Buggy system stuck in the 1990s needs an overhaul

by Brian Leubitz

Sometimes California Forward hits on some solid ground, like on open government and transparency. Yesterday, they joined up with Common Cause, the League of Women Voters, the Sunlight Foundation, the California Newspapers Association and  a few others to push out a letter calling for greater support for the Cal-Access website and other transparency measures.

This week a broad coalition consisting of good government groups, newspaper publishers, and lobbyists came together for one goal: fix our disclosure systems.

The thrust of the effort, led by CA Fwd, is a joint letter submitted to Governor Jerry Brown and legislators urging them to prioritize funding for modernized campaign finance (Cal-Access) and conflict of interest (Form 700) systems. In addition to accelerated funding, the letter calls for oversight of the projects to ensure milestones are met on-time and within budget or be left with projects that, as currently structured, could take years to develop at huge costs to the taxpayer.(CA FWD)

Since it crashed a few years ago right in the heart of election season, it is functional but still very janky. It needs to be brought into this decade. This isn’t a ton of data, Silicon Valley operations deal with far more data in a lot prettier way. We can do this, it isn’t rocket science. Heck, I bet you put a few computer nerds in a room with some cash for servers and a few cases of Red Bull and you would have a system that would make any activist happy.

We can do this, and it is about time it happens.

Former governor worries at message he would send to voters

by Brian Leubitz

Back in 1994, Pete Wilson leveraged nativism and Prop 187 to a big re-election win over Kathleen Brown. But, apparently there is a bridge too far, and his name is Tim Donnelly: (h/t to David Siders)

“I respect and share the concern of Tea Party and other California voters who are determined to reverse the growth in the size and cost of our state government. I strongly urge them to vote for a candidate for Governor whose campaign can compel the public to focus on reform of our failing public schools and of the tax and regulatory burdens that are driving companies and good jobs out of California.

Neel Kashkari can and will produce such a campaign. Tim Donnelly will not because he cannot.

Keeping public focus on the real and important issues facing California will require a candidate who does not have to defend Tim Donnelly’s bizarre votes and statements or his irresponsible personal behavior. Donnelly’s record – not California’s critical challenges – is what would inescapably become the focus of a Donnelly campaign.

With Tim Donnelly on the ballot, it would be a losing campaign, risking injury to our party and our state, and to other Republican candidates who deserve to win.” (FlashReport)

Ouch! Now, unfortunately for Wilson and the GOP, the conservative base seems to like them some crazy. With the ballots already out, whether Kashkari can pick up the momentum he needs to pull into second is still a very open question. Meg Whitman and her millions of dollars aren’t walking through the door anytime soon, and the future of GOP as a viable party in California is looking rather hazy.

Well, kinda. Enabling legislation will get a tweak

by Brian Leubitz

Call it the third rail, or whatever you so desire, but changing anything even remotely associated with Prop 13 was considered strictly verboten. However, Asm. Tom Ammiano has apparently broken through some of that muck. Ammiano’s legislation, AB 2372 has now received the support of a number of business organizations, and even the Howard Jarvis people say that they won’t rally the troops against the bill. This is rare:

“This particular loophole really pushed a button in people,” said Assemblyman Tom Ammiano (D-San Francisco), coauthor of the measure, AB 2372, with Raul Bocanegra (D-Pacoima).

Lenny Goldberg, leader of the California Tax Reform Assn., praised the measure as a “step forward” and noted the irony of being on the same side as his frequent foes. (LA Times)

Now, to be clear, this is not the major Prop 13 reform that we’ve been talking about. It resolves a basic fairness question. Long story short, commercial real estate that never transferred over a 50% interest wasn’t reassessed for Prop 13 purposes. It got a lot of attention in a few very notable instances, and the public pressure was even getting to Jon Coupal and his HJTA horde.

Don’t expect this to become a trend. The Chamber of Commerce is unlikely to have wholeheartedly changed their tune, but this is solid policy. However you look at it, this small change makes sense.

Becomes just the third woman, and first out lesbian, to hold the post

by Brian Leubitz

The pictures on twitter are a bit grainy, but standing next to her spouse, Jennifer LeSar, and all the usual notables, Toni Atkins was sworn in as the 69th Speaker of the Assembly. Gov. Jerry Brown is just to the right, holding something up and outgoing speaker John Pérez just behind. Thanks for the photo, @KevinMullin!

That’s not the only mention of twitter, as @ToniAtkins is now getting another account, @SpeakerAtkins. Follow them both, I imagine the latter account will gear up over the next few days and weeks.

Atkins has been waiting for the official transition for a few months now, and she’ll need to get the ball rolling straight away in the budget process. While Atkins made a nod to the rainy day fund, which will need to be wrapped up soon, she focused on housing the homeless and protecting California’s most vulnerable.

“We must work to ensure stability, and that includes an adequate reserve for those rainy days when the economy again takes a downward dive,” Atkins said, “and yet we must also realize that where we have our greatest challenge is at the same time expanding opportunity and lifting up the most vulnerable who have suffered a great deal and need us not to forget them now. While we have made difficult decisions during the recession, they have held on with white knuckles.”(SacBee)

The new Speaker has a long history of building coalitions and fighting for housing and vulnerable populations. She’ll need to call on a lot of that for the next two years to make the Assembly run smoothly.

Small fire departments facing long-term financial sustainability questions

by Brian Leubitz

Last night I attended a meeting of the Bodega Bay Fire Protection District. Not normally the type of event that I cover here at Calitics, but beyond some self-interest, it was a fascinating experience. The meeting was attended by embattled Sonoma County Supervisor Efren Carillo as well as a host of Sonoma County officials from the City Administrator’s office, the Parks Dept, and County fire dept.

The reason for the meeting was pretty simple: the fire district is running out of money. If nothing happens in the next 15 months, crews will be cut from three to two leaving the district incapable of responding to simultaneous incidents. Of course, the money question brings up a series of other questions. First, to clear it out of the way, as far as I can see there has been no issues of any kind of glaring mismanagement. Rather, it is a case of a system set up to fail doing just that.

It wasn’t always that way. The fire district is post-Prop 13 district, which is something of an immediate strike one in terms of revenues. But in a county that gets a lot of tourists, it is particularly popular. The tiny hamlet of about 1,000 attracts over 13% of Sonoma County’s transient occupancy tax (TOT) and over 4 million visitors per year. Putting aside the issues of collecting that tax, particularly for airbnb and similar services, almost all of the burden for providing fire and ambulance services falls upon local property owners. It is why Bodega Bay has one of the highest parcel taxes for a fire district in the state.

At the meeting last night, many homeowners expressed frustration with the lack of TOT coming back to the community. While there has been varying levels of support over the last few years, next year’s budget includes no such support for the district after the district’s proposal to replace their aging ambulance was rejected. Given the large number of tourists, and the fact that 57% of calls were for non-residents, many feel they are carrying an outsized burden and subsidizing ambulance protection for the state and county parks in the district.

There are additional available revenue sources, the county general fund, and Prop 172 funds chief among them. There is a change.org petition here about the Prop 172 fund that I highly recommend folks sign.

The County officials certainly seem committed to working on finding additional sources of revenue, and residents are organizing to make their presence known at the budget hearings this June. And in an election held on April 8 (because of a recall election in the neighboring Russian River fire district), a new tax measure, Measure A, was defeated by a final tally of 206-356. Most of the reasons for that failure are listed above, but the consensus last night was that it was mostly the unfair burden on the small community surrounding the parks. Well, that and a bit of off-topic ass-hattery calling for a No vote based on “saving the salmon”.

All this brings us back to the whole system set up to fail. In the world after Prop 13, revenue is increasingly difficult to acquire, and because it can, money tends to drip upward to the state. In case after case, the state has reached for local money to pay for various constitutional requirements. While some of that has come back, including through Prop 172, somehow it is never really replaced. Counties are then forced to reach down the ladder to finesse finances, and it becomes harder and harder to consistently fund local districts. (See the closure of Palm Drive hospital, which also complicates the situation in Bodega Bay.) And then you have situations like the $150 fire fee, where the money never actually went to the fire districts that actually did the fire protection.

Perhaps the system was meant to fail, or perhaps it is just a patchwork system that now has seen so many patches that the entire system is now completely dysfunctional. But in the end, the long-term answers need to come from the state. If we are to have this local control of our fire protection and other public services, they need to be able to access their fair share of revenue to provide these vital public services.

Yes, that really happened

by Brian Leubitz

You knew at some point that Tim Donnelly would break out of his standard issue right-wing rhetoric to really reach for some crazy stuff. Something that would really grab attention and force Republicans to redouble their efforts to somehow make sure that he isn’t the GOP standard bearer in November. Sure, polls have him up big over former TARP administrator Neel Kashkari, but that doesn’t wipe away years of crazy. After all Donnelly is that guy →

But linking Neel Kashkari to Shariah law, can’t say that I saw that one coming. But, in a facebook post still available today, Donnelly links to a bizarre and factually ridiculous commentary in the Washington Times and posted the following comment:

Neel Kashkari supported the United States submitting to the Islamic, Shariah banking code in 2008 when he ran TARP.

Shariah is “the seditious religio-political-legal code authoritative Islam seeks to impose worldwide under a global theocracy.”

This revelation is spreading fast, as people like Anita Gunn refer to Mr. Kashkari’s support of Shariah an “October Surprise”.

Now, I don’t normally go around defending Republicans who are campaigning on shutting down high speed rail, but I think this is worth a mention. First of all, it is racist on its face. If Neel Kashkari was white, would he face this ridiculous accusation? His family comes from a tradition of Hinduism, which turns out is not a tradition that is generally friendly to Shariah, but I suppose that knowledge would require a bit of reading. This is about ignorance.

The Washington Times article itself is a joke. Kashkari and Treasury officials were actually supporting the idea of connecting the Shariah-approved financial system into the larger global finance system, not making everything submit to Shariah law. It turns out that wouldn’t really work well for our finance system anyway, as Islamic banking forbids the practice of receiving interest. That’s kind of the point of Wall St., so I don’t think we’ll all be converting to Islamic Banking anytime soon.

A tip of the hat to Josh Richman for pointing to the LA Times article where Donnelly doubled down on this crazy:

Donnelly stood by his remarks late Monday.

“Given the recent stories and protests about the outrage of the discriminatory nature of Sharia law, we’re horrified that Kashkari would support Sharia anything,” he said.(LA Times)

Ladies and gentlemen, this is your leading GOP gubernatorial candidate, Tim Donnelly.