Public Unions Fighting Public Disclosure
The essence of self-government is the ability to know what your government is doing, who it hires and how it spends its money. But public employee unions have been — shamefully — seeking to prevent the public from learning such information.
Within the last year, state public employee unions sought to block — and then boycott — the Sacramento Bee for publishing the salary data of state workers. There is no more essentially public record than that. Now comes news from San Bernardino that the county is giving unions heads-up about public records requests in an attempt to block them.
Unions there are attacking newspapers that make requests for records on county employees. This is particularly outrageous because public records request from newspapers and the public are often the only way to learn how public employees and their unions behave. Public employee unions are exempt from the federal laws and regulations that require unions representing private sector workers to report on their internal finances to the U.S. Department of Labor.
Retire Proposition 13.
Retire Proposition 13. No, not the ballot measure, which has saved California taxpayers countless billions over the past 30 years, retire the number 13 applied to any new ballot proposition.
There are 12 ballot propositions on the November ballot. That means the first proposition at the next election, probably the special election the governor plans to call in 2009, will be labeled Proposition 13.
A decade ago, Senate Minority Leader Ross Johnson (R-Irvine) and state Sen. Steve Peace (D-El Cajon) offered a bill to prohibit any future ballot measure from carrying the number 13.
Those guys didn’t have triskaidekaphobia. That’s the fear of the number 13. There are a number of explanations of why the number 13 is considered unlucky. One of the most enduring explanations is that there were 13 people present at the Last Supper.
Johnson and Peace thought that voters seeing a Proposition 13 on the ballot would attach some meaning to the measure that may not be there.
Saddle Up and Deputize a New Sheriff in L.A.
We need a new Sheriff in L.A., and it’s not because we have problems with gangs, drugs, graffiti and other crime. We need a new Sheriff to keep law and order down at City Hall, to keep our politicians honest and to keep our taxes from breaking the bank, and we need our Sheriff now. City Council members Wendy Greuel and Eric Garcetti passed a motion last month to create a “Collections Sheriff”; a position or department that will hold department heads accountable and make them do their jobs.
Why do we need the “Collections Sheriff”, you ask? Let’s start with the $500 million in aging debt, some as much as two decades old, that the City of L.A. has on its balance sheets that it hasn’t done anything with since it found out about these accounts in June 2007. Then let’s look at the fact that in 2007 L.A. had over $1 billion in “uncollectables” on its books, meaning that it intended to write off all of this revenue it is supposed to collect. Finally, we need a Collections Sheriff because the city has known about these and other problems for years and has failed to take any serious action to rectify the situation.