The Sacramento Bee
The entire effort for a ballot measure on the proposed downtown Sacramento arena has been messy, with the public left in the dark too often.
People who want a vote on the arena subsidy accuse city officials of hiding the ball on how much taxpayers would actually fork over. But they’re not doing themselves any favors by playing games with their petitions.
They should be straight with voters and release all the various petitions they submitted last month. James Cathcart, a leader of Sacramento Taxpayers Opposed to Pork, told The Sacramento Bee’s editorial board Wednesday that he doesn’t know if that will happen.
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Lassen County Clerk Julie Bustamante announced Friday that petitioners seeking to oust Lassen Supervisor Jack Hanson from office have collected enough valid signatures to allow a
Patients facing skyrocketing health insurance premiums, including one who is now uninsured due to rising prices, joined consumer advocates today to launch an historic all-volunteer signature-gathering effort to qualify an initiative measure for California’s November ballot to regulate health insurance rates. Millions of registered voters will be receiving ballot petitions to sign in the mail and in their email, reminiscent of the volunteer mail effort that qualified insurance reform Prop 103 for the ballot in 1988. View the mailer and email at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyUi2yXYUto&feature=youtu.be.
Stanislaus County’s nine mayors will be in Riverbank tonight to kick off their campaign to support Proposition 22, a statewide initiative that would prevent the state from taking money allocated for local agencies, public safety and transportation. Riverbank Mayor Virginia Madueño is holding the fund-raiser at her home.
America’s ideological warriors, ranging from Ralph Nader on the left to Grover Norquist on the right, will take part, beginning Friday, in a five-day conference in San Francisco on global trends in direct democracy.
The votes haven’t even all been counted for the propositions on last Tuesday’s ballot, and yet another measure has been cleared for the general election. Secretary of State Debra Bowen announced last week that proponents of the so-called State Parks and Wildlife Conservation Trust Fund Act had submitted enough valid voter signatures to qualify it for the Nov. 2 ballot.
A June ballot measure that will determine the fate of a new 49ers stadium? Yes, you’ve heard that before, but this time the vote has traveled south. In 1997, San Francisco voters narrowly approved $100 million toward a new 49ers home at Candlestick Point, a $325 million facility that never progressed beyond a blueprint.
Public employee unions have dodged a bullet this election year. Proponents have stopped pushing a measure to prohibit unions from deducting political money from public employee wages. Supporters of the measure had trouble raising enough money to gather the 694,354 valid signatures they needed to qualify the constitutional amendment for the ballot, said Lew Uhler, president of the advocacy group the National Tax Limitation Committee, which worked with the initiative’s proponents.
Proposed ballot initiatives to allow California’s state budget to be passed by a simple majority of the Legislature and to allow the state Senate and Assembly once again to draw their own district boundaries have drawn opposition from the California Chamber of Commerce. Both initiatives have been cleared to gather voter signatures but have not yet qualified for the ballot. The “Passing the Budget on Time Act” would reduce the current two-thirds vote requirement for passage of a budget and would require lawmakers to forfeit pay if they failed to pass a budget on time.
Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson is taking a second shot at strong mayor. Johnson proposed a scaled-back version of his original strong-mayor initiative Tuesday, asking his colleagues on the City Council to place an initiative on the June ballot that would give his post increased authority over the budget and some high-ranking city officials.
Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner has publicly endorsed a ballot measure that would prohibit deducting earnings from public employees for political activities.
For $200 and a postage stamp, anyone can get a ballot measure petition approved to circulate in California. With deadlines looming for the 2010 elections and the state in need of serious engine work, more than 50 proposals ranging from the serious to the ridiculous have been cleared to begin gathering signatures in hopes of making it onto the November ballot.
State Sen. George Runner has sued Attorney General Jerry Brown to force California’s top cop to rewrite the summary on a ballot measure that would require people to show a picture ID before they could vote. Runner, a Republican from Lancaster, charges in the lawsuit filed Oct. 14 in Sacramento Superior Court that the Democratic attorney general tried to “mislead the public” with a slanted ballot measure.
The only thing missing from this City Hall soap opera is a man with amnesia. After a political watchdog group said Tuesday that Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson has no financial stake in strong-mayor discussions before the City Council, the spokesman for the campaign behind the proposal called for City Attorney Eileen Teichert to recuse herself from all future discussions on the topic. “Her personal politics are getting in the way of doing what’s best for the city,” said Steve Maviglio, a volunteer spokesman for both the mayor and Sacramentans for Accountable Government.
As the Capitol sifts through the residue of last week’s new deal on the state budget, Republican Assemblyman Anthony Adams is still coping with the fallout from February’s budget deal, one in which he broke partisan ranks and voted to impose new income, sales and vehicle taxes. Conservative activists, egged on by popular Southern California radio talkers John Kobylt and Ken Chiampou, launched a recall drive against Adams, whose district sprawls across a wide swath of Southern California deserts and suburbs.