Growth-control measures rejected in EDC
By Peter Hecht, Sacramento Bee
El Dorado County has long roiled with bitter political battles over new housing developments and perceived threats to the rustic Sierra foothills environment.
But Tuesday night, voters overwhelmingly rejected initiatives that proponents argued would protect rural community boundaries and ban new subdivisions that threaten to gridlock Highway 50 with traffic. They also elected two new county supervisors, Michael Ranalli and Sue Novasel, who both campaigned against the initiatives and “land use planning through the ballot box.”
Measures M, N and O went down to ignominious defeat in the face of more than $1 million in campaign spending by real estate and development groups, including building interests proposing thousands of new homes for western El Dorado County. The political media blizzard – costing more than $20 per vote based on Tuesday’s turnout – broadcast a message that the county’s pastoral landscape was imperiled by the growth-control measures themselves.
“It means that even a good ballot argument and proposition is hard to win against $1 million,” said Bill Center, a former county supervisor and co-sponsor of Measure M. “It was basically an electoral carpet bombing with signs and mailings and robocalls and World Series ads. They ran the best campaign that money could buy.”
Any time you get slick full color ads for an initiative in the mail, voter beware.
This time voters got duped. The ‘ no, no no,’ for M,N,O ‘ campaign confused enough voters to pass. What they said they were protecting was exactly what they are seeking to destroy.
Lazy electorate. I’m on the hook for what you don’t bother to understand….
PORKED some win everybody else gets Porked.
The developer’s lied, bribed local politicians with campaign funds and poured near a million dollars into this and bought votes very cheaply at about 20.00 each for their dreams to build tens of thousands of new houses and continue their path of destruction and rezoning rural areas with no road capacity or water for it. Bribery of the dumbed down and the corrupt worked again.
$20 a vote? That’s nothin’!
In this election cycle in Alaska $150 per person, not per voter, but per person for the whole population of the state was spent.
The No on M-N-O campaign was truly disgraceful. It is astonishing so many gullible voters were duped by the big bucks and disingenuous, slick mailings of these out of town developers and their political puppets.
Time to build, did you ever think the environmental movement is hurting you these days, I’m glad that there is development going on, pro building for me, sick of you environmental clowns trying to run things.
Novasel wants us to trust the BOS to make decisions for us? Really? Because they have been doing such a great job of engaging their constituents – and listening to them – so far?
Just shows people need to pay attention to what’s really going on. We received 3 copies of the same “no on MNO” flyer the week before the election. Big bucks.
Most of the above commenters are victims of the
no-means-yes syndrome.
Classic failure to think beyond the lies they heard today.
Land use planning via public vote always leads to the enrichment of a few very quickly and the many get to pay for it for the rest of their lives.
People who think they will get jobs when the developers get busy may be in shock when the usual gangs of illegals get the work for half of what a US citizen would get and the results are often huge defect lawsuits from shoddy work. The real story is any candidate taking developer money has an immediate conflict of interest and this kind of bought and paid for politician is cheap. This should be illegal and they should not be allowed to vote on any development issue after taking the bribe. The people have a two year window to work on another proposal for the next election and this isn’t over yet. Out of town developer’s projects, who trash and leave, against the people who have to live with them, is an on-going war in this county.
Democracy at its finest. The amount of money spent on campaigns throughout this country is obscene, including our local elections.
It is also pathetic how few people vote!
Ok ONE TIME, lets build RIGHT NEXT TO YOU. Lets clog YOUR STREETS with excess traffic, strain YOUR WATER SUPPLY, and generally OVERRUN your little piece of paradise with MORE MORE MORE
It’ll be great, trust me…..
You are all the same.
If it negatively influences you, you are against it.
If someone else has to take the bullet, you are all for it.
I dream of the day when the courts tell the politicians they can only spend $1000.00 total for their election. Period, end of story.
Not gonna happen, GF. Courts don’t make laws. They interpret and uphold the law.
At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work. We’ve still got the freedom to make a few choices of our own about how we spend our own money.
This is not like buying a pizza. Freedom to spend?
Theoretically anyone should be able to spend freely on the candidate of their own choosing. Theoretically. However, this topic becomes complex once one considers the massive influence a wealthy donor or corporation enjoys compared to the average citizen. It is undue influence and runs counter to the spirit of what an election is really about. Citizens United is dead wrong and history will show.
The sewage that these developers spewed with their no no no mno campaign was purposely misleading and flat out disgusting. Money in elections is a lot like money interests in our health care system. In a civilized society, it has no place. It corrupts the process. The free market is not omniscient, it does not know all and it has no place in an election. The recent no no no campaign is just the latest example.
Ultimately, however, it is an indictment on the electorate. Stupid people make stupid decisions. Money simply buys stupid people’s votes.
With Citizen’s United, money simply buys a loud voice with marketing. Examples. The highest grossing Restaurant in America is still McDonalds, with Subway a distant second. Until last year, Soda was the most popular beverage in America; this year it is water (58 gallons per year) number one then Soda (44 gallons per year) number two. BTY, Coke is still the number one selling Soda.
In the 1800’s and early 1900’s Montana went through a similar phase of money buying politicians, newspapers, judges via copper Kings; search “copper collar” and Anaconda Copper Mine for references.
In 1912, the voters of Montana passed the Corrupt Practices Act via a State referendum that banned corporate spending in Montana elections. When the Montana law was challenged in 1912, the Montana Supreme court said, “Western Tradition Partnership, is a conduit of funds for persons and entities including corporations who want to spend money anonymously to influence Montana elections.”
The Montana Supreme Court again ruled in 2012 that the 1912 Corrupt Practices Act was needed to ensure the integrity of Montana’s elections and because of Montana’s history of corporate vote-buying that the law should stand. However, the US Supreme Court nullified the Montana Law (and others) with it’s 5 to 4 Citizens United decision.
Montana Justice James C. Nelson wrote, “Corporations are not persons. Human beings are persons, and it is an affront to the inviolable dignity of our species that courts have created a legal fiction which forces people—human beings—to share fundamental, natural rights with soulless creatures of government. Worse still, while corporations and human beings share many of the same rights under the law, they clearly are not bound equally to the same codes of good conduct, decency, and morality, and they are not held equally accountable for their sins. Indeed, it is truly ironic that the death penalty and hell are reserved only to natural persons.”