It sounds like one of those stories that conservatives often use to make government look bad – the city of Sacramento is fining a household $746 for letting their lawn die to save water. But the real issue here isn’t government – it’s whether California will abandon wasteful and even elitist 20th century values to meet the needs of the 21st century.

The basic tension:

“In order to make the lawn go, I would have had to keep watering it intensely, and since the drought was declared, I decided that wasn’t a good idea,” said Hartridge. “Honestly, I think there’s a disconnect within the city about priorities.”

Two weeks ago, The Bee reported that Sacramento’s per capita water use is among the greatest in the world….

The city’s landscaping rule is intended to maintain neighborhood visual standards to prevent one neighbor’s tastes from harming another’s property values.

The rule was the subject of much conflict last year when amended to provide gardeners leeway to grow more than grass. Sacramentans can now grow large trees, shrubs and, yes, even food in their front yards without fear of reprisal.

But the rules still require front landscaping to be irrigated, which means scores of homeowners could be penalized for growing cacti or other drought-tolerant vegetation.

The problem here isn’t bad bureaucrats – it’s bad policy. Like so many other California cities, Sacramento maintains absurd codes that mandate green lawns and other wasteful practices simply to perpetuate a failed 20th century urban design model. The belief is that property values will be hurt if people have anything other but green lawns and shrubbery. We have to ensure our neighborhoods look exactly as they did in 1965, never mind the cost to our water supplies.

But it goes deeper than just water conservation – important though that is. As noted in the blockquote, Sacramento only recently allowed residents to grow their own food in their yards. Urban food production, and home gardening, is an essential step in healthier eating and energy conservation. Many cities still have bans on using a clothesline to dry your laundry, even though it saves a lot of energy (and is usually easier on your clothes!).

Residents ought to be encouraged to live sustainably, and use their home as it ought to be used – to produce self-sufficiency. We can and do discuss density and mass transit as part of urban design needs, but the micro-level issues such as brown lawns and clotheslines matter too.

When I lived in Seattle from 2001 to 2007 I saw a different and better way to live. Residents there let their lawns die over the summer. Many grew food in their yards. I learned to use a clothesline there (because it wasn’t kosher to use them in Orange County, sensible as it’d have been). My neighbors had chickens, who laid delicious eggs – most summers we never had to buy eggs from a store.

Many California cities have outlawed some or all of those practices since the 1950s or earlier. It was a class-based move – middle-class homeowners saw clotheslines and chicken coops as signs of poverty and low-class behavior, which would invariably drive down property values. To a homeowner, government merely exists to protect property values, even at the expense of sustainable practices that help the environment and the infrastructure.

These practices will also help preserve the middle-class. California’s 20th century middle class was a product of cheap oil, which made it affordable to live in a suburban home and get your food from a supermarket. With the end of cheap oil, food inflation is going to destroy the living standards of working Californians. It just makes sense to encourage sustainable living.

This week’s edition of the SF Weekly has an article on Stealth Bloggers which argues that our work is “compromised” because some Calitics writers were paid by campaigns this last cycle – specifically, Bob Brigham and Brian Leubitz were paid by Mark Leno’s campaign. The Weekly wants to believe this is some sort of scandal, perhaps to deflect from the Weekly’s own criminal practices.

But there’s no there there. As the article notes, Brigham and Leubitz were completely honest about their affiliations. Brigham repeatedly explained that he was proud to do work for Mark Leno. Leubitz said the same. How is it stealth when there is open and prominent disclosure?

There was nothing to prevent Joe Nation and his supporters from writing their own pieces here at Calitics. A blog such as Calitics encourages such contributions – the front page has prominence, sure, but other diaries can get recommended and even promoted.

The problem is that the Weekly author, Matt Smith, wants to put blogs in the same category as journalists, who supposedly maintain neutral objectivity about what they cover. We have NEVER made such a claim to objectivity. Our biases and positions are open. That’s the real difference between us and other journalists, who hide their affiliations and biases and pretend to be objective. Smith holds up traditional journalism as pure and ideal, when it is clearly no such thing – witness their fawning support for John McCain.

There are no hidden affiliations here. Some Calitics writers, myself included, work for the Courage Campaign. Others have worked for candidates and ballot proposition supporters or opponents. And many aren’t paid by any political group at all.

Our writing is positional. You know that going in. Anyone who reads Calitics and who is shocked to know that we espouse progressive Democratic causes is either not paying attention or being intentionally misleading.

Bloggers believe that the reader is intelligent enough to come to their own opinions on the matter. We disclose our affiliations so that the reader can make up their own mind about whether to take our opinions seriously or not. Matt Smith implies an intent to deceive that simply isn’t there – it’s a dishonest article.

Finally, there’s nothing to stop someone from starting their own blog to cover California politics. We believe more bloggers should be credentialed to the CDP convention, to the state legislature, to press conferences. The more the merrier. We’re not afraid of it, no matter what the position or opinion is of the blogger.

Of course, this IS the same Matt Smith who told his readers a few weeks ago to ignore who was backing Prop 98 and focus instead on its supposed benefits. Consistency doesn’t seem to be a strength of his.

The Center for Governmental Studies, as part of its Democracy by Initiative project, has published an article on online signature gathering. CGS stops short of endorsing the proposal but discusses some of the pros and cons:

One approach to balancing the influence of money in qualifying initiatives would be to let registered voters sign initiative petitions on a computer and transmit their signatures over the Internet to be counted toward the required total, so long as proper authentication and other security procedures were followed. This could help level the playing field for less-well-funded groups who could mobilize voter support via the Internet as an alternative to paying petition circulators the going rate — two dollars and up per signature. Online petition signing could also enhance public discourse about ballot measures through interactive online commentary and discussions.

Others have voiced objections to online signature gathering on the grounds that insecure computers or communications links could lead to large-scale fraud in signing initiative petitions; that voters without computers and Internet access would be disadvantaged; and that online signing would make qualifying initiatives too easy and thus deluge voters with many more ballot measures at each election.

It’s an interesting idea. Certainly it would be valuable in combating the dirty tricks signature gatherers use to get people to sign, where they typically obscure the actual meaning or intent of a proposed initiative. Online signature gathering would enable voters to better understand what they’re signing – though whether that’ll acutally happen or not is an open question.

To counter the likelihood that this would produce more initiatives on the ballot, CGS suggested raising the number of signatures required to qualify an initiative. And of course there are security concerns to be considered – with the possibility that more secure methods would be more off-putting to potential online signers.

It seems to me that this reform would only have value in concert with other fundamental reforms of the system, from meaningful and enforcable campaign finance reforms to limitations on what the initiative process can be used to do. I’m all for giving the people themselves more power (so I’m ideologically inclined to support having an initiative system) but for it to have maximum use online signature gathering ought to be enfolded within a larger package of reform.

This should come as no surprise to Calitics readers, who have been treated to a steady diet of articles on the flaws with our prison system. In a system with too many prisoners and too few funds to properly accommodate them and their legal processes, those combined factors mean that the death penalty system is on the verge of collapse, according to a state commission report released today:

The commission did not advocate abolishing the death penalty but did note that California could save $100 million a year if the state replaced the punishment with sentences of life in prison without possibility of parole. Death row prisoners cost more to confine, are granted more resources for appeals, have more expensive trials and usually die in prison anyway, the commission said in its 117-page report….

Among the panel’s findings:

* Seventy-nine death row inmates have not obtained lawyers to handle their first appeals, which are by law automatic, and 291 inmates lack lawyers to bring constitutional challenges based on facts that the trial courts did not hear. It takes inmates an average of 12 years to obtain a state high court ruling on their first appeals.

* The California Supreme Court has such a backlog that only one appeal from a conviction after 1997 has been resolved.

* California does not meet the federal standard for paying private lawyers to handle death cases, and the state’s method of paying these attorneys — sometimes with flat-fee contracts — violates American Bar Assn. standards.

The problems facing the state’s administration of the death penalty stem from the same causes as the broader prisons crisis. California voters and politicians embraced “tough on crime” policies in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s but neglected to properly fund the system, which has grown like a cancer on our budget. It’s never difficult for politicians to propose new crimes or higher sentences, but these same legislators – like the Runners – also work to cut the state’s taxing ability, putting California on a collision course with both the federal courts and common sense. Either we fund the system properly, or pursue saner correctional policies.

The report’s authors did not agree on solutions. Natasha Minsker, head of death penalty policy for the ACLU of Northern California, argues that since there’s no money to improve the system, we should turn to life imprisonment instead of putting so many people on death row:

Considering California’s fiscal crisis, spending all of this money is not only unlikely, it’s impossible….

Few people realize that condemning someone to permanent imprisonment costs California taxpayers millions of dollars less than sentencing him or her to death. We have had the option of permanent imprisonment for as long as we have had the death penalty, and it’s proven itself to be a more functional system that serves as a severe, but cost effective, punishment.

Which brings us to our third option, according to the Commission: replace the death penalty with permanent imprisonment until death, and save millions of dollars for public safety programs that actually work to punish criminals, protect the public and help victims. This would cost us less than $12 million, a savings of more than $200 million a year over option one.

The report itself notes that most death row inmates die before they can be executed anyway, rendering the whole process somewhat pointless. Combined with the racial biases that Minsker describes in her article but that the report did not closely examine, and the fiscal issues involved, it seems sensible from a public policy standpoint to eliminate the death penalty and embrace the life imprisonment option.

It’s clear that California’s correctional policies are totally unsustainable. But with a broken political system and a lack of leadership from either party on fixing it, it seems unlikely we’re going to get any real solutions anytime soon.

As we’re all painfully aware, during the ’00s the US media have become ardent defenders of the status quo, generally unwilling to discuss harsh realities that might threaten that status quo unless absolutely forced to do so – Hurricane Katrina, for example, or the reaction to Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. Perhaps the most significant issue not being discussed in the media is peak oil – which, in its simplistic form, explains why the high fuel prices we are seeing today are going to be a permanent feature of life.

Gas prices are NEVER coming back down – rising demand is meeting a shrinking supply and the result is the end of the cheap oil that modern America was built upon.

As gas prices remain high more media outlets are discussing energy policy but only lately are they beginning to acknowledge that the era of cheap oil is over. Today’s Los Angeles Times starts examining the topic with a front-page feature, Envisioning a world of $200-a-barrel oil. It focuses on how consumers, transportation, and global trade will be affected, and even tries to examine the “upside” to this, particularly the eventual localization of American life, perhaps the closest a major American media outlet has come to embracing the ideas of Jim Kunstler.

The article is a good beginning, but it avoids the key question of how we ought to respond. Videoconferencing and staycations are not substitutes for statewide initiatives to deal with the crisis. The article discusses the airline crisis but doesn’t discuss ways to provide alternative forms of transportation such as high speed rail. Nor does it discuss ways to encourage more renewable energy sources, or local food production, or urban density.

Still, just as it took Al Gore’s movie to convince Californians to take even the small step of climate change action embodied in AB 32, so too will it take the media’s willingness to tell Californians that cheap oil is over to produce action on shifting our state away from an oil-based economy.

Cheap oil was responsible for much of the prosperity of the postwar era, especially in California. It enabled people to find an affordable home to purchase, even if it was distant from their workplace. It enabled them to buy inexpensive food without needing to grow their own. It enabled the development of global trade networks that provided markets for Californian products and services.

The end of cheap oil is welcome from an ecological perspective but it will finish off working Californians if we don’t proactively work to build a post-oil infrastructure to provide for prosperity, just as we spent the 1950s and 1960s building an infrastructure around oil to provide for prosperity.

Newspapers like the LA Times could help show Californians the need for and value of such projects. It will require them to break with the status quo – but Californians are already doing so in practice, riding mass transit and even their bikes in much higher numbers than ever before. In the absence of media coverage of our changing state, we in the blogs will do what we can to keep up.

I’ll be on KRXA 540 AM in Monterey at 8 AM Thursday morning to discuss this and other California-related topics

As you might remember from last fall, California conservatives tend to prefer low taxes to adequate fire protection. As Northern California is ablaze – with two huge fires burning out of control in the Big Sur mountains to the south of me – attention is again focused on providing adequate fire services. And as Democrats and Arnold Schwarzenegger debate the best way to fund it, conservative Republicans continue to fight the very concept. From the San Jose Mercury News:

Hoping to buy more fire engines and helicopters, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is proposing a statewide surcharge on property insurance of $6 to $12 a year. Another lawmaker, state Sen. Christine Kehoe, D-San Diego, wants to charge a $50 yearly fee on the 900,000 homeowners living in rural areas to fund fire prevention….

The new engines were recommended by a state task force after massive wildfires in Southern California in 2003 killed 24 people and burned 3,600 homes.

The governor’s proposal would add a surcharge on property insurance for all commercial and residential structures statewide. In ZIP codes designated as “high-hazard zones” for earthquakes, fires or floods, the fee would be 1.4 percent, about $12.60 a household per year. In “low-hazard zones,” the surcharge would be 0.75 percent, or $6.75 a year.

The main debate between Kehoe’s and Arnold’s proposals is who should pay for the costs of fighting fires in the urban-wilderness interface. I like that Arnold’s plan would have higher rates for those in higher risk areas, but would still require all property owners to pay something. The fact is that even the brush fires are not exclusively a threat to folks who chose to live in fire-prone areas. Much of California is a fire-prone area, even the urban areas.

Last fall, the Santiago Fire in Orange County came within 1/4 mile of my grandparents’ home in Tustin and within a mile of the home where I grew up and where my parents still live. It’s on the coastal plain, not in the foothills, not in the brush. But a fire that gets started in the brush can easily get blown into a densely populated area. And of course, the large fires require departments from across the state to respond, but someone’s gotta stay behind. Since most fire departments in California are understaffed – such as here on the Monterey Peninsula – it is imperative we add the necessary equipment. And let us not forget the threat of earthquakes.

Of course, to conservative Republicans none of this matters, because omg it’s a hidden tax increase!!

Taxpayer groups and many Republican leaders oppose it.

“It’s not fair to the general taxpayer in an urban area,” said David Wolfe, legislative director for the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association. “They are subsidizing people who are choosing to live in high fire danger areas.”

Critics also call the plan a ruse to cover up firefighting cuts Schwarzenegger suggested in his January budget proposal that contained 10 percent cuts of every department.

“Our state budget is $110 billion. If we can’t dedicate enough money for basic public safety, then what the hell is government doing with our money?” said Assemblyman Kevin Jeffries, R-Murrieta.

Remember that conservative Republicans pulled the same thing in Orange County in 2005, helping defeat a measure that would have channeled more of existing funds into the OC Fire Authority, which found itself shorthanded last fall when the Santiago Fire broke out.

It is common sense that we properly fund our fire services. Whether it’s Kehoe’s or Arnold’s plan we adopt, the conservative Republican attitude of “you’re on your own” must be firmly rejected.

The New York Times confirms what I argued back in April: high energy prices are putting a halt to urban sprawl. The NYT article focuses on the Denver exurbs but one can just as easily substitute it for the Bay Area or SoCal exurbs:

Across the nation, the realization is taking hold that rising energy prices are less a momentary blip than a change with lasting consequences. The shift to costlier fuel is threatening to slow the decades-old migration away from cities, while exacerbating the housing downturn by diminishing the appeal of larger homes set far from urban jobs.

In Atlanta, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Minneapolis, homes beyond the urban core have been falling in value faster than those within, according to an analysis by Moody’s Economy.com….

Basic household arithmetic appears to be furthering the trend: In 2003, the average suburban household spent $1,422 a year on gasoline, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. By April of this year – when gas prices were about $3.60 a gallon- the same household was spending $3,196 a year, more than doubling consumption in dollar terms in less than five years.

Which is exactly what we witnessed here in California. The housing bubble began to burst here in CA in mid to late 2006, when gas prices first broke $3 for a sustained period of time. And the areas first and hardest hit were those dependent on long commuters – Riverside County, Stockton, Modesto.

It’s a phenomenon we’re witnessing here in Monterey County. Home prices have held fairly steady here on the peninsula, but in the new suburbs such as Marina and Greenfield sprawl has ceased. Several major developments have been put on hiatus or canceled outright, even though the cities have already built the roads.

The deeper problem is that California has spent far too much time and money promoting a failed urban model. The time has come to Redefine the California Dream for the 21st Century. We need to reinvest in our city centers and provide the infrastructure – especially the mass transit infrastructure – to bring folks into the urban centers. But we must also provide the housing capacity for them. The 20th century homeowner aristocracy has to give way to a 21st century middle class that will be fundamentally urban, not suburban.

Over the weekend David Dayen compared California’s situation to that of Youngstown, Ohio in the 1980s. It was an interesting choice of cities. Youngstown is pursuing a strategy of livability and post-industrial land use, including the encouragement of food production and cutting off services to abandoned housing tracts. It took Youngstown 25 hard years to accept that the past will never return and a new path is necessary. Will it take California that long to realize its suburban dream is dead and that our future is urban?

God I hope not.

One thing you can usually count on in a hostage crisis is that the hostage takers will eventually start to freak out. And so it is with Assembly Republican Leader Mike Villines, who let loose on Democrats in an interview with Valleyfornia. (h/t to Josiah Greene at the CMR) Some highlights, beginning with his whining on dams and environmental rules:

That’s a liberal minority of people these environmentalists, who I call whackos, who are totally out of touch with reality (that) are controlling the legislative process.

Right there Villines explains why his party is viewed by even other Republicans as tainted dog meat – in a state that is so strongly environmentalist, California Republicans have deluded themselves into thinking that voters actually think the way Villines and his Rush Limbaugh-fed colleagues do.

Villines then predicted that Republicans would win seats if the redistricting measure passed – showing the “government reform” groups supporting that plan to be useful idiots – because, in his words,

They are totally out of touch with reality. Their main issues are gay marriage, no reservoirs, no taxes. This is not mainstream California. They are out of touch.

Psychologists might call that “projection” but we can just call it the last gasp of a dying party. Unfortunately that dying party has a lot of power with the 2/3 rule and they are using it for all it’s worth. Villines says some progress is being made in negotiations with Speaker Bass and the Senate leadership but these comments ought to suggest they’re locked inside the building for the long haul, until all their demands are met. If innocent Californians are hurt, well, tough – such is the mentality of the hostage taker.

And to think these are the guys George Skelton thinks we oughta listen to…