Sunday, April 15, 2007

A1: "Initiative on sales tax could make ballot"

Okay, so we have a new group of half a dozen people getting started on an initiative to make the temporary 1-percent City sales tax permanent. But there's an important piece missing.

Quoting from the initiative, we see, “Starting Jan. 1, 2016, funds from the 1-percent Transaction Privilege Tax shall be used exclusively for ‘street maintenance.’”

Presumably this use of 'exclusively' references the current uses of the tax revenues for both streets and the acquisition of open space, and would eliminate the latter. Open space has been an issue of major contention since the campaign to approve it in the first place, and it's no surprise that some people might want to knock it out.

But Cindy's story only mentions the open-space angle in the background graph. It seems clear that this could easily be the primary motivator for the initiative backers, especially considering that they hope to pass it eight years before any possibility of implementation. That demands exploring.

If it's on A1 it's a news story, and shouldn't be treated as a simple inside-page press-release dump. Did Cindy do this, or the editors?

1 comment:

leftturnclyde said...

Steve you have regularly given the editors of this fine paper and some of the local politicians low marks for ..shall we say evil genus?
look at this thing my god, its classic misdirection . yeah never mind the fact that we're gonna stop putting money into aquiring open space(ignore the saliva from the developers pooling on the floor ..they have no interest in this) we want to make this tax a permanent thing so we can ..take care of our streets ...and the new ones that will be built for all the subdivisions and strip malls on all the open space we did'nt buy because we didnt put any money aside because ..the greedy bloodsucking ..oops progress minded Business leaders are our friends ..hey we're out of water ..hey where did our buddies with the earth moving equipment go?