“In 1978, Howard Jarvis launched the U.S. anti-tax movement in California with Proposition 13, which capped annual increases in property taxes and kept people from being forced from their homes during real-estate bubbles. A generation later, the Golden State could be on the brink of launching another populist movement, one driven by anger over government compensation practices. A key battleground is San Diego. In June, voters will decide on Proposition B, the Comprehensive Pension Reform Initiative. It would end defined-benefit pensions for all new city hires except for police officers, instead providing pensions similar to 401(k)s. It would prevent pay sweeteners from being added to base salary when calculating pensions, and it would require city workers to pay a bigger share of their pension costs. Finally, Prop. B would mandate a five-year salary freeze.”

Ventura County, Phoenix hoping for big changes in benefits

It took longer than I hoped, but it finally seems to be unfolding. Here's CalWatchdog founder Steve Greenhut in his U-T San Diego column:

“Voters approved [DeMaio's] measure with nearly 66 percent of the vote, but … the big vote numbers hid the difficulty of the battle.

“It has been challenged by a union-friendly state agency, the Public Employment Relations Board, which continues to claim that the measure — which instituted a 401(k)-style pension plan for new city hires, capped pensionable city pay for five years and ended pension-spiking abuses — improperly deprived unions of the right to negotiate. That nuisance continues, even if there’s little doubt the constitutional right to vote will ultimately trump the unions’ claims.

“But the courts have three times sided with the city as it continues to implement the measure. And while nothing has been easy here, either, officials in other places are starting to notice that the San Diego approach to reforming pensions might offer the most hope for significantly reining in pension costs without having to go through a legal meat grinder.

“Today, the county of Ventura, which operates an independent retirement system under the state’s County Employees’ Retirement Law of 1937, filed an initiative that closely copies the San Diego blueprint. Earlier this week, Phoenix also filed a similar initiative for the 2014 ballot. Arizona has a different legal framework, but the basic ideas are the same. Officials from both cities met with DeMaio and other reformers in San Diego last November. DeMaio believes that other '37 Act' California counties could follow suit.”

Good luck. As Steve's piece notes, pension reform is incredibly popular — which is why pension status quoists fight so hard to make it incredibly difficult.

And good luck to Carl DeMaio, who is running for Congress against a first-term Democrat in a district that Mitt Romney won in 2012. A McClintock-DeMaio one-two punch in California's GOP congressional delegation sounds pretty amazing to me.

By Wayne Lusvardi

The word arid has two meanings: insufficient rainfall to grow trees or dull and boring.  The second meaning seems to characterize the level of intelligence that’s on display in the recent media water war that has broken out between the major newspapers in Los Angeles and Phoenix.

This e-water war was provoked by William deBuys’ op-ed article in the March 14 Los Angeles Times, “Phoenix’s Too Hot Future.” The Phoenix-based Arizona Republic newspaper retorted on March 15 with an editorial, “Los Angeles More of a Water Vacuum than Phoenix.”

DeBuys is the author of the book: “A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest.” He is a Ph.D.-holding environmentalist who lives on a farm in New Mexico.  His book adds to the growing number of recent gloom-and-doom books on water that give predisposed pessimistic and fearful readers what they want to hear.  But deBuys’ provocative article is meant to set back the real progress that has been made between California and Arizona in its longstanding war over Colorado River water.

This is why deBuys inserts into a discussion of water references to the culture war between California and Arizona over the controversial topic of immigration and contentious Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio.  Many of the online commenters take their cues from deBuys’ provocations and aim emotional potshots at each other without gaining any new information on the water issues between the two states.

Author won’t let facts, history get in way

DeBuys charges that Phoenix is creating too much global warming that will suck water out of the Colorado River, leading to hydroelectric power shortages and Katrina-like natural disasters.  DeBuys claims that Phoenix’s high-profile dust storms are caused by its contribution to climate change.

But it is deBuys’ total omission of the history of the Colorado River Compact and the famous California vs. Arizona U.S. Supreme Court case that makes his argument arid.  If it weren’t for the obstreperous W.S. Norviel of Arizona, California and the other Lower Basin states in the Colorado River Compact that was finalized in 1944 probably would not have been allocated half of the river’s available water.  And if Arizona had not shorted itself of its full entitlement of water over the past few decades, California would have been shorted of bonus water.  But deBuys prefers to use clichés that incite resentment and reverses the historical record: “If cities were stocks, you’d want to short Phoenix.”

Now that Phoenix is taking its full river water allotment by building the Central Arizona Project, California is finally the state this is shorted.  This is why California is proposing to spend up to $39 billion to shift from depending on Colorado River water to tapping wet year water surpluses from the Sacramento Delta. California has been living off the good graces of unused Arizona water surpluses for decades. Now Phoenix has decided to put its water surplus into sustainable water banks. But deBuys charges that it is Phoenix — not Los Angeles — that is unsustainable.

No, Phoenixians aren’t on the brink of frying

DeBuys also is scientifically challenged. He contends that the urban heat island effect from the paving of the Arizona desert will fry Phoenixians.  As Stanford University climatologist Mark Jacobson has pointed out, combating warming near the ground surface will result in the dreaded inversion layer that traps air pollution.  Jacobson states that efforts to reduce global warming would be a “public health disaster waiting to happen.”

In other words, if there is going to be a Katrina-like disaster in Phoenix, it is likely to be caused by efforts to combat global warming.  So much for deBuys’ fear-mongering.

The entire federal water storage and hydraulic conveyance system in the Southwest was put into place precisely to lessen the natural droughts caused by “climate change.”  By building a regional water works system spreading over several states and watersheds, local droughts could be overcome and urban civilization could thrive in arid areas.  The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation were 100 years ahead of the negative environmental prophets of today in building a sustainable water system that would withstand “climate change.”

If you want an informed discussion about water shortages and climate change, avoid the false pop prophets of water decline and catastrophe.