Can we get some more Republicans to place a pro-SANDAG tax resolution on their City Council’s agenda? We really need to do this to get each and every Republican Council member and Mayor on record about this SANDAG tax.
Escondido City Council placed it on the agenda and not one council member voted for the tax. Poway and La Mesa rejected it unanimously as well. It is now fair to say that every Council Member in Escondido, Poway, and La Mesa (as well as two in Vista and one on El Cajon) are NOT tax and spend Republicans –– one could even call them taxpayer champions.
El Cajon and Vista passed it with the support of “tax and spend Republicans” (over the loud objections of Amanda Rigby, John Franklin, and Bob McClellan). Coronado has a vote scheduled in May.
What happens if you are in … say … Santee, though? For argument’s sake, let’s assume that Santee’s SANDAG representative, Jack Dale, intended to vote for the SANDAG tax (I can’t see him doing that but humor me) AND, nobody on the Council put the resolution on the agenda. We would have to assume that those Councilmen either (a) didn’t care about what was being said in their name or (b) were complicit with the SANDAG tax scheme Dale approved.
IF Jack Dale voted for the SANDAG tax (and again, I am just using him as an example, I doubt he would), then every single member of the Santee City Council would be tagged as tax and spend Republicans; we would have no other evidence to prove otherwise.
If you’re Randy Voepel, it doesn’t matter; you are going to be elected to the Assembly so you don’t care about your tax record. If you’re Ronn Hall, you are in a safe seat until 2018 — your challenger will call you a tax and spend Republican but you can probably survive the attack because it’s old.
Gosh, if you’re running for office in November, you might be in a pickle. I’d want to be on record about the SANDAG tax. If my opponent supported Dale’s approval (once again, I can’t see Jack Dale voting for a new tax), I would be printing up the campaign mailers calling him a “tax and spend Republican”. I would be reminding the Republican Party of San Diego County that my opponent ignored the party’s long standing “no new taxes” pledge despite the specific clarification from the Chairman. I would call every taxpayer advocacy group in the County and ask them to point out that I was the candidate who was a taxpayer champion … like the Republicans in Escondido, Poway, and La Mesa are. I would ask them to call my opponent a “tax and spend Republican”.
This is one of those rare times in politics where the moral and the practical actually intersect. Why wouldn’t every Republican in the County want to go on record of being a taxpayer champion?
I used the Santee example because that’s one of the last bastions of fiscal conservatism in the County — it ain’t gonna happen in Santee. Jack Dale won’t vote for this SANDAG tax and, if he considered an approval, Mayor Voepel would remove him before he could vote. If they put a resolution on the agenda, it would be shot down FASTER than they rejected it on the Escondido Council. The members of the Santee Council are taxpayer champions.
…at least, I THINK they are (gulp)
It would be nice to see a resolution on the Santee Council agenda, though — we could use another unanimous rejection of the SANDAG tax scheme.