Something light to take us into Halloween weekend and the final weekend before Election Day. This year we were blessed with another crop of spooky campaign signs, as a reminder these were the batch from 2010.
This year there are only five candidates for City Council and they all get the spookified treatment. The nod to the cat butt for Trish Spencer’s sign is glorious.
You can see them all after the jump, but click through for the full experience:
(more…)A few other tidbits from the Youth Activists Forum, first off was the answers to a question about Prop 15. When the question first came up I was 100% sure this was a softball designed to give all the candidates something to agree on. Turns out, I was wrong and, to be honest, a little heated when I heard the responses:
Then there was a question about whether the candidate would make ethnic studies a requirement for graduation. Now, I know all of you, dear readers, understand that the school district and the City of Alameda are separate entities. But there was one candidate who did not and answered that he would make ethnic studies a graduation requirement: Amos White. Which was, yet another, demonstration that night that he is woefully under informed when it comes to basic Alameda government stuff. When Trish Spencer is better informed than you and gives a nuanced answer, you know you’re in trouble.
Then there was this from Gig Codiga who is, evidently, feeling a little defensive about needing to talk in detail about this mailer:
Folks, this is why you try to catch as many forums as possible and this is why I hope that, even in a post COVID world, we continue to live stream these forums for people who can’t make it out in person. On Monday night the Youth Activists of Alameda hosted a City Council forum. I saw a link to this from someone’s Facebook post and so glad that I registered and found the time to listen to this one because there were some things that were said that I don’t think we’ve learned in any other forum.
There are a lot of things to touch on but I’m going to concentrate on one big thing that is really important. It came really early on during the forum so I don’t know how many people were logged on. This was not in answer to any question, this was in the opening statements.
This is what City Council candidate Gig Codiga said about police officers in Alameda:
(more…)Vice Mayor John Knox White has a good table of turnout in the past 16 elections and where they rank from the sheer number of people who turned in ballots:
I’ve recreated it below with “Notable races” filled in to help provide some context for that year.
(more…)On Friday I circled back to a question I had left on Trish Spencer’s Facebook page to see if she had answered. After all, all the candidates are running to represent Alamedans and so should be responsive to prospective constituents. Specifically, this question:
Turned out, not only did Trish Spencer not answer the question, she deleted it too.
But wait, there’s more.
In addition to deleting it, she blocked me from commenting on her posts as well:
I’ve been following the discussion around the RHNA allocations sort of tangentially. Meaning I’m not really listening or watching the conversations just sort of following along when people who are watching the meetings tweet about what’s going on. This is a really good thread to get caught up on what happened at the October 15th meeting:
I did catch that some of the Contra Costa county leaders were upset about their allocations and were/are pushing for an alternate methodology which would take the weight off of cities in that county and push it anywhere but there. So, naturally, Trish Spencer decided that we, in Alameda, should support the CoCo County methodology:
Look, I’m not the best proofreader out there, I often don’t proofread my own posts. But I’m also not running for political office either. So when I say that maybe candidates should hire someone to proof read their stuff, I’m not saying that it should be me who they hire, but I work very inexpensively. *coughdonutscough*
This fundraising email went out from Amos White’s campaign to an unknown list. I know the list is unknown and weird because my husband received the email and he never signs up for campaign related emails.
But anyway, here’s the funny part of the email. In the place where you enter the information of who that email is from the Amos White campaign misspelled the name of former City Councilmember Frank Matarrese.
Who has endorsed him.
Who is allowing him to use his name in a campaign email.
Who is Amos White’s “Honorary Campaign Chair.”
This is truly brown M&M territory here.
This is some shady stuff that Gig Codiga is trying to pull with his latest mailers which, I’m assuming, was sent to every voter with a 94502 area code. But first, because this was already flogged by Tony Daysog, this was a letter sent out by city staffer Andrew Thomas:
A lot of the reasons why there has been the sentiment that “crime is rising” when the data simply doesn’t bear out probably has a lot to do with why we thought in mid to late 2017 that there was a lot of crime: social media. But this time the social media blitz is coming directly from the Police department itself.
First, yesterday Vice Mayor John Knox White posted a huge crime update on his website, excerpt:
In Alameda there are a number of ever-changing narratives around recent increases in crime that don’t hold up to scrutiny. There are two aspects of crime and enforcement that create the snapshot. Crime reports and clearances. On both measures, Alameda is doing ok. The crime rate is down and clearance rates are up. This means that there are fewer crimes being committed AND we are catching more of the people committing them (again, kudos to Alameda’s detectives).
May 2020 saw a spike in Part 1 crimes as Alameda and the county started to open up a little with the Pandemic. This mirrored what the Alameda’s police department reports as increases throughout the County and region.
Since that time, Part 1 crimes have dropped every month and in September are sixth lowest than any time in almost three years. August and September have been below our annual average
What has risen though is the number of social media posts by the Alameda Police Department’s account which specifically reference crime.
(more…)There was a delightful flurry of activity on Friday afternoon that had nothing to do with Measure Z or with the City Council race. It had to do with the School Board and not even the School Board election but the School Board itself.
Lemme recap some of the backstory here for those who don’t have kids in AUSD or don’t really care about public schools in Alameda. Earlier in the year the School Board right around the time we all went into COVID hibernation mode (mid March) the School Board decided to move forward with a subcommittee to create a policy around Boardmember conduct. I’ll add here that I find nothing wrong with crafting policy around Boardmember conduct. It’s important and there should be clear expectations and the ability to censure any elected official for actions that are outside of the outlined and vetted expectations. And this is one of the reasons why, if you also agree to that, you should be voting yes on Measure AA which does that on the City Council level.
For more backstory, this is in direct response to the news in late February involving School Boardmember Jennifer Williams and a DUI.
But here’s where it gets messy in the way that only this School Board can manage. After all we’re sort of back where we started with this Board composition only rather than kneecapping Jennifer Williams with plenty of time to spare — and assuring that she could not hold the title of President of the School Board which she would have been during this rotation under the old rules — it appears that the kneecapping is happening with an accelerated timeline.
(more…)