Dear Oaklanders,
Tomorrow, October 29 at 10:00 a.m. at 1148 E. 18th Street, Suite 10, Make Oakland Better Now! co-hosts the kickoff meeting for two critical signature gathering campaigns, one for City Council term limits and one for a budget reform charter amendment imposing a rainy day fund – a forced savings account – on the City once its finances begin to recover.
Those of you receiving this message – the 300+ of you on our e-mail list and the 400+ members of our Facebook Group – have already heard about these measures and tomorrow’s event. But this is a special request to all of you from the MOBN! board – please come out on Saturday; we really need you.
For the past 27 months, here are some of the things we have done:
- In our posts, first at our web site and now at Oaktalk, we brought you information about what’s going on in City Hall and ideas about how to make our City a safer and better functioning place to live and work.
- In our “Tasty Pastry” series, we brought you detailed information about Oakland’s budgetand its budget processes.
- During the Mayor’s race, we obtained answers to detailed questionnaires from nearly allhe mayoral candidates (including all the major candidates). Unlike many unions and other organizations who use candidate questionnaires, we made ours available to the public, publishing them on Oaktalk and at Oakland Local.
- We are continuing our efforts to be effective advocates at City Hall for the manyOaklanders who believe the crime rate in our beautiful city is morally unacceptable,that our streets cannot be allowed to continue to crumble, that the culture of governmental secrecy must stop, and the broken budget process must be fixed.
Our next step is something we cannot do alone. We need boots on the ground, and that means we need you.
We realize term limits and this budget reform won’t come close to solving all of Oakland’s problems. And in the coming months, you will be hearing from us about more measures. But these are the first steps we must take in order to end the political atrophy at City Hall and prevent our elected officials from engaging in the repeated overpromising and overspending that has caused our current predicament.
We have less than six months to collect almost 40,000 signatures in order to place these measures on the 2012 ballot. This will take hard work, dedication and many, many volunteers. The road to real reform will be a long one. But we take our first steps tomorrow.
Please join us.
If you can make it and you haven’t told us already, please RSVP to
Oaklanders@MakeOaklandBetterNow.org.
If you can’t make it tomorrow but you still want to help, please send an e-mail with that information to Oaklanders@MakeOaklandBetterNow.org. One of our organizers will contact you soon.
Thanks for any help you can give. We look forward to working with you as we Make Oakland Better.
Sincerely,
The Make Oakland Better Now! Executive Board
