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Y'all need to get out there and vote today if you haven't already.
The San Francisco ballot is HUGE this year. 20 local propositions and 7 state, plus the usual slew of elected offices up to State Governor, yielding a total of four big ol' ballot cards. Some fairly major issues are on the ballot: $13 billion bond issue for improving school facilities statewide, $1.6 billion to repair and quake-proof the water supply infrastructure for the Bay Area, and the like. There are also some pretty trivial issues in question, like "do we change the way the city decides which newspapers it publishes official notices in?"
I don't really know how it works in other places, but here in SF we have a Board of Supervisors, one each elected from 11 districts of the city, who share power with the Mayor. It's all pretty leftish here in the city, and you have to start thinking in the finer grain of "liberal" versus "progressive" versus "radical", but the Mayor is perceived as being owned by special interests, while most of the supervisors tend to populist representation of their neighborhoods. We live right on the edge of the largely-Hispanic Mission district, and up until this year were represented by district 9's Tom Ammiano, the gay stand-up comedian who had a pretty good run against Willie Brown in the last Mayoral race. However, the district boundaries were just revised, and a section of the border between districts 8 and 9 moved over a block. We're on that section of the border. We're on that block. So we're suddenly part of the Castro-Noe Valley neighborhood, upper-middle-class yuppies and guppies. Since the odd and even numbered districts elect their supervisors in alternate elections, we wind up voting for our Supervisor in two successive elections due to the redistricting, which feels kind of like we're getting away with something.
The redistricting itself is kind of amusing. According to the "Task Force on Redistricting" web site, the factors taken into account in setting the borders include:
• US Constitution & SF Charter rule requiring districts equal in population,
• Federal Voting Rights Act rule against diluting the voting power of minorities,
• Consititutional rule prohibiting use of race as the principal factor in redistricting,
• SF Charter Requirement to keep "communities of interest" in the same districts and use adjusted census data where available, and,
• 2002 Election Task Force goals of considering "propensity to vote" and maintaining neighborhood boundaries, commercial districts and grouping related institutions.
The second and third items are my favorites. You can't split an ethnic neighborhood and dilute the voting power of minorities, but you can't split the city up on racial lines either. The solution is to tack a more or less complete ethnic neighborhood (like the Mission) onto a more or less complete white neighborhood (Bernal Heights) and call that a district (District 9 in this case). Seems to work OK, but what do I know? You can see the changes made here — see that little sliver between 8 and 9? We live right in the middle of it.
