Remember, until January, Brown and rail authority board chairman Dan Richard had been dismissive of the huge court losses suffered by the state in August and November in Sacramento Superior Court.

In those decisions from Judge Michael Kenny — the first a tentative finding pending a state response, the second definitive — he held that the project would break state law if it used state funds on construction because it didn’t have enough money in hand to finish the 300-mile initial operating segment and because it had not completed adequate environmental reviews. Both requirements were laid out in the ballot language of the 2008 measure providing $9.95 billion in state bond money for the project.

CalWatchdog readers may have heard my theory that Brown has wanted to surreptitiously pull the plug on the troubled, almost-certainly doomed project since late last summer — just without getting any of the blame. Of late, the dean of the Sacramento press corps is offering up my theory, though typically without giving credit.

My theory tidily explains the bizarre actions of the rail authority’s legal team. Kenny’s August ruling identified the funding and enviro deficiencies with the state business plan, but in the state’s “remedies” brief, no remedies were offered to these deficiencies. This means the state didn’t challenge the fundamental finding of Kenny in August — that the state had an illegal business plan.

Without any challenge to his core findings, Kenny reaffirmed them in his November final decision. As noted above, Jerry pretended this was no big deal.

But then in January, the governor did his U-turn, demanding quick resolution to the project’s legal battles. The legal brief the AG’s office filed on behalf of the governor and the rail authority was strange, even insulting — essentially arguing that the courts had no standing to block a big state project.

Accelerating the legal ‘dominoes’

So why would Brown do this instead of just letting the doomed project play out — the course set in motion in the fall when the “remedies” brief offered by the state contained no remedies?

Here’s a theory that makes lots of sense: It wouldn’t hurt the gov’s strategy of trying to kill the project stealthily. But it would stymie a mini-revolt of Democratic elected officials who either have lost patience with the headache-riddled project or who perceived it as a political risk to keep backing the boondoggle.

“I heard … that there was about to be a revolt; but then the Gov. directed this writ to be filed and told everyone to shut up,” an insider told me in an email.

This didn’t stop Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom from bailing on the project on Feb. 15. But it apparently held off the mini-revolt by showing the governor wanted a decisive resolution of the issue.

Checkers vs. chess vs. barking dogs

The people covering Sacramento who are playing checkers buy the nominal narrative that this isn’t strategery, it’s just a legal fight playing out with no hidden motives.

The people covering Sacramento who are playing chess absolutely can see that asking for a swift resolution of legal challenges was driven by the motive of protecting at-risk Dem electeds from having to defend an insane project.

But my god, I have to hope that the people covering Sacramento who pay attention to the dogs that didn’t bark will eventually look at October’s smoking gun.

In August, Judge Kenny said the state’s business plan (Jerry Brown’s business plan) for the bullet train broke the law. In October, the state (Jerry Brown) responded essentially by saying, “OK, you make a good point, we’ll just use federal money for now.”

Yet three months later, the state (Jerry Brown) said the judge was nuts.

Hellllllllooooooo!

Hellllllllllllllllllllllllooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!

Sacramento media: Isn’t this, yunno, news?

Sheesh.

Dumb DE dumb dumb. Dumb de dumb dumb DUMB!

I groused about it in this U-T San Diego editorial:

“Imagine a family in which both parents work and make $100,000 a year between them but have $300,000 in steadily growing credit-card debt. If the parents got raises and their income increased to $110,000 a year, would you say the family is suddenly in good shape financially? Of course not.

“But that sort of happy talk is just what we’re hearing from state leaders after an upbeat report from the Legislative Analyst’s Office predicted a coming era of budget surpluses because of revenue from tax hikes and a surge in capital-gains tax receipts, thanks to Wall Street’s latest boom.

“The 62-page report mentions the state’s massive unfunded liabilities for the California Public Employees’ Retirement System and the California State Teachers’ Retirement System only briefly.”

Reporters don’t connect budget happy talk with pension gloom

What’s amazing is that the same Sacramento reporters who have covered Gov. Jerry Brown’s efforts to win pension reform don’t connect the dots. If Brown says pension benefits are a toxic, long-term, unaffordable fiscal nightmare, how can that be squared with Mac Taylor’s fiscal happy talk? It can’t be.

Here’s Mac:

“We now find that California’s state budget situation is even more promising than we projected one year ago. The state’s budgetary condition is stronger than at any point in the past decade.”

Here’s me:

“As of September, CalPERS had about $260 billion in assets and about $340 billion in liabilities. Those numbers are based on CalPERS’ assumption that decades of investment returns will average 7.5 percent annual growth.

“But a comprehensive 2011 study overseen by Joe Nation, a professor at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and a former Democratic state lawmaker, concluded assumptions of 5 percent to 6 percent are more historically appropriate. In September, Nation said a more realistic assessment of CalPERS’ current unfunded liability is $170 billion — not $80 billion. …

“The Legislative Analyst’s Office’s report simply doesn’t contemplate what state budgets would look like in coming years if they addressed and paid down the state’s share of CalPERS’ unfunded liability. Instead, it only predicts a slow growth in annual contributions to $2.8 billion by 2019-20 — meaning the total unfunded liability will continue to grow by billions each year.”

In even worse shape than CalPERS: CalSTRS

“CalSTRS is in even worse shape than CalPERS. The state teachers’ pension system reports assets of $172 billion and an unfunded liability of $70 billion. But it too uses the 7.5 percent projection for investment returns. Even with that questionable assumption, CalSTRS is on track to run out of funds in 2043. If Nation’s more prudent model were followed, CalSTRS’ unfunded liability would double, and it would run out of funds long before 2043.

“Once again, the LAO report doesn’t contemplate what state budgets would look like in coming years if they addressed and paid down CalSTRS’ unfunded liability. Even if the optimistic 7.5 percent earnings estimate is used, it’s been estimated that CalSTRS needs $4.5 billion a year for 30 years to dig out of its financial hole. Yet the LAO only predicts a slow increase of state funding to $1.8 billion in 2019-2020.”

I have whined an awful lot about the state media in recent months. They keep giving me fresh fodder.

How can reporters covering Sacramento not realize that they can’t simultaneously believe that the state government is in good shape fiscally and that it faces an enormous long-term crisis in paying for unfunded retirement benefits?

It’s truly bizarre, because this isn’t a case like fracking or AB 32 where there’s a green agenda driving coverage. Instead, it’s just the laziest pack journalism imaginable.

By Chris Reed

On Sunday, as I read iconoclastic pollster Pat Caddell‘s sharp, persuasive tirade documenting the many issues where the national media have spared the public from the details of the Obama administration’s venality and incompetence, I got to thinking about the parallels with the Sacramento media’s coverage of the state government.

What was the single fact that most explains how California works, but which has never appeared in a succinct version in a regular newspaer story or “analysis” of Sacramento? It was obvious. Here’s a one-paragraph version that should be the basis of what journos call the “nut graph” of most stories about state spending and state priorities:

“The members of the most powerful political force in state politics, the California Teachers Association and the California Federation of Teachers, get far more money from taxpayers than any other single group. The teacher unions’ power derives from the automatic dues deducted from teachers’ paychecks, meaning taxpayers directly fund the lobbying and political operations of Sacramento’s most influential entity.”

I have lived in California since 1990, and I have seen many stories that point out that the biggest chunk of the state budget — per Proposition 98 — is public education, with a minimum of roughly 40 percent. In that time, I occasionally have seen stories that focus on the fact that compensation for all school employees is by far the biggest chunk of school district budgets.

But I seriously don’t remember a mainstream newspaper story that makes the collective points in the nut graph above. Nor do I remember a story that goes into the details of the nut graph: that teacher compensation has long been at least two-thirds of total state education spending and that it now is more like 80 percent.

Nor have I seen a story that frames the battle over school spending as being almost entirely about teacher pay, or that specifically says teacher pay is the single biggest element of the state budget.

Before now, have you ever read this anywhere? I doubt it.

This tracks with the points made by Caddell about the selective obliviousness of the media. Just as with the national media’s disinterest in noting that the White House lied about a terrorist attack on the 11th anniversary of 9/11, we’re seeing the California media look at Propositions 30, 32 and 38 and not note the centrality of the teacher compensation issue.

If they did, it would be obvious that the dominant issue in state politics is teacher jobs and teacher pay.

Now here is where it gets really pathetic.

Prop. 38

Proposition 38, introduced by liberal civil rights lawyer Molly Munger, has as a central tenet that the money it raises (allegedly) couldn’t go to teacher raises. It’s one of Munger’s talking points. So a KEY PREMISE of 38 is that it will avoid teacher union avarice.

And yet this is never pointed out by the regular media in anything approaching the stark terms laid out in my nut graph above, or the more indirect ways used by Munger.

This is incredible, this avoidance. It’s not just libertarian-lite whiners like me. It’s not just small-government/good-government advocates like CalWatchDog.com. It’s not just the California Republican Party. Anyone who has a functioning brain has to realize what’s going on here.

But not the Sacramento media. Instead, here’s an example of the crap/pap we see. This is a short Associated Press update of a 2005 budget fight that makes my point:

August 9, 2005

Teachers, schools superintendent sue governor over school funding

By JENNIFER COLEMAN, Associated Press Writer

SACRAMENTO — California’s top school official and the state’s largest teachers union sued Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Tuesday to restore $3.1 billion they claim is owed to public schools.

At issue is a deal school officials say was struck during a meeting with the governor in December 2003, a month after he was sworn into office.

Educators said they agreed to accept $2 billion in cuts to help the newly elected governor balance the 2004-05 state budget. To do that, lawmakers had to suspend Proposition 98, the voter-approved funding guarantee for schools.

In return, the governor promised schools would get more money if state revenues increased more than expected, said Jack O’Connell, superintendent of public instruction.

“Revenues did go up, and according to our agreement with the governor public education should have been one of the beneficiaries,” O’Connell said.

Instead, O’Connell said, schools were shorted an additional $3.1 billion over two years.

Schwarzenegger has denied there was a promise to share the excess revenue with schools. Because the funding guarantee was suspended, the schools were not entitled to a share of the billions of unanticipated income tax revenue California took in, his administration said.

In the budget approved earlier this summer, the governor used about $4 billion in unanticipated revenue to pay down some of the state’s debt, fund road improvements and reimburse cities and counties for money they lost when he repealed an increase in the vehicle license fee.

In the lawsuit, O’Connell, the California Teachers Association and some parents ask the court to find the state out of compliance with the law and state constitution.

The 2005-06 spending plan, signed by Schwarzenegger in July, invests nearly $60 billion in schools – more than half the $117.3 billion state budget.

Teacher pay

If you read that, would you have the slightest idea that this fight was almost 100 percent over teacher pay? Would you have the slightest sense of the Sacramento political dynamics it reflected? Would you have any sense of whose ox would get gored if Arnold got his way? Would you have any grasp of the real story of what this said about how Sacramento works?

No, of course you wouldn’t.

I know several reporters who cover Sacramento, and I have OK-to-good relationships with a few. But it is simply beyond my comprehension that so many of them think that it would be bad journalism to explicitly point out that teachers get more money from taxpayers than anyone else. And that these teachers’ unions use automatic paycheck deductions to massively multiply their clout.

These are objective facts, and they make the case for Proposition 32. But the next time that Associated Press or the reporters of the Sacramento Bee or the Los Angeles Times reports them, it will be the first.