Measure G election March 3rd, 2020 in Redlands California

These are notes, thoughts, and observations about a local measure in the election in Redlands, CA where I reside.  So it's relevant locally, and only a curiosity to everywhere else.

I'm voting NO.  I recommend you do the same if you like the architectural charm and history of Redlands, and like what's left of its small-town feel. 

As someone said in earlier commentary, follow the money.  Then think just a little bit.  The reason the new train route is being built is in part for the purposes of ESRI.  Employees can commute in, and some residents can commute out. The train will have some good consequences, and some bad. More customers for Redlands businesses will come in, at least in theory. Also, it will bring some undesirables that most Redlanders would not want here. 

But the train will stand or fall on its own, economically.  If the people behind the train are depending on the building of crackerbox towers and an "urban feel", aka "stack and pack", for riders, as a long-time Redlands resident I hope they are severely disappointed. 

Is ESRI behind the push for Measure G? Several inputs suggest they are highly in favor of Measure G.  ESRI is expanding at a rapid rate, which on balance is great for Redlands.  But Redlands should be careful.  I watched in Bellevue and Redmond WA through the 1990s and early 2000s, as Microsoft expanded from its initial "intended" campus to multiple campuses. Traffic, electrical and other utilities, taxes, building codes and even freeway offramps all had to be considered and changed to accommodate the company as it grew from 5,000 to 50,000 people going to work daily. Effects on quality of life were negative, almost everybody agreed, even if financial effects were positive.  

If I were advising ESRI, I'd advocate multiple campuses, or "sub-headquarters".  Site diversity is good!  This is countered by most company's natural desire to have everybody together, and enjoy both real and imagined efficiencies. But if there is a bomb scare, a flood, a power outage (I experienced a case where someone forgot to maintain the backup generators! We all were sent home.), a fire, a riot, an earthquake, a terrorist act, or anything else, the benefit of having multiple "HQ-capable" sites becomes apparent. If Redlands is landlocked, as some say, go to other lands.  North San Bernardino, by Cal State SB? Closer to the main train station; great freeway access (a negative would be a location essentially on the San Andreas fault).  Moreno Valley/east Riverside? Freeways; land; housing; shopping.  Menifee? Temecula? Housing and freeway access; potential employees, ex of Orange County.

A friend argued that Redlands is land-locked.  Therefore, the argument went, Measure G is needed to increase Redlands' tax revenue.  Redlands doesn't need more tax revenue, in my opinion, as much as it needs to spend what it has better, on some more basic things.  The new city manager's emphasis on street repair is good, even if it's inconvenient at times now.

We pay high property taxes in California in general, and in Redlands in particular. Over the years I've watched as we voters have voted to pay for more and more stuff. The slow creep upward has not been fun to watch. At these heights, we should expect a sparkling, homeless-free, safe, well kept city with great infrastructure, with great education for our kids.  The argument that the crackerbox towers will expand the tax base without expanding the city's cost structure sounds like a fantasy to me. Read the City Attorney's Measure G analysis where the developers get a sweetheart clause that no longer requires them to pay the normal fees supporting infrastructure for their developments.  

The argument that Measure G will enable the Redlands Mall property to be re-developed, and that defeating Measure G will prevent that, is a lie. It is further an insult to people's intelligence. If an extra story or
two is needed for the mall to pencil financially for a developer, get a code variance on that specific property.  If a law prevents a code variance, we can vote on a law for that property. But "Transit Villages"? Train stations? Sustainability? Housing policy? Dreams of an "urban feel"?  None of that is relevant to the mall. 

The land that the Redlands Mall improvements (the actual mall building) sits on is owned by the owner of the mall.  Nothing unusual there.  But the parking lot land, which surrounds the mall building, is owned by the City of Redlands.  And that is a problem for developers who consider re-developing the mall.  If this is still true, and if we in Redlands want the mall re-developed, Redlands should quit-claim deed the surrounding parking lot to the mall's re-developer, and negotiate a tax deal in return.  Or something of that type. ( I just learned from a City Council member that the improvements and surrounding parking has been consolidated under single ownership.  This is good.)

It seems that CVS likes its location and has a lease in the mall building.  But they can't be made to move?  I'm sure the right terms in a new building would convince them to move.  They're a business, unlike the legendary or proverbial last homeowner in an eminent domain case!

Now for some arithmetic.  When my family moved here in 1963, Redlands population was around 40,000.  I even remember the number 36,000.  I read that our population had reached around 70,000.  Redlands feels full.  We shouldn't go north of there.  But what do the numbers in Measure G indicate?  My guess would be that Redlands could grow to 100,000. Here's how.

First let's find the theoretical maximum of new residents within the Measure G area.

The Measure G "Transit Village" area is over 780 acres.  The measure says the residential unit density can go up to 27 per acre. Using an average of 2.03 residents per household, Redlands could add over 21,000.  (2.03 x 27 units x 780 acres) / 2 = 2c,375. We divide by 2 because not all of the acres would have any such density. So if you add population growth outside the "transit villages" area to the 21,300 inside, you see a Redlands with a population over 100,000.  I don't want that. Do you?   

Reading the "WHEREAS" clauses of the Measure G text indicates the mindset of the authors.  It's certainly not about preserving the unique architectural heritage and experience of Redlands.  It seems to be about inflicting an urban high-density dream on Redlands to achieve some notion of environmentalist and "cosmopolitan" buzzwords to make the authors feel better. 

It won't work.  It has no chance.  And people who value classic Redlands won't be happy.  The developers of the "transit villages" will profit, and return to their yachts in Newport Beach and Marina Del Ray. 

If a group wants to develop a cosmopolitan/urban "transit village" utopia, they should buy land in the desert and start from scratch with a completely new design.  Osaka, Japan, for example, has concentric subway belts around the city center, on which one can get from most places to most other places in the city.

I close with a cautionary tale from personal experience. Across Lake Washington from Seattle is Bellevue. It had a small-town charm in ways somewhat like Redlands.  Some people in the region can still remember when the upscale mall at the center of town was a raspberry farm.  In the late 1990's Bellevue decided that it wanted a more "urban feel" like Seattle.  They changed the orientation of the downtown parking places to parallel so they could stuff more lanes on the roads, and put meters on all of them.  Bellevue's downtown is now a forest of towers.  People who moved to Bellevue to get away from Seattle's problems have taken their money and moved again.  This began long before Seattle suffered from its problems with homelessness.

If you've read this far that's great.  Thank you.  Here are my final high-level impressions:

• Redlands is deciding whether it wants an "urban feel" or wants to remain what it is: a unique, upscale suburb. 
• Mayor Foster and most of the City Council cautions voters about a future threat of dictates from Sacramento ruining our city with ham-handed housing units building requirements.  
• I haven't heard the Redlands is making any effort to fight the State's over-reach into municipal affairs that supposedly makes it prudent to adopt Measure G. California cities like Redlands, Claremont, Woodland (a suburb of Sacramento) and many others should band together and tie up the Sacramento nonsense in court.  All of these cities have historic architecture and a suburban feel that is to be treasured.  
• The City Council is basically asking us to trust them to exercise restraint and good judgement, after we vote away hard-won restrictions on over-building.  As a side note, this is the same group that brought us Redlands Mall in the first place.  The Mall replaced the beautiful (and very solid!) La Posada hotel and shops complex.  
• Even if one was in favor of some increased residential and commercial development downtown, Measure G reads as a gross over-reach of anything that makes sense for Redlands.  For example, go to the intersection of Alabama and Park, and take a good look at the 2-story concrete tilt-up light industrial park being built.  Now multiply the height by 3.  Six stories?  Really?  Good for Redlands?  No on G!  The gross over-reach means the City should go back to drawing board and do it again, if anything is to be changed from existing law.  
• The City Council has been working on this awhile.  The City let an RFP for an "urban feel" city plan in 2017.  An architectural firm out of Pasadena was hired whose website says they are "Architects and Urbanists". What's that?  Why would we want to pay to import big-city problems to Redlands? No on G! 

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source for 2.03 avg persons per household, by income.
https://censusreporter.org/profiles/04000US06-california/

Todd Akin, Republicans and Winning Elections

The Two Personalities of the Republican Party

The Todd Akin brouhaha brings into focus something I've thought about the Republican party for a long time. The Republican party is a mash-up of economic thought and socio-religious thought.

As you read this, recall those circular drawings you saw way back in about forth grade. You were studying the intersection of sets. There is the set of economic conservatives who vote Republican. And there is the set of social conservatives who vote Republican. The Republicans seem to assume at times that their voters are at the intersection of those sets. I don't assume that, and as I listen to peoples' commentary I suspect that most are outside the intersection of these sets.

That is, they vote Republican for economic reasons *or* because they are socially conservative. Often I think the social conservatives don't care about economic issues and the economically-minded or free-market voters stay Republican in spite of the socially conservative platform planks.

I worry about the limiting effect of the intersection of those sets. As I survey the American scene it appears to me that the set of social conservatives is shrinking. They may be hard-core and vocal, but small in numbers. And the rise of Hispanic voters may render them less important than otherwise.

What about those who are economically conservative and socially liberal, such as myself? We are sometimes called Libertarians. The only catch with voting Libertarian is that they don't have the juice to win - and a vote Libertarian is basically a split from a Republican candidate or issue that might win. 

Into all of this comes Todd Akin

The Republican assumption seems to be that it must have hard-core religious social conservatives in the tent (with Todd Akin suddenly excepted). I don't agree - instead, the whole fiasco is just another exhibit illustrating the wisdom of separating religion and state. I could mention Islam at this point, but I won't.

George W. Bush's strategy was brilliant at the time, I thought. He said a lot of nice things to keep social conservatives in the tent, but did very little in terms of trying to change policy. I liked it that way.

I believe that in America today, and given the ways it is trending, the closer Republicans move to a Libertarian-style platform the better they will do. That's because hard-core church attendance and socially conservative believers are declining in numbers. And young people who are not constrained by any such belief systems are increasing in numbers. And those same young people can no longer assume affluence will be theirs in middle age. They  hear the constant drumbeat in the media about the economy. Some of them will give economics systematic study, and come around to free-market thinking.

I'd celebrate if the entire abortion plank were dropped from the platform. To wit, if Todd Akin does not want an abortion, he does not have to get one. :-)

In my personal experience I've seen that a woman does not get an abortion lightly. That's even if that woman fights vehemently for the right for women to have them. It seems the right to have them is important, but theoretical, before a woman is pregnant. But when the fetus is hers, a lot of feelings, hormones, religious beliefs, fears, medical risks and facts, social concerns, and advice from loved ones suddenly come into her equation. And that's probably how it should be.

What's the latest in the world of taxes?

California wanted to cover it's deficit in part with the 1A-1E propositions. The Obama administration wants to cover its universal healthcare project in part with the Cap and Tax (Cap and Trade; sorry!) legislation. And some in Congress are looking at paying for everything else in part with a new national sales tax.

Well, Rahm and Barack didn't waste their crisis, of that we can be sure. Please bear with me while I write only a semi-serious post because I don't have time now for a serious one. All of the scary ideas shown above are for real though. I've seen and heard them from multiple sources in the news.

Now, recall Amy Winehouse' song "Rehab" and its "No, No, No!" refrain. Or if you'd rather, Aflac's commercial in which the goat is eating the paper and saying "Naw, Naw, Naw!". Take your pick of those, but either way, that's what we TEA partiers and the rest of us in the electorate should be saying to new taxes.

Imagine a curve on a graph that rises and then falls somewhat like a bell curve. The X axis shows the amount of taxing and spending, and the Y axis is the number of votes for the pols in question. If this much taxing and spending hasn't bought all the votes they're gonna get, then no additional amount will do it. It's hit a point of diminishing returns. The TEA parties are a first loud manifestation of this. Eventually it will get loud enough that even the dumbest, deafest pol will hear it.

The key test is whether this will occur before or after permanent damage has been done to the American economy, civic environment and way of life.

Oh, and a VAT (Valua Added Tax) such as used in Europe is a somewhat slicker and slier alternative to a new national sales tax. In fact, many economic theorists I've respected over the years have preferred a VAT to both a sales or an income tax. But the question was asked on aTV news show today, "So, could either of the those replace the income tax"? The answer was a resounding "No, it would of course be in *addition* to the our income tax"!

California Election - What Happened?

California had its election Tuesday May 19th and we've all had a couple of days to digest the results. 1A through 1E failed by hefty margins and 1F passed. 1F is the pay cap for pols in deficit years. My interpretation is that the electorate is angry and just said "No!" to everything in sight but the pay caps. That's a good start. We, the California electorate, should have gotten angry and stayed angrier a long time ago.

Remember Arnold Schwarzennegger's mandate when he won the recall election? It was intended to be a turn toward fiscal responsibility and to cure the ills amplified by the previous governor, Grey Davis. It didn't quite work out that way.

The tax-and-spend liberal machine that owns Sacramento has fought Arnold to a draw and stalemate, at least. Or possibly the machine has won and is rumbling its way over the financial cliff. It's possible that history will show that California was "GM'ed" by the public worker's unions starting a long time ago. I read somewhere that there was a union voting disaster facilitated by Jerry Brown while he was governor. That's going back a long way indeed. But its effects are ongoing. And we should remember that Jerry Brown still lurks in Sacramento as Attorney General, possibly positioning himself for larger office and opportunity.

Lastly I want to call attention to Proposition 1A. It seemed to be an effort to reduce the "pro-cyclicality" of California's spending. That sounded good, until I got to the massive tax hike part. If we in California thought on a more Chinese-style long-term timeframe, 1A might have been written differently.

Calornia Propositions A-F election today, cont.

As a first follow-up, here's some quick arithmetic. The result is that Proposition 1A wants everyone in California to pay an additional $422 a year, on average.

Here's the breakdown. Proposition 1A's summary/analysis says that state tax revenues would rise by about $16billion a year through the 2012-13 year. So let's look at that number as 16,000,000,000. Wolframalpha.com says that California's population was 36.46 million in 2006, and increases by about 1.267% a year. So we'll take 36,460,000 and multiply by 1.01267 three times to compound to 2009. We get 37.86million, with a little rounding. Or we can write it 37,860,000. We'll cancel out three zeros from each number and divide. 16,000,000 / 37,860 = 422.61.

I think I know how I want to vote. That kind of marginal tax increase is very contractionary, as in the opposite of stimulative. And in California it's about wealth creation and getting the economy going again. Or rather, it should be.

Calornia Propositions A-F election today

Well, today is our election in California. The date got here fast and I haven't done my research into these propositions. The usual newsprint pamphlet containing the legislative analyses is missing from our house. Either we've misplaced it or we never got it.

I noticed a huge lack of URLs for information about the propositions. The single paragraph blurbs on the ballot don't mean anything. The basically explain nothing about the proposition, except the subject from the 60,000-foot level. And especially in this election, I don't believe what I've heard and seen in the political print ads and on TV. The ads are so slanted that they don't really make sense to me. The marketing program for these propositions basically "stink to high heaven"!

If you want to research these, here are some links.
http://www.voterguide.sos.ca.gov/pdf-guide/props/prop1a-analysis.pdf
http://www.voterguide.sos.ca.gov/pdf-guide/props/prop1b-analysis.pdf
http://www.voterguide.sos.ca.gov/pdf-guide/props/prop1c-analysis.pdf
http://www.voterguide.sos.ca.gov/pdf-guide/props/prop1d-anaysis.pdf
http://www.voterguide.sos.ca.gov/pdf-guide/props/prop1e-analysis.pdf
http://www.voterguide.sos.ca.gov/pdf-guide/props/prop1f-analysis.pdf
Gotta love the one for 1D. I don't know how much stock I should put in an analysis when they can't spell the word.
For other info and .htm presentations of the information, go to http://california.gov/ and search with "proposition 1x legislative analysis", where x is the prop of your choice.

Over the course of the last month, I've noticed that any economic analyst I've considered intelligent has recommended "no" votes on all of these propositions. I'll probably vote "no" myself.

Having said that, are California's political process and budget processes broken? Certainly. They are also wildly pro-cyclical, where spending goes up during good economic times, followed by budget crunches during bad times. This was true since before the defense-related recession in California in the late 80's, the Silicon Valley / dot-com boom-and-bust of the 90's and early 2000's, and so on. So the processes certainly need to be changed. As an aside, the "rainy-day fund", known in the analyses as the "BSF" seems designed to smooth the cyclicality to the upside, with more taxes, instead of forbearance of possible spending during good times!

One glaring, flashing omission from these proposals is discussion spending cuts. There's a lot of rearranging of deck chairs and debt, shall we say, and some sizable tax increases. There is discussion around protecting certain "sacred cow" spending areas. But the whole thing seems built around the idea of "Don't look at the spending behind the curtain!"

Talk with you soon. I'm off to study and Vote!

Congratulations on Election Victory

It's Thursday and I'm pretty much done crying in my beer about Barack Obama and his team winning the election. I congratulate Mr. Obama and his campaign people. It's clear they ran an effective and organized campaign. If they are as smart in running the executive branch and dealing with the Congress everything will be OK. And that's even from a markets and Capitalism point of view.

It seems to me the election winners would have been the same even if none of the rumored irregularities around the edges with with ACORN and anonymous illegal campaign contributions turn out to be true. But we will only know about this in time, after the research is done, any court cases are settled, and the books come out chronicling the campaigns.

We will also see how deep runs the international affection for President-Elect Obama. He gets his first Presidential level security briefing today. I said to someone before the election that getting that first briefing would probably be an opinion-changing experience for most people. I'll be watching for any changes in what President-Elect Obama has to say about the international scene.