John Diaz: Scenes from our endorsement meetings

It’s high season for editorial pages across California. With 17 state propositions on the ballot, along with myriad key races and local measures — two dozen in San Francisco alone — we began our meetings with proponents and opponents well before the traditional Labor Day start of intensive focus for the November election.

The challenge of sorting through these measures is that many of them are thick in complexity, opaque in intent and fraught with untested premises.

It’s a fascinating process, with no shortage of mind-numbing statistics and even a few moments of poignancy and humor. Here is a glimpse inside some of our meetings so far:

Charm offensive

Dean Cortopassi, a 78-year-old Stockton-area farmer, has been far and away the most charming and intriguing presenter for or against an initiative.

Cortopassi has spent $4.5 million of his own fortune on behalf of Prop. 53, which would require a statewide vote before the state could issue revenue bonds for a “megaproject” of $2 billion or more.

He made no secret that one of his targets was Gov. Jerry Brown’s proposal for twin tunnels to divert water from the delta, but he emphasized that his interest was purely environmental, not financial: water rights for his thousands of acres in the San Joaquin Valley are unaffected. Besides, he said, he’s at the point in life of giving away, not accumulating, wealth.

He was flanked by a lawyer who wrote the initiative and a leading antitax crusader, Jon Coupal of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, but the goateed Cortopassi pretty much dominated the meeting in his distinctly folksy way.

“When a politician says, ‘This is an investment’ ... he’s lying.”

The state budget debt-concealing schemes are “three walnuts and a pea.”

Caltrans and other state agencies skim money for administration off revenue bonds the way the mob once operated in the backrooms of Las Vegas casinos, he said.

Want to put a billion dollars in perspective? One billion minutes ago, Jesus was alive, he noted. One billion seconds ago was 1959. If you start counting to 1 billion, it would take 95 years to finish.

I’ll take his word on the latter.

Adults only

It’s not every day that one gets corrected for addressing someone by their real name.

“It’s Ariel,” a co-presenter reminded me as Ariel X of San Francisco’s Kink.com during the porn industry’s argument against Prop. 60, which would mandate performers’ use of condoms in the production of adult films.

Ariel X and performer-producer Chanel Preston, chair of the Adult Performer Advocacy Committee, made a serious case that the regulation proposed by the initiative did not reflect either the reality of a pornography production or the effectiveness of the strict health testing protocols already standard in the industry. The argument turned clinical when Chanel explained that a female performer may be engaged in sex from “30 minutes to multiple hours” in a day, raising the danger of broken condoms or infections from sustained abrasiveness.

The Yes on 60 side had graphic descriptions of its own. Dr. Gary Richwald, who has advised the porn industry, detailed how many of the common practices were high risk and said the testing regimens are insufficient to detect infections before exposures occur. He suggested the industry remains “a legal form of sex trafficking.”

Derrick Burts, 29. an HIV-positive former porn actor, described the pressure to perform without a condom. He ended up with chlamydia in his first month, gonorrhea in the second and, soon after that, herpes.

Burts has gone back to school and is training to be a life coach.

Spinning for dollars

“I’m not here to defend the tobacco industry,” Beth Miller, one of Sacramento’s best connected communications consultants, said at one point, in response to a question about its insidious marketing practices. Actually she was, by definition. Miller was the lead representative for the campaign against Prop. 56, which would raise the state’s cigarette tax by $2 a pack. She and her colleagues, who included a former director of the state department of finance and an antitax advocate, made a game attempt to, well, defend the tobacco industry’s position.

Surely the industry that has so shamelessly and successfully marketed to low-income and minority communities would not try to complain that the tax was regressive? It did.

Surely the industry that makes its profits by selling cigarettes would not feign indignation that too little of the revenue was going to smoking cessation? It did.

Surely the industry that pooh-poohs the connection between higher taxes and smoking reduction would not try to warn that the tax increase would be producing successively less revenue over the years and thus put a burden on the state to maintain the health care spending it supports? It did.

When you see those arguments in the onslaught of TV ads, you might get the impression they were sponsored by a public-health group. They are not. It’s Big Tobacco’s spin, brought to you by Big Tobacco’s dollars.

It’s always interesting — impressive in a curious way — to observe the ingenuity of industries determined to turn the tables on their ballot-box adversaries.

Perhaps the craftiest maneuver on the Nov. 8 ballot is Prop. 65, an initiative bankrolled by the plastic-bag industry, which would require that all the money from those 10-cent fees on carry-out bags at the grocery story and select other retailers go to a special wildlife fund.

Now let’s be clear: The plastic bag industry is against those bans on single-use bags now in effect in more than John Diaz 150 communities across the state. Its real agenda is to torpedo Prop. 67, which would bring that ban statewide and allow retailers (whose cost for a paper bag can range from 6 cents to 15 cents for smaller stores) to keep the dimes they collect.

The American Progressive Bag Alliance (you must admire the way they substituted “progressive” for “plastic”) scoffed at the conservation benefits of the ban, notwithstanding that it has the strong support of environmental groups. The industry’s clear aim is to have voters approve Prop. 65 (which would keep only the local bans in place, while at the same time undercutting retailers’ support for it) and reject Prop. 67.

In a ballot with 17 measures, fomenting voter confusion is not a bad strategy.

In the department of Indefensible Spin, extra points to Steve Maviglio, a Democratic master of partisan playmaking, for coming in to argue — alone and pro bono, no less — against the legislative transparency reforms in Prop. 54. He tried to make the argument that good government would be undermined if the public (and rankand-file lawmakers, for that matter) had access to legislation at least 72 hours before a vote, and video of all hearings became available on the Internet.

I had to ask if one of Sacramento’s premier consultants had ever gone before an editorial board as a volunteer before.

“It’s the first time,” he said with a laugh.

Our verdict on his presentation will be published Tuesday.