Altadena Elections

BLAST! BLAST! BLAST!

Last night many good people were voted off the Altadena Town Council, some who often voted with me, and some who did not. In the main they were replaced by people with deep ties to the "Not For Profit" industry. The NFP's ran some very stealth campaigns that were clearly very well organized. Very unusual for a low controversy year.

Why one asks oneself? One can not come up with an answer that does not indicate in the short term a lot more looking the other way at conflicts of interest, using the Altadena Town Council as a buggy whip for NFP funding, and probably a round of really undesirable Land Use changes. I hope I'm wrong, I hope this will be a Council that will pull together, not for personal or industry profit, but for the general good of the whole Altadena community. We will see, I suppose.

It really doesn't help that the PSN basically doesn't cover the election, nor the Weekly (once a ALTADENA paper!) and that candidates are forbidden through the Altadena Town Council bylaws from saying anything that could be construed as negative except how someone may have voted while sitting as a member, in the past. This prevents, by the construction of the rule, the usual rough and tumble search for the truth that American Elections have always been, also preventing discussions of conflicts of interests, and any real discussion of real issues facing Altadena, such as the growth of Altadena as a hub of not ofr profit funding and the resulting degradation of the quality of educational services and neighborhood quality of life.

The no negative campaigning rule turns the Town Council elections into sloganeering of empty platitudes, and is so tight in its regulation that it deprives the Altadena Citizen of the opprotunity to even know what controversies exist at the ATC level, let alone what candidates differing opinions or interests regarding those issues may be.

Thats a shame, the Altadena Citizens deserve the opprotunity to make informed choices,and as of now neither the Pasadena Star News, The Pasadena Weekly or the Altadena Town Council by laws afford them those opprotunities.