Tobacco tax one of the most heated ballot measures

Good morning! Happy hump day. We’re talking about ballot measures first this morning. 

There’s broad agreement that the 17 initiatives on the statewide ballot on November 8 cover some of the most significant public-policy issues to come before voters in more than a decade.

For instance, voters will have a chance to legalize marijuana, outlaw the death penalty, put an end to the state’s virtual ban on bilingual education, approve a broad gun-control package and reduce prison sentences for some non-violent felons.

But two months before the election, one of the highest-visibility measures also is fairly narrow in scope. Proposition 56 would raise California’s relatively low tobacco tax (relative to other states) by $2 a cigarette pack – and increase taxes by an equivalent amount on all other tobacco products (cigars, chewing tobacco, etc.).

It also would significantly increase taxes on electronic cigarettes and vaping products. It has high visibility right now because of a series of advertisements opponents are running on radio stations across the state.

CalWatchdog has more.  

In other news:

• “Orange County plans to open a temporary homeless shelter in a former Santa Ana bus terminal within 30 days in an effort to address mounting pressure to reduce a large homeless encampment that has engulfed nearby government offices, causing health and safety problems. The action came just hours before the Santa Ana City Council approved a resolution declaring ‘a public health and safety homeless crisis.’” The Orange County Register has more. 

• “California voters face two capital punishment choices on the November ballot: End the death penalty or speed the way for execution. On death row, inmates are conflicted on the prospects of one-shot appeals, mandated lawyer assignments and simplified execution rules meant to rekindle a capital punishment system that hasn’t executed anyone in a decade, or the simple alternative, throw out the death penalty in favor of life without parole.” The Los Angeles Times has more. 

• Lynwood is the first city in Los Angeles County to approve marijuana cultivation, reports LA Weekly.

• “The mighty grizzly bear ruled California’s valleys, forests and coasts with fierce claws and jaws until people shot the last ones nearly a century ago. Now an environmental group is asking the state to consider bringing it back,” reports The San Jose Mercury News, which is showing off its flashy new website this morning.
• Quote of the day: “Reintroducing grizzly bears to California would be idiotic,” said Pete Margiotta, a Walnut Creek resident and longtime hunter. “Somebody is going to get killed.” 

Legislature: 

• Gone ’til December.

Gov. Brown:

• Speaking at 12:30 p.m. at the California Independent System Operator’s eighth annual stakeholder symposium in Sacramento.

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SB 375 (Chapter 728, Statutes of 2008) directs the California Air Resources Board to set regional targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The new law establishes a “bottom up” approach to ensure that cities and counties are involved in the development of regional plans to achieve those targets.

SB 375 builds on the existing framework of regional planning to tie together the regional allocation of housing needs and regional transportation planning in an effort to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from motor vehicle trips.

San Diego County has become the first major county to file its SB 375 compliance plan. So far, there have 德州扑克 been two ongoing court fights over whether the county’s long-term infrastructure-improvement planning does enough to push the region to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, as mandated by Steinberg’s law.

The county had to file its plan at the same time it was formulating its long-term approach to traffic congestion. Recent improvements to Interstate 15 have paid huge dividends. This made San Diego Association of Government officials even more committed to an expansion of Interstate 5 from the Del Mar area north to Camp Pendleton. Work is supposed to begin next year. Traffic engineers concluded there was no single project that would do anything close to relieving the congestion that would be accomplished with the I-5 improvements.

But that upgrade is now imperiled because greens have won at the appeals court level in both of the legal fights over the adequacy of San Diego County’s long-term plans.

What should 57% of infrastructure $ go to?

So what is one of the key fights in the legal battles over the county’s plan?

The contention of one side that spending on mass transit should start at 38 percent of infrastructure spending and reach 57 percent from 2040-2050.

There is no history of mass transit being popular anywhere but in packed-in cities like Tokyo and New York. California is not Tokyo or New York.

So how could those insane tree-huggers propose that 57 percent of future infrastructure spending in the San Diego region go to mass transit?

Bulletin: That isn’t what the Sierra Club supported. It’s what the county proposed and the Sierra Club and many other environmental groups rejected as unacceptable.

This is crazy enough on its face. But when you think about it more deeply, it becomes absolutely ridiculous. A state law is pushing local governments to assume mass transit will be the most logical way to move people around in a spread-out state — in 2040! This is happening even though there are so many promising energy-technology initiatives in the works — and even though there have been plenty of concrete gains since 2008.

Cars get cleaner as freeways de-emphasized

I had more on this issue in a Tuesday U-T San Diego editorial.

California is not the boroughs of New York City writ large. It is a sprawling state, and that is never going to [embrace mass transit] so long as housing is cheaper on the edges of the state’s population centers. Cars are infinitely more convenient for a typical day’s requirements — commuting to work; running errands on lunch breaks; getting kids to school, music classes, sports practice or jobs.

But instead of acknowledging this immense convenience factor, greens seek policies that would create mass inconvenience. The Interstate 5 experience in North County is already often bad; if the freeway upgrade is blocked, it will become routinely horrible. For people who hate cars, this amounts to a desired result.

They think this way even as we see rapid progress in developing far cleaner cars — and not just the Prius. As The New York Times reported Sunday, the “once-distant promise of clean, affordable hydrogen-powered cars is starting to become a reality,” with very positive implications for global warming. Pragmatic environmentalists will see this as good news. But not those who view cars and freeways the same way that most people think about bubonic plague.

Here’s a link to the NYT story on hydrogen-powered cars.

]]> https://calwatchdog.com/2014/12/02/nutty-sb-375-about-to-become-ongoing-nightmare-for-ca/feed/ 6 70961 https://calwatchdog.com/2014/02/10/faulconer-election-wont-stop-los-angelization-of-san-diego-politics/ https://calwatchdog.com/2014/02/10/faulconer-election-wont-stop-los-angelization-of-san-diego-politics/#comments Mon, 10 Feb 2014 17:51:10 +0000 http://calwatchdog.com/?p=59133 On Tuesday, San Diego voters will decide between two City Council members in a special election to fill the remaining 33 months of the mayoral term of disgraced, resigned Bob Filner.

The early conventional wisdom was that the clear favorite was Republican Kevin Faulconer, 47, the longest-serving council member and a community figure since his election as president of San Diego State University’s student body a quarter-century ago. Not only was Faulconer like the congenial moderate Republicans who have led San Diego for much of the last four decades, his opponent was a neophyte.

Democratic Councilman David Alvarez, 33, only became a public figure in 2010 when he beat out scions of two local political dynasties to win a seat representing a largely Latino district south of Interstate 8 — the dividing line in city politics between blue-collar communities nearer the Mexican border and the affluent neighborhoods from La Jolla to inland Rancho Bernardo.

That conventional wisdom has given way to a new assumption: Faulconer may win, but it will be very close — and he may be the last Republican that San Diego elects as mayor.

Given the Democrats’ hold on nearly all of California’s 10 largest cities, Faulconer might be the last big-city GOP mayor to be elected in the Golden State — barring a change in our political dynamics or demographics.

GOP held sway in San Diego not long ago

Although Democrats had long enjoyed a voter-registration edge in California’s second-largest city, Republicans did surprisingly well until 2012. It was that year that Filner, an abrasive 20-year paleoliberal congressman, edged out GOP Councilman Carl DeMaio, a small-government crusader who helped win huge changes in city compensation practices in his one term in office.

Many observers credited Filner’s 51 percent to 47 percent win to the strong turnout triggered by President Obama’s re-election campaign among Latinos and African Americans — 29 percent and 7 percent of the city’s population, respectively — and young people of all races. Also seen as a factor was DeMaio’s combative manner; the gay libertarian, the theory held, turned off the independent voters that Jerry Sanders attracted in his successful mayoral campaigns of 2005 and 2008.

So when Filner resigned in August, Republicans were confident after DeMaio decided instead to run for Congress and the well-liked Faulconer emerged as the sole credible GOP mayoral candidate. In the first special election, in November, Faulconer led with 42 percent, with Alvarez second with 27 percent, and Republican-turned-independent-turned-Democrat former Assemblyman Nathan Fletcher third with 24 percent. In this week’s runoff special election — runoffs typically have light turnout — the assumption was that reliably Republican absentee voters would carry the day.

Instead, the last published poll showed Faulconer only ahead 47 percent to 46 percent, within the margin of error. Millions of dollars in campaign spending by the national chapters of local unions — most of it for negative ads trashing the GOP candidate — had taken their toll.

But Republican insiders — and scores of business executives — are worried about much more than just this election.

The “Los Angelization” of America’s Finest City

It’s not just the usual concerns of GOP operatives in California: that the party’s hot-button social issues turn off young voters and that Latino voter turnout is steadily increasing. It’s that San Diego’s politics are undergoing what might be called a “Los Angelization.”

The city’s school board was taken over by the local affiliate of the California Teachers Association in 2008, when union muscle elected a new board majority that instituted policies that drove away an acclaimed reformer superintendent and yielded an operating budget in which an astonishing 92 percent of funds goes to employee compensation. The CTA control of the school board only increased with the 2010 and 2012 elections.

Now the same thing is happening with the City Council. Union-favored Democratic candidates — such as Alvarez — are increasingly likely to beat Democrats with independent streaks. As recently as 2011, there were Democrats on the council who occasionally would take on unions — politicians with backgrounds in engineering and small business, as well as party members who appeared eager to hear out business interests’ concerns.

But now the union muscle-flexing not only has Alvarez near an improbable mayoral victory, it has prompted hard-left decisions by the City Council in the months since Filner quit — decisions supported by formerly semi-independent Democrats who see the writing on the wall.

Last fall, on a party-line 5-4 vote, City Council Democrats approved increasing fees on commercial development by at least 377 percent to provide more funds for affordable-housing programs — even though the programs have a horrible record of actually getting people in homes.

And on another party-line 5-4 vote, council Democrats approved a restrictive new master plan for a job-rich shipyard industrial area adjacent to the Barrio Logan neighborhood in Alvarez’s district. They did so despite dire warnings from many CEOs and business owners that it would give leverage to environmentalists and community activists to shut them down.

No more independent Democratic voices

The contrast between the current council Democratic majority and past Democratic majorities was striking. In 2007, an effort to punish Wal-Mart for the sin of being anti-union died when then-Councilwoman Donna Frye — the most popular Democrat in San Diego — changed her mind and opposed an anti-“big box” ordinance. Frye candidly admitted that her constituents liked Wal-Mart and didn’t want it punished.

Present council Democrats appear incapable of such candor. In voting for the massive fee increase on commercial development, Council President Todd Gloria — the interim mayor since Filner’s resignation — repeatedly insisted that not only would there be no negative economic fallout from the hike, it would help the local economy.

The same Gloria once stood up to unions by backing a “managed competition” process in which groups of city workers vied against private businesses for the right to provide city services — a reform strongly endorsed by voters.

Alvarez has made clear he plans to nullify voter-backed reforms. Will Gloria stand up to him? Maybe he would have a year or two ago. But now that San Diego politics are becoming as union-dominated and doctrinaire as those of Los Angeles or the California Legislature, probably not.

A Faulconer victory in Tuesday’s mayoral election may quiet GOP worries about the radicalization of San Diego City Hall — but not for long.

“According to city documents, [newly hired City Manager David] Cavazos would earn $558,625.85 his first year, $515,395.08 his second year and $515,895.08 his third year. The annual compensation includes his $315,000 annual base salary plus retirement, medical insurance, life insurance, relocation allowance, temporary housing and time-off costs. …

“… when he retired in 2011, former City Manager Dave Ream received payments of $431,158, making him the second-highest paid city manger in the state for that year, according to a database maintained by state Controller John Chiang. Included in Ream’s compensation was a $365,000 lump-sum payout in unused time off.

“Ream’s payment came after the city gave a controversial $191,000 payment to former City Attorney Joe Fletcher. Fletcher had collected that amount in unused vacation, holiday and sick leave through unusual clauses in his employment contract that allowed him to accrue time as if he had been hired 13 years prior to his actual hiring date.

“And most recently, former City Manager Paul Walters received an severance package valued at $706,396. “

High pay doesn’t translate into well-run city

What’s striking about this generosity is how it is simply not linked to reality. Santa Ana is simply not a well-run city. This is in sharp contrast with Anaheim, its neighbor and — except for the affluent Anaheim Hills community — its demographic doppelganger.

I worked in Santa Ana for seven years and know many people who work or live in the region. Large parts of the city have a dusty, depressed vibe. Traffic is routinely horrible. Crime is far higher than the U.S. norm and auto theft rates are among the highest in the nation. Scandal is common.

Instead of lavish pay, Santa Ana executives deserve rebukes.

By Chris Reed

The city of San Bernardino’s defiance of CalPERS’ demands for payment will be remembered as the first in a very long line of defiant acts from local governments in California as budgets that don’t add up force local officials to make tough and often unprecedented decisions. For local officials, telling Sacramento to take a hike is a much easier call than taking on those who benefit from city compensation policies or who benefit from city services.

Given CalPERS’ central role in so many local governments’ pension nightmares, there is a perverse sense of karma at play in San Berdo’s using bankruptcy protection to avoid its overdue pension payment. The decision of a judge to side with the city in its maneuvering will absolutely prompt other cities to copy it.

But a new act of defiance is more complicated. The city of Santa Ana’s decision on Friday to stiff the state on the $56 million it owes for redevelopment funds that state grabbed in 2011 has no legal cover such as a bankruptcy filing.

Redevelopment is a farce that deserved killing. The city of Santa Ana is poorly run. So was its redevelopment agency. So it’s tough to side with Santa Ana Mayor Miguel Pulido, a very interesting fellow.

But the state government has been preying on local governments for so long when times are tough that it’s impossible to root for Jerry, Darrell, John A. and Monsieur Maviglio. And given that a redevelopment refund may help the state to keep the bullet-train fiasco alive, I’ve decided to root for Santa Ana.

There is also this: An era of local governments refusing to honor contracts will underscore what a disaster California has become since union power metastasized after Gov. Pete Wilson left Sacramento in January 1999.

Meanwhile, no one tell Politico’s crack staffers. They’ve bought Jerry Brown’s spin that his tax triumph means he’s a genius. Groan. Par for the course for East Coast saps.

By Steven Greenhut

SACRAMENTO — We all would laugh at a man who, sinking in millions of dollars in house payments, car loans and credit card bills, decided to fix his cash-flow problem by looking for nickels, dimes and quarters lurking underneath the sofa cushions.

Likewise, we should shake our heads at the way the state of California — groaning under a budget deficit approaching $16 billion and hundreds of billions of dollars in unfunded pension and retiree medical benefits — is stepping up tax collection to help plug a hole caused by its chronic overspending.

I met Tuesday in Santa Ana with about 12 owners of catering trucks — mobile eateries that sell mostly Mexican food — and they told a disturbing tale of how the state’s Orwellian-named tax agency, the Board of Equalization, is targeting and mistreating them. The business owners assembled in the room blamed their tough times more on state tax authorities than on the economy.

The truck owners say the state is handing them tax bills for tens of thousands of dollars, based on unrealistic estimates of their taxable sales. When you buy food at the trucks, a burrito and Mexican-bottled Coca-Cola (the kind with real sugar, rather than the icky corn syrup) may cost, say, six bucks. That’s all you pay, as opposed to a restaurant, where state tax would be added onto the transaction. The trucks don’t collect a per-item tax, but owners later estimate their sales and send their money to the tax man.

Unrealistic estimates

The BOE, truck owners say, used to tax them based on realistic sales estimates and used to account for the fact that many of the items they sell are nontaxable. They say the BOE also used to work with them to make their tax bills and treated them respectfully.

No more.

Desperate for cash, state officials now concoct unrealistic estimates of food sales and employ heavy-handed tactics, the truck owners said.

To make matters worse, the truck owners say police harass them — due, in part, to city officials who don’t like having the trucks around. Every city has different rules for placement of permits on the truck, and most of the owners report getting multiple citations for minor infractions. Each citation can cost $700, which can eat up days’ worth of taco sales.

The people I met with spoke mostly Spanish, which was translated for me by Lou Correa, the Santa Ana Democratic state senator who organized the group at my request. I promised to print only the first names of the attendees because of their fear of retribution from authorities.

“It reaches the point where you have to think about your health,” said Veronica. “They filed lawsuits against me. They said they would charge me as a criminal in court. I’m out of business. I sold my truck. There are people out there who get government aid who are driving brand new cars. They come after a person like me, who is not asking for anything. As long as I have two feet and two hands, I want to work.”

Welfare

Officials suggested to one truck owner that he apply for benefits from the welfare office. That’s just like California these days — hardworking people are ill-treated, but there are plenty of benefits available for those who prefer to live on the dole.

Many of those I met with told stories of long waits, complicated audits, confusing instructions, unhelpful officials, of bureaucratic indifference. Some also said the state tax agency reports violations to the IRS, which they say, can trigger a federal tax audit.

Those who work other jobs have their wages garnished to pay the state.

“We were paying an acceptable amount, and then the state needed more money,” Gilberto said. He told me that this is a group of mom-and-pop business owners who cannot afford attorneys and accountants.

I talked to the Board of Equalization’s Michelle Steel, the elected official who represents Orange County on the tax agency. She promised to pull the records of the truck owners and see what can be done to help them.

At the gathering in Santa Ana, one man blurted out the word “pensions.” Everyone laughed. In English or Spanish, these business owners understood that the state is shaking them down for money to pay for its reckless overspending, on programs including six-figure pensions for many government employees.

Concern for the poor

The state Capitol is controlled by liberal Democrats, who frequently invoke concern for the poor, working-class people and immigrants to justify spending schemes. Yet here is another example of how these officials, lawmakers and bureaucrats, put the demands of the well-paid and powerful public-employee unions over the needs of cash-strapped immigrants and working people.

State officials refuse to tackle solutions for the pension debt or rein in public spending. Indeed, they are busy approving fanciful projects such as high-speed rail. Yet, the state has no money. This is the end result of an infantile progressive movement that refuses to make hard choices, always blames the private sector and figures that higher taxes will solve every problem.

Sen. Correa also planned a meeting with owners of nail salons, who say they are being targeted by state regulators for large fines based on picayune regulatory violations.

I’m not arguing that small businesses shouldn’t pay their fair share of taxes or comply with reasonable rules, but it’s a sad day when the state government treats them like criminals – or like a piggy bank.

Read those surveys of business owners, including at least one that ranked California last in the nation in terms of business friendliness. The owners don’t complain so much about the state’s high tax rates, but about the prevalent attitude in which they are treated with hostility by authorities.

I love California. But if I depended on a catering truck for my living, I’d fill it up with my belongings and drive to Nevada.