Rounding up Tuesday's results

Last night was a big win for Democrats throughout the country, with wins in Maine, Virginia, New Jersey, and elsewhere around the country. In Marin, 20 nonpartisan seats to community service district (CSD) boards and municipal councils were up for grabs. How the seats went says a lot about where the county is going - and what kind of people Marinites are becoming.

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Planning as physical philosophy

The Papers Series are lightly edited papers I wrote for classes at Cornell University as I studied for a Master's in Regional Planning. Often, references will be to printed books rather than to websites. If you want to check it out yourself, contact me and I will see if I have a scanned copy available.

This paper was originally written at the end of my first semester. It details the evolution of my understanding of planning as a discipline, not just as a subject area, through the lens of the semester's readings.

Since I began the program at Cornell, my thoughts and ideas about planning and planners have changed markedly, though I would classify the change as evolutionary rather than revolutionary. My once-clear perspective as a Glaeserian urbanist has become clouded by notions of justice, equity, participation, democracy, and humanity’s aptitude to tear down each of those. That said, the cloudiness in my outlook is one of added complexity, not of rejection. Like salt dissolving into water, I suspect these notions will dissolve into my urbanism, leaving something that looks similar to the original product but is quite different in taste and use.

My background as a blogger and advocate in Washington, DC, and Marin County steeped me in the world of activism, which stretches beyond the world of traditional planning and into engineering and politics. Alon Levy divided a subset of these activists, transit activists, into what he termed technicals and politicals:

Politicals are the people who tend to trust the transit authorities, support a general expansion of all rail transit projects, and believe the primary problem is defeating oil-funded anti-transit lobbies. Technicals are the people who tend to distrust what the authorities say, and prefer their own analysis or that of technically-minded activists; they support transit but are skeptical about many projects, and treat agency inertia and turf wars as the primary obstacles for transit revival. [1]

While Levy was concerned with transit activists only, the distinction is usefully applied to planning activists as a whole. In my writing I have striven to be technically minded first, leading me to believe that poor planning outcomes were fundamentally problems of rules and subsidies rather than inherent injustice. These were problems of “agency inertia” rather than unspoken bias or injustice, and I wrote from this perspective. [2a, 2b, 2c, 2d] As I anticipated Cornell, I thought that being able to easily discourse on FAR, traffic flow, zoning, bike lanes, rail procurement, and a host of other topics that I believed were core to planning would prepare me for class. I was wrong.

The great theme of my first semester was the exploration of justice and equity. From Samuel P. Hays [3] to June Manning Thomas [4] and a huge body of literature between and beyond, planning has roots that extend past the physical and deep into the philosophical. Planners are not simply engineers who must play politics to be allowed to do quality work, as Levy’s technicals might want. No, planning arises from the very political concerns of justice. Any answer to the question, “How ought we live?” must necessarily include economics and planning - the "we" in that question - as well as personal ethics and morality.

Though, as a planning course, we did not explore the question of how we ought to live directly, we did touch on the effects whatever answer must have on planning. In short, these principles are:

  • The promotion of economic equality
  • The promotion of equitable power distribution
  • The recognition and celebration of diversity in all forms
  • Reflection upon one’s own failures and successes

None of these planning principles deal with physical planning. Instead, planners must place those physical aspects of the profession in a subordinate position to justice. To this technically-minded armchair planner/blogger, this inversion of priorities within the planning profession was a surprise, though in retrospect it ought not to have been.

My undergraduate education in politics was steeped in concerns of justice even though contemporary politics rarely addresses justice directly. Rather, justice must be worked out through public policies. As a field with ties to many public policy arenas, planning must also look to justice as a guiding light. Curiously, these principles were outlined in papers and books long before the concept of justice itself was analyzed by planners [5a, 5b]. The success of Susan Fainstein’s The Just City [6] and Leonie Sandercock’s Towards Cosmopolis [7] strongly implies that there was a yearning for planning-focused philosophical examinations of the nature of justice, but the paucity of work on the subject prior to Cosmopolis implies that the cart came before the horse.

Although not as surprising as the importance of justice to planning, the prominence of politically left-wing solutions to myriad planning problems was unexpected. Bill Goldsmith’s twin lectures [8] on the progressive city, for example, were stridently and proudly leftist. [Note: the lectures were class lectures and are unavailable. However, Goldsmith's book, Saving Our Cities, was the source for much of series and is therefore recommended.] Dolores Hayden’s discussion of gender and city planning led to a decidedly collectivist model [9]. Sandercock praises the activist planner who leaves her career behind to fight for the underclass [10]. Meanwhile, Smart Growth activists (for example James Bacon [11], Streetfilms [12], and David Schaengold [13]) have actively tried to appeal to an economically conservative audience that would find such analyses repugnant.

The contrast between these two thrusts of planning thought is striking. Social justice is firmly based in progressive and left-wing theory, while prosaic discussions of urban finance find their basis in classical economics and right-wing theory. Although I expected some emphasis upon the former rather than the latter, I did not expect the political left to so dominate the field.

I wish to bring a variety of things forward with me into my planning practice, but perhaps nothing is more important than the impossibility of making people good. Although hardly a new concept, the at times utopian, at times downtrodden perspectives of Marxist and neoliberal urbanists alike remind me of the folly of trusting people to do the right thing. Neither Marxism nor neoliberalism offer systems that get people to actually abandon injustice. Rather, they both seek ways to restrain the fundamentally flawed nature of humanity.

In a planning practice, then, we must always be aware of the infinite creativity of people to seek their own well-being at the expense of others. No matter how great our plan, someone will probably find a way to muck it up. Since we must also be optimistic, as we planners ought expect our plans to be followed to some degree, our aim ought to be to be clear-eyed optimists who will expect failure to lurk around every corner.

When failure or success do come, self-reflection as described by Raphaël Fischler [14] must be at the core of my practice. Why did that meeting work and this one did not? What has gone right with that project after 5, 10, or 15 years and what has gone wrong? Did I bake failure into the project, or were outside forces at work? How might I inoculate my projects against such outside forces in the future?

Self-reflection must also mean a constant search for a truer meaning of justice. Justice, the context of planning, goes beyond one's personal definition of what is just and must respect for others’ definitions of justice. If I allow my own concepts of justice to fossilize, I risk losing some of my capacity to respect and honor diverse ideologies. Given that planners are also called to a more equitable power distribution, I must especially approach disempowered communities with humility. Self-righteousness is antithetical to the aim of both the former aim (respecting and honoring ideologies other than my own) and the latter (empowerment of the disempowered).

The first semester of CRP was an unexpected and delightful surprise. It was far more introspective, theoretical, and exciting than I had ever imagined it to be. Planning itself is clearly quite bold. As a field, it challenges how we order our society and asks us to truly be broad-minded in a way that pure political science does not. A politician must eventually find a constituency and find how to work justice within the confines that constituency sets, but a planner is called to form a more just society beyond whatever constituency she may be most comfortable with. I am happy to have joined that calling.

Works Cited

[1] “Politicals vs. Technicals: The Primary Division of Transit Activists,” Pedestrian Observations, June 28, 2011.

[2] David Edmondson, “A Greater Marin,” The Greater Marin, March 19, 2012; David Edmondson, “Reducing Passenger Train Procurement Costs” (Washington, DC: Competitive Enterprise Institute, June 5, 2013); David Edmondson, “Being Marin Again,” The Greater Marin, December 9, 2013; David Edmondson, “Tautological Housing Study Reminds Us That Demand Is More than Skin Deep,” The Greater Marin, February 11, 2015.

[3] “The Politics of Reform in Municipal Government in the Progressive Era,” The Pacific Northwest Quarterly 55, no. 4 (1964): 157–69.

[4] “Social Justice as Responsible Practice: Influence of Race, Ethnicity, and the Civil Rights Era,” in Planning Ideas That Matter: Livability, Territoriality, Governance, and Reflective Practice, ed. Bishwapriya Sanyal, Lawrence J. Vale, and Christina D. Rosan (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2012).

[5] John H. Mollenkopf, The Contested City (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983); Doug McAdam, Freedom Summer (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).

[6] The Just City (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011).

[7] Towards Cosmopolis: Planning for Multicultural Cities (Chichester, England: Academy Press, 1997).

[8] “The American City Today” (Lecture, Introduction to Planning Practice and History, Cornell University, October 7, 2015). See Saving Our Cities: A Progressive Plan to Transform Urban America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016).

[9] “What Would a Non-Sexist City Be Like? Speculations on Housing, Urban Design, and Human Work,” Signs, Supplement on Women and the American City, 5, no. 3 (1980): S170–87.

[10] Towards Cosmopolis.

[11] “Too Little Density, Too Much Road Surface,” Bacon’s Rebellion, November 12, 2015.

[12] Elizabeth Press, William Lind: A Conservative Voice For Public Transportation (New York: Streetfilms, 2009).

[13] “Why Conservatives Should Care About Transit,” Public Discourse, April 17, 2009.

[14] “The Reflective Practitioner,” in Planning Ideas That Matter: Livability, Territoriality, Governance, and Reflective Practice, ed. Bishwapriya Sanyal, Lawrence J. Vale, and Christina D. Rosan (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2012).

 

Election Maps for November, 2016

As anyone who follows American federal politics knows, location can mean a lot when it comes to who votes for whom. Electoral maps on the local level are rather more rare, but no less informative. Here below are the maps of relative support for selected races and candidates from the November 2016 election. (1)

(You can click on the images for a bigger size and the PDFs are available, too, by request. Feel free to request more maps in the comments section. Note that this is not the final tally but one of the interim tallies. The exact levels of support may change a bit.)

President

Hillary Clinton won every single voting precinct in the county with at least 52 percent of the vote and Donald Trump got second place in all but two precincts, each of which are worth less than 100 voters. Rather than map first and second place, then, I wondered how the voting was distributed across the county.

Tiburon, Blevedere, Ross, Corte Madera and Novato were the most conservative of Marin's cities, though in Marin that means voting for Clinton with 55-65 percent of the vote rather than 80 percent. Jill Stein did best in West Marin's villages and downtown San Rafael, and Trump did his best in Novato.

District 4 Supervisor

In Marin's marquee election, Dennis Rodoni beat out Dominic Grossi in second-round voting. Broadly speaking, Rodoni carried the northeastern half of the district with broad-based support in Woodacre, Dillon Beach, Novato, and a slice of Larkspur. Grossi took the district's southwestern half, getting support from San Rafael, Corte Madera, Mill Valley, and a handful of West Marin villages.

This mirrors the support received in the first round, indicating to me that there was not much convincing going on in the latter half of the campaign.

Proposition 64: Marijuana Legalization

As with Clinton support, no precinct in the county rejected the measure. That said, we can see that support for the measure largely followed the same lines as the presidential race: places that were cooler on Clinton were cooler on legalizing pot, and vice versa.

2016.11-Prop64-Support.jpg

Measure A: "Strong Start" quarter-cent sales tax for child services

Marin's marquee ballot initiative was much more divisive. The measure, which would have passed a quarter-cent sales tax "to fund expanded preschool, child care and health services for low-income children in Marin," (2) did not pass. Though no precinct had less than half its voters supporting the initiative, because it was a new tax it needed a two-thirds majority. There is some of the liberal/conservative split seen in these results, but at first glance it looks bit more ambiguous than in the presidential election.

Look under the hood, however, and one finds a significant correlation between Clinton support and Measure A support. Here's that scatter-plot:

Basically, for every percentage of Clinton support in a precinct, that precinct also saw a half-point more support for Measure A. That's not a one-to-one match, but it is definitely there.

So Marin does seem to have something of an ideological split. Indeed, it may be possible to use Republican and ballot measure voting patterns to mark which areas are more or less liberal than the Marin County average. What to label this divide, of course, would be quite heated: both sides want to seem mainstream (and both are!) and being "conservative" in Marin is almost seen as a character flaw. Chime in in the comments if you have ideas ("populist" vs "progressive" or something?)

The core message of this post is that Marin does have politically diverse geography beneath the liberal veneer. Understanding it should be integral to any political outreach program.

1. Marin County Elections Department. November 8, 2016 General Election Statement of Votes Cast [Internet]. 2016 [cited 2017 Feb 7]. Available from: http://www.marincounty.org/depts/rv/election-info/past-elections/page-data/tabs-collection/2016/nov-8/sovc-listing-page

2. Halstead R. Marin voters face 11 tax measures on November ballot. Marin Independent Journal [Internet]. 2016 Aug 12 [cited 2017 Feb 7]; Available from: http://www.marinij.com/article/NO/20160812/NEWS/160819921

 

Returning to the Flood

Last week, San Anselmo came within inches of yet another disastrous flood. Perhaps it’s time to revisit the flood detention basin issue.

Background

After the flood in 2005, a plan was put forward to build a flood detention basin in Memorial Park which would protect the downtown from floods by temporarily diverting water to the park during heavy storms. The town received a $8.72 million state grant to build the $17.2 million basin and planning work began. In 2015, voters rejected Measure E – without downtown’s support – which would have allowed the use of Memorial Park as a basin. The flood zone board is now trying to figure out what to do instead.

Support for Measure E. Image by the Author.

Of those currently on the council, Matt Brown and Ford Greene oppose the conversion of the park. Councilmember Brown led the charge to pass Measure E. In the same election he also ousted now-former council member and basin supporter Doug Kelly. Councilmember Greene has consistently sided with Marin’s populists on issues such as affordable housing, zoning reform, transit, and the flood basin. Both have appeared at Citizen Marin and associated group meetings. The rest of the council (Kay Coleman, Tom McInerney, and John Wright) supported the conversion of the park [1] and presumably still would if it were a possibility.

Councilmember Brown is certainly unmoved by last week’s close call. To quote the IJ, “Brown said he and many other San Anselmo residents wisely chose not to buy property in the floodplain. He said spending millions of dollars to address flooding in the Ross Valley would be ‘tantamount to a bailout of somebody’s real estate decision.’” He also voiced skepticism that the town should even pay for flood mitigation: “[H]ow how much are we willing to pay to put that plan into place? This is a multimillion-dollar project, one that I believe the people have to decide if it’s worth implementing.” [2]

Councilmember Greene doubts that the basin system would even make a difference but advocates instead for another basin in Fairfax and the demolition of 636 San Anselmo Avenue, which straddles the creek. [3] This is one of the proposals currently undergoing public comment.

What now?

The basin would have been part of the work plan for Flood Control District 9, the board charged with reducing flood risk in Ross Valley, but the rest of the work plan is still proceeding. This includes raising bridges in San Anselmo, Ross, and Fairfax; creating flood detention basins at Loma Alta and Lefty Gomez Field in Fairfax; creating additional storage capacity at Phoenix Lake; and improving the creek channel in Ross and Larkspur. [4] The conversion of Lefty Gomez Field has already inspired opposition. [5]

Of course, the Memorial Park basin was part of the overall flood mitigation strategy for the watershed and, with its demise, an alternative needs to be found. There are four alternatives currently before the district board, each of which costs approximately the same as the Memorial Park conversion. You can read all about them here, but the gist of them is that each would be disruptive somewhere. The No Basin Alternative involves heavy roadwork on the Sir Francis Drake Boulevard bridge. The Sleepy Hollow alternative involves a detention basin at Brookside Elementary. Councilmember Greene’s preferred alternative would involve at least partially demolishing two of downtown San Anselmo’s iconic buildings. [6]

It is a shame that downtown San Anselmo has to endure not just neglect from its neighborhoods but active opposition to its success. A town ought to be more than a commodity to be used but a community that sticks together and looks out for one another. Downtown is supposed to be the heart of that community.

Works Cited

[1] Richard Halstead, “Dueling Ballot Measures over Flood Control Divide San Anselmo,” Marin Independent Journal, September 26, 2015; Peter Seidman, “Shelter from the Storm,” Pacific Sun, May 4, 2015.

[2] Richard Halstead, “Ross Valley Flood Scare Brings Calls for Action,” Marin Independent Journal, January 13, 2017.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Marin County Department of Public Works, “FZ9 Project Fact Sheets,” Marin County Watershed Program, accessed January 18, 2017.

[5] “Save Lefty Gomez Field,” accessed January 18, 2017.

[6] Liz Lewis, “Update-Analysis of Replacement Project Alternatives for DWR Grant” (San Anselmo, CA: Flood Control Zone 9 Advisory Board, June 21, 2016).

Supervisor races were all about geography

The June 7 primary election gave us political junkies a much-needed look at temperature of Marin County's electorate. In lieu of polls, it's easy to imagine the loudest voices are also the most politically powerful, but that doesn't seem to be the case this year. Instead, geography was destiny, with incumbents swinging to large victories in incorporated areas and challengers finding difficulty breaking out of their unincorporated enclaves. In West Marin, it was a classic case of North vs. South.

These maps were created using the First Count data released by the elections office on June 10. Full data counts won't be available until next week. A brief update will outline what changed once these data are released.

District 2: Katie Rice, Kevin Haroff, Frank Egger

Image by the author. Click to enlarge.

This election pitted incumbent Katie Rice against Larkspur councilmember Kevin Haroff and former Fairfax councilmember (now Ross Valley Sanitary District board member) Frank Egger. Haroff was endorsed by the Citizen Marin coalition and came out early against the Larkspur Station Area Plan. Egger orchestrated rezoning large chunks of downtown Fairfax to include more parking a few years ago and has called for more parking around Larkspur Landing.

First, Rice won every precinct and won the district with a whopping 57 percent. Nowhere did she earn fewer votes than her challengers. However, these two split the Citizen Marin vote, and there are areas where Rice won less than the combined totals of her challengers.

Rice was strongest in Gerstle Park, downtown San Rafael, and Larkspur, but would have likely lost Ross, Greenbrae, and northern Fairfax had she only faced one challenger. Egger was strongest in Fairfax, as he often is, but failed to make a good showing elsewhere. Haroff showed strongest in Ross and Greenbrae but did not do so well in his home city.

District 3: Kate Sears and Susan Kirsch

Image by the author. Click to enlarge.

Incumbent Kate Sears beat back a vigorous challenge from Citizen Marin co-founder Susan Kirsch who arguably started her campaign almost two years ago.

Strawberry vigorously pushed back against a then-years-old Priority Development Area, arguing it was a way for Sears to ram through new housing. Though that anger and resentment are largely in the past, its marks remain on this electoral stage, with Kirsch handily winning the Strawberry Peninsula and narrowly earning the support of nearby unincorporated neighborhoods on the Tiburon Peninsula.

Tam Valley/Homestead Valley/Almonte, home to Citizen Marin ally Sustainable TamAlmonte and numerous protests over Muir Woods tourists, however, went to Sears, as did all the incorporated towns in the district. Sears’ strongest support came from Marin City, possibly indicating that attempts to make inroads there by Kirsch and Community Venture Partners’ Bob Silvestri have not been terribly successful electorally. Sausalito, home to Citizen Marin allies and councilwomen Linda Pfeifer and Jill Hoffman, also went strongly for Sears.

District 4: The West Marin melee

Image by the author.

The chaotic 8-way race to replace Steven Kinsey resulted in a runoff between first-place Dennis Rodoni and second-place Dominic Grossi. No doubt the various endorsing bodies will be looking hard at the positions of both as progressive Wendi Kallins (frequently misspelled Wendy) and Citizen Marinite Al Dugan both failed to make the top two.

Rodoni, Grossi, and Kallins, along with 8th-place finisher Mari Tamburo, each claimed victory in at least one precinct. Rodoni’s support was concentrated in the urban areas of District 4, such as Larkspur and Novato; Grossi won the rural ranchlands of West Marin, as is befitting a rancher; and Kallins won her home of Forest Knolls, Olema, and San Geronimo. Dugan’s support, such as it was, came from East Marin, implying his platform of traffic and pension reform just don’t resonate out West.

EDIT: [A typo in my map reversed Rodoni and Grossi, which gives us an interesting chance at counterfactuals. Here's my alternative, corrected analysis:]

Rodoni, Grossi, and Kallins, along with 8th-place finisher Mari Tamburo, each claimed victory in at elast one precinct. Rodoni's support was concentrated in the township and urban areas of southern West and East Marin, including his home of Olema. Grossi won his home city of Novato and the more agriculturally-focused areas of northern West Marin, with just a few pockets of support in Southern Marin. In this first-round of results - we won't have the final vote tally until next week - Kallins won the central areas of West Marin in the San Geronimo Valley. Tam Valley was fairly evenly split.

Dugan support was strongly focused in East Marin, though he came in a distant fourth place. His support, such as it was, indicates his platform of traffic and pension reform just didn't resonate out West.

Intriguingly, Kallins seemed to be most in competition with Grossi, not Dugan, with a negative correlation between Grossi and Kallins vote shares. Dugan seems to have been a candidate on his own, with no clear negative correlation between his vote share and anyone else’s. He shares this in common with the other also-rans and Rodoni. This likely means that Grossi and Kallins split support. If Kallins supporters swing over to Grossi, he would be a formidible foe, able to command support of most of the incorporated areas of his district as well as the more populous pieces of West Marin. Rodoni would need to pick up not just Dugan supporters but many of the other also-rans to match. We will find out more as the Grossi and Rodoni campaigns gear up for the runoff in November.

If a pattern can be drawn, it is that Marinites reward competence and presence in their supervisors. District 4 residents rewarded supervisors with West Marin sensibilities. In Districts 2 and 3, their efforts or not, Kate Sears and Katie Rice have both been at the forefront of efforts to fix their districts' traffic. Yet this also cuts the other way: Strawberry and Greenbrae feel sidelined by their respective supervisors. Building trust will be difficult in these communities, but will be important: the superior organizing power of anger and aggrievement can make governing difficult even for an electorally safe politician.

Author's note: I am digitizing a huge amount of electoral data going back to 2013 for all races. If there is a race you would like to see mapped, let me know in the comments.

Author's other note: Unfortunately, Marin’s elections office does not keep shapefiles of electoral precincts, only lists of which residential properties belong to which precinct. This makes for unpleasant-looking maps, with holes and gaps where roads or uninhabited parcels are. But, short of redrawing hundreds of electoral precincts, it’s the best we have.

Citizen Marin slate loses big – what does it mean for their coalition?

In the aftermath of elections in three supervisorial races where incumbents prevailed handsomely and West Marin’s Al Dugan notched a dismal fourth place, behind progressive third-place finisher Wendi Kallins, it is worth asking whether the coalition that birthed them still has steam.

Citizen Marin and its coalition – Community Venture Partners, MAD, Larkspur Strikes Back, Citizens for Sustainable Pension Plans, and Sustainable TamAlmonte, among others – came to Marin in a splash back in 2011 and has notched up significant victories halting plans that would have allowed Marin’s affordable housing supply to expand in Strawberry, Tam Valley, Larkspur, Terra Linda, and Marinwood. They elected Damon Connolly to the Board of Supervisors and fought hard against new bicycle lanes, transit infrastructure, and zoning reforms throughout the county.

This year seemed like a golden chance for them to solidify a majority on the Board of Supervisors, allowing them to not just block reforms and homes but also entrench car-oriented policies and push against regional planning efforts from a position of power. In Kevin Haroff, they had a Larkspur councilmember; in Susan Kirsch, a longtime activist with name recognition; in Al Dugan, a resume sure to appeal to pension reformers.

They also had time. Talk of the supervisorial races was active in anti-housing circles as early as two years ago, with Susan Kirsch penning a coming-out Marin Voice in 2014.[1] They even felt confident enough to campaign against Measure AA, with Kirsch calling it taxation without representation.[2]

Yet each, sticking to the familiar talking points about housing, regionalism, and traffic, lost big, with incumbents Katie Rice and Kate Sears beating challengers by double-digit margins and Dugan not even notching above 10 percent.

In the absence of solid data, it’s tough to say exactly why the three failed, but it’s likely the anger that propelled the anti-housing coalition to prominence is subsiding in the population at large. Dick Spotswood, for what it’s worth, agrees, writing, “Much of America is angry. Not Marin.”[3]

Even if this is the case, housing advocates and other progressive reformers have only started to win a conversation set by Citizen Marin. They have yet to really start a new one. Supporting the progressive vision of Marin as a collection of welcoming, car-optional and quiet suburban towns is quite a different thing than just disbelieving Citizen Marin’s fearfulness.

And there are real problems that have languished as progressives have fought a drag-out fight for better affordable housing, especially the utter mismanagement of Golden Gate Transit.

There is no guarantee that the conversation will shift or that the coalition is on its way out. It still has elected supporters throughout Marin, and the upcoming Plan Bay Area meetings offer it an opportunity to reignite the anger that launched its march. Dick Spotswood still occupies a powerful soapbox. Yet the tide that nearly shifted Marin’s political landscape certainly feels as though it is ebbing. It simply remains to be seen whether the coalition will be able to launch another successful anti-incumbent challenge.

Works Cited

[1] Susan Kirsch, “Building on Voters’ Push for Political Affirmation,” Marin Independent Journal, November 12, 2014.

[2] Susan Kirsch, “Bay Tax Is Taxation without Representation for Marin,” Marin Independent Journal, March 9, 2016.

[3] Dick Spotswood, “Marin Results Don’t Reflect Much Voter Anger,” Marin Independent Journal, June 11, 2016.