Scare tactics, no alternatives
Lance MONTAUK, The Oakland Tribune
Article Last Updated: Sunday, February 22, 2004 - 9:22:05 AM PST

YOUR Alameda County Sample Ballot contains two big spending proposals, each involving about $100 million dollars yearly. One of them appears serious, and the other -- Measure A -- rather anemic.

Regional Measure 2 raises Bay Area Bridge tolls by $1. Whatever your opinion, the 22-page Regional Traffic Relief Plan, printed in your Sample Ballot, is impressive. It demonstrates a diligent effort to compile a complete spending package, and -- even more importantly -- to explain it to the voters from historical, financial, statistical, graphic and geographic perspectives.

In contrast, Measure A itself has four short paragraphs -- less than half a page of text -- to direct spending $100,000,000 yearly. Another two sentences create a powerless Oversight Committee. That's it. No plan how to spend the money, no back-up plan if it fails.

Measure A's proponents threaten us with plague, pestilence, guilty consciences, and trauma victims exsanguinating in the streets -- i.e. total disaster -- if it doesn't pass. But, they have no plan for this looming threat: no 22 pages explaining what services would be cut, which labor contracts renegotiated, which managerial positions eliminated, or which revenue streams explored. Instead, as they will surely claim in their opposing article, we face undefined but unmitigated disaster.

A vast coalition supports Measure A. Tens of thousands of leaflets in three languages, glossy home mailings, billboards, an internet site and salaried political campaigners, all gathered to stampede voters into supporting Measure A. All hopeful that a transient budget problem, compounded by the supervisors' ineptitude, can be transformed into a 15-year tax hike.

Everyone agrees that the Alameda County Board of Supervisors gets a big fat "F" for their financial mismanagement of the last few years. A $215,000,000 tobacco settlement gift, supposedly reserved for health care, vanished two years ago, just when we needed it most. During the good economic years, instead of saving for a rainy day, the supervisors quadrupled county debt, tripled debt per capita and doubled the budget percentage dedicated to debt servicing. The supervisors abandoned governance of Highland Hospital to a spineless citizens' committee, which twiddled its fingers while deficits ballooned. Then -- and now -- the supervisors did nothing, like last week, when Highland's CEO kept hidden his financial plans. Why on God's Earth would anyone want to give these supervisors even more money to waste?

Why? "Because," they say, "otherwise the world will end." That's why there's no 22-page plan in your Sample Ballot outlining our alternatives. If the county supervisors -- or the medical center -- came up with a plan to deal with current deficits, then obviously voters would actually have a choice. And, of course, if we have a choice between real alternatives, that would mean the world is not ending, and Measure A would be defeated. Voila!

Such scare tactics are pure politics at work. The supervisors are ignoring their responsibilities by not producing an alternative plan, in case Measure A fails. Their goal: avoid specifics. Gather a coalition of Measure A beneficiaries, and launch a half-million-dollar campaign to get foolish voters to support it.

Indeed, Alameda County's electorate is foolishly apathetic. Three Board of Supervisor incumbents are running unopposed right now for re-election. This lack of competition has produced our current unhealthy body politic. No wonder that with a lazy public and no viable political opposition, our county's elected leaders blundered into this morass, and no wonder they seek to spend their way out of it.

The Oakland Tribune's Measure A editorial stated that the buck ultimately stops with the supervisors. Then the Tribune suggested (four times!) they get more "involved. The Tribune is wrong -- the buck stops not with the supervisors, but with the voters, and the supervisors won't get more "involved" unless we force them to.

Vote "No" on Measure A, and make the supervisors earn their office.

Lance Montauk is an emergency physician living in Berkeley.