Tuesday, March 2, 2010

Morning News Round-Up -- 3.2.10: Another "reliable" poll?

Yesterday's (unreliable, 7-point margin of error) poll about the 49ers in Santa Clara that was leaked to the Chronicle's Matier & Ross (and made fun of by Watch Dog), is in the news again: This time, showing support for the A's to San Jose move. If one part of the poll is unreliable, then can we trust the other parts of the poll? Oregon-based Rick Lindholm did the poll of 200 folks in each city about each stadium issue, and is now on the defensive. He claims that the poll wasn't paid for by anyone, rather that it is his own poll that he uses in an ongoing way to help with other clients. Here is Lindholm's reasoning for doing the poll in today's story: "Lindholm said he was not hired by anyone to conduct either survey. He said he does polling on a variety of issues in the Bay Area, using the results to help him build a database for his other polling work for private clients." But last June, when he did another "unpaid" poll talking about baseball in San Jose, said this: "Lindholm told the Mercury News on Tuesday that he had conducted the polls for free and that no one had hired him to do them." This guy is either loves doing polls for free or loves to see his name in the paper... or both. It is becoming more and more clear that this guy is working for one or more San Francisco interests that would like to kill one or both stadium measures in Santa Clara County.

The County is considering giving defendants some rights when they are charged with misdemeanors by having a defense attorney from the public defenders office show up. How progressive... for 1930. The cost is a million buck for the next two years.

Note to Michelle McGurk: Make sure you don't include this in today's City Hall clippings. We don't want anyone to freak out about this headline: Tesla kicks tires on new Palo Alto headquarters. While Tesla kick the tires, Paul Krutko kicks himself...

The power outage on Sunday in Palo Alto is causing a (seemingly) growing headache for the Utilities Department in Palo Alto. The Department wasn't giving residents and businesses any information about the outage, when the lights would come back on, or what the cause was. The Utilities Department's official response: "We're very sorry for the inconvience... We failed... I'm sorry..."

The Mayor of Palo Alto, Pat Burt, gave his State of the City yesterday and talked about improving infrastructure, installing red-light cameras, how he wants to improve relations with Stanford (yeah, right), and of course High-Speed Rail. He didn't mention that he wanted to improve the communications efforts of the Palo Alto Utilities Department...

Steve Poizner is getting ready to launch a statewide ad campaign... hopefully in the ad he will describe his thinking of why it took so long to start his statewide ad campaign... "I waited so long to start this ad campaign because I love coming from 20 points down and I've been busy bidding on stuff on eBay. I'm Steve Poizner, and I approved this message."

Poizner's announcement about this ad campaign couldn't come on a shittier day, and not because of the weather. But Jerry Brown is slated to announce that he is officially "official" in the race too...

Morgan Hill has strong, limited development rules in place and has for a long, long time. They seem to be working, according to a recent study.

Finally, we take a look at San Jose Inside where Councilmember Pierluigi Oliverio gets all academic on our asses. He goes into parking theories and how free parking is a bad idea. Watch Dog actually agrees... so Councilmember Oliverio, how about proposing that the Mayor and Council have to pay for parking everyday in the City Hall garage. Symbolic, yes. But powerful. Email us if you are interested in proposing that idea here. (We won't tell anyone we gave you the idea...)

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