Maven’s Action Alert: Defang, Derail, and Defeat Prop 98 on June 3rd

May 23, 2008

On Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008, it is absolutely necessary to get to the polls and VOTE NO AGAINST PROP 98. Marinmaven and the entire family from the most FoxNews Fan Conservative to the most Flaming liberal (me) are voting NO on Proposition 98. It’s Howard Jarvis and Company with one of the most dishonest and badly written initiatives evah.

They use legitimate concern over a somewhat troublesome US Supreme Court decision that governments can use eminent domain to take property for private development to ram through a wide reaching and destructive initiative. Instead of writing a straightforward law like Proposition 99, that focuses its goal directly to the Supreme Court decision, 98 broadens what they consider is a government taking to the detriment of Californians.

Proposition 98 outlaws any law or regulation that might limit property value for individuals and companies to benefit the environment or community good. Proposition 98 considers rent control a government taking and rent control ordinances would be abolished. This is during a time of an unprecedented mortgage crisis in our state where people are losing their homes and forced to look for rental housing. Abolishing rent control will turn out the elderly on fixed incomes, low income families, single moms, people who are trying rehabilitate themselves. More and more Californians are becoming renters, and this initiative will take away all their protections as they can be interpreted as limiting the value of property.

If you doubt there are landlords who would gouge renters you need only look at Contempo Marin where the landlord wants to triple people’s regardless of what it does to the value of their private property — their trailer home.

Proposition 98 will take away the right of communities to protect themselves from growth that would effect their health and their own property values. Imagine if you couldn’t keep a landowner from polluting if its prevention in any way limited his property value? What if a community had a landowner of a blighted strip mall that was attracting crime? With Proposition 98, communities would no longer have a say in the development of their community.

Proposition 98 is so badly written, it will even effect California’s ability to work on needed public works to keep our water clean and fix the infrastructure we all use.

So, regardless of what you may think of the merits of rent control, you have to be concerned what Prop 98 will do to California’s ability to have enough storage and delivery systems for clean drinking water, have enough schools, prisons, flood control, service roads, and other infrastructure that we are going to need for our growing state. All of these projects benefit business as well as individual citizens.

Howard Jarvis’s organization is betting on low turn out to ram this down our throats. We got to stop them! In the next post, I am going to tell you how how I am going to pitch in and how you can join me to defang, Derail, and Defeat Prop 98. It is just too extreme.

Posted in Contempo Marin, Marin Water, Mark Leno, california politics, elections, environment