Frank Russo at the California Progress Report explains the nasty and dishonest part of the budget deal, a side deal that sets a bad precedent for future budget fights. The move would exempt proposed power plants from environmental review under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), the cornerstone of our state’s environmental protections.

As a reward to powerful interests that were slapped down by a court decision in July and prevented from building a power plant that would add tons of pollutants per day to the already brown skies of the South Coast Air Quality Management District (SCAQMD), the fix is in for an amendment that the public will not be able to see in one of the bills attached to the California Budget to be voted on tonight. The hope is to slip this provision through-without a committee hearing and daylight that would expose what is being done here.

There is no way that this legislation, which has been ready in Legislative Counsel form since at least August 20 would ever pass the policy committees of either house. The arguable links to the budget are tenuous at best. The plan is to slip it into SB 1083 which right now is a shell of a bill with the “author” being the Committee on Budget and Fiscal Review. It will be brought up on the floor in “mock up form.’ i.e. without being available to the public, and at a time when it may hardly be noticed during the chaos that passing a California budget has turned into.

This is an affront to the California Environmental Quality Assurance Act (CEQA) and to the state’s legal process. It is contradictory to the scheme of AB 32, the landmark global warming greenhouse reduction bill that the legislature passed in 2006 and that Governor Schwarzenegger signed with much ballyhoo. It gives the executive officer of the SCAQMD the authority to use pollution in the districts offset account balance to credit up to 0.1 tons per day and 0.6 tons per day in the aggregate to eligible electrical generating facilities.

This would apply to an unknown, but potentially substantial number of power plants. The cumulative effect on air quality in Los Angeles and in communities that environmental justice advocates have been trying to protect would be bad. The executive officer’s action is made exempt from CEQA. Although it may apply to over facilities, the Sentinel facility that was the subject of a decision from a judge on July 29, 2008 after reviewing evidence, will be overturned.

The decision Russo mentions is from the LA County Superior Court, which ruled that the plant promoters were not forthcoming with environmental and pollution information that would potentially have shown the project to be in violation of CEQA.

Republicans have long wanted to get rid of CEQA and AB 32. Beginning last year they tried using the budget crisis they created to push through a weakening of CEQA, AB 32, or both. Democrats have resisted them until now, but appear to be giving in to Republican demands as the price of getting a budget deal done.

This should not be part of any budget deal. Democrats need to hold the line on CEQA. They would do well to understand that if you give the Republicans an inch in 2008, they will demand a mile in 2009.

Dave Johnson, Speak Out California

Friday morning’s San Francisco Chronicle story, Legislature’s approval rating at a record low, illustrates why California’s budget impasse continues.  From the article,

“Democrats and the minority Republicans have hunkered down, with neither side willing to make the compromises needed to put together a budget plan that can garner the required two-thirds support.”

The budget problem is that reporting like this keeps the public from understanding what is happening in Sacramento.

Here is what is happening with the budget:

• The Democrats have offered plan after plan, accepting deep budget cuts, some borrowing and offering various ways to raise revenue.
• The Governor has offered a plan, with deep budget cuts, borrowing, and a temporarysales tax increase.
• The Republicans have refused to compromise, refusing any budget that raises any revenue at all, not even asking the extremely wealthy to pay the same sales taxes that the rest of us have to pay.

It is just that simple.  The Republicans have been blocking the budget and they are getting away with it because the press refuses to report that the Republicans are blocking the budget.  If the press reported this simple fact public pressure would build and the Republicans would have to yield.

Update – A comment on the possible budget “compromise”:  It just kicks the can down the road by delaying dealing with our problems.  It doesn’t fix anything, and cuts essential services from the people who need government most.   In fact it just makes it much, much harder to solve the problem in the next budget because it steals revenue from next year.

Click through to Speak Out California

(How about a bit of good news. – promoted by Julia Rosen)

Great news! The California Supreme Court has ordered anti-union employer the Cintas Corporation to pay hundreds of workers the $1.65 MILLION they were owed for their backbreaking labor in industrial laundries.  By violating the city of Hayward’s living wage regulations, Cintas illegally underpaid Northern California workers for years. Living wage regulations like Hayward’s require the city and certain firms with large city contracts to pay wages that reflect the local cost of living including a dollar extra per hour if the employer doesn’t provide health benefits.  

This is a huge win not just for the Cintas workers who will finally be paid the money they are owed but for but for the living wage movement as a whole. At one point in their suit Cintas’ lawyers claimed that living wage laws were unconstitutional. When workers filed the suit in 2003, it was one of the first attempts to enforce a living wage law through the courts. As plaintiff Francisa Amaral said:

“For five long years, Cintas refused to give us what was rightfully ours,” said Francisca Amaral, one of the suit’s plaintiffs. “They told us that we would get nothing. They spent millions of dollars to try to deny us our rights. The decision shows that workers can get justice and get what we’ve earned through our hard work.”

Why would a company spend money on lawyers to fight paying its workers a living wage? Wait. Don’t answer that. That was rhetorical. Though I honestly just don’t get it. I guess it’s my family values talking here.

Anyway, the Court’s decision allows more than 200 Northern California laundry workers to enforce a landmark judgment by the Alameda County Superior Court that was affirmed earlier this summer by the California Court of Appeal, which is believed to be the one of the largest living wage awards in U.S. history and strengthens cities’ ability to enforce local labor standards.

Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, Cintas workers have a similar pending class action case for violations of the city’s living wage. Over the past few years, questions have also been raised about Cintas’s history of compliance with living wage laws in Marin County and Santa Monica, California, as well as in Dayton, Ohio, and Madison, Wisconsin.

If you’ve been reading my posts on Dkos (and other folks too) you’d know that Cintas has a history of violating worker protection laws. The company settled an overtime case brought by delivery drivers in California for more than $10 million in 2002. Since then, thousands of drivers across the country have joined a national overtime lawsuit against Cintas.

  * For more on Cintas check out: uniformjustice.org and MakeCintasSafe.info.

  * For more on the living wage movement check out the PBS’s POV series and podcasts here.

  * Progressive States Network has written about various state policies too

(Video clip is Springstein’s version of traditional work song “Pay Me My Money Down”)

California media are reporting that the “big four” have reached a budget deal, with the Assembly and Senate to vote tomorrow night on a budget. It’s not yet clear exactly what’s in the budget, especially the details of the $9 billion or so in cuts. Cobbled together from the SacBee and the LA Times here’s what we do know:

• $9 billion in unspecified spending cuts, but education is “protected” – likely K-12 only. My guess is health care and public transportation will be gutted. The cuts are going to be horrific.
• No new taxes, but some tax loopholes will be closed
• No borrowing from other state funds or from local government, although whether any borrowing at all will happen is not yet clear
• Much of the “balanced” budget involves using accounting tricks to close the gap and apparently a $2 billion deficit is already anticipated for 2009-2010
• A rainy day fund will be created and Arnold will be given “limited” authority to make midyear budget cuts

It’s vague outlines at this point, as you can tell, and as soon as we get more information we’ll post it.

My analysis? Perata was right. The Republicans scored a major victory. They have been crowing that the budget deficit could be closed without new taxes, and now they’re going to tell Californians they were right. This is going to make it very difficult to beat back Republican claims and convince voters in 2009 that new revenues are needed to restore and protect basic services.

Perata clearly believed that he’d taken this stalemate as far as it could go, and that the very real suffering the delay was causing could not longer continue, whatever the cost. He made some efforts to pressure Republicans within their districts but these had failed. These efforts were incredibly weak, inconsistent, and got hardly any press – I’d hesitate to even call them “efforts” – but Perata felt we might as well try and find a deal now before we felt even more pain.

More pain is certainly in store, however. Next year’s budget is likely to be even worse than this year’s. The financial system is in meltdown – Lehman Bros and Merrill Lynch are collapsing as we speak – and the economy will be in tailspin. We’re going to begin the next budget cycle $2 billion in the hole, and even the budget that may get passed tomorrow night might not be sufficient to ride out the worsening recession during the 2008-09 fiscal year.

As far as I can tell we’re headed for a spring special election to deal with 2/3 and perhaps other budget-related reforms. Steinberg will take over soon and hopefully start pushing forward an anticipatory instead of reactive strategy for the ’09 budget. Democrats took FAR too long this year to propose their own budget and properly frame the reasons for the shortfall. They need to start planning tomorrow for the 2009 budget.

We’re about to embark on the war for California’s future – this deal is a cease fire, nothing more. Republicans want to destroy our government, destroy economic opportunity and economic security, and Democrats need to be ready to fight back. The stakes could not possibly be higher.

UPDATE: Joe Mathews at Blockbuster Democracy slams the deal:

Tax rates don’t increase under this budget, but that doesn’t mean the budget doesn’t raise taxes. Instead, this budget will rely on borrowing and gimmicks that inevitably force tax increases in the future. In fact, this unbalanced budget will add to the state’s debt and debt service costs, which cuts into the amount of the budget that can be spent on actual government services. In the end, people will pay the same tax rates, but they will get less in services. That’s right — less services for the same money. That’s a tax increase in disguise.

And if you want to maintain services — and the public wants to maintain levels of services, eventually taxes will have to be raised to cover this borrowing and the service level. Bottom line: it would be more accurate to call this a “No New Taxes While The Current Republican Lawmakers Are Running For Re-Election” budget.

I don’t disagree with this analysis at all. But I think the key message here isn’t so much about taxes as it is about Republican efforts to gut government for their own purposes. To fix the budget we have to solve the tax issue – and to do that we have to emphasize the economic value of spending much more than we have been.