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.
Hi, This is Richard Selwach,
Candidate for Gainesville City Comm
At Large 1. My website is www.voteselwach.com
My priorities if elected are
To stop the biomass plant, clean city/safe city, government in the sunshine and fiscal responsibility…please visit my website for more info or to contact me.
Qualifying ended last Friday, and now the City Commission races are set for January 31. In the District 1 contest Ray Washington got in at the last minute. He joins Armando Grundy and Yvonne Hinson-Rawls in what could end up in a runoff. I look forward to all three candidates posting here and telling us why District 1 voters should pick him or her.
The At-large race saw Harold Save get out and serial candidate Richard Selwach and newcomer Mark Venzke get in. This is Selwach’s 6th attempt at a city seat. The rest are: Dejeon Cain, James Ingle, Donna Lutz, Darlene Pifalo, Lauren Poe and Nathan Skop.
Right now I am sending out the invitations to each one of these candidates to log in and tell us about themselves. Last January, this site saw 16,000 visits and over 37,000 pageviews. We hope they are willing to avail themselves of so great an audience!
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.
It is not too late to get involved in the Biomass fight. Check out this letter former Mayor Tom Bussing wrote for recent publication in the Sun…
Commissioner Mastrodicasa’s essay in the Sun demonstrates that
she is keeping herself completely out of touch on the BioMess Scandal.
She just doesn’t get it. She still thinks everyone is in love with this
impending disaster.
We sure hope she’s wrong. Now is the time to step up and let her know.
[email: mastrodij@cityofgainesville.
Mastrodicasa, like all of the other city commissioners, disregards the
massive pollution that will impact vulnerable populations, and that the
diesel fume from 100,000 truck trips is bad for people.
So critical discussion must center on other troubling aspects of the project.
Fair enough. Let’s get right to the facts.
First, the usual tired claim that 35 meetings have “aired out” this project
is simply a lie.
In truth, those meetings were a lead-in for the Commissioners’ first choice,
a giant new coal plant that we did not need.
At the last minute, they instead decided to give us a BioMess that we do
not need. It went downhill from there.
These are the Legal Facts:
When Mastrodicasa speaks of blanket approvals from all of these proceedings, she
ignores the fact that the Authorities (bureaucratically) declined to look into the finances.
Now citizen litigants have pried the cover off of the Secret Contract.
We have new information to share with the public, information that the Commissioners
wouldn’t share.
We are starting to expose the financial facts, for the first time.
We are bringing this HOME to the City Commission
(as the Florida PSC suggested ).
You can help.
Let your voice be heard.
Too big to ignore
This blog has always been committed to local candidates and letting them get their message out for free. I have kept this space free of Senatorial and Gubernatorial and Presidential candidates because I felt like they got plenty of coverage already. But after going through two of my own campaigns in the last two years, I have had to come to terms with the fact that local politicians are a big part of our national problems because they promise to get grants for us so our buses will be “free”. This was particularly highlighted when newly elected Governor Rick Scott turned down “free” Obama stimulus money to build a bullet train because he said we could not afford to run it.
Indeed, government spending and government debt issues are quite divisive. Many Americans are concerned while others think we can ignore it and just keep printing the money. That is pretty much the divide, whether you understand it or not.
We have all lived with government debt all of our lives. Politicians keep telling us it is manageable and that it is like any one of our credit cards. And that’s a great way to make the sale, because most Americans are deep in debt and feel uneasy and hypocritical about demanding that the government be more responsible than they are themselves. So, when the light begins to dawn, and you realize how dangerously high the debt has become, and you dare to SAY SOMETHING ABOUT IT, you get called a lot of nasty names by your neighbors and coworkers. They will avoid the real issue at all costs by calling you a racist, a hater, a homophobe, an imbecile and an inbred redneck. Then, if you organize and begin to protest, you will be called a TERRORIST, and a threat to all that is good and holy.
So, if you care about the growth of government and government spending, you had better pay attention to your local elections. And the first one will be the Gainesville City elections in January. Yes, it should coincide with the primary date, which means more people will be showing up at the polls than usual. For those of you who haven’t been paying attention, city elections usually garner a whopping 12% turnout; sometimes more, sometimes less. But, due to the Republican Presidential Primary, there should be a LOT more Republicans voting than usual, and some of those people (certainly not all) will be avidly looking to punish big spenders. Unfortunately, there will be no incumbents to fire, so voters will have to actually do some homework. I hope you will continue to follow this blog as that time draws near.
Six months out from the next Gainesville City Commission election, and we already have four candidates for the at-large race. And they have all filed in the past week or so. There are also two names filed for the District 1 contest.
In District 1 we have Yvonne Hinson-Rawls, a sub-committee chair on the Alachua County Democrat Executive Committee, versus Armando Grundy, who most recently served on the county’s Charter Review Commission. This District represents East Gainesville and has been most recently served by Chuck Chestnut, followed by Sherwin Henry. Both men ran unopposed for their second term, and were then term-limited out of office.
In the at-large race, which represents the entire City of Gainesville, we have Darlene Pifalo, a Realtor with a history of serving on state and local boards to promote affordable housing; Donna Lutz, another Realtor I know little about; James Ingle, recent candidate for the District 2 seat on the commission who had union support; and Lauren Poe, who just got voted off the City Commission by Todd Chase.
Gainesville City Commission races are notoriously sleepy affairs with very, very low voter turnout. There will be the predictable but meaningless bellyaching about how these elections should be held in November instead of March, BUT THIS IS JUST HOW IT IS! It is so easy to vote now, we have no excuse.
That said, unless there is an epic revival of citizenship, Hinson-Rawls will defeat Grundy. She is the approved Democrat being run by the machine. Although Grundy is also a Democrat, he has been a Republican and is a bit of a maverick.
The at-large race will be a Pifalo-Poe runoff. Poe is the machine Democrat, Ingle is a populist Democrat, and populists are not reliable voters. That’s why there is no “populist machine”. Lutz will finish last. She is a first timer who will be needing support from Pifalo’s base, and that will not be happening. Poe lost in District 2, but did so respectably. If he keeps it close in that, the most conservative, district, he will take 1, 3 and 4 handily. That will make him the overall winner in April.
All of this could change if you, the voters, start connecting the dots between the people you elect and your cost of living and your lack of opportunity.
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!
I am excited to post that I am running for Alachua County Commission seat 3 which Paula Delaney currently occupies. This is so important to me that I filed in February but laid low while we tried to get Rob Zeller and Todd Chase elected to the Gainesville City Commission.
I will say that I am not your typical hand picked Alachua County Politician in that I am not part of the local political elite. I am just a regular guy that is willing to step up to redirect our Countys vision and bring fiscal responsibility and common sense principles into our government. I believe that not ever having held a political office is my advantage. I can more relate to the 95% of our citizens that live throughout the county that find it more and more challanging to make ends meet.
I will make Roads and Public Safety the first items addressed with each budget.
I will work with businesses in our county to identify and eliminate those regulations which make it difficult to open new businesses or that keep new businesses out. We need to recognize that Business growth is essential to all aspects of our lives as taxpayers and consumers and is the lifeblood of our communities.
I would also represent all the munincipalities equally in our county and recognize that any money spent belongs to the entire county and not just a small core group.
I am a registered Republican and am on the Alachua County Executive Committee. I am also a member of our local Tea Party which is made up of a very good cross section of all political parties in the county that are concerned with the current direction of the BOCC.
As I know that the BOCC should not make any decisions without the input of our citizens I would welcome your input and ideas on how to make our quality of life truly better by being more efficient with taxpayers money. As individuals we have had to learn to live within our means and our representative government should reflect the same idea. Thank you for taking the time to read this and I would appreciate the support as I move foward with my campaign. For more info you can contact me at 352-356-VOTE or through my website www.voteforwalt.com
WHEREAS,
... Gainesville Regional Utilities (GRU) has no current need for additional generating capacity and
GRU will not need additional capacity until 2023, at the earliest; and
… conservation and demand-side management options, if fully explored and implemented, would
postpone the need for additional generating capacity further into the future; and
… the final contract (Power Purchase Agreement [PPA]) with Gainesville Renewable Energy Center
(GREC) was negotiated in secret; and only a redacted version has been made available to the
Public (1); and
…the GRU-GREC wood burner will require daily withdrawal of over 1.4 million gallons of water
from the endangered Floridan Aquifer, despite the urgent need to preserve water resources; and
… the GRU-GREC wood burner will consume more than 1 million tons of wood annually, which will
be transported to the site by trucks, adding to traffic and air pollution in Gainesville, Alachua and
the region; and
… the burning of woody biomass to generate electricity will more than double the carbon dioxide
emissions per unit of energy currently produced at the GRU Deerhaven coal-burning power plant,
and will increase other emissions that are toxic to the environment and a threat to public health;
and
…the public will have to pay GREC tens of millions of dollars annually for a power plant we do not
need.
THEREFORE,
We the undersigned Citizens of Gainesville and Alachua County hereby request that
the Gainesville City Commission [fully disclose the terms of the City’s contract (PPA)
with Gainesville Renewable Energy Center, LLC, and furthermore, we request that the
Gainesville City Commission](2) revoke the contract.
(1,2 Pursuant to satisfaction of one condition of the Settlement Agreement with citizen litigants, who
challenged the GREC permits, these clauses are stricken. GREC and GRU fulfilled this demand by releasing
a full, unredacted version of the contract on April 6, 2011.
-- Revised April 15, 2011)
Don Marsh,
