parenthood Advocates Mar Monte. She’s an obscure candidate because she’s refusing special interest money; she does her homework, though, and got her paperwork in well before deadline. She supports instant-runoff voting and public financing of electoral campaigns. In the debates, she’s been refreshingly succinct; this woman doesn’t waste time.
• Member, City Council Seat 7: SmartVoter
  • Melinda Hamilton: SmartVoter. Planned Parenthood Advocates Mar Monte says she’s pro-choice. She supported clean elections when it came to a council vote, and would support IRV on the current per-seat system but not for batches of seats (e.g. taking the top 3 or 4 each election). She has accepted plenty of money from special interests, but is honest enough to acknowledge it by publishing her Form 460 on her own web site rather than leaving it to someone else to dig up. She answers questions about taking money from lobbyists and special interests the way Dean Chu does, by trying to muddy the definition instead of answering whether she’s going to give greater weight to requests from people who have cut her $1000 checks; I find this very off-putting.
  • Pat Meyering: SmartVoter. Planned Parenthood Advocates Mar Monte says he’s pro-choice. He is refusing special interest money, and supports ranked voting and clean elections. I was planning to vote for Melinda Hamilton— I wanted to reward her for standing up for campaign finance reform— but I was ultimately persuaded by Meyering’s vision for providing the infrastructure that would encourage Sunnyvale residents to get out of their cars and use public transit instead of spending $100M on the Mary overcrossing to sustain the status quo. The other candidates are also dubious about the overcrossing, but don’t have a plan; Meyering doesn’t hesitate to propose bold visions, and he always tempers them with the requirement that the feasibility be carefully scrutinized before implementing them.
• Measures Submitted to the Voters. Brief summary in the San Jose Mercury. The election guide notes that the full text of the measures is available online.
  • Measure B: a new public library for Sunnyvale. SmartVoter. The candidates’ views on the measure. Special Interest Watch notes that developers are backing Yes on B.

    Supported By	Opposed By
    BuildTheLibrary.org Sunnyvale Sun Santa Clara County Democratic Central Committee

    A new library. What’s not to like? There are plenty of letters in the Sunnyvale Sun arguing it back and forth, raising the question: will it give us fair value for the money, or is it a $108M boondoggle? One writer points to replacement costs for buildings which has libraries at about $300 per square foot; the proposed library is more than 3 times that. The Build the Library FAQ points out that $108M is for planning for worst-case scenarios, and that the City is required by law to take any unused money to buy back bonds and reduce assessments on taxpayers.

    I am still waffling on this; I was going to tentatively vote yes until I got an automated phone call asking to vote for it. This is a cause that apparently doesn’t inspire enough citizens that they can have human beings phone people live, but it does inspire enough money that they can spend on a robot. This is sufficiently dubious to push me over the fence: I smell boondoggle. Do we need a new library? Yes. Do we need this new library? No.

  • Measure C: SmartVoter. Eliminates a disparity in term limits. Yes.
  • Measure D: SmartVoter. Provides clarity about the limits of serving on commissions so people can serve a full 8 years. Yes.
  • Measure E: SmartVoter. Allows the Council to appoint people to the Personnel Board if no one has nominated someone to fill the nominee seats in six months; avoids paralysis due to lack of a quorum. Yes.
  • Measure F: SmartVoter. Each city board has a chance to review its budget, instead of just the Library and Parks. Yes.
  • Measure G: SmartVoter. This provides more flexibility for permitting family leave for councilmembers, at the expense of opening up the possibility that they can all vote each other extended vacations if they’re all in cahoots. A tentative yes, though if anyone abuses the privilege, it should be highlighted in the next campaign cycle.
  • Measure H: SmartVoter. Two-year terms for mayors. That’s enough time to develop experience and then make use of it. Yes.
  • Measure I: SmartVoter. Requiring that the City Manager reside in Sunnyvale turns out to be unconstitutional; this cleans that up as best we can. Yes.
  • Measure J: SmartVoter. Requiring that the annual budget presentation include the 10-year forecast is a good thing; I’m a little wary of taking away the re-authorization of multi-year capital investment projects, but 4 votes to kill it by denying re-authorization would also work to bring up a resolution to kill it explicitly. Yes.
  • Measure K: SmartVoter. Starts terms in January (so new councilmembers don’t have their term interrupted by vacation), allows the Council to meet in other places than the Council Chambers if they give appropriate public notice, and lets more information go onto the Internet. Seems pretty sensible. Yes.
  • Measure L: SmartVoter. Some basically sensible cleanup and clarification. Yes.

Comments

[wild-patience.livejournal.com]

I was kind of shocked to find Dave Whittum at our front door the other day. He was responding to the hubby's e-mail.

Of course, having lived in a house with no doorbell (it had just a knocker) for 16 years, I was startled to hear the doorbell, period.

[seshat.livejournal.com]

*blink* I'm registered to vote, but I never received a ballot in the mail. WTH? Grrr...Time to walk into my polling station on my way home and be grumpy at them.

[mithriltabby]

One of my co-workers didn’t get one either, and someone on my neighborhood association’s email list was actually told their precinct wasn’t voting this year. I’m wondering if this is accident, incompetence, or electoral fraud...

[seshat.livejournal.com]

I went and hit smartvoter.org, and according to them my part of Santa Clara County has nothing on the ballot this year.

Wackiness abounds.

[mithriltabby]

Yeah, elections are very local this time. I’m still collecting data on people who didn’t get their ballots, just in case there’s a pattern.

[mithriltabby]

Election results.