Wednesday, December 16, 2009

San Diego County Term Limits

I was reading other blogs this evening (Sorry, San Diego Politico) and came skimmed through SD Rostra and a post by Jill Sims.

It seems Jill considers herself to be a political intellect and not one to question others, but I had to post my responses to her post.

1) She thinks county supervisors will retire when they are in their 70's. How many congressional members retire in their 70's or have stayed on way passed that point and were wheeled into the chamber for votes - Strom Thurmond.
2) She thinks county counsel write proponent ballot measures. I'm sorry, but they get their own lawyers and county counsel review them.
3) She thinks the proponents should target sheriff, assessor, district attorney and tax collector or as she says, county treasurer, because they are in office for long times. Maybe Jill should just look back and find facts to support her wild theories then the true facts; Bonnie beat the incumbent, Kolendar beat the incumbent, McAllister beat the incumbent and Butler is not running.
4) She thinks it might be illegal to place term limits on only a certain group of elected officials at a level of government. Just look at the President of the United States
, term limited and Congress no term limits.
5) She thinks the Sheriff, District Attorney, Assessor and Tax Collector don't effect employee contracts and the budget. Wrong.
6) She tried to make the case the proponents were doing this to get revenge on the supervisors with regards to their contract, but she seems to unravel her own theory by showing it isn't retroactive and would not kick them out now.

I hope this will answer the many items Jill tried to hypothesize and kind of missed the mark.

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

San Diego County Term Limits Qualify for June Ballot

It has been reported the term limit measure for the San Diego County Board of Supervisors has been qualified by the San Diego County Registrar of Voters. The Board of Supervisors will have to place it on the Jan 12th agenda and vote to place it on the June ballot.

Below is the press release I was sent:


Term Limits Qualified

San Diego County Board of Supervisors Term Limits is guaranteed to be on the June 2010 ballot

SAN DIEGO -- (December 15, 2009) – The campaign to reform San Diego County government announced today it has passed the next crucial milestone for appearing on the June 2010 ballot when the San Diego County Registrar of Voters qualified the signatures this week.

Registrar of Voters Deborah Seiler found that the measure qualified for the ballot after her office projected the campaign to have submitted 118 percent of the required 77,837 signatures needed to appear on the June ballot.

The ballot measure would limit the County Board of Supervisors to serving no more then two-terms. Voters from all over San Diego County signed petitions to qualify the measure after County Supervisors have had a lock on winning re-election after re-election. This has been due to a yearly $10 million in unrestricted slush funds that Supervisors have doled out as political favors, campaign accounts in the hundreds of thousands of dollars from previous uncontested races and supervisorial districts that the Supervisors get to draw themselves.

Every member of the current Board of Supervisors has served at least 14 years on the Board. The last time incumbents lost their re-election was in 1984, now more then 25 years ago.

“I find it difficult to fathom, that in a county of over 1.4 million registered voters, a select few would believe only five individuals can run our county government,” said Margarita Johnson, a worker at the Sheriff’s Department. “We are lucky to live in San Diego, and I know we have a wealth of individuals with the background to do this job and will step up, once there is an equal playing field and who have the needs of all the San Diego residences.”