I do not know what is on Gavin’s mind this year, but I see a plausible scenario and justifications he could use for dropping out of office before finishing his term in 2011 and even before the 2010 election. Word is spreading that with her assignment as chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Dianne Feinstein will NOT run for governor, leaving the Democratic field wide open at this point. The Board of Supervisors is firmly entrenched in the progressive camp for the foreseeable future, especially with Mar, Chiu and Avalos coming aboard and Mirkarimi could be a more activist President than Peskin was. The recession and state budget mess will prevent him form rolling out any new grand schemes and he seems to have given up on fighting the violence in the City. Time is running short when you take into account the money he needs to raise to compete with Brown and Garmendi and raising the cash is a full time endeavor in itself. By the end of 2009, he is either out of Room 200 or out of the race for governor.  

It took about four weeks for the San Diego County Registrar of Voters to finish counting every single vote of the 2008 General Election and then upload the vote database to their web site. After anxiously waiting for a few weeks, I took the database and converted it into a usable format and started producing some reports that allowed me to drill down and see exactly how each community and city voted.

I’ved used the term “community” to describe a place within the City of San Diego boundary, such as Mira Mesa and La Jolla and the term “unincorporated” means that the place is not a city, such as Julian and Alpine.

The data is first grouped into 18 cities and unincorporated area (19 total groups). The City of San Diego and unincorporated area are then broken down by community. After scanning each of the totals, it makes it very easy to compare the different political viewpoints of each of the communities. For example, Proposition 8 received an unsurprising 83% opposition in Hillcrest, while the Campo area voted 77% in favor of the proposition.

view all of the reports

Lost amidst the union-busting and efforts to destroy public schools in Arnold’s budget proposal is maybe the first serious, legitimate attempt to sensibly manage the prison crisis in decades, with a reform plan that would save the state $1 billion by boarding up the revolving door between jail and parole for nonviolent offenders.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s latest budget proposal would reduce by tens of thousands the number of criminals behind bars and under community supervision.

Parole would be eliminated for all nonserious, nonviolent and non-sex offenders. The proposal would cut the parole population by about 65,000 by June 30, 2010, or more than half of the Christmas Eve count of 123,144.

At the same time, the corrections plan calls for increasing good-time credits for inmates who obey the rules and complete rehabilitation programs. Combined with the new parole policies that would result in fewer violators forced back into custody, the proposal would reduce the prison population by 15,000 by June 30, 2010. It stood at 171,542 on Dec. 24.

It is insane and wrong, particularly during this budget meltdown but really in general, that 2/3 of all prisoners entering the system in 2007 were parole violators.  These are minor, possibly technical offenses with little bearing on public safety that clog up the jails, creating constitutional crises.  California is the worst state in the union when it comes to parole policy, and these changes would simply bring the state in line with the rest of the country, all of which are able to manage without a perpetual crime wave.

Now, it may anger tough on crime advocates, as well as those who have a self-interested stake like the prison guards, but I have to say that they are the right people to anger.

The California Correctional Peace Officers Association, still at odds with Schwarzenegger over a new contract, blasted the plan.

“What it means is residual costs to all citizens of California and higher insurance rates and more crime,” said CCPOA spokesman Lance Corcoran, whose union represents about 30,000 correctional officers and parole agents. “These are individuals who do not take advantage of opportunities for change, and they are not going to change,” he said of the offenders who stand to benefit from the proposals.

More scaremongering isn’t going to work.  There is no reason for tough on crime policies to continue to rule the day.  Those days are over.

The proposals on rehabilitation and time credits for prisoners, which would accrue in county lockups and get advanced if detainees take drug, vocational and educational programs, are already in the work-around budget passed by the Legislature.  Arnold could go ahead and sign that, and put us on a more responsible criminal justice path immediately.  

We know that Arnold holds a grudge against unions, which he believes caused him that stinging defeat in 2005, and much of his goals on the budget lately have taken their aim at those unions.  In particular, Arnold is seeking to privatize major infrastructure projects, ostensibly for the sake of “efficiency” but as a practical matter to get the jobs out of union hands.  I thought that much of this was just a sop to Arnold’s friends on the Chamber of Commerce and just more of the conservative mantras of animosity toward unions and privatization equaling a universal good.  But there’s also a quid pro quo angle involved here in the form of David Crane, a top economic advisor to the Governor, who would stand to benefit financially from any public-private projects put forward by his current boss.

As Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger demands that lawmakers allow private interests into California’s huge market for public works projects, a company with close personal and financial ties to the governor’s economic advisor is positioned to benefit.

The advisor, David Crane, has spent years promoting private-sector involvement in public construction projects — one of a few issues holding up a deal between Schwarzenegger and legislative Democrats to ease the state’s worsening fiscal crisis.

Babcock & Brown, the financial services firm where Crane worked for a quarter of a century, hired a Sacramento lobbyist last year to influence the governor’s office on so-called public-private partnerships, records show. Since joining the governor’s team in 2004, Crane has received hundreds of thousands of dollars of income from deals he made while at Babcock, a firm founded in San Francisco and based in Australia, according to financial disclosure reports.

Those deals included projects in areas such as telecommunications, in which he served as a financial advisor; personal investments in real estate from Babcock’s public-private partnership projects in England; and partnerships he formed with other Babcock executives to invest in oil wells and an Italian restaurant chain.

Crane is claiming that he cannot possibly benefit financially from any future deals, but one wonders whether, even if Crane is telling the truth, it really matters.  The network of friends and former business associates to which Crane’s advice could directly or indirectly steer business is vast.  This is how government-by-profit-taking typically works, rewarding friends and punishing enemies.  Whether or not Crane gets his profit now, as an economic adviser, or later, when he returns to Babcock & Brown or some other destination, is in many ways besides the point, just a clever way to avoid violating the letter of the law.

Jessica Levinson, the director of political reform at the nonprofit Center for Governmental Reform in Los Angeles, said Crane appears to be operating within the letter, though perhaps not the spirit, of the law.

“It starts to have the appearance of doing political favors for old friends, and that is not something that I think is illegal, but it still may not be fully ethical,” Levinson said. “I think it all comes down to, is he making this decision for public good or is he making it to help his old business friends?”

By the way, Crane is a Democrat, or at least that’s what it says on his voter registration card.  The issues are the same.  He’s a free market fundamentalist who probably thinks he’s advocating on behalf of a good solution for California.  After a while, the theft becomes so commonplace that the thieves don’t even see it as stealing anymore.