A survey of 2,800 U.S. colleges prepared by the Institute of International Education and the U.S. State Department underscores once again how much the budget of the University of California relies on high tuition and fees paid by foreign students.

The survey showed California had far and away the most international students with 161,693. Some 42 percent of the students are from China and 13 percent are from India. Five UC campuses had at least 8,000 international students: UCLA (11,942), UC San Diego (10,652), UC Berkeley (10,063), UC Irvine (8,064) and UC Davis (8,048).

The numbers illustrate that for all the criticism leveled at UC President Janet Napolitano in a 2016 report by state Auditor Elaine Howle, the UC system’s most important fiscal strategy relies on attracting foreign students. They pay about $44,000 annually, triple what in-state students pay.

The audit showed that in 2008 – at the beginning of the Great Recession – about 5 percent of students in the UC system were international students or from other U.S. states. By 2016, the number was 15.3 percent. The large increase was linked by UC leaders to the sharp long-term decline in state financial support. Critics, however, said UC had refused to do any of the belt-tightening done in the rest of the state government in response to a 20 percent decline in state revenue a decade ago.

Howle’s most explosive allegation was that standards had been lowered so much for non-California applicants that qualified in-state students couldn’t get into to any UC. 

Napolitano rejected nearly all of Howle’s allegations but didn’t challenge her point that a huge change in UC admissions policies had been made with scant explanation to the public or to then-Gov. Jerry Brown and the Legislature. Under heavy pressure, she agreed to major increases in California student admissions – but not to stop relying on foreign students as cash cows. The main concession on that front from UC regents who strongly backed Napolitano: a 2017 decision to have a maximum of 18 percent of non-California students in the UC system. This has had little if any effect on how many are admitted because UC now enrolls far more total students – about 280,000 – then it did four years ago (248,000).

Californians enrolled in UC system set record this year

In June, UC announced that new records had been set in the number of Californians admitted as freshmen (71,655) and transfer students (28,752) at the system’s nine undergraduate campuses.

Meanwhile, it appears that tension related to the U.S.-China trade war has ended the years of annual increases in Chinese students at UC. According to recent reports, their enrollment is flat or slightly down at several campuses. UC San Diego Chancellor Pradeep Khosla lamented the development in an interview with the Los Angeles Times last month – not on fiscal grounds but because of the quality of the students, especially those in science majors.

But another factor besides tension between Washington and Beijing could be that colleges across the United States have reached the same conclusion that UC leaders did in 2008 and are now going after the same pool of high-paying international students as UC.

In August, USA Today reported that its analysis of federal data showed that “more than 240 public universities across the country admitted fewer in-state students in 2017 than they did five years earlier, and for 46 of those, the share of in-state students is down by at least 10 percent.”

A scathing audit on school funding that found the state did not meet promises made six years ago to help English language learners, foster children and students from poor families sets up a 2020 test of the clout of the California Teachers Association and the California Federation of Teachers – and of the willingness of Gov. Gavin Newsom to take on the unions who were early backers of his successful 2018 candidacy. 

State Auditor Elaine Howle’s review focused on how school districts in San Diego, Oakland and Clovis had implemented the Local Control Funding Formula, which was adopted by the Legislature in 2013 at the behest of then-Gov. Jerry Brown. The governor and then-Senate President Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, were among several leaders who said the LCFF would be a game changer by getting additional assets to struggling students.

But Howle found instead that billions in extra funds the formula directed to districts with high percentages of English learners, foster kids and poor families had been used for general needs – including raises for teachers. She concluded there was little or no evidence that the LCFF had boosted these students’ performance.

“In general, we determined that the state’s approach [to Local Control] has not ensured that funding is benefiting students as intended,” Howle wrote.

Howle’s finding confirmed all the major criticisms of the formula that have been raised by education reformers and by civil rights lawyers who have repeatedly sued Los Angeles Unified over its treatment of poor minority students. 

Bill to track school funding couldn’t even get a hearing

But these groups have never gotten far with Local Control changes. Last spring, Assemblywoman Shirley Weber, the San Diego Democrat who pushed for the audit, couldn’t even get Assembly Education Committee Chairman Patrick O’Donnell, D-Long Beach, to hold a hearing on her bill to require disclosure of how LCFF dollars are being used.

Howle’s audit gives Weber new evidence to push for tracking such spending, and she has said fixing Local Control is her top priority in 2020. But O’Donnell, a former teacher who is close to the CTA and CFT, is unlikely to drop his opposition to tracking the funding.

A key question is likely to be what the governor does. While Newsom won the early endorsements of the two teacher unions, he spent the 2018 campaign telling editorial boards and the Los Angeles and Silicon Valley billionaires who back education reform that he too wanted to fix Local Control to ensure it helped struggling students and had proper accountability protections.

But any attempt to get school districts to stop spending LCFF dollars on teacher compensation – and on rapidly growing teacher pension costs – will go directly against the CTA and the CFT. They already see available school funding as inadequate and are both pushing for billions of dollars in tax hikes in two measures expected to be on the ballot in November 2020. They also won changes that will make it more difficult for charter schools to be approved or renewed using the argument that charters were diverting funding from regular public schools at a time when those schools are desperately underfunded. They are unlikely to accept the notion that the audit must be acted on.

Meanwhile, Newsom has so far used his political capital to advance an education reform that teachers unions also may question. But the reform – using metrics to track the performance of students throughout their K-12 journey – isn’t nearly as contentious as the state forcing many school districts to reorient their Local Control spending and stop using it for raises and pension bills.

According to a new website run by California State Auditor Elaine Howle and her staff, the dozen most populated cities in California all have significant fiscal problems and will be forced into major adjustments in coming years.

Eleven of the cities – Los Angeles, San Diego, San Jose, San Francisco, Fresno, Sacramento, Long Beach, Bakersfield, Anaheim, Santa Ana and Riverside – face what Howle classified as moderate risk. One – Oakland – was seen as a high risk.

All 12 of the cities face considerable stress from the rising cost of pensions. Several – especially Los Angeles – also have vast unfunded health care obligations for their retirees. 

Howle’s findings were depicted as surprising in a Sacramento Bee analysis, which focused on the health of the state economy and the low unemployment rate. But government finance experts have long warned that California’s cities – which have seen the cost of post-employment benefits roughly triple over the last 30 years – are in a far worse position to deal with pension bills that the state and counties. That’s because total employee compensation takes up a much bigger chunk of city budgets.

Howle warns cities to prepare for recession

At a news conference introducing the website, Howle said a primary goal was making sure that both local officials and residents of each city would use her office’s analysis to prepare for a possible economic downturn. Even a mild recession is likely to reduce revenue that cities get from sales and hotel taxes and from development permitting.

“If some of these [cities’] costs continue to go up and these cities aren’t prepared for them, they will have to cut services in order to pay pensions, to pay for benefits, to pay for the debts that some of the cities have taken on,” Howle said, according to the Sacramento Bee. She specifically said nearly half the cities will struggle to meet their steadily increasing payments to CalPERS.

Rankings on the website are based on the 2016-17 fiscal year, with a focus on each city’s pension obligations, pension funding, pension costs, anticipated future pension costs, retiree health care expenses, debt burden, liquidity, general fund reserves and revenue trends.

Overall, 18 cities were said to be at high risk overall, 236 at moderate risk and 217 cities at low risk. Compton – which has not produced an audited overview of its finances in five years – was judged to be in the worst shape, followed by Atwater and Blythe. 

The other cities listed at being high-risk: Lindsay, Calexico, San Fernando, El Cerrito, San Gabriel, Maywood, Monrovia, Vernon, Richmond, Ione, Del Ray Oaks, Maryville, West Covina and La Habra.

Among the cities found to be in the best shape: Rancho Cucamonga, Chino Hills, Poway, Indian Wells, Rancho Mirage, La Quinta and Mountain View.

The fact that 2-year-old information was being presented by the auditor as a snapshot of cities’ current fiscal health prompted criticism from the League of California Cities.

“It doesn’t tell the story of now, and so we’re not really clear on how helpful this dashboard is to the public, to the cities or basically anybody,” Jill Oviatt, director of communications and marketing for the league, told the Bee. She likened Howle’s rankings to “a data dump that’s void of context and analysis.”

Despite requests from more than 20 civic groups that she keep recruiting applicants for the California Citizens Redistricting Commission past the present Aug. 9 deadline, state Auditor Elaine Howle doesn’t appear to believe it is necessary. 

Last week, California Common Cause, the California NAACP and the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials were among the organizations that asked that the deadline be moved to Sept. 30. They cited statistics showing that whites were heavily overrepresented in the first 7,500 applicants, that Latinos and Asian Americans were heavily underrepresented, and that women were somewhat underrepresented.

“California voters only get one shot every 10 years to draw the lines that shape our future,” their letter to Howle said. “We, the people, want a chance to make a real impact for our families, neighborhood and state.”

Common Cause chief says applicants not diverse enough

Rey Lopez-Calderon, executive director of California Common Cause, told the San Francisco Chronicle that the redistricting commission had gotten a much worse response than in its recruitment efforts before the 2010 census, when there were about 30,000 applicants. That was the first time the commission handled redistricting after being created by Proposition 11, a 2008 ballot measure that put the state auditor’s office in charge of setting up the commission.

“We need differing views on the commission, and not just ethnic views,” Lopez-Calderon said. “[We] need people who know the different parts of the state.”

But in a news release on Tuesday, Howle didn’t address or give any credence to the civic groups’ concerns.

“I am pleased to announce that as of this morning, over 10,300 Californians have stepped forward for a chance to serve on the second 14-member Citizens Redistricting Commission,” Howle’s statement said. “This is great news for direct democracy! As we enter the final days of the initial application period, my staff and I will continue working to encourage even more eligible individuals throughout the state to apply.”

After applications close, Howle’s office expects to come up with a list of 40 finalists by next April. The committee’s 14 members will be chosen by Aug. 15, 2020. Under the rules of Proposition 11, the commission includes five Democrats, five Republicans and four people who are independents, decline to state a party preference or are members of another party. 

U.S. Supreme Court: Partisan gerrymandering allowed

The ballot measure was passed over the bipartisan objections of most of the state’s political establishment at the behest of then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and good-government groups. They successfully argued that the task should be taken away from the state Legislature because it had long since proven it drew election district boundaries to protect incumbents. In 2004, for example, not a single one of California’s then-51 House seats changed parties.

But the belief that partisan gerrymandering is fundamentally bad and must be avoided took a huge blow from the U.S. Supreme Court in June. On a 5-4 vote, the court’s conservative majority declined to force changes to extreme gerrymanders adopted by Republican lawmakers in North Carolina and by Democratic lawmakers in Maryland.

“We conclude that partisan gerrymandering claims present political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote. “Federal judges have no license to reallocate political power between the two major political parties, with no plausible grant of authority in the Constitution, and no legal standards to limit and direct their decisions.” 

When Gavin Newsom is sworn in as California governor on Jan. 7, he’s already indicated he will take criticisms of the state’s troubled $77 billion high-speed rail project seriously.

That’s in sharp contrast to outgoing Gov. Jerry Brown, who described project critics as “declinists” with no vision for what the Golden State could become. Brown only offered vague pronouncements when asked about giant cost overruns and the $50 billion or more gap between available funding and what’s needed to build the high-speed rail linking Los Angeles and San Francisco.

If Newsom lives up to his word, he’s going to need to respond to profound issues raised by project watchers in and out of the state government over the last two months.

In November, state Auditor Elaine Howle issued a harsh report on poor management practices in the California High-Speed Rail Authority, especially the billions in cost overruns due to the decision to launch construction of the project’s $10.6 billion, 119-mile first segment in the Central Valley before the authority was fully ready. Howle’s audit led Newsom to tell a Fresno audience that he might shake up the leadership of the rail authority.

Among the few specifically positive observations that Newsom has made in recent months about the project was that the first segment held promise to link Silicon Valley workers with less expensive housing in the Central Valley.

Project seen as ‘notoriously unpopular’ in Central Valley

But a Dec. 23 Sacramento Bee analysis found that even though the bullet train project was generating thousands of jobs in the agricultural region, it was “notoriously unpopular” among residents.

“They resent how construction has carved up their farms and scrambled their highways,” the Bee reported. “Completion of just a partial segment through the Valley is still years away, and residents doubt the project will ever get finished. They question the promises that high-speed rail will lift the Valley out of its economic doldrums.”

This skepticism is increasingly shared by elected Democrats both in the Central Valley and the rest of the state.

A Dec. 28 Los Angeles Times report quoted Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon as saying problems with the bullet train are so widespread that it should “be paused for a reassessment.” Rendon said the prospect that the project would run out of money before ever reaching the Los Angeles region left voters in the area feeling deceived.

Assembly Transportation Committee Chairman Jim Frazier, D-Oakley, has made clear that he will work to have rail authority chairman Dan Richard ousted because of cost overruns and management issues.

The bullet train’s image has also deteriorated among state pundits.

When California voters approved $9.95 billion in bond seed money for the then-$45 billion project in 2008, the ballot initiative was broadly supported by newspaper editorial boards.

“Americans who visit Japan or Europe and hop a bullet train get a stunning reminder of how far behind much of the industrialized world we are in swift, clean, efficient transportation,” the San Jose Mercury-News editorial page declared on Oct. 18, 2008. “Californians can change that by approving Proposition 1A, a bond to begin construction of a high-speed rail system that would whisk passengers from Los Angeles to the Bay Area through downtown San Jose in a mere 2 1/2 hours. It will be a catalyst for the economic growth of California and this region over the next 100 years.”

An editorial printed last month in the Mercury-News showed a 180-degree swing in opinion: “The incompetence and irresponsibility at the California High-Speed Rail Authority are staggering. … It’s time to end this fiasco to stop throwing good money after bad.”

Decision on cap-and-trade funding may signal Newsom’s intentions

An early sign of Newsom’s level of enthusiasm for continuing on Brown’s path is likely in coming weeks as initial work is done on the 2019-20 state budget. The California Air Resources Board reported pulling in $813 million from its Nov. 14 auction of cap-and-trade air pollution credits – a heavy haul.

If Newsom opposes diverting 25 percent of cap-and-trade revenue to the bullet-train project – as has been done since 2015 – that will be the clearest indication yet that he is ready to back away from the troubled project.

It’s back to the bad old days of being both a punching bag and a punchline for the California Department of Motor Vehicles.

In the final decades of the 20th century, the state DMV was scorned for its bureaucratic sluggishness and bored clerks. But the arrival of the internet as a tool to make taking care of some routine transactions much easier online and to schedule appointments for tests and renewals produced an era of relatively positive appraisals.

In 2006, San Jose Mercury-News reporter Gary Richards caught this moment in a front-page story:

“People coming in to renew licenses, solve registration problems, pay fees and deal with what was once a most painful experience.

“Not any more. This is the new Department of Motor Vehicles, where customer service is a top priority, waits are down to minutes, there are chairs, and even clean bathrooms. Frowns, scowls and worried looks of the past have been replaced by – get this – smiling customers.

“All the result of beefed-up staffing, internet service options and a new electronic queuing system at most branches.”

In 2008, Richards did a follow-up column in which he wrote about positive experiences that local readers had at DMV offices in San Mateo, Redwood City and Los Gatos.

But after the events of 2018, this brief era of goodwill toward the DMV seems like distant, almost implausible history. Wait times are nearly 50 percent longer at DMV offices than last summer.

Agency officials blame the increased workload created by the state’s obligations under the federal 2005 Real ID Act. By October 2020, Californians must have new federal ID cards before they can fly on commercial aircrafts. The DMV began issuing the IDs on Jan. 1.

But despite having years to prepare for the new obligation, DMV leaders seemed surprised by the extra workload.

Bitter public complaints have already led the Legislature to appropriate nearly $17 million so the agency can hire 230 new workers to reduce wait times. But based on public complaints, those hired so far haven’t seemed to improve wait times.

When legislative Democrats last week heeded the Brown administration’s request and balked at asking state Auditor Elaine Howle to review the DMV, the scandal – or at least criticism from state pundits – only intensified.

Last weekend, in its latest move to address critics, the DMV began keeping 60 offices around the state open from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturdays.

DMV chief says she expects much faster service

The agency’s director, Jean Shiomoto, told the Sacramento Bee that her goal is for those with appointments to wait no more than 15 minutes and for those without appointments to wait no more than 45 minutes.

“You’ve got to put an ambitious goal out there to reach it,” she said. “That is what we are definitely working to achieve.”

But lawmakers don’t seem confident of any relief soon.

Sen. Patricia Bates, R-Laguna Niguel, announced that she planned to introduce legislation that would give 90-day extensions of renewal deadlines for those with licenses that expire this year.

Her rationale: “No Californian should spend an entire day off work waiting in line to take care of DMV business or wait for several weeks to make an appointment. The media stories and firsthand accounts from constituents about shockingly long wait times and other logistical challenges at DMV offices demands that the Legislature act quickly.”

University of California Regents have bought UC President Janet Napolitano’s story about how her office came to interfere with an audit of its performance ordered by the state Legislature, with regents saying they were disappointed by the scandal but prepared to move on after reprimanding Napolitano.

But there could be more fallout on two fronts: in the Legislature and in the governor’s race, where the frontrunner, Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, is an ex-officio UC regent.

That’s because Napolitano’s story seems so implausible. According to an independent report prepared at regents’ behest by former California Supreme Court Justice Carlos Moreno and the Hueston Henningan law firm, after state Auditor Elaine Howle sent surveys to UC campuses in October 2016 asking for their assessment of UC’s Office of the President, Seth Grossman, Napolitano’s chief of staff, and Bernie Jones, her deputy chief of staff, put out the word that they needed to review the responses. This was done even though Howle had emphasized the responses were supposed to be confidential. Subsequently, three campuses – UC Santa Cruz, UC Irvine and UC San Diego – revised their responses to make them more favorable to Napolitano’s office.

But Napolitano told the Legislature in May, and Moreno’s investigators more recently, that while she approved the plan to have her office review the responses, she did so because she wanted to ensure the responses were correct – not because she wanted to protect her image. She also said campuses had requested help.

Moreno’s report did not suggest the UC president was lying. But it found no evidence that campuses sought help with their responses. And it noted that UC Santa Cruz Chancellor George Blumenthal said that he was chewed out by Napolitano for his campus sending in a response to Howle without running it by her staff. UC Santa Cruz’s response was the harshest of any campus, giving Napolitano’s office one “poor” and three “fair” ratings out of the 10 categories in the survey questions. After Blumenthal’s telephone conversation with what he described as a “furious” Napolitano, UC Santa Cruz changed the “poor” and “fair” ratings to good and upgraded three “good” ratings to “exceptional.”

Napolitano said she remembers her conversation with Blumenthal as being routine, not angry. But Blumenthal’s account is consistent with other findings in the Moreno report, such as Napolitano’s declaration in a text message that Howle was on a “witch hunt.”

The two aides cited in the Moreno report resigned a week before the report’s release and declined substantive comment on the allegations against them.

Lawmakers unlikely to be satisfied with handling of scandal

The Legislature, which passed a bill last session subsequently signed by Gov. Jerry Brown making it a crime for a state agency to interfere with a state audit, could consider follow-up legislation. There’s considerable residual anger over Napolitano’s May testimony to a joint legislative hearing in which she repeatedly denied personal wrongdoing of any kind. Assemblywoman Catharine Baker, R-Dublin, vice chair of the Higher Education Committee, cited that testimony last week in calling for Napolitano to be fired.

In the gubernatorial race, UC-related sparks seem just as likely to fly. While Newsom told the Los Angeles Times that he considered regents’ decision to reprimand Napolitano “insignificant” – suggesting he wanted stronger punishment – he joined the unanimous vote to retain her as UC president.

This is tough to square with Newsom’s reported comments about how he would deal with corruption and ethical issues in state government: “I will not be known for being timid about this or anything else. Gov. Brown says reform is overrated; I say it’s underrated.”

As for Howle’s part, she wants regents to take additional actions beyond reprimanding Napolitano, according to a letter she sent to regents and an internal report by her office that were obtained by the Los Angeles Times.

Howle asked regents to “consider disciplining university employees who repeatedly interfered with a state audit, tried to hide their actions, misled investigators and withheld requested information until threatened with court action,” the Times reported.

At the regents’ Nov. 17 meeting in San Francisco, they began consideration of measures meant to “clarify and strengthen” how UC officials who report both to the regents and to Napolitano must deal with state audits.

Is University of California President Janet Napolitano attempting to scapegoat two of her top aides for a scandal that enraged the California Legislature? Or were the aides’ abrupt resignations last week a Napolitano message to regents and lawmakers that she realizes the gravity of the mistakes made by the UC Office of the President in interfering with an audit ordered by the Legislature?

This was the speculation touched off by Wednesday’s UC announcement that Seth Grossman, Napolitano’s chief of staff, and Bernie Jones, his deputy, had “resigned to pursue other opportunities.” Neither offered substantive comments to the media on their decisions.

Jones played a central role last year in getting three UC campuses to change their responses to state Auditor Elaine Howle, who had been asked by the Legislature to examine campuses’ relationships with Napolitano’s office – the latest of several attempts in recent years by the Legislature to get a better understanding of UC’s murky finances.

The responses were supposed to be confidential so Howle could get an unfiltered assessment of UC’s Office of the President. But at Jones’ direction, officials at UC Santa Cruz, UC San Diego and UC Irvine either dropped criticism or offered more positive descriptions.

The San Francisco Chronicle, which in May broke the story that emails confirmed interference with the audit, reported that Jones’ boss – Grossman – was CC’d on emails about responses to the audit and that Napolitano’s involvement in the attempt to protect her office’s reputation was direct and indisputable.

UC Santa Cruz’s initial response to Howle’s inquiry was perhaps the harshest of any campus. It rated the help from Napolitano’s office in four categories as either “poor” or “fair.” All were later changed to “good.” Ratings for three other services were changed from “good” to “exceptional.”

Santa Cruz response changed after Napolitano spoke with chancellor

The changes were undertaken in November 2016 – after Napolitano spoke with UC Santa Cruz Chancellor George Blumenthal.

“Per your conversation with Chancellor earlier today, we have already started the recall process of the State Audit Survey,” Ashish Sahni, Blumenthal’s top aide, told Napolitano in an email obtained by the Chronicle.

The resignations of Grossman and Jones were only the latest fallout from the spring scandal. After Howle told legislators she’d never seen such improper behavior from a state agency in her 17 years as auditor, they passed a bill making it a crime subject to a $5,000 fine to interfere with a formally requested state audit. Gov. Jerry Brown signed it into law last month.

Meanwhile, at the behest of UC regents, former California Supreme Court Justice Carlos Moreno continues to conduct an independent investigation into the scandal. There is no indication when he will submit his report; it is not on the agenda for the regents’ meeting in San Francisco on Wednesday and Thursday.

Moreno’s inquiry has so far seemed a low-profile, leak-free effort. But at the very least, it has the potential to embarrass Napolitano again over her handling of the scandal.

Howle – who discarded the campuses’ responses as worthless because of the interference – released the audit on April 25. The finding that initially spurred the most headlines was Howle’s assertion that the UC Office of the President hid $175 million in funds from regents and the public.

Napolitano was able to lessen the fallout from that finding by arguing that far from being hidden, the funds were dedicated to important programs.

But her assertion that audit responses were changed after individual campuses’ asked for help from her office were immediately challenged by state lawmakers at a contentious May 2 hearing. Less than 30 hours later, the Chronicle posted its story showing the changes had been orchestrated by Napolitano’s office – not initiated by the campuses.

Gov. Jerry Brown’s signing of

But will the laws actually lead law enforcement agencies to routinely test nearly every rape kit, as advocates want? That’s very much in doubt, given the long history of police chiefs’ and sheriffs’ resistance to the idea.

The three new laws do not require more testing.

AB41, by Assemblyman David Chiu, D-San Francisco, requires law enforcement agencies to regularly report how many untested kits they have to a state database.

AB1312, by Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher, D-San Diego, and Assemblyman Marc Berman, D-Palo Alto, requires law enforcement agencies to preserve untested rape kits for at least 20 years.

AB280, by Assemblyman Evan Low, D-Campbell, allows individual state income tax filers to make a donation to help police agencies pay for testing rape kits.

The rape kit backlog – estimated at 13,500 currently in California and at 400,000 in the U.S. in 2015 – has been labeled a national disgrace by sex assault support groups and by such journalists as New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. They argue that the backlog results not just because of a lack of resources – rape kit tests cost about $1,500 – but due to officers’ skepticism about rape allegations. This view is backed up by Michigan State University professor Rebecca Campbell’s research project focusing on the Detroit Police Department, which found many officers believed victims were lying or were of questionable character.

‘Cold hits’ after ending backlog solve thousands of crimes

Advocates of ending the backlog say it contributes to higher crime by leaving criminals free to plague society. They cite the success police agencies which have cleaned up their backlogs have with “cold hits” of criminals already on file in the FBI’s CODIS (Combined DNA Index System) database. “Cold hits” have helped close the files on thousands of unsolved crimes.

But police agencies say officers do a better job dealing with sexaul assault victims than they may have in the past, thanks to a focus on the issue by groups like the Police Executive Research Forum. They also argue that only testing rape kits in cases that have a chance of leading to convictions makes sense – if the alleged victim won’t testify or identify a suspect, why use limited resources to continue investigating?

In 2014, at the request of the Legislature, California State Auditor Elaine Howle weighed in on the rape-kit testing debate, doing so with an audit of three large law enforcement agencies. While her final report recommended that all rape kits generally be tested, it did not offer a definitive view of the value of such a policy.

“Even though kit analysis can aid investigations of sexual assaults, the extent to which analyzing more sexual assault evidence kits than are currently being analyzed would improve arrest and conviction rates is uncertain, and additional information is required to determine the true benefit and cost to California of such a policy change,” the audit noted.

The audit was based on how the Oakland Police Department, the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department and the San Diego Police Department dealt with the approximately 1,900 rape kits they gathered from 2011-2013.

Of the 1,900 kits, nearly 850 had been tested, nearly 140 were at labs for tests at the time of the audit and about 910 – or 48 percent – had not been tested.

University of California President Janet Napolitano could face her roughest week in nearly four years as leader of the state’s flagship college system as lawmakers react sharply to a

Legislative oversight hearings could be held as soon as Tuesday, according to the San Jose Mercury-News, after state Auditor Elaine Howle’s second damning report in 13 months. Napolitano’s and UC regents’ reaction is far different to the second report than the first, suggesting new dynamics that could put Napolitano’s job at peril or lead to the revival of a 2014 proposal that would ask voters to strip UC of the independent autonomy it enjoys under the California Constitution.

UC regents had backed Napolitano in 2016 in her dismissive response to Howle’s complaint that UC had admitted out-of-state students who paid much more in tuition than nearly 4,300 California students “whose academic scores met or exceeded all of the median scores of nonresidents whom the university admitted to the campus of their choice.” Howle said UC officials did this for nearly a decade in response to the state’s reducing funding during the revenue recession and in lieu of even basic attempts to control costs.

Napolitano could have blamed policies she inherited. Instead, she blasted Howle’s report as inaccurate. Though Napolitano’s defense lacked exculpatory evidence, UC regents largely dismissed Howle’s findings, with Regent John Perez even saying the report reflected an unseemly bias again out-of-state students.

Napolitano, regents change tone from last harsh audit

Napolitano’s reaction to the new Howle report, however, is conciliatory. Her office challenges the assertion that $175 million in reserves was hidden, saying that the funds were committed to various tasks and couldn’t have been used to head off tuition hikes. Otherwise, its official response to the audit thanked Howle for her work and said her recommendations would be implemented.

Some regents and lawmakers expressed disbelief that they as well as the general public weren’t told of the reserves even as Napolitano was lobbying hard for tuition hikes.

“Unbelievable,” said Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, according to the Bay Area News Group. Newsom, a regent and an early front-runner in the 2018 governor’s race, said the era in which regents served as “lap dogs” for the Office of the President had to end and that regents should look hard at rescinding the tuition hike.

Perez declined comment.

The University of California enjoys a unique status among state agencies that goes beyond its constitutionally guaranteed autonomy. Taxpayers only directly pay for a little more than one-tenth – about $3.6 billion – of UC’s $32 billion budget. The rest largely comes from tuition, federal grants and reimbursement for services UC does for the federal government, including operating and managing three national scientific laboratories.

But Gov. Jerry Brown and legislative leaders still see UC as an agency using public dollars that needs to be fully accountable. This has led to eight recent audits, many of which – including the latest – depict UC as having few basic financial controls and as being unable to document how and why it divvies up the various funds it receives. Howle’s analyses have consistently shown a UC system with no interest in belt-tightening.

Bad blood remains from 2014 tuition hardball

Where the contretemps goes this week is anyone’s guess. Some coverage has suggested that Howle’s critique goes overboard. But Napolitano doesn’t have a history of strong relationships with state lawmakers, some of whom see her as behaving in imperious fashion, and that could be a stealth factor in how the Legislature responds to Howle’s latest audit.

In late 2014, when the UC president got UC regents to endorse a five-year, 28 percent tuition hike that would go into effect unless the Legislature increased UC funding, Sen. Ricardo Lara, D-Bell Gardens, and Sen. Anthony Cannella, R-Ceres, introduced a Senate constitutional amendment that they hoped would go before voters in 2016. It would have limited UC’s independence by giving the Legislature a veto on tuition hikes and pay raises for top UC executives, among other provisions.

The bill was shelved in 2015 after Brown and Napolitano reached a compromise on state funding. But resentment of Napolitano’s belief that she could push the Legislature around and try to embarrass it to get her way endures.