Surveys over the winter showed state voters were evenly split – within the margin of error. But a USC-Los Angeles Times poll posted last week showed 51 percent were opposed to the tax, 38 percent were in favor, and 11 percent had no opinion or didn’t expect to vote on the measure.

What’s changed? Fuel prices in California. They were relatively stable and low throughout 2017, dropping to an average of $2.93 per gallon of unleaded gasoline last July, according to AAA. But as of Tuesday, AAA reported the state average for a gallon of unleaded gas was $3.74 per gallon – a 28 percent increase in less than 11 months, with most of the jump this year.

A Politico story Monday said geopolitical trends made it likely that gas prices would continue to rise nationally and noted Democrats were eager to use the issue to hammer President Donald Trump and Republican congressional incumbents.

That dynamic may not work in California. Brown and Democrats had support of some GOP lawmakers and business groups, but the push for Senate Bill 1 was mostly a one-party affair. It was billed as a way to address badly needed road and infrastructure improvements by raising $52 billion over 10 years. The law added 12 cents per gallon to gasoline taxes and 20 cents per gallon to diesel taxes. It also increased vehicle registration fees by $25 to $175 and for the first imposed a $100 additional fee on the vehicle registration of electric vehicle owners, with the EV fee taking effect in 2020.

State’s reputation as anti-tax haven took hits in 2012, 2016

The November 2018 gas tax repeal is only the latest chapter in decades of ballot fights over taxes in California, most notably the 1978 approval of Proposition 13, which capped annual property tax increases and made it more difficult to increase or add other taxes. But the Golden State’s reputation as the birthplace and home of the national anti-tax movement was shaken in 2012 and again in 2016 when state voters approved raising income taxes on the very wealthy, with future sunset dates on the tax hikes.

Some of these voters may not be as enthusiastic about increasing regressive taxes like those on fuel. Signature gatherers said they found it relatively easy to gather the 900,000 signatures turned in to state officials last month, far more than the 585,000 they needed to qualify the measure for the November ballot. The effort was galvanized by conservative talk-radio hosts, particularly KFI 640 AM’s John and Ken in the Los Angeles region.

The ballot measure has been avidly embraced by the leading GOP candidates in the governor’s race – Rancho Santa Fe businessman John Cox and Huntington Beach Assemblyman Travis Allen. Congressional Republican officials have also latched on to the idea that having the gas tax repeal on the November ballot may improve the chances of the GOP holding seven California House seats targeted in November by the national Democratic Party and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco.

Until recently, Brown has mostly ignored the push to repeal the tax hike. But in a May 18 speech to transportation officials at Union Station in downtown Los Angeles, the termed-out governor blasted the “stupid” effort as  “devious and deceptive” – “nothing more than a Republican stunt to get a few of their losers returned to Congress, and we’re not going to let that happen.”

Supporters of the gas tax hike also have another tack. They are increasingly emphasizing what transportation projects are in the works at least partly because of the additional funding SB1 provides. In late April, the state announced that $4.3 billion of rail and bus service improvements would be part of the first wave of projects.

CalWatchdog contributing writer Chris Reed was on with John and Ken on KFI 640 AM/Los Angeles on Monday to talk about the lurid sexual harassment scandal involving San Diego Mayor Bob Filner.

Here is the link to the segment Reed was on. The eight-minute interview begins about two minutes into the broadcast.

By Chris Reed

We’ve seen some very good reporting about the bullet-train fiasco from around the state. The two best recent examples are stories outlining the chicanery in the bidding process for the contractor for the first segment and describing how the California High-Speed Rail Authority has lost support from key early advocates of the project.

But what’s needed is for someone to focus like a laser on the funding prospects for the second segment of the bullet train before we spend billions on the first. A U.S. Government Accountability Office report in December said that $39 billion more in federal funding would be needed for the project to complete its San Francisco to Los Angeles route, with $20 billion specifically to complete the first segment.

However, as I noted in today’s U-T San Diego editorial, hopes for such federal largesse are now pretty much dead:

“The congressional directive to the FAA to end air traffic controller furloughs strongly suggests the demise of the president’s contention that the March 1 budget sequestration requires proportional cuts across a vast range of departments instead of smart, focused cuts that establish and reflect national priorities. …

“This in turn suggests that we have just begun an era of relative frugality in Washington, D.C., after years of the federal government spending 40 percent more than it took in.

“And what does that mean specifically for California? That the state bullet-train project looks more futile than ever. Discretionary domestic spending is going to pretty much disappear in the post-sequester era. What does a December Government Accountability Office report on the bullet train say will be needed to build the second segment of California’s project after the $13.4 billion in committed state and federal funding is used up? Billions of dollars in federal funding –- i.e., discretionary domestic spending.”

Media ignore link between sequester fight, bullet train

Yet nobody in the California media besides the U-T has made the link between last month’s federal budget showdown and the state bullet train project. If they did, then this would be the conclusion that everyone but rail cultists would come to:

“The California High-Speed Rail Authority has attracted no private investors because such investors want revenue guarantees the state cannot legally offer. The federal government -– or some unlikely foreign benefactor –- is the authority’s only hope for funding to build its grand project. If the federal option is gone, should we really spend billions on an instant white elephant in the Central Valley?

“The answer is, no, of course not. But as long as Gov. Jerry Brown is in denial on bullet-train realities –- starting with but not limited to the death of the federal funding option -– here comes a boondoggle for the ages.”

John and Ken’s preferred shorthand for the project — the Browndoggle — should be what we call the white elephant that’s soon to rise in the Central Valley. Our alleged savant governor is the opposite of a genius on this topic. We’ll soon see a multibillion-dollar monument to his obliviousness.

By Chris Reed

As soon as I heard EPA chief Lisa Jackson was leaving, I took to Twitter to predict state air board chair Mary Nichols would be considered a hot candidate for the job, as she was in 2008. When the San Francisco Chronicle got around to this angle Saturday, I expected the usual cheerleading. Instead, lo and behold, it acknowledged the Hien Tran scandal that I broke after being tipped off by UCLA epidemiologist James Enstrom — and the Chronicle framed it as the worst thing to happen on her watch:

“Either way, if nominated, it’s likely we’ll hear about some of the not-so-great air board moments under her leadership. Among those is how she handled a researcher whose work supported a major diesel exhaust regulation and who was found to have lied about his scientific credentials.

“Nichols didn’t tell all of the board members about the falsification before they voted to approve a regulation based on his research. Also, he was never fired.”

I began writing about this story in December 2008. When I established that Hien Tran didn’t have the Ph.D. he claimed from UC Davis, it was the lead item on Rough & Tumble one afternoon. Afterwards, it disappeared from California’s mainstream media for a few months, even as I broke the news that the degree Tran presented the air board with was a mail-order Ph.D. from Thornhill University, a diploma mill associated with, yes, a fugitive pedophile.

Thankfully, in March 2009, Lois Henry of the Bakersfield Californian started writing great columns that did a powerful job of demolishing Tran’s rotten science. John and Ken had me on to talk about the scandal and eventually even gave James Enstrom a platform to explain how he figured out Tran’s deceit.

Finally, after a September 2009 air board meeting at which the full governing board was confronted with evidence of Tran’s fraud, did the bleep begin to hit the fan.

Finally, Mary Nichols was held to account for keeping the Tran scandal from a majority of the board even as it voted for highly controversial diesel emission rules based on his work.

Even then, it still took a month for the mainstream media to tackle the story, and when they did, Dan Walters wrote a dishonest column excusing Sacramento journalists for not taking the scandal seriously a year earlier when I broke it.

But now it could cost Nichols an EPA seat. The story of how Tran kept his job while Enstrom got fired for rocking the boat would be riveting at a Senate hearing — and the background information is plentiful on the web.

Yo, Mary: karma time!

Especially when there’s a hot California politics topic in the air, I try to listen to KFI AM 640’s broadcast of John and Ken weekday afternoons. If you’re not in the Los Angeles area, you can listen to them here.

They were in rare form Feb. 28, ridiculing five California politics columnists for attacking John and Ken themselves. The topic, of course, was Gov. Brown’s $60 billion tax increase proposal ($12 billion a year for five years). Over five years, that’s about $5,000 for every family in the state.

Except for the Chron’s John Diaz, I didn’t catch the names of the other columnists because I was bobbing in and out of traffic. But it doesn’t matter.

As John and Ken pointed out, it was pretty strange that all five of these columnists came out swinging at them at the same time. John and Ken have led the fight against the tax increases voters defeated in 2009 and 2010. And they also have a “Heads on the Stick” campaign against any Republican sellouts who back tax increases, such as Unable Able “Can’t Believe I’m Lieutenant Governor” Maldonado, who last November was wiped out in his re-election bid.

Their current “Heads on a Stick” campaign includes 10 GOP legislators who haven’t taken the “No New Taxes” pledge against putting Gov. Brown’s tax-increase scam on a special June ballot, complete with phone numbers to call the legislators. Let’s name them, as of Feb. 28, 2011: Assemblyman Katcho Achadjian, Sen. Tom Harmon (always a “moderate,” in my experience here in Orange County), Assemblyman Paul Cook, Sen. Bob Huff, Sen. Sam Blakeslee, Sen. Anthony Cannella, Sen. Tom Berryhill, Sen. Bill Emmerson,  Assemblyman Bill Berryhill and Assemblywoman Kristin Olsen.

The columnists are saying that all they want is “democracy,” so let’s let people “vote” in Jerry’s Special Election. As we’ve commented on here at CalWatchDog.com, that always has been a joke. For one thing, if they really believed in “democracy,” how about putting a new Gann Limit on the ballot? Not just this time, but last year and next year and the year after?

The Gann Limit, if restored (voters passed it 30 years ago, but it was effectively repealed later), would limit increases in state spending to increases in population plus inflation.

I guess, for these columnists — and Gov. Brown and the Democratic Legislature and all those tax obsessives — some democracy is OK, and some isn’t. It’s like in Orwell’s “Animal Farm“: Four legs good, two legs bad. Until the pigs start walking on two legs. (See the full video, for free, below.)

And speaking of pigs, what’s democratic about governments as wasteful as ours? It’s worth pointing again to Sunday’s L.A. Times story on the massive waste in L.A. Community Colleges’ $5.7 billion bond.

And if we’re going to have “democracy,” how about if the public-employee unions pledge that, if there’s a vote on taxes, they won’t use their vast warchests to support it?

As things stand, here’s how “democracy” works: Taxpayers are taxed to death. The money goes to the government employees. The union siphons off tens of millions in dues form the employees. The tens of millions in dues then go to run ad campaigns backing tax increases on the ballot, or bought-and-paid-for politicians who vote for tax increases.

Rinse and repeat.

Year after year.

After year after year after year after year after year.

It’s not democracy. It’s racket.

March 1, 2011