The Commission’s First Draft Maps: Doing worse than the Legislature did
The results are in and the first draft maps released by the Citizens Redistricting Commission on June 10 have bombed. Over the past two weeks, Commission members have had to sit through hours of testimony on the maps while more than 1,000 of their fellow citizens told them what a lousy job they did.
The first maps achieved remarkable results. First, they managed to violate the Federal Voting Rights Act by actually reducing the number of majority-minority districts in a state where Latinos accounted for 90 percent of net growth over the past decade. The Commission now realizes this; they threw out their staff’s entire congressional work product for Los Angeles County and the commissioners themselves are now redrawing the districts.
Second, in place after place they managed to gerrymander the state even more than the legislature did in 2001 with a series of truly bonehead districts. Now that is a real trick, and here are just six examples of where they did a worse job than the politicians did ten years ago.
Victory for Taxpayers in San Diego
The names of San Diego County public employees retiring with six-figure pensions are a matter public record, according to a court ruling in a case brought by the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association with amicus briefs filed by the Small Business Action Committee and a number of newspapers.
The 4th District Court of Appeal held, in a published decision that applies statewide, that public employee retirement systems must disclose the names and pension amounts of retired public employees.
This is a significant victory, and a vindication. Even when we have won lawsuits, retirement agencies across the state of California have refused to release their data unless under the threat of lawsuit. Today’s published appellate precedent settles this issue once and for all.
The decision is significant because it requires for the first time that the worksheet of how their pension amounts was calculated must be made public. The worksheet reveals details that explain how some public employees are able to retire with pensions significantly higher than the salaries they earned while employed.
The Unpredictable Mr. Brown
Jerry Brown had his chance at political revenge last night
but to his credit he sidestepped that opportunity. On the day the Democrats
passed an alternative budget to Brown’s original plan with no cooperation from
Republicans, Brown vetoed the controversial union supported ‘card-check’ bill
that had reached his desk on partisan votes, Democrats for, Republicans
against.
Rumors flew around the capitol that Brown was using the
card-check bill as a bargaining chip in his budget negotiations. If some farm
area Republican legislators would vote to put tax extensions on the ballot,
Brown would veto the bill, the rumors implied. No Republican openly supported
the tax extensions and the tax extensions were not part of the final budget.
Yet, Brown vetoed the card-check bill, anyway.
So much for capitol rumors.
Good News on the Sheet Beat
The state of California is swirling around the drain. Unemployment is the second-highest in the nation. Businesses are seeping away. The state budget deficit is intractable.
In times of crisis like these, we yearn for a true leader to step forward with clear thinking and bold plans. Someone who can get us on the path out of this morass.
Thank goodness Kevin de León has emerged. He’s a Democratic state senator who represents downtown Los Angeles. And he’s got a plan. De León has declared war on those dastardly flat sheets in hotels. He wants fitted sheets, and he’s introduced a bill to mandate them in all hotels in the state. The bill passed the Senate a few weeks ago, and if it passes the Assembly, it’ll be a misdemeanor for a hotel to use flat sheets.
No, no, no. This is not a waste of the Legislature’s brain power in a time of crisis. This is really important. You see, hotel housekeepers could get hurt lifting mattress corners to tuck in flat sheets.
The Distance Running Subculture of Southern California in the 1960s
(Few readers know that our publisher, Mr. Joel Fox, was a distance runner in the 1960s, and ran
the Boston Marathon in 1969, 1970 and 1971. So I knew he wouldn’t object if I
slipped in as this week’s "California Employment" posting a note on the
distance running subculture of Southern California. A version of this posting
first appeared last week in Zocalo Public
Square.)
Before
distance running entered the mainstream culture in the 1970s, before marathons and
road races attracted thousands of runners, before Nike and Reebok, there was a
distance running subculture in Southern California.
You
wouldn’t have known it existed from the Los
Angeles Times or local television and radio. But a vibrant distance running
community was out there in the 1960s, under the radar. The community was linked
by a network of all-comers races, weekly
road races and the recently-established marathon races. Most consequential,
among this community new ways of thinking were emerging about long distance running as a lifestyle,
as well as about workout regimens, diet, lifelong training, and the inclusion
of women.
My
older brother Jim, then a senior at Fairfax High, introduced me to long
distance running in the summer of 1967, a few months before I was to enter the
school. My first run was from our house in the Fairfax district to the top of
Mt. Olympus in the Hollywood Hills. Though I ran only the first two miles and
walked the rest, I was soon hooked.