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The recent Mike Rotkin opinion piece on the March 26 Santa Cruz County supervisors’ coastal rail-trail vote contained numerous misstatements of facts and repeated popular canards, too numerous to detail here. Two examples will suffice.
The oft-repeated claim that the majority of the “public” voted no on Measure D is blatantly false and deliberately misleading. If we look at the numbers, 73.23% of only 37% of the total electorate voted “no” on the June 2022 ballot measure. Again, if you count, 56,390 votes is 21% of 270,861 residents, not “three-fourths of the public.” Not even poor math skills can justify the claim that “the vast majority of the voters in every supervisorial district and in every demographic group in the county” voted for the ultimate trail.
Rotkin claimed that the supervisors’ decision “makes it difficult for the county to complete a state application for additional funding by the June deadline at the California Transportation Commission.” This turns out not to be the case. As was carefully explained by Supervisor Manu Koenig, the county staff can ask for an extension on the CTC deadline if they can’t complete their homework by the June deadline.
Everyone’s entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts.
Michael A. Lewis
Live Oak