(click to view full size)I am not here to defend the City of Vernon.  They have enough people handling this for
them and the issues has already drawn enough of its own attention.  Nevertheless, the issues with Vernon are
representative of other issues with Sacramento that deserve attention.  How can any rational person look straight
into the camera and say with a straight face that handing over Vernon to the
County of Los Angeles won’t have a negative economic impact on the 50,000 jobs
and the families that depend on them?

The state job numbers announced last Friday showed a net
payroll job gain of 12,500 jobs. This is not a lot  compared to total California payroll jobs of
nearly 14 million. However, this job gain constituted nearly 20% of the 63,000
net payroll jobs added throughout the entire United States.

We are likely on the road back to payroll job growth in
California, though it will be a long and winding road, given the extent of
payroll job losses since 2006 of over 1.4 million payroll jobs, and the
obstacles ahead. Beginning on the plus side, several sectors that have been
struggling showed growth, particularly construction and manufacturing.

In any state budget impasse, attention inevitably focuses on the areas of conflict, and the public’s focus will soon turn to the reluctance of most Republican lawmakers to vote for a plan that would ask voters to extend temporary taxes for another five years.

But even as the debate over revenues begins in earnest, we shouldn’t lose sight of the deep spending cuts that are part of the plan moving toward both floors of the Legislature this week.

The cuts in the health care safety net, in particular, will make it more difficult for the neediest among us, including children and the elderly, to obtain the care they need to stay healthy or to get well once they are sick.

The cuts reduce payments by 10 percent to doctors, hospitals and nursing homes that care for the poor. California already has among the lowest reimbursement rates in the country, paying, on average, less than half what doctors get under the Medicare program.

Cross-posted at Zev.LACounty.Gov.

We spoke—and the governor listened.

Gov. Brown’s office announced that he’d scaled back one of the most onerous facets of his “realignment” plan to erase the state’s $26 billion deficit. Responding to concerns and criticisms of county leaders and law enforcement officials across the state, Brown significantly shrank the numbers of state prisoners and parolees he’d planned on putting under the management of California’s counties.

And that’s good news for a couple reasons.

First, our local criminal system already is bursting at the seams. Our jails are overcrowded and we simply don’t have the kind of staffing—or the money—needed to supervise the huge numbers of parolees with which the governor wanted to saddle us. The Board of Supervisors, Sheriff Lee Baca and District Atty. Steve Cooley had made this abundantly clear to Sacramento.

The Los Angeles Times completed an exhaustive six-part
series yesterday on the Los Angeles Community College system, which charged
that out of billions in bond money "tens of millions of dollars have gone to
waste because of poor planning, frivolous spending and shoddy workmanship." Ironically,
some members of the community college board of trustees are running for
re-election in Tuesday’s election.

While little attention is spent on races such as the
community college board, the Times articles should open the eyes of the
property taxpayers who back the bonds and pay for the waste mentioned in the
article.

Board of trustee candidates for re-election are filling
mailboxes with campaign literature, one even boldly claiming that he "fights to
protect taxpayers."

Cross-posted at NewGeography.

Ever since Jay Gould, Leland Stanford, and Cornelius Vanderbilt acquired their first legislatures, railroads have been best understood as political networks, rather than as transportation lines. The Obama administration is hyping high-speed rail (HSR) with a $53 billion proposal not because the president is a trainspotter or because he collects back copies of the Official Guide of the Railways (like I do). Rather, it’s because politicians understand that the states blew their money on generous pension plans, pretentious sports stadiums, and bridges to nowhere, and now need billions to plug their budget deficits. It’s easier to funnel money into tapped–out state capitals under the smoke and mirrors of a feel-good rail project than it is to announce that the federal government stands behind states’ subprime debts. The Government Accounting Office estimates unfunded state liabilities at $405 billion, which is probably what HSR would, in the end, cost. Think of it as the Stimulus Express.

The high-speed scheme is a dream of superfast trains, traveling at 150 m.p.h., linking Portland, Maine, and Charlotte, North Carolina; Chicago with St. Louis and Kansas City; the Orlando corridor in Florida (which the governor there has rejected); and express trains in Texas and California. Another way to look at the proposed HSR network is to imagine it connecting the cities and states that Obama needs to carry if he is to have a chance of winning the 2012 election.

Business has become the focus of Governor Jerry Brown’s efforts to line up support for his budget plan. But business is far from unified and does not speak with a single voice.

Yesterday, Allan Zaremberg, president of the California Chamber of Commerce, gave Brown hope that the largest, most influential business organization in the state may support his plan to deal with the budget. Zaremberg was careful with his words and did not give an outright endorsement to any budget plan saying that would have to wait until all details are in place and the Chamber board has an opportunity to meet on March 11.

What may accompany the five-year tax extensions on a special election ballot that Brown is pushing could have a lot to do with his securing support from different segments of the business community.

When the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce recently endorsed Brown’s effort they did so with caution and recommendations advising the governor that the business leaders wanted to see regulation reform and a shorter period for the tax extensions.

California’s long and complicated constitution – and the
governing dysfunction it promotes – is bad. But Californians who care about
such things have been able to take comfort in the idea that ours is not the
most broken constitution in the country.

Thank God
for Alabama.

But there’s
news there.

Democrats
in the Alabama legislature are pushing for a referendum asking voters whether
they want to tear up that state’s 1901 constitution – a document longer than
California’s massive constitution – and write a new one.

It’s a bad
sign when Alabama political elites are more willing to confront their
constitutional problems than those in California. Powers-that-be have dismissed
the notion of top-to-bottom constitutional reform as a pipe dream.

Which means California may soon be
the country’s undisputed leader in constitutional failure.

Cross-posted at HealthyCal.

Democrats on the Legislature’s budget-writing committee passed a budget Thursday that largely reflects Gov. Jerry Brown’s plan to close a $25 billion shortfall with a combination of spending cuts and extensions of temporary taxes.

The budget bill passed on a party-line vote and now goes to the Assembly and Senate for approval. Democrats control both houses, and, thanks to the passage of Proposition 25 last November, they now have the ability to adopt a budget by majority vote rather than the two-thirds super-majority that was required until this year.

But they still need a two-thirds vote to raise taxes, and, by most accounts, even to put a tax increase on the ballot, as Brown has proposed. And so far, most Republicans in the Legislature have said they will not vote to send the governor’s tax plan to the voters in a special election in June.