Measure K lawsuit successful in district court, will move on to appeals court (at the taxpayers’ expense…)

Sorry, busy busy – I received GREAT NEWS about the Yuba County Measure K lawsuit, and I forgot to post it. 

The judge ruled in favor of the plaintiffs – 

Accordingly, for all of the forgoing reasons, the Court grants judgment in favor of Plaintiffs on their first and second causes of action seeking to invalidate Measure K because it failed to garner the required two-thirds vote required for enactment of a special tax.

What happens next – later that day I received a note from my  friend Connie – 

“At a BOS meeting yesterday, they voted in CLOSED SESSION to appeal the ruling. That gave the voters and taxpayers no opportunity to voice their concerns etc.”

Yes, the Yuba County supervisors voted to spend MORE TAXPAYER MONEY to fight a court ruling. Like I told my friend Connie, studies show appeals don’t have a very high success rate, only about 17% of these lower court decisions are actually overturned, it seems most appeals are thrown out without hearing due to procedural errors. But the taxpayers will pay for all that – I hope they remember all this at election time. 

The city of Chico will not make the same mistakes Yuba County made. City Asst Mgr Chris Constantin has repeatedly warned city staffers, as well as elected and appointed officials, that the city can’t put any specific purpose on their planned sales tax increase because that would require a 2/3’s vote of the public.  And I think their surveys have shown very clearly that they will be lucky to get 51%. 

Their campaign so far, like CARD’s, has been to point out the failed state of our city infrastructure, the public safety concerns, and our growing population, telling us there’s not enough money to go on from here.

The answers to theses claims are as follows:

1. our city infrastructure has been neglected while they’ve raised their own salaries and paid their pension deficit with our money
2. public safety is at an all-time low because the city has declared a “shelter crisis designation” to get in on the gravy train of “the homeless industrial complex” 
3. our population is growing because the city keeps approving development. And now they’re talking about buying water from Paradise to take the pressure off our ground water supply? Why do they continue to approve subdivisions for which there is no water?  Because if they stopped approving all this new development they’d lose all those developer fees and the resulting new property taxes. 

Our city staff are a bunch of junkies – money junkies. I know public workers – they tend to spend money just like the agencies they work for. The new job requires a bigger, fancier house and lifestyle (watch “Fun With Dick and Jane”, the old version). These people are as over their heads as the economy. They can’t stop making more money, they’re up to their necks in debt. 

So while we raise a glass to the folks who fought Measure K, we better be getting ready to fight our own battle.