Governor Brown’s Prison Guard Contract Comes Under Fire
However, critics say that the proposed contracts will not cut state spending by nearly enough.
However, critics say that the proposed contracts will not cut state spending by nearly enough.
From the standpoint of local government, the need for statewide pension reform exists because local government cannot roll back their pension obligations or change the rules under which they and CalPERS operate, but the legislature can change many of those things.
The sophisticated political observer learns to take such claims with a grain of salt and not to merely repeat these claims as facts.
A new poll released last week showed strong and bipartisan support for raising taxes on the wealthiest state residents – those making over $500,000 per year, according to the poll.
Unions argued that the proposal should take place at the collective bargaining table, while reform groups called it “unambitious,” and Republicans said that, while it is a good start, they would prefer something put before the voters.
In a video statement Governor Brown said, “Today I have broken off discussions with the Republican Party in Sacramento regarding solutions to our budget crisis.”
How serious a threat was this? Serious enough that the city has already authorized bonds to encumber as many redevelopment projects as possible.
I understood that there were concerns about my view on the local firefighters union, as well as my view on pensions in general. What I did not expect was a nasty and unpleasant experience unlike any I had ever encountered before.
As recently as yesterday afternoon, a spokesperson for the Brown Administration said that the Governor remains committed to negotiating with the Republicans in the Assembly and Senate – needing two votes in each house from Republicans – and still believes he can reach agreement.
At a local level, we have had some cutbacks to K-12, but Davis has mainly come out of this all right, presuming that the voters pass Measure A in May. However, statewide the news is pretty grim.
Actually, that was the pledge the State of California made back in 1961 when it formed the CSU system, creating an affordable system to allow everyone who had the desire to go to college.
However, the hard part remains, about 13 billion dollars of the 26.6 billion deficit as the legislature did not address either the elimination of redevelopment or the extension to higher taxes.
In a release from the Field Poll, they find, “Voters generally do not favor simply increasing taxes as a way of dealing with the estimated $25 billion budget deficit facing the state over the next eighteen months.”
“We accepted your invitation to bring you our ideas on important structural reforms and willingly took to heart your admonition ‘to get out of our comfort zone,’ ” the letter to the Democratic governor from key Republicans read. “Although it is clear that you engaged in our conversations seriously, it appears we have reached an impasse in our discussions about how to move the state forward.”
On Thursday, a Senate-Assembly budget committee voted to send the spending plan to the floor of both houses in the legislature this week, and that includes the complete elimination of the state’s redevelopment program.
David Crane, a former advisor to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and current member of the UC Board of Regents, wrote, “In the private sector, collective bargaining is used to equalize the power of employees and employers.”
The paper reports that the opinion, sought by the Senate’s Republican Leader Bob Dutton, does not specifically address the Governor’s proposal.
Recognizing that an effort to reduce pensions for current workers would prompt legal challenges, the commission argued that public pension funds’ dire fiscal conditions necessitates themselves reducing benefits for current employees as well as merely reducing benefits for new hires. Creating a second tier is insufficient to address current fiscal problems.
Wolk’s legislation, Senate Bill 214, is a compromise between the entrenched camps of the Redevelopment debate. For proponents of eliminating redevelopment, claiming that they are wasteful and operate to the detriment of schools and other core services, it will protect source of revenues to these services from being usurped by redevelopment. For the proponents of redevelopment, SB 214 would allow Infrastructure Financing Districts (IFDs) to absorb many of the functions of the current redevelopment agencies.
Republicans are already calling it a ploy to convince legislators to place the tax measure on the ballot, that would cut the needed budget cuts in half.