Friday, April 27, 2007

Yet Another Override Blunder

According to the office of Campaign and Political Finance advocates cannot accept contributions or spend money until officially forming a Ballot Committee and filing that statement of organization with the Amherst Town Clerk.

The first direct mailer from ‘The Amherst Plan Committee’ carried a postmark of April 2 (with an expensive 39 cent first class stamp) yet their Ballot Committee Form filed with the Amherst Town Clerkthe carries time/date stamp of April 3’rd (a day late and many dollars short.)

8 comments:

Rick Hood said...

I can't find anything here in this blog about what is good about the position you are taking on the override and why. All I see is knocking the other side.

The pro-override side is doing a great job of articulating it's position and is not wasting any time knocking the other side.

http://www.theamherstplan.org

Larry Kelley said...

Gee Rick, with your boo-boo sending out The Amherst Plan Committee's entire campaign strategy over a public listserve last week, and now this naive comment (hey the Blogosphere is the rough and tumble Internet) I'm amazed you make a living doing web consulting.

I try to keep things short and snappy. NO MORE OVERRIDES, or my runner up choice: ENOUGH IS ENOUGH.

Rick Hood said...

Thanks for proving my point.

Be amazed.

Larry Kelley said...

Yeah Rick, thanks for wasting my bandwidth.

I got out 47 lawn signs today (although I just received a report that two on Amity Street were vandalized), what did you do to justify your Overriding existence?

Rick Hood said...

It's not your bandwidth - blogger is free.

Thanks for putting more signs out - it's motivating our side.

Rick Hood said...

Oh, and I helped organize the info session last night, videotaped it and got it to ACTV to try to help educate people instead of just telling them how to vote.

Be "short and snappy" if you like. People who think need more than that.

Larry Kelley said...

Yeah, and that "info session" you helped organize, unlike Blogger, was not free. The taxpayers footed the bill.

Use of the Middle School auditorium, not to mention the School Superintendent and Town Manager, the two highest paid bureaucrats in town.

And according to the email you accidentally sent to everyone last week you even tried to get the Town Manager to persuade ACTV to cover the event. I guess Mr. Shaffer was not overly persuasive, if you had to cover it yourself.

I also heard the turnout was lousy, around 20 to 25 (pathetic is a better description).

Preaching to the converted (like signature ads) can be effective, as long as the flock is rather large.

Rick Hood said...

Hmmm… a public building and public employees being used to inform and educate the public. Where have I heard that before? Oh yeah, public schools.

It doesn’t surprise me that you'd rather the public stays in the dark, since you seem to be fine with turning out the lights on our school kids by cutting a total of 18% of teachers in two years (7% in 2007 and 11% in 2008).

Cuts required for a no-override 2008 budget:
Regional schools = $1,333,516
Amherst elementary schools = $706,447

The average teacher costs $52,000. Do the math. Administrators and clerical personnel are being canned too – which is just great since it loads up teachers with work that those support people would otherwise be doing. Fewer teachers frazzled with extra administrative work. Nice.

So what do we tell these kids? Stuff it? Suck it up?

Sure, why not. Let's just pocket the income tax cuts we got from Bush and Romney, cut education and pass along a huge federal deficit to our kids. Nice. Very nice.

The greatest generation we are not.

PS: If it helps any, I agree with you on Cherry Hill. We should not spend $1 on golf when we need every dollar we can get for education (and fire and police).