Vote no is better than no vote

It’s old and tired news already, but yes, that’s right Measure C lost, which means very little for the actual budgeting process since the money collected from Measure C would go toward servicing bonds that would pay for capital improvements.   The big downside of the demise of Measure C is that capital projects which have been on the backburner will continue to remain on the backburner until something catastrophic happens and then the City will have to shift pots of money to find a way to pay for whatever needs fixing with more than just duct tape and custom machined parts.

Going through what the Measure C campaign did wrong would just take too long.  Suffice it to say — as others have written — hopefully John Russo (and I use John Russo as a placeholder for everyone who thinks this is the best way to stabilize and provide predictability in the budget) will learn from this the way that the school parcel tax folks did and come up with something that has some widespread support without seeming kitchen sink-ish and pandering.

On a more exciting note, even though I have to say this “top two” onto the November election thing will take some getting used to.   Vice Mayor Rob Bonta completely owned the Assembly 18 primary on Tuesday night.

I had heard different polling results and assumed that Joel Young was in the lead given the concerted effort to take him down via glossy mailers, but either people hadn’t planned on voting Young to start with or the glossy mailers did their job because Young did really poorly, only 3 percentage points better than the Republican candidate who did zero campaigning at all.  Suffice it to say, his political career seems to be in a downward spiral.

So it’s Abel Guillen and Rob Bonta headed to November to battle it off.  So far, since the focus — on the part of the independent expenditure committees — have been to neutralize Joel Young, we’ll see if the negative campaigning comes out for either of these two guys.

I have to say, I really hope that it doesn’t come down to that.   What will be interesting to see is if some of the individuals and groups that have co-endorsed these two candidates will decide to pick sides instead of straddle the fence in the November election.   If Rob Bonta is able to protect his base, Abel Guillen is going to have some ground to make up since he is trailing a good 9 percentage points behind Rob Bonta.

Of course the big story of the election is just how crappy the turnout was.  I mean, it was pathetic.  Right now the turnout is only about 28% of registered voters, compared to the School Parcel Tax Special Election in March of 2011 which saw 51% of registered voters vote.    And that was a special election, and generally special elections do much more poorly than regular elections.   I realize that people like to be excited about what they vote for, but come on.  Voting is so easy with absentee ballots now, there really is no excuse to not vote.