Recycling law leads to theft, but what can be done about it?

by Brian Leubitz

If you read the San Francisco Chronicle often enough, you get the general vibe of where CW Nevius is headed. He’s all about quality of life and would generally prefer a modern suburbanization. Lovely for the suburbs, but it doesn’t always go well in the City of San Francisco. And he’s living in San Francisco now, and noticing the little things.  

Like recycling theft. First, let me say as somebody who worked on a campaign about San Francisco’s waste system, it is a very common concern, in pretty much every part of the City. I don’t know if it as big of a problem in LA or other urban parts of the state, but it raises many issues (and many questions) here in SF.  I’ll take the quote from Recology’s Adam Alberti

“It hurts everybody,” says Adam Alberti, a spokesman for Recology, the city’s garbage collection firm. “We have heard reports of (scavengers) being paid in drugs instead of cash. And there is an impact on ratepayers when recycling theft is happening.” (CW Nevius/SF Chronicle)

Now, first, let me say that the California Redemption Value system works very well for its intended goals: increasing recycling. In the latest report, aluminum recycling is at 99%, and glass at 91%. These are good figures, and mean that we are leaving less junk for future generations to deal with. But, like most public policy interventions, there are side effects. I know for a fact that recycling theft is real, as I see it every Thursday night when I put out my garbage. But the other ills, such as the ills Mr. Alberti mentioned, are very real. To a surprising degree, recycling theft is an organized crime. Groups pay a small pittance to the people that actually gather the materials, and then they go around and flip the materials for a tidy profit.

But these side effects cannot deter us from our greater environmental goals. We can’t go backward on recycling, not in an era of increasing scarcity of resources. Therefore we simply cannot toss out the baby with the bathwater on our CRV program. We are the leader on this program, so in some ways that leaves us to come up with our own solutions. Some of the proposals bandied about in the past have included limits on how much you could redeem, and requiring some form of ID or otherwise providing personal information upon redeeming a large quantity of recyclables. But we shouldn’t limit ourselves to these ideas, we need to work on ways to address the issue while still achieving our original goals.

Corrections Secretary Jeffrey Beard: “As a society, we just have not done a very good job of dealing with the mentally ill.”

by Brian Leubitz

Dan Morain has a very thought provoking column today taking off from the recent discussion about the prison health care litigation. Long story short, Gov. Brown is working to once again attempt to emerge from the litigation that has upped the prison health budget from $732 million to over $2bln. He makes a fair point:

“That money is coming out of the university, it’s coming out of child care. It’s a situation you wouldn’t dream anyone would want.”(SacBee)

Our spending on prison health care is high, very high, but the problem is that we are spending money in the wrong place. Kind of like our health care system spending big money in ERs, rather than setting up more primary care clinics, we are pushing the mentally ill to the most expensive “treatment” facility available, and one with a poor track record of success. This  spending is really a symptom of the much larger issue of our failing on mental health care in general.

Morain does a good job explaining the process of closing the state hospitals that had been “caring” for the mentally ill. I have no doubt that the decision was completely justified at the time, but the funding necessary to really create a more just and humane system never really appeared. From Reagan on down through the years, the governors and legislators just never felt a high priority on mental health spending. There are many other (completely valid) competing priorities and the mental health lobby is comparatively weak. But on the flip side, there is a large lobbying infrastructure for prison dollars. And nobody wanted to become the politician that was “soft on crime,” so the prisons grew.

In just a few years from the great exodus of the hospitals, homelessness had markedly increased, and we were on our way to a crisis in mental health care. But the bottom line is that the cuts to mental health care, have a remarkably poor return. They boomerang back on us with higher prison and law enforcement cuts rapidly. Back in 2004, Californians voted for Prop 63, which increased taxes for mental health care. However, though the law required that the money not replace what was already being spent. But when the cuts came in earnest over the past 5 years, that part of the law was tossed aside, and mental health lost big. And, predictably, while the numbers are kind of fuzzy on this, the numbers of mentally ill finding themselves in prison increased.

At this point, whether or not we have a receiver for the prison health care system seems mostly beside the point.  It doesn’t address the point upstream where resources could have the most chance of being effective in the reduction of mentally ill inmates. There are plenty of recriminations to go around, but in the end, all of California’s leaders, for decades, have failed our mentally ill population.  

Former Assembly Speaker hopes to mediate with California Teachers

by Brian Leubitz

If you are planning to come to the CDP convention in Sacramento in a couple of weeks, it will be no secret that the teachers are an important constituency within the party. And they are critical for elected officials due to their willingness to fight, and spend, for the causes they consider important. Fabian Nunez knew this as Speaker, and he still knows it. But now he might get a chance to see the other side of labor, as he has agreed to represent Michelle Rhee’s “StudentsFirst” organization, a group that focuses on school reform, the extensive use of metrics for teachers, and being something of an opponent to teachers’ unions.

In an interview, Nunez, a Democrat who cut his political teeth as a union operative, said he hopes to play the role of mediator for StudentsFirst and labor leaders, though he made it clear that he thought the CTA had abused its clout with lawmakers. He cited the union’s successful efforts last year to kill legislation that would have sped the dismissal process for teachers who abused students.

Teachers unions said the bill was an attack on teachers’ due-process rights, giving school boards, rather than an administrative judge and two educators, final authority over dismissals.

“When that bill died, I think it gave a lot of people heartache,” Nunez said. “I think there are a lot of labor Democrats who are coming to the conclusion that we can’t read from the CTA script anymore.”(LA Times)

Of course, that bill has become a flashpoint for a lot of so-called reformers, but when it comes down to it, both major teachers unions have worked on negotiating a bill that can work to move potentially abusive teachers out of the classroom quickly while still maintaining a fair process. And just last week, Sen. Alex Padilla, the author of that original controversial bill, signed on to work with Asm. Joan Buchanan on the subject. Padilla is now the principal coauthor of AB 375 – Teacher Discipline and Dismissal and AB  1338 – Mandatory Reporting of Sexual and Child Abuse. (Press release here or over the flip)

But the ills of California education can be plainly spotted by anybody who understands simple arithmetic. We are chronically underfunding our schools. There are only 4 states that spend less per pupil than us, all of which are lower cost states. We are 43rd in educational results, perhaps higher than where we should be given our spending.

Our schools need additional resources, so teachers aren’t forced to spend their own money buying supplies for their students and that all students have the tools to be successful. I don’t doubt that the former Speaker has the best of intentions for our students, but maybe he can help push for some additional resources while he’s at the work of reforming. Our students, and their teachers, deserve better.

Photo credit: Former Speaker Fabian Nunez with Michael Moore, courtesy Randy Bayne

PRESS RELEASE Padilla and Buchanan Join Forces to Protect Children

DOMA faces skeptical Kennedy

The audio of the DOMA Oral Arguments is now available online, and all signs are positive for the LGBT community. I’ll post some snips to this post shortly. At any rate, Justice Kennedy seemed very skeptical of the federal government’s right to ignore state definition of marriages. (Here is the Transcript of the Oral Arguments.)

If the Supreme Court can find its way through a dense procedural thicket, and confront the constitutionality of the federal law that defined marriage as limited to a man and a woman, that law may be gone, after a seventeen-year existence.  That was the overriding impression after just under two hours of argument Wednesday on the fate of the Defense of Marriage Act.

That would happen, it appeared, primarily because Justice Anthony M. Kennedy seemed persuaded that the federal law intruded too deeply into the power of the states to regulate marriage, and that the federal definition cannot prevail.   The only barrier to such a ruling, it appeared, was the chance – an outside one, though – that the Court majority might conclude that there is no live case before it at this point. (Lyle Denniston/SCOTUSBlog)

Now, a ruling based on federalism (aka states rights) would be a much more narrow decision than something based on the equal protection clause of the 5th Amendment. In other words, the federalism argument says nothing about the inherent right to marriage equality, it would simply say that the federal government cannot ignore the duly granted marriages of each state.

The first hour of the argument dealt with the question of whether the House Republicans (through the Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group) are an appropriate party for the case, and whether this is a case that the Supreme Court can now hear. The Court seemed generally comfortable with exercising jurisdiction on the case, but it is a highly technical question of law.

After a break, the argument moved on to the merits of the case, and Paul Clement, the House’s attorney, got beat up for a while by Justices Sotomayor and Kagan. (Check out the “skim milk” audio clip.) Furthermore, Justice Kagan quoted from the findings in the legislative history (see the 74minute mark of the main clip):

I’m going to quote from the House Report  here — is that “Congress decided to reflect an honor of collective moral judgment and to express moral disapproval of homosexuality.”

That quote resulted an audible mumble from the gallery. Clement argued that the House report had other rational basis points to support the statute. He didn’t argue that there was animus against the LGBT community, just that the animus wasn’t enough to strike down the law.

On the flip side, the government, and Ms. Windsor’s attorney, got some grilling on their position that DOMA violated equal protection. The question of what the standard should be, (strict, intermediate, or rational basis), didn’t seem to be going the government’s way either. In fact, if Justice Kennedy gets his way, and decides the case on federalism, we may not get to that question at all in this case.

In the end, if Kennedy is leaning the way he seemed to be in the oral argument, DOMA seems unlikely to survive. However, a broad decision in either this case or the Prop 8 case seems increasingly unlikely.

Also, check out AfJ’s audio analysis of the case.