Before I get to Todd Hemingson’s latest amazing chutzpah, I did promise this and then ran out of time, and then a week on the murderfoot medicine sapped all my energy:
Yes. Agreed. Post is in the mental hopper. RT @teddholladay: @mdahmus Shouldn't you apologize, too? You voted for the guy, after all.
— M1EK D (@mdahmus at all the other places) (@mdahmus) March 27, 2015
so here it is, finally:
I was wrong about Steve Adler.
I wanted to believe that the “new way forward” meant taking transit seriously on technical grounds and not being beholden to the bad actors controlling the ANC-aligned “neighborhood associations”1. (which Martinez sometimes tacked towards and sometimes tacked against). I endorsed him, modestly, in his runoff. But that was all wishful thinking. Wishful thinking that he was aligned more to rich developers than rich landowners, basically. His ads about permitting fooled me, as did meetings he had in private with people whose judgement I trust.
As much of an unmitigated disaster as Mike Martinez was at Capital Metro, basically meaning that his governance strategy was going along with every stupid idea they ever came up with, Steve Adler is even worse – with the continued push for the homestead exemption, pandering to the aforementioned bad actors hiding behind the term “neighborhoods” worse than I ever imagined possible on every development issue2, hiring Capital Metro’s chief eel as his new chief of staff3, and most recently, an absurd traffic strategy which boils down to “every stupid thing your ignorant idiot suburban coworkers think will fix everything, a lot of which we were already doing, and none of which will do jack shit given that the grid is just fundamentally over capacity”. The traffic strategy shows he is a suburbanite, or just cravenly and ignorantly pandering to same, but either way, there is no way that ends well for the city.
I should have seen this coming, when he backed his campaign treasurer’s idiocy about the Guadalavaca bus lanes, but he fooled me (and others I trust). I also wanted to punish Martinez for his incredibly bad leadership of the transit agency and vote out anybody who voted for Prop 1, but as others pointed out at the time, it was possible to end up with somebody even worse by doing that. And it sure looks like we did.
Mea culpa.
Next in this series: I was wrong about AURA.
changed from ‘neighborhoods’ in first draft, see Roger’s comment ↩
his comment that he wanted to “let neighborhoods decide on loosening rules for ADUs” = nobody will ever build any more ADUs ↩
which some people at AURA actually thought was a good thing, which will lead into the next episode in the Mea Culpa series. There is no universe in which making that guy your chief of staff is a sign of anything but ignorance on transit and sliminess on everything else. ↩
