Alachua Voter Guide

It has reached my ears that there is some work going on to get together a petition drive that would put Gainesville City elections on the same November schedule as all other elections. This would mean that there would no longer be an annual election, and it means that the terms of the commissioners would have to be altered from 3 year terms to either 2 or 4 year terms.

For years I have opposed this because I thought that conservatives would eventually get smart enough to exploit the criminally low turnout and start voting in enough numbers to take over the city. I no longer have this sort of confidence. Therefore, it is time to roll the dice and change the landscape! apparently, we have nothing to lose. Stay tuned for more details.

I have placed a poll in the sidebar for a little while, so please weigh in!

This is nothing for our city to be proud of. This is what the turnout for this past runoff election looks like.

Please, never tell me that conservatives are “outnumbered” in this town. Only people who CARE are outnumbered!

All are invited to Leonardo’s 706 (at 706 West University Avenue in District 1) for a “Final Nail in the Biomass Rate Hike Coffin Campaign Fund Raiser” from at 6 p.m. – 8 p.m. on Monday, January 23. It is my only fundraiser of the election. The purpose is to raise funds to ensure voters in District 1 have vital information about the GRU-GREC biomass deal.  It will have an additional purpose of helping fund further communication of information to At Large 1 voters.

We hope to see you there!

This press release in Marketwatch:

 GREENWICH, Conn., Jan. 17, 2012 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ — An investment affiliate of Starwood Energy Group Global, LLC (“Starwood Energy”), an energy infrastructure investment firm, has acquired a partial ownership interest in the Gainesville Renewable Energy Center (“GREC”) from Tyr Energy, Inc. GREC is a 100 MW biomass power plant currently under construction in Gainesville, Florida. The acquisition was signed and closed on December 30, 2011. Read more

If you read the rest, where it gets all rosy and fuzzy about how wonderful the plant is for Gainesville, remember that this is a PRESS RELEASE It is not news in the sense that an investigative report is. But I have to wonder why, on the last day of 2011, Tyr Energy decided to get out of such a wonderful deal. The plant is in the middle of construction and has not burned the first twig, and these guys, presumably, took a profit. And the buyer, Starwood Energy, thinks this is an even better deal than it was when it was still a heavily redacted contract that the public knew nothing about.

Where are all these fabulous profits coming from? The public! I guess that’s why it’s a Public Utility: it burns ratepayers.

Today I heard Debbie Martinez making the exact same statement on 99.5 FM during Talk of the Town (noon to 1pm weekdays).

To be fair, every candidate in the at-large race except one, former commissioner Lauren Poe, is against the biomass plant. This is what happens when the city tries to hustle this plan past the people they are supposed to represent.

So, are they mistaken, or did they lie? Considering that the city commission stupidly let GREC remove our escape clause from the contract, it is not hard to imagine this sort of gross incompetence from other parts of our city government. But I am going with “they lied.”

Ray Washington…you are the
Best district 1 candidate
Out there and I’m glad you’re running… I would
Vote for you if I lived
In district 1…thank
You for looking out for
The ratepayers and taxpayers.

People in the City of Gainesville will be voting on city commissioners about the same time they are caving in on their New Years’ Resolutions. Due to the accelerated pace of the Presidential Primaries, and its effect on our city elections, we will be choosing an At-large City Commissioner and a District 1 City Commissioner on January 31.

Well, realistically, the District 1 race will likely be settled, since there are only two candidates so far. But the At-large race has seven challengers for the open seat, which means that an actual victory will most likely occur during the February 28th runoff. Although the January 31 election will be well attended because it will coincide with a hotly contested Republican Presidential Primary, the runoff will be the typical step-child of elections that garners a 14% turnout if we are lucky.

Speaking of accelerated schedules, qualifying for candidates will be closed on November 18 at noon. At that time, they will either all have their fees in and paperwork done, or one or two will decide to bail out and help one of the others. It will be just 6 days before Thanksgiving, people will be consumed by the holiday season and football, and it will be hell to raise money for a campaign.

Of course, looking on the bright side, maybe everyone is too broke to celebrate the holidays, and they will actually start looking at local issues, and care about their city government. Perhaps they will insist on some belt-tightening and tax relief. But they will have to insist on it. They will have to CARE, and look critically at City Hall, and elect REFORMERS. Enough of the party of the status quo: the bus-buying, tree-burning, rate raising, road-narrowing planner class. They will have to show up on Election Day, KNOW what they are doing, and VOTE for new blood. If they don’t, the planner class and the other spendthrift geniuses who are just greasy little cogs in the overfed government machine, will coast to victory with one of those 10-12% turnout Apathy Festivals we call elections around here.

Good luck, Gainesville.

When I started this site back in 2004, my intention was to give candidates a place where they could get their message out for free. I had run for County Commission in 2002, and was still smarting from the terrible job the Gainesville Sun had done in covering the election.

I found out that if you were misquoted, no matter how egregiously, they did not feel obligated to print a correction. My campaign had a web site, but back then nobody really went to candidate web sites because so few had them. So only a few people got to read my reaction to the mistake that was sent to 60,000 readers of the Sun.

When I started this site (originally called Freeforallcandidates.com), I thought that people who ran for public office on the small local stage would leap at the opportunity to take control of their information by using this free service. What I discovered was that almost all of them control their information by letting out very little of it.

In the absence of candidate-generated-content, I started going to the forums and doing a little reporting, as well as recording some of the highlights and putting them on the web. This gave people more information than they usually got from the Sun, which was usually pretty scant, and never mentioned anything exciting that actually happened. But at least the voters would periodically write me to express their gratitude that there was one convenient place to find candidate information.

Today, the Gainesville Sun is worse than ever at covering local issues…unless they are cheerleading the city commissioners who are all a part of the local Democrat Machine. Their masthead should identify them as the official propaganda tool of the local party and be done with it. I cannot recall the last time I saw an actual investigative report in the Sun.

Fortunately, there are other channels for local information. There is a local talk show called Talk of the Town on 99.5 FM that has been showcasing the best investigative reporting this area has probably ever heard. Former County Commission candidate Ward Scott has been exposing the Machine politicians on the county commission by going through all their audio files and finding serious violations of Florida’s Sunshine Law and playing them over the air. Talk of the Town has been doing this for months, and there is not a peep about it in the Sun. People are calling in and wanting to know what they can do, and the hosts of the show have been urging listeners to call the State Attorney and complain and to urge him to take action.

What I want to know is: will the Sun finally report this when commissioners are doing the “perp walk” with their lawyers on TV20?

If you would like to hear these audio files yourself, you should listen to the show at noon each weekday. Or, since they do actually talk about other things, you can go to the local Republican Party Website and see “The Ward Scott Fraud Files” and listen to them there.

It is a scandal that our local “professional” journalists do not report on this  story, and that Ward Scott, a private citizen, has to do this himself. And it’s a further scandal that other government officials have to be begged to do something about it!