On the eve (hopefully) of the city council vote to suspend scam-era operations until Marty's task farce finishes it's work on the issue, it comes as no surprise that 67% of Eye readers wanted to get rid of the traffic scam. In last week's unscientific poll, 46% wanted to scrap the program and refund the fines, 21% simply wanted the program scraped, 7% wanted to lower the fines again, 25% wanted the program left alone, 1% didn't know, and 1% didn't care (read the results here).
No matter how you look at it 67% is a very large section of our readership population. It would be wise for the council to consider this system's growing unpopularity before they decide not to vote for a moratorium.
All of which brings to mind another issue. Councilor Winter must have the votes to suspend the rules to allow his moratorium to be even discussed. An easy out for wimpy councilors would be to simply vote against suspending the rules; which would mean that Councilor Winter's bill wouldn't be heard at this council meeting.
We've urged you to contact your councilors before and we're about to do it again. If you have already sent an email to the council - good work, but you might want to do it again tomorrow. The council has to realize that there are serious issues with the entire system from its claims of lowering accidents (it doesn't) to its complete and utter lack of due process that could more accurately be described as fraud.
We've received a copy of the class action lawsuit that was filed last Friday and have had a chance to skim through the filing. From our layman's perspective it looks damn good. We'll be talking about it more next week and we'll make a copy of it available for your own review as well.
This week's Eye Poll takes us back to politics. After all of the announcing to announce the leak to announce the announcement took place, last Thursday's entry by Congressman Tom Udall was something of a let down. That being said, we're almost positive (as positive as any Eye can be this early in a race) that he'll be the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate (unless of course he's hit by one of Marty's eco-friendly extra large buses that have been seen cruising the streets of Albuquerque lately). But that's our opinion; let us know what you think in this week's Eye Poll!
-----Council Emails-----
District 1 - Ken Sanchez - ksanchez@cabq.gov
District 2 - Debbie O'Malley - domalley@cabq.gov
District 3 - Isaac Benton - ibenton@cabq.gov
District 4 - Brad Winter - bwinter@cabq.gov
District 5 - Michael Cadigan - mcadigan@cabq.gov
District 6 - Rey Garduno - tkellerman@cabq.gov (Assistant to Councilor Garduno)
District 7 - Sally Mayer - smayer@cabq.gov
District 8 - Trudy Jones - tjones@cabq.gov
District 9 - Don Harris - dharris@cabq.gov
-----Update-----
One of the emails that we have been giving out has been incorrect. Rgarduno@cabq.gov apparently belongs to another RGarduno. We apologize for the inconvenience to Ms. Garduno.
Which brings up another gripe. Since our friends on the council have been allowed to hire their own personal assistants, they've taken their emails off the cabq.gov website and listed only their "policy analysts." We don't know about you, but those yahoos work for us and it's incumbent upon them to have a direct means of communication.
More importantly, they shouldn't be using paid staffers as a shield to keep us from taking them to task when we feel like it. They're the ones that signed up for this job and spent the money and time to be elected. (Ok... O'Malley and Garduno used our money but you get the point.) Criticism fair or not comes with the territory.
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