Who looks stupid now?

The city of Sacramento is supposed to stay neutral on local ballot measures. City employees can’t use their office to support or oppose, and city resources can’t be used to help campaigns.

So why would the city provide a venue for Angelique Ashby, leader of the No on Measure M campaign, to talk to city residents about the measure?

As regular readers know (much more than they’d like) Measure M is on forming a Sacramento Charter Commission. Last week, the city held an informational meeting on Measure M (among other items) at Hart Senior Center.

Supporters of Measure M asked if they could have someone make a pitch, but they were told no. This city-sponsored event would just include an impartial presentation of the facts and a little Q-and-A.

But the “impartial” presenter was in fact city council member Ashby, who has steadfastly argued from the dais that Measure M is unneeded and too expensive. Ashby even signed the official ballot argument against Measure M, and she is easily the measure’s most high-profile opponent. Before the meeting, Ashby posted on her Facebook page, “Busy day ahead, including two community meetings to ask folks to please Vote NO on Measure M.”

Rick Bettis, an activist with Common Cause who attended the meeting, said that Ashby played it pretty straight. She disclosed her opposition to Measure M upfront and mostly kept her opinion out of it. But Bettis had to correct her when she told audience members there was no organized “yes” campaign, and that the end result of the Los Angeles charter-commission experiment was a strong-mayor form of government. (That’s part of it, but they also got an ethics commission and neighborhood councils and other reforms.)

Charter-commission candidate Anna Molander says that no matter how she conducted the meeting, Ashby is not impartial. In fact, she’s about as partial as they come.

“The city is not permitted to spend public funds to support or oppose ballot measures, particularly where the opposing view is offered no opportunity to speak,” Molander said in a letter she sent to the city attorney.

“It unleveled the playing field,” Molander told Bites later. For Measure M, it was never all that level to begin with.

This is the anniversary month of Occupy Sacramento. Bites is unsure of Occupy’s success. Most mainstream Sacramentans never got the connection between defiant campouts and everyday problems such as mortgages and jobs and car payments. Or maybe they got it and were ready to move on a long time ago.

Of course, the city’s reaction to Occupy has been a complete failure. Arrests of nonviolent protestors, rules and curfews that—wink, wink—aren’t about Occupy at all. Tell it to the judge.

“We never thought we’d be fighting against our own local government,” Occupier Bob Saunders told Bites at a sparsely attended Occupy event at the Capitol not long ago. Something else he said that Bites has heard before: While the cops hassle and arrest Occupiers, “Drugs keep getting sold in Oak Park, people keep getting shot in Meadowview.”

True, and drugs are shot and people sold in other parts of the city as well. And Bites supposes the cops too would rather be fighting crime than rousting Occupiers, though they may disagree about who’s to blame for the current situation.

Saunders has a point, though. The city has arrested 110 Occupiers so far, with every case dismissed, at a cost of more than $400,000 to city taxpayers. And you thought Measure M was expensive.

Mayor Kevin Johnson is wildly popular with Democrats … in Arizona. A couple of weeks ago, the Arizona Democratic Party gave Johnson a prime spot at a big fundraising event in Phoenix. Johnson played NBA basketball in Phoenix, if you didn’t know. Ex-President Bill Clinton was there, too, and he praised Johnson and joked that Johnson always “looks like he’s about to dribble.”

Yup. Sadly for our always-potentially dribbling mayor, he is not nearly as popular with Sacramento Democrats. That may bug him a little, judging from one Twitter post he sent from the road: “In Phx supporting @azdemparty raised a record 150k! This is what happens when Dems work together @SacDems.”

Ooh, burn! See what you get, @sacdems? You kept hassling Johnson about petty stuff like using City Hall to benefit his private nonprofits, so he went fundraising in Arizona, where they know how to treat a mayor.

And since he’s never, ever here, our mayor-in-exile will have no impact whatsoever on important local elections and ballot measures—even though millions of dollars are at stake for city services and schools. Who looks stupid now, @sacdems?