Tony Kranz responds on ballot argument honesty question

This is solely the opinion of Council Member Tony Kranz, not speaking for anyone else on the council:

My friend K.C. threw up a post on this weblog the other day that did what any blogger wants their writing to do: generate comments (173 so far, a record on his blog says W.C.). The title of the post was Scariest Prop A Thinking and went on, in many words, to express his opinion about what the council wrote in the arguments against Proposition A, and comments I had made on this blog. He ascribes motives to the council that I disagree with and feel pretty sure the rest of the council does as well.

So what was it that scared him so? One thing he wrote had to do with this comment I made in reply to a direct question from an anonymous commenter about the council's argument against Prop A:

Prop A defines any upzoning as a major change, but the definition before was essentially this: if you couldn't get 4 out of 5 votes from the city council, it was major.

This doesn't seem that scary to me. I would call it the representative democracy definition of whether up-zoning was "major" or not, since it was left to our elected representatives to consider the political impact of approving a land-use plan, as well as the community impact. In fact, this was true whether there was up-zoning on a project or not.

And it turns out that the thinking in the early 1990's was similar to what I wrote on the blog. Way back around the time former County Supervisor, Mayor and Council Member Pam Slater-Price voted to add the 4/5ths exception to our General Plan by amendment, the same logic was used in the City Council Staff Report for the meeting of 9/25/91. Here's an excerpt:

Based on testimony at the [Planning] commission hearing, the following options can also be considered:

e) Instead of specifically-defined exemptions, give the Planning Commission and Council disoretionary authority to determlne when items are exempt from voter-approval. All items would be subject to voter approval except when the commission and council determine an item is exempt. This option removes the difficulty of trying to specifically define "minor" changes; it also creates undefined discretion. Variation: define at least some of the circumstances or criteria under which Commission and Council would have discretion to exempt.

As mentioned, the council back then ultimately added the 4/5ths exception, which—in another display of representative democracy—the current council unanimously voted to remove, making direct democracy the final step in ALL future major land-use decisions.

However, Prop A isn't only about the right to vote. It also includes provisions that would cause existing specific plans to be amended and, in my opinion, that is not a good way to govern. These "secondary" amendments could easily have been avoided, as they were in the initiative that passed in Escondido, by specifying that the provisions of the initiative would only apply to future land-use planning documents.

Kevin also calls aspects of the city council arguments against Prop A scary. His opinion is that we used "weasel" words, and suggested that we should have written our arguments using language that fit the context of Prop A. Needless to say, I disagree. We wrote our arguments as a group, in open council sessions, doing our best to honestly describe what we thought were important points to make. But as E.B. White said, "The best writing is rewriting." In our case though, any rewriting would have required another meeting to re-agendize the subject, deliberate and hold another vote. The calendar didn't allow for that.

Now the calendar shows we're a day away from the special election which will decide Prop A. California's tradition of direct democracy will have made its mark on our community. Regardless of the outcome, we'll have a lot of work to do in order to move our city forward.

WCV comment: We thank Tony for continuing the dialogue with the public, and we wish other council members were as open to publicly discussing the initiative as Tony has been. However, we don't think this explanation changes the fact that, by any objective measure, the council lied to the public in its unanimous ballot argument against Prop A. The council stated,

THERE NEVER WERE, AND WILL NOT BE, APPROVED PLANS FOR 5-STORY BUILDINGS IN ENCINITAS. Major land use changes HAVE ALWAYS happened with a vote of the people and the Council is committed to codifying this practice.

In fact, large sections of the downtown 101 area were increased  from two stories to three stories without a public vote. To argue that these changes were not "major" strains credulity. Apparently, no council until now, including the council that allowed the changes, has tried to make the claim that those changes weren't "major." In fact, as the Staff Report quote above shows, the earlier council specifically chose not to define "major" or "minor" but to give themselves the 4/5 vote exemption regardless of how "major" a change.

The current council's ballot argument looks like they were more interested in making a strong argument to persuade uninformed voters than in telling the truth.