The Agrinautica

   Okay its time for some voting. I should have told you how to vote earlier but well, I procrastinated. Anyway, I'm going to tell you how to vote on some of the issues now. You should probably abstain on everything I don't give you guidance about here =D

Davis Issues
Measures H & L - AKA Sacramento Municipal Utilities District (SMUD) seizure of this corner of Yolo County through Imminent Domain from PG & E. Both sides seem to be giving the same kind of statistics about how they'd be better so thats kind of a wash to me. All the local governments are supporting SMUD and I figure they've managed to sift through the numbers and do an analysis ... but I'm extremely loathe to take THEIR word for anything. And so it comes down to the ideological issues: SMUD, a government agency, versus PG & E a private corporation. While PG & E can very easily be characterized as an evil corporation, its nevertheless a private enterprise and if anything can be appealed to "our American values" its not forcibly seizing private property by governments. As such I'm going to have to vote my concience and vote private enterprise, despite the outrage this may cause to my communist supporters.

Measure K - AKA approving a Target in the corner of town. Supporters cite that currently we are the largest leaker or sales tax to neighbouring towns in the whole county and that'll only get worse if we don't build a target. Additionally it will be very convenient to have a target, and it will be one of something like ten large retail buildings nation-wide to be built to the standard of environmental friendliness that it will. Opponents cite conservative NIMBYism and fear for the economic safety of the bougousie small-business owners. I see these as spurious non-arguments and therefore support the building of a Target in Davis and urge you to vote yes on K.

Measure L - A Measure to recommend the city council consider choice voting! Because you know it would never occur to Councilman Heystek to consider choice voting otherwise. It seems kind of retarded to have a measure to recommend the council consider something, but nevertheless, I very strongly urge you to vote yes on Measure L.


Statewide
Prop 86 - Yes! Because I am all for the gradual elimination of cigarettes from society, and the utilization of market forces to encourage this is brilliant. Anyway, I see it as a tax on self-destructive behaviour.
Prop 87 - Kind of retarded.. taxing our production but NOT passing it on to consumers? I tried to read the text of the bill but it was very long and very boring, so I don't know how they intend to prevent it from being "passed on to consumers." But it SHOULD be. In the preambulatory clauses of the bill it mentions that it will reduce consumption of automobile fuel ... not if they succeed in preventing the costs from being passed on to consumers! What it will accomplish is increasing our relative consumption of oil imported from elsewhere ... go us! Even so, I'm in favour of reducing the amount of oil extracted from the ground, which is what this will accomplish, so I say vote yes. Its retarded though.
Prop 88 - It was looking decent until I read "flat tax of $50 per parcel of land." That is unacceptably regressive to me. No.
Prop 90 - Justice Wheat urges one to vote no because this will in effect allow protected environmental land to be imminent domained. Its complicated, I don't fully understand it, but Wheat appears to and I'm trusting him on this ... and so should you!


Justices
   Did you know there are justices up for election or something? I didn't. And from looking at the elections pages I still can't figure out even if we're choosing one from each relevant group or what... or any way to evaluate them. I'd really like to have an opinion on this, but I have no idea what is going on and I blame the system.


In Other News
   Its Kristy & I's 3 Year Anniversery today. Expect an update on that later. Also today I submitted my press release announcing my retirement from the ASUCD Court (!!). I will be making my farewell speech at next week's senate (the 16th) and at that time formally resigning "effective when replaced." Okay now I've got to run off and vote.

   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.


Picture of the Day