Allen's Weblog

Last year San Diego County voters were offered an “opportunity” to fund a large number of local road repair/building and resurfacing efforts, if the voters approved by a 2/3 vote.
Despite massive advertising, the Measure A, failed.

Now we learn, we were being honeyfuggled! (Yes, it is a word, and it has been years since I used it, but when writing about politicians I should use it far more often.)

The government entity giving the public this “opportunity” is called SANDAG, the San Diego Association of Area Governments, a high powered group with a huge staff and a governing board with representatives from each city in the County. Often, Mayors themselves are the representatives.

Like most government organizations, the government representatives on the Board are politicians and are not skilled at reading spreadsheets. 

(As an aside, I once got my hands on the Summary Budget of the Poway School District, and a quick comparison to the previous budget jumped out to me on the page that every new figure was a multiple of the previous figure out to three places! All the assurances that the staff was supposed to have worked for months on the budget, when actually some guy with a calculator spent 15 minutes multiplying last year’s numbers to increase them by the same multiple.)

The SANDAG staff KNEW that their income from a proposed tax was vastly overstated — the public position was $18 billion when they, and at least some of the political members KNEW that the actual number was $14 billion. 

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