Fox and Hounds Daily Says Goodbye
With this article, we end publication of Fox and Hounds Daily. It has been a satisfying 12½ year run. When we opened in May 2008, our site was designed to offer an opportunity to those who wished to engage in public debate on many issues, especially in politics and business, but found it difficult to get placed in newspaper op-ed pages.
Co-publishers Tom Ross, Bryan Merica and I have kept F&H going over this time investing our own time, funding, and staff help. Last year at this time we considered closing the site, however with an election on the horizon we decided to keep F&H going through the election year. With the election come and gone, and with no sense of additional resources, we have decided to close the site down.
Fox and Hounds will live on, at least, with my articles collected in the California State Library.
On a personal note, I have spent over 40 years in California policy and politics. There have been some incredible high moments and some difficult low points. It pains me that politics too often is a blood sport, frequently demonizing the motives of opponents and using the legal system as a weapon in public discourse. At Fox & Hounds, we tried to adhere to the practice of giving all a voice in the debate, yet keep the commentaries civil and avoided personal attacks.
F&H offered the opportunity to publish different perspectives (even ones that criticized my writings!). We had success as indicated by the Washington Post twice citing Fox and Hounds Daily one of the best California political websites and many other positive affirmations and comments received over the years.
Tom, Bryan and I want to thank our many readers and writers for being part of our journey. The publishers of Fox and Hounds Daily believe that we added value to California and its people. We hope you agree.
Devil is in the Details of Mayor Reed’s Pension Proposal
While the Pension Reform Act of 2014 proposal would end reliable, fixed-benefit retirement plans for public employees, the Act clearly looks like a lucrative retirement plan at taxpayer expense for those who are proposing the Act.
If the Act were to pass, Section 9 of the Act enables the proponents of the Act to collect — at taxpayer expense — all legal and related costs of defending the Act if it is challenged and the state declines to defend it in the courts.
And the Act would of course be challenged because even though the Act changes Article 1, Section 9 of the California Constitution, California’s Section 9 is nearly verbatim from Section 10, Clause 1 of Article 1 of the United States Constitution, making the language of the Act unconstitutional vis-à-vis our federal Constitution. Because our federal Constitution trumps the state constitution, the state would decline a futile effort to defend the Act, thereby allowing the proponents of the Act to jump in and defend it in a long and costly series of court battles filled with many costly motions — and to send all their the inflated legal and “related” costs to the state for taxpayers to pay.
Initiative Process Scrutinized in PPIC Roundtable
At first glance having a former governor, former Assembly Speaker and former state chief justice sit on a panel to talk about initiative reform seems like something of an odd combination. But if you consider that Gray Davis, Willie Brown, and Ronald George each come from one of the three branches of government and have close to 100 combined years of public service in their respective sectors, their selection by the Public Policy Institute of California starts to make a lot of sense.
With moderating duties helmed by the LA Times’ Patt Morrison, the PPIC’s Reforming California’s Initiative Process event, held Thursday afternoon in Sacramento, was an analysis of California’s popular but flawed process of direct democracy. The event shares its name with a PPIC report released this month by Mark Baldassare. “The reason PPIC got interested in writing this report is because the last ten years and in particular the last five years have been a period of historic interest in changing California,” Baldassare said, prior to turning it over to Morrison and the panel. “While many political insiders say the [initiative] system is broken, most Californians view the initiative process favorably. Strong majorities think it’s a good thing, and many voters believe their fellow voters are better at making decisions than the governor and the legislature.”
Magical Thinking and the BART Strike
Magical thinking pervades our California state and local government. Policymakers often believe an event will occur because they want it to occur.
So it has been on the BART strike. From the start of negotiations in the spring of 2013, local officials have claimed that the two sides could reach agreement, without paralyzing the region, even though all evidence since 1979 has been to the contrary. Every negotiation since 1979 has been contentious and gone down to the last day. The pattern was the same this time, except that the unions, SEIU and ATU, went out on strike on Friday morning, October 15, before a settlement was reached on Monday night.
In the past twenty years of negotiations I’ve never seen such public anger at the BART unions for not settling earlier, and for going out on strike. But the anger is misplaced. The BART system runs so well because of its highly professional workforce. Further, the BART unions were aggressively pushing for better pay and benefits for their members. That’s what unions do.
Skeptical of the Bullet Train, But CA Needs More Track
I’m not a big fan of trains, but my oldest son, Ben, 4, loves them. He’d been lobbying to go on a “big train trip,” and his school would be closed for a couple days at the end of September, when I had a meeting in Sacramento. Why not take the kid on a train trip from L.A. to the state capital, by Amtrak?
It would be useful research, too. California governments are still close to broke, but we are preparing to spend big money on one thing: connecting L.A. to San Francisco via high-speed rail through the San Joaquin Valley. Construction could begin in just a few months in the heart of the valley, and I realized I’d never traveled through that part of California by rail. The Amtrak line in the Central Valley goes through some of the same communities that would be connected under the high-speed rail plan.
So, on a recent Thursday morning, I found myself waiting on the platform of the train station next to Burbank Airport with a very excited 4-year-old. The noise there gives grownups headaches, but it’s paradise for kids who love machines. Ben cheered the Southwest Airlines planes that came in for landings, admired the Metrolink and Amtrak trains that stopped at the station, and called out the colors of the cars that sped by us on Empire Avenue.
In L.A., the Grass Isn’t Always Greener
Desperate times call for desperate measures. Or at least that’s what your government is telling you.
Citing perennial drought conditions in Los Angeles, this week the L.A. Department of Water and Power (DWP) is touting the success of a program called “Cash for Grass” – which frankly sounds like a place you should turn in your unused medical marijuana. But L.A.’s cheekily-named program is actually a water conservation plan that is costing big bucks – and the only ones getting soaked in this scenario are the ratepayers.
The Los Angeles utility has shelled out more than $1 million in incentives for a program aimed at curbing water usage, but at up to $2,500 per lawn it appears to be little more than a glorified lawn makeover service at the public ratepayers’ expense. Cue the new TV series, “HGTV: Kicking Taxpayers to the Curb” edition.
The L.A. area’s “Cash for Grass” program, which has been in place since 2009 but recently upped its ante with increased financial incentives, provides cash to residents who will rip out their grass lawns in exchange for desert landscapes.
ACA Excludes More than a Million California Residents
The Affordable Care Act promises to bring insurance to millions of Californians who don’t have coverage today. The law will help the poorest of the poor, middle-income families and people who have been denied coverage because of pre-existing health conditions.
But Congress explicitly excluded one very large group of US residents: undocumented immigrants.
They are not eligible for the expanded access to Medi-Cal, the state and federal program for the poor, and they can’t get subsidized insurance through the new online marketplace known as Covered California. They can’t even buy insurance on the exchange if they want to use their own money.
By the time the Affordable Care Act is fully phased in, experts say, about 40 percent of the remaining uninsured in California will be undocumented immigrants. That’s more than 1 million people.