A year after being branded by a London newspaper as America’s most lethal police force, the Bakersfield Police Department and the Kern County Sheriff’s Office are now the subjects of civil rights investigations by the state Attorney General’s Office.

Attorney General Kamala Harris, in her final month on the job, announced the probes last week. She cited media coverage and complaints from community groups and individuals about “a pattern and practice of excessive force” in Kern County’s two largest law enforcement agencies.

A Bakersfield police officer’s recent fatal shooting of Francisco Serna, an unarmed 73-year-old with a history of dementia, may have been the last straw.

But the underpinning of the state probes is the unusually thorough and expansive investigation by the Guardian. Its five-part series in December 2015 included videos and links that offered extensive substantiations for its findings.

Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood said his agency will cooperate with the state probe. Newly appointed Bakersfield Police Chief Lyle Martin put out a statement making a similar promise.

Their agencies had previously been less forthcoming about possible problems, according to The Guardian.

Police killed more in Kern County than New York City

“In all, 13 people have been killed so far this year by law enforcement officers in Kern County, which has a population of just under 875,000,” the newspaper wrote in December 2015. “During the same period, nine people were killed by the NYPD across the five counties of New York City, where almost 10 times as many people live and about 23 times as many sworn law enforcement officers patrol.”

“One senior Bakersfield police officer has been involved in at least four deadly shootings in less than two years. Another officer separately shot dead three people within two months in 2010. Other law enforcement officers in Kern County have meanwhile been involved in deadly beatings of unarmed men, sex crimes against women and reckless car crashes resulting in criminal convictions.”

The second part of the Guardian series framed the frequent police killings as the predictable result of a police culture in which few if any officers were held accountable for unprofessional behavior and in which citizens who challenged police conduct could pay a heavy price.

Kern County sheriff’s deputies had a confrontation with a 55-year-old man named Scotty Byrket in which “they broke his ribs, fractured his spine and stained his body with bruises,” then decided they had insufficient cause to arrest him. But after Byrket told a reporter about his mistreatment, deputies revived the case. “Byrket was arrested and charged with resisting arrest. He was convicted and sentenced to four months in jail,” the Guardrian reported. “Then, after he was released, he was arrested again and charged with resisting arrest when deputies had first arrested him for resisting arrest.”

The Guardian also noted 10 unarmed men had been killed by Kern County sheriff’s deputies since 2005 after allegedly resisting arrest. None of the deputies in the killings faced sanctions. None of the killings were reported to the FBI and three were not reported to the state, as is legally required. Three were also not disclosed to the Guardian after it made a public records request to Kern County.

Kern County’s coroner found nothing untoward in the 10 men’s deaths. Unusually, however, the coroner is Donny Youngblood, who is also the sheriff — creating a conflict of interest and meaning there are fewer checks and balances on law enforcement behavior.

The Guardian series was an outgrowth of the London newspaper’s attempts to chronicle every police killing in the United States in 2015. Because of frequent links on the traffic-generating Drudge Report, the Guardian has a following in the U.S. and a financial motive to report on U.S. events. U.S. gun violence is closely followed by many British readers.

Meantime, though, the county’s payroll increased from $7 million in 2013 to $8 million in 2014, while the county’s top wage earner, former Sheriff John Evans, saw his overall pay package increase 13 percent.

Inyo County’s population dropped a modest seven-tenths of a percent, and managed to keep its payroll package total to a minor jump, from $35.3 million in 2013 to $36.6 million in 2014.

But the price of mental health apparently increased in Inyo; Jeanette Schneider, a county psychiatrist, received an 18 percent hike in her employment package in a year, from $164,000 to $195,000.

In isolated pockets around the state, government salaries, with their accompanying benefits, continue to go up.

Even in areas in which there seems little need due to declining population, politicians like Sierra County’s Evans, who worked first as a reserve officer and moved up the ranks, are rewarded with pay increases that rival those in the private sector.

The state still stings from the public salary debacle in Bell, where in 2010 it was revealed that city officials were taking outsized salaries. The discovery led to a 12-year prison sentence for former City Manager Robert Rizzo.

At publicpay.ca.gov, the public can see who is getting paid what at all levels of government

Today, anyone can check salaries in a number of cities, counties and schools via State Controller Betty Yee’s payroll database. Go to publicpay.ca.gov or transparentcalifornia.com, an endeavor hatched by the Nevada Policy Research Institute. The latter is used for this report.

Numerous smaller counties have refused to produce the requested information. Most of the refusals have come from smaller counties losing population, including Trinity, Alpine and Modoc counties.

The state’s population increased 4.2 percent between 2010 and 2014, according to Census Bureau data. Few municipalities lost people, making Sierra County an outlier.

In cities with modest growth, though, double-digit raises have been handed out freely.

San Benito County experienced growth of 4.5 percent between 2010 and 2014. Between 2011 and 2014, the county’s payroll increased 10 percent. The county’s highest paid employee is District Attorney Candice Hooper, whose compensation went from $190,870 in 2011 to $233,061 in 2014, a 22 percent raise.

Then there’s Kern County, which grew 5 percent while County Administrative Officer John Nilon received an $83,210 raise between 2011 and 2014.

The county pay increases have wide variances, and in some cases, both population and overall payroll has remained the same.

The population of Nevada County, for example, has remained the same for five years at around 98,000. Its payroll, at $68 million, has also stayed the same.

“We have wide differences in the state’s 58 counties, and the number of people and the pay scale will vary just as widely,” said Greg Fishman, a spokesman for the California State Association of Counties. He ventured that some of the larger increases in pay are being made up after some years of zero raises, or “catching up.”

RELATED – Public-as-watchdog: Public salaries at your fingertips

The pay of county administrators like Nilon has always been high, and some might say outsized when considering the number of people in a county.

In a number of counties, the boards of supervisors have set higher pay rates for both administrators and elected positions such as sheriff or tax assessor.

Sometimes, pay cuts don’t take.

In El Dorado County, the Board of Supervisors in 2013 vowed to cut the pay of some top positions in the government, including the auditor-controller and the treasurer-tax collector.

The culprit was pay package add-ons, the board said.

“They just started getting more and more and more,” Board of Supervisors Chairman Ron Briggs told a reporter. The changes were to go into effect last year. Current total payroll is not yet available, but the episode typifies how compensation can get out of control, especially when collective bargaining contracts are in play.

Epitomizing the “more and more” concept are three physicians in Kern County, all of whom earn over $1 million in total compensation.  

But despite calls for reform of the financially-troubled Kern Medical Center, where the three are employed, there has been little reform of the generous publicly-funded pay practices.

In December 2013, county leaders said the salaries at the medical center needed attention.

“We need to have a payroll review over there,” Kern County Supervisor Mick Gleason told a local newspaper. “Cost control has to be paramount in everything we do over there.”

His colleague, Supervisor Leticia Perez, added that “we are making dramatic and significant changes at KMC — to better the organization. It’s good to revisit these contracts.”

In 2014, one of the three physicians, Andrea Snow, saw no boost to her regular salary of $498,429 or the cost of her benefits. Instead, her “other pay,” which can include allowances and bonuses, was boosted by $300,000, a 29 percent compensation increase.

Schools and universities from the smallest unified school district to the top-tier university systems in the state issued more bonds in 2015 than they had i

A CalWatchdog analysis of data for the year shows 465 securities issuances from education entities. Some were refunding issuances — refinancing existing bonds — but the majority were general obligation bonds, which rely on taxation for repayment.

Most of the issuances came from school districts, charter schools and education districts, while 64 were directly tied to a single community college district or public university system.

A driving factor in the boost in issuances is the increase in real estate values in much of the state, said Kevin Carlin, a San Diego-based public interest attorney with a public works construction background.

“There is a limit in bond measure (regulations) that says you can’t issue more than a certain percentage of assessed value in a district. So once you get maxed out on the value limit, you have to wait for those limits to go up.”

The voter-approved bonds are part of a continued spending surge on education in the state.

In November, voters will decide on $9 billion in school construction bonds. It’s the first statewide education bond measure since 2006. The issue is propped up by big money from the construction and engineering industries and so far has drawn little opposition. The measure was qualified for the ballot via a push from the California Building Industry Association.

Bond measures are easier to pass now than they were before 2000, when Proposition 39 allowed for passage with 55 percent of the vote rather than two-thirds, as before, said Mike Turnipseed, a watchdog in Kern County.

“The threshold was changed, and today, over 80 percent of bond proposals are approved,” he said. “If cities want to issue bonds, it takes the two-thirds approval, but not schools.”

With the bond issuances come big projects. Add to that numerous funding mechanisms. The state’s School Facility Program earlier this year signed off on $113.6 million for 22 districts to use for various voter-approved projects. The program helps school districts with matching funds or to reimburse districts for finished endeavors.

Higher education spending grows faster than enrollment

At California State University in Sacramento, where enrollment grew 2 percent between 2003 and 2014, a $91 million science building has been approved.

The University of California Board of Regents approved spending $7 million for what will eventually be a $150 million research building for the Riverside campus. It will house 40 to 50 new faculty members. Enrollment at UC Riverside has increased 2 percent since 2012. Full-time employee ranks, meanwhile, have grown 20 percent.

“The only way to best serve our students and California is to grow our faculty,” UCR Chancellor Kim A. Wilcox told a subcommittee of the Regents at a September meeting.

The Milpitas School Board in San Jose agreed to pay architectural firm Gould Evans $2.2 million for the design of an elementary school. The school board is set to purchase 6.7 acres from the city for $21 million.

The school district in Oakland this month issued a request for proposals to upgrade kitchens in 16 schools with a budget of $15 million.

Meantime, schools and colleges continue to hire.

The City College of San Francisco will bring on 55 new full-time faculty and 46 administration workers.

University of California regents in July approved salary increases to executives. One executive, UC Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks, received a 3 percent increase to $516,446 annually.

RELATED:  Developer lobby promoting $9 billion education bond

Between 2001 and 2014, California voters approved $146.1 billion in bond debt for school and college districts, according to a study published in July by the California Policy Center.

“The idea that people are forming is this assumption that property values will skyrocket forever,” said Kevin Dayton, the author of the study. “That way it won’t be so painful for the kids to pay it off as adults. But this is all built on predictions and we have no idea if this will come true.”

The bond debt comes in addition to the billions of dollars handed over to school districts from the passage of Proposition 30 in 2012 which included an additional levy on income over $250,000 as well as a ¼ cent increase in the state sales and use tax.

The revenue is earmarked for education. To date, $13.1 billion has been raised through the taxes.

Many of the schools are spending the money on salaries and benefits, according to the state’s Proposition 30 tracking site. For example, at Harnett Community College District, $5.3 million went to salaries and benefits while $103,000 went to athletics, art, diesel mechanics and a theater group, Western Stage.  

The figures cover the 2012-2013 school year; the usage report for the 2013-2014 year is not completed yet.

Steve Miller can be reached at 517-775-9952 and avalanche50@hotmail.com. His website is www.Avalanche50.com

Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputies are accused of shooting a mentally ill teenager in the street in a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court just two weeks after the county

The lawsuit also comes on the heels of an agreement by the department to release deputy-involved shooting records to the county’s Office of Inspector General.

The lawsuit claims Fernando Escobedo, 19, was shot and killed by deputies on Nov. 30, 2014.  Escobedo was known to the department through past brushes with the law. Shortly before his death, his mother had sought help from the Sheriff’s Department and explained his mental health problems, the complaint says.

A video of the shooting obtained by CalWatchdog appears to show Escobedo running from the home of his mother, Hilda Alvarez, away from two squad cars parked in front of the home and into the path of two other arriving squad cars.

An officer comes out of the last car and points his weapon at Escobedo, who turns and runs away before dropping to the ground. The video is embedded at the bottom of the page. 

From the complaint:

“Ms. Alvarez immediately heard three gunshots and yelled ‘don’t shoot.’ One of the officers then hollered ‘watch your crossfire.’ Immediately thereafter, four more shots were fired at Mr. Escobedo.”

Deputies told local media at the time of the incident that Escobedo charged an officer with a steak knife, which the family disputes. The video does not show the victim charging any of the officers.

The Sheriff’s office did not respond to emails and calls for comment.

The shooting is classified in the department’s database as a “hit shooting incident,” one of three in the month of November 2014. The shooter, unnamed in the lawsuit, was a 50-year-old Hispanic deputy who had been on the force for eight years according to Sheriff’s Department records. 

The records indicate that Escobedo’s alleged weapon was recovered. They also indicate Escobedo was under the influence and had a criminal history. Records show Escobedo was arrested in July 2014 and charged with possessing stolen property.

The “hit shooting incident” designation does not indicate a fatality. Since 2010, the department has recorded 175 hit shootings, and 91 of them resulted in a fatality, a review of records shows.

In about half of all shooting incidents involving L.A. County deputies since 2010, the suspect had a criminal history.

California counties have worked to open their records in the months since 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot in an altercation with a police officer outside St. Louis in 2014.

The San Diego County District Attorney’s office now lists the shootings it reviews. In Kern County, law enforcement and the district attorney’s office hammered out an agreement in July for enhanced review of officer-involved shootings. L.A. County has a database with all deputy-involved shootings. 

In the city of Richmond, a new police chief initiated policies to reduce police shootings, including reviews of all uses of force and providing officers with Tasers and pepper spray to be used as an alternative to a firearm.

California’s law enforcement community has been embroiled in controversies over excessive force, including shootings, for decades.

The violence reached a flash point in the late 90s. A gang unit in the Rampart division of the Los Angeles Police Department was plagued by beatings of suspects and officer-involved shootings.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, in particular, has in the past five years battled with rogue officers.

Three deputies were found guilty in June, 2011 of the beating of a jailhouse visitor. In November, the department paid $8.85 million to the family of Alfredo Montalvo, who was shot by deputies after a brief car chase in 2009.

In October, 2015, a man suspected of driving under the influence was shot. Deputies claimed he began to drive toward them after being pursued and cornered by squad cars. The deceased had no criminal history, according to records.

Since 2009, Los Angeles County has paid out $22 million in 43 wrongful death lawsuits as of July.

The Escobedo complaint alleges that the shooters were not properly trained in dealing with the mentally ill.

“The department fails, refuses and neglects to keep a centralized database of those reported to it as suspected of being mentally ill,” the lawsuit claims. “Neither [past sheriff John] Scott nor [current sheriff Jim] McDonnell provided training necessary for officers faced with the challenge of bringing such people safely under the custody and control of patrol officers, thus placing the mentally ill … at greater risk of death at the time of arrest or when officers seek to question them.”

Norm Pattis, the Connecticut-based lawyer handling the lawsuit for Escobedo’s mother, did not return calls or emails.

Legislation passed in September requires law enforcement officers in California to get more training in handling mental health cases.

The bill requires the state provide at least 15 hours of basic training in dealing with the mentally ill, up from six hours.

Video of Nov. 30, 2014 shooting of Fernando Escobedo:

By Chris Reed

President Obama’s first energy secretary, interior secretary and EPA chief all at various times in his first term depicted hydraulic fracking — aka fracking — as safe. His Energy Department put out a report in 2011 describing the newly improved energy exploration process as just another dirty heavy industry that isn’t much of an environmental concern if it is well-regulated. The president himself even campaigned on the boom in U.S. natural gas production created by tracking.

But repeated Nexis hunts have shown that this fact inexplicably has never been reported in The Los Angeles Times. Last month, the paper’s intent to deceive Californians on this topic was made crystal-clear when it covered a speech by new Interior Secretary Sally Jewell on fracking rules for public and Indian lands. In the speech, as The New York Times reported, Jewell offered a ringing endorsement of fracking’s long and safe history. But the L.A. Times left this out, instead citing a petroleum industry spokesman as making the case for fracking’s long and safe history. I wonder how LAT reporters Neela Banerjee and Wes Venteicher sleep at night.

It was on the op-ed page — but at least it was finally in the LAT

On Friday, however, Jewell was finally quoted and the Obama administration’s position was finally acknowledged by the Times. It may have been in an op-ed by Rock Zierman of the California Independent Petroleum Association, not in an editorial or a front-page analysis, but it was there in black and white and can no longer be denied.

“The ‘safe fracking’ question has been asked and answered many times over by government regulators, scientists and other technical experts, and they have concluded that hydraulic fracturing is a fundamentally safe technology. Interior secretaries and EPA heads have repeatedly said that fracking can be done, and is being done, so that it doesn’t present environmental or public health problems.

“That’s been the case for decades, Interior Secretary Sally Jewell, a former petroleum engineer and a former president of REI, the outdoor equipment retailer, said in May. Jewell’s predecessor, Ken Salazar, testified to Congress that hydraulic fracturing ‘has been done safely hundreds of thousands of times’ and warned lawmakers against anti-fracking ‘hysteria.'”

If Obama views were known, polls would change

The LAT web page with the op-ed, alas, has a link to a poll showing Californians are deeply worried about fracking — thanks to the deceit of enviro reporters like Banerjee and Venteicher.

But if the views of the Obama administration were actually regularly acknowledged, we wouldn’t just have polls that are much more favorable to fracking. We’d have a completely different public debate, one in which the default view is that fracking’s critics are, as former Interior Secretary Ken Salazar suggests, “hysterics.”

By Dave Roberts

California’s experiment in incarcerating tens of thousands of criminals in local jails or their homes rather than in state prisons is 10 months old, so the verdict is not yet in on whether it’s been a success or failure. But if Kern County’s experience is any indication, Californians could be in for a bumpy ride on the Kumbaya road to early releasing or attempting to help criminals at the local level, rather than simply locking them up in the state pen.

The statewide experiment known as “realignment” was launched last October. In the six-month period from October 2011 through March 2012 in Kern County, burglaries increased 20 percent and auto thefts and robberies were up 12 percent over the same period in the previous year, according to a recent probation report. Kern County was already one of the most crime-ridden counties in the state. Violent crime skyrocketed 49 percent from 2001-10 while property crime increased 20 percent.

The influx of hundreds of criminals into Kern County jails has resulted in a 200 percent increase in assaults on jail staff, 122 percent increase in the placing of prisoners in “safety cells,” 9 percent increase in fights, 10 percent increase in drug use and 40 percent increase in suicide watches. Longer sentences for some of the inmates, some as long as six or nine years, have led to a “prison mentality” developing among some inmates in what used to be a short-term housing facility, according to a grand jury report.

Kern County was unprepared for the inmate explosion. Nineteen barracks in the county’s Lerdo jail are so antiquated that at any time three of them are closed for maintenance. Some of the one-man cells have been converted to two-man cells. The county has qualified for $100 million in state funding to add another 790 beds.

As a result, hundreds of prisoners have been released to home detention or rehabilitation and work programs. One of those releases was a drunk driver with prior convictions who served only a few months of a six-year sentence, according to the Wall Street Journal. Another inmate with prior convictions, who would normally have been sent to state prison for several years for receiving stolen property, instead served just four months in jail and was sent home with a GPS ankle bracelet. Many inmates receive half-time credits, further reducing their sentences.

Training

Under realignment’s goal of reducing the recidivism rate, Lerdo inmates can now take art, auto body and computer classes and receive drug counseling from four newly hired substance abuse specialists.

I asked Nevada County Sheriff Keith Royal, who is also president of the California State Sheriffs’ Association, whether Californians are less safe today than they were a year ago before realignment.

“That’s a hard question to answer,” he said. “The one thing many of us have seen is an increase in crime. But the problem is you don’t know if it’s the economy or realignment. No one has an answer yet. It’s too early to know. Are we concerned? Yes. We want to make sure we don’t get sued and don’t release the wrong people onto the street. We are all in the learning stage on what realignment is and how we implement those tools that benefit our local communities. But when the day is done, we all share the same concerns: We want to make sure we make the decisions that keep our communities safe.”

The crime rate has been trending down in the state in the last decade. Violent crime decreased 30 percent from 2001 to 2010, while property crime declined 16 percent. Statistics for 2011 are not yet available on the state attorney general’s website, so it could be at least a year before the statistics comparing crime rates before and after realignment are available.

“I think the jury is still out, but time will tell,” said Royal. “But for me in managing my inmate population, I am going to do everything I can to make sure the right people stay in custody. I don’t want violent people on the street. Those who are released are the low-level offenders. Drunk drivers are doing a portion of their time on home detention along with those that show very minimal threat to society.”

Repeat criminals

I asked Royal what effect the new system will have on repeat or would-be criminals who know that they can now do the crime but may not have to do the time — even after being arrested and convicted. “Unless we do the survey, we could speculate, but we don’t know at this point,” he said. “It is a concern that has been raised. ‘Where’s the punitive action for misconduct if I know I am not going to be in jail very long?’”

It’s possible that Kern County is an outlier and many, perhaps most, of California’s 58 counties will escape relatively unscathed from realignment. But all county sheriffs share some things in common, according to Royal. “We all agree that the numbers [of prisoners in county jails] are greater than we thought,” he said. “We all have space problems. We are concerned about future litigation issues [due to potential overcrowding and inadequate medical care]. And we all believe there’s inadequate funding. That’s a concern all of us share.”

The extent of the local prisoner influx problem depends on the county, according to Karen Pank, executive director of the Chief Probation Officers of California.

“We have seen a lot of population management impacts from realignment in many counties, Kern being one of them,” she said. But “for every Kern you could probably find a county that is experiencing the same type of capacity issues, and the funding needed to deal with that seems to match up better. Depending on the county situation, realignment plays out differently.”

Probation departments

It’s definitely having a major impact on county probation departments, which are taking over from the state much of the post-prison oversight role. Like Royal, Pank believes a better job can be done at the local level than the state level.

“One trend that we will start to be able to see is that the people supposed to be supervised by probation that were previously supervised by [state] parole are showing up to probation at a much higher rate,” she said. “Our absconders are lower. That’s a good sign. If we are properly involved and charged to work with the right population and have the flexibility, we have the opportunity to do some good for the criminal justice system. But it’s still too early to know if all of those things will happen.”

But it’s not too early for Paul McIntosh, executive director of the California State Association of Counties, to declare realignment a major step in the right direction.

“One of the things we have been doing with the former approach is we have been ripping families apart,” he said. “You incarcerate the male or breadwinner of the family and the rest of the family is on the social service roll. One of the goals [of realignment] is to keep families together and over time they will prove successful. We have said that anything that follows an incarceration model has problems, because there’s not enough money to lock everyone up and throw away the key. Are there going to be hiccups? Of course. We are in the process of multi-generational change. It will take a decade to work through this.”

Whether California can afford a decade of prisoner release “hiccups” remains to be seen.

By WAYNE LUSVARDI

The desire for imaginary benefits often involves the loss of present blessings. — Aesop’s Fables.

In Kern County, things evaporate.  The County once had a 100-square mile seasonal body of water called Buena Vista Lake near its center that dried up when Lake Isabella Dam and the California Aqueduct were built in 1953.  The size of the lake swelled and shrank wildly depending on intermittent rainfall.

Now, a Kern County labor leader has charged that the notion that the County’s pension fund has dried up has been “made up” to extract concessions from county employees.

The problem in Kern County is reality. The original Lake Buena Vista no longer exists, although it is shown on old maps. And Kern County’s pension fund has not so much evaporated as the promised level of benefits was imaginary in the first place.

As the Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management reported in October 2010, Kern County is facing a situation in the “best case” where 51 percent of its General Fund would have to be dedicated to paying pensions by 2019. And in the “worst case” situation, 82 percent of its operating budget would have to paid for pensions by 2015:

Percent Municipal Revenues Consumed by Pensions

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Kern County apparently is on track for the worst-case scenario. But labor leaders are still true believers, just as Bernie Madoff’s investors were.

Labor leader Regina Kane, president of Chapter 521 of the SEIU, issued a press release this week stating:

We have been told to sacrifice the price of our medical coverage and promised retirement benefits for a made-up financial crisis so the supervisors can call themselves pension reformers, in keeping with the current political fashion.

Such rhetoric is expected in hotly contested labor negotiations, but may mislead union members into believing they are getting the shaft from an unfair game of political football.  Social psychologists call this “cognitive dissonance” – when a prophecy has been shown to be false, those who believed in it don’t abandon their faith. Instead their beliefs just get stronger.

Blame the Stock Market?

Another true disbeliever is economist Dean Baker of the left-leaning Center for Economic Policy and Research, who has stated that the major driver of the County’s pension fund shortfall was the stock market crash of 2008, not “ever-increasing or overpromised benefits to employees.”

Apparently even economists’ opinions are also based on beliefs and unrealistic assumptions.  Kern County’s pension fund was based on linear projections of annual compounded returns on investments, lasting forever, to plug the gap between promised benefits and actual contributions from employees.  But financial markets are not linear and upward; they are cyclical, as history has proven and everyone knows.  Seasonal lakes dry up or are drained and imaginary pension benefits evaporate or recede when financial markets panic.

This is especially so for the 2008 financial market bubble that was invested in speculative sub-prime real estate mortgages and retail real estate projects “puffed” by local redevelopment schemes. In essence, local pension funds, growth management plans, affordable housing quotas and redevelopment were a connected house of cards.

Of 459 cities in California, 413 of them have redevelopment agencies. And over 100 cities had inclusionary housing ordinances as of 2003.

Creating Redevelopment Funds

To pump up sales taxes for municipal pension funds, redevelopment projects were created based on overpriced retail outlets and “inclusionary” housing that inflated prices of retail goods and services, condos and apartments.  Union leaders and advocate economists can blame the bogeyman of Wall Street, but this was also a crisis that was cooked up locally.

Financiers may have packaged globalized mortgage-backed securities, but municipal governments acted locally to bring it all about by a combustible package of slow-growth zoning, inclusionary housing laws, affordable housing mandates and redevelopment. In a quid pro quo, redevelopment promised to avoid developing in NIMBYs‘ back yards if the NIMBYS would just allow the redevelopers to build mixed-use housing and retail in older, hollowed-out downtowns.

The public seems to have never caught on that, to build one unit of inclusionary housing, about four units of market-rate housing have to be built at an over-market price to subsidize that one affordable unit. This is called a bubble.

Developers, planners and city councilpersons can respond to the anti-growth NIMBYs that they are forced to build overpriced market-rate housing just to meet affordable-housing mandates. So state affordable housing mandates are the cart that drives the horse of local development, so to speak.

This is why affordable housing mandates are artificial and have no bearing in reality as to whether a city has enough older affordable housing stock or not.

True affordable housing is old, obsolescent and located further from commercial services and transit centers.

But in recent years, “affordable housing” has been redefined as a lack of brand new condos or apartments built on pricey commercial land with pools, spas and gyms, and located next to light-rail transit stations.  In other words, affordable housing is imaginary and has been redefined as lack of luxury housing for the poor — an oxymoron. Affordable Cadillacs can’t be far behind.

The story of local complicity in the national financial panic has largely not been told, however. A Cato Institute study, “How Urban Planners Caused the Bubble,” found:

* Cities with no growth management plans experienced 40 percent appreciation in home price from 1995 to 2008, while those with such plans appreciated from 100 percent to 150 percent. 

* Home prices did not bubble in 29 states, only one of which had a growth management law. Conversely, home prices bubbled in 16 of 21 states with such laws.

* Between 2000 and 2008, the Atlanta, Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston metropolitan populations each grew by more than 125,000 per year without out experiencing bubbles, while having no strong growth-management plans.

* There was a strong correlation of foreclosure rates and growth management induced housing bubbles.

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Such studies, however, have failed to see how growth management plans, redevelopment, affordable housing quotas and inclusionary housing combined to induce a housing price fever to generate more sales taxes and a larger property tax base to pay for overcommitted pension funds. By definition, redevelopment is an economic bubble not manufactured on Wall Street but on Main Street. Redevelopment projects functioned as Potemkin casinos that cities bet their futures on and lost.

The Redevelopment Ideology

Redevelopment is also not just physical real estate, tax increment financing or a bubble — but an ideology. An ideology is not a lie, deception, propaganda or trickery. By definition, the liar knows he is lying, the ideologist does not. Those advocating saving redevelopment in California are perfectly sincere. Just look at the beautiful projects they have created (they would say)!

But ideologies frequently serve a vested interest and distort reality where it is beneficial for them to do so.  You can tell when an ideology has been operating when those beneficiaries claim that when things didn’t work out right, it must be imaginary.

They say in Kern County that once a year you can see a mirage of the former Buena Vista Lake.