Two Important Court Decisions for Signatures and the Initiative Process
Conservatives say they like judges who follow the law and the original intent behind it. Liberals say they like judges who understand the world and have empathy.
I like judges who agree with me.
In that vein, there were two very agreeable court decisions on the initiative process in the past week.
In L.A.: Why 50,000 Motorists Caught on Camera Crashing Red Lights Haven’t Paid Their Tickets
Cross posted on www.ronkayela.com
LA contracted with a private company to install red-light cameras at 32
of its 4,300 intersections to catch scofflaws. The company went
bankrupt and now is owned by a firm from Arizona, the state the city is
boycotting, and its contract is up.
In five years, the program has chalked up a $1.5 million loss for the
city because two-thirds of the $466 fine goes to the state and county
and nearly one in five of the tickets for red-light crashing — fully
50,000 of them worth nearly $6 million — have gone unpaid.
You can’t renew your license or car registration if you have unpaid tickets.
New Jobs, Not a New Jobs Tax
What do you need when you don’t have a job? You need a job. That seems pretty obvious. And with 2 million Californians still out of work, what California needs is a lot of jobs.
Instead, what we now have on the ballot in November is the Jobs Tax Initiative. A proposal that would cost us jobs, a lot of jobs. A proposal that would punish with higher taxes, businesses that want to hire Californians and create new jobs. That would push existing jobs out of the state. That heaps new burdens on already struggling small businesses. That goes right after high tech and bio tech, the very industries that we are expecting to create the next wave of good jobs.
What seems pretty obvious about the Jobs Tax initiative – is what a bad idea it is.
Three Faces of Los Angeles
If you’re a
business person who has to deal with the city of Los Angeles, you may
get the feeling you’re watching that old movie, "Three Faces of Eve."
I mean, Los Angeles must have a multiple personality disorder. How else can you explain this:
On Tuesday, Councilman Tom LaBonge
stood up at an event in which the governor and the mayor, among others,
congratulated themselves for helping a bioscience business stay in Los
Angeles. He implied that he was all in favor of helping businesses.
LaBonge told the crowd that when he first met Austin Beutner, L.A.’s
so-called jobs czar, a few months back, he instructed Beutner to "do
what we can" to help businesses.