Elections

Part One – Candidates Questions – We are just five weeks out from the November Election date.  And while all eyes are focused on the Presidential Debate scheduled for Wednesday, locally voters have critical choices and nowhere more than on schools where the public will be asked to decide between five very different candidates for school board and whether to fund another parcel tax, Measure E.

This summer, the Vanguard launched an editorial board.  There will be a number of functions for that board, including helping to direct and advise the direction of the Vanguard.  The first public event was last night’s candidates forum for the school board candidates, held at at Harper Junior High.

On Monday, October 1, 2012, the Davis Vanguard and Davis Media Access (DMA) will be hosting a candidates forum for the Davis School Board candidates, to be held in the Harper Junior High Multipurpose room. The doors open at 6:30 PM and the forum begins at 7:00 PM.

The forum will have a unique setup in that candidates will be seated facing each other in a discussion format. Each of the five candidates will ask one question to be answered by themselves and the other candidates and then there will be time at the end for question and answer of the candidates.

Claire Sherman is not your typical candidate for school board.  She openly acknowledges that her stances on issues facing the district may make it difficult for her to be elected and that gaining election may not be her top priority, as she is not planning on raising or spending money beyond the costs of putting her ballot statement on the sample ballot.

Nevertheless, she believes that there are issues that are not be voiced in this community, that the current school board is too homogeneous and caters to the high-achieving student population.

In the city of Davis it seems that for a long time the city council was the center of political life.  The most intense races, the most interest was generated on issues of growth facing this community.

In the past, city council races have drawn numerous candidates, have been intensely waged along sometimes clear lines of demarcation.  But back in June, there were just five candidates for three spots, the campaign itself was focused more on personalities than clear political lines, and the intensity, with a few notable exceptions, was fairly low.

Jose Granda, often critic of the Davis Joint Unified School District, particularly on issues of taxation, has put his proverbial money where his mouth is and becomes the fourth known candidate for the office, joining incumbent Susan Lovenburg, Nancy Peterson and other recent entry Claire Sherman.

Because incumbent Richard Harris has declined to run for a second term, the filing period remains open until August 15 and there is a rumor that a fifth candidate may enter.

If it lacks the flare of the dramatic announcement of Richard Harris, who turned not only the prospective school board election on its head, but the entire community as well, Susan Lovenburg will have to be forgiven.

Her time on the board is perhaps as tumultuous as anyone’s, beginning with the late night meetings and dramatic decisions that punctuated early 2008 in the first of many fiscal crises that saw the young board propose and ultimately reject closing Emerson Junior High, DaVinci, and numerous programs like foreign languages, music, art and drama.

It is a weird thing to be talking about Election Day, when just about everybody other than me has voted, but that is where we are.  I have had numerous conversations in the last few days with people in all sorts of capacities.

I still predict that Measure C passes.  I do not think it will get three-quarters of the vote as Measure W did back in 2008, but I also do not think this is going to be the squeaker that Measure A was last year.

Enough has been made about the possibility that mail-in ballots are less secure than other forms of voting that it seemed like a wise idea to speak with Yolo County Clerk Freddie Oakley, so she could explain what her office does to protect the integrity of the process.

Jose Granda has been given no less than two editorials and three or four letters to the editor in the newspaper to continue the same inaccurate information that he has espoused for two months and that prompted a Yolo County Superior Court Judge to have to strike portions of a ballot statement.

We sympathize with the local newspaper – after all they are trying to provide balanced coverage of a ballot measure whose support is imbalanced and whose opposition is led by two individuals who have for some odd reason decided that their best approach is not to attack the measure but rather to attack the electoral process, and to do so based on inaccurate representations of that process.

The Election is rapidly approaching for Measure C, the extension of the district’s current parcel tax for another five years.  We have received some reports from around the community about illegally-placed signage.

It appears that the No on C people have an inadequate understanding of the laws on permissible sign usage.  They posted a complaint on the Davis Enterprise comment section that “No on C signs are being stolen all over town. Is this the way C supporters are supposed to act?”

by Hiram Jackson and Greg Brucker

About 30 years ago, Davis schools faced the biggest deficits on record up to that time.  Significant cuts were made to the music program, and the school elementary music program was eliminated for three years.  This occurred in the years just before Davis passed its first school parcel tax in 1984.

Once the elementary program was reinstated, it took another 10 years to restore the whole music program to its previous levels of participation and excellence.  We are also faced with a similar decision in 2012 as to whether to continue funding for programs like elementary music.  But in light of how much Davis families appreciate that music performance is an essential component of a basic education, this is a choice that you can make at the ballot box.