Tag Archives: CA Assemblywoman Cecilia Aguiar-Curry

Contacting your legislators isn’t always as easy as it sounds

17 Feb

Thank you Cyber Bully John Ferrera, due to your nasty comment, people have been reading that month-old post I made about your boss, Cecilia Aguiar-Curry and ACA1, the bill that would drop the 2/3’s voter approval threshold for tax measures to 55%.

And I took your suggestion and tried to contact your boss via e-mail at the address she provided on her website. I sent her your message, as well as a link to Bill Track, and the contents of the bill. I told her I thought your comment was inappropriate and unprofessional, and that you are trying to mislead the public regarding ACA1.  My e-mail was sent back later in the day.

“Delivery has failed to these recipients or groups:

cecilia@ceciliaforassembly.com (cecilia@ceciliaforassembly.com)
Your message couldn’t be delivered. Despite repeated attempts to contact the recipient’s email system it didn’t respond.

Contact the recipient by some other means (by phone, for example) and ask them to tell their email admin that it appears that their email system isn’t accepting connection requests from your email system. Give them the error details shown below. It’s likely that the recipient’s email admin is the only one who can fix this problem.”

Microsoft provided a link to try and fix the problem – they advised me that the problem is in the “destination domain,” probably “Aggressive anti-spam settings in the destination domain that block legitimate senders, for example, all senders from any domain in Exchange Online.”

I think this is the problem with a lot of legislators’ contact info. They hide behind their anti-spam software. They really don’t want to hear from the public, and they don’t want to use e-mail because then there is a record of what they said, they can’t deny it. A phone call can go all over the place, and then you have no record of what was said. 

Maybe I’ll write a letter to her local newspaper – that’s a 50-50 proposition in my experience, some editors won’t print letters from out of towners, others are glad to get letters from anybody. We’ll see!

 

 

Tags:

Meet professional cyber bully John Ferrera, chief of staff for California assembly member Cecilia Aguiar-Curry

15 Feb

There’s a lot of yak-yak about “civil discourse” these days but I don’t think any of it is sincere. We’re warned about “cyber bullies” but usually in the context of teenagers posting trash about each other online that used to go on the bathroom wall.

Adults do a lot of cyber bullying, I  get it all the time. I know, I’m a crusty old broad, but I can tell when somebody is trying to intimidate me into shutting up, just by calling me a “troll” and telling me to “get a life”. I usually don’t post those comments, not because I’m thin-skinned, but because they don’t have anything to do with the conversation. But yesterday I got a comment from a public employee that was post worthy.

John Ferrera, Chief of Staff commented on CA ACA 1 – another attempt to lower the 2/3’s tax measure threshold disguised as a housing bill

“You never comtacted our office for a conversation about your concerns or to explain why local officials should not be able to ask their viters for support of local priorities to support the local economy. So how transparent and engaged are you? The Assemblymember’s phone is everywhere. Her office is in the State Capitol. And she meets daily with people from all over California. But you’re frustrated that you can’t just troll her on social media instead of engaging in a policy discussion. Your choice, not hers. And, by the way, after years of fires in her district in Lake, Sonoma, Yolo, Colusa and Napa, she was the first person to offer assistance to her colleagues dealing with the Camp Fire. You think they may want to ask their voters to support local rebuilding efforts? Under her initiative, they can if they want, and voters must support. If not, nothing happens.”

What a jerk. He could have asked me if I wanted to chat about the bill, and then let it go, instead, he seems to be calling me out, playground style. This comment is so hateful and angry, if he had spoken to me like this in a small room, I think I’d be very uncomfortable. Not only is this man an adult, he’s an adult who gets paid over $100,000/year, plus benefits, to protect the public interest. 

He commented on a month old post I wrote about an assembly bill that would lower the 2/3’s voter approval for tax measures to a simple majority – 51 to 55%. But it’s been disguised as a housing measure, using wild fire victims as bait.  Read the post here:

https://chicotaxpayers.com/2019/01/08/ca-aca-1-another-attempt-to-lower-the-2-3s-tax-measure-threshold-disguised-as-a-housing-bill/

I don’t think I wrote anything insulting, I just expressed my outrage at this clever ploy to get us to sign away our voting rights tacked onto a bill that uses fire victims as a shield. Here’s the bill, from Bill  Track.

https://www.billtrack50.com/LegislatorDetail/21570

“resolution to propose to the people of the State of California an amendment to the Constitution of the State, by amending Sections 1 and 4 of Article XIII ? A thereof, by amending Section 2 of, and by adding Section 2.5 to, Article XIII ? C thereof, by amending Section 3 of Article XIII ? D thereof, and by amending Section 18 of Article XVI thereof, relating to local finance.”

How could they make this more confusing?  This stuff isn’t written for the general public to understand. But you get that, right?  “amending Section 18 of Article XVI thereof, relating to local finance.”  

It’s pretty obvious, this bill is an attempt to change the system by which bonds are approved and the proceeds spent.  Read about that here:

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displayText.xhtml?lawCode=CONS&division=&title=&part=&chapter=&article=XVI

This bill is being carried by  assembly member Cecilia Aguiar-Curry, from Dixon-Winters California, near Sacramento. I went to her website to look for contact information, but was asked for my zip code, and then told she didn’t accept mail from outside her district. I think that should be illegal – we’re ALL her constituents, everything she does affects all of us. But we’re not allowed to contact her at her taxpayer supported website?

So I dumped my outrage into a blog, and went about trying to contact various friends of mine about the bill. I didn’t call her a whore, I didn’t give out her private address with 12-packs of eggs, I just suggested that people write to her local newspaper to tell her what they thought. And I made a personal note to remember to keep tabs on the bill.

Then the other day I got the nasty little comment from Ferrera. A pretty nasty, deliberate attempt to bully me into shutting up.

Yeah, good luck with that!

Tags: , ,