municipal elections, spring 2003

yes, we're coming up on another election day. just municipal races—city council, board of education, and the community college district.

i'm in the 4th district for the council, and the two candidates are tom labonge (the incumbent) and derek milosavljevic. while derek gets some pretty serious bonus points for having a weblog, it's too bad he was so worked up about getting the city council to pass a beyond-pointless resolution about war in iraq (which labonge then voted for, something i was willing to look seriously at another candidate because of—not because of how he voted, but that he didn't stand on his chair and scream at everyone for wasting time on it). it's a shame he doesn't have any sort of explanation of who he is on his site. one might read "film executive/producer", look here, and think "oh, ben affleck's stand-in." i hope his enthusiasm for politics continues, but i can't see a reason to vote for him over labonge this time.

i've been getting positively inundated with mailers for the board of education race in my district between caprice young and jon m. lauritzen. as far as i can recall, all of them have been attacking caprice young, usually for authorizing an expensive bathroom in her office. caprice young wins my vote by proposing to split up lausd, which is just obviously way too damn big to be effective.

and then there's the community college district. four races, twelve candidates, and i can't work up the motivation to bother with any of it. people who think putting more positions up for election will result in some sort of improvement in responsibility to voters are just so misguided. you just end up with candidates elected purely based on some sort of name recognition or what union/church/newspaper/other-organization backs them.

a small little election. you might not even know it was coming up, if all you did was read blogs.