While falling asleep last night, I began thinking that the news reports have not shown the usual comparison of this year’s rainfall with the annual averages. I looked it up. By golly, so far El Nino is not what it climatologists predicted it would be: Too big to fail. Annual rainfall is measured from July 1 to June 30. From July through … Read More

Meghan Sahli-Wells says she wants to combine local elections with state and federal elections to increase local participation in our City Council and School Board elections. Has she forgotten that, with the increase of voter participation, the ta ctic of bullet voting would be less effective due to the dilution of the small but very partisan bullet voters? Wouldn’t this … Read More

Having only three candidates running for two open seats for the School Board last week is one of the best scenarios in looking at the local electorate’s use of bullet voting. If there had been a fourth viable candidate, it would have clouded the observations, but, fortunately, this election we had only three candidates from which to choose, even though … Read More

(See PDF here.) Notes from Tuesday’s School Board election when Prof. Kelly Kent (1888 votes) and Anne Burke (1461) won two open seats: I was just looking at Precinct 1 when I noticed that it had 100 ballots cast — and 61 votes not cast. It dawned on me that since there were only two votes to cast per ballot, and since 61 votes were not … Read More

I took reader Patrick Meighan’s suggestion to reach out to Dr. Kelly Kent’s School Board campaign and asked for an informal, face-to-face meeting. She and I met outside at Tanner’s on Sepulveda last Thursday, a little after 11. After congenial chitchat, there came an uneasy pause. I took the initiative and asked her the pertinent question that had led to … Read More

Our District’s Future with STRS Increases In the past, it was one thing while the rate for CalSTRS, the public school educators’ pension fund, held constant at 8.25 percent, to have our School Board oversee the only variable when our School District gave raises to its employees. It will be quite another, though, now that there are two increasing variables to consider. The second is the annual … Read More