Photo Credit: Patch.com

A Senate panel unanimously advanced a bill on Tuesday that would significantly increase the penalties for possession of large quantities of the powerful opioid Fentanyl, a drug that has led to a wave of overdoses in Sacramento recently.

Fentanyl, which is reported to cause a euphoric high 50 to 100 times more powerful than heroin, caused 29 overdoses in the Sacramento area in a seven-day period last month, nine of which were fatal, according to the Sacramento Bee. The drug killed 30 people in Orange County in 2015 and 62 people in Los Angeles County in 2014.

The bill, if approved, would add Fentanyl to a list of dangerous drugs allowing stiffer sentences based on weight in an effort to target kingpins and cartels. The bill’s narrow focus on major suppliers is what drew the support of Democrats, who were skeptical of traditional “tough on crime” policies that target low-level offenders and addicts and flood prisons.

Sen. Pat Bates, R-Laguna Niguel, said the bill would “cut the head off the drug cartels and stop it at it’s source.” Bates, a former Los Angeles County social worker and Sen. Bob Huff of San Dimas are both sponsoring the bill.

Distribution of Fentanyl is already illegal, but this bill would add penalties per weight. For example, an amount in excess of one kilogram would add three years to a sentence, four kilograms or more would add five years and 10 kilograms or more would add 10 years.

Further action

While the bill focuses on top dealers, legislators called for further action. Sen. Loni Hancock, an Oakland Democrat who chairs the Senate Public Safety Committee, said it was necessary to reach out to young people and other potential users about the effects of Fentanyl. Bates agreed that further action was needed, that “allocating resources to the rehabilitation and certainly treatment,” is “extremely important.”

“But we really have to stop the import of these very dangerous drugs,” Bates told CalWatchdog of the pending bill. “It is a public health crisis.”

Sen. Jeff Stone, R-Riverside County, who ran his own pharmacy prior to his time in the Legislature, called the drug “the nuclear bomb of street drugs.” Doing what seemed to be on-the-spot calculations, Stone said one kilogram was enough for 4 million lethal doses.

California Democrats succeeded in sending Gov. Jerry Brown legislation that would substantially expand voter registration.

The move teed up a significant advance toward one of the party’s longtime statewide and nationwide goals. As MSNBC noted, Democrats see themselves at a disadvantage when turnout reaches relative lows. “More than 70 million eligible Americans aren’t registered to vote — a key reason why turnout fell to just 36 percent in last fall’s midterms,” according to the network. “The unregistered are more likely than the registered to be non-white, young and poor – all groups that lean Democratic. Nearly half of all eligible Latinos, and over half of all eligible millennials, aren’t registered.”

AB1461, introduced by Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, D-San Diego, would ensure “eligible citizens would be registered to vote when they get their driver’s license at the Department of Motor Vehicles unless they opt out,” according to the Los Angeles Times. “The measure would not take effect until a new computerized voter registration database is established some time next year,” presumably before November’s elections.

Heated rhetoric

The bill returned California — and the political media — to the heated climate of 2002, when Prop. 52 hit state ballots. That initiative “would have allowed people to register and vote on the same day,” the Washington Post recalled. “Backed by Democratic groups and opposed by Republicans, the proposal would have made it much easier to increase the vote from targeted demographics. Your candidate is supported heavily by older voters? Pull up a bus outside a nursing home, pack it full and drive to the polling place. Anyone not already registered could vote within minutes regardless.”

Cries of likely fraud drove Prop. 52 down to defeat

This time around, the state GOP have raised louder alarms about the possibility of fraud. As the IJ Review observed, lawmakers have cited “the increased potential for non-citizens to gain access to voting through these automatic motor-voter programs. California law allows unauthorized immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses, and opponents are concerned that they could inadvertently be registered to vote.” As the Times noted, state Sen. Jeff Stone, R-Murrieta, warned the bill could “further undermine the integrity of our election system.”

At the same time, civics-centric critics have cautioned that automatic registration could give greater weight to voters with a more casual or cavalier attitude toward the ballot. One editorialist at the Orange County Register suggested that, “while we celebrate the widespread expansion of the franchise, we ought to avoid cheapening it to the point where it is regarded as little more than a vehicle for self-expression. When you step into a voting booth, you hold the lives and livelihoods of your fellow citizens in your hands. If you can’t be bothered to register, perhaps you’re not ready for that responsibility.”

On the left, by contrast, the legislation was hailed as a great leap forward. In California, The Nation suggested, over 6.5 million voters would be registered. Although Gov. Jerry Brown has yet to signal whether he’ll sign the bill, The Nation added, he threw his weight behind the idea of automatic registration at the 1992 Democratic National Convention:

“Every citizen in America should have not only the right but the real opportunity to vote […]. And it’s the responsibility of government to ensure that by registering every American […]. They know how to get our taxes — why don’t they get our votes, and the votes of everyone in this country?”

Courting the unknown

At any rate, the bill has introduced a fresh layer of complexity to the California political calculus. By adding an “unknown” category to the way registrations tabulate political preferences, CA FWD noted, the bill would create a new question for candidates courting first-time voters: “How does a campaign target an unknown voter in the era of California’s Top Two Primary?”

Political Data, Inc.’s Paul Mitchell told CA FWD “we expect campaigns will do what they have with other new registrants: use age, geography, ethnicity, gender, household partisanship, and other factors to drive targeting decisions.” Reliable data on voters with unknown affiliations, in other words, was set to become a political premium.

Daniel Parks / flickrMore than a month after Gov. Jerry Brown called for lawmakers to hold a “special session” on transportation funding, California still doesn’t have a plan for how to close its annual $5.7 billion shortfall for road, bridge and highway repairs.

More than a month after Gov. Jerry Brown called for lawmakers to hold a “special session” on transportation funding, California still doesn’t have a plan for how to close its annual $5.7 billion shortfall for road, bridge and highway repairs.

Brown said in his Inaugural Address in January that fixing the shortfall was a top priority in 2015. He referenced a $59 billion backlog in deferred maintenance, but that sum could balloon, transportation experts say, if bridge and road repair projects are neglected and require infrastructure replacement.

“All the data out there shows our roads are deteriorating, both at the state and local levels, at an alarming pace,” said Jim Earp, executive director of the California Alliance For Jobs. “If we don’t address it, the costs will skyrocket.”

Road reconstruction costs are tenfold higher than proper maintenance, added Earp, whose organization represents construction companies and unions.

While this debate is centered at the Capitol, its implications will be felt across the Golden State where motorists stand to pay a hefty price as roads get worse.

Driving on roads in need of repair costs California drivers $18.4 billion a year in extra vehicle repairs and operating costs, according to TRIP, a national nonprofit transportation research group based in Washington, D.C.

That amounts to an average of $762 per California motorist, and is hundreds of dollars more per year than motorists in Nevada, New York and Texas pay.

A report released by TRIP last week showed 15 metro areas in California rank among the nation’s worst for road pavement conditions. Those rough roads mean big bucks for drivers in San Francisco and Los Angeles, where the associated vehicle maintenance costs top $1,000 annually, according to the report.

Tax increases

This year, Democratic lawmakers have submitted a range of ideas to plug the funding gap, and ultimately start fixing more roads.

They include a $10 billion plan by Assembly Speaker Toni Atkins, D-San Diego, to charge all drivers a $52 annual road user fee.

Her five-year plan would also accelerate loan repayments from the state’s general fund that are owed to transportation accounts. Additionally, it would free up $1 billion per year by returning truck weight fees to transportation funds instead of using them to repay debt owed by state government.

Also in the mix is San Jose Democratic Sen. Jim Beall’s SB16, which would raise the gas tax by 10 cents per gallon, bump up the vehicle registration fee by $35 annually while also charging a new $100 annual fee for zero-emission vehicles.

The 10-cent increase would leave California with the highest gas tax in the nation.

Republicans, meanwhile, say they have no appetite for tax hikes and want to use existing funds to pay for the state’s crumbling road infrastructure.

Sen. Jeff Stone, R-Riverside, lashed out at California officials for their years of diverting money from transportation repairs after an Interstate 10 bridge collapsed earlier this month during a severe storm east of Coachella.

Built in 1967, the bridge was listed as “functionally obsolete” on the 2014 National Bridge Inventory, meaning it was no longer considered adequate for the high volume of traffic it handled. The listing did not mean the bridge was inherently unsafe, but instead was built to outdated capacity standards.

“It was one of hundreds of bridges across our state in need of replacement or repair,” Stone said in a press release. “Maintenance and repairs of California’s bridges and highways have been neglected far too long. Millions of taxpayer dollars, approved by voters to build and maintain our bridges and highways, have been siphoned away to programs that have nothing to do with infrastructure, transportation or highway safety.”

Out the door without a plan

Lawmakers held two special sessions in early July, then left the Capitol for a month-long recess a week later without a firm plan for moving forward.

Some, including Earp, said progress was made.

“I think there’s some good karma going on,” Earp said. “There’s a much greater chance that something will get done than we’ve had in quite a while. There’s a lot of traction on it.”

Still, getting a two-thirds vote in the Legislature for any new taxes will be a “heavy lift,” Earp noted.

Republicans in the Assembly are frustrated that Democrats waited until this summer to make transportation funding a priority rather than dealing with it in the spring budget process given the state’s higher revenue totals.

Some are less-than-optimistic that a deal will be reached, unless key pieces of their plans are incorporated, a GOP spokeswoman said.

“We’re stuck in proverbial political traffic,” Amanda Fulkerson, spokeswoman for the Assembly Republican Caucus, said.
Republicans in the Assembly proposed the following to raise $6.6 billion for road repairs:

• Dedicate 40 percent of the funds in California’s cap-and-trade program, generating $1 billion annually
• Use existing funds from vehicle weight fees, for $1 billion annually
• Invest half the governor’s strategic growth fund into shovel-ready road projects, for $200 million annually
• Eliminate redundancies at Caltrans, saving $500 million annually
• Eliminate 25 percent of the state’s long-term unfilled employee positions, saving $685 million annually
• Make a $1 billion commitment in the state general fund for transportation

The road ahead

The next round of special session meetings won’t start until lawmakers return to the Capitol Aug. 17, at the earliest.

From the initial sessions, it appears lawmakers want “a portfolio approach” taking the best pieces from existing plans rather than looking for just one solution, said Jay Day, chief of staff for Assemblyman Jim Frazier, D-Oakley. Frazier is chair of the assembly’s special session panel tasked with addressing the problem.

Day added that ultimately lawmakers need to fashion a bill that’s to the liking of Gov. Jerry Brown, who has said he doesn’t favor another transportation bond.

They won’t have much time. The deadline for the Legislature to pass bills is Sept. 11.

“Everything’s on the table,” Day said of funding options. “We’re in dire need. We have a nearly $6 billion shortfall every year.”

Contact reporter Chris Nichols at chris@calwatchdog.com or on Twitter @ChrisTheJourno

Unanticipated opposition

“The state Assembly Health Committee on Tuesday postponed a key vote on legislation that would allow adults with a terminal illness to seek medication from a doctor to end their lives,” the San Jose Mercury News reported, “raising doubts about the fate of the hotly contested bill.”

“Democrats representing the Bay Area who sit on the committee are expected to support the End of Life Option Act, but several Democratic members from Southern California remain undecided. And they’re facing intense pressure from the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles to vote no.”

In the wake of East Bay resident Brittany Maynard’s decision last year to end her life in Oregon, where assisted suicide is legal, SB128 was introduced by state Sens. Lois Wolk, D-Davis, and Bill Monning, D-Monterey. Northern California Democrats quickly lined up in support of the bill, although Gov. Jerry Brown’s signature is not guaranteed. “Gov. Jerry Brown has not yet said whether he would sign the bill,” the Washington Post noted, adding that SB128 “would make California the most populous state to allow physicians to write lethal prescriptions for dying patients.”

Catholic clout

The about-face indicated that Christian voters, including Democrats, possess more power to influence legislators than many observers and policymakers assumed. “The California Medical Association dropped its opposition to SB128, but the Catholic Church and other religious groups are still fighting it,” the Associated Press observed.

Apparently, however, one voice in particular had an outsized impact on key members of the health committee — that of Los Angeles Archbishop José Gomez, who sent out a letter insisting that SB128 must be opposed. Citing “dangerous implications for our state, especially the poor and the most vulnerable,” he urged legislators not to “allow California to become a place where we respond to human suffering by simply making it easier for people to kill themselves.”

At a requiem mass for the aborted conducted in January, Gomez struck a similar tone. “Only God, who is the Lord of our beginning and the Lord of our ending, can make the determination of the beginning and end of life,” he said. “If the child in the womb has no right to be born, if the sick and the old have no right to be taken care of, then there is no solid foundation to defend anyone’s human rights.”

Homing in on the same targets as Gomez, right-to-die advocates recently singled out several legislators who they hope to flip in their favor. According to the Pasadena Star-News, the Compassion & Choices organization “visited the offices of three Latino Catholic Assemblymen: Jimmy Gomez, D-Los Angeles; Roger Hernandez, D-West Covina; and Freddie Rodriguez, D-Chino. About 30 people stood outside the West Covina district office Tuesday chanting ‘SB128! We can’t wait!’ and ‘Si se puede.’ Some held up signs saying, ‘It is my life. It is my death. Please respect my choice.'”

“Patricia Gonzalez-Portillo, spokeswoman for Compassion & Choices, cited an independent survey released last week that said 7 out of 10 Californians support the proposed legislation, including 70 percent of Latinos and 60 percent of Catholics.”

A second try

Meanwhile, Assembly Republicans nursed hopes of succeeding where their colleagues had failed. SB128 had passed the Senate over the objections of critics like state Sen. Jeff Stone, R-Temecula, who raised the specter of an influx of so-called death tourists. “What is going to be the new theme of the state of California?” he asked, according to CBS Sacramento. “Come play, live and die in California.”

Republican realignment

The bill has enjoyed the effective sponsorship of state Sen. Holly Mitchell, D-Los Angeles. But it has attracted bipartisan support, intensifying a nationwide shift among Republicans toward serious interest in recasting criminal justice issues around fiscal responsibility, devolved government power and a culture of mercy.

As Mitchell pointed out, U.S. Senators Chuck Grassley, R-Ia., Mike Lee, R-Utah, and Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., all put their names to a January letter warning the Justice Department that seizures under federal asset forfeiture law had become “overzealous” and oppressive. “We are concerned that these seizures might circumvent state forfeiture law restrictions, create improper incentives on the part of state and local law enforcement, and unnecessarily burden our federal authorities,” they wrote.

For libertarians, the shift marked a welcome change of heart among Republicans in California and nationwide. FreedomWorks noted approvingly that at least one California Republican withdrew his opposition over the course of the bill’s journey through the state Senate.

“State Sen. Jeff Stone, R-Temecula, who voted against SB443 in committee, rose in support when it reached the floor of the chamber. ‘This bill basically says that the government cannot seize the property of innocent people. Asset forfeiture is an important tool for law enforcement, and I strongly believe that the guilty should be subject to forfeiting their assets gained by illegal means,’ said Stone. ‘At the same time, however, the government should not be able to permanently seize property of people that are suspected of committing a crime. [T]his bill simply allows for innocent people to get their property back if they are not convicted of a criminal activity,’ he added.”

Horror stories

Although California has seen its share of asset forfeitures run amok, they rarely get traction on their own, so often happening out of the public eye. In late April, however, the Drug Policy Alliance helped fuel momentum for SB443 by releasing a Southland-centric report on the dark side of asset forfeiture in California.

In one anecdote, the Orange County Register reported, “retired Redondo Beach police Lt. Diane Goldstein described how a food truck owner had $10,000 in cash seized by police on the grounds that a drug dog detected narcotics on the money. While charges were never filed, and a judge ordered the money returned, the money had already been divvied up with the federal government, and the man didn’t have the financial resources to pursue the issue further.”

Deep roots

Thanks to their personal and political history, some longtime California Republicans have found themselves at the center of the broader debate on criminal justice reform. In the early 1990s, Patrick Nolan, onetime Republican leader in the Assembly, spent 33 months in prison for felony racketeering in the wake of the FBI’s 1988 Shrimpscam bribery sting. His experience there led to a decades-long effort to spearhead reforms targeting sentencing guidelines, mandatory minimums, drug policy, prison rape and recidivism rates, to name a few.

As the New Yorker recently recounted, Nolan’s labors have been instrumental in shifting the center of gravity among conservatives and libertarians toward a proactive stance on changing the way the U.S. approaches criminal justice. “When conservatives did venture into California, last November, to help pass Proposition 47,” the New Yorker observed, “the measure required that two-thirds of any money saved be funnelled into alternative correctional programs.” According to Nolan, “we know that just releasing prisoners or diverting them from prisons without services would increase crime.”

“Nolan has a wish list of additional reforms that he will pitch to conservatives. He would like to see abusive prosecutors lose their licenses. He would require the police to videotape interrogations from beginning to end, not just a confession that may have been improperly extracted.”

It was only a year and a half ago that Assembly Bill 10 was signed into law. It raised California’s minimum wage from $8 an hour to $9 in July 2014 with another increase to $10 scheduled to take effect in January 2016.

SB3 would supersede that bill, increasing the minimum wage from the current $9 to $11 in January 2016 with another $2 bump to $13 in July 2017. Thereafter the minimum wage would increase with inflation.

Leno lays out argument for higher minimum wage

The bill’s author, Sen. Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, and its supporters spent more than an hour telling the committee that the wage hike is needed to lift California’s minimum wage workers out of poverty. They assured that doing so would not hurt businesses and would benefit California’s economy and the state budget.

State Sen. Mark Leno

“Wages are growing at the very slowest rate relative to corporate profits in the history of our country,” said Leno. “The median wage has been stagnant over the last 30 years. Sixty-five percent of workers are working paycheck to paycheck. Millions of Californians impacted by our minimum wage are living in poverty, and will continue to live in poverty even when we get to our incremental success under AB10 to $10 an hour next year.

“And they all by definition qualify for public assistance. That means that the taxpayer is subsidizing the private employer’s responsibility for his or her workers’ basic human needs: housing, food and medical care.”

A $13 minimum wage equates to about $26,000 per year, he said, which is above the federal poverty level of $24,250 for a family of four.

Leno argued that businesses will benefit from increased consumer spending. “When workers have more dollars in their pockets to spend on their daily needs, there’s an increase in demand for goods and services,” he said. “That’s when employers have to hire more employees to meet that demand. And that’s what economists call a virtuous upwards cycle.

“Currently, though, we’re in a stagnation, if not a vicious cycle downward, where we’ve put such constraints on the middle class that it’s shrinking and shrinking, putting more people into poverty.”

Higher wages will also benefit businesses by reducing turnover, attracting higher-skilled workers and increasing employee satisfaction, which leads to better customer service, said Leno.

Effect on unemployment rates and income inequality?

California’s experience with raising the minimum wage last July has shown that it doesn’t hurt employment, he said. The state’s unemployment rate, which was 7.4 percent in July 2014 when the minimum wage increased $1, dropped to 6.5 percent in March.

“I’m not stating that there’s causation here,” said Leno. “But there is minimally correlation and proof positive this is not a job killer bill. These numbers become even more impressive when considering them on a national scale. California jobs added in January accounted for 28 percent, almost a third of all jobs created in the United States of America were created here in California – though we represent only 12 percent of the population and we just increased our minimum wage.”

The bill’s coauthor, Sen. Connie Leyva, D-Chino, who said she has spent the last 20 years in the labor movement, said the minimum wage hike is needed to reduce income inequality.

“Right now the income gap is enormous,” she said. “It’s the biggest it’s ever been. CEO pay is at an all-time high while workers are falling further and further behind. And while we certainly respect our CEOs and we love to see companies do well and be successful, sometimes they forget that the people who show up and do the work day in and day out are the ones that are making them successful and are the ones that are making them the profits that they have.”

Teenagers no longer make up most of the minimum wage workforce, she said. Today 88 percent are 20 years or older and 55 percent are women. And most are part-time, averaging 28 hours a week.

“You don’t even have enough money for your rent, let alone eat, pay your utilities and drive your car to work,” said Leyva. “We really can’t have it both ways. We can’t keep people working in poverty and then be unhappy that they are using the social safety net. So either we make sure people can earn a living and support themselves and their families, or we’re going to continue to put more money into the social safety net.”

Effects on CA businesses

UC Berkeley economics professor Michael Reich told the committee that more than a third of all California workers will get a pay raise under SB3, but businesses will be able to absorb the increased labor costs.

“We find that the most affected industries are going to be restaurants, hotel and retail,” he said. “And that businesses will mainly adjust to these increases by reducing turnover costs. Workers won’t quit as often, they’ll stay longer, they’ll be more productive. This will save employees recruitment and retention costs, which would themselves absorb the savings of about 15 percent of the increased payroll.

“The rest of the cost that businesses face will be primarily absorbed, we think, through price increases, small price increases, about half of 1 percent overall, based on our Los Angeles study.”

Although higher prices tend to result in decreased spending, that will be offset by the increased dollars in workers’ wallets. The net effect, based on preliminary calculations, is that California’s gross domestic product would increase by about one-tenth of 1 percent, said Reich.

Similarly, although the state budget will take a $2 billion hit over two years due to paying higher wages for social service workers, that will be more than offset by reduced state Medi-Cal payments, he said. The health care costs for those workers would instead be borne by the federal government’s Medicaid coverage through the Affordable Care Act. And the federal costs will be offset by reduced food stamp payments.

“So when you add up the increased cost of the salaries, the lower expenses for Medi-Cal and increase in income and sales tax revenue … then the state budget would realize net gains of about $2.1 billion in 2016 and 17 under SB3,” said Reich. “When I mentioned this at a private meeting with Gov. Brown he said, yeah, he’d like a free billion dollars too.

“So in summary, the minimum wage will help people whose standard of living has been declining and can’t meet expenses on their own. It will have modest effects on businesses, which I think will be absorbed mainly through turnover reductions and through increased prices. It will have a very small effect on the California economy, certainly not a negative effect. It won’t harm the economy. And it will have very large positive effects on the state’s budget.”

Sen. Stone argues against wage hike

But the lone Republican on the committee, Sen. Jeff Stone, R-Temecula, does not believe it. He cited the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate that raising the federal minimum wage by nearly $3 would cost 500,000 jobs. Despite that, Stone supports raising the federal minimum wage to $10.10 because it would be applied equally throughout the country.

State Sen. Jeff Stone

But California’s $13 minimum wage would “further make us more business unfriendly,” he said. “We rank at the bottom of the list. According to Chief Executive’s annual report of CEOs, California is dead last. This certainly is not going to create an asset for business.

“I appreciate the data that you’ve given about the increase in employment numbers. But one thing those numbers don’t reflect is that there have been thousands of people that have already left the state. There are businesses in droves that have already left the state, have gone to Texas, South Carolina, Nevada, Arizona. They’re gone. There are people that are stuck here in the state of California because they may not be able to afford to leave the state and are jumping at any opportunity to have a job.”

Stone said that the best way to lift people out of poverty is to provide them with the education to get better jobs. “I believe that by increasing the minimum wage – and this is where we’ll just agree to disagree – is that we’re going to be hurting those that we most prolifically want to help,” he said.

“Straw that breaks the back of CA businesses”

He warned that raising the minimum wage could be the straw that breaks the back of California businesses on top of expenses such as sick leave, taxes, worker’s compensation, Obamacare and unemployment insurance.

“If you combine all of this and now you have this higher minimum wage, I personally believe that we are pushing the state to a threshold of a catastrophe,” Stone said. “We have governors from other states now that have already grabbed the low-hanging fruit. Those are the large businesses that are leaving; businesses like Toyota, businesses like Sherwin Williams Paints. They are taking thousands of jobs with them. And now they are coming in and going after the small business man and taking the small businesses out of state.

“And with FedEx and UPS, people can ship with Amazon.com, you don’t have to have a brick-and-mortar facility to have these jobs in the state any more. And we cannot rely on the beautiful climate and the beautiful mountains and our beautiful oceans to keep people here. People have to eat, people want to have opportunities.

“And there is going to come a time – and I don’t want to see it happen – that we are just going to basically price ourselves out of business in the state of California and become nothing more than a welfare state. I believe we can do better.”

A daunting challenge

Stone was backed by several business representatives, including Jon Ross, representing the California Restaurant Association. He said that no study has analyzed the business impact of a nearly 63 percent minimum wage hike over three years.

“There is no model out there of actual experience that will tell you what the impacts will be,” said Ross. “And to us, that’s a heck of an experiment. Trying to impose that kind of a cost impact on a restaurant model where two-thirds of your costs are labor costs, to see those go up by 63 percent over that short period of time is daunting.

“The assumption is that this will be borne by price increases. But our operators, especially the small ones who are local, know that they can’t raise prices at that rate that fast. Small increases over time is the way prior minimum wage increases have been dealt with. But those have been increases in the 25, 50 cent range, and the biggest one ever in 2010 going up $2 over an 18-month period.

“So what is being suggested here is fundamentally different than anything that has been tried in this state before or tried anywhere else. And our guys are very, very daunted by the challenge that this would pose.”

Ross said that the reason teenagers are no longer predominant in minimum wage jobs is that they have been priced out of entry level employment. Six of the top 10 areas in the country with the highest rates of teen underemployment are in California, he said.

The concern about minimum wage workers living in poverty may be overstated, he said, when considering those who are receiving tips, which can raise their pay on average to $20-$25 an hour.

“One of the things that’s sort of crude about the minimum wage as applied in the typical restaurant environment is that it doesn’t take account of those disparities in the house [between tipped and non-tipped employees],” he said.

SB3 is scheduled to be considered by the Senate Appropriations Committee on April 20.

Richard Pan, a physician, took in just over $2,800 in gifts and travel payments, including a $440 outing at a San Francisco Giants baseball game, compliments of the Pacific Gas and Electric Co. Pan is now a Democratic state senator representing a Sacramento district.

And Jeff Stone, whose business, Innovative Compounding Pharmacy, is worth over $1 million, took 25 pages to document his property holdings, including a number of manufactured home rentals. The Riverside County Republican, too, is part of the state Senate’s freshman class.

Their financial information is part of the new filings of statements of economic interest for 2014, which went online Tuesday and are available for public perusal.

It’s the first filing for the freshman class of both the Assembly and the Senate — and for the public, it’s the first time to get a glimpse of their wealth as well as their perks.

Elected in November, taking gifts in December

Some got off to a quick start. Ling-Ling Chang, a new Republican assemblywoman from Chino Hills, declared $2,433 in travel payments over four days in December. In that period, she participated in an education symposium for the California Charter Schools Association for $1,258 and a policy summit for TechNet, a group that lobbies for tech giants with a hub in Los Altos, for which she claimed $1,175.

At the same TechNet event, freshman Assemblyman Bill Dodd, a Napa County Democrat, received $340. Both Chang and Dodd noted the money was for speech/panel participation.

Some like gifts in keeping with their interests. State Sen. Bob Hertzberg, a Los Angeles Democrat referred to as a “deal-making, cigar-smoking” guy in a 2004 L.A. Times profile, disclosed $765 in gifts involving cigars.

Hertzberg, a former speaker of the Assembly, is back in Sacramento after spending 13 years in the private sector.

Some of the financial disclosures are on the quirky side: Kansen Chu, a San Jose Democrat Assembly member, holds a financial interest of between $10,000 and $100,000 in NeuroSky, a company that sells a product that claims to use electrodes on your forehead to interpret brainwave electricity – and, yes, to read your mind.

Like most states, California requires annual disclosure of gifts as well as income and property interests. They are submitted to the state’s Fair Political Practices Commission, or FPPC, which also polices alleged violations of the state’s campaign laws.

At the state Assembly level, 18 of the 27 new state Assembly members come from the ranks of city councils. At the upper ranks, five of the 10 new senators are former Assembly members.

Lawmakers with a history of having hands slapped

The FPPC sends warnings to lawmakers who have violated the rules in the form of a public letter. And some taking new offices have already been warned of potential malfeasance.

Jeff Stone received a warning in 2010 about a 2009 vote when he was a supervisor in Riverside County, in which he “may” have violated conflict of interest provisions by awarding funds to a nonprofit that stood to benefit him.

“However, we have determined that an enforcement action for a violation is not warranted, because the funds awarded were restricted and could not be used for administrative costs of your source of income,” the note from the commission stated.

Pan has also received a warning about political behavior when he allegedly received services worth over $500 from a lobbyist who hosted a fundraiser for him in 2012.

Much is made of the staggering wealth of members of Congress, where California Sen. Dianne Feinstein is among the richest senators and Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Vista, is noted as the wealthiest among U.S. representatives.

At the state legislator level, wealth is not so easily tracked in California. Filers must note holdings in both real estate and stock ownership, which can indicate in increase in wealth.

Gifts, though, are more readily tracked. In California, the gift limit for 2013-14 was $440 for goods from a single source.

State Attorney General Kamala Harris in her filing for her final year in 2010 as district attorney in San Francisco reported no personal stock holdings. It was her last year before taking her current office and she received $1,869 in gifts, mostly flowers as a departure present.

In the previous year, 2009, she noted that her book, “Smart on Crime,” had earned her between $10,000 and $100,000 in royalties, although the book was released in October.

Book royalties are usually paid on a semi-annual or quarterly basis.

Newsom likes gifts; Harris, not so much

This year, Harris, the leading Democratic nominee in the race to replace retiring U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer, has more holdings to declare due to her marriage in August to fellow attorney Douglas Emhoff.

Harris’ filing shows holdings in Comcast, Costco, Home Depot, Nike, Verizon and Visa, which she notes were held in Emhoff’s IRA and are held separately. Harris, as the state’s chief law enforcement officer, could potentially oversee activity involving some of those companies.

Her gifts this time around are more modest: just one receipt of flowers, from Fox Entertainment, declared at $101.

The man initially seen as her rival for Boxer’s U.S. Senate seat, Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, has for years accepted more lucrative gifts.

In 2010, Newsom’s last year as mayor of San Francisco, he declared $3,512 in gifts, including tickets to the opera, symphony, sporting events and Cirque du Soleil.

Last year, Newsom, who declared in January that he would not run for Senate, reported $3,781 that again included tickets to sporting events, a crystal trophy and a Christofle tray.

Riverside County Supervisors Jeff Stone just gave up — at least for now — on his call for the secession of the new state of Southern California. Reported the Orange County Register, Stone “had proposed that 13 counties — 12 of them Republican — break away and become the 51st state of South California.”

It’s still a great idea. But instead of “secession,” which has bad connotations of the Civil War, advocates should talk of independence — as in the independence of the United States in 1776.

California’s population of 37 million is 12 times as big as the whole USA back in 1776. It’s even larger than the 30 million of the Civil War, 1861-65, when the whole country split apart.

There are obvious differences between the two separate states, North California and South California. South California is Texas with great weather: pro-business, anti-tax. An independent South California would, like Texas, have no income tax. It would be attracting businesses instead of repelling them.

North California is North Korea with great weather. It’s socialist and severely anti-business and high tax.

The archetype of a South Californian is John Wayne, who lived in Newport Beach and epitomized American independence and toughness, of straight talk and no nonsense.

The archetype of a North Californian is Arnold Schwarzenegger, who as governor imposed record high taxes and the jobs-killing AB 32, the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 — while himself driving gas-guzzling Bentleys and Mercedes, and living in a massive, high-carbon-footprint compound in Brentwood. He’s a California Kim Jong Il.

Even current Gov. Jerry Brown’s father, Pat Brown, backed dividing the state in two in his 1970 book, “Reagan and Reality: The Two Californias.” He favored putting Los Angeles in South California, whereas Stone would put L.A. in North California. A lot has changed politically since 1970. L.A. once was much as Orange County is today. But politically, L.A. now has become another San Francisco.

South California has become a large Republican area routinely abused by the larger, Democratic North California. Money is stolen from the South and wasted in the North. It’s taxation without representation every bit as egregious as that imposed by the tyrant, King George III, in the 1770s, which led to the American Revolution.

The reason this idea keeps coming back is because it’s inevitable, like the independence of the United States. Check out these words from the Declaration of Independence:

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. 

Notice the words, “That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.”

That perfectly describes the repression of Southern California, which is yearning to breathe free of Northern California.

Riverside County Supervisor Jeff Stone advocates something I long have backed: Split California in two.

Let Gov. Jerry “Jobs Killer” Brown, the nutty Democratic Legislature, the government employee unions and others following the North Korean political philosophy have their own state. Then they can raise taxes and impose new regulations to their dark hearts’ content.

And let those of us who favor low taxes and small government have our own state. Like New Hampshire, we would have no income or sales tax, and little state regulation.

The PI reported:

Stone proposed late Thursday that Riverside County take the lead in pushing for 13 counties to secede from the state.

Fed up with high taxes and continued raids on local government funds, Stone said the counties of Riverside, Imperial, San Diego, Orange, San Bernardino, Kings, Kern, Fresno, Tulare, Inyo, Madera, Mariposa and Mono should form the new state of South California.

“We have a state Legislature that has gone wild. They just don’t care. Their goal was to get a balanced budget so they could continue to get a paycheck,” Stone said by telephone late Thursday. “There is only one solution: A serious secession from the liberal arm of the state of California. I know the state of California can do better.”

Right on!

Splitting the state up actually was an idea strongly supported by Gov. Brown — that is, the first one who built the state, Pat Brown, rather than the second one, Jerry Brown, who’s tearing it down. Pat Brown wrote a book on the subject.

Actually, splitting the state in two would be just a start. We need three, four, ten, many Californias.

July 1, 2011