Argument Against Renewal of The Home Rule Option: Verl Farnsworth

Vote NO on Mesa Question 1:

In 2016 Question 1 on your ballot asked if you wanted to increase your sales tax by 23% to pay for an ASU campus to be built in downtown Mesa. Overwhelming you said, “no”.

However, this year the City Council decided to use some shady chess play in order to ignore your vote.

This  year Question 1 is “Home Rule”. 

This is the tax increase you turned down in 2016.

The Mayor and City Council knew you would reject the ASU project if it was on the 2018 ballot.
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Blogger Insert: 
Approving another extension of the alternative expenditure limitation called "Home Rule" is like writing a blank check
Would you ever do that again?
An animated gif to get across the point that the mayor and some of his friends simply do not listen to what voters have REJECTED.
Most of the mayor's friends - one in particular, Mesa Mormon Mega-Millionaire Conservative Republican AZ Senator Bob Worsley is gambling in private for-his-own profits and personal wealth-creation in rampant real estate speculation here in downtown at the same time he holds the trust of the public. Tricking  taxpayers to finance their schemes is simply DECEIT and a potential conflict-of-interest between public office and personal private gains.
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Now you can show your disdain with your vote being ignored in 2016 and vote NO on this question.

This means you get to tell the City Council that they must abide by article IX of Arizona’s Constitution and have a balanced budget.

Deceitfully, this form of debt and... water rate increases do not require voter approval, and because Now your utility bills will increase for the next 20 years to pay this debt.

 

 

Currently, City Council has decided not to balance the budget in order to fund this new ASU campus.

As a result, this deficit spending will deplete the city’s reserve fund.

Deficits for the next 5-years alone will add up to more than $60 million dollars. If you were to eliminate the new ASU building downtown not only would it balance the budget, we would have in excess of $40 million to be able to lower water and utility bills.

We also should be putting this money away in a rainy fund for when the economy takes a downturn. Our city leaders should have already been putting these protections in place.

 

It's time to not only vote NO on “Home Rule” but replace the existing City Councilmen who voted against your wishes and elect fiscally responsible leaders now and in 2020.

 

 

 

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WHO IS VERL FARNSWORTH?

Verl Farnsworth was a nonpartisan candidate for District 5 member of the Mesa City Council in Arizona. Farnsworth lost the primary on August 28, 2018.

 

Primary election for Mesa City Council District 5 

Incumbent David Luna defeated Verl Farnsworth in the primary for Mesa City Council District 5 on August 28, 2018.

Total votes: 12,847 (100% precincts reporting)

		Candidate	%	Votes
✔		David Luna  (Nonpartisan)	57.9	7,437
		Verl Farnsworth  (Nonpartisan)	41.9	5,382

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AZ Forward 2018 Environmental Excellence Awards

Crescordia Awards 2018

Looks like you can tell what foamed to the top for The Governor's Award in this year's version of the Arizona Forward's EEA held last week on October 6,2018. Take a look at the image - that type of beer is usually called an IPA (Indian Pale Ale) ....note there's no "Indian"
Instead take a close look at the glass - it's marked Goldwater, a nice golden-brown when it's brewed from human wastewater, that of course has been 'purified'.
At 5.7% that packs a lot of alcohol content!
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Congratulations again to the Environmental Excellence Awards winners! If you'd like to see a complete list, have a look at the press release on their website. #sustainability #AZFAwards2018 http://bit.ly/2PmqBpD
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Believe it - or not - The City of Mesa managed to snag two mentions in the Parks & Trail awards section ... a runner-up mention for the $12,000,000 in taxpayer money spent  for Pioneer Park and a mention for  4-mile bike trail segment that fills in a gap in a program started first in Phoenix.

Mesa Mayor Giles wants you to hear about the city's EEA awards and mentions when  he badgered Beth Huntig, head of the city's Engineering Department, to "brag about" and "brag about it just a little" at the Thu 11 October Mesa City Council Study Session.
Giles plans to stage an award ceremony at the Monday Oct 15th City Council Meeting at 5:45 pm  
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In a newly created category it was former Phoenix mayor who got one of the awards for an individual

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The City of Chandler was recently honored with an Award of Distinction at the Arizona Forward Environmental Excellence Awards. 👏👏

Chandler earned the award in the Sustainable Communities category for the Downtown Chandler project that extended Dakota Street, rebuilt Commonwealth Avenue and rehabilitated a historic Salt River Project canal.

#AZFAwards2018 #LoveChandler

...

http://bit.ly/2ynu8wC

See More 

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The Pima County Wastewater Reclamation's Arizona Pure Water Brew Challenge project won the Governor’s Award for Arizona’s Future at the 38th Annual Arizona Forward Environmental Excellence Awards presented by SRP, October 6, 2018, in Scottsdale.

Arizona Forward honored the project for its effort to effectively steward water resources and engage the public in sustainability efforts.

“This is a great honor, there were so many outstanding projects being recognized,” said RWRD... Deputy Director Jeff Prevatt, who led the project. “Our project will help ensure long-term water sustainability for future Arizonans and has really helped promote water reuse discussions nationwide.”

#conservation #sustainability #arizonaforward

See More 

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A MAP OF EVERY BUILDING IN AMERICA

A MAP OF EVERY BUILDING IN AMERICA (See > Nation of Suburbs: Mesa, AZ]

By TIM WALLACE, DEREK WATKINS and JOHN SCHWARTZ OCT. 12, 2018

"Most of the time, The New York Times asks you to read something. Today we are inviting you, simply, to look.

On this page you will find maps showing almost every building in the United States.

Why did we make such a thing?

We did it as an opportunity for you to connect with the country’s cities and explore them in detail.

To find the familiar, and to discover the unfamiliar.

So … look.

HISTORY MADE APPARENT:

The nation’s expansion shows itself: The clustered development of the original colonies flowed west, with scattered cities and towns linked, like beads on a string, by rivers, highways and railroads.

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Every black speck on the map below is a building, reflecting the built legacy of the United States.

Use the search bar in the THE NYTIMES LINK farther down  to find a place and explore the interactive map above . . ."

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These images are drawn from a huge database that Microsoft released to the public this year. The company’s computer engineers trained a neural network to analyze satellite imagery and then to trace the shapes of buildings across the country. Such information has been available before in some places, but this is the first comprehensive database covering the entire United States.

In some cases, we have augmented the data with information from state and local governments that have collected their own.

We found fascinating patterns in the arrangements of buildings.
Traditional road maps highlight streets and highways; here they show up as a linear absence.

Where buildings are clustered together, in downtowns, the image is darker, dense.
As suburbs stretch out with their larger lawns and malls, the map grows lighter.
Your eye can follow the ways that development conforms to landscape features like water and slopes.

You can read history in the transition from curving, paved-over cow paths in old downtowns to suburban sprawl
You can detect signals of wealth and poverty, sometimes almost next door to each other.
It all reveals what Andy Woodruff, a cartographer, calls
“the sometimes aesthetically pleasing patterns of the built environment.”

These images don’t just reveal cityscapes; they reveal ourselves.

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Below, more details on what the map reveals about the structures that surround us.

> History Made Apparent

> The Imprint of Geology

> Traces of Distant Culture

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/12/us/map-of-every-building-in-the-united-states.html
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A NATION OF SUBURBS

Mesa, Ariz. America’s suburban streets twist and flow, with their wild involutions and curving cul-de-sacs. Mesa’s suburbs are especially imaginative, particularly from above. The feeling of meandering through a place whose layout is designed to thwart speed and comprehension is familiar to anyone who, in the days before GPS, needed to pick up a friend or deliver a pizza in an unfamiliar neighborhood.

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Barbara Berasi, Larry Buchanan, Guilbert Gates, Baden Copeland, Monica Davey, Conor Dougherty, Manny Fernandez, Adam Nagourney and Julie Shaver contributed to producing this project.
Data sources: Building footprints from Microsoft. Washington, D.C. building footprints from the city.
Note: In some cases, the building shapes generated by Microsoft's automated process do not match the existing building footprints exactly. We manually corrected as many of these mistakes as we found, or, where available, replaced the shapes using more precise local data sets.

 

PETER SCHIFF: A CRASH HAS OCCURRED AND THE STORM HAS BEGUN

Don't mess with The Fed

Mesa Ballot Election 2018 [Produced by The City of Mesa]

Published on Oct 8, 2018

Views-to-upload date/time on this blog: 33

To learn more:https://www.mesaaz.gov/city-hall/city... 

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In the interest of being fair-and-balanced there are some other opinions about these six questions - you just cannot accept things at  'face-value' produced by the city.
We really do not need more of an increasing burden - there are reasons backed up by a thoughtful analysis of financial data to provide you with more information to make an informed choice when you vote:

This year on our ballots in Mesa we will be asked to consider half a billion dollars of new debt.

• Local control of the budget vs. spending caps from the state (Question 1)
• Raising the sales tax 14% (Question 2)
• $85 million dollars to build a police/fire joint station in northeast Mesa (Question 3)
• $111 million dollars for parks and culture. Including ASU park downtown, a permanent ice skating rink, and massive soccer fields in northeast Mesa. (Question 4)
• Modifying the City Charter to allow us to spend $100 million on a sports complex in northeast Mesa. (Question 5)
• Increase the lodging tax by 20% (Question 6)

"I’m sure that not all of my positions will align with your views and that’s ok. I only wish to present the facts to those who are looking for them in the abyss of data. 
I should also note the opinions I express are my own.
My goals are simple, they are to provide transparency to the finances of our city for the purpose of protecting the assets that belong to the residents before they are entirely depleted due to a massive spending spree with no plan to pay for anything.
It’s time to get our spending under control.
In addition, my hope is that we can start creating policies that favor the middle class and the poor in our community.
This requires us to live within our means and get back to providing core municipal services to our residents.
It is important to note that financial crisis situations do not occur overnight. They take years to evolve usually with those at the helm ignorant in what it is they’re creating.
READ MORE > click here  
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On this blog:
More than you probably want to know about Home Rule
https://mesazona.blogspot.com/2018/05/explaining-increases-hikes-in-fees.html
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Half-A-Billion Bucks In More Debt? Mesa Voters Get The Final Say On Massive Bond & Tax Proposals > VOTE NO!

Mesa Voters Get The Final Say On Massive Bond & Tax Proposals > VOTE NO!

That's right > Say NO across-the-board when you vote. 
The combined GIGANTIC size - almost half a billion dollars - of the bond debt requests and the sheer number of money-related ballot questions on this November 6 General Election are up to voters here in Mesa to make the final say. There's a lot more at stake on the State level with other Proposals to deal with that will affect and impact our futures, but let's keep it hyper-local here in this post right now.
Keep in mind that except for the separate massive unjustified $300M - that is $300,000,000 - budget  OVERRIDE proposal for a failing Mesa public education system, other issues have been passed by the Mesa City Council to get voted on. 

They tried to sting us all two years ago with that privately financed bogus $500,000 ASU public relations campaign that no one got tricked by - it blew up in their faces when voters simply said NO. Played for fools once...Never again!
This time around they've had two years to 're-package' their underhanded bag-of-tricks into a Grab-Bag-of-Goodies they hope can trick everyone all over again.
How? By slow-jamming (and at the same time fast-tracking) a number of proposals through the Mesa City Council.

This year it was not unanimous - it was contentious

READ MORE > https://mesazona.blogspot.com/2018/10/half-billion-bucks-in-more-debt-mesa.html

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“How Fascism Works”: Jason Stanley On Trump, Bolsonaro and the Rise of F...

Why release this now?

Published on Oct 11, 2018

https://democracynow.org - In his new book “How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them,” Yale professor Jason Stanley warns about the dangers of normalizing fascist politics, writing, “What normalization does is transform the morally extraordinary into the ordinary. It makes us able to tolerate what was once intolerable by making it seem as if this is the way things have always been.” We speak with Jason Stanley in New York.
Democracy Now! is an independent global news hour that airs weekdays on nearly 1,400 TV and radio stations Monday through Friday. Watch our livestream 8-9AM ET: https://democracynow.org

Please consider supporting independent media by making a donation to Democracy Now! today: https://democracynow.org/donate

Free Speech Police

This is not trivial - Pie is deadly serious in this broadcast - He's not making this stuff up.
Why are the police or for that matter anyone else, getting involved over people's choice of words and trolling/tracking Twitter posts? . . . it's free speech when we live in a democracy

Published on Oct 12, 2018

Views: 5,140 [to upload time 15 minutes after this got posted online. 

If you want the Police to arrest people for their choice of words then you want to live in a police state.
For tickets to see Jonathan Pie LIVE:USA go to jonathanpie.com/live