• Congratulations To New City Councilmember Dustin Nigg

Local returns first:
Welcome to the City Council Dustin Nigg.

Dustin Nigg with his wife Desiree at his side. 

The early vote count had Nigg up about 65% to 35%. It makes me wonder who voted for a candidate (his opponent) that publicly withdrew from the contest a week after she entered it. 

Four of the Wildomar city council members at the watch party on election night.
From left to right Tim Walker, Dustin Nigg, Bridgette Moore and Ben Benoit.

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Thankfully there are more sane people than cranks & dullards in District 2. With 50% of the vote counted he had 622 votes. 

Update: Most recent total shows 1,299 votes to 718.

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As for the rest of the races, it was good to see that Assemblywoman Melissa Melendez was re elected. 

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I had a much longer blog in mind, but after writing it, I junked most of it. This has been an interminable election season and I'm guessing you already know who won the big contest. Hint, he has the fancy hairdo and a perma-tan.

Same goes for the statewide props. If you are concerned, you already know about them. If not, I'm still not going to bother with them here.
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Closing the book on Measure V

Congratulations to all the supporters for their victory. I was the odd man out on this issue, but all the Measure V supporters I came in contact with were as delightful as can be. We need more of that when there are political differences, not less. 

So allow me to give some final thoughts on Measure V.

Though I was assured that much (most) of the bonds were going to infrastructure (new classrooms) I'm still not sanguine about bonds paying for other things, even if it's not the lion's share of the bonds.

I was on a facebook thread the other day that was discussing Measure V... and I learned something. 

I only wish I'd talked to Lake Elsinore councilmember Steve Manos before writing my blog against Measure V (or my opinion to the Press Enterprise).

My problem all along has been that borrowing money with bonds is too expensive for things other than land and buildings. I said that I might be for Measure V if it new schools were part of it.

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Lo and behold, new schools are part of it. Just no where near Wildomar, based on Steve Manos' reply.

That means, with the passage of Measure V, Wildomar voters have, rather generously, chosen to help Lake Elsinore build some schools (I'm assuming that Wasson Creek is in the LE, because it sure ain't in the W)

I'm pretty sure that the schools in Wildomar weren't built with Lake Elsinore money.

To be fair, I did claim "dibs" on a recent park expansion paid for by LE, across the street from Wildomar, so it's only fair that we help them build a school or two... right?

Link to blog about park expansion

If this were a lopsided baseball trade, I'd compare it to the Mets letting Nolan Ryan go in exchange for Jim Fregosi... and the Met's thought they got over too. Comparing the Ryan Express to Gary Gentry? Get outta here!
*in the above comparison, Wildomar is the Mets.

Link to 1971 NY Times Story about it

I've found that discussing Measure V has been a no win proposition, because the people in favor of V, that I've conversed with, had no problem paying $50 a year (estimated average per homeowner) and only having $34 of that actually getting into the district's hands. 

(Do the math on borrowing $105M and paying back $170M.)

We all know how short the shelf life is for all things tech. How many of you are still using your first generation iPhone, iPod or iPad?

They also seemed unfazed that any high tech merchandise, that would be procured today, would be well out of date in under a decade... yet we'd still be paying for it well past 2040.

If Measure V had been passed twenty years ago, the most modern machines of the time would have been running Win95. 

If Measure V had passed in 1996, there would still be ten more years of paying for those 1996 state of the art "high tech" machines. 

That didn't seem to resonate with some, so I went with another analogy; a refi. 

If you refinance your home, and take out an extra $10K for a vacation, you'll be paying for that vacation for the life of the loan (typically 30 years). 

Someone responded, "But the memories of that vacation will last a lifetime!" (There were no smilies or emojis so I'm guessing that was supposed to be a serious response).

Those memories had better "last a lifetime" because if you do such a thing in 2016, you'll still be paying for that trip to Hawaii after your grand kids graduate high school. 

Let's hope now that the district has secured sh'loads of Wildomar largess, that they won't hesitate a moment longer on approving the signal in front of David A Brown middle school.

As an aside, I was trying to research how the [newer] schools in Wildomar were financed. Unless I'm mistaken, they were done by Mello Roos taxes/CFDs, but since I couldn't find the the data, I didn't add that to the meat of the blog. 

However, while searching around with those keywords I was led to a Patch article about Wildomar parks. It's dated June 28, 2012. It was discussing the yet to be named Measure Z, which restored the park funding.

Link to Patch story

Read the article, but more fun than that, skip down to the comments (for some reason they are in the wrong order. You need to start with the comment that is furthest down the page).

Though there were many timeless comments by Wildomar's queen of mean, and people trying to battle her, my favorite was by Kenny Mayes to a guy named Gil.

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"Fame," they say, "is what you do today". What you did yesterday is only good to wrap fish in.

— EG Marshall, 1914-1998

Wildomar Rap would like to see you try wrapping fish in it.