Additional notes on campaign
statement by Alan Day:
"The current
EID Board has been busy over the last 8 years"
Expanded summary
comment:
"The last 8 years" is
inappropriate to consider the incumbent's record, which began in
2004, 7 years ago. Harry Norris was elected in November, 2003, his
first year on the board was 2004. In 2003 Al Vargas was our Division 5
Director, but Alan Day appears to have assigned responsibility to Harry Norris for the
year before he took office as an EID director.
This affects all
of the arguments made by Alan Day and other EID critics about Harry
Norris' performance. The most flagrant of these the consequent
falsehoods is the claim that this board tripled debt, when in fact it
increased debt by only 49% and did so after avoiding new debt for 6
years.
Additional
notes:
The timeline in question is this, specifically
highlighting debt changes and color coding to note which Division 5
Director was involved:
It is important to distinguish between EID problems caused by external factors and internal factors during these years.
It is easy to recognize some of the external problems:
EID, like the entire public sector, has been impacted by collapse of
new housing development and the consequent "Great Recession". The graph
below is a fundamental view of the largest that collapse. Not all
problems have been predictable: EID history is checkered with acts of
nature such as fires and landslides on the Sierra's west slope.
Rate of new
housing development, tracked by building permits for new homes and
multifamily housing units:
Internal problems, including overstaffing, correlate well with the term
of a prior EID General Manager, who served from 2001 through 2007. A related metric is staffing level versus service level:
In addition to head count, EID also uses furlough Fridays to cut costs.
