Breaking up is hard to do, but its on our Fall ballot

The Daily Journal (San Mateo County), Sue Lempert Column (Opinion), 4/4/14.  "The Draper Dream or, Not in my state."

California proposed as six states,
we don't expect that to happen

California bear carved up, steak and hamburger

"Tim Draper has a dream to divide California into six states. He hopes his proposition will be on the November 2016 ballot. There is little chance that his initiative will pass or be implemented if it does pass. So why is he doing this and investing $5.2 million to date? His dream could be California’s worse nightmare.   ....   This is not the first time Draper has become involved in politics or launching ballot measures. He helped finance a previous initiative on school choice (vouchers) which failed.

What makes the proposal so bizarre is that it would take thriving economy and turn it into six unequal parts. No economies of scale. You would have more government, not less. Six governors, many more state legislators, six who knows how many separate departments for each entity. While locally, schools and cities are trying to consolidate to save money, Draper is hoping to fix the Cal

ifornia economy by dividing it. Six small lopsided states don’t seem likely to improve a business climate, improve schools or build new infrastructure. What is most surprising is that a venture capitalist from Silicon Valley it not thinking globally, but provincially. We have heard about Nimbys, or Not in my backyard. What about Nimsys, Not in my state? If you need my water, go fend for yourself."   Read article.

References -  Six Californias campaign website. The initiative, Ballotpedia.  OneCalifornia (facebook), Bipartisan Political committee to oppose the "Six Californias" ballot measure.  

Click on California to view the six state's counties

Related article opinion - Slate/Will Oremus,7/17/14,"What's worse than one California? Try Six Californias." .... "Draper calls it the “Six Californias” plan, which cleverly makes it sound like the state would be multiplied rather than divided. If Jefferson Davis had Draper’s marketing acumen, he might have rebranded the Confederate secession as the “Two Americas” plan. And who can forget the glorious “Six Yugoslavias” initiative that made the Balkans the envy of the world in the 1990s? The goal in this case, Draper explains, is not to throw the world’s eighth-largest economy into bitter conflict and existential turmoil, but rather to smoothly and peacefully divvy up a state that has become too large and diverse to govern. How hard could that be?  Admittedly, Draper’s plan is a little light on details—minor things like how to parcel out the state’s precious water, its mountainous debt, its enormous prison population, and its world-class university system. But if history teaches us anything, it’s that these sorts of questions always work themselves out one way or another."

Bloomberg Businessweek/Politics and Policy/Joel Stein, "Billionaire Tim Draper's mad plan to blow up California." .... "A billionaire Silicon Valley venture capitalist who hit it big funding Hotmail, Skype, Tesla Motors (TSLA), and Chinese search engine Baidu (BIDU), Draper has gone from Democrat to Republican to Libertarian to Draperist; the Draper party (of one) believes that government’s problem is that it lacks competition. “I’ve met every governor since Reagan and they’re all great people. And I’ve met lots of state employees and they’re all great people. So I came to the conclusion that California is ungovernable,” he says. .... :Many assume that a man with such an improbable plan—even if the ballot passes in California, the 49 other states aren’t eager to endow what was California with 10 more senators—knows nothing about politics. ..." 

Related OneCalifornia opposition - NPR Public radio 90.9 wbur (Boston), "Here and now", audio, 8:36 minutes. Guest:   Steven Maviglio,  co-founder of OneCalifornia... press secretary to former California governor Gray Davis.   

Note graphics:  from this article, from Americans for Legal Imigration; bear from OneCalifornia (reference above), California by counties from Six Californias.  

Posted by Kathy Meeh