The ruling’s potential impact on California public education — and public education nationally — could be immense. Even if it doesn’t stand, it will inspire similar lawsuits everywhere, and similar concerns about the proper balance of power in public schools between unionized employees of those schools, and students and their parents.

But to just focus on the California politics angle, the Vergara effect could also be immense.

From now on a litmus test for every Latino politician is whether they agree with Judge Rolf M. Treu’s comparison of California’s public school system with the formally racist segregated school systems that existed in much of America before the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education ruling.

Will Latino pols stand up for Jim Crow Lite?

Treu goes farther than even Latino reformers like Gloria Romero in depicting the fight over teacher tenure and teacher union power in a starkly racial fashion.

I look forward to seeing how John Perez, Hilda Solis, Lorena Gonzalez, Juan Vargas, Xavier Becerra, Joe Baca, Loretta Sanchez, Linda Sanchez, Tony Cardena, Gloria Negrete McLeod, Raul Ruiz, etc., react to Vergara.

This is not a question they can finesse.

Do they want to keep an education system that the judge called functionally anti-Latino so as to stay on the CTA’s and the CFT’s good side?

Or do they want to blow up the Jim Crow Lite system the unions have built for poor Latino students?

We shall see. I will set up Nexus alerts to keep tabs on what these pols are saying — and to see if California’s Democrats have a cleansing civil war that will force party members to wrestle with the fact that the CTA and the CFT stand for a lot of things.

But social justice isn’t one of them.

By Dave Roberts

When is a tax not a tax? When it’s called a fee by Gov. Jerry Brown and fellow Democrats. But the $30 million that has been proposed to be sucked out of Californians’ wallets and fed into the wood chipper of state government definitely walks, quacks and smells like a tax, according to some Republicans.

Brown’s 2012-13 budget includes a 1 percent tax hike on retail sales of lumber and wood products. The money will pay the cost for state agencies to regulate the timber industry. Timber company officials are backing the bill because consumers get stuck with the tab instead of them, and the legislation, AB 1492, introduced by the Assembly Budget Committee, limits the amount of the judicial damages that timber companies can be hit with in the event of a forest fire.

The Senate Budget and Fiscal Review Committee approved the bill 11-0, with five Republicans abstaining, on Aug. 15. Although calling it a fee rather than a tax means that AB 1492 does not need the two-thirds legislative approval mandated by Proposition 26, the bill still requires two-thirds support because it’s been deemed an urgency item as the tax takes effect in January. Although the vote was lopsided in the budget committee, the bill was bashed and thrashed by several Republicans and even one Democrat before that.

That Democrat is Sen. Roderick Wright, who represents Inglewood. He sounded positively Republican as he blasted California’s expensive regulatory practices. He ended up voting for AB 1492, but was not happy about it.

“One of the things that we seem to do in California is we make stuff decidedly more expensive for absolutely no benefit,” said Wright. “Those states, Oregon and Washington in particular, seem to have figured out a way to manage their forest as well or in some cases better than we do, have a lower timber harvest plan cost, deliver more board feet of lumber at a better price. We are importing lumber from them in many instances. And their fire danger seems to be less than ours. So they end up achieving all of the benefits at a lower cost than we do.

“It seems like to me we have an ass backwards system. And I’m not sure what we do with it. Today we may have to support this because it may be the best that we have. But I don’t think anyone would even suggest that this is a good idea. It’s just better than the stupidity that we have been operating under. We’re just making an improvement over something that was before admittedly stupid. So now it’s just less stupid.”

New tax

Another Senate Democrat who voted for the bill, Gloria Negrete McLeod, also seemed skeptical about how the new tax on wood products would be implemented. “What if I go to the lumber store and I want a lath, and I only want six inches of a lath because I want to shore something up,” she asked. “Are you going to charge me six inches of a lath as opposed to a board as opposed to a bunch? What about toothpicks? They are made out of wood. [Laughter in the audience.] I’m serious.”

Although the specific wood products that will be taxed have yet to be identified, the intent is to focus on building products, responded Matt Paulin, assistant program budget manager for the California Department of Finance. But that answer did not satisfy Mira Guertin, a lobbyist representing Home Depot.

“Home Depot has concerns this new assessment burdens retailers like Home Depot,” she said. “The definitions are vague. The toothpick example raised by Sen. Negrete Mcleod is not really all that farfetched. There’s a lot of things like doors, window frames, lattice work, gardening barrels, tool handles, all sorts of things, thousands of products in these stores that could potentially be subject to the tax. And that is a big burden for retailers to try to program around that. And also the list will change every year.

“We are also concerned that this is potentially a double increase for our customers. They may be facing or choosing to impose on themselves a half-percent sales tax increase in the fall [Proposition 30]. This would go on top of that. It’s currently unclear in the language whether the sales tax is applied to the 1 percent lumber assessment or not. That’s something we’d like to see clarified at the very least.”

Quick decision

Senator Doug La Malfa, who represents Butte, led the Republican attack on the bill, which he said should first have been considered by other committees dealing with governance, finances and natural resources.

“Here we are with 16 days to go in the session taking up some very important policy that should be heard and fully vetted in these committees,” he said. “And we are doing it once again as a budget trailer item on some key tax and resource policy. Traditionally, when we have the implications on the regulatory side and the new tax that’s going to be involved, I think we would like to vet out in the committee process and have input on … what is going to be deemed a wood product that’s going to be subject to the 1 percent sales tax.”

Hearing the word “tax,” Committee Chairman Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, smiled and corrected La Malfa, calling it a “regulatory fee.”

La Malfa responded, “If it walks and quacks like a tax …” He went on to agree with Wright about incompetent regulations: “I’m just really troubled by this. And this is something that I care passionately about. I’ve served here almost eight years in the Legislature. And forestry management issues, the ability to harvest timber within our state instead of exporting our so-called environmental problem to other states or countries, I think great strides need to be made. Yet what we are doing is conceding California’s costs are going to be tremendously higher for timber harvest plans than Oregon or Washington, which are very successful in managing forests.”

Tax or fee?

Sen. Bill Emerson, R-Riverside, is concerned that the lumber tax revenue will be sawed off to other programs, especially if more money comes in than is needed to regulate timber.

“What happens when the economy improves and the dollars go to, say, $60 million?” Emerson asked Paulin. “You’re telling me that any excess funds would be protected and not ripped off as we’ve done traditionally in this state of California. Will they go into the General Fund and just be used for whatever?”

Paulin responded, “No, they clearly can’t go into the General Fund, being a regulatory fee.”

Emerson interrupted, “Sir, sir, it’s not a regulatory fee. Individuals are paying. This is a tax. It’s a consumer tax that individuals are paying. It has nothing to do with regulatory. You may use it for regulatory, but it has nothing to do with a regulatory fee. Let’s be honest about that one.”

But the committee Democrats were persuaded by the pleas from timber company officials, some of whom said that they are in danger of going out of business if AB 1492 is not passed. One of those is Chuck Henderson, manager for Shasta Forest Timberlands, who said his family-owned company owns 140,000 acres of timberland in northeast California and has been in business since 1894. It is being sued by the federal government for $791 million in connection with the Moonlight fire, which burned 65,000 acres in the Plumas National Forest in 2007. If the federal government is successful in court, Henderson called it “a virtual economic death penalty.

“This law is critical to the survival of family-owned timberland companies such as ours as well as farmers, ranchers, ski areas and anyone else whose business abuts government property. This law sensibly seeks a balance between economic and environmental damages and the value of the land damaged. It recognizes the cost of negligence while also ensuring the risk of accidents is insurable. Last year our insurance doubled for half the coverage. And what’s more, we now have four layers of insurance where we used to have two. This is not sustainable. If we are no longer able to afford insurance, we will no longer be able to stay in business and no longer be able to stewards of our land and no longer able to deliver the economic and environmental benefits that we have provided to the community and to the citizens of California for over a century.”

Leno cited the pleas from Henderson and other timber harvesters as he called for the vote. AB 1492 received two-thirds support, 47-23, in the Assembly on March 22. No Republicans voted for it, but four abstained. The full Senate still is considering it.

By John Hrabe

Anti-tax groups face a tall order this November. There’s priority one: defeating the competing multi-billion-dollar tax-increase plans of Gov. Jerry Brown and liberal activist Molly Munger. Both propositions will receive tens of millions of dollars in campaign contributions from unions and special interest groups.

Even if both measures fail, Democrats have a backup plan to push tax increases through the state Legislature. State tax increases require two-thirds approval of both houses. Democrats are expected to be within just a handful of seats in the state Assembly. In past years, when Republicans held only a notch above one third of the seats, legislative Democrats have successfully picked off a few moderate Republican votes for tax increases.

Thanks to redistricting gains and a chronically underfunded opposition, Democrats are a lock to reach two-thirds control of the state Senate. “A candidate’s view on taxation will be the central issue in swing senate districts,” wrote Joel Fox, editor of Fox & Hounds and president of the Small Business Action Committee.  “A newly Democratic controlled Senate will vote for taxes from time to time. Especially if taxes are perceived to fall on someone else — that famous man behind the tree in the ditty, ‘don’t tax me, don’t tax thee’ tax the man behind the tree’.”

But, before you send a bigger check to Sacramento, consider an ironic scenario that could be taxpayers’ saving grace in 2013. Two even-numbered state senators running in two different congressional races could set off a chain reaction of events that would effectively block tax increases for most of the year.

State Senators Gloria Negrete McLeod and Juan Vargas, both of whom have records of supporting tax increases, have made their respective runoffs for the House of Representatives. If both pro-tax Democrats win their congressional races, their state Senate seats would remain vacant until they could be filled by special elections. The pair’s victories would reduce the Democratic caucus by two members and effectively erase Democrats’ two-thirds’ advantage.

“The vacancies do not change the threshold for the two-thirds requirement, which is 27 seats in the Senate,” confirmed Bernadette McNulty, chief assistant secretary of the Senate. In other words, taxpayers would be temporarily protected with the career advancement of the two pro-tax Democrats.

Vacancies Filled by Special Elections

Prior to being sworn into Congress, the pair would need to resign from the state Senate. Depending on how quickly Gov. Brown called a special election, it could take up to 120 days from the date of their resignation to fill the vacant seats. During that period, Democrats would need to pick up additional Republican votes for tax increases. In 2011, it took approximately 16 weeks for then-Assemblyman Ted Gaines to fill a vacant state Senate seat.

Both Negrete McLeod and Vargas hold safe Democratic seats, so it would be only be a matter of time until Democrats regained their supermajority control of the state Senate. However, it would likely be a zero-sum game for legislative Democrats. Every seat picked up by Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, could be a direct loss for Assembly Speaker John Perez, D-Los Angeles.

After all, the strongest contenders in an abbreviated campaigns would be members of the state’s lower house, who have built-in name identification and a proven fundraising network. In the process of filling Senate seats, there could be vacancies in the state Assembly. More importantly, every member of the Assembly to move up to the Senate would trigger another special election process and potential four-month delay.

Howard Jarvis Taxpayers: ‘Appreciate Any No Vote’

The Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, the state’s leading anti-tax group, says that when it comes to tax increases, any no vote is a good vote.

“While our first choice is a responsible Legislature that recognizes that taxes are too high, not too low, in the real world we appreciate any ‘N0’ vote, even if that vote is the result of a vacancy,” explained Kris Vosburgh, executive director of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association. “California already ranks at or near the top in tax burden, and taxpayers are grateful for any advantage that helps level the playing field.”

He added that the goal of Proposition 13 “was not to make tax increases impossible, but to create a system that required taxes to be approved with a strong consensus based on clear, demonstrable need.”

An Empty Seat: The Best Representative?   

Not all Republican leaders see the vacancies as a positive development for California, conservative philosophy or the Republican Party.

“If one’s over-riding interest is a narrow definition of tax policy, then, yes, I suppose an empty seat might be preferable to one filled by a hard-line anti-tax conservative who might question the narrow edict of The Pledge in the interest of pursuing the larger strategic priorities,” said former Republican Assemblyman Roger Niello, who broke ranks with his caucus in 2009 to support Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s $13 billion dollar tax hike. “But with the tax pledge (and this could apply to others, too), the rigid dogma attached to it has elevated a no tax policy to an over-arching strategy.  That is true dysfunction.”

Niello added that conservative philosophy involves more than just taxes and includes “such things as personal responsibility, free market economy, limited government, effective and efficiently focused government responsibilities and local control.”

Top Two Primary Turns Senators into Strong Challengers

So how likely is it that 2013 turns into another year of special elections? For starters, the pair of Democratic state senators must win their congressional races. Both are plausible candidates; one is almost guaranteed.

Vargas, who is running for the open 51st House seat, faces only token opposition from Republican challenger Michael Crimmins. In the June primary, Vargas’ vote share was more than double that of Crimmins. Altogether the Democratic field combined for more than 70 percent of the vote.

Meanwhile, Negrete McLeod’s road to Washington is more difficult. She is challenging fellow Democrat Rep. Joe Baca in the 35th House district. In the June primary, Baca finished first with 45 percent of the vote. Negrete McLeod wasn’t far behind, trailing by only 2,500 votes or 8.5 percentage points. The only other candidate, the Green Party’s Anthony Vieyra, pulled in nearly 19 percent of the vote.

The Top Two primary system could also bolster Negrete McLeod’s chances. There’s likely to be little difference between the Democrats’ voting records in Congress. Republican voters without a Republican on the ballot might be encouraged to support Negrete McLeod, if for no other reason than to temporarily block state tax increases.

State Senate Campaigns: Central Issue Taxes

Of course, this unexpected turn of events also relies on Democrats first taking a supermajority of the state Senate. Most Capitol insiders believe the State Senate is a lost cause for California Republicans, who spent more than $1.2 million on a futile attempt to advance a referendum on the Citizen Redistricting Commission’s Senate maps. Ultimately, that money could have been spent to bolster the campaigns of the party’s three swing candidates in the 5th, 27th and 31st districts.

Democrats need to win just one of three swing state Senate races this cycle in order to reach the all-important two-thirds threshold. Those three seats are the 5th Senate race between Bill Berryhill and Cathleen Galgiani; the 27th Senate race between Todd Zink and Fran Pavley; and the 31st race between Jeff Miller and Richard Roth. 

In addition to the two Democrats, another state senator, Republican Doug LaMalfa of Oroville, has a free shot at Congress. He holds a safe Republican seat and has signed Americans for Tax Reform’s Taxpayer Protection Pledge.