TABOR: A Guide To The Perplexed

In the "under the radar" section of the news comes a website launched today that actually breaks down one of the more complicated ongoing grassroots-level schemes of the right: the little-known connections of a right-wing real-estate developer and the nationwide ballot campaign he funds.

One of the inititiatives Rich is behind is California's Proposition 90, which the San Francisco Chronicle reports today will, if passed, not only keep local governments from seizing private property for the benefit of a developer—thus keeping, say, a slum neighborhood from being redeveloped into a shopping mall—but would "require public agencies to compensate property owners for 'regulatory takings,'" an even more mischevous scheme. That means, for example, that a developer who could not build on a piece of land that was declared a protected wetland would have to be paid for what he presumably lost by being unable to build on it. It is designed to scare municipalities into not pushing environmental and other citizen protection laws.

Check out the site for yourself—and be forearmed.

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