Dear All,
Attached and pasted below are the minutes of LPSF's meeting of August 13, 2011. Thank you so much to Aubrey for doing such an excellent job in producing these minutes in Jawj's absence.
Marcy
Minutes August 13, 2011
Written by Aubrey Freedman (for Jawj Greenwald)
Minutes of the LPSF Meeting of August 13, 2011
Members Present:
Phil Berg, Marcy Berry (Chair), Michael Edelstein, Aubrey Freedman, Ron
Getty (Vice Chair), Les Mangus (Treasurer), and Starchild.
Guest: Jim
Korn
Officers Reports
Chair: No report
Vice Chair: No report
Treasurer: Les Mangus
reported that the LPSF has $6,019.90 in its coffers. The amount has gone up in the last month due
to the donation snafu with PayPal being resolved, at least for the moment.
Secretary: Minutes of
the July meeting were posted online.
Committee Reports
Internet/Social Networking:
No report.
Initiatives/Ballot Measures:
See below.
Membership: No
report.
Outreach: No report.
Political Candidates/Activists’ Report: In response to a request for information from
Professor Elmendorf, a law professor at UC Davis doing research tracking
differences in responses by the same individual/entity when they address
different audiences, Marcy Berry dug far back in the party archives and
provided the professor with the LPSF’s ballot recommendations from 2004
on. Les Mangus wrote a letter to the
editor of the SF Examiner. Aubrey
Freedman worked with Starchild on helping to organize the first event of the SF
Liberty Coalition. Michael Edelstein
worked on phone banking for the Ron Paul campaign. Jim Korn participated in the “slut walk”
event in The City. Phil Berg attended a
Libertarian meeting in Vancouver. Ron
Getty continued his work on Facebook with sending people Libertarian messages
on their birthdays. Ron also was awarded
the Lights of Liberty award for writing letters about liberty issues.
Announcements
Jury Rights Day on September 5, 2011. See FIJA.org (Fully Informed Jury Association)
The next meeting of the LPSF will be at the Glenn Park
Library on September 10, 2011.
The next meet-up of Starchild’s SF Liberty Coalition will be
on Thursday, August 18, 2011 featuring a panel discussion on SF government
committees. Joe Eskenazi from the SF
Weekly will be the guest speaker.
Old Business
SF Liberty Coalition-Starchild is the Organizer and Aubrey
is the Assistant Organizer. Meets on the
3rd Thursday of each month at 50 Mason Social House from 7-9
PM. The first event was held on July 21
featuring candidates for the upcoming election and also proponents and
opponents on the various ballot measures.
Attendance was not as high as anticipated, and not as many candidates as
expected showed up; nevertheless, Starchild and Aubrey were pleased with the
quality of the speakers that did show up.
Jim Korn remarked how well timed the event was—that it ended right on
schedule at 9PM.
Now that school is about ready to start, Marcy will mail out
the packages that Rob Power prepared for the Civics departments in high schools
in the Bay Area. Marcy will use the list
of high schools that she has from another project. Les offered to help Marcy with the mailings.
Donation problem with PayPal. There was some discussion about whether we
can set this up as a business account so that it is not tied to any one
person’s Social Security number. Marcy
said that she would call the IRS to see if she can get a TIN number for the
LPSF.
New Business
Recommendations for the ballot measures in the November 8, 2011
election. Ron Getty gave the background
and his thoughts on each measure. People
asked questions and offered comments,
and then a vote was taken on each measure.
A (School Bonds).
The City is already over $1.5B in long-term debt. The measure requires a thorough audit of how
the money is spent. Instead of selling
bonds to raise money for school repairs, the SFUSD could sell some of their
unused properties and consolidate students/staff/schools to cut expenses
instead of a costly bond measure. The
school district hasn’t even used up all their previous bond money. 6 No votes, 0 Yes votes.
B (Road Repaving & Street Safety Bonds). This measure will need to get a yes vote by
2/3 of the electorate to pass. With
interest and other costs, it could end up costing $350M. It contains a 50% pass-through feature that
will affect renters, and property homeowners will see an additional assessment
on their property tax bills if this passes.
7 No votes, 0 Yes votes.
C (City Retirement & Health Care Benefits-pension
reform by the unions, the Mayor, and the Board of Supervisors). This is an alternate measure to counter D,
the Adachi measure. It is 280 pages long
and will exempt the fireman and police employees from any changes to their
contributions until June of 2015. This
is a “foxes in the henhouse” measure.
This measure will save $300M less than D over 10 years. 7 No votes, 0 Yes votes.
D (Retirement Benefits for City Employees-pension
reform by Jeff Adachi). For those who
earn under $50K/year, this measure will not affect how much they
contribute. It won’t change current
employees’ pension benefits, but it will affect the amount new employees have
to contribute. The employees who earn
the highest salaries will have to pay more into their pensions. Will save The City over $1.6B over the next 10
years. Les made the point that this
measure doesn’t really solve the problem, and The City may get around D (if it
passes) by just increasing the employees’ pay.
5 Yes votes, 1 No vote, and 1 abstaining vote.
E (Amending Initiative Ordinances & Policy
Declaration). This measure will enable
the Board of Supervisors to rescind an initiative after 3 years if it feels the
measure is no longer needed or caused unintended consequences. There was some discussion if this measure
would apply to initiatives approved and passed by the electorate or just
initiatives passed by the Board of Supervisors.
The general consensus was that it would increase the power of the Board
of Supervisors. 7 No votes, 0 Yes votes.
F (Campaign Consultant Disclosures). This measure adds a myriad of rules to
increase openness in campaigning. The
general consensus was that there are already too many complicated rules to
comply with. 7 No votes, 0 Yes votes.
G (Sales Tax).
Half of one percent increase in SF County, depending on what the State
of California ends up doing with its proposal to restore the sales tax increase
that ended on June 30, 2011. We were
running out of time at this point in the meeting, and a measure increasing the
sales tax was deemed not worth wasting time on.
7 No votes, 0 Yes votes.
H (School District Student Assignment System). This measure was designed to give parents an
easier chance to get their children into their neighborhood schools. Consideration to proximity to neighborhood
schools will be given priority status when the school district assigns
students, if the parents request a neighborhood school. 4 No Recommendation votes, 2 Yes votes, 0 No
votes.
Motions Passed:
A motion was passed to approve funds for a paid argument to
be printed in the Voter Information Pamphlet for the November 8, 2011 election.
A motion was passed to approve the argument in favor of
Proposition D, the Jeff Adachi pension reform ballot measure.