Top 10 Reasons Park Supporters Should Vote No on 2C:

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1.  It mingles funds.
2.  Under 2C, Open Space is no longer a focus nor will it have the same legal protections it does as the stand alone tax the voters passed for the specific purpose of acquiring, protecting and maintaining open space.
3.  TOPS is one of the very few enthusiastically supported taxes in CS.  Why undermine a successful program?  We believe that the city is trading on the good name of TOPS while actually the terms of the new ordinance will reduce dollars for open space, by almost 25%, in spite of the overall doubling of incoming funds. It's the only category which is being reduced.
4.  The trend of acquisition, trades and redesign of our parks is troubling:  the Broadmoor Land Exchange/trading away Strawberry Fields, the reduction in park requirements for developers (PLDO), the expansive implementation of concreting our parks, and extravagant spending on things like a $330,000 self-cleaning bathroom.
5.  The ballot language is too complicated, and many people don't understand what it means.
6.  Even the Park Board was concerned about the lack of protection for open space and asked for language that enforced levels of acquisition. That safeguard was ultimately denied.
7.  You cannot buy more land with less money.
8.  There were 17 other funding sources on the table.  Pursuing those, along with a separate parks tax for maintenance is the proper way to do this.
9.  It has been suggested that they will add more strings to the spending after they pass it -- we have heard this logic before -- it is unwise to give politicians, of any stripe, double the money and take away voter controls.
10.  We wouldn't oppose if Parks leadership had simply agreed to Protect Open Space dollars in the legal language of the proposed new ordinance. Their own advisory board tried to tell them that in no uncertain terms. Why did they decline to do that and instead ask that we simply trust them? 

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