How I'm Voting on March 7 - LA City/County (Hollywood)
County Measure H: Yes. This will impose a 1/4 cent sales tax increase in the County to fund social services for homeless people. It is the County counterpart to the City's recent Prop HHH success, which raised $1.2 billion to build housing for the homeless. I'm involved in all of this via a Deans' Commission on homelessness here at USC, where the University is "all-in" on addressing homelessness in LA. It's an exciting time to be in this effort because so many positive things are converging at once - Measure M being critical....
City Municipal:
Mayor: Eric Garcetti. I'm still very impressed with him. Hard-working, thoughtful, effective - so far, so good. The challenges of the city are huge -- there is much work that's hardly done: dealing with looming pension obligations, reducing the influence of big money on planning/zoning decisions, meeting the huge shortfall of housing units, etc, etc. It looks like he "gets it" and is chipping away at these serious problems...
City Attorney, Mike Feuer, and Controller, Ron Galperin - running unopposed - both seem to be doing a good job --
City Measures:
Measure M: Yes. Regulation of marijuana. This proposition has pretty much unanimous support from major stakeholders in the City. There's no organized opposition to it. It regulates and taxes marijuana sales in an orderly, sensible way.
Measure N: No. Regulation of marijuana. It is a "stub" - it was replaced by Measure M and nobody now supports Measure N.
Measure P: Yes. A minor technical change to bring the system of leasing for the LA Harbor into line with other waterfronts in the state.
Measure S: No. It would make the planning and zoning process in LA more rigid. There is indeed a problem with undue influence of developers' big money over the planning and zoning processes of LA. However, Measure S would cause worse problems than it would solve. For one thing, it will make it significantly harder for housing projects for the homeless to be built under HHH. Measure S is NIMBYism codified into law. We need more housing, not less - we need more flexibility to build housing, not more impediments to meeting the 500,000-unit housing unit shortfall statewide...
LA Community College District:
Vargas, Fowler, Buelna. I "triangulated" advice from the LA Times, the Democratic Party Central Committee, and other sources to arrive at these picks. It's tough to decide, because the sources of info on these candidates are very limited....
LA Unified School District District 4: Zimmer, the incumbent and the president of the board. His main opponent, Nick Melvoin, is funded by the charter-school movement. Zimmer isn't perfect - the District has a whole lot of problems. But I think he's taken a balanced approach - defending improvement to the regular schools, supporting quality charters but not buying in to the dogma of the charter-school movement and its billionaire backers. Public schools have become a political football - as evidenced by the appointment of charter-school/private school voucher fanatic Betsy DeVos to the cabinet as the Secretary of Education. The future of public education is in incremental, sensible, proven improvements to regular schools. Charters can serve as experiments that can then inform improvements in regular schools. Charters cannot and should not replace regular public schools.
JIM BURKLO
Website: JIMBURKLO.COM Weblog: MUSINGS Follow me on twitter: @jtburklo
See a video interview about my new novel, SOULJOURN
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Associate Dean of Religious Life, University of Southern California
Website: JIMBURKLO.COM Weblog: MUSINGS Follow me on twitter: @jtburklo
See a video interview about my new novel, SOULJOURN
See the GUIDE to my articles and books
Associate Dean of Religious Life, University of Southern California