November 8, 2007

Who Has Spoke????

Now that the election is over in Ventura you have all the winners of the council race telling all and wide that the "people have spoken", you have the Chamber of Commerce telling us "the community has spoken", you have the Measure C7 advocates telling us "the folks are with us".

Let's examine the situation just a bit, out of approx 110,000 citizens in the city of Ventura only about 60,000 are registered to vote. Out of that 60,000 registered voters only 14,177 even bothered to go to the polls. The ones that did go to the polls were friends of the incumbent winners or they were folks that had been scared to death with the Gang in the Ivory Tower telling them that the "sky was falling". The actual story was that if the C7 measure didn't pass the city would not have enough money to keep all their police and firemen. The same story they were using when trying to raise the sales tax 1/4%.

So in truth what happened on Nov6th was not an overwhelming acceptance of the incumbents or of the C7 measure, or of the Gang in the Ivory Tower, what really happened was total apathy. Far from being a case where the "people have spoken" or "the community has spoken" it seems to be a simple case of the "people don't give a damn."

Rellis Smith
res@venturastuff.com