[Originally posted at NorCal Politics on February 16, 2006]

I don’t have too much to add to this BeyondChron story on the first run at ranked choice balloting in San Francisco. The long and the short of it seems to be this:

1. No need for expensive run-off elections (the last one cost the city $3M);
2. Higher voter turnout; and
3. Higher voter turnout in traditionally low-turnout neighborhoods and ethnicities.

There’s also a strong argument that IRV tends to select candidates who reflect the true preference of the electorate, as:

1. There’s no penalty for truly voting your first choice first, which avoids the “don’t vote third party” problem; and
2. If candidates are sufficiently extreme to reflect only a small core consituency, the system will settle on the more moderate candidates who represent the natural compromise candidates.

All of which means, of course, that it threatens both of the existing party establishments and the pundit class who make their living on complaining about the status quo while doing their best to maintain it.

Not a lot of California-related blogging going on today. Maybe it’s the weather. No teasers, no flip. It’s all right here.

• Frank Russo of California Progress Report does a pretty good job making flood control interesting and explaining the politics of it. It’s boring until the flood hits. Then it better be boring, or you’re hosed. This kind of grunt work on infrastructure is most of what a government should be doing, and exactly what the Republican Party does not do.
• BeyondChron is disgruntled today. Well, they’re generally disgruntled, but excessive gruntlement is a sign that one is not paying attention. In particular today, Media Alliance worries that the Google / Earthlink tag team that the City of SF picked for citywide Wi-Fi may not provide proper privacy protections and other good public interest provisions.
• Dan Gillmor tips us to a foreign takeover of a local media outlet.
• Alliance for a Better California doesn’t like Dan Walters’ Generic Union Bashing Column any more than I did, but they go into much more detail.
• Beep informs us that there’s a ballot proposition in Santa Barbara County to split the county in half. The history on this should be interesting, especially as the northern half of the county seems to want the split, but the southern half funds the county. This sounds vaguely familiar to me somehow…
• The Santa Clara County Dems have some endorsements for June.
• Progressive 11th just points us to a couple articles on dirty money that tell us more of what we already know about Dirty Dick Pombo.
• From My Left Wing: It’s funny because it’s true.
• Kingdaddy at Arms and Influence just doesn’t write about domestic politics much, and never about state politics. But he’s worth reading if you’re at all interested in military theory and history. Today he writes about the Diggers, Quakers, Levellers and a host of other sects that arose in England in the 17th Century and the our current theocrats. It’s just interesting.

or, “Why I didn’t post anything today.“

So, someone stole my car yesterday or the day before.  Not a huge deal in and of itself.  It’s a cheap car, and I’m not that attached to it.  The thieves took it from street parking near my house, and dumped it in someone’s driveway across town, where DPT promptly (and rightfully) towed it yesterday morning.

When I realized the car was gone this afternoon (hey, I don’t drive every day), I made my first mistake.  Instead of calling the police to report the car stolen, I called Auto Return, the San Francisco impound yard.  They had the car.  Then I made my second mistake.  I went out the door without a book, thinking I could file the police report and challenge the tow after I got my car out and stopped the clock on the storage fees.

Not so much.  You have to file the police report before you pay off the impound lot or you can’t challenge the tow.  The impound people send me down the street to SFPD’s South Station (I’m still pretty chipper at this point).  The police at South Station sent me back to the impound lot and had me call the non-emergency dispatch.  The non-emergency dispatch sent me back to South Station, where they had me sit down until a very nice officer came out to tell me that dispatch had been wrong and that I needed to go back down the street to Auto Return and wait for an officer to come look at the car and decide whether the tow fees (around $250 at this point) will be waived.

So, I do.  This was my third (and biggest) mistake.

I wait for about three hours, with no police officer, and no way to know when they’ll get there.  The non-emergency dispatcher, when called said it could be  hours.  (I am far less chipper at this point, and am struggling not to be flat-out rude.)  (Remember, I have nothing to do except wait, and I can’t really leave, in case the police officer shows up.)  And did I mention that there’s no bathroom at Auto Return?  At some point in those 3 hours, as much to relieve the boredom as for any other reason, I ask Auto Return if I can see the car.  It’s got some joyride detritus in it, but it starts fine and it’s drivable. 

So I go back to South Station, where there’s apparently been a shift change in the last 3 hours, and ask them if there’s anything they can do.  There’s apparently nothing that they can do w/r/t the police report from inside the station.  (And they seem puzzled that I was told that I should wait for an officer.)  The new shift offers me a piece of paper with the information on it about how to challenge the adminstrative fee portion (and maybe the illegal parking ticket) of the tow, if I come back the next day during business hours. 

It’s not worth it.  I can’t lose another day to this kafkaesque farce.  I’ve now been told three different things about how to handle this situation, I have no way of knowing which of them is correct, and I need my car.  I tell the officer as nicely as I am able that the paper should go to some one who will use it, and that I’ll just go eat the fees.

So I walk back to Auto Return, pony up the $250, and resign myself to paying the $75 ticket for illegal parking.  I can’t challenge the tow, and I can’t challenge the ticket, since there’s no police report.

I’m not even pissed at the thief any more.  I’m pissed at the city.  The thief was a thief.  People suck.  But the city?  Can’t even get its act together to tell me the same story three times in a row on how to handle the theft of a car which winds up in impound.  That happens how many times a week?

I know that I was trying to report a property crime in which the property had been recovered.  I get that it’s the lowest possible priority. Still, if it’s the official policy of the SFPD that I should just be happy I got my car back, and that the tow fees and ticket is just a thief-triggered tax on having a car in the city*, then just tell me that when I ask, and I’ll add that to the taxes I already pay — maybe it could be made deductable from state and federal taxes.  Don’t make me cool my heels waiting for an officer who may never come.  I’d rather just know that’s the deal.

I know that this is a small thing, but it’s interactions like this that really frame how people feel about their government, right or wrong.  Even if the SFPD had just told me candidly that they didn’t have the resources to get anyone there that day, I would have been happier than I was with “Can’t promise anything, but wait, and someone will be there.”  I should note as well that as the afternoon progressed, I was probably the least polite of any of the players involved in this farce.  And that is of course a character flaw on my part.

*I don’t want to hear piety about not having a car in San Francisco.  If I could swing it, I would.  But for a variety of reasons, I need a car.

As night follows day, so does a lawsuit from the NRA follow any regulation of guns at any level of government.  And so, the City of San Francisco finds itself defending Proposition H, the ban on handgun sales and ownership within city limits.  I’m not going to bother quoting any of the article here, as it’s fairly predictable; this diary is more in the way of a confession. 

I’m a bad liberal on gun issues.  I was among the 42% of the city residents who voted against Proposition H, mostly for the following reasons:

1.  It won’t do any good to ban handguns within city limits.  San Francisco is about 7 miles on a side, and you can be in rural counties in an hour’s drive.  If one is serious about handgun control, one has to deal with it not just statewide, but nationwide, and that simply will not happen, given the power of the gun lobby in most of the rural states that control national policy.

2.  Given that it won’t do any good to ban handguns within city limits, why, for the love of Pete, is the City of San Francisco poking the NRA?  Why did the City feel compelled to create yet another talking point for Republicans in the middle of the country?  And why are they spending my tax dollars on this fight?

Honestly, the gun regulation battle is pretty much over in this country for a generation at least.  I’m not saying states and municipalities shouldn’t pass reasonable regulations, but symbolic moves like Proposition H aren’t helping anyone.