I think I’ve met most of the members of the Sacramento Bee editorial board. They seem like smart, serious journalists who care about the truth. So I’m always a little caught off guard when they completely make shit up in their editorials.

It never gets weirder and more distorted than when they write about charter reform, and the ongoing fallout from Mayor Kevin Johnson’s three-and-a-half-year-long strong mayor effort.  And today was a doozy.  (WTF, I just wrote doozy. It’s late.)

As you know, the Sacramento City Council on Tuesday said, “enough,” and voted to put a measure on the November ballot, asking voters if they want to approve a charter commission to consider any possible reforms, including a strong mayor form of government, maybe an independent redistricting commission, or an ethics commission, to name a few.

To help with their decision, the City Attorney provided a two-year estimate, totalling $621,000 in administrative and election costs, that would apply if voters say yes to a charter commission.

That includes the costs of this November’s ballot question (maximum of $205,100), costs for existing city staff to help the commission with research and meetings over two years ($316,578), and the cost of putting any of the commission’s recommendations on the ballot in 2014 (somewhere between $35,000 and $150,000, they went with the high number to be conservative.)

Keep in mind that first number, the $205,000 in election costs, assumes that the charter commission is the only local measure on the ballot in November. It won’t be, there’s also a sales tax measure and a measure doing away with the claw headed to the same ballot, and they will share some of those costs. And the rest of the costs don’t apply at all, unless the voters approve the charter commission measure.  Which is no sure thing, since as the Bee editors rightly point out, the public is not clamoring for charter change. (Other than the mayor, of course.. But this fact never occurred to Team Scoopy during strong mayor 1, or strong mayor 2, or strong mayor 3. Then it was all, “let the people vote.”)

In any case, in today’s editorial the Sac Bee editorial board shorthands all those possible costs as simply, “…the council’s 6-3 vote to spend $621,000 to place charter review on the ballot.”

Which is completely, 100 percent wrong and misleading and just wrong wrong wrong.

Then they follow with an equally warped quote from Dustin Smith of the Sacramento Police Officers Association, “The money they voted to spend on charter review could pay for six police officers.”

No, that’s absolutely not true, because the council didn’t vote to spend any money on charter review. They voted to ask us if we think it’s worth spending that money.

(Oh hey, that reminds me. Remember when we got to vote on those hundreds of thousands of dollars in consultant fees and staff time the city spent on a financing plan for a new Kings arena? No?)

The Bee’s City Hall reporter Ryan Lillis is, of course, more conscientious about the facts. But unfortunately he even gives the $621,000 lie some cover in his story today, by running a similar quote from Dustin Smith and never correcting him. And he never makes it clear that there’s no money spent on a charter commission until and unless the voters say they want a charter commission to go forward.

The Bee editorial concludes with this exasperated question, “Is it too late to pull this wrongheaded proposal back?”

I don’t know, is it too late to pull this wrongheaded editorial back? Because I don’t think the usual clarification on page A2 is going to cut it.

So the Mayor is “refocusing” his efforts on the arts.  Short of press conferences and announcements, I am a little confused about what those efforts have been up until now. I continuously hear from artists in the trenches that they have no idea where the so-called “effort” has benefited actual artists (for full disclosure, I have been married to one of those artists for over two decades).

I usually don’t lift an entire paragraph from the Sacramento Bee, but after reading the story on the subject this morning, I had to read the following three times.  And I am still not sure what it means:

The initiative is focusing on bringing the arts community together with novel projects such as a recently started Flywheel Creative Economy Incubator.  That effort will bring together 10 artists, nonprofits and social entrepreneurs the initiative feels are doing cutting edge work, in a partnership with Sacramento’s Urban Hive.

WTF?  Ok, all the gobbledygook aside, how will “the initiative” determine what “cutting edge work” is, and who will be the arbiter of cutting edge?

With all due respect to the Mayor, I sincerely appreciate him bringing to the light the need to highlight the arts in Sacramento.  But this new effort just sounds a lot like another reason to issue another press release.  I hope I am wrong.

Kudos to the Red Rabbit

Public art is often a touchy subject.  It is the quintessential damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation.  You are just not going to please everybody.  But it is an important part of our region’s landscape.

Two cases in point:  The Indio Arch and the Red Rabbit.

When the City installed Gerald Walburg’s Indio Arch on K Street at 4th Street, it was very controversial.  Back then, City leaders were attacked for spending public money on the piece.  Then fast forward two years and it started showing up on postcards as a cherished Sacramento landmark (still is).

More recently, the Sacramento Metropolitan Arts Commission and the County were criticized for the purchase and installation of the Red Rabbit (“Leap”) in the new gazillion dollar Sacramento International Airport Terminal B.  Everybody seemed to have an opinion on the 56-foot sculpture by Lawrence Argent, and many not good.  Now, it seems like Shelly Willis, Manager of Sacramento’s Art in Public Places program deserves kudos for the selection of the piece, and sooner rather than later.  Leap was recently chosen as one of 50 winning entries (out of 500) by Americans for the Arts Public Art Network.  Look for those postcards shortly.