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Congratulations to our Associate Publisher / Editorial Director Jeremy Walsh and his wife Elise on the birth of their baby girl, Fiona Kristine Walsh, on Nov. 1!
Fiona made her appearance a bit earlier than anticipated, but at least she waited until after all the Tri-Valley candidate forums were done. (Thank you, Fiona! I owe you a cupcake on your first birthday.)
Hosting forums and covering elections are among the most important work we do. Every other year our staff embarks on three to four months of planning, dozens of interviews and a lot of writing.
I’ve been involved in election reporting for more than 30 years. It is very disheartening that every election season seems to get more and more vicious, pitting neighbor against neighbor, making me and many others long for the days before a flat-out lie posted online about a candidate wouldn’t be accepted as truth by half the population without investigation.
An October report by the Andrew Carnegie Foundation reported, “Forty-one percent of local government leaders say polarization is hurting their communities, up from 30 percent, and views of polarization nationwide remain high at 91 percent.”
The top three polarizing issues in local elections? Cost of living, taxes and housing.
In the Tri-Valley, for at least the past decade, the staff and I have heard about candidate signs being removed from public places. One year we had photos sent to us.
That was bad, but this year we received multiple reports of volunteers confronting residents at their front door and “bullying” them into removing campaign signs in their yards and replacing them with the opponent’s sign.
And, let’s face it – NextDoor can be a cesspool full of hate and half-truths, and the “moderators” are not at all moderate.
Another sign of local elections going off the rails: The amount of money in some of the Tri-Valley district races this year was startling, with one candidate raising $15,000 and another self-funding the campaign with $50,000.
Keep in mind, these are district races with the number of voters totalling approximately 13,000 and 9,600, respectively.
The vitriol in the Pleasanton mayoral race started months before Councilmember Julie Testa even announced her candidacy, but hit a crescendo in August. Former Pleasanton mayor Karla Brown’s reproachful public comment during the Aug. 11 City Council meeting about Mayor Jack Balch’s limiting a public speaker’s time was one of the most cringeworthy incidents in what was a very recognizable campaign to discredit and vilify Balch.
Balch made it clear at roughly 11:40 p.m. during the July 27 council meeting that speakers would be limited to three minutes.
In the July 27 meeting, Sandra Yamaoda was the first speaker on the topic of annexation of the Arroyo Lago development on the East Side of Pleasanton. The “senior citizen”, as Brown referred to her as in a Facebook post congratulating herself for dressing down the mayor, went past her allotted three minutes and refused to leave the podium, even as the next speaker stood next to her.
Balch told Yamaoda that her time was up and said “no thank you” when Yamaoda asked to continue, even as the next speaker was at the podium. Ignoring him, Yamaoda said “in conclusion…” Balch rapped the gavel and as she left the podium, Yamaoda was overheard saying “don’t yell at me” – but he hadn’t yelled at her.
Balch was applying the stated time limit consistently and fairly by making all speakers stick to the time limit. In other words, he was running a council meeting as the presiding officer should, applying the rules fairly and keeping the meeting on track at almost midnight. In doing so, he also respected the equal time for other audience members waiting to speak.
Brown and fellow former Pleasanton City Council majority member Valerie Arkin used that incident all the way to the bitter end of their campaigning for Testa.
It is a terrible reality that this nastiness has driven away really good candidates from public service. And the residents are the ultimate losers.
My sincere hope is that the good people of the Tri-Valley – and beyond – realize what is at stake and vote based on what a candidate can bring to the community, not on one-sided social media posts, grandstanding at public meetings or name recognition because there are more signs for a particular candidate.
Editor’s note: Gina Channell Wilcox, a journalist since 1989, has been the president and publisher of Embarcadero Media Foundation’s East Bay Division since 2006.
