(DD: This email went out earlier today to activists throughout San Diego)
Did you see the news last night? KUSI(!) broke down the political ads of the cycle and called our Ask Carl This commercial a "very effective" ad! We've been pushing hard to make sure Carl gets the tough questions, and we've gotten here because of your help.
You know the facts, and maybe you’ve seen the ad:
We already know some of the taxpayer subsidies that Carl DeMaio has pushed for: subsidizing downtown developers. Subsidizing hotel revenues. Even subsidizing parking tickets. But he's also been committed to subsidizing public safety risks with our taxdollars.
After wildfires twice raged through San Diego, the council moved in 2009 to make homeowners responsible for keeping their own property clear of dangerous brush that could feed new fires. Carl DeMaio was the only member of the council to oppose holding people accountable if they didn't take basic steps to prevent wildfires.
In May 2009, DeMaio was the lone opponent to adjusting the permit cost for casino parties to cover the entire cost of providing police monitoring. The same package tackled runaway false alarms from security companies that sucked up resources and diverted police officers from real work.
That seems like pretty basic stuff: If you're calling the police over and over with false alarms, that's a problem. Reports at the time showed that less than 1% of burglary alarms were legitimate, wasting millions of tax dollars every year. Not only does it waste precious resources, it hurts the ability of police officers to respond to actual emergencies. But apparently that wasn't a problem to DeMaio.
We've talked a lot about how Carl DeMaio is openly running as the candidate bought and paid for by private corporate interests, but not as much about what that actually means in practice.
Sure, it means that DeMaio openly admits that you should give him money in order for him to care about you (always an admirable trait in an elected official), but it says even more about how he thinks government should work.
It isn't just that he thinks government should run more like a business (debatable). It's that he thinks government should be bought and paid for by rich corporations (in this case through him), and they're the ones who should, in turn, receive all the benefits.
When he talks about workers having too much influence on government, DeMaio generally leaves out the second part: too much influence relative to whom? To the rich lobbyists, developers, and city contractors who are supporting and funding DeMaio; the private interests who want to make sure that any money government might bring in goes directly to those companies and not to providing services to the general public. Indeed, DeMaio got rich in his younger days doing exactly this: Taking tax dollars and re-routing the money to private corporations and his own pockets. He knows how to pull off that hustle.
