ENDORSEMENT SPECIAL: Avoid R, and the Rest of the Story
Sometimes you can’t tell the players without a scorecard. You probably wouldn’t know what’s wrong with Berkeley’s proposed Measure R if you didn’t recognize the names of those who signed the rebuttal to the ballot argument which pushed it.
No one who has been watching Berkeley politics as long as I have would ever have expected to see Shirley Dean, Dave Blake, Nancy Carleton and Jacquelyn McCormick singing the same tune in perfect harmony. Dean was a stalwart standard bearer of Berkeley’s moderate faction, while Blake and Carleton have always been outspoken progressives. What links them all together is that they genuinely care about what happens to Berkeley, even though they’ve seldom agreed on what the prescription should be.
The ballot question is couched in deliberately vague language, but in plain English what it does is transfer the power to draw council district boundaries from citizens to elected incumbents: in other words, it facilitates gerrymandering by self-interested parties. California just took this power away from the politicians and put it in the hands of a commission which was not only non-partisan, but more important, not politicians, and that’s what we need in Berkeley too.
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