The Agrinautica

   It was raining yesterday. It was pretty cold and wet but I was kind of hoping it would rain again today. It was raining two years ago today, when I asked Kristy out down on Telegraph in Berkeley.

   Today is also voting day for the Yolo County special election, as a Yes on X supporter helpfully illegally* reminded me via telephone last night.
   At this moment I know next to nothing about anything on the ballot other than Measure X, but I plan on educating myself on the other topics before voting later today. Measure X campaigning has been omnipresent for the last month or two, but its hard to sort through the bombardment of information on the subject and people's ulterior motives. Anyway I thought I'd share with you all the results of my analysis of the subject. There were several assumptions I had in mind when I began, these were: (1) that the City of Davis is currently ridiculously anti-growth; (2) the City needs to stop blocking Trader Joes from coming to town asap (incidently, not knowing the assumptions other people had when they first looked at this issue is the primary factor in me distrusting their opinions on the matter). Otherwise I was completely objective in my analysis.
   Measure X essentially extends the city limits to include the land which developers want to use to create Covell Village (ie Measure X essentially is a yes or no on Covell Village). Yes it might be a pleasant place to live if you're into that kind of thing but I'm gonna skip the fluff and get to my critical conclusions.
   (1) The least expensive housing unit created will be $538,000, with the average being $683,945. City analysts have determined that a "middle income" family cannot afford housing over $387,000. What this means is that students certainly won't be able to afford the housing, and furthermore prices city-wide will likely rise with the influx of more affluent persons. As we're not creating pile of new high income jobs around here, I'm assuming this is housing for commuters from Sacremento 11 miles away. Lets not make Davis a commuter suburb.
   (2) I've been pushing for a Trader Joes around here for awhile. I think its ridiculous that the city can even prevent an enterprise from situating itself in this town. The principal objection in the past has been that Trader Joes would put The Nugget or the Food Coop out of business. Covell Village proposes putting a Trader Joes right across the street from the Nugget. Smart one there. The Trader Joes in the package is the principal part of the deal Do X proponents use to appeal to students I think (other than free pizza coupons for support), but according to No on X people, the City is ALREADY in discussion with Trader Joes about two other locations. The retail portion of Covell Village wouldn't go up until 2009, but Trader Joes could begin moving into one of the other two locations much sooner, so the Covell Village Trader Joes claim is actually the opposite of true.
   (3) All Covell Village traffic will go out on Covell st, and apparently the planners did not make any plans to mitigate the congestion this will cause. The city Environmental Impact Report (EIR) estimates it will double traffic on Covell, producing Grade "F" traffic, with "conditions intolerable for most drivers." (!) If we're going to expand, there's no hurry, lets do it intelligently and actually plan ahead. If the traffic was a minor change I wouldn't even count it here, but from the looks of it, its going to be ridiculous, so its what really breaks the plan for me. Local green party officer Mike Siminitus had an interesting outlook on this: "I don't expect people to be driving much by 2009 anyway."
   So there you have it, having analysed the proposal with no ulterior motives or assumptions other than those listed, I have firmly concluded to urge one to vote No on X.

   I did my best to ignore the apparent inability of Yes on X supporters not to break laws and elections regulations (Two Pollworkers Found to be Publicly Pro X, Yes on X Supporters Accused of Illegal Campaigning) but it does make me suspicious that there must be strong ulterior motives to cause these people (predominantly developers and other bourgousie) to break so many regulations.
   I find it amusing that none other than the ASUCD Elections Chair, Jonathon Leathers, filed a case with the Yolo County District Attorney against Yes on X campaign violations. In the Aggie article they strangely didn't mention that he's the ASUCD Elections Chair, but I think its a good sign that our Elections Chair is actually attentive to electoral legal issues for once. Then again, in an ironic twist of fate, the current elections committee is made up entirely of the people who pwned the last elections committee over electoral misconduct last year.

   Feel free to tell me your thoughts on the other ballot measures, especially the obscure ones like school board and less talked about propositions. Also I need to write No on X two more times so there'll be the same number of bolded No on X's as their opponents in this entry.

*It is illegal to solicit someone on a cell phone, and makes me very angry when someone does. This caller was lucky they got my voicemail.


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