Fear Less Sausalito
Dear Neighbors—
The BIG NEWS is that the Marin Independent Journal has endorsed Measure X. Read it here.
“Measure X is a positive step in the right direction. Sausalito can no longer afford inaction.”
We have all seen in our mailboxes the fruits of an expensive, professionally poll-driven opposition campaign designed to stoke fear and confusion through misleading claims and factoids taken out of context. It has left some of us wondering whom—and what—to believe.
When making your choice, consider the thoughtful endorsement of the Sierra Club, Greenbelt Alliance, Sausalito Sustainable Waterfront Association, Heath Ceramics, and many other community businesses and leaders. (See links at the end to their testimony)
When first covering Measure X back in June, the Marin IJ said that “the devil is in the details”. Its editorial board then studied the details, received extensive legal analysis and opposition arguments from SOS, and interviewed both sides.
After assessing all the details, the Marin Independent Journal concluded:
“Sausalito’s Marinship needs Measure X to take a step forward…Sausalito can no longer afford inaction. The IJ editorial board supports Measure X in the November election”.
Yes on Measure X is your vote and your power to break the complex legal stranglehold on common sense improvements in Sausalito.
Yes on Measure X is the first small step toward a more thriving waterfront for maritime, industry, artists, and residents; and toward reducing tax pressure on you.
Measure X is overwhelmingly about removing absurd restrictions in the 215-acre Marinship.
Today, these make it illegal for a coffee roaster to sell a cup of coffee to a worker, an industrial bakery from selling baguettes to a resident, and has kept Heath Ceramics from enclosing its storage yard to keep the rain off its clay.
These restrictions are why Heath may leave its Sausalito birthplace and has already expanded manufacturing in San Francisco rather than here. We aren’t getting that economic activity or tax revenue.
You are paying higher taxes to subsidize decay.
Measure X is about these commonsense fixes.
It does not approve any new construction. Not a single building.
It simply moves us from impossible, to just very very hard.
It invites proposals, it doesn’t guarantee permits.
Any building proposals still face exhaustive, often multi-year, environmental review, including impact studies and mitigation of traffic, views, infrastructure, flooding, soils, contamination, noise, wildlife, air quality, and historic impacts, and after all that, a discretionary approval process that can totally restrict the height, appearance, and size of what gets permitted to be built.
Sausalito’s character, scale, and charm remains protected in Measure X by retaining the power to prohibit anything we don’t like.
And your vote is protected as the ultimate safeguard. Under Measure X, voters can veto any government action in the same way Measure X itself got on the ballot.
Sausalito just demonstrated that power. In only 10 days, unpaid resident volunteers with clipboards by the ferry, gathered the signatures to put Measure X on the ballot.
This is the people’s power to vote in action.
Compare that to the power of paralysis in the current system. Nothing new has been built since Schoonmaker in 1985. The sandy beach there wasn’t the result of landlord generosity; it resulted from a negotiation power that has been practically banned since 1985.
Do you like the sandy beach at Schoonmaker?
Measure X means we may get more things like that in town.
Maybe a salt-water pool, a walking path along the water, a community center, or other community benefits?
Voting against X means we will get more things like this.
Don’t be fooled by the fear, uncertainty, and doubt campaign.
A group called SOS, that could just as well stand for “Scare Our Sausalito” as anything else, has spent more than $15,000 on professional polling to find the right combination of words, themes, and grossly exaggerated images, to elicit fear in voters.
Wild claims are eventually debunked but their money is well spent for their goals.
When we are scared, we freeze. And when we freeze, we do nothing.
Or we succumb to vague, poll-tested promises of a better plan sometime in the future (despite 20+ years of planning)
As the Marin Independent Jounral said in its endorsement:
“It is a Sausalito tradition to stop proposals and promise a better plan in the future.””
We see the same tactics nationally: fear, half-truths, spin, and poll-tested language designed to make us afraid. These tactics can work—and when they work, we get more of them.
But its up to us if we want to live like this.
This is our vote for a different future.
President Obama called for Hope over Fear.
His anthem wasn’t: “No we can’t”
It was: “ Yes, we can.”
I believe we need to trust ourselves that we can take this small step forward.
I hope you will Vote YES on Measure X.
PS: If you have the time to dig deeper:
Here are emblematic messages from an artist, marina steward, entrepreneur, maritime organization, fisherman, and maritime leaders who are being suffocated by our current laws.
Here is Heath Ceramics pleading for help. Do we value Heath?
Click to read the endorsements from the Marin Independent Journal here, the Greenbelt Alliance, the Sustainable Waterfront Association.
Here is a like to the SFChronicle polemic on Measure X.
Here is a description of the mind numbing multi-year process that will still exist after Measure X that ensures we can control the appearance of anything actually permitted; regardless of what is proposed.
Watch the whole Measure X debate here.
Here is an FAQ and a Fact vs. Fiction, if you have time to read.
Here is how CAST, and MALT are examples of what is empowered by Measure X. Both these protective mechanisms take money. And Measure X is a pathway to funding things like this.
