Inside UDJ by Editor K.C. Meadows

I heard today from the folks who are circulating petitions to reverse the Board of Supervisors' 43 percent pay raise that signatures are coming in fast - about 100 an hour when they have volunteers out there. They are collecting signatures at Safeway, Albertson's (which will officially become a Lucky's store this week, which is why our readers got a Lucky's supermarket sales insert in their papers this week) and Raley's with a goal of 4,000 which will give them a cushion for the 3,000 approved signatures they need to get the reversal on the November ballot. They'll be out there in force Friday, Saturday and Sunday. By the way, if they get 3,000 signatures, my understanding is they can take the petitions straight to the Board of Supervisors and the board can then vote to simply accept the reversal and do what the voters want without going to the ballot, or vote to put the measure on the ballot. My advice would be to simply reverse the raise right now and set up a citizen committee to look at the issue. I think they could find seven people who would sit on a committee which would actually give them a raise, but perhaps not such a big one. Pretty much everyone agrees that tying their raises to the judges was greedy and uncalled for. If they tie it to anything, it should be the county employees' rate of increase. And under all circumstances they should be required to vote on it.
On another superviso rtopic, I am hearing that it is fast becoming common knowledge that the travel policy that the board rewrote to give themselves both mileage and fat travel stipends is illegal under California law.