It has been 35 years since California voters overwhelmingly approved Proposition 13, a measure that, as Governor Jerry Brown put it in 2011, “started the centralization of power” in the state. He should know because he was also governor in 1978 and helped oversee that shift.

At the time, Californians were enraged that their inflation-fueled home values were accompanied by rising local property taxes. The referendum limited those taxes to 1 percent of their property’s value.

At the time, advocates of Proposition 13 claimed it would limit government spending. They were wrong.

David Crane’s argument above advocating doing away with the property tax protections in Proposition 13 is flawed. Crane says the state would function more efficiently if it relied more heavily on a stable property tax instead of more volatile income and sales taxes, but what makes the property tax so stable in California is Proposition 13.

Under the Proposition 13 formula, during economic downturns property tax revenue does not fall as much as the sales and income tax because many properties are not tied to current market values. If properties taxes were based on market values, as they were before Prop 13 passed, California schools and local governments would have taken an additional major hit during the recent recession because the taxable value would drop dramatically and the tax take would fall with it.

Let’s face it; while the intent of California’s global warming regulations was good, how it actually works is not.

We can continue to attempt to roadblock the implementation of California’s landmark greenhouse gas legislation, or we can figure out how to implement this policy with as little impact on Californians’ checkbooks as possible.  It’s past time that all of us roll up our sleeves and figure out what fixes are needed to make it work right.

Governor Jerry Brown has shown a growing interest in reforming laws that are leading to abusive litigation in California. Last year he signed a bill to cut down on Americans with Disabilities Act lawsuits. This year he made reforming the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) a top priority because CEQA lawsuits have been blocking important development projects. And last week, Brown announced that he is taking on a new effort – reforming the well-intentioned but widely misused Proposition 65, an initiative approved in 1986.

We Californians have all seen the warnings…the store where you are shopping or the product you are about to use “contains chemicals known by the State of California to cause cancer or reproductive harm.”

Predictions from the Legislative Analyst that the state will have more revenue than the governor projects in his May budget revision — with most of the money going to the schools under the provisions of Prop 98 — could set up a spending tug-of-war with Prop 98 in the middle.

Passed in 1988, Prop 98 set a guaranteed percentage of the state’s general fund budget for K-12 and community college education. The measure also established a complicated formula to not only send money to the schools each year, but to make up for what the schools did not receive during particularly dismal budget years.

There’s consensus that California needs a big new deal to govern water. There’s no consensus on what should be in it. Habitat restoration? Rebuilt levees to withstand earthquakes? Or new tunnels to divert water from the Sacramento River to farmers and cities in Southern California?

These are all possibilities for the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, a water source for 25 million of California’s 38 million people. But if there’s to be a smart deal on the most contentious and complicated issue in California, the most important ingredient isn’t water. It’s sunscreen—the sunscreen that participants in any negotiations should apply to themselves as they head out to look at the affected places firsthand.

Even the most casual observer knows the City is cooking the books.

We are all familiar with the angst associated with the annual budget.  But this year is a cake walk as General Fund revenues are projected to increase by $325 million, accompanied by unanticipated pension savings of over $50 million.

But the Mayor’s budget that was approved by the Budget and Finance Committee last week is hardly balanced as the City once again has failed to provide adequate funding for its two severely underfunded pension plans and our failing infrastructure. 

SACRAMENTO — The Senate Governance and Finance Committee on Wednesday passed six constitutional amendments to make it easier for local voters to pass various tax increases on property owners.

“California didn’t knowingly vote for centralized power,” said Sen. Lois Wolk, D-Davis, speaking about the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978, as she opened the committee hearing on the bills. Wolk, the committee chairwoman, echoed longtime critics of Prop. 13 that it reduced the ability of local governments to increase taxes, requiring the state government to step in and fund programs.

One of the first local ballot measures aimed at cutting public pension costs, a cap on Pacific Grove payments to CalPERS approved by voters three years ago, was ruled unconstitutional by a Monterey County superior court judge last week.

Judge Thomas Wills ruled Friday that Measure R violated the contract clause of the state constitution, reaffirming the view that pensions promised on the date of hire are a “vested right” that can’t be cut without providing a new benefit of equal value.

Finally, a major California institution has offered Californians the kind of advertising campaign we need to hear: “Believe in Something Bigger,” it asks us, and we should. Instead of the stale, small debate about California’s future, evidenced again this month with the release of the revised budget, we should be thinking about a bigger, better California, and how to build the new governance system, infrastructure, and human connections to make it possible.

Unfortunately, “Believe in Something Bigger” is the slogan of the California lottery.