Peak Democracy, which Encinitas will use as primary vehicle for public input on where to put high-density development, exposed as sham

You may recall that this past spring, the Encinitas council majority (Barth, Kranz, and Shaffer, with Muir and Gaspar opposed) followed Gus Vina’s recommendation to spend city funds to buy silly blog software called “Peak Democracy” from eccentric Berkeley politician Mike “Moonshot” Cohen.

Residents at the time implored the council not to purchase the software which was rife with potential for abuse, but the majority would not deny Vina his toy.

Six months or so into the great Peak Democracy experiment, all we’ve got for our money is two absurd polls. The first freaked dog owners out with the question, “How important is it for off-leash dog hours to remain at Encinitas Viewpoint, Orpheus and Sun Vista parks once the new dedicated two-acre off-leash dog park is open at Encinitas Community Park?” This seemed to imply that staff were considering cutting local dog park hours and making everyone drive their dogs to the Hall Park instead. Fortunately, it seems it was just space filler so they could say they were doing something with the new software.

The second trivial question was about the arts, a multiple choice question “What’s your favorite type of public art?” The choices were “interactive art,” “mosaic,” “mural,” “sculpture,” and, bizarrely, “LED installation.” We hope that Encinitas Arts Director Jim Gilliam wasn’t involved in writing this inane question that views the medium as the most important aspect of art.

But now the council is considering moving beyond irrelevant time-wasting internet polls, to using Peak Democracy as the primary vehicle for public input on the extremely important Housing Element Update. They’ll use it to decide which properties to upzone, resulting in multi-million-dollar windfalls for some lucky property owners.

How is Peak Democracy working in other cities that have been using it longer? Let’s see how verified Vallejo residents Tony Kranz, Lisa Shaffer, and Teresa Barth used Peak Democracy to give input on Vallejo public policy.







Great idea, Teresa!

Peak Democracy has a feature that distinguishes residents as “inside Vallejo” as opposed to random out-of-town commenters. Somehow, these three computer whizzes were able to persuade Peak Democracy that they were legitimate Vallejo residents.

How will we know which, if any, Encinitas opinions on Peak Democracy are real people if we are to use Peak Democracy as the primary tool for alleged “public input” on the Housing Element?

Fortunately, we can’t think of any reason why property owners looking for a multi-million-dollar upzoning windfall would bother to spend a few bucks hiring teenagers to create fake online accounts to push upzoning in their direction. Can you?