EDC will take action “to get the City Council out of the immigration business” as President Paul McNamara put it, following authorization from members at the July 10 meeting. In making the motion to allow the Club to get involved, member Dan Buse said “no person should be afraid to contact the police department.”
Three agents [...]

Andrea Guerrero, an immigration law expert from the American Civil Liberties Union who spoke to EDC at its June 12 meeting, told the group that efforts to control illegal immigration into the United States are compromising civil liberties and rights of both immigrants and U.S. citizens. Guerrero also said that the agencies enforcing immigration laws [...]

Club members approved a resolution at the June 12 meeting that calls upon Escondido Police to “henceforth desist from further DUI/DL checkpoints, and use those funds allocated for DUI reduction in roving/saturation patrols.” The resolution had been presented to members for consideration at the May 8 meeting. Escondido Police Chief Jim Maher was in the [...]

EDC members at the May 8 meeting received a data-driven review of police checkpoints that City Council member Olga Diaz called “the most thorough presentation” on the issue that she had seen. In the presentation, EDC past president Margaret Liles challenged statistics used to support a need for checkpoints, demonstrated that drivers license checkpoints are [...]

In a fiercely competitive discussion of endorsement in the 50th Congressional District, EDC members rated both candidates ‘acceptable’ during the May 8 meeting. A motion to endorse EDC member Francine Busby failed to achieve the 60 percent majority required. A subsequent motion to endorse EDC member Tracy Emblem also failed. Then separate motions to rate [...]

California voters will have a chance to conduct an experiment that could help reduce or even eliminate the corrosive effects of money and fundraising on the political process. Proposition 15 would increase fees on registered lobbyists to provide funding that would be used in the Secretary of State campaigns in 2014 and 2018. In this [...]

The discussion of Proposition 14 at the Club’s April 10 meeting seemed to be a contest between lofty aspirational goals for the democracy, and nuts and bolts questions about whether it could work. Voters will face Prop. 14 on the June ballot when they are asked to decide whether to open primaries so all voters [...]

EDC members received two quite separate views of the City of Escondido’s budget problems from the two City Council members who comprise the Budget subcommittee – Olga Diaz and Dick Daniels – at its March 13 meeting. Diaz and Daniels take budget reduction ideas from city staff and wrestle them into budget proposals to be [...]