This week, just as the two sides were prepared to go to war, Molly Munger, the backer of Proposition 38, decided to pull statewide ads attacking Proposition 30.
Proposition 30 is on life support, with recent polls showing it passing with barely 50 percent, what pundits are calling “a precarious position for a tax hike initiative with three weeks to go until Election Day.”
While many are focusing on the Presidential Election or the local school board and parcel tax elections, Proposition 30 may have the single greatest impact locally, not just on K-12 education but also higher education.
A complication is a competing tax measure from Molly Munger. Most analysts downplayed the impact when polls showed that the wealthy attorney Molly Munger, who has spent more than $30 million on her campaign, was only getting in the low 40s in support as opposed to 51 percent for Proposition 30.
It has been a long time since California has been on the forefront of anything in this nation. However, as many other states have moved to making voting more difficult, enacting draconian if not disenfranchising laws, California in the past week has moved in the other direction, enacting same-day voter laws, online registration, and other innovations.
In a press release, the ACLU announced, “California leads the nation in promoting voter access.” They applaud a third voter access law which enables voter registration through the implementation of the Affordable Care Act.
A new survey conducted jointly by The Institute of Governmental Studies (IGS) at UC Berkeley and The Field Poll finds the initiative backed by Governor Jerry Brown, Proposition 30, continuing to lead but with support marginally lower than in early July and the undecided proportion increasing.
While much of the focus locally will be on the school parcel tax, Measure E, and the School Board races, one of the most critical election battles outside of Yolo County that will affect us locally is Proposition 30, the Governor’s Tax.
There have been past efforts to increase voter participation. In my first election as an adult, my generation launched “Rock the Vote,” aimed at getting the participation of youth. Later there was the Motor Voter Law that allowed people to register as they renewed their driver’s license.
Now, Secretary of State Debra Bowen, Senator Leland Yee and San Mateo County Chief Elections Officer Mark Church and the other 57 county elections officials have launched an effort that could be equally revolutionary, as it allows people to register to vote online.
One of the organizers of the event, Steven Payan of Occupy Woodland, said in a release late Sunday, “This is about hundreds of thousands of lives lost, deformed from chemicals and mass pollution to [the] environment and a company allowed to get away with it because of government ties, and massive lobbying dollars.”
Critics on Both Sides Blast the Deal which Rolls Back 3% at 50 But Only For New Employees –Governor Brown and Democratic leaders on Tuesday outlined their compromise proposal for what they are calling “a sweeping pension reform agreement that saves billions of taxpayer dollars by capping benefits, increasing the retirement age, stopping abusive practices and requiring state employees to pay at least half of their pension costs.”
“These reforms make fundamental changes that rein in costs and help to ensure that our public retirement system is sustainable for the long term. These reforms require sacrifice from public employees and represent a significant step forward,” said Governor Brown.
While cities and local government attempt to dig themselves out of self-inflicted holes, the legislature is threatening to makes matters worse by extending the statute of limitations for a presumptive death benefit claim filed on behalf of firefighters or peace officers, at a detrimental fiscal consequence for employers.
AB 2451, sponsored by Speaker John Pérez would eliminate the 4 ½ year statute of limitations on work-related death benefits for public safety employees who die of diseases presumed by law to be job-related. Opponents fear that there would be no limitation under the law “on the period of time between the employee’s exposure to and presumable death from heart disease, cancer, tuberculosis or blood borne pathogens.”
By Assemblymember Mariko Yamada During the summer of 2005, my older daughter worked for the Executive Officer…
If the governor’s tax measure does not pass this fall, local school districts like Davis figure to be hammered by automatic trigger cuts. For Davis that means the loss of about 3.5 million dollars in funding which, combined with the expiration of Measure A and the increased costs of special education, puts Davis in a catastrophic hole at negative 7.5 million dollars.
A Field Poll released today shows that the voters are largely mixed on the latest round of state cuts, with 37 percent believing the cuts went too far, 28% that they did not go far enough and 24% believing they are just right.
As local communities like Davis face devastating budget cuts, protracted labor strife, and even bankruptcy due to a retirement pension crisis, leaders in Sacramento are moving closer but have failed to reach an agreement on pension reform.
Last February the governor unveiled the statutory and constitutional language to implement the 12-point pension reform plan he presented last October.
The attorney general identified deceptive practices regarding loan modifications, foreclosures occurring due to the servicer’s failure to properly process paperwork, and the use of incomplete paperwork to process foreclosures in both judicial and non-judicial foreclosure cases.
Jose Granda, the oft-times critic of the Davis School District, tried to take his fight to the legislature on Tuesday. His target this time was legislation sponsored by Assemblymember Mariko Yamada, which would close loopholes that became evident during March’s parcel tax election.
AB 1626 has already unanimously passed in the Assembly, but it encountered some opposition on Tuesday in the Senate Elections & Constitutional Amendments Committee as it passed on a party-line, 3-2 vote.
Given the lightning rod that has developed for student protests, one would think that more care would be taken. But the lesson that we learned this week is that neither prudence nor decency seem to have a place when it comes to the decisions made by the CSU Trustees, who follow the actions of UC from late last fall.
In a meeting this week with the San Francisco Chronicle’s Editorial Board, Governor Brown threw down the gauntlet, arguing that his tax initiative was the only one that would solve the state’s fiscal crisis and increase funding to schools and higher education.
The Chronicle reported, “He said that one of the other tax proposals, known as the millionaires tax, might poll well because it would hit the wealthiest Californians and dedicate money almost exclusively to education, but that it fails to consider the effect of Proposition 98 – the state’s education funding guarantee – and amounts to ‘ballot-box budgeting’ that creates more problems than it solves.”
It has been a fascinating week in California politics. We have a field poll release giving us interesting information about the state’s political landscape, and news at the end of the week suggesting Republicans are in denial while the Democrats are likely to eat themselves… again.
A few days ago, Republican Senators Bill Emmerson (Hemet), Tom Berryhill (Modesto), Anthony Cannella (Ceres) and Tom Harman (Huntington Beach) wrote an op-ed in the LA Times, pushing for their public employee pension reform legislation.
They discussed Senate Constitutional Amendment 13, which “resulted from last year’s failed negotiations with Gov. Jerry Brown over the reforms we sought and that California desperately needs — including pension reform.”
Occupy Movement Blasts the Deal and Calls For Moratorium on ForeclosureKamala Harris last week had a day many politicians dream of: a headline-making announcement that delivers a large amount of money to constituents. Symbolically, the attorney general’s foreclosure settlement announcement and her role in shaping the out-of-court mortgage-abuse settlement with five huge home loan banks – Wells Fargo, Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup and Ally Financial – marked a huge victory for the little guy in a sea of turmoil and unsettledness.
On the other hand, there are more questions than answers at this point. As Peter Schrag, the venerable columnist now writing for the California Progress Report noted, “California Attorney General Kamala Harris deserves at least some of the self-congratulation she heaped on herself when the big national mortgage foreclosure deal was announced last week.”
A few years ago, Republicans, believing that legislative districts had been unfairly drawn, joined with the “good government” folks who believe that partisanship is bad to create a citizens redistricting committee to replace what they saw as partisan cronyism.
The problem was that the lines shockingly still gave the Democrats an advantage, in fact, perhaps an even greater advantage than they had previously.
Angry Response From Public Employees to the Governor’s PlanOn Thursday, Governor Jerry Brown unveiled the statutory and constitutional language to implement the 12-point pension reform plan he presented last October.
“These major reforms for state and local pension systems will improve their long-term sustainability while providing employees a fair retirement,” the governor wrote. “These reforms also will end system-wide abuses and reduce taxpayer costs by billions of dollars over the long term.”
