Time to work toward 100 percent renewables?

Good morning! TGIF. It’s inauguration Day. So, in honor of the festivities, whether you’re watching in adoration of the incoming president, in morbid curiosity, or just plain ol’ hate watching, we’ll keep it short this morning.  

• Environment: “It’s time to talk 100% renewable energy, California Senate leader says,” writes the Los Angeles Times. 

• NFL: “The Oakland Raiders have made good on a threat that loomed over hometown fans for months, filing paperwork Thursday to move the National Football League team to Las Vegas.” SF Gate has more. 

• Trump: “Scientists in California have named a newly discovered moth species after President-elect Donald Trump, saying the white and yellow scales on the insect’s head are reminiscent of Trump’s blond hairdo.” Capital Public Radio/AP have more. 

• Pensions: “San Diego county and city pension funds have nearly $7 billion less in the bank than they need to cover benefits already earned by current and former employees, a deficit that’s risen 90 percent in just two years, new reports show.” Voice of San Diego has more.

• Obamacare politics: “Democratic legislators took their pro-Obamacare message on the road Thursday, convening a hearing in Bakersfield to examine the repercussions of repealing the Affordable Care Act. The state Senate health committee pointedly held its hearing in the Central Valley — far afield form the state Capitol and the home districts of most members in attendance, but the home turf of key Republican members of California’s congressional delegation including House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy.” The Los Angeles Times has more. 

Legislature:

• Gone till Monday. 

Gov. Brown:

• No public events announced. 

Tips: matt@calwatchdog.com

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New follower: @JonathanArambel

As CalWatchdog reported earlier this week, the San Diego Chargers are much closer to moving to Los Angeles, having gotten the formal blessing of team owners at a meeting in Irving, Texas, to leave if they choose by the Jan. 15 deadline the NFL established a year ago. But the situation in Oakland with the Raiders seems cloudier — at least in California media, as opposed to websites that specialize in the NFL.

With the Raiders, the seeming good news for fans who want the team to stay starts with the fact that the Oakland City Council and the Alameda County Board of Supervisors appear enthusiastic about working with Fortress Investment Group, which is led by NFL Hall of Famer Ronnie Lott and billionaire investor Wes Edens, on a stadium plan. On Bay Area talk radio, supporters of the plan have dropped hints of having deep-pocket supporters who might come forward to minimize how much taxpayers would have to pay for the billion-dollar-plus new stadium the Raiders and the NFL want.

NFL officials who have criticized San Diego officials for their response to the Chargers’ stadium needs are offering praise for what’s happening in Oakland.

ESPN reported this week that the league told Oakland’s leaders to not worry about the threat the team would leave even though Nevada state leaders have committed to provide $750 million in public funds for a $1.9 billion NFL stadium in Las Vegas. The team would only have to pay $500 million toward the stadium, with the rest of the tab largely picked up by Las Vegas Sands chairman and CEO Sheldon Adelson. One of the world’s richest persons, Adelson hopes to end up a minority or majority owner of the team.

The implication of the remarks by NFL executive Eric Grubman to ESPN is that the league very much wants the Raiders to stay in Oakland even if a better deal is available in Las Vegas. When allowed to comment anonymously, officials with other NFL teams have said that the league should be wary of having a team in the city that is the capital of American sports gambling.

Raiders may sue to leave if NFL owners say no

But optimism about Oakland keeping its team is less apparent on Pro Football Talk, a niche website now affiliated with NBC Sports that has broken dozens of stories in recent years because of its network of NFL insider sources. Site founder Mike Florio wrote this week that Adelson and Raiders owner Mark Davis were struggling to finalize a deal that would bring the team to Las Vegas.

But Florio has long depicted the Raiders’ exit as close to a done deal. On Nov. 22, he reported that Davis would sue the NFL to allow his team to move to Las Vegas if he could not get the support of three-quarters of the league’s 32 owners to relocate his team, as NFL bylaws require.

Davis’ father, NFL Hall of Famer Al Davis, successfully sued the league after it sought to block him from moving the team from Oakland to Los Angeles, where it played from 1982 to 1994 before moving back to Oakland.

Florio has interviewed Mark Davis dozens of times off the record. While he honors the rules and doesn’t quote Davis directly, the impression his coverage always gives is that the Raiders owner sees becoming the first major pro sports franchise to set up shop in Las Vegas — a tourist-centered metropolitan area with 2.1 million residents — as akin to a no-brainer.

Many reporters have also made the obvious point that the Raiders’ image as edgy, unconventional outsiders conforms with Las Vegas’ image.

Florio believes a final decision will be made by September.

Assembly Bill 2863, introduced by Assemblyman Adam Gray, D-Merced, would make California the fourth state after New Jersey, Nevada and Delaware to legalize some Internet poker websites. The measure, which passed the Assembly Governmental Organization Committee on a 19-0 vote last week, says the sites can only be operated by Indian tribes that already have casinos in California.

The connection between the financial struggles of California horse-racing tracks and online poker is based on track owners’ arguments that they have been financially devastated by the rise of legal online horse betting and by the proliferation of Indian casinos in the Golden State since 2000. That’s when voters approved a state constitutional amendment making it much easier for tribes to get casinos approved. While the racing industry is declining in California, it still has some pull in the Legislature.

But there is a split in the media over how much of a breakthrough online poker advocates truly achieved last week. Coverage in the niche media that specialize in gambling was less likely to see the committee vote as a huge step toward online poker’s legalization than the mainstream media.

OnlinePoker.Report.com challenged the description of some of California’s wealthiest tribes as being “neutral” on AB2863 simply because they had not taken an unequivocal public stand on the measure. In particular, OPR reported, Agua Caliente and Pechanga representatives privately express broad skepticism about Gray’s bill. 

Some CA tribes want to block online juggernaut

Their biggest objection involves what in the online poker world is known as the “bad actor” debate: whether online poker sites with questionable histories should be firmly banned from partnering with casinos in setting up new state-specific online sites.

PokerStars is the site most consistently depicted as a villain, which led to clauses in a Nevada law meant to keep it out of state-approved online poker sites. Founded in 2001, the world’s largest online poker site was the biggest fish targeted in the U.S. government’s 2011 crackdown on online betting. The next year, it settled its legal fight with the Justice Department by paying $700 million without admitting wrongdoing.

Now PokerStars has quickly established itself as a juggernaut in New Jersey with its pokerstarsnj.com site. In 2014, it lined up partners in California: the Morongo Tribe and the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians.

Unless other tribes get language in AB2863 that provides hard protections against a PokerStars-Morongo-San Manuel partnership, the legislation may end up being opposed by most of California’s richest tribes, whose generous campaign donations have given them considerable clout in Sacramento.

There is again a gap between mainstream and niche media coverage of this issue. Instead of being about keeping “bad actors” out of states, gambling news sites depict “bad actor” clauses as being about market protectionism.

One of the world’s best known law professors, Harvard’s Lawrence Tribe, agrees with that description and could work as a lobbyist for and counsel to PokerStars if a state law attempts to keep PokerStars from partnering with California tribes.

The Spanos family, owner of the Chargers, has until January 2017 to decide whether to serve as a tenant in a to-be-built mega-stadium in Inglewood owned by Stan Kroenke and the officially relocated Los Angeles Rams. If the Chargers don’t take the option, Raiders owner Mark Davis will then have a one-year option to join the Rams in Inglewood.

In the days after the Jan. 12 announcement that the NFL had given its blessing to the Rams leaving St. Louis for Inglewood, there was considerable cynicism in San Diego and the sports world in general about the Chargers’ one-year option. The assumption was the team was gone.

But in the past 10 days, there have been glimmers of hope that the Chargers may yet be able to work with the city and county of San Diego to build an NFL-worthy stadium with $350 million of public subsidies. The main reason is the emergence of Fred Maas — a high-profile developer and former leader of the Centre City Development Corp., which oversaw highly successful redevelopment efforts in downtown San Diego — as a special advisor to the Chargers helping get a stadium built. The Union-Tribune has more:

“(Maas) has been around San Diego a long time,” Chargers chairman Dean Spanos said on a video posted to the team’s web site. “… He’s very familiar with all the political aspects of what goes on in the city, how all that works. His knowledge of San Diego as a whole will help us.” …

 

Maas was the stadium point man for former Mayor Jerry Sanders, as well as the former director of the Centre City Development Corp.

 

The Chargers suggested to Faulconer that he consider Maas to head the city’s side of stadium negotiations in 2014.

 

After meetings with Faulconer, Maas withdrew from consideration, citing concerns about the commitment he would have to make considering all that the new mayor was working through. … It was around that time in late 2014 that many people close to Spanos began to indicate he had essentially given up on getting a stadium deal in San Diego.

The San Diego Reader offered this tart description of Maas: “a specialist in steering public money into private real estate ventures.”

Raiders owner blasts A’s over long lease

Meanwhile, in Oakland, no Maas-type figure has emerged to help owner Mark Davis deal with local governments. While the Raiders renewed their lease for another year at O.co Coliseum, Davis is sounding increasingly downbeat about the lack of progress toward a new stadium — especially because of the actions of the Oakland A’s, the other primary tenant at the Coliseum.

“There’s an elephant in the room, and that’s the Oakland A’s,” Davis told CSNBayArea.com … . “They signed a 10-year lease while we were negotiating with Oakland officials, and it kind of put somebody right in the middle of things. There isn’t much you can do. They’ve tied our hands behind our back. Now it’s up to the A’s to make a declaration of what they want to do. If they don’t do that, I don’t see how we can make a deal.”

That’s from coverage in the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Leaders of Nevada’s largest city are wooing Davis. Their strongest argument is the prospect of the Raiders not having to pay much or anything toward construction of a new stadium that an NFL team could share with the University of Nevada-Las Vegas’ football team. Last month, the Review-Journal reported, Davis went to Vegas and …

… met with casino giants Sheldon Adelson and Steve Wynn, Ultimate Fighting Championship owner Lorenzo Fertitta, UNLV president Len Jessup and former school president Donald Snyder. Adelson’s Sands Corp. has proposed building a $1.2 billion domed stadium … .

Long-standing NFL concerns about having a team in America’s sports betting mecca remain intact, if not as prominent. Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones and New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft have come under fire for their early investments in DraftKings, a daily fantasy sports betting site that has exploded in popularity since 2014, and they may be forced to sell their shares.

It’s supposed to be the latest thing in solar power.

Gov. Jerry Brown and other state politicians tout the new Ivanpah Concentrated Solar Thermal Power Plant in the Mojave Desert as a showcase of the state’s green-energy future. The plant will help the state meet the target of 33 percent of state electricity coming from renewable sources, as mandated by a 2011 law signed by the governor.

Unfortunately, it’s about as “green” as a souped-up 1957 Chevy hot rod belching exhaust fumes without a catalytic converter. Southern California hot rodders used to race their modified cars on empty, dry lakebeds in the desert. And the Ivanpah solar also is located on a dry lake-bed near the California-Nevada borderline 35 miles west of Las Vegas.

Public TV station KCET estimated Ivanpah’s increased emissions:

“The plant’s total CO2 footprint from burning natural gas would rise to just above 92,200 tons per year, approximately equivalent to the annual greenhouse gas output of 16,500 average passenger cars.” 

Ivanpah’s application to the Desert Air Resources Board says it will emit 95,545 tons of Greenhouse Gases per year that would contribute to smog, excluding any carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.

Ivanpah is the largest solar power plant in the world, encompassing 4,000-acres of land with 173,400 heliostatic mirrors used to focus heat toward three central towers rising as high as 40-story buildings, each driving a steam turbine to generate electricity.

Different types of solar

There are four different types of solar technology, as described by Go Solar California, an initiative of the state government:

1. “Photovoltaic (PV) systems, which convert sunlight directly to electricity by means of PV cells made of semiconductor materials.
2. “Concentrating solar power (CSP) systems, which concentrate the sun’s energy using reflective devices such as troughs or mirror panels to produce heat that is then used to generate electricity.
3. “Solar water heating systems, which contain a solar collector that faces the sun and either heats water directly or heats a ‘working fluid’ that, in turn, is used to heat water.
4. “Transpired solar collectors, or ‘solar walls,’ which use solar energy to preheat ventilation air for a building.”

Ivanpah uses No. 2: CSP, also called “solar thermal technology.” It uses heat to produce steam-generated electricity.

Turbines

Each of Ivanpah’s three steam turbines has auxiliary boilers that are used to pre-heat fluid in the early morning, to keep fluid warm at night, and to boost production especially during cloudy days or when there are desert dust storms.  Natural gas is needed to heat the auxiliary boilers when the sun is down or covered by clouds.

You have to leave a thermal solar power plant idling on natural gas fuel rather than on clean solar power.

As reported in the Sacramento Bee, In Feb. 2013, Gov. Jerry Brown certified Ivanpah as a special “leadership project” that qualified for fast tracking under the 2011 California Environmental Quality Act reforms. The Bee wrote:

“Brown’s office said the California Air Resources Board has certified that the $1 billion solar project will not generate additional greenhouse gas emissions during construction, and that it will provide enough electricity to power about 264,000 homes.”

Fast-tracking

By fast-tracking Ivanpah’s construction, opposition to the impact of the project on bird kills, desert tortoise habitat, and potentially dangerous glare from its mirrors on commercial passenger aircraft was overcome. But now that the project is operational, another loophole in environmental laws designed specifically for solar projects like Ivanpah is coming into light.

Burning natural gas to pre-heat the boilers is generating 383.7 tons of carbon dioxide (C02) per operating day at Ivanpah. C02 is classified as a greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming.

This was overlooked by regulators at the California Energy Commission, large electric utilities such as PG&E and Edison that have signed 25-year contracts to buy solar power from Ivanpah, and even co-investor Google Inc. that put $168 million into the project.

Back on October 4, 2011, Brown signed Senate Bill 226, amending the California Environmental Quality Act so that “cumulative” impacts from a number of related public projects do not disqualify a project from categorical exemptions under certain circumstances.  The bill’s author was state Sen. Joe Simitian, D-Palo Alto, who chaired the Senate Committee on Environmental Quality at that time. Simitian’s constituents included Google.

Brown signed SB226 into law over the opposition of his own party’s 2010 political platform.  Oddly however, no opposition was filed by environmental organizations to SB226 while in committee review in the Legislature.

By 2012, Brown sanctified more CEQA reforms to fast track pet projects by calling them “the Lord’s work.”

Ivanpah was cleared to go online.

Part 2 will be on Ivanpah as a hybrid gas-solar plant

This is Part II in a series of stories about Nevada’s economic strategy. To read the first installment, click here.

In September, Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval delivered the Republican Party’s weekly address. In the video, which lasted less than six minutes, Sandoval blasted the Obama administration’s handling of the economic recovery and touted Nevada’s approach.

Sandoval, elaborating on how dire the economic situation in Nevada was when he took office in early 2011, said that “mere survival” was not good enough for his state. He said that he ordered all new regulations be frozen until they could be reviewed; cut spending by hundreds of millions of dollars; balanced Nevada’s budget; merged and eliminated state agencies; and extended tax exemptions for businesses. (Sandoval, working with a Democrat-controlled state legislature, later agreed to extend some taxes that had been set to expire.)

In the video, Sandoval pointed out that Nevada had experienced 31 months of economic growth and had the second strongest decline in unemployment in the nation. He also claimed that a wide array of businesses now had plans to move to Nevada.

“When it comes to growing jobs, it is my responsibility to leave no stone unturned when it comes to getting Nevada working again,” he added.

So what exactly are those plans?

Selling Nevada

Nevada’s pitch to firms interested in expanding or relocating to the state is simple. The state has some of the lowest taxes in America. California's top income tax rate is 13.3 percent; Nevada has no state income tax.

Nevada's regulations are limited. Given the state’s size, working with government is quick and easy (California businesses often complain about how long routine approvals take). Some firms — though certainly not all — are coaxed with even more tax incentives. And Las Vegas — known for its tourism, as well as the benefits that come with being a large metropolitan area — has always been a major selling point.

A patchwork assortment of agencies remains tasked with selling that message to firms that might want to expand or grow in Nevada.

At the top is the Governor’s Office of Economic Development. Historically, the lieutenant governor was tasked with running economic development in Nevada, but 2011 legislation centralized power in the governor’s office by creating the OED.

Sandoval has aggressively courted major companies since. In early 2012, he announced the state would attempt to create 50,000 jobs by 2014. Apple and Starbucks have both moved parts of their business to Nevada as a result of negotiations handled primarily through the OED. (Apple received a large tax break.)

In addition to attracting outside states, the OED focuses on attracting workers to some of Nevada’s core industries like gaming and tourism, as well as mining. The office is also pushing to expand the small tech industry in southern Nevada, along with logistics and transportation industries.

“They’re making a big push for drones as a way to diversify,” University of Nevada, Las Vegas political science professor David Damore told CalWatchdog. (The U.S. military currently has a major drone base located outside of Las Vegas.)

But the OED is only part of the economic strategy. Nevada also relies on regional agencies to draw businesses on a smaller scale. Their efforts, though less individually significant, add up.

“You have the local agencies that are able to make connections with smaller firms who are looking at a specific area,” added Eric Herzik, a political science professor at the University of Nevada.

This system — the OED focusing on major companies and regional agencies drawing smaller firms — is generally effective. Damore noted, however, rural agencies in Northern Nevada often compete among themselves and can have trouble attracting business.

“The problem they really have is just scale. There are so few people out there; it’s hard to get people to say they’ll invest in a county with 700 people,” Damore explained.

But others, such as the Las Vegas Global Economic Alliance, have had more success. Earlier this year, for example, they approved a set of incentives that could bring more than 1,000 jobs to southern Nevada. For a state with less than 3 million residents, the numbers could have an impact.

Leaving California

The array of agencies pitching the Silver State’s benefits has an unexpected ally: California.

The Golden State has long maintained a tougher climate for businesses, relying on its natural benefits to justify the expense of doing business in the state. Nevada has long tried to capitalize on that fact.

But late last year, Nevada’s advantages became significantly clearer. California voters approved a series of measures that raised taxes throughout the state. Proposition 30 raises about $6 billion in annual revenues through a regressive sales tax hike and a progressive tax hike on the wealthiest Californians. Proposition 39 closed tax loopholes for multi-state businesses that operate in California, raising taxes about $1 billion a year.

Though a majority of Californians supported the propositions, not all did — particularly businesses and some of the state’s wealthier residents.

Despite its welcoming tax and regulatory climates, Nevada still faces many deficiencies in quality of life that make it a hard sell. It lags in education, health care and — though it’s a subjective measure — weather.

Which begs the question: Just how effective has Nevada’s economic campaign been?

Check back tomorrow for third and final part of the series, where CalWatchdog investigates some of the results of the changes implemented in Nevada — and what that means for California.

/calwatchdog.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/viva-las-vegas-poster.jpg”>Recently, Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law a new pact with Nevada, effectively conceding to Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval’s demands that California be more open to economic development along the beautiful Lake Tahoe shoreline. It was a rare moment of agreement — created through deft political maneuvering on Nevada’s behalf — between two states that have taken different approaches to taxes, regulations, environmentalism and development.

For Californians, the moment should also be a teachable lesson about the differences between the two states — and how those differences will ultimately affect the quality of each state. But to understand how California will be affected, it’s important to first look at where Nevada was, where it is now, and where it’s headed.

It begins with the Great Recession.

Collapse

In the fall of 2008, just five years ago, the global economic slide that began in late 2007 took a turn for the worse. Millions of jobs were lost, the United States’ GDP shrunk, major financial institutions collapsed, the housing bubble burst, and unemployment rose to record levels.

The Great Recession hit America hard, but it hit some states harder. Nevada may have been hit harder than any other state — probably because it was doing so well before the recession struck.

Nevada experienced tremendous economic growth leading up to the recession. Between 2000 and 2010, Nevada’s population grew 35 percent. Housing prices skyrocketed, and new homes were being built at record numbers. Anyone walking down the Las Vegas strip would see constant, tremendous change. But the boom times ended with the national economic collapse — and Nevada, the brightest star, burned the fastest.

Nevada’s housing market remained in terrible condition well into 2012, though signs of improvement have since emerged. A January 2012 CNN Money piece laid out just how badly the housing market had become in Nevada:

A staggering 1 in 16 homes have been hit with a foreclosure filing, versus the national rate of 1 in 69 homes. And more than half of borrowers owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth, compared to just over a fifth nationwide.

Meanwhile, home prices continue to plummet. S&P/Case Shiller recently reported that Las Vegas home prices fell by 9.1% over the 12 months ending in November, the second-worst performance among the 20 cities surveyed. The reason: a high number of foreclosure sales.

The myriad foreclosure prevention programs rolled out by the Obama administration have done little to stabilize housing and the economy in this hard-hit state, housing counselors say.

Unemployment skyrocketed after the housing market collapsed. In February of 2007, Nevada’s unemployment rate stood at 4.2 percent. California was at 5.0 percent. By September 2010, 14 percent of the people who were actively seeking employment in Nevada could not find a job; 12.4 percent of Californians were in the same predicament. As of August of this year, for when the most recent data is available, Nevada’s unemployment rate is down, but it’s still the highest in the nation, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. California isn’t far off.

Downfall

The downfall of Las Vegas didn’t help either. The desert destination, essentially the lifeblood of Nevada’s economy, felt something it hadn’t before: failure. A 2009 Guardian report captured just how bad the situation had become:

After a quarter of a century of phenomenal growth, Las Vegas has come to a shuddering halt. The seemingly endless supply of gamblers has dried up. So has the conference trade, hardly helped by a warning from President Barack Obama that bailed-out Wall Street banks should avoid “taking junkets to Las Vegas” on the taxpayers' dime.

Always good value, Vegas hotels have had to slash their room rates by 30% to fill beds. Downtown casinos are offering rates of barely $20 a night, while the four-star Las Vegas Hilton, where Barry Manilow is a resident performer, is offering rooms for as little as $39.

Unemployment in Vegas has reached 11.1%, compared with a national average of 9.4%. And a spectacular collapse in the local housing market has left seven out of 10 homeowners nursing negative equity.

On the city's world-famous Strip, two huge building sites are eerily quiet. Fontainebleau, a half-finished $3.9bn casino which intended to offer perks such as an Apple iMac computer in every room, went bust this month. Echelon, a $4.8bn resort bankrolled by Boyd Gaming, ceased construction last year.

Change of Plans

The Great Recession — and its distinct impact on life in Nevada — transformed the state from a booming region to one of the worst off in America. It also changed the way Nevada operated. Check back tomorrow for Part II of the series, where CalWatchdog investigates some of the changes that Nevada's governor, economic development agencies and private-public partnerships have embraced recently to fix the way the state operates.

Gov. Jerry Brown and the other anti-business fanatics in the Legislature and government unions just don’t get it: If you attack businesses, they leave California.

A recent departure was Pixel2Canvas, which split Lake Forest for North Las Vegas. It’s noteworthy that the company left Orange County, which has a much better business climate than the rest of California because the locals are more libertarian. But Orange County still is in Taxifornia. Reported the Orange County Register:

You coulda seen this coming. A year ago, Curt Benton moved his company, Pixel2Canvas and its 14 jobs, from Lake Forest to North Las Vegas.

The company is a fine art printer that puts digital art onto canvas, a process called gliclee.

Initially, Benton planned to keep his family in Orange County and commute. But now they have moved to Nevada too.

What happened? “Nov. 4,” Benton said.

That was the date of the last election in which Democrat Jerry Brown won the governorship, the Democrats increased their majority in the state legislature.

“It’s clear there’s not going to be any pro-business turn in the politics of California,” Benton said in a phone interview from North Las Vegas.

He sat down with his accountant and found out he would save $60,000 in business and personal taxes and workers comp insurance by moving everything to Nevada.

Got that, Gov. Jerry? You are at fault. Your election. Your anti-business attacks. Your assaults on taxpayers. Your subservience to the greedy government-worker unions.

Booming in Nevada

The Register story continues:

Nevada’s welcoming business climate has allowed Benton to expand, creating even more jobs — in Vegas, not California:

While I was barely hanging on in Lake Forest, my business is now flourishing in sunny Las Vegas, 42% increase over the previous year’s numbers,” he said.

“All the non-entrepreneurial folks say that I’m being greedy by not paying the taxes I should be paying in California but let me tell you what I’ve done. I’ve turned (the money I saved) back into my company with $100,000 in new equipment purchases and started two other ventures to employ additional people currently looking for work. That’s how greedy I am.”

Benton started a consumer side, CanvasRox.com that puts photos on jewelry, purses and more, and a motor sports company called CB Motorsports LLC. He’s considering a third venture to distribute a unique product from China.

But California is so anti-business that Benton couldn’t expand here. Benton:

“I could not have done what I am doing now in California,” he added. “I have run the numbers. Growth that I’ve enjoyed here in Vegas would have increased my tax burden significantly [in California] and I would have decided to just sell the company or stay small.”

The message is clear: California is the state most hostile to business, especially small business. The governor, supposedly a bright guy, is totally beholden to the tax-devouring government-worker unions.

There will be no reform for years, if ever. The state should put signs on the roads leading into California: “Beware: Severe anti-business climate ahead.”

July 18, 2011

I know California’s economy is in tough shape. But I’m happy that the state’s prison guards are meeting in Las Vegas, where Gov.-elect Jerry Brown just addressed them. Their union leaders have tough jobs making sure every last taxpayer penny is spent wisely, for the benefit of all Californians. They need a place to “let it all hang out” before returning to California with all its problems. And what better place to do it than in Elvisland?

Reported the L.A. Times:

On Monday he could be found at a major resort in Las Vegas, addressing the prison guards’ union, which spent more than $1.8 million on Brown’s behalf during the campaign. Just don’t ask us what he said. The Times was barred from covering the brief speech.

A reporter who traveled to the Rio All Suites to catch the Brown address was initially told that the governor’s staff had vetoed her presence there.

However, union officials later said it was their policy to keep the media out of the event. Even spouses of convention delegates were blocked from listening to Brown’s remarks, they said, for which the ballroom’s doors were closed.

Brown, who spoke of transparency often on the campaign trail, has held few public events and had little engagement with the media since defeating Republican nominee Meg Whitman on Nov 2. Attendees described his less than 10-minute speech as a thank you to the group.

The union is the largest public union still without a contract.

I checked out the Rio All Suites hotel where Jerry and the prison gang had their party. Gov. Brown’s reputation for frugality is lived up to. Here’s how the hotel describes its rooms:

Every room is a suite at the Rio! The Rio hosts more than 2,500 suites, providing spectacular views of Las Vegas. Every suite offers more than 600 square feet of spacious luxury, including a separate dressing area, couch, 32-inch TV, table with chairs, hairdryer, in-suite refrigerator, iron, ironing board and complimentary in-suite safe.

What do our abstemious public servants need an “in-suite safe” for? Oh, I know. That’s where they can keep safe and secure all the wonderful things they do for us.

After a hard day of working out a contract with Gov.-elect Brown that’s a good deal for the taxpayers of California, no doubt Our Guardian Servants retire to their Suites to read their Gideon Bibles. They would never do this at Rio Las Vegas’ Bikini Beach:

Every Thursday through Sunday, part of VooDoo Beach is transformed into “Bikini Beach”, a European-style pool at Rio All-Suite Hotel and Casino.  Designed specifically for adults over 21, this pool allows guests to bask in the sunshine while listening to the music of a live DJ and watching go-go dancers on the pool deck.  Rent a daybed and receive chilled towels, complimentary water, and a five-minute massage.  For added exclusivity, guests can reserve one of five luxurious cabanas, which includes bottle service, freshly cut fruit, and your own personal bikini server.

After a relaxing day at the pool, it’s time to party!  Your admission into Bikini Beach gets you free admission into VooDoo Lounge the same night.  In addition, each guest will receive a coupon, redeemable at any time, for free admission into Crown Theater & Nightclub, VooDoo Lounge, and 2 for 1 cocktails at Carnaval Court at Harrah’s.

No one under 21 permitted in Bikini Beach; valid ID required for entry.

And I’m sure the ASPCA is wagging its tail at how the guards are treating their pets. Mistreating animals can get you thrown in prison, you know. Here’s how Rio Las Vegas describes its PetStay Las Vegas amenity:

Rio All Suites Hotel & Casino is rolling out the red carpet for traveling dogs, with the launch of “PetStay,” the resort’s new pet-friendly hotel program.

Guests participating in the PetStay program are greeted by several canine-friendly in-room amenities including a mat, food and water dishes, disposable waste bags and dog treats.

Rio All Suites Hotel & Casino features a designated PetStay area within the hotel, equipped with welcome packets that direct guests to outdoor relief areas and dog walking routes as well as specialty room service menus. Additional information about dog-friendly items for purchase and nearby dog services (such as grooming, walking and veterinary care) is available upon check-in at each of the participating resorts.

And here’s an actual YouTube taken at the VooDoo Lounge on the rooftop of the Rio Las Vegas. I don’t think I can see any actual California prison guards are in this YouTube, proving how they behaved themselves while in Vegas.

Suitably relaxed, I’m sure the guards will return to their prisons and treat the inmates in their charge with extra-special care, and pinch every taxpayer penny.

Dec. 6, 2010