A Progressive Alamedan

Various writings from a resident of Alameda regarding the political scene. The local perspective of local, state and national politics and a few other odds and ends of local concern. May not be particularly interesting to people outside of the Alameda area.

Friday, October 31, 2008

Yes on P - it supporters are not hiding

I hadn't planned on writing a post about the local Measure P, but after seeing the advertisement in today's Alameda Journal, I had to write something.

The advertisement is a rebuttal to the Yes-on-P ad recently placed by the City of Alameda Democratic Club, one of the few paid Pro-measure-P placements I've seen. (I think I've seen two Yes on P yard signs in town.)

The Democratic Club's ad against Measure P talks about how the measure is largely opposed by the realtors and well-funded by their statewide group. So the realtors are acting in their own interest; I'm not surprised. They don't want another tax that will add a couple of thousand dollars to somebody's million-dollar investment. (Who cares that property values could end up dropping if city services had to be cut!) Unfortunately, as is the case with many other ballot initiatives, they are a well-funded group that are pouring large amounts of money into the campaign.

This "Yes" rebuttal advertisement attempts to discredit the association between the realtors and the No campaign. However, they did a laughably bad job at it..

My first clue? They way they use the word "realtors", defined in my computer's dictionary as "a person who acts as an agent for the sale and purchase of buildings and land; a real estate agent." Instead of using the word like a normal person would, they write it like this: REALTORS®. (That's followed by the "registered trademark" symbol in case your computer has trouble with Unicode.) Sorry guys, if you really wanted to disassociate yourself from the realtors, you need to learn to spell the word in plain English. Your funding is showing!

I'm fine with debating the finer points of how beneficial the tax will be, but I find it offensive to have a deep-pocketed group fund an opposition campaign and then try and distract the public as to who is funding the campaign. It's a shell game that happens over and over again.

I get tired of having new taxes, but the reality is, our state is sucking our city dry, and the city of Alameda needs to fund its essential services. So I am in favor of Measure P. And the other people and organizations who are in favor of it are quite up-front about who they are and why they are in favor of it.

So I"m going to recommend a Yes on Measure P.

1 Comments:

Blogger Staff said...

The problem with P is that it is a tax that many cities in the county do not charge. This could make the differance between buying and not for many trying to buy in Alameda.

I was lucky, by about a $1,000. If our house would have cost $1,000 more in closing cost back in 2000 we could not have afford it all the fees at closing.

City service do need to be cut and most of all Public Safety retirement needs to be renegotiated.

As a liberal and a progressive I need to balance how City Service benefit the entire community compared to the cost to the community.

P will change the community.

11:28 AM  

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