BIKE: Election Endorsements, Round 2

[Patrick Goetz]

Robert M Farr wrote:
> 
> Kim hasn't updated her web site since election night and appears to have 
> thrown in the towel already.
> 
> Clarke has for years consistently courted the bicycle vote. I believe 
> she's sincere, deserves our votes and she's almost certainly going to 
> win the runoff.
> 
> If we want to make Clarke more aware of cyclist issues <sarcasm> and I'm 
> sure there's an easy consensus among us on what those issues are and 
> what we think should be done about them </sarcasm> it's probably better 
> done by simple communication, not trying to put Clarke and Kim on some 
> sort bicycleforum hot-seat for our edification.
> 

I agree that it's probably too late to have any kind of meaningful 
impact on the election at this point, but one of the purposes of such 
questions is alerting candidates to the issues that are important to a 
particularly constituency.  To this end I left out one from the list I 
submitted yesterday.  With this addition, I think the list is fairly 
comprehensive.

- Given the relative lack of connectivity across Town Lake for 
bicyclists, how important do you consider the completion of the Pfluger 
bridge to be?  If important, what would you do to see that this bridge 
gets completed as soon as possible?

I don't know anything about Jennifer Kim dropping out of the race or 
throwing in the towel; you'd think she'd have let her supporters know. 
If she's still running, however, there is political value in getting 
some of these questions a bit of public airing even if it is no longer 
possible to put the issues before all of the newly elected councilpeople.

I also agree that Margot Clarke has courted the bicycle vote.  She's 
also courted almost everyone else's vote, too, including such groups as 
the Klu Klux Taco Klan, the East side mafia, which in addition to using 
threats and intimidation to keep neighborhood people in line, engages in 
extortion and other not so community friendly acts.  (I know she's done 
this because she showed up to talk to them on the same evening they 
happened to be threatening me with extortion over a east side 
development project I was thinking about getting involved in.)  Raul 
Alvarez was supposed to have been a bicycle friendly candidate, too, but 
hasn't done anything for us.  On the contrary, he's currently 
stonewalling the TOD zoning ordinance because of pressure from the KKTK. 
  It's Clarke doing things like seeking the endorsement of thugs and 
criminals that made me decide finally that Kim was a better candidate. 
This is business as usual at City Hall, and the status quo is clearly 
not working for us as a community, particularly the part about 
preventing development in the urban core because of a few cranky 
neighbors or a local mafia that would lose control of the neighborhood 
as a result.