Judge grants a restraining order in petition count

Comment 1 by Barry Parr  on  Jul 14  at  2:20am  •  All my comments • 

Says the judge, “The right to vote is the most cherished right we have in this country. We have people dying in foreign countries for this right.”

That’s true. They’re there because a lot of people in Florida were denied their right to vote in 2000.

Comment 2 by Mary Bordi  on  Jul 14  at  11:08am  •  All my comments • 

Doesn’t anyone do math these days?

All the news reports I’ve seen so far claim that 5340 signatures were turned in and that 34% were found to be “invalid” or some such thing. What is 34% of 5340?

It’s 1816.

Huh? The articles say that 1757 were determined to be invalid.

There’s a simple answer. The 5340 signature figure included the “property owner assessed valuation” signatures.That was a whole different signature gathering effort, although it was accomplished by the same folks. These signatures included many landowners outside the area who had not been informed of the annexation. As I understand it, they are to be verified by the assessor’s office.

So anyway, my point is, that the 34% is actually based on a figure in the area of 5167 registered voter signatures that were turned in. As far as I know the “property owner-assessed valuation” signatures either haven’t been verified yet orthe figures haven’t been made public.

Sorry to appear so nit-picky, but too many people today don’t question the figures and ask themselves where they came from. Not that this changes anything!

I would have thought that the newspaper reporters, in order to be factual, would have caught this.

Comment 3 by Barry Parr  on  Jul 14  at  12:30pm  •  All my comments • 

According to the certification by the county, 5,340 protests were delivered and 5,340 were verified. Of those 3583 were found sufficient and 1,757 were found “not sufficient” and reasons were given.

But you’re right that 1,757 is 32.9% of 5,340 — not 34%.

There were 341 protests found “not sufficient” because they were “not registered”. It’s possible that this includes some of the absentee property owners. It’s impossible to say without more information.

Comment 4 by Barry Parr  on  Jul 14  at  12:34pm  •  All my comments • 

The following eyewitness account of the hearing was emailed to me by Kathryn Slater-Carter:

I attended the hearing in Half Moon Bay Foundation v. LAFCo hearing in Redwood City yesterday. It went on from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. with a break from about 11:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. The court heard testimony from several individuals opposed to the annexation including Terry Gossett, Bob Braitman (currently Executive Officer of Contra Costa County LAFCo and a “for-hire consultant) and Frank Iwama (of Counsel to the Hannig law firm which is representing Braun and Save Our Bay). Of particular interest, Terry Gossett testified that he had personally “touched” each of the approx. 5,000+ protest forms that were submitted to LAFCo AND that he had altered many of them to add additional information which was available to him from the voter registration roles. His testified that his group had created a data base from the petitions it had collected. Bob Braitman gave vague and rambling testimony with much personal opinion and few actual facts.

During the afternoon, David Tom of County Elections gave excellent testimony attesting to the fact that Elections acted according to the Government and Elections code and had done its best to consistently, fairly and openly process the protests that were submitted. He said it is “highly unusual” to have so many duplicates and altered forms.

Judge Forcum set another court date, July 22, for a full evidentiary hearing on this issue and directed County Elections to count the number of protests where PO boxes were given and deemed invalid.

Interestingly, the judge persevered with this directive despite the fact that County Counsel forcefully made the point that even if all the protests deemed invalid because of changed address information were counted there still would not be a sufficient number for an election. The judge admitted that the evidentiary hearing might be “an academic exercise” but felt that the issue needs a full trial. He said he found no fault with the elections count but chided LAFCo for taking a conservative interpretation of the government codes detailing the acceptable protest forms. LAFCo had determined that petitions altered by someone other than the signatory were invalid.

The Half Moon Bay Coastside Foundation aka Save Our Bay spent considerable time attempting introduce issues not in its original complaint and attempting to persuade the judge to just stop the court proceedings and call an election. I was impressed that the judge stuck to the original complaint and did not expand the scope of the hearing.

It was interesting to note that when the judge did set this for trial the HMBCoastside Foundation wanted the trial date set far beyond the time for this issue to be put on the November election. The judge, consistent with his concern for the vote, set the hearing for 9 am July 22.

A much more objective description of the proceedings in Judge Forcum’s court may be found at: http://www.sanmateocountytimes.com/Stories/0,1413,87~11268~2271219,00.html

The court-ordered re-evaluation of the rejected protest petitions began at 3PM yesterday (Wednesday, 14 July). All previous observers (including my wife and I) were notified with a phone call about noon the same day by elections officials. As judge Forcum suspected, many of the formerly rejected petitions are now being found to be valid.