Failure to Sell San Quentin Reflects Deeper Problem
The fact that a bill by state Senator Jeff Denham to sell San Quentin failed to move forward from the Senate Committee on Public Safety yesterday indicates a deeper problem than the state managing this one piece of property.
Over the years, the state has acquired property as if it were a real estate magnate building an empire. California should not be in the real estate business. It should just hold property related to its essential functions and manage that property wisely.
While a prison is an essential state function, San Quentin is an example of poor management of resources.
The 157-year old prison on San Francisco Bay that houses Death Row inmates is in need of repair and expansion. However, the prison sits on prime real estate with magnificent views of the bay. As an investor once told me, there is only so much California waterfront property and this chunk of land would bring a princely sum in the marketplace. Denham estimates the sales price as up to $2 billion.
Give Port Truckers a Break Already
Why do the Port of Los Angeles and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa so hate small, independent trucking firms?
The city-owned port and the mayor have been on a long campaign to eradicate the thousand or more companies whose trucks haul cargo in and out of the port. And they have cynically tried to use the Clean Truck Program as a club to knock the life out of the small companies, as if they were so many baby seals huddled around the port.
Of course, the answer is simple: They hate the little companies because they’re not unionized. The port could have written its Clean Truck Program merely to create a fair and just system in which new clean-burning trucks could be purchased by the small trucking firms at subsidized rates. Instead, its program mandates that new trucks be driven by employees of a few big companies – big companies whose employees can be organized easily by the Teamsters.
The Federal Government is now in the US Auto Biz
The week opened with another financial stunner: The US Government seems to now be in the US Auto business. According to President Obama’s statements Monday, GM’s CEO, Rick Wagoner, joins America’s ranks of the unemployed, and Chrysler seems headed for a Shotgun Marriage with Fiat – just business as usual in another week here in Great Depression II.
Not that they didn’t have it coming. Since all the BailOut frenzy of last Fall and their private jetting into Washington to beg, hat in hand, for money to Congress, only to be unceremoniously kicked out to return via Amtrack, US automakers have been treading on the thinnest of thin ice. We all debated whether or not they should be left to the forces of nature and then something of a compromise was reached whereby US automakers were given some BailOut dollars, much less than they said they needed, and told to come back with a real plan for how they would get themselves out of the financial black hole that is swallowing them up. Well, those plans underwhelmed the Obama Administration, to say the least.