Daily Archives: October 21, 2004

Loma Prieta +15 Years, Continued

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Anchor Banker Brian Zimdars (give them a call) read my post and passed along his recollections from that day (Brian lived and worked in the Bay Area at the time:

I read your story about the earthquakes that hit SF fifteen years ago. It brought back memories. Linda and I were also living in CA at the time, I was working in Palo Alto and Linda was in San Mateo. We lived down in the Almaden Valley in San Jose. I remember my drive home lasting close to three hours, there were massive buckles in the road on 280 which really slowed down traffic. As I made my way down to San Jose it was eerie, all of the power was out in San Jose. What an amazing sight, seeing (or not seeing) more than one million people without power. We did not have any damage to our home. Seeing the devastation to 880 up in Oakland, the damage to the Bay Bridge (I traveled these roads frequently during business trips) and downed housing with fires in San Francisco was amazing. I felt lucky to be in the office that day and not out on the road conducting business. Thanks for the story.

WSJ on City Spending Growth

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The Wisconsin State Journal Editorial Page on Alder Zach Brandon’s view of the Mayor’s proposed 3.6% spending increase:

It’s the spirit that counts: Madison Ald. Zach Brandon wants his City Council colleagues to break with their time-honored tradition of soaking the taxpayers for a few dollars more.
Brandon is developing a list of spending items that could be cut from the Madison city budget, saving taxpayers more than $2 million. But what he proposes isn’t as important as the underlying goal: Reversing the council’s longstandin g profligacy.
Brandon, who pushed a package of cuts last year along with a spending cap that went nowhere, this time believes he can strong-arm council members with a political pledge to put a lid on city spending. He has dropped his red “tax cap” baseball- hat publicity gimmick for a modest pledge he’s circulating to council members. Brandon, of the Southwest Side’s 7th District, wants each council member to promise not to increase city spending beyond the $192.5 million that Mayor Dave Cieslewicz has already proposed. If they want to add a few dollars for a pet project, they need to subtract the money from another item in the budget.

Judith Davidoff has more…