My food truck brings all the boys to the yard

I was going to write about the Planning Board meeting tonight tomorrow night! (thanks JKW) (Historic Preservation Ordinance, Food Trucks, and more!)  But I decided that I wanted to write about something else.   Quick tip on the Food Truck agenda item, apparently the Off the Grid set-up on Saturday at South Shore is super popular and brings lots of people to the shopping center resulting in more retail sales for existing tenants.   The City is also looking at adding more flexibility to bring food trucks to Alameda Point as well.

Anyway, I wanted to post some graphics I made about the Beltline property, because immediately after a commenter mentioned that most people probably don’t know the size and scale of the property given the fence and all, I thought it would be interesting to see how the Beltline compares with other Alameda Parks.

So here is an overhead view of the property, these are all from Google maps, click to enlarge, I’m guessing that I should add that all the dirt parts in the middle makes up the Beltline.

That’s a wrap-up

For some reason, I didn’t feel nearly as invested in this election as I did two years ago.   It felt like there was so much more at stake two years ago, this year it just seemed like any which way the election went, it wouldn’t be THAT bad if any of the candidates won this time around.   This year the City Council race was kind of “meh” and even though the outcome was pretty much as my gut anticipated — although I expected Jane Sullwold to do much much better than what actually happened — Marilyn Ezzy Ashcraft ran a nearly pitch perfect campaign.    She had collected nearly all the important endorsements, but she also had a good ground game and it showed in the outcome.

Tony Daysog ran a lean campaign but in the end the combination of name recognition and the door-to-door campaign put him over candidates that had a lot more money.   Name recognition was probably the biggest asset in Tony Daysog’s corner.   If Beverly Johnson had stayed in the race, it’s pretty much a gimme that she would have won, probably beating out Tony Daysog, but perhaps not Marilyn Ezzy Ashcraft.

In the end I think Stewart Chen lost the campaign for himself because with the amount of money raised and the type of endorsements he had, he should have easily won over Tony Daysog.   I think the endorsement scuffle might have lost him some key votes and in the end, it doesn’t appear that the addition of the AEA endorsement was much help on election day.

Reading the tea leaves

Much like the “Bronco Bamma” girl, I’m really quite “done” with this whole election.  Between the national and local elections, next Tuesday can’t come fast enough.   While I’m not quite at the point of shedding tears quite yet, my stomach lining can’t take any more of the stress.  But I just wanted to point out that, if you haven’t had quite enough about election stuff and you still haven’t quite done enough research yet, I’ve been keeping my election roundup page quite updated.

And in the grand tradition of trying to read the tea leaves, my election Brain Heart Gut predictions.   I can’t recall if I did this for 2010, but my 2008 guesses were right on City Council wise, but I was way off on my School Board predictions.  So for those new to the Brain, Heart, Gut game, you make predictions based on who you logically think will win (Brain), who you want to win (Heart), and who you believe will win (Gut):

You asked, they answered: Tony Daysog, City Council candidate

1.What is the hardest decision you’ve had to make in your professional life?

One of the most difficult decisions I made had to with Alameda Power and Telcom (AP&T), which is now called Alameda Municipal Power (AMP). In the summer of 2003, we on City Council were discussing ways to close a $7 to $8 million budget shortfall to construct the telcom /fiber optics project. I supported the telcom project as early as when the Public Utilities Board first surfaced the idea around 1997. In getting city approval via a successful 1998 ballot initiative, City Council promised that, outside of the initial capital infusion to start the project, electric utility revenues would not subsidize telcom operations, i.e. the latter had to stand on its own as a business operation. As the bulk of construction budget was spent in ZIP Code 94501, by the early Fall 2003, Council began discussing ways to finance the $7 to $8 million shortfall, because construction for ZIP Code 94502 had not yet started. In early Fall 2003, I scoured a number of documents such as the City’s Comprehensive Annual Financial Reports (CAFR) and the PUB’s Business Plan, to see if there were any revenue centers within the PUB’s budget that we could tap to close the shortfall.

Almost final City Council questionnaire

So a couple of weeks ago I asked folks to help crowdsource a questionnaire for City Council candidate. Ooh, speaking of City Council candidates, yesterday I received some info that one of the City Council candidates might be out of the running:

Word is that Beverly Johnson may be dropping out of #Alameda City Council race

— Lauren Do (@laurendo) August 27, 2012

That’s right, it’s not official official yet (aka there have been no press releases out of the campaign yet) but it appears that — from the rumors around town — that Beverly Johnson is dropping out of the race.   So, if true, it could be that she simply realized that she was done with the City Council.   Early rumors had reported that she was no longer interested in serving.   But now with the wrench thrown in with her appointment to the Office of Administrative Law, perhaps it has something to do with that.  I mean, the commute would be pretty hellacious.

Anyway, back to the crowdsourced questions.