The Peebles-funded Measure L campaign has been hiring paid canvassers from out-of-town to go door-to-door in Pacifica. The canvassers were hired and organized by FieldWorks of Washington, D.C., through their San Francisco office. The Peebles-funded campaign is apparently paying FieldWorks $103,455.39 to knock on doors in Pacifica.

The current total spending by the Peebles-funded "Yes on L" campaign through 10/21/06 is $1,310,384.78 according to the campaign's official election filing report (warning: large 3MB Adobe Acrobat PDF file).

Pacificans have been receiving somewhat half-hearted telemarketing calls from a firm in (according to one telemarketer) Marysville, Kansas. Marysville is roughly the size of Linda Mar, is close to the Nebraska border on the old historic Pony Express route, and is reported to have a great old Redstone City Hall.

Peebles and his P.R. firm Davies Communications are running a new push poll, in a blatant attempt to "sell" Measure L through leading questions. The calls appear to be coming from "First Media Services" of El Paso, Texas-- a location known for low-cost labor for telemarketing operations.

I am not a life long Pacifican, but I choose to stay in Pacifica for many of the same reasons the rest of us do. When I first noticed that signatures were being collected outside our super markets to place Measure L, the quarry development initiative, on the November ballot, I immediately thought: Didn't we vote this down just a few years ago? Of course we did. So before I signed, I tried to establish what the difference was between the current proposal, L, and the prior one, 2002's E.

Fightin' John Maybury strikes back:

Shannon Del Vecchio's letter to the editor last week complained about the San Francisco Bay Guardian quarry expose, but Bay Guardian reporter George Schulz quoted extensively from Pacifica's new playpal Don Peebles. That sounds fair and balanced to me. Shannon also wrote about "every stupid rumor made up by the No on L' contingent." Wow! That's some amazing doublespeak. If I were a lawyer for "Noel," I'd be drawing up papers right now. Coastside.com caught Peebles PR hacks (Davies Communications of Santa Barbara, officially in denial) red-handed in a "sock puppet" astroturfing incident, which was independently verified by the San Mateo County Times and reported widely in the Pacifica Tribune and San Francisco Chronicle. That's not one-sided journalism, Shannon, that's good reporting on unfair campaign practices.

I moved to Pacifica because it was a sleepy coastal community, which I really enjoy. I always hoped it would stay that way. It shocked me to read in the Pacifica Tribune in May that a Florida developer was going to have a series of Charrettes about the quarry. I could tell right off the bat that Peebles and the people that work for him were going to be using slick, deceptive politics, which don't work here in Pacifica.

John Maybury serves it up straight in his Wandering and Wondering column of September 13th, 2006:

[Peebles] is a businessman with a huge investment to recoup, and an even bigger loan to pay off. He is not a charity. He is not here to rescue us from our fiscal dilemma. He is here to play high-stakes poker, win big, and cash in his chips. Don't fall for the sweet talk.

This weekend, Pacificans began receiving push-poll telemarketing calls from "The Rockaway Quarry Committee", the group funded by Peebles Atlantic Development Corporation, and stage managed by Peebles' Southern California P.R. firm, Davies Communications.

The San Mateo Times' "Insider" also published a column about the Davies Communications insider who posed as Pacifica residents in favor of Measure L on the Pacifica-L mailing list. The details are basically the same as have been covered elsewhere (for example, here and here). The interesting part is the new spin by John Davies, CEO of Davies Communications: