On Thursday, August 14, the Mountain View Los Altos (MVLA) High School District held two ribbon-cutting ceremonies to officially open new classroom buildings at both campuses. Board President Judy Hannemann and Superintendent Barry Groves presided over the festivities. The early morning events at 8am and 9am drew light crowds of visitors, project participants and students. Mountain View mayor John Inks attended the Mountain View campus ceremony.
LWVLAMV Annual Meeting 2013 Highlights
The 43 members at the June 1st League of Women Voters Los Altos Mountain View annual business meeting elected a new board, approved a conditional change in tax status to 501c(3) –tax exempt donations– and heard Joe Simitian, two-term state Senator and our current Santa Clara County Board Supervisor, talk about Civility in Politics.
Our League of Women Voters Los Altos Mountain View chapter recommended the following for education and advocacy at the state level. (No studies were recommended.)
1. Continue working on core issues such as health care, redistricting, initiative and referendum (all)
2. Promote school safety using LWVC’s position on gun control (Dorothea Grimes-Farrow, Steve Chessin)
3. Explore public funding for early childhood education (Ellen Wheeler)
September Letter from the President
As I step into the Presidency, many thanks to Past-President Sue Graham for her extraordinary leadership, vision and commitment to make our League of Women Voters Los Altos Mountain View a respected voice on topical issues in our community. By way of introduction, I am “almost” a California native, having graduated from Gunn High School and Stanford University. I had a rewarding career in public administration with Santa Clara County and the City of Mountain View, until I retired in 2009. We are 30-year residents of Los Altos.
Plan Bay Area Approved
So What is Plan Bay Area?
Plan Bay Area charts a course for the Bay Area’s Sustainable Communities Strategy out to the year 2040. The Plan will accommodate needed growth within our nine counties while at the same time decreasing greenhouse gas emissions from cars and light trucks. Clustering housing in cities and reducing travel needs is intended to help California achieve GHG reduction under AB 32, the state’s landmark climate change legislation. —Sue Graham, VP Programs LWVLAMV
September Message from the President
As I step into the Presidency, many thanks to Past-President Sue Graham for her extraordinary leadership, vision and commitment to make our League of Women Voters Los Altos Mountain View a respected voice on topical issues in our community. By way of introduction, I am “almost” a California native, having graduated from Gunn High School and Stanford University. I had a rewarding career in public administration with Santa Clara County and the City of Mountain View, until I retired in 2009. We are 30-year residents of Los Altos.
LWVUSA Website Highlights – Fracking, Money in Politics
The League is concerned that two sites were left out of EPA Progress Report.
On May 7, 2013 the League — namely the LWVUS and 18 different state Leagues — offered comments to the Environmental Protection Agency’s Science Advisory Board on the study of the potential impacts of hydraulic fracturing on drinking water resources. [Citizens and residents] are highly dependent on the reliability of this EPA Study.
The League of Women Voters [is] . . . concerned
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Disclose Act California working its way through State Senate
The Clean Money Campaign reports that SB 52, the Disclose Act, cleared the first of seven hurdles, passing out of the state Senate Elections Committee and on to the Senate Appropriations Committee and then to the full Senate in late May.
Authored by Senators Mark Leno (SD 12) and Jerry Hill (SD 13) and sponsored by the California Clean Money Campaign, SB 52 would require political ads to show their top three funders clearly and prominently so voters know who is paying for the ads.
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Egon Terplan of SPUR on Bay Area Regional Planning
“Five Not-So-Easy Pieces” – jobs, housing, transit, taxes, climate
Excerpts From the Bay Area Monitor web site. The entire article is here.
By Alec MacDonald
For Egon Terplan – the regional planning director of SPUR (the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association) – looming questions revolve around five overlapping issues: jobs, housing, taxes, transit, and climate change. He has investigated how government manages these issues and found the Bay Area’s current system lacking — but he sees strategies for improvement that won’t necessitate a radical overhaul of existing institutions…
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Our League now posts to Facebook and Twitter
The web team has been busy setting up Facebook and twitter accounts. Much of the content on Facebook is being streamed automagically from our tweets and also from our posts on this website. Getting Twitter to stream to stream to FB was easy. There is an option right inside the Twitter application to do so. However getting a notice of a new post on this web site to go to Facebook was bewildering. We looked at a variety of Facebook 3rd party apps – NetworkedBlogs and also at delivr.it – but found them too confusing. Instead we are giving the Facebook 3rd party app Social RSS a whirl. It allegedly will it post website articles, and it also posts links back to the articles on the website. We’ll keep our fingers crossed.
Rich Gordon and Jerry Hill draw a crowd of over 100 in Los Altos
If you missed the League’s “Meet Your Local Elected Officials”event on March 3 here’s the scoop. Our event headliners, Rich Gordon and Jerry Hill discussed the top 3 priorities of the State Legislature. In the spirit of our local League’s Observer Reports, here is a transcript of the five minutes of remarks made by Rich Gordon and Jerry Hill. (Their oratorical style was preserved, but small edits were made to improve readability.)
Over 100 persons attending
As can be seen in the photo at the top, over 100 people attended the event, including about 40 officials and staff and about 60 members of the public.
Rich Gordon’s Remarks
Over the last two years the state of California has dealt with a budget deficit problem of $27 billion dollars. We cut $20 billion dollars worth of programs and services for the state. The voters in November passed prop 30 which helped us with the last 7 billion. So the governor was able to present to us at the state a balanced budget. But balanced very delicately and in a fragile kind of way. Any prolonged federal sequestration will throw that completely out of kilter. Federal funds we receive at the state will be diminished. And across the state communities will begin to experience various levels of dismay. Probably the city in the state that will be hit the hardest will be San Diego, because of the heavy military presence in that community. So we thought we had our fiscal house almost in order. But it may not be. So I expect over the next several months that will be one of the major issues we will be dealing with in Sacramento. We will work to adopt the state budget by June.
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