The Beers with Demo Election Guide

Beers with Demo is proud to endorse Ms. April Boling for 7th District City Council here in America’s Finest City. April is a CPA and owns a small but successful accounting firm here in San Diego. We got a chance to meet here last Saturday and she seemed a very pleasant, down-to-earth and earnest person.

As you may know, San Diego has put itself in a terrible bind with its underfunded pensions to the public employee unions and with her opponent, Marti Emerald, garnering the support of those very unions, we are very skeptical that Emerald will do anything to buck the current system of the unions calling the shots down at city hall.

April is a very strong supporter of Prop. 13 and against raising taxes which is just city hall’s way of passing responsibility for their ineptness and corruption on to the citizens who didn’t want or ask for this unholy mess.

And while Emerald believes that the illegal immigration issue is something for the Feds to deal with (not an entirely unreasonable stance, by the way), April is committed to ending the city’s de facto “sanctuary city” status. (It should not be the primary responsibility of municipalities to enforce federal law but neither should there be a tacit or silent recognition of illegal immigration by this city while hiding behind the its-not-our-job façade).

The only two propositions on the ballot that we really care about are the two eminent domain ones… 98 and 99.

Yes on 98

No on 99

Prop. 98 sets a higher bar for eminent domain than does 99. 98 allows you to challenge your case in court where the final decision is taken out of the hands of the very public agency trying seize your property. There are simply too many loopholes and exceptions for taking of private property in 99. In fact, the independent legislative analysis says that a Yes vote on 99 means, “In a limited number of cases, government would no longer have the authority to take a single-family home." Emphasis on limited. Its no surprise 99 is backed heavily by the developers.

Unfortunately, 98 is getting beat by 99 in the polls in large part because of false information being spread regarding rent control. The 99ers want you to believe that rent control would be eliminated immediately if 98 passes. This is a lie. Landlords will not be able to raise the rent on existing tenants. Once the tenant leaves, the landlord will be able to raise the rent to market rates on the next tenant but will be restricted by existing rent control laws from raising them further while that tenant resides there.

We would like to see them eliminated altogether but believe 98 is an entirely reasonable step in the right direction. Unfortunately, people don’t bother to read the actual ballot language.