The state’s primary system pushes the top two candidates into the general election, regardless of party. As it stands now, Republicans will likely be out of the running after next Tuesday when voters submit their ballots.

If Republicans could coalesce around one candidate, they’d have a shot at one candidate making the November runoff. Republican candidates account for 20 percent of the vote among likely voters, with Sanchez, of Santa Ana, polling at 14 percent. 

However, the five highest-polling Republican candidates are between three and four percent a piece, with each having little incentive to drop out in favor of another. And none of the Republican candidates are well known and have raised little money to increase their name ID.  

“Republicans probably wish that someone could clear the field and unite the party behind one candidate,” said John J. Pitney, Jr., a Roy P. Crocker professor of politics at Claremont McKenna College. “But nobody has that power.” 

Harris leads with 30 percent, having the backing of the California Democratic Party. But a large percentage of respondents are undecided —  27 percent said they either hadn’t made up their minds or are not voting — meaning a lot can happen on Tuesday.

Top Two

The top-two system, approved by voters in 2010, theoretically favors more moderate candidates by removing partisan primaries.

While Sanchez is widely viewed as the more centrist candidate, as one of the few remaining members of the fiscally-conservative Blue Dog Democrat coalition, Harris has nearly double the support among those who have declined to state a party preference, 16 percent and 32 percent, respectively.

But neither Harris nor Sanchez are polling well with Republicans, five percent and four percent, respectively. It’s unclear which way voters would lean after June, once the field narrows.

“It’s always a fallacy to extrapolate from a primary to tell what’ll happen in the general,” said Democratic strategist Garry South, who is not working with any of the candidates.

Voters want a dealmaker 

Another poll from last week showed 69 percent of voters prefer someone who “is willing to make compromises to get legislature passed over one who holds true to their beliefs without compromise.”

Despite her liberal philosophy and voting record, Boxer long ago mastered the art of legislating. Even at a time when Congress is getting little done, she managed to broker a deal last year on a highway bill with her ideological opposite, Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla.

Harris does not have legislative experience for voters to draw from. Sanchez has run heavily on her reputation as a dealmaker, having made Congressional Quarterly’s recent list of the 25 most influential women in Washington, for being a “debate shaper and swing vote.”

With her legislative abilities, Sanchez changed how sexual assaults in the military are reported and tracked, thereby increasing accountability and consistently helped secure federal funding for Orange County’s groundwater replenishment system which provides water to millions of residents.

Yet the polls show voters still turning to Harris in larger numbers. South attributed this to Harris’ statewide name recognition, compared to Sanchez’s limited reach to mainly within her congressional district.

“She is a representative of one of the 53 seats in California, nobody knows her in the other 52,” South said, adding that a Democrat on Democrat race in the general could change the dynamic. 

Republicans

Arguably the two most well-known Republicans in the race are two former state party chairmen, Tom Del Beccaro and Duf Sundheim. Ron Unz, who ran for governor against fellow Republican Governor Pete Wilson and is an outspoken critic of bilingual education, seemed to raise his profile substantially during the two debates.

None of the three have raised enough money to compete though. Sundheim has raised $621,000, Del Beccaro has raised $365,000 and Unz has raised almost $52,000. All of that is nominal compared to Harris, who has raised almost $10 million, and Sanchez, who has raised $3.5 million.  

In a state with several expensive media markets and without any noteworthy amount of name ID, the financial shortcomings of the Republican candidates is holding them back.

“Nobody knows who any of them are and none have two nickles to rub together,” said South.

Particularly for a seat that’s rated “Safe Democrat” by The Rothenberg & Gonzales Political Report, Republican donors will largely look to spend money elsewhere on more competitive races. 

“Even if they could get a GOP candidate into the top two, that person would still lose the general election,” said Pitney. “The GOP leadership has to focus its very scarce resources on races it might win.”

Jean Fuller, the Senate Republican leader, pointed to California’s high rents, high poverty rate and high tax burden as ills helped by these bills — a “first step” in helping make the Golden State more affordable. 

Fuller cited damning stats: CNBC ranked California the 5th most expensive state to live in the country in 2015, average monthly rent is 50 percent higher here than in the rest of the country, 40 percent of Californians are living at or near the poverty line and Californians have one of the highest tax burdens in the country. 

And earlier this month, the American Legislative Exchange Council gave California one of the worst economic outlooks in the country. 

“Senate Republicans united around a very positive agenda that gives voice to Californians being left behind by their own Capitol,” the Bakersfield Republican said. 

“There is no question that California has become a very expensive place to live,” Fuller added.

Fuller did not explain how the proposals would be paid for (nor did her office provide an estimate of how much the package would cost). Instead, Fuller said the government should focus on the “most disabled” and the “most vulnerable populations” as a top priority, adding that state revenues have increased steadily over the last few years. 

“If the priorities are carefully weighed, I think we do have enough money, especially when we’ve had extra resources come in in the last couple of years,” Fuller said.

Package of Bills

The 11 bills center on tax breaks and proposals focused on encouraging access to work, education and homeownership.

Access to work: One bill restores MediCal coverage for one free pair of eyeglasses every other year for those who fail the DMV vision test. Another bill provides $100 standard allowance for CalWORKs welfare-to-work participants, as well as an allowance for education costs. 

Education: One bill provides a tax deduction for college expenses, while another creates a sales and use tax holiday for school supply purchases. A third bill would create a tax deduction for education savings accounts.

Homeownership: There’s a renters tax credit, a bill to eliminate property tax inflation for senior and disabled veterans, and one that would do that same for senior citizens. There’s two proposals giving a property tax exemption for disabled veterans. And there’s a proposal to encourage a homeownership savings accounts that would help first-time homebuyers with a down payment.

Navigating the Senate

Unveiling an agenda at a press conference, however, is far easier than carrying the bills through the Legislature for a Republican caucus with virtually no power. They face a Sisyphean task of getting the bills through a Democratically-controlled Legislature, where they are a mere seat away from irrelevancy — below the dreaded one-third threshold. 

According to Bill Whalen, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, Republicans in the Legislature face three legislative options. The first is to have an idea embraced by Democrats, which could carry the bill to the governor’s desk. The other two are either the bill is dead on arrival or it gets a hearing and then fizzles out. 

“There’s three outcomes, two of which are negative,” said Whalen, who served as chief speechwriter and director of public affairs for former Republican Gov. Pete Wilson.

After voters amended the Constitution in 2010 to require only majority approval of the state budget (as opposed to two-thirds), Republicans lost a yearly opportunity to leverage legislation as their numbers in both chambers are only slightly above one-third. 

“For a few weeks anyway, Republicans had a lot of relevance in the process,” Whalen said, adding that now Republicans’ leverage is now mostly reserved for Constitutional amendments.

The initiative’s details, first announced in late January, “would amend the fixed-sentence law Brown signed in 1976, to make prisoners found guilty of a non-serious, non-violent and non-sexual crimes eligible for parole,” according to the Huffington Post.”The governor estimated this might make as many as 7,000 inmates eligible to seek parole.”

In addition, HuffPost noted, Brown’s initiative would also call for a “credit system” of “time off for good behavior, to be run by prison officials, which might affect even more inmates than would the changes in parole eligibility.” The mechanics governing that kind of regime would be left to lawmakers or regulators.

Aware of the prospect of law-and-order pushback — at a time when populism has captivated many of his California critics — Brown “enlisted a platoon of law enforcement leaders — including San Diego District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis — to join him when he” rolled out the shorter-sentences measure, noted KQED.

“But those individual voices apparently did not portend a ringing endorsement from other prosecutors across the state: On Thursday, the California District Attorneys Association’s 17-member board of directors voted to oppose the initiative, with just one member abstaining,” the station reported. “The CDAA represents the state’s 58 district attorneys and is a political force in Sacramento. The group’s opposition to Brown’s ballot proposal may explain in part why he choose to go to the ballot instead of going through the state Legislature.”

Lining up opposition

Further fulfilling political expectations, prominent Republicans moved to mobilize support against Brown. In a mailing list email, former Republican Gov. Pete Wilson slammed the would-be law. “The initiative should be entitled ‘The Dangerous Streets Act: A Retreat to Lenient Sentencing of California’s Violent and Serious Criminals.’ If passed, it will undo the protections that were enacted to safeguard Californians from becoming crime victims in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s,” wrote Wilson, as Debra Saunders observed at the San Francisco Chronicle. Saunders continued:

“Like Wilson, Michael Rushford of the tough-on-crime Criminal Justice Legal Foundation sees Brown’s plan as an evisceration of California’s landmark Three Strikes Sentencing Law and the state’s Victims’ Bill of Rights — both successful ballot measures that enhanced penalties for repeat offenders. They believe that realignment and Prop. 47 have led to the release of too many bad guys.”

For Brown, however, the proposed initiative would simply continue to reform what even critics acknowledge has long been a dysfunctional and at times abusive prison system. Already, Brown “has approved parole for roughly 2,300 lifers convicted of murder and about 450 lifers sentenced for lesser offenses — a revolution in a state that released only two lifers during former governor Gray Davis’s entire four-year term,” as the Washington Post observed.

Rising costs

Nevertheless, as the paper reported, Brown has faced a conundrum in following court orders to thin out the state’s incarcerated population: “As many as 90 percent of inmates in 2013 had either a violent or serious felony conviction, according to the Public Policy Institute of California. That left the state with little choice for bringing prisoner counts down.”

Compounding the trouble, cost savings Brown promised for changing course have yet to materialize. “Federal judges required the state to reduce the headcount in the state’s 34 main adult prisons more than officials wished, according to the revised long-term plan Brown’s administration released Wednesday at the insistence of state lawmakers,” the Orange County Register noted. That change, said officials, lead to “a $3 billion annual difference between the promised savings and the $10.5 billion corrections department budget Gov. Jerry Brown proposed earlier this month, in part because the state also chose to boost the number of prison beds available.”

And in the wake of a withering state report on the culture of abuse that persists in the prison system, incoming secretary of the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation Scott Kernan has vowed to invest in new leadership and diversity training programs for guards and other employees.

But not all teachers want to pay that much; 12,212 teachers in 2014 opted for “fee payer” status, which docks them around $650 a year.

The fees are supposed to cover only non-political activities, like hammering out contract agreements. Those opting out of the union, despite paying the fee, are ineligible to vote in union matters.

Wherever it goes, the money represents an estimated $7.8 million annually for the California Teachers Association, and many feel that it is being extracted from the unwilling.  

Which means that a victory in the legal crusade of teacher Rebecca Friedrichs to overturn the mandatory assessments would inflict a heavy hit on the union, which collects and uses the money. Given the choice, some teachers currently paying the $1,000 a year would forego any payment if it were not mandatory, diminishing the union’s power.

Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, which was heard by the U.S. Supreme Court Jan. 11, has drawn 57 amicus filings, or documents in support of one of the two parties. Most of the filings offer legal opinion or expertise, and the originators break down along the lines of conservative and liberal.

The filers in favor of Friedrichs include 17 Republican attorneys general led by Michigan’s Bill Schuette, the Goldwater Institute and former California Gov. Pete Wilson.

Those supporting the teachers association include the state of California, the California School Employees Association and the Obama administration.

What’s at Stake

The plaintiffs seek to overturn a 1977 Supreme Court decision, Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, which allows the fees to be taken against the will of the employee.

“Abood failed to recognize the full extent to which teachers unions advocate positions during collective bargaining on intensely divisive public-policy issues, some of which — from the perspective of nonmember teachers — are harmful to both teachers and students,” reads the filing on behalf of Wilson.

The state’s school employees association contends in its amicus filing that “the essence of exclusive representation is that the union represents, and speaks for, all unit employees on employment issues pertaining to wages, hours, and terms and conditions of employment (hence the term “collective bargaining”) … the characterization of union representational activity as per se ‘political advocacy’ or ‘influencing public policy’ is so far outside the real world of public school employment and labor relations as to be ludicrous.”

RELATED: Read the transcript of the oral arguments here and listen to the arguments here.

According to one analysis, .08 percent of CTA political money went to Republicans between 2003 and 2012.

Since 1997, the association has donated $184 million to 583 filers, 50 of them Republicans, according to the National Institute on Money in State Politics. The top individual recipient is Gov. Jerry Brown, who has taken $3.25 million from the association. The union group also spent $3 million to help Brown defeat Meg Whitman in the 2010 gubernatorial race.

It spent $21 million in 2012 to defeat the unsuccessful Alliance for a Better California ballot measure, which would have ended payroll deductions for political activism.

It has also given money to other unions, including the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor and a Nevada measure backed by teachers unions to require additional funding for public schools.

The union also receives money from offshoot groups, including the California Teachers Association for Better Citizens, which donated $1.5 million in 2010 to its independent expenditure arm, and Teachers and Families Supporting O’Donnell for Assembly 2014, which backed the successful campaign of Assemblyman Patrick O’Donnell, D-Long Beach,  a public school teacher seen as a political ally of the union.

The union has 65 paid staffers, including two staffers working full time on political issues – one at a gross salary of $138,087 and another at $105,004 – and three others who spent 80 percent of their time on political activities, the union’s most recent federal filing shows.

“Every year, petitioners are required to provide significant support to a group that advocates an ideological viewpoint which they oppose and do not wish to subsidize,” Michael Carvin, an attorney representing Friedrichs and her co-plaintiffs told the Supreme Court justices in his argument Jan. 11. He said the problem was not that the union was the sole representative of the workers, but that the workers were forced to subsidize the union’s political positions.

In his argument, Edward DuMont, representing the state, said that the union had to be funded and not by the state. “It’s very important that we do not fund it directly and that we not be perceived as controlling the speech of that representative.”

Union Influence Under Pressure

The decision by the Supreme Court “may mark a sea change in the way in which we understand labor law going forward,” Richard Epstein, a law professor at New York University School of Law, said in a post-argument podcast.

Epstein’s analysis explains that the five conservative justices regarded the plaintiffs  as “‘compelled riders’ who are obligated to pay fees to a union even if they felt they were better off without a union “even if the union offered them membership for free.”

It’s the opposite of what the union has referred to as free riders, who reap the benefits of a union without paying a full price, he said.

Epstein predicts that Abood will be overwritten in a 5-4 ruling with the conservative justices prevailing, and “the agency shop will be ended on constitutional grounds.”

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

The California Court of Appeal, Second District, will take up the closely followed appeal in its Los Angeles courtroom.

The 2014 decision by Los Angeles Superior Court Rolf Treu made headlines across the nation. After the judge cited evidence showing the near-impossibility of firing incompetent teachers in California, he wrote, “All sides to this litigation agree that competent teachers are a critical, if not the most important, component of success of a child’s in-school educational experience. There is also no dispute that there are a significant number of grossly ineffective teachers currently active in California classrooms” — with most working in largely minority schools.

The result, said Treu, was a de facto segregated system that reminded him of the circumstances in Kansas that led to the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education that led to the end of segregated schools. He wrote that evidence presented by the Vergara plaintiffs — nine students in predominantly minority schools in Los Angeles Unified — showed California had failed to provide “a student’s fundamental right to equality of the educational experience.”

Poor teaching a ‘deep-rooted inequity’

The ruling was depicted by the California Teachers Association and the California Federation of Teachers as an outrageous exaggeration of problems in state public schools and a de facto attack on teachers and unions. Nevertheless, the ruling prompted the New York Times to run an editorial lambasting California’s schools for neglecting Latino and African American students:

When states are sued for providing inferior education to poor and minority children, the issue is usually money — disproportionately more money for white students, less for others. A California judge has now brought another deep-rooted inequity to light: poor teaching.

In an important decision issued on Tuesday, Judge Rolf M. Treu of the Los Angeles Superior Court ruled that state laws governing the hiring, firing and job security of teachers violate the California Constitution and disproportionately saddle poor and minority children with ineffective teachers.

The ruling opens a new chapter in the equal education struggle. It also underscores a shameful problem that has cast a long shadow over the lives of children, not just in California but in the rest of the country as well.

Treu stayed his invalidation of the teacher-protection laws pending appeal.

The state government’s appeal of the ruling, filed by Attorney General Kamala Harris, questioned Treu’s assumptions about the effects of state law:

The notice of appeal cited several issues, including that “changes of this magnitude, as a matter of law and policy, require appellate review.”

 

The notice also faulted the trial judge, saying that he had “declined to provide a detailed statement of the factual and legal bases for [his] ruling.”

That’s from the Los Angeles Times.

High-profile law professors split on ruling

A powerhouse group of law professors, led by Harvard’s Lawrence Tribe, supported Treu’s decision in a friend of the court brief:

The California Constitution establishes public schools for the benefit of children, not teachers, and the State Education Clause talks about the right to public education as “essential to the preservation of the rights and liberties of the people,” not as a right essential to the economic security of the teachers selected by the state to make that right a reality. Public schools exist to educate students, not to provide jobs, and job security, to teachers.

 

Another group of high-profile law professors, including Harvard’s Charles Ogletree and UC Irvine’s Erwin Chemerinsky, criticized Treu’s reasoning in their brief opposing the ruling:

Even if the record supported and the trial court found that the statutes caused the harms to the education of poor and minority students, that would not be sufficient to find the statutes invalid on their face and enjoin their enforcement. There also would need to be proof that striking down these statutes would remedy the harms and improve the education for these students. … There is no basis in the trial court’s decision, or in the voluminous record of an eight-week trial, for concluding that education of any identifiable group of students would be improved by the elimination of tenure, the prohibition on considering seniority in layoffs, or the injunction against enforcement of the procedural requirements for performance-based dismissal.

 

For more on the various friend of the court briefs — including one filed by former GOP Govs. Pete Wilson and Arnold Schwarzenegger — go here for an EdSource overview.

Gage Skidmore / flickr

On the strength of an explosive presidential campaign that has pushed him out to an early lead in some polls of Republican contenders, Donald Trump has changed the political conversation in California, where members of both political parties have not hesitated in making him a political football.

Livid Democrats

Although Republican candidates across the country have found themselves muting their criticism of Trump — not wanting to draw even more media attention away from their own campaigns — Democrats have railed against him, especially in progressive states. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz has stood virtually alone in backing up Trump’s more incendiary remarks, drawing a rebuke from Sacramento Democrats hoping to officially condemn both candidates.

As the Los Angeles Times reported, state Sen. Isadore Hall III, D-Compton, “offered a resolution blasting Trump for calling Mexican immigrants ‘rapists’ and drug-runners during his campaign kickoff last month.” In an interview, Hall told the Times it was intolerable “to have a president who is representing California,  [which has] the largest population of immigrants, calling immigrants rapists and thugs and criminals. We don’t have a place for that. California is a place of inclusion.”

Hall’s bill, SR39, would do more than merely criticize Trump and Cruz; it “calls upon the State of California to divest from Donald Trump, The Trump Organization, and any affiliated entities,” while urging “private businesses and individuals throughout California to end all business ties with Donald Trump, The Trump Organization, and any affiliated entities[.]”

According to the Los Angeles Times, which compared Trump to former Gov. Pete Wilson, “there was a flashback quality to Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s hour-long denunciation of illegal immigration at a campaign stop Friday in Beverly Hills.”

“He appeared with a group of people who have lost family members in crimes or traffic accidents involving immigrants in the country illegally. ‘The illegals come in, and the illegals kill their children,’ Trump said.”

Complications for Harris

Influential figures in the state GOP, meanwhile, have trained their fire on Trump’s connections to the opposing party, which have extended remarkably far into recent times.

Shawn Steel, a member of the Republican National Committee and a former chairman of the California Republican Party, went after Trump’s support for state Attorney General Kamala Harris, the leading candidate to replace outgoing Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif. “In the past four years, Harris’s campaign has accepted a total of $6,000 in campaign contributions from Trump — with the most recent contribution on February 20, 2013,” wrote Steel at the Flash Report. “When national embarrassment Donald Trump isn’t busy attacking immigrants, he’s writing big checks to Democrat Kamala Harris,” he continued, calling on Harris to “denounce” Trump’s words and “give her ‘Donald Dollars’ to charity.”

Harris was just one of two Democrats Trump donated to since 2012, according to Politifact. “Data from the Federal Election Commission and state elections offices provided by the two websites show that Trump has given $584,850 to Democrats and $961,140 to the GOP over the last 26 years,” the site noted.

The connection threatened to complicate Harris’s current posture toward Trump. The two have staked out starkly different positions on immigration, with Trump recently slamming the “sanctuary city” status of San Francisco — where Harris laid the groundwork for her political future by serving as its District Attorney. Under pressure in the wake of a stunning murder along the city’s waterfront, perpetrated by an unlawful immigrant, Harris refused to criticize San Francisco’s lenient approach.

“Let’s react to that specific case in prosecuting that specific murder, and making sure he faces very swift consequences and accountability,” she told the San Francisco Chronicle. “On the issue of immigration policy, let’s be smarter.” Turning to Trump’s comments on the matter, she described him as “‘ignorant’ and representative of ‘someone who clearly cannot be a leader,'” according to the Chronicle.

Wilson argued that the reason California had both the highest taxes and the highest poverty rates in the country is because decisions by the Legislature made it difficult to create jobs. The former Republican governor said that excessive regulation was driving jobs away from California, particularly the application of CEQA, the California Environmental Quality Act, when used to thwart projects that would create jobs.

He also criticized AB32, the Global Warming Solution Act, saying California employers have to meet standards no employers in other states have to meet. He predicted that the state would fall from its ranking as the eighth largest economy in the world because of the energy cost increases that will result from AB32. In answer to a question by panel moderator Jim Newton, former Los Angeles Times editor and columnist, Wilson said he would roll back the provisions of AB32.

Governor Davis, a Democrat, said excessive regulation was a problem but that there was nothing wrong with laws like AB32 or CEQA, which he supported. He reminded the Town Hall Los Angeles audience that Gov. Ronald Reagan had signed CEQA into law. On the other hand, he acknowledged some problems with the law relaying a story about a project that would create 70,000 jobs but was tied up in litigation for five years because of a CEQA inspired lawsuit. He said this type of CEQA use would scare off investors.

Saying “life is a balance,” Davis argued that California was not standing alone in battling climate change, pointing to other states and Canadian provinces that had taken steps in that direction. He suggested the CEQA law be tweaked and refined.

To which Wilson countered, he sees no tweaks coming out of the Legislature.

Both Wilson and Davis defended Governor Jerry Brown’s position on water cutbacks, which generally left farmers untouched by the new mandated cuts. Both former governors said the farmers have suffered much already with the ongoing drought. Davis argued for more use of recycled water; Wilson better water storage facilities.

Wilson was challenged by a question from the audience if he reconsidered his position on Proposition 187 to deny services to illegal immigrants.

Wilson responded that Proposition 187 of 1994 was a cry from taxpayers who felt overwhelmed by cost and safety issues tied to the immigrants in the country illegally. He said 20 percent of the state’s prisoners at the time were illegal immigrants and a 18-fold increase in health care costs and education cost increases were the result of the immigration. That’s what inspired Prop. 187, he said. He blamed “two capitols”: Washington D.C. and Mexico City for ignoring responsibility for the border.

He did not blame the immigrants, however. Wilson said, “People below the border did what I would have done in their shoes.”

For the fourth year running, San Diego had the lowest murder rate among the country’s ten largest cities.

The department investigated 32 homicides, down from 39, giving San Diego, the eighth largest city in the nation, a murder rate of 2.4 killings per 100,000 residents, according to data compiled by U-T San Diego.

By comparison, Phoenix, which has a slightly larger population than San Diego, had a murder rate of 7.7 per 100,000, while San Antonio, another city of similar size, had a rate of 7.3. Philadelphia had the highest rate of the nation’s ten top cities, with 16 killings for every 100,000 residents.

But this good news has an unusual subtext: If San Diego is so safe, why is there bipartisan agreement that more must be done to widely boost compensation for current San Diego police officers and to make the force bigger? This story is from Feb. 6:

San Diego and its police officers labor union announced on Friday a tentative agreement for compensation increases that aim to help reverse recent struggles with recruiting new officers and retaining existing staff.

The five-year pact doesn’t include salary hikes until July 2018, but most officers would see large jumps in their take-home pay starting this July because the $92 million deal includes sharp increases in benefits for veteran employees.

Those include thousands in higher stipends for uniforms, additional holiday pay and lower health insurance contributions.

“We’ve had a real crisis when it comes to recruiting and retaining some of our best and brightest police officers,” Mayor Kevin Faulconer said at a Friday morning press conference in City Heights announcing the deal. “That ends today.”

The recruitment and retention issues are backed by the numbers. The San Diego Police Department has about 180 budgeted, unfilled positions, and the agency says 249 officers left the force from July 2013 through last month. An independent survey shows the city has low police pay relative to other jurisdictions.

But if the city is enjoying such a safe run, why would its leaders consider the status quo unacceptable?

We’re in a strange new era when it comes to the social sciences and crime, which has gone down for three decades for reasons that researchers cannot agree on. Old theories about declining exposure to lead in childhood, increased incarceration because of tougher sentencing laws and the increase in abortions of unwanted children after the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling are still around, but there are plenty of new ideas. Vox last month cited 16 different explanations offered by researchers with varied backgrounds and different levels of hard evidence.

Police union supported by both parties

In San Diego, however, this esoteric debate never came up. Instead, the police union’s strong ties with Republican Mayor Kevin Faulconer, the Democrats who make up the majority of the City Council and the city’s downtown establishment resulted in a consensus that more, better-paid officers are needed.

Faulconer also needs a less polarized environment at City Hall if he hopes to achieve an agenda that includes funding an expanded convention center, possibly helping build an NFL stadium and bringing coastal prosperity to minority neighborhoods south of Interstate 8. Having a good relationship with by far the city’s most powerful union can only help this agenda.

Outside of San Diego, there is a presumption that Faulconer wants to run someday for statewide office as a moderate, can-do mayor with plenty of Democratic allies. The pay deal with the police union fits this narrative.

But inside the city, Faulconer fits a familar mayoral archetype, not necessarily that of a man with big statewide ambitions. Affable Republican moderates have led the city for most of the last 40  years, from Pete Wilson to (then moderate) Roger Hedgecock to Dick Murphy to Jerry Sanders.

And though currently popular, Faulconer could face a tough re-election fight in 2016. While initial media reports depicted the GOP councilman winning election easily in a February 2014 special election against Democratic Councilman David Alvarez, his final margin of victory was only 5 percent, in an election with poor Democratic turnout.

]]> https://calwatchdog.com/2015/03/09/is-san-diego-safest-big-city-or-having-a-police-crisis/feed/ 8 74874 https://calwatchdog.com/2014/03/21/krauthammer-pulls-plug-on-obamacare-at-pri-thatcher-dinner/ https://calwatchdog.com/2014/03/21/krauthammer-pulls-plug-on-obamacare-at-pri-thatcher-dinner/#comments Fri, 21 Mar 2014 16:12:49 +0000 http://calwatchdog.com/?p=60490 Columnist and Fox News commentator Charles Krauthammer pulled the plug on Obamacare in his keynote speech March 7 for the Pacific Research Institute’s Second Annual Baroness Thatcher Dinner. It was given before 450 local and state community and business leaders at the Island Hotel in Newport Beach, including former Gov. Pete Wilson and former SEC Chairman Chris Cox. PRI is CalWatchdog.com’s parent think tank.

“The reason that Obamacare is going to fail, it is not just a symbol of this radical liberalism, it is the embodiment of it,” said Krauthammer, who also is a medical doctor and psychiatrist. His column runs in the Orange County Register and his new book, “Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics,” has sold more than 1 million copies.

“It is not just an aspiration, they finally achieved something they wanted to do for a hundred years, and they finally enlisted the United States in the roster of enlightened countries that have nationalized health care. Now everybody can see it and everybody can feel it. Five million Americans have already lost their insurance over this. Others have been thrown into all kinds of disarray. And health care itself is in disarray.”

Optimistic

Although quipping that after the Republicans lost the presidency in Nov. 2012 he had to put on his psychiatrist’s hat and prescribe anti-depressants to some in the GOP, Krauthammer remained optimistic, “We have institutions like PRI that can prepare, the same way the think tanks in England prepared for that generation [of Baroness Thatcher]. Now it turns out that everything that you predicted here at PRI about Obamacare is coming true. And we also have the fact that we have a center-right country.”

Before Krauthammer spoke, PRI Chairman of the Board Clark Judge brought up how PRI President and CEO Sally Pipes “is the one who has formulated the alternative to Obamacare that almost surely will be enacted the next few years. Sally has been a national force, and with that PRI.” Pipes, who has headed PRI for more than two decades, is the author of three books critiquing Obamacare, most recently, “The Cure for Obamacare.”

Judge also praised the work of Lance Izumi, PRI Koret senior fellow and senior director of education studies, in particular for the film, “Not As Good As You Think: The Myth of the Middle Class School.”

And Judge commended CalWatchdog.com Editor-in-Chief Brian Calle and Managing Editor John Seiler for reversing “the decline of reporting in Sacramento.  They have broken story after story. They are bringing investigative reporting back to California.”

Bill Simon

The dinner gave its Second Annual Baroness Thatcher award, named after the late prime minister of the United Kingdom, to William E. Simon, the Republican nominee for governor in 2002. The award was presented by James Piereson, the president of the William E. Simon Foundation.

Piereson pointed to Simon as “a leader in the world of philanthropy, who climbs mountains and runs marathons.” Simon also is a visiting professor at the University of Southern California and the University of California, Los Angeles.

Thirty-four days after California Gov. Jerry Brown declared an official statewide drought emergency, he joined State Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg and Assembly Speaker John A. Perez on Feb. 19 in announcing an emergency drought aid package. (They are pictured at right from the event.) 

Ninety five percent of the $687.4 million drought aid package, or $647.7 million, comes from the continuation of existing, ongoing programs, many of which began before an awareness of a protracted drought.  The remaining 5 percent of the funding comes from shifting air pollution taxes collected in 2013 under the cap-and-trade air emission program toward water conservation and efficiency projects.

The governor’s drought package is the culmination of a bill, SB731, that Steinberg had been shepherding through the Legislature for some time.

As detailed in the table below, the $687.4 million emergency drought bill is funded from the following sources:

• $549 million, or 81 percent, from two existing water bonds, Proposition 84, the Safe Drinking Water Bond Act of 2006; and Proposition 1E, the Disaster Preparedness and Flood Protection Bond Act of 2006.
• $46.3 million, or 7 percent, from Federal Emergency Management Agency emergency food and shelter programs administered by the state.
• $40 million, or 5 percent, from shifting air pollution cap-and-trade taxes toward water conservation projects that also reduce air pollution.
• $20 million, or 2 percent, from shifting air pollution taxes mainly imposed in 2013 on refineries and electric power companies under California’s cap-and-trade emissions program.
• $15 million, or 2 percent, from Assembly Bill 21, the Safe Drinking Water and Small Community Emergency Grant Fund; and Assembly Bill 118, the Safe Drinking Water State Revolving Fund, both enacted on Oct. 8, 2013. The bills were enacted four months before the drought was declared.  AB21 was introduced on Dec. 3, 2012 and AB118 on Jan. 4, 2013, more than a year before public officials became aware of a third consecutive year of low rainfall thus far into the 2014 rainy season.
• $13 million, or 2 percent, from wildfire brush clearance programs administered through the Department of Forestry and Fire Protection and the California Conservation Corps, with state general fund revenues.
• $10.4 million, or 1 percent, in unidentified funds in the governor’s press release toward unspecified projects. 

Even though there is very little that is new in Brown’s drought bill, it will assure parched small water districts in Central California that funding is potentially available for relief efforts and projects.

Seventeen small water districts in California have been preliminarily identified as possibly running out of drinking water in the next two to four months.  Two of these water districts in Mendocino and Sonoma counties along the Northern Coast are not even connected to the state or federal water projects.

Former Gov. Pete Wilson’s emergency policy

Brown suspended the California Environmental Quality Act in his official emergency drought declaration. But so far he hasn’t made steps to use that power to enlarge Shasta Dam or other projects.

By contrast, in 1994 after the Northridge earthquake, Gov. Pete Wilson invoked emergency powers to repair the Santa Monica freeway in four months.

Today, focus of the Democratic majority in both the governor’s office and the Legislature is to continue the course with mostly existing water conservation projects, not take emergency action through new construction.

Perpetual conservation or new water storage? 

Nobody can predict all the impacts of this drought because no one knows its duration, even California’s expert climate change scientists.

Mike Wade of the California Farm Water Coalition reports that farmers spent $2 billion since 2003 on irrigation water conservation projects.  Six water bonds from 2000 to 2011, Propositions 12, 13, 40, 50, 84, and 1E, totaling $19.55 billion, don’t seem to have produced much of a demonstrable result.

The total of the bond funding equates to 78 percent of the proposed, and much-criticized, $25 billion Delta Twin Tunnels project.  So far, California hasn’t been getting much bang for its buck with conservation projects.

Brown, Steinberg and Perez’s emergency drought bill can’t make it rain. Legislatures and voter initiatives can fund more empty water bonds, but may only anger a public whose money has been taken for a water dousing rod that didn’t work.

Ultimately, Californians will have to vote on whether they want continual conservation policies that make for higher water rates, new reservoirs and tunnels to convey added system water — especially during droughts.

Breakdown of Gov. Brown’s Drought Aid Package