The Buzz 11.21.18

WHO’S IN TOWN?

Winning voter approval is never a sure thing when cities or counties put new property taxes on the ballot, especially when state law requires 66.67 of the vote. So it was a big deal when nine San Francisco Bay Area counties put the state’s first regional ballot measure to the test in June 2016 with Measure AA. The measure proposed to raise $500 million over 20 years for wetlands restoration in San Francisco Bay with a $12-per-parcel annual tax. It won by 70 percent. In town this week is Matt Gerhart, program manager for the San Francisco Bay Area Conservancy program of the Coastal Conservancy. He’s going to explain the history of how Measure AA came about and where it stands now one year into funding.

6-7:30pm Tues Nov. 27. Middlebury Institute of International Studies, McGowan 102, 411 Pacific St., Monterey. Free. middlebury.edu/institute/events.

FREE SPEECH

It’s a newspaper editor’s worst nightmare: People quoted in a story turn out to be fabrications. That’s what happened at the Houston Chronicle, which on Nov. 8 published the findings of an investigation into veteran reporter and former Austin bureau chief Mike Ward. “A pattern began to emerge: Alongside quotes from easy-to-find political figures, his stories were spiced with sparkling quotes from ordinary Texans, including a software engineer from Dallas, a businesswoman from Williamson County, a tea party activist,” wrote correspondentDavid Wood, who was hired to investigate. “The review included 744 stories, from early August 2018 back to January 2014, when he was hired after a long career at the Austin American-Statesman. A team of three pulled out the names of 275 individuals who were presented as ordinary Texans and made every effort to find them. Of the 275 people quoted, 122, or 44 percent, could not be found. Those 122 people appeared in 72 stories.” Ward has resigned and the paper retracted eight stories.

GOOD WEEK / BAD WEEK

GOOD:

Nationwide, voter turnout in the 2018 general election was proportionally the highest in 104 years, according to the U.S. Election Project. That phenomenon was played out in big cities and small, including tiny Carmel-by-the-Sea. The town had the highest number of voters for a municipal election since 2008, with just over 2,000 ballots counted as of 5:06pm on Friday, Nov. 16, the latest results available. That’s 400 more than the next highest turnout, which was in 2012. It was a particularly good week for councilmember-elect Jeff Baron, who received 1,236 votes to win a seat on the council, 82 more votes than mayor-elect Dave Potter and 77 more than the previous top vote-getter in 2012, former mayor Jason Burnett. The number will likely go up: Monterey County Registrar of Voters Claudio Valenzuela expects the count to be finalized by Nov. 30.

BAD:

It’s been a rough go, and now the Salinas Valley Solid Waste Authority and the city of Salinas are breaking up. On Nov. 20 (after theWeekly’s print deadline), Salinas City Council was set to vote on a one-year notice of intention to withdraw from the agency, which also includes as members the cities of Gonzales, Greenfield, King City and Soledad, as well as Monterey County. For years, Salinas officials have been advocating to relocate the Sun Street Transfer Station out of the middle of the city to make room to develop the Alisal Marketplace, to no avail. SVSWA General Manager Patrick Mathews says the city leaving won’t solve that problem, and notes that city officials have thwarted some prospective new locations for the dump. In a Nov. 19 letter urging City Council to reconsider, Mathews writes that Salinas’ share of SVSWA’s liabilities is 62 percent – about $56 million.