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Indybay Feature

Steve Pleich Withdraws from City Council Race; Urges Support for Sherman and Van Allen

by Steve Pleich (spleich [at] gmail.com)
Thanks and Goodbye
Today I am announcing my formal withdrawal as a candidate for City Council in 2014. While many people have expressed their belief that I would be an excellent addition to the council, the challenges of raising enough money to field a competitive campaign are simply too great to overcome at this time. But as I step from the stage, allow me to make a few observations about the political climate I leave behind.

Even the most casual and uninitiated observer would agree that the political climate in Santa Cruz has taken on a distinctly conservative cast. Special interests remain powerful in our community – even within our elected government. Wealthy groups and individuals continue to give many thousands of dollars to candidates in every election campaign, and they expect their contributions to yield benefits. Yet even within this present framework of political expediency and self-interest, there lies the grain of progressive thought and activism that the challenges of the immediate future demand.

Many of those challenges – creating positive outcomes for people experiencing homelessness, protecting and preserving our civil liberties and our inherent right to privacy, saving the planet from our own excesses, building a freely available digital infrastructure and, yes, ensuring public safety, demand progressive solutions.

Implementation of a forward thinking, progressive public policy is just as important to good governance as the vision that underlies it. The task is to design wise, innovative, and cost-effective programs to address our challenges. Unfortunately, when it comes to bold and innovative programs to meet critical human and social needs, our community seems out of practice. It is time to begin anew and a full-throated statement of progressive vision will point our community in the right direction.

Finally, to my supporters who have shown unstinting loyalty and confidence in me personally and my politics throughout the past four years and two council campaigns, words cannot adequately express the debt of gratitude I owe to each and every one of you. And although this may not be our year, our time will come.

As I exit this campaign, I make on final request. I ask that all those who have supported me with their time and their pocketbooks do as I plan to do. That is to support the two candidates who I believe best exemplify what we believe and who, in my opinion, will serve Santa Cruz best in the coming years. Those two candidates are Leonie Sherman and Bruce Van Allen. They are both worthy of our trust and confidence and I urge you to give them whatever support you can. That having been said, let these officially be my final words for this 2014 City Council Campaign:

Thank you Santa Cruz and, for now, goodbye.
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by Jim Weller
I'm sure you can be more effective at doing good and resisting evil as a citizen at large in the polis, rather than as a politician.
poor_door.jpg
I saw Micah Posner one day a few months ago and asked him how he could cope with all the hypocrites and opportunists on the council.

"Hey ! You're talking about ME too!"

That's about as progressive as it gets around here. The willingness to admit you're a tool.

As I said elsewhere on this site in another, not too different context

"Speaking of property development and gentrification I want to note that "Walnut Commons co-housing for middle class families" has opened for (guffaw) occupation, and it seems to be occupied by Rich White Retired people with nary a child to be seen.

It's REALLY EASY for developers, in collusion with a CORRUPT CITY GOVERNMENT, to evade low-cost and affordable housing requirements when all the local 'activists' think this doesn't relate to the issues of houselessness, poverty, and a viable non-institutionalized, non-'shelterized' counter-cultural community, and ignore it."


Walnut Commons co-housing for middle class families" doesn't even have "...two entrances, one in front for the exclusive use of upper-income residents, another, reportedly in the alley, for residents of more modest means."

See: http://auntieimperial.tumblr.com/post/93685995879 for more about that Poor Door. If that shocked Slate, Colbert, and NPR, just imagine what they'd think about people who would allow rampant and unchecked development WITH NO PROVISIONS AT ALL for local workers and the impoverished.

The “poor door,”… The city's failure to make sure their TBSC buddies at Slater Developers built even THAT into their fraudulent plan for 'co-housing for middle class families'.... because co-housing circumvents low cost and 'affordable' housing, and didn't populate it, as they wanted and have done, with "Rich White Retired people with nary a child to be seen...." speaks volumes about the ineffectiveness, callousness, and yes, opportunistically driven ignorance, of the city's politicians including psychopathic wannabes like Steve Pleich (who simply laughed when I mentioned the situation with "Walnut Commons" to him), and poverty-issue related activists of Santa Cruz. You deserve the cultureless, 'event venue' shithole of a city Santa Cruz has become.

by Trip Weir
I was starting to think of joining the ACLU again since it seems like you turned the local chapter around. For years it was handing out "Hammer of Justice" awards to the same tools of the business community with enough campaign contributions to get elected to the city council.
by Steve Pleich (spleich [at] gmail.com)
No, Trip, my candidacy for 2014 may be over but the dream of building a better community is still very much alive. You would be most welcome as we move ACLU Santa Cruz forward.
That sounds like a much more effective systemic solution to clear and present dangers than yet another toothless run for 'kinder, gentler'!!!
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