The Way to Win on Split Roll

Seeking to change Prop 13 is usually political suicide. And so far, it appears that San Francisco County assessor Phil Ting and others who want to create a so-called split roll (by eliminating some of the Prop 13 protections on commercial property) are unlikely to get very far.

Ting has the language right. He’s arguing that he’s merely closing “corporate loopholes” that protect older businesses and allow corporations to postpone reassessments of their property. Fixing loopholes polls well, but the advantage will melt away once voters understand that Prop 13 is at risk.

To win, a split roll initiative needs more than clever rhetoric and framing. It needs a tax cut.

Ting and split roll advocates point out that Prop. 13 “shifted the tax burden to individual homeowners while dramatically reducing California’s tax base.” Commercial property owners often structure transactions to avoid the reassessment that would increase property taxes. In San Francisco, Ting writes, most of the property taxes were on the commercial side 30 years ago; now the opposite is true.

Letter from Seoul: California Direct Democracy Doesn’t Meet International Standards

This week, I’m in South Korea attending the 2nd Global Forum on Modern Direct Democracy, which brings together journalists, academics, and activists with an interest in initiative and referendum. (There are people from 25 countries here).

One presentation came from a representative of the so-called Venice Commission (aka The European Commission for Democracy Through Law), an independent think tank that advises the Council of Europe on constitutional matters. The Venice Commission has formulated a code of good conduct for direct democracy. It offers the most widely accepted international standard for initiative and referendum elections.

Reading it from the perspective of a Californian is sobering. The state doesn’t meet the standards in several regards:

-Administrative neutrality. The commission says that officials administering elections must be completely neutral. California’s secretary of state is a partisan office

The Constitutional Convention: Invite Everyone

As a reporter, I spent a good amount of time sneaking into places where I wasn’t supposed to be. Humankind, especially the sub-species known as newspaper editors, have a fascination with exclusive places and events, after all. My experience – over and over – was the same. The story was always better when I could NOT find a way inside. The mystery – and the fact that I could write about the secrecy of the particular event or meeting – made it more interesting. When I managed to sneak in and witness what happened, the story often proved to be a letdown: the negotiation or party was always far more boring in reality than in the imagination.

Which brings me to the ongoing debate about who should be permitted to serve as a delegate at a state constitutional convention. Should delegates be elected in some form? Should regular voters be delegates, chosen at random or through some other kind of system? Views are being expressed and opinions are hardening. Supporters of elections suggest that bringing in random voters would create a chaotic disaster. Supporters of using random voters fear that special interests would dominate elections.

Here’s a simpler way to do it (which was first suggested to me by a very smart and experienced California political consultant with no ties to the convention):
Open up the convention to anyone who wants in.

That’s right. Let’s try Athenian democracy.

Endorsing After the Sell-By Date

After sitting through three hours of Thursday’s tax commission meeting at UCLA, I’m less than confident that the body’s recommended package (an important compromise) has any prayer of passing the legislature.

But I do know one thing: the tax commission needs a time machine.

As part of its package of tax changes (flatter income taxes, a phase-out of sales and corporate tax, and the establishment of a business net receipts tax), the commission included a proposal for a rainy day fund.

If that sounds familiar, it should. A rainy day fund was part of Prop 1A, which was defeated by voters on the May 19 special election ballot.

The rainy day fund proposed by the commission is eerily similar to the Prop 1A fund. So much so that the commission seemed to be endorsing the measure – nearly four months after the election.

This may set some kind of political record for tardy political endorsements. As observers of the commission pointed out, the body discussed whether to endorse Prop 1A before the election but declined, out of political caution. Which is fine.

Now what they need is to find some way to send their endorsement back in time.

Not that it would have made much difference in the election.

Mixed Messages on Card Check

The labor movement, not for the first time, is sending mixed messages about “card-check” legislation.

In Washington, John Sweeney, the outgoing president of the AFL-CIO, said that he would support dropping the card check provision of the Employee Free Choice Act (which would permit unions to organize without elections) – in exchange for provisions that would call for speedy elections – within 5 or 10 days of a certain number of workers petitioning for the union.

In California, the United Farm Workers – which has the right to such speedy elections through the state’s landmark Agricultural Labor Relations Act – has decided such speedy elections don’t work and instead has been pushing legislation that would allow the union to organize by card check. Last week, UFW rallied its political and labor allies, and threatened to oppose badly needed water legislation if Schwarzenegger didn’t sign the legislation. (He vetoed it anyway).

So which is the better policy, speedy elections or card check?

There are a couple different answers to that.

REVEALED! The Conspiracy Theory Behind the Birther Conspiracy Theory

I’m not one of those media types who dismisses the so-called birthers – those who believe President Obama wasn’t born in this country – out of hand. I take them very, very seriously. Heck, according to some polling, half of Republicans might be birthers.

It just seems impossible to me that such a large group of people would persist in making the same, thoroughly discredited claim over and over if there weren’t something else going on. I mean, every public record, including his birth certificate, show he was born in Hawaii. (And by the way, as a Little League coach, I’ve had to become an expert in birth certificates—the umpires check them all the time these days – and I can tell you the Obama one isn’t a forgery). The birthers have been mocked up and down the dial and across the political spectrum. It’d be crazy to keep going once you’ve been so thoroughly debunked, right?

Why Should I Have to Pay For Your Primaries?

News item: Some in the California Republican Party don’t want to let California voters registered as Decline to State (full disclosure: I’m proudly one of them) vote in the GOP primary.

Fine. But why then should I, as a taxpayer, have to pay for your primary?

The same is true of other partisan primaries. Registered voters that are not members of a party are the fastest-growing segment of the electorate – 20 percent and rising fast. In an era of super-tight budgets, our taxes, by paying for primaries, are subsidizing the parties.

What do we get out of it? Hyper-partisan legislators that dominate the legislature. Budget gridlock. The total failure to deal with urgent issues such as prisons and water. And who do the 20 percent of Californians who are DTSers have to represent them in Sacramento? Not a single legislator, unless you count Fresno Assemblyman Juan Arambula, who was elected as a Democrat.

Fantasy Football and the Constitutional Convention

One of my oldest friends spends each fall obsessively playing fantasy football. (It would be more accurate to say he spends each fall “cheating” at fantasy football, but that is a different story).
Here’s how nuts he is: To prepare for our league’s draft next weekend, he has run more than 30 “mock drafts” on web sites that offers fantasy addicts this service.

At his urging, I recently signed up for one of these mock drafts, and immediately found myself thinking about the debates over whether California needs a constitutional convention and how to conduct such a convention.

On the web site I used, there were a half-dozen mock drafts starting every five minutes. I signed up for a draft similar to my own league, with 12 teams. Eleven other people (I have no idea who they were—you could sign up anywhere in the world simply by registering with the web site) also signed up. And then we took turns drafting, remotely over the Internet. There was a time limit of one minute for each pick.

Majority Vote Budget and 2/3 for Taxes: The Worst of Both Worlds

California’s budget process is broken. Democrats use their
majority to spend as much as they can. Republicans use their leverage under the
two-thirds requirement for budget and taxation to block the taxes needed to pay
for that spending. At budget times, this produces delay and last-minute
compromises that merely serve to push problems into the future.

Word
is that the folks at California Forward (and an increasing number of good
government types) say they want to change this system – by eliminating the
two-thirds requirement for budgets (to a majority) while preserving the 2/3
requirement for taxes. Among the various explanations I’ve heard for this, the
one most oft-repeated is: budgets, which last only a year, should be easier to
pass, but tax increases are open-ended (except when they’re not, as in this
year’s temporary increases) and should be harder. There’s also a political
explanation. California Forward is trying to avoid opposition from Republicans.

Gray Davis, Reformer

After listening to former Gov. Gray Davis spend 30 minutes Thursday Night making a strong case for a top-to-bottom reform of state government – including a constitutional convention — the independent columnist Tom Elias, who was among the first to suggest Davis’ recall, was incredulous. Why, he asked, weren’t you for these things when you were governor?

During the Q&A with LA Times columnist Patt Morrison and an audience of about 100 at the California Endowment in Los Angeles, Davis never gave a clear answer to that question, suggesting that he had been for the following ideas when he was governor, but had more freedom to speak his mind. The ideas he’s for?

An open primary. A majority vote to pass a budget (but not for taxes). A spending limit that includes a rainy day fund. “Pay as you go” rules on budgeting. Performance-based budgeting. A two-year budget. Giving local governments more freedom to protect their own funding and to cooperate with each other. Reforming term limits.