The public deserves straightforward leadership, not a wink and a nudge.
An excerpt.Editorial: Arena waiting game
Key details to come just as ballots are mailed
Published 12:01 am PDT Tuesday, September 5, 2006
There is something strangely appropriate about the name of Measure R, on the November ballot in Sacramento County. Does the "R" refer to the late Hermann Rorschach, the psychologist who came up with the Rorschach inkblot test?
The Rorschach test works like this: The therapist hands the patient a piece of paper with an abstract design on it. The patient expounds on what the design actually is and means, from which the therapist gains deep insights into the patient's inner reality.
Measure R has this much in common with the Rorschach test: It can mean any number of things to the voter.
On its surface, it is a quarter-cent sales tax increase for the next 15 years. In theory, that money will be for general purposes, but thanks to an elaborate series of political winks and nudges, everybody knows that much of the proceeds will pay for a new downtown arena for the Sacramento Kings. Or will it? Knowing that will take more information than will be on the ballot or available to voters.
Sacramento County supervisors waited until the very last minute to place Measure R on the ballot. Even so, negotiations with the Kings hadn't yet firmly answered some basic questions about what is to happen if voters say yes: How solid is the commitment to building an arena in the downtown railyards? What if there are construction delays? What happens when the unexpected happens?
Ideally, questions like this should all be considered and resolved long before a proposal as important as this gets on a ballot. But negotiations with the Kings owners, the Maloof family, took much longer than expected. And the negotiations over these loose ends are expected to last until Oct. 6. That, says county chief financial officer Geoff Davey, is when the Kings and the county and city of Sacramento hope to have a "memorandum of understanding" of what they all have actually agreed to.
Oct. 6 is perilously close to the time when absentee voters begin voting. That gives the public precious little time to consider all the facts before deciding how to vote.
