Apr 07 2007
The Unofficial Official Outcome
Welcome to Scuttlebutt Pipeline! If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed or sign up to receive email notifications of new entries.
Also, don't forget to check out Fifty for the Fall, your chance to win $50 cash - no strings attached!
The “official” outcome may not be announced until Tuesday but the fact remains, the Spaceport Tax has been approved and it is a go.
At the end of Thursday, ballots in favor of the tax totaled 8,947 — or 50.8 percent — while ballots against totaled 8,682, or 49.2 percent.Some spaceport tax proponents watching the election review appeared jubilant soon after realizing the results had gone their way. (source)
There really is no denying this no matter how much I may want to. In the end it looks like money and pretty flowery words won out over common sense. And while I realize you can’t win all the time, I had hoped that the outcome would be anything but this. I hope that this will not come back to bite the citizens of Dona Ana county in the butt, but somehow I doubt it.
“This is another situation where money topped the power of the people,” Vado resident and activist Mitch Boyer said. “If we had anywhere close to the amount of money they had we would have won it because the information we were disseminating, once people looked at it, they changed their minds. We just didn’t have the resources to do that.” (source)
Damn Straight.
It’s awful how pretty words often win over common sense. People are just dumb.
Yes it is sad to see just what money can buy. In this case it was a massive snow job. It really upset me everyday to check the mail and see more and more fliers, pamphlets, and notices supporting the Spaceport Tax. All of them were high quality print jobs as well. Not to mention the numerous billboards, banners, and commercials that advocated the tax. In the end how could we the opponents compete with that? Despite the fact that all information given out was always accurate, factual, and well backed up, the word could just not get out there as well as the proponents. It is true that many people, once they read more of the facts changed their tune, but when you can only reach a small percentage of the people and your opponent has several government officials (including the governor) lending aid and funds, well it’s just an uphill battle.