Sunday, January 24, 2010

State petition for city economic justice


Call to petition the State for city economic justice from Councilmember Mary Ann Nihart

If you can help with petition signatures Saturday, January 30th, send Mary Ann an email at mnhart@pacbell.net

Hi All, Please help!


I am organizing a Pacifica effort at supporting the proposition from the League of California Services Cities to stop allowing the State to Take money designated for local services. Next Saturday, January 30th is a Statewide Signature Day to launch this effort. In Pacifica, we will meet at 10 AM in front of Safeway in Manor for a brief rally and "photo op" to increase awareness and then we will split up to cover the grocery stores in town until 2 PM to gather signatures for the ballot measure. I can not do this alone and I really need your help. I am absolutely committed to protecting our City, restoring financial sustainability and local control to our cities, counties, and schools. Just in case you do not know, since 1991 the State has taken nearly an entire City General Fund annual budget from Pacifica. $28 million dollars that started as part of our general fund budget but in the end we did not receive. This happens to all of our cities, counties, and most importantly our schools. How do they do this? As most of you know, they collect the money through property and sales tax so they just simply do not give us all of our share. Since now we are on average 8 months behind in payments from the State, it is easy for them to do. What are they taking? Funds designated by voters through gas tax, property tax and other sources to go for specific needs in communities. We most stop this practice. It absolutely plays havoc with our budgets and local needs. I have attached a one page summary, but you can also go to www.savelocalservices.com for additional information.

What do I need? I need some key people to volunteer that day from 10 to 2 PM. I will bring everything, including signage, but I need some leaders to manage each of the sites. Minimally, I would like to cover the two Safeways and Albertsons so I need at least three leaders. If more of you volunteer to lead then we will cover more sites. Then I need people to sign up to help at each site for some or all of the 10 to 2 PM time. The more volunteers, the easier the work and the more signatures we gather. We will be handing out information and collecting signatures. Signatures are the most important part of this effort.

Please pass along this information. Any questions, feel free to send me an email or call 650-359-7624. Please pass this information along to others, but before you do...please please please send me an email that says you will help!

See you next Saturday
Mary Ann

Submitted by Kathy Meeh

4 comments:

Jeffrey W Simons said...

Thanks for posting this, Mary Ann. When these proposed actions by the state government were being discussed at City Council meetings, my comments were: don't complain about it, DO SOMETHING!! Other cities have taken action to protect themselves, and it is nice to see our City Council joining with other cities to direct a loud, unified voice to Sacramento.

Kathy Meeh said...

Hi there, Mary Ann sent a corrected copy show in the first line correction as "League of California Cities" not "League of California Services". I picked-up the first copy. Consider this my error, and Steve if you can see and correct the initial copy that would be nice, otherwise folks this typo is on me.

ian butler said...

Excellent idea! I will try to be there with a video camera.

Kathleen Rogan said...

I don't know. The people voted for these elected officials who continue to tax the middle class and grow government, increase entitlement's , over regulate business to the point of driving them out and now that they realize they are bankrupt they are taking money from local city coffers. I warned all of you way back in a letter to the trib and you all thought I was nuts. To all of you who voted these people in office who bankrupted our state, I blame you. You keep voting in the same people over and over. Until I see change, real change I am not helping anyone get out of the mess they created.
Instead of letter writing, which won't help, concentrate on creating jobs to pay off your debt.