Saturday morning fervor

I know you have all been counting down the days, making little red Xs on your calendar until the circled date of February 23rd.   Well your wait is almost at an end my friends, because it is time for:

THE MEASURE A FORUM

aka

THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT

[insert dramatic music here]

While the rest of Alameda sleeps in and slowly drags their butts out of bed for a nice leisurely day of leaf raking or enjoying Park Street, the obsessive among us, myself included, will be plying ourselves with danishes and crossiants and attempting to keep our snarky remarks muttered well under our breaths.   There will be morning pastries, right?

I would offer to live blog at the event, but I’m pretty sure that Kofman Auditorium doesn’t have free wifi access. But don’t worry if you don’t go, much like the Futile Exercise in Compromise (FEC) aka the Ad Hoc Committee thingamagig you too will be subjected to many many “differently biased” reflections on what actually went down at the forum after the fact.   Certainly you will get my opinion and of course I imagine that Alameda Daily News will publish many opinions, all that basically say this:

What a waste of time, all of the non-Alameda residents didn’t know what they were talking about.   Alameda is a specially unique place that exists outside of the space-time continuum.  Best practices and examples from other locations cannot be applied to Alameda because of this and because they will never understand this, their opinions are useless.

Different folks will spin the size of the crowd to meet whatever view point they are espousing at the time, such as:

The turnout was so small, clearly everyone knows what they need to know about Measure A already and therefore support it.

Or in the case of a large turnout:

There were so many people there who wanted to learn about Measure A, but because there weren’t enough knowledgeable Alameda residents on the panel who understood Measure A, they didn’t get enough of the right information.

Because according to the last Don Roberts show in which Pat Bail was a special guest, they talked briefly about the makeup of the panel.   Saying the only good panelists were Woody Minor, Denise Brady, and David Howard, because those were the only people they were familiar with.   With a sneer as Don R. said Judge Richard Bartalini’s name (Alameda resident, by the way) they said, “what does he have to do with Measure A?”   After reading off names like Hansom Hom (Alameda resident, formerly part of Alameda Planning staff) because they didn’t remember him he’s not a good panelist either.    And David Burton (Alameda resident, architect, and Climate Protection Task Force Member), their response to his sitting on the panel was “what does climate protection have to do with Measure A?”   So it’s not just that you can simply be an Alameda resident to qualify as a panelist, you also have to meet the Don n’ Pat test of suitability. 

The complete agenda is here and Dorothy Freeman can rest assured that she will not be muzzled during this forum as there is an hour and a half (2:30 - 4:00 p.m.) scheduled for Open Forum to make comments to the Planning Board.   This would be a good time to cut out if you don’t care to hear the same old same old stuff you hear at every other meeting, or if your supply of Tums has run out.    You can choose to submit a written statement to the Planning Board instead.

So, if you see me there, stop by and say, “hi,” in the immortable words of Austin Powers, “I won’t bite…hard.”