The governor’s plan, unveiled last month, came after months of coverage about spiraling housing costs in urban areas, starting with San Francisco, where average monthly apartment rents have soared past $3,500 over the past year. Brown wants to modify the California Environmental Quality Act to give pre-clearance to high-density projects that meet certain standards, including having a portion of units that are deemed affordable. He also wants to reduce the obstacles to obtaining building permits.

The strategy reflects an approach that has worked fairly well in New Jersey and Massachusetts. Its basics were recommended in a 2003 Public Policy Institute of California report, which emphasized the need for a statewide approach, given how ineffective local housing policies were in creating housing stock.

Brown’s initiative passed the Assembly on a 46-7 vote on May 27 — perhaps reflecting that state lawmakers were hearing it from their constituents over the cost of rent and homes. But environmentalists are now loudly opposing the measure, and its passage in the state Senate is far less assured. Labor unions and trial lawyers, which have a history of using CEQA to force concessions or settlements from developers, also are opposing the plan.

A joint letter sent to every state lawmaker by unions, the Natural Resources Defense Council and other green groups last month warned that if adopted, Brown’s plan “would be a disaster for local government, local communities, the environment and the citizens of California.”

Brown laments difficulty of changing CEQA

In an interview with a UCLA publication, Blue Print, the governor addressed the difficulty of amending CEQA, something supported by all living California governors.

“The unions won’t let you because they use it as a hammer to get project labor agreements. The environmentalists like it because it’s the people’s document that you have to disclose all the impacts,” the governor said. “And, of course, the developers have a problem because ‘impact,’ boy, that’s a big word. Everything’s an impact.”

But as the Los Angeles Times recently reported, CEQA is not the only obstacle in San Francisco or Los Angeles.

In 1978, San Franciscans approved a ballot measure limiting changes in neighborhood density. In 1986, city voters backed a strict growth control initiative that capped commercial office construction.

In L.A., a 1987 court ruling limiting city officials’ discretion in approving building permits for projects with more than 50 units has had the effect of “preventing construction until city officials prepare an environmental impact report or declare one unnecessary, until a full trial is held in the case, or until the Supreme Court changes the ruling,” if a project faces challenges under state environmental laws.

Brown’s proposed CEQA changes, if approved, would override the San Francisco laws and the Los Angeles court precedent. A Brown aide has called the local laws “micromanaging” that would prevent an adequate response to the housing crisis.

The League of California Cities, while acknowledging the seriousness of the issue, has joined unions and greens in opposing the governor’s plan.

Dan Carrigg, the league’s legislative director, told the San Francisco Business Times, “We support local decision-making. When you have one of these one-size-fits all policies … sometimes what works in one spot doesn’t work well in another.”

Urged to intervene in a hot-blooded dispute over the fate of six beleaguered Catholic hospitals, Harris approved their sale to Prime Healthcare Services. But she attached a stringent list of conditions designed to satisfy the Service Employees International Union and other Prime critics.

The decision sparked its own wave of criticism, plunging the sale itself into doubt. And Harris has so far declined to comment.

Among other demands, Harris’ solution would require several key changes well in excess of what Prime had originally agreed to. KPCC reported that, to acquire the hospitals, Prime will have to ensure Medi-Cal and Medicare participation guarantees for all outstanding pensions and — most critically — a “10-year commitment for emergency services at some of the hospitals.”

According to the Los Angeles Times, “The hospitals would be required to provide abortion and other reproductive health services that the Daughters of Charity would not” because they are an order of Catholic nuns.

Harris’s measures come on the heels of a lengthy process involving several consultants’ reports, six public meetings and 14,000 comments delivered to her office, according to the San Jose Mercury News. As the San Francisco Chronicle noted, the Attorney General’s office is required to authorize conversions from non-profit to for-profit status.

In an effort to save the hospitals from closure without offending workers’ groups, she turned to the report’s recommendation of a laundry list of conditions — some 70 pages of them. Prime unsuccessfully pressed the Attorney General’s office to ease from some of the consultants’ recommendations, reported the Mercury News. In its original deal with the hospital chain, for instance, Prime accepted specified commitments that terminated after five years, not 10.

Hospital politics

The nonprofit chain of six hospitals, which includes the St. Vincent Medical Center in the heart of Los Angeles, has long been in need of a buyer. But the hospitals found themselves at the epicenter of a political conflict, implicating not only health care but race, class and the economy.

As the Times reported, the lack of a deal put at stake some 7,600 jobs that have been delivering care to lower-income neighborhoods in Los Angeles.

It was a golden opportunity for Prime, which was willing to make unusual concessions in order to forge the deal. “In October, Prime Healthcare agreed to pay about $843 million in cash and assumed debt to acquire the six hospitals,” the Times noted. “A key part of the agreement was Prime Healthcare’s promise to assume $300 million of liability for the pensions of 17,000 current and former Daughters of Charity employees.”

On the other hand, Prime has developed a reputation in Southern California for swiftly acquiring a big portfolio of hospitals, thanks to a strategy of turning around struggling institutions by whipping their cost structures into shape. For labor unions and their allies, that was a problem.

SEIU’s United Health Workers West, which backed Harris’ decision, has suspected Prime of planning to cut not only costs but jobs and services. Adding to the climate of acrimony, a San Bernardino Superior Court Judge recently found that Prime violated a court order by “needlessly admitting emergency room patients into its Chino hospital,” according to KPCC.

An uncertain prognosis

While unions may be placated for the moment, Harris has yet to score a clean political victory. Prime’s executives have not lost the ability to walk away from the negotiating table. And after a weekend spent looking at options, the Times reported, they have not yet made a decision:

“‘We hope to have a decision within a week,’ said Dr. Kavitha Reddy Bhatia, vice president of clinical transformation for Prime Healthcare and daughter of the company’s founder, Dr. Prem Reddy.”

Hospital executives haven’t finished scrutinizing Harris’ proposal either.

The sooner they press Prime for an answer, the sooner they will discover whether they will face what Harris has strained to prevent — Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

On the heels of a recently approved $15 minimum wage in Seattle, advocates for dramatically increased hourly wages sensed an opportunity to select a fresh target. That’s where L.A. comes in. Organizations including the Los Angeles Workers Assembly and Peoples Power Assemblies have begun drafting a measure that would put a $15 wage on November’s city ballot.

Activists’ experience in Seattle suggests that once a city votes in a mandatory wage boost, reversing the policy can be an extreme challenge. That even appears to be true during the time before increased wages are implemented. A business-led effort to repeal that city’s wage ordinance called Forward Seattle has run aground, failing to collect enough signatures to put a repeal plan before voters. That marks an end to organized opposition to the increase in wages, which takes effect gradually until topping out in 2017.

Hotel politics — and union gamesmanship?

Activists in L.A. had already singled out hotel workers for a planned hike in wages, almost doubling the rate to $15.37 an hour. Industry and business organizations reacted predictably. Lynn Mohrfeld, president and CEO of the California Hotel Association, observed that the scheme would only affect non-union hotels — stoking speculation that unions hoped businesses would encourage unionization to avoid the sudden leap in costs.

Mayor Eric Garcetti, who had been cagey about singling out hotels when his primary opponent Wendy Greuel called it a “living wage,” now supports the idea. Garcetti has said he would sign an ordinance bringing large hotels’ minimum wages to $15.37, but is only “reviewing” the current, broader proposal for a blanket $15 wage, according to a spokesman.

One reason activists looked to Los Angeles after Seattle is simple: California has already been successfully targeted for blanket minimum wage hikes. On July 1, Assembly Bill 10 went into effect, raising the state minimum wage to $9 an hour. On the first of the year in 2016, that figure will rise again to $10. Gov. Jerry Brown signed the bill last fall, giving activists a substantial amount of lead time in planning their next move.

L.A. isn’t the only city where minimum wage increases are on the march. Just this month, San Diego skipped over voters entirely and opted to raise wages through its City Council. Todd Gloria, the council president, initially wanted to put the matter on the ballot, but ended up deciding to impose it directly on a 6-3 partisan vote, with all Democratic members voting yes and all Republican members voting no. San Diego will hike the minimum wage to $9.75 on the first of the new year, to $10.50 at the start of 2016, and to $11.50 as 2017 rings in. Starting two years later, the minimum wage will rise along with inflation.

Powerful coalition builds in S.F.

Meanwhile, in San Francisco an overwhelming coalition of labor, interest and some business groups succeeded in placing on their city ballot a gradual wage increase to $15 by 2018. Although even San Francisco’s Chamber of Commerce has lent its symbolic approval to the measure, restaurateurs and hospitality industry leaders expect the hikes will hit them hard.

Finally, East Bay mayors have recently hatched a plan to coordinate their minimum wage increases. A wage proposal on Oakland’s upcoming ballot is poised to trigger a round of hikes that would end up reaching from Richmond to Berkeley to Emeryville and beyond.

Liberals, union leaders and labor activists were disappointed when Congress opposed a national minimum wage hike — a marquee initiative drummed up by high-ranking Democrats to shift attention away from Obamacare’s then-humiliating struggles. But the subsequent shift to state and local activism has demonstrated the effectiveness of politics practiced closer to the ground.

With momentum behind them, L.A. organizers have settled on an accelerated timetable for phasing in the hikes. Small businesses and nonprofits would get less than two years to prepare for the increase, while large businesses would be hit immediately.

The lack of public support for the strike is striking in that the union is arguably the state’s most sympathetic public employee union. The union says that 99 percent of its food workers, custodians and respiratory therapists are income-eligible for some form of public assistance, which it contrasts with the bloated salaries and lavish benefits provided to top UC administrators.

Despite the clear income inequality among the 190,000 faculty and staff at the University of California, a majority of Democrat elected officials have failed to publicly comment on the upcoming strike.

High-paid BART employees undermined low-paid UC workers

Since last summer’s strike by Bay Area transit workers, Democrat politicians have become fickle friends of organized labor.

Described by the San Francisco Chronicle as “among the best-off in the country,” the 2,300 BART mechanics, custodians, station agents, train operators and clerical staff earned an average base salary of $71,000 per year plus $11,000 in overtime pay. That was before the union received a 15.38 percent pay increase over four years in exchange for increased pension contributions. Previously, BART paid both the employee and employer pension contributions.

Several Democrat leaders, including Assembly candidate Steve Glazer, publicly opposed the strike, signaling an intraparty split on labor issues.

“The prospect that well-paid Bay Area Rapid Transit system workers with lavish benefits and little-known perks might inconvenience rich white-collar liberals in the San Francisco area,” wrote CalWatchdog’s Chris Reed, “has finally triggered an intraparty battle of the kind that California Democrats have somehow managed to avoid for decades.”

Field Poll: Public sours on unions

Following that bruising battle at BART, for the first time, Californians have a negative view of organized labor. Last December, a Field Poll found that a plurality of registered voters said that unions “do more harm than good.” Forty five percent of those surveyed viewed unions negatively, a 16-point swing in just two years.

Union approval has even fallen among union households. Thirty one percent of union households have a negative view of unions, a huge increase from the 18 percent result reported in March 2011.

“It seems like they keep winning the battles,” Field Poll director Mark DiCamillo said back in December when the poll was released. “The question becomes, ‘Are they moving the public in the direction where they may lose the war?’”

That first casualty in the war against unions are the low-paid service workers at the University of California. Earlier this month, AFSCME 3299 released a  list of elected officials throughout California who “have united in support of AFSCME 3299’s pursuit of a fair contract settlement with UC.” Just eight state legislators were included on the list.

Even former union members are jettisoning their union credentials. State Sen. Norma Torres, D-Pomona, who recently launched her third campaign in three years, wasn’t among the small group of state legislators to publicly back the lowest-paid workers at the University of California. Her absence was noticeable given that she’s a former member of AFSCME. Since being elected to the Legislature, Torres has distanced herself from the union by omitting her union activities from her official biography.

Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez stands with UC workers

Not all Democrats are shunning labor unions out of political expediency. Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, D-San Diego, a former secretary-treasurer of the San Diego-Imperial Counties Labor Council, has repeatedly offered support for UC’s lowest-paid workers.

“UC continues to disregard the well-being of its lowest wage workers,” said Gonzalez, one of the eight Democrat legislators to publicly stand up for UC workers. “It makes no sense for the Legislature to continue to write the UC system a blank check while they continue to increase the wages of those at the very top, while leaving our service workers to be subsidized by taxpayers through safety net programs.”

She added, “All work is dignified and all workers should be accorded respect by our public university system.”

In addition to Gonzalez, Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, who serves on the UC Board of Regents, has voiced his support for AFSCME 3299 on various social networks. The union adds that more members are silently with them.

“Whether on picket lines, phone lines, in letters or in statements to the press, the overwhelming majority of the state Legislature’s Democratic Caucus has stood shoulder to shoulder with AFSCME 3299 members throughout their struggle for fairness and dignity at the University of California, and we are deeply grateful for their support,” AFSCME 3299 said in a statement. “We are equally grateful to the members of the GOP Caucus who have stood with us.  Our fight is not a matter of right and left, but right and wrong.”

96 percent of UC service workers and patient care workers voted in favor of the strike authorization. AFSCME 3299 represents 8,300 service workers and 13,000 patient care technical workers.

The eight legislators who publicly back AFSCME 3299

• State Senate Majority Leader Ellen Corbett
• Assembly member Marc Levine
• Assembly member Paul Fong
• Assembly member Jimmy Gomez
• Assembly member Lorena Gonzalez
• Assembly member Shirley Weber, Ph.D.
• Assembly member Rob Bonta
• Assembly member Reggie Jones-Sawyer

SB 687 was on the agenda in the education committee. The bill would allow school districts to permit adults to volunteer time or resources for maintenance or improvement of a school, volunteer time in the classroom or help during the lunch period.

And the bill would prohibit a collective bargaining agreement from prohibiting a school district from using volunteers.

Needless to say, SB 687, authored by Sen. Joel Anderson, R-Alpine, but presented by Sen. Mark Wyland, R-Solana Beach, elicited a great deal of discussion and plenty of union pushback.

Despite the need for maintenance at so many of California’s public schools, most of the committee concern seemed to center around the displacement of union employees with volunteers and “faulty work.” The bill analysis by the committee staff said volunteers “may not have the proper qualifications and training to perform capital projects.”

Committee members cited several school volunteer projects that went awry, including a heating and air conditioning replacement and a broken drinking fountain. “It puts the safety of kids in jeopardy,” said Sen. Marty Block, D-San Diego.

Torres’ comment draws guffaws

“There nothing in the current law preventing parents from volunteering in schools,” said Sen. Norma Torres, D-Chino, who noted that parents and volunteers do community beautification projects at school campuses in her district once a year. “And they are always done side by side with the classified employees, to plant flowers, remove graffiti, to do small things that improve the quality of life of that student while they are there,” she said.

“I am concerned about infrastructure improvements,” Torres said. “I don’t know — I am very concerned that everybody is talking about a water fountain as if it was no big deal. But some of our water fountains here in the Capitol had been infected with worms.”

Her comment prompted some guffaws and giggles.

“I don’t think that’s funny,” Torres said. “Our children deserve better than that. There’s asbestosis — some child may not know until 30 years from now that they got asbestosis from some parent cracking a wall and tapping into those types of contaminates.”

Torres continued: “Lead poisoning — we tried to do a painting project that included painting fences around the school, unknowingly that there was lead. Thank goodness that the classified employees, the people in the building trades that were assigned to work with the parents that day, understood what the volunteers did not understand.”

“I think this is a slippery slope and going down the …  um … wrong tube here with this proposal, and I’m not supporting it.”

Long list of unions oppose bill

After testimony in opposition of the bill by the California Teachers Association, California School Employees Association, California Federation of Teachers, and California Labor Federation – all labor unions or groups — Committee Chairwoman Sen. Carol Liu, D–La Cañada Flintridge, said she would keep the bill in the committee to allow Anderson to make changes to it.

Bill Lucia with Ed Voice, offered support for SB 687, saying it should be a local control, district by district issue, particularly to deal with irregular maintenance in schools.

But don’t expect to see parent volunteers at schools doing anything but planting flowers.

An order issued by a Sacramento Superior Court judge on Nov. 27 ruled Gerawan Framing did not have to enter into collective bargaining while preparing an appeal. The UFW didn’t even mention this setback on its website.

UFW jumps the gun

While Gerawan Farming was awaiting the results of the Nov. 5 Gerawan employee election to decertify the UFW, the UFW requested a temporary restraining order Nov. 22 to force Gerawan into collective bargaining anyway. This attempt to force unionization on the Gerawan employees was helped along by the  California Agricultural Labor Relations Board, which ordered the collective bargaining, while the Board simultaneously has been sitting on the employee election results.

Gerawan Farming refused to enter into the collective bargaining process pending the allotted 30-days to prepare an appeal. The company has since filed a complaint with the with the California Court of Appeal, Fifth District in Fresno, against the ALRB’s invocation of the California’s Mandatory Mediation and Conciliation Statute.

The UFW tried to get the state court to issue a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction prohibiting Gerawan Farming from refusing to abide by the ALRB’s collective bargaining order. The UFW argued, “Otherwise the UFW and the workers will suffer irreparable harm from precisely the automatic stay that the Legislature declined to enact.”

(All of the documents in this case, including the UFW complaint and judge’s order, can be found here. Case number 2013-00153803)

Judge Brown’s explanation

Superior Court Judge David Brown explained in his Nov. 27 decision:

“The review by the court shall not extend further than to determine, on the basis of the entire record, whether any of the following occurred:

“(1) The board acted without, or in excess of, its powers or jurisdiction.

“(2) The board has not proceeded in the manner required by law.

“(3) The order or decision of the board was procured by fraud or was an abuse of discretion.

“(4) The order or decision of the board violates any right of the petitioner under the Constitution of the United States or the California Constitution.”

Legal cherry-picking

The UFW argued that the language within the state law compels the result they were seeking. “They assert the Legislature’s deliberate creation a narrow framework for review of a Mediator’s report by the Board (ALRB), demonstrates a desire to provide farm workers with the benefit of a collective bargaining agreement,” the judge wrote.

The UFW argued that the language of the statute provided that no final order of the Board should be stayed on appeal unless the appellant shows irreparable harm, and a likelihood of success on appeal shows an explicit intent to provide a collective bargaining agreement to agricultural workers without delay.

But the judge didn’t buy the UFW’s legal argument.

“Unfortunately, there are no provisions of the Agricultural Labor Relations Act governing the Mandatory Mediation Process that permit the Agriculture Labor Relations Board to seek temporary relief during the pendency of the 30-day period for seeking appellate review,” the judge said, quoting from a similar 2012 case, Ace Tomato Company Inc., v. United Farm Workers.

Judge Brown explained:

“In Ace, following a Board Decision affirming the mediator’s report, the UFW filed a request for agency action to enforce the anti-stay provision in the Mandatory Mediation Law, alleging that Ace had failed to implement the CBA as ordered, and requesting that the Board go to court to enforce its decision (under Lab. Code § 1164.3(f), either party or the Board may file an action to enforce the Order of the Board),” the Judge wrote. “Immediately thereafter, the Board issued an Administrative Order requesting that Ace provide a response to the UFW’s request for enforcement. Ace provided a response indicating that it intended to file a petition for review in the Court of Appeal of the Board’s decision affirming the mediator, but did not indicate whether it had implemented the agreement. Shortly thereafter, the Board issued another Administrative Order, ordering Ace to state whether it had in fact implemented the CBA.”

“As in unfair labor practice proceedings, the Board’s decisions are not self-enforcing,” the judge said. “Rather, in order to enforce its decisions, the Board must first obtain a judgement.” And judgments are obtained through the Superior Court.

Legislative intent

The judge explained legislative intent should be gathered from the whole legislative act, rather than cherry-picking a few words or isolated parts. He wrote, “Courts should thus construe all provisions of a statute together,… significance being given when possible to each word, phrase, sentence, and part of the act in pursuance of the legislative purpose.”

In other words, the judge told the UFW that words matter, especially in context. “The meaning of a statute may not be determined from a single word or sentence. Its words must be construed in context, keeping in mind the nature and obvious purpose of the statute where they so as to make sense of the entire statutory scheme,” the judge said.

The judge added there was “no legal mechanism by which the UFW could seek to enforce the collective bargaining agreement” at that time.

Judge Brown ruled: “The application is DENIED.”

Sacramento’s publicly funded arena deal has been billed as “the largest redevelopment project in city history” in Sacramento, which should make every tax payer shudder.

A publicly funded arena will mean Sacramento taxpayers can expect a giant toilet flushing publicly funding. Other people’s money is so easy to recklessly spend.

City-created the blight

The blighted Downtown Plaza in downtown Sacramento is entirely the fault of the city, through eminent domain, and its lousy property management. As the largest slumlord on the street, the city is responsible for driving the downtown K Street Mall area from a once-bustling pedestrian mall filled with independently owned shops and department stores, into a crime laden, blighted area replete with abandoned buildings and homeless people — after spending hundreds of millions of dollars in redevelopment money on the space.

Sacramento Police Department has had to cut cops. There are no road repairs. Park maintenance is dwindling. City services overall have been cut already. The publicly funded arena will just usher in massive debt. And when the team can no longer pay its bills, the city, already sinking under huge debt and unfunded pension liability, will file for bankruptcy.

Publicly funded arena deals are public sinkholes, and a bad deal for taxpayers.

New York arena bust

The Wall Street Journal just reported the New York City Barclays Center arena is not producing nearly the revenue projected. The Barclays Center is not only losing money, it made only one-third the first year projected revenue, and can’t pay the annual debt service.

Sacramento’s bad deal

Officials claim the Sacramento arena deal would require the city to commit “$258 million in value, or 58 percent of the arena cost,” according to reports in the Sacramento Bee. “Of that, $212 million would come from selling bonds backed by future revenues from city downtown parking garages. The city’s contribution is the same as it was in last year’s aborted project to build an arena at the downtown railyard.”

But that’s just part of the public’s contribution. Public policy watchdog Eye on Sacramento, says the public’s contribution is actually $375 million, when all of the publicly owned assets being thrown into the deal are accounted for.

What else is being thrown into the pot? The city also agreed to give the arena private development group the city’s empty 100-acre plot next to Sleep Train Arena in North Natomas, as well as six other city properties, five of them adjacent to or near the downtown arena site.

And Sacramento officials are giving away the city’s parking lot and metered parking revenue, after claiming the parking lots have no value.

Is it any wonder economists think arenas make bad investments for taxpayers?

Arenas and sports stadiums a bust

“The basic idea is that sports stadiums typically aren’t a good tool for economic development,” said Victor Matheson, an economist at Holy Cross who has studied the economic impact of stadium construction for decades, reported the Atlantic. “When cities cite studies (often produced by parties with an interest in building the stadium) touting the impact of such projects, there is a simple rule for determining the actual return on investment, Matheson said: ‘Take whatever number the sports promoter says, take it and move the decimal one place to the left. Divide it by ten, and that’s a pretty good estimate of the actual economic impact.’”

“The main problem, I think, with the public financing of sports stadiums isn’t that they happen, but that they happen so often because of how they are sold to taxpayers.”

Ohio arena bust

“Nearly 20 years after county officials promised that public financing for a pair of professional sports stadiums would help usher in a new era of economic vitality, the reality is somewhat different,” the Huffington Post reported in March about Drake Center. “The county’s agreement to build new stadium facilities for the Cincinnati Bengals and the Cincinnati Reds has been described as ‘one of the worst professional sports deals ever struck by a local government’ by the Wall Street Journal.”

Arizona arena bust

In June 2012, the city council of Glendale, Arizona, decided to spend $324 million on the Phoenix Coyotes, an ice hockey team that plays in Glendale’s Jobing.com Arena.

“As the city voted to give a future Coyotes owner hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars, it laid off 49 public workers, and even considered putting its city hall and police station up as collateral to obtain a loan, according to the Arizona Republic,” the Atlantic reported. “The latter plan was ultimately scrapped.”

Glendale is on the hook for $15 million per year over 20 years to a potential Coyotes owner, but also committed to $12 million annual debt payment for construction of its arena. In return, the city receives only $2.2 million in annual rent payments, ticket surcharges, sales taxes and other fees.” The city will still lose $9 million annually.

The art of the deal

The pubic cost of Sacramento’s current arena subsidy plan will require payments of $25 million per year for 27 years after the initial 8 years of “interest only” payments.  The state recently prohibited school districts from using similar long-term “capital appreciation” bonds.

Arena projects rarely make economic sense because of the flawed way they are structured. Stadiums and arenas are financed with long-term bonds, sticking cities with the debt for unusually long periods of time. Sacramento’s arena bond debt will be around for at least 30 years.

The labor union boasted 50,000 members by the end of the 1970s. But according to the UFW’s last Labor Organization Annual Report filed with the U.S. Department of Labor, as of Dec. 31, 2012 the union had only 4,443 members. So it has declined by more than 90 percent. By contrast, today the California Teachers Association lists 325,000 members.

In order to breathe new life into the union, many in the farming community claim the ALRB and UFW appear to have joined forces to reverse their misfortune by targeting one of the biggest non-union farming operations in the state. Should they succeed in unionizing Gerawan Farming employees, adding the 5,000 farmworkers would double union membership, and certainly boost the ALRB’s status.

Gerawan Farming

The UFW won an election to represent Gerawan Farming’s workers 23 years ago. But after only one bargaining session, the union disappeared and wasn’t heard from for more than 20 years.

Last October, the union reappeared to impose a contract on Gerawan Farming and its employees — without a vote of the workers.

Silvia Lopez

“We don’t want the union,” said Silvia Lopez in a recent radio interview on Fresno’s KMJ radio station with host Ray Appleton. “Why is that so hard to get?”

Lopez, a 15-year employee of Gerawan Farming, is one of hundreds of farm workers who protested the ALRB and United Farm Workers recently.

Lopez said their primary issue with the United Farm Workers union is the 3 percent deduction the union will take out of their paychecks for dues. For a majority of the Gerawan Farming workers, union dues have never been taken out of their paychecks before. Lopez said the union is coming after them because of the union agreement in 1990, but she said a contract was never drawn up.

“The union just came in and said they would charge us to represent us,” Lopez told Appleton. “I was worried. Where have you been?” she said she asked. “We don’t need them. We are waiting for someone to help. No one is helping. Where is Jerry Brown? Who is going to defend our rights?”

Lopez said she collected the workers’ signatures herself, crew by crew, as she counted the employees. “I wrote down everything. I know the employees of Gerawan,” Lopez said.

When the ALRB said the signatures were no good, Lopez said she was angry. “That’s a lie. I know ALRB and they’re lying,” Lopez said. “I counted those signatures. I know I turned in 90 percent of the signatures. If the union comes into our company, we are going to quit. We won’t pay 3 percent to the UFW. I don’t like the UFW. They don’t offer the benefits they promise.”

Lopez added, “Why are they scared of an election?”

Help farm workers

Farm employees from Gerawan Farming have been trying to get out the UFW since October 2012. The employees recently petitioned the ALRB for a vote, but it sided with the UFW to block the employees from even being able to vote on keeping or booting the UFW.

After circulating a petition collecting workers’ signatures to decertify the UFW, the ALRB rejected workers’ petition last week. The ALRB claimed the workers’ petition lacked valid signatures and even accused  the workers who organized the petition of forging signatures.

“What Would You Do?” the Help Farm Workers website asks. “What would you do if representation were forced on you without your right to vote on it? What if that representation carried with it a dues tax on every dollar you earned?

“This is what faces the workers at Gerawan Farms unless the California ALRB honors their right to a fair and free election.”

ALRB

Adding insult to injury, ALRB’s Visalia regional director Silas M. Shawver has accused Gerawan Farming of circulating the petition seeking the decertification election, according to the Fresno Bee.

” ‘There is no doubt that there are Gerawan workers who genuinely want to decertify the union at their workplace,’ the ruling states,” reported the Bee. “However, ‘the evidence shows that a majority of the current employees at Gerawan have not expressed interest in decertifying the union.’”

The recent ruling came following Gerawan employees’ rallies in front of ALRB offices in Visalia and Kerman, demanding, “Let us Vote.”

“In a letter to Silas Shawver, regional director of the ALRB, Gerawan noted that Shawver’s math just doesn’t add up: more than 2,000 signatures from Gerawan employees were filed asking for a decertification vote, yet only 1,300 were needed and just 100 were deemed invalid,” the Help Farm Workers website said.

A Gerawan Farming statement on the Help Farm Workers website explained:

“We believe the Petitioner and the potential voters have a right to know the signature count. Otherwise, it appears that the decision about whether to dismiss or not dismiss a petition is an arbitrary one not based on a fair and careful assessment of whether there is reasonable cause to believe there is a bona fide question of representation,” the statement said.

“Gerawan reminded the ALRB that, at Gerawan’s request, the agency officials personally met with over 2,100 Gerawan employees before the election. The Board’s agents, including Mr. Shawver, visited the farm so they could inform the workers of their right to ask for an election. “When the ALRB hides the actual signature count, as you have done, it certainly creates reason for suspicion that something is just not right.”

Gov. Jerry Brown just signed SB 743, “easing environmental regulations for developments in California cities, including a new basketball arena in downtown Sacramento,” the Los Angeles Times said.

In March I predicted Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento would jam legislation through exempting the Sacramento Kings new arena plan from the restrictions of the  California Environmental Quality Act, in order to meet a dubious deadline imposed by the NBA.

March 30, after Steinberg’s office told me he did not plan on authoring legislation to streamline or bypass the required environmental process for the proposed Sacramento NBA arena, I predicted they weren’t being straight with me.

Steinberg’s office denied any plan to do this. But the reason I wrote the story and asked about this was I knew this was the next step in scamming the public with the publicly subsidized arena.

The need to bypass California’s absurdly strict environmental guidelines and restrictions prevent most large scale projects from ever taking place without legislative intervention. And Sacramento officials shoved the latest iteration of an arena deal through at breakneck speed for a reason.

But even Steinberg couldn’t get his original bill, SB 731 through the committee process. His colleagues weren’t comfortable with Steinberg’s intended claims of reforming the entire CEQA process, when really his bill was just a conduit for the Sacramento arena deal.

SB 731 was shelved and the new conduit became a gut-and-amend bill. SB 743 rose from the ashes like a Phoenix. (Poor choice of words for the Sacramento Kings…)

Steinberg’s latest bill was introduced at the very end the legislative session, without notice, public debate or any real scrutiny by media. Nearly all of the Sacramento local media — radio, television, newspapers and magazines — are backing the arena project, and providing the cheerleading.

Yet Steinberg’s bill is even worse than previous stadium legislation. It also would allow the City of Sacramento greater eminent domain powers to seize the downtown property currently in the way of building the project.

More shameful, is what media claims the bill will do, rather than highlight what abuses of power it will allow, and gifts of public property to the arena developers.

According to the LA Times provisions of SB 743 will (in bold):

–Remove parking and aesthetics standards as grounds for legal challenges against developments in urban infill areas near transit stops.

Among the assets being “gifted” to the arena deal are the city’s parking garages and meters, which currently generate about $9 million a year for the general fund. The city has proposed diverting all of the city parking revenues to pay the arena bond payments. This will blow a $9 million annual hole in the general fund.

City staff assigned zero value to the 3,700 parking garage spaces the city is giving to the developers, nearly 50 percent of all city-owned garage spaces. The garage spots actually have a fair market value of $58 million, based on the city’s own 2012 parking valuation study.

–Modernize the statewide measurements against which traffic impacts are assessed and resolved, allowing developers to offset the impacts by building near mass transit stations.

Not true. Steinberg’s CEQA exemption bill would allow arena construction to go ahead even with existing traffic backups in this part of downtown, and anticipated significant traffic impacts due to the arena. Then taxpayers will be on the hook when Caltrans decides to send a bill of $100 million-plus for freeway improvements — after arena construction is already underway.

–Expand an exemption from CEQA litigation for mixed residential/commercial projects located within transit priority areas where a full environmental impact review has already been completed.

For the Sacramento arena project, the bill prevents certain lawsuits stopping the project unless a judge finds a danger to public health and safety, and allows the government to force the sale of properties through eminent domain concurrently with the environmental review process.

Even if there are violations to the CEQA laws, mitigation doesn’t have to be addressed until the end of the first basketball season with an official NBA team actually playing in the arena.

“This bill sets a terrible precedent by eliminating any realistic chance of halting construction if the arena is approved illegally,” Kevin Bundy, Senior Attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a press statement, in a story I recently wrote. “This is a wink and a nod to public officials that they can ignore California’s most important environmental law with impunity.”

The truth is the City of Sacramento is giving assets to the arena developers, which city officials say have a value of $46 million. However, Eye on Sacramento, a public policy watchdog group, estimated the real value of these assets is at least $139 million, making the total taxpayer subsidy $350 million — not the $257 million as represented by the city.

Another area of substantial discrepancy is between the subsidy numbers provided by the city and EOS’s subsidy calculations.

City staff also assigned zero value to the six digital billboard sites the city is giving away as part of the arena deal. But EOS found the sites are worth $18 million based on values established in a deal the city cut with Clear Channel Outboard just last year.

The remaining discrepancies are due to the city staff’s gross under-valuation of the six land parcels the city is also giving away to the developers. EOS found two of the six parcels to be worth four to six times the values assigned by staff.

Opposition

Because of the lack of public debate about the arena deal, as well as the highly dubious numbers put out by the city over the growing public subsidy, groups are joining efforts to oppose the arena in Sacramento for the Kings pro basketball team unless it is first put before voters for a vote.

A recent poll by the opposition group Sacramento Taxpayers Opposed to Pork found 78 percent of the respondents favor a public vote on taxpayer subsidies for the arena. Yet Steinberg and Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson, a former NBA player, have forged ahead as if it’s already a done deal.

And despite the Steinberg fast-tracked legislation now signed by Gov. Jerry Brown, I suspect the effort to put an initiative on the ballot will heat up.

A recent poll by the opposition group Sacramento Taxpayers Opposed to Pork found 78 percent of the respondents favor a public vote on taxpayer subsidies for the arena. Yet Steinberg and Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson, a former NBA player, are forging ahead as if it’s already a done deal.

But the deal is not done even though Steinberg is fast-tracking legislation to give the arena an exemption from the California Environmental Quality Act. The exemption is needed to meet an NBA-imposed deadline for quick construction.

Steinberg’s bill, a gut-and-amend job on another bill, will be introduced Friday. It will be similar to recent bills granting CEQA exemptions for a proposed stadium in downtown Los Angeles for a pro football team; and for a new stadium for the San Francisco 49ers in Santa Clara.

No debate

Steinberg’s latest bill is also being introduced at the very end the legislative session, without notice, public debate or any real scrutiny by media. Nearly all of the Sacramento local media — radio, television, newspapers and magazines — are backing the arena project.

Yet Steinberg’s bill is even worse than previous stadium legislation. It also would allow the City of Sacramento greater eminent domain powers to seize the downtown property currently in the way of building the project.

“When it comes to infill projects, when it comes to high wage, big job-opportunity projects, we ought to do all that is reasonable to expedite the process,” Steinberg said in a press conference Aug. 30.

The “reasonable, high wage, big job-opportunities” he is referring to will fall under a Community Workforce and Training Agreement in Sacramento, which requires most of the constructions workers hired for the arena project to be unionized.

Flexing union muscle

“Labor unions and the firm signed to lead construction of a new Kings arena in Sacramento have come to an agreement over the use of unionized labor in the construction of the project, a move that assures peace with the unions but will likely trigger a new source of opposition to the proposed public subsidy for the arena,” the Sacramento Bee reported Wednesday.

But that only enraged and energized the Coalition for Fair Employment in Construction, a 15-year-old California-based organization dedicated to opposing Project Labor Agreements, which guarantee contracts to unionized firms. The CFEC called the arena PLA “a waste of taxpayer money and a payoff to unions to avoid baseless complaints and lawsuits under the California Environmental Quality Act.”

“Steinberg needs union lobbyists and Democrats to push through his special [California Environmental Quality Act] exemption bill,” said Eric Christen, CEFC Executive Director. “Requiring construction companies to sign a Project Labor Agreement with unions locks up majority support in the legislature for this special interest bill.”

Opposition to the arena deal process

“This is not a hospital, emergency response center, or even a school,” Abigail Okrent told me in an interview discussing Steinberg's gut-and-amend legislation; she's the legislative director for the Planning and Conservation League. “If this is such an urgent issue, why not for other issues? It’s a basketball stadium, not a hospital.”

The rushed bill will allow only a limited public comment period during the CEQA process, according to Okrent. Even more egregiously, she said that, even if there are violations to the CEQA laws, “mitigation doesn’t have to be addressed until the end of the first basketball season with an official NBA team actually playing in the arena. This is a contentious issue which requires more discussion.”

The Planning and Conservation League has taken no position on the arena, but is objecting to the rushed,  gut-and-amend bill, and to the lack of proper public vetting.

“This bill sets a terrible precedent by eliminating any realistic chance of halting construction if the arena is approved illegally,” Kevin Bundy, Senior Attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a press statement. “This is a wink and a nod to public officials that they can ignore California’s most important environmental law with impunity.”

Gifts of assets

The City of Sacramento is giving assets to the arena developers, which city officials say have a value of $46 million. However, Eye on Sacramento, a public policy watchdog group, estimated the real value of these assets is at least $139 million, making the total taxpayer subsidy $350 million — not the $257 million as represented by the city.

Among the assets being gifted to the arena deal are the city’s parking garages and meters, which currently generate about $9 million a year for the general fund. The city has proposed diverting all of the city parking revenues to pay the arena bond payments. But according to EOS, this will blow a $9 million annual hole in the general fund.

Sacramento is already running a $9 million deficit; another $9 million would double that to $18 million.

Another area of substantial discrepancy is between the subsidy numbers provided by the city and EOS's subsidy calculations.

According to EOS, a large portion of the discrepancy can be attributed to city staff assigning zero value to the 3,700 parking garage spaces the city is giving to the developers, nearly 50 percent of all city-owned garage spaces. EOS calculates the garage spots actually have a fair market value of $58 million, based on the city's own 2012 parking valuation study.

City staff also assigned zero value to the six digital billboard sites the city is giving away as part of the arena deal. But EOS found the sites are worth $18 million based on values established in a deal the city cut with Clear Channel Outboard just last year.

The remaining discrepancies are due to the city staff's gross under-valuation of the six land parcels the city is also giving away to the developers. EOS found two of the six parcels to be worth four to six times the values assigned by staff.

And EOS warns Steinberg's CEQA exemption bill would allow arena construction to go ahead even with anticipated traffic impacts. Then taxpayers will be on the hook when Caltrans decides to send a bill of $100 million-plus for freeway improvements — after arena construction is already underway.