Ballot Questions for Prince George's County, Maryland
Important Information on the Ballot Questions
This election's ballot will have several important and confusing questions
for residents of Prince George's County.
There will also be a few bond referendums and one minor question regarding
company employees.
Prince Georgians who Care
has a web page
with the text of the Questions up for referendum, including the
charter ammendments. It's a good place to start and has some
useful information.
As always, some of the best, most thought-out analysis and explanation has
been done by the league of Women's voters.
Use this link
to see their information.
To find out the real deal, the actual text and true details of the ammendments
are available
here
on the Gazette's web site. It is in PDF (Portable Document Format).
If you're having trouble getting it to appear on your screen,
see if you have Adobe's Acrobat Reader installed. If you don't, you
need to get it (free from Adobe's web site).
If you do, you may need to download the PDF, then start up
Acrobat Reader to read it.
You can also do a search in Google, which
will allow you to view a the document as converted by them.
Unfortunately, the PDF is formatted for tabloid (11 x 17) paper, and you may
have trouble printing it. By shifting the images onto letter size paper,
I have successfully made a
6-page set (about 9 point font) and a 9-page set (about 12 point font) that
should print out correctly. However, they are in Postcript format,
which geocities doesn't recognize as a legitimate format. I've posted them
here with the filename extension '.pdf' but you cannot view them directly in
Acrobat Reader. If you have a "postscript printer" you may be able to print
the files directly. On Linux or Unix, use the 'gv' or 'lp/lpr' command.
I will also try converting them to PDF, but I'm not sure what the result
would be.
The 6-page set - postscript (each 11x17 page fits on 2 letter size pages):
The 9-page set - postscript (each 11x17 page fits on 3 letter size pages):
The 6-page set - PDF (each 11x17 page fits on 2 letter size pages):
The 9-page set - PDF (each 11x17 page fits on 3 letter size pages):
I would appreciate feedback from people indicating which, if any of the
above options, works best. Please leave a message on my
Message Page. (Just ignore the stuff about my
family history and type in your message - I can easily sort it out.)
Opinions
Believe it or not, there are a few web sites giving their opinions on the
issues. They're not the easiest to find, so I've collected them together
here.
- If you want to see what the media has to say, you might consider reading the
editorial
that appeared in the Gazette.
- Current council member Thomas R. Hendershot has shared
his opinion on the Prince George's County Government official website.
He apparently spoke about the matter at a council meeting in July, as you
can see on the web page. It's a PDF file (see above for instructions if you
are unable to get it on your computer)
- An sort-of-independent opinion from David Swanson can be found
here
on his web site.
- Follow this link to see my own opinion on the matter
Question J
If you you're like me and don't have an election memory,
you are probably wondering what Question J is about.
According to the
League of Women Voters ,
there was a question in the last general election,
which was passed, permitting the county to increase the number of
hours per year worked by temporary or seasonal employees from 700 to 1800.
Now they simply want to undo most of that, and lower in from 1800 back
down to 1000.
Note that
700 hours per year is about 14 hours per week or 4 months full-time;
1000 hours per year is about 20 hours per week or half a year full-time;
1800 hours per year is about 36 hours per week or nearly full-time.
I'm not going to mention politics because I'd be speculating out of hot,
thin air.
Return to my Elections 2004 page