The President's Message
Dennis Mar, President, League of Women Voters of the Monterey Peninsula
April General Meeting
If you want to get a preview of our speaker Greg Greenway, he has a 13 minute online video in which he talks about building a community voice for housing. Go to the web site <video.Google.com> and search on “planning for housing greg greenway". Don’t confuse our speaker with a singer/song writer by the same name. While one of the music videos is the song "Singing for the Landlord," this is not our speaker.
The “Planning for Housing" clip is a good reminder that the LWVMP web site has videos of all of the general meeting speakers for the last three years. To view one online, go to our League’s home page at <www.lwvmp.org> and scroll to the bottom of the page. In the sentence beginning “Also watch online videos…", click on the word “videos" to see the complete list of programs available. As always, thanks to Bob Evans, Barbara Bass Evans, and Nancy Pratt for providing this service."
Carmel Election
Interest is running high over the Carmel City Election on Tuesday, April 13, 2010. The city has contracted with a private company to run the election instead of using services from Monterey County. While more common elsewhere, use of a private company is unusual on the Monterey Peninsula. We have a lot of questions. The LWVMP board established a committee to learn more about private management of elections and to observe it in action. Carl Pohlhammer is the committee chair with members Tamara Harris, Lorri Lockwood, Carmelita Garcia, and Dennis Mar.
Proposition 15
My description of this proposition is “public financing of elections: one office at a time." Quoting from the LWV of CA web site, the proposition would establish “…a pilot project to make voluntary public financing available to [Calif.] Secretary of State candidates in 2014 and 2018. …The pilot program would be funded primarily by fees on lobbyists, lobbying firms and lobbyist employers,…"
The LWV of California is a co-chair of the “Yes on 15" campaign. See the flyer in this VOTER about the local kickoff event.
“I Can See Clearly Now"
Sorry, but every time I hear the word “transparency", I think of that Johnny Nash song. “Transparency" is a word that we want to spread among the attendees to the LWV national convention in Atlanta this June. Read Bev’s more detailed article on page 2 of this VOTER.
Work by LWVMP has shown that the SARA standards of “secure", “accurate", “recountable," and “accessible" are insufficient to judge the appropriateness of proprietary electronic voting devices. Our goal is to strengthen the criteria so that the League has a better tool to evaluate new technology.
Yes, our little League is leading the charge on this issue as we did at the 2008 national convention and the 2009 state convention. This is real League stuff!
