All posts by Brian Leubitz

Prisons

Switch it Over

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Shift to local jails means big changes in some counties

by Brian Leubitz

With the realignment shift towards counties, all of a sudden the once sleepy 58 sheriff positions become a whole lot more meaningful.  Sheriffs will be in charge of far more prisoners, and the one who gets the lion’s share of that is Lee Baca in LA County.

The so-called “prison realignment” beginning Saturday will transfer the state’s responsibility for lower-level drug offenders, thieves and other convicts to county jurisdictions.

An estimated 9,000 parolees will be added to the caseloads of the Probation Department, whose workers already oversee inmates released from county jails.

The Sheriff’s Department will have to find room in its jails for an additional 7,000 inmates convicted of non-serious, non-violent and non-sexual felonies.

Gov. Jerry Brown said Thursday this sweeping overhaul of the correctional system would help the state save money, reduce the 70 percent recidivism rate, and bring the state into compliance with a U.S. Supreme Court order to ease prison overcrowding. (LA Daily News)

To be honest, you can’t get a whole lot worse than the current system.  We still aren’t dealing with some of the underlying problems in sentencing, but baby steps I suppose.  However, if we could just fix our broken probation system, we would see that 70% recidivism rate falling rapidly.

The big question is how this will be funded.  Gov. Brown has pledged additional funds for the prisons, but as of yet, most counties have big holes to close in their jail budgets.

Budget

Is the Budget Unraveling?

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Little cuts could mean big problems

by Brian Leubitz

The Legislature cheered the Amazon deal, after all they were hardly in the mood to fight it out with one of the nation’s largest tech companies.  I mean, after all, we can’t offend corporations, can we?  But that little deal cost the state around $200 million in this budget.  Not the biggest concern in an 80-something billion budget, but certainly not good news.

But the bigger question is what happens if somebody pulls the thread on Prop 98’s school funding requirements?  We are underfunding K-12 by billions of dollars, and would you trust this state to pay up later? And does that really make up for it anyway?  You can’t redo first grade five years later.

Well, consider the string pulled several times:

California’s budget, already on shaky footing with tax revenues coming in lower than forecast, was hit with three new problems Wednesday when advocates for public schools, the developmentally disabled and cities filed separate lawsuits challenging the spending plan.

The California School Boards Association, the Association of California School Administrators and three school districts claim the budget shortchanges schools by $2.1 billion, while service providers for people with developmental disabilities argue that a $91 million cut runs afoul of federal and state mandates.

The League of California Cities filed a suit challenging a shift of $130 million in vehicle license fee money from cities to counties to pay for realignment, the criminal justice overhaul engineered by the governor to reduce the prison population. (SF Chronicle)

Now, there is still a long way to go on this, and the AG’s office is defending the budget in court. The question now is if any of these succeeds, most importantly the education funding suit, does the rest of the budget explode?

Oh, yeah, there’s one other thing, we’re definitely on track to get nowhere near the revenue Gov. Brown anticipated for the triggered cuts.  The trigger looks to be cocked.

Uncategorized

Wait or Gut-And-Amend?

Controversial legislative technique faces scrutiny over rushed proceedings

by Brian Leubitz

Gut and amend has its purposes.

I say that because there are a few major pieces of legislation, that were heavily discussed and fully vetted that still required gut and amend. Most notably, Mark Leno’s marriage equality bill in 2005, which was ultimately vetoed by Schwarzenegger.

Some issues should be given the second crack that gut and amend offers. But a little background.  “Gut and amend” basically means that a legislator will take a bill that was passed out of one house, strip its language, and replace it with entirely different language.  It ultimately has to get a confirming vote back in the first house, so every legislator votes on the new language.

The issue is that frequently gut and amend bills will come in the context of the last few days of a legislative session, where it is difficult if not impossible to deliver the proper scrutiny on the new text.  And thus, we get stories like this:

A few hours earlier, using an obscure parliamentary procedure, the senator had carved the contents out of a bill about local gas taxes and “amended” it into a proposal to warn women about breast cancer risks. It was now speeding through the statehouse so fast, and with so little scrutiny, that Simitian would later be on the defensive about one significant effect: a possible multimillion-dollar windfall for a medical business in his district.

Although most bills take months to wend their way through the Legislature, Simitian’s midnight measure was no anomaly. Proposals routinely emerge from nowhere in the waning hours of a lawmaking year and ride a fast track to the governor’s desk, without normal vetting and with standard rules waived. In the chaos, special interests can manipulate state law, sometimes so subtly that they elude detection.

The senator’s bill was one of many that bypassed the usual reviews this year as they flew through lawmakers’ hands at the eleventh hour. They included an exemption from environmental rules for a Los Angeles stadium developer, which Brown signed Tuesday, and a gift to unions that would permit child-care workers to organize. The governor has until Oct. 9 to act on the labor bill, Simitian’s proposal and hundreds of other potential laws. (LA Times)

Now, I’m not sure it’s time to point the corruption arrow on Joe Simitian on this, but you can see where it comes from.  Given the haste most gut and amend bills get through the Legislature, transparency is far from the first goal.  The bill in question isn’t necessarily a bad one, but perhaps something that could have waited for the next legislative session.

The problem with gut and amend isn’t the process itself, it is the extent to which it is used. Legislators need to consider whether the bill they are pushing can wait to proceed through the normal process to allow a more transparent process. If the answer is no, well, hopefully it is no because it is critical to the state, and not because those pushing the bill favor the lack of transparency.

UPDATE: I want to just emphasize one point. I think it is unfortunate that this breast cancer prevention bill got singled out for a discussion of gut and amend.  Like Mark Leno’s marriage equality bill back in 2005, it has been through the full process of hearings, and people on both sides of the issue have gotten a chance to present their case.  Ultimately that isn’t true for some gut and amend bills, and it probably would have been helpful for the Times to point to one of those bills as the poster child.  

This bill ends up getting lost in the forest, but I’m confident that Sen. Simitian has the best of intentions for breast cancer prevention.  And, given the attention that the bill just got from the Times, it makes it more difficult for the Governor to sign it now. That is ultimately unfortunate, as the bill deserves a fair hearing based entirely on the merits of early cancer detection.  I, however, am optimistic that Gov. Brown considers policy before politics on his legislative decisions.  Good legislation still makes good law, even if it came through an ugly process.

Economy

A Long Hard Slog

Many Californians are again worse off than last year

by Brian Leubitz

In another Field Poll release (PDF), the pollsters take the temperature of the state on economic issues.  To summarize, it is bad out there.

“Pretty gloomy stuff,” said Field Poll director Mark DiCamillo. “The length of these negative reports is now becoming historic.”

Field also found that 91 percent of voters say that California’s economy is in bad shape. Forty-two percent believe that things will stay the same over the next year, while 30 percent say it will worsen and 26 percent think it will improve.(SacBee)

Half of all California voters report a decline in their economic condition from a year ago.  And that is for the fourth straight year.  Much of that has to do with the global and national economic condition, but we have been hit particularly hard.  We had huge housing bubbles in the Central Valley, where unemployment is now at staggering levels. Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to control the foreclosure rates in any meaningful way.

The state government can do some things to help, but right now, we are handcuffed and making the situation worse.  We are laying off teachers and other state workers by the thousands.  All this has a major negative effect on the economy.  For every state worker you fire, there is a multiplier effect in the private sector.  All this compounds to make the situation worse.

We should be doing more, but instead, we are looking at ways to cut more jobs. It’s like 1937 all over again.

Budget

Amazon Reopens Affilliate Program After Brown Signs Deal

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Internet retailer ends long stalemate with California

by Brian Leubitz

You may have noticed that in the article below, I have an Amazon.com link to a book about a horse.  Which, mostly I just found kind of cute,  but tangentially related to the story.  But, why Amazon, you ask?  Well, remember that deal I mentioned a few weeks back, well, it’s official and Amazon has reopened their affiliate program to Californians.

Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation Friday that postpones new sales taxes rules that would have affected online purchases in California, granting more time for traditional and online retailers to lobby Congress for a national standard on the high-stakes issue.

The bill, crafted as a compromise among Amazon.com, traditional retailers and California lawmakers searching for ways to raise revenue, delays until at least September 2012 online tax rules that were implemented as part of this year’s state budget package.

*** **** ***

Under the deal, the retailing giant will rekindle its relationship with its California affiliates and has promised to create at least 10,000 full-time jobs and hire 25,000 seasonal employees in the state by the end of 2015.(AP)

So, you can now go back to wondering whether the Amazon tablet will be the iPad killer and getting free shipping.  That being said, buying in local, independent stores is still your best choice for economic development in your own community.

Budget, Jerry Brown

Jerry Brown Discovers Some Horsemen

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Jerry talks anti-tax doctrinaires with CalBuzz.

by Brian Leubitz



The Republicans and the Democrats, at least in the venue I know best, California, have a very different relationship with their respective bases.  The Democrats raise money from their activist base, gets volunteers, and then generally ignores them.  The Republicans, well, it is a very different story.  Sure they get money and volunteers, but the tail wags the dog.  The right wing activists of the Republican party controls them.

As a long-time blogger, I suppose I have a bigger megaphone than most.  However, I have nowhere near the power (nor earning power) of Jon Fleischman, my right-wing counterpart at the FlashReport.  He says something, and all of a sudden, legislators are looking around to make sure that they didn’t cross him. Me, well, sometimes I get an “attaboy” when I am of some use, but let’s just say that Calitics isn’t lucrative, and that nobody is calling me a horseman of anything but the cartoon variety http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_dj0Q…

So, it is interesting, that, in an interview with CalBuzz, Governor Brown called out the Republican base as the proverbial tale wagging the Republican party.

Invoking the infamous symbols of Conquest, War, Famine and Death from the Book of Revelation, the former seminarian identified the anti-tax fearsome foursome to whom the Republicans submit as 1) DC anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist; 2) Jon Coupal of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association; 3) LA radio spewers John Kobylt and Ken Champiou and 4) FlashReport, GOP operative Jon Fleischman’s right-wing blog.

“It’s emotionally quite wrenching for any of the Republicans to embrace anything opposed by the Four Horsemen of the Tax Apocalypse,” Gov. Gandalf told Calbuzz. “If that group, or even maybe any one or two of them, invoke the dreaded ‘t’ word, they do cower.”

Of course, this is really nothing new.  If you’ve taken a bit of time to really consider the California right-wing over the past two decades, it doesn’t take a PhD in political science to see their slide from pragmatic dealmakers to ideological extremists.  Jerry likely knew this before he retook the Horseshoe, but perhaps the breadth and depth of this takeover took him by surprise.

To be honest, in many ways, the right-wing has more power over the Democratic Party than the left-wing base.  Under the 2/3 rule, revenue legislation must be tailored to hold all of the conservative Democrats. Nobody can take a walk, even if we did have the 2/3 Democratic chambers that we have been lusting after for so long.

Fleischman has a post today excoriating former Senate minority leader Dave Cogdill for agreeing to temporary sales tax increases.  He states, and perhaps daydreams, of what California would have looked like if we had a 2011 budget in 2009.  And the thing is for Fleischman, perhaps the world may have looked slightly better.

But that is only if you are doing well.  After all, California (and the US in general) is a great place for those who are doing well financially.  But ask those Californians who are alive today because they got a helping hand from state services, and you would see a very different picture of that 2009 vs 2011 budget debate.

Of course, the fact that the Rich need the state is hardly reported. But California without the economic engines that are the UCs, CSUs and the community colleges is a markedly different (and worse off) state.  A California without the public infrastructure is a worse off state.  We all need the public goods that only the state can provide efficiently. Denying that might be convenient for the Right, but it is devastating for California.

Uncategorized

Few Aware of Redistricting Commission, Fewer Want Repeal

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Republican effort to repeal maps faces uphill battle



























Approve(y) % Disapprove(N) %
Congress Map-All 42 29
Congress Map-Heard 52 30
Senate Map-All 44 28
Senate Map-Heard 62 22

by Brian Leubitz

Field Poll’s latest effort focuses on the question of the redistricting commission (full PDF here), and well, wait, that happened?

California voters are inclined to support the political maps drawn by a commission they created, but nearly two-thirds are unfamiliar with the work of the California Citizens Redistricting Commission, a new Field Poll shows.

The survey found huge majorities of Democrats, Republicans and nonpartisans unfamiliar with the 14-member panel and its work this year to craft new political boundaries for 80 state Assembly seats, 40 Senate seats and 53 members of Congress from California.(SacBee)

To the right, you can see the numbers, but one thing sticks out.  Informed voters like the plan and aren’t interested in repealing them.  As in, they remember about the fact that they played a part in approving Prop 11, and don’t really mind how it went down.  That’s really not good news for those who are trying to repeal the Senate and Congressional maps (the Republicans.)  

Already we’re hearing about spin on these numbers, arguing that claims of special interests getting preferential treatment will inspire voters to kick the maps back to the “independent” (as in, vastly more Republican than the state as a whole) judiciary.

Unless some sort of major funding (as in tens of millions) comes in, these maps look pretty solid to survive.  Good luck to the Republicans in their effort to play the good government hero against, um, well, those evil nonpartisan good government organizations.

Uncategorized

Back to Business for Meg Whitman

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We hardly knew you, Meg Whitman.

by Brian Leubitz

The internet is abuzz with the rumor that Meg Whitman is about to be named CEO of Hewlett-Packard:

Meg Whitman, eBay’s former chief executive, will likely be named to lead Hewlett-Packard after markets close on Thursday, according to a person familiar with board decisions.

The decision to replace Léo Apotheker, the company’s chief executive, after only 11 months on the job is all but made, lacking only a final vote, said the person, who is not authorized to speak for the board. While Mr. Apotheker is going, his strategy, including consideration of spinning off H.P.’s personal computer business from other parts of the company, will remain in place. (NY Times)

While there were rumors that Whitman would be considered for a prominent role in any Romney administration, it now appears that her attempts at government greatness are behind her. She won’t be running for Senate next year, and future government positions are unlikely.

At this point the more important question for Californians is whether she can save HP without further jettisoning thousands of jobs at the once (and future??) Silicon Valley giant.

Uncategorized

DiFi Puts $5 Million To Replace Durkee-held Funds

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Senior Senator worried about short-term cash flow issues

by Brian Leubitz

Senator Dianne Feinstein has about $5 million in her campaign accounts, according to her June reports.  How much is really in those accounts remains a mystery.  As her treasurer, Kinde Durkee, seems to have been in the habit of using her clients accounts as her personal piggy banks, your guess is as good as the Senator’s.

But, you know, Sen. Feinstein can do something about that.  After all, she is the spouse of one Richard C. Blum, who has $5 million checks just laying around the house.  So, she put one of those towards her campaign, this time under a hopefully more reliable treasurer. But despite her sagging poll numbers, this is it:

“That is my intention at the present time to try to work it out so that it’s possible,” Feinstein said Tuesday. “The effort is simply to replace the money that is lost.”

Feinstein will transfer the money to her campaign by the end of September. Candidates and incumbents can spend an unlimited amount of personal funds on their own campaigns, although Feinstein is not expected now to commit any more of her own money beyond the initial $5 million, according to sources close to the campaign.(Politico)

Though she hasn’t actually drawn any competitors yet, somebody will show up.  Apparently not Meg Whitman, and let’s not kid ourselves about Schwarzenegger.  But, it would be hard to point to any current Republican elected official that would be competitive with Feinstein, they are just too far to the right.  And even Whitman was unable to buy the office.  Whether the lack of a true primary is able to allow a Whitman-esque competitor stay away from the right-wing things you have to say remains to be seen.  

But there will be some sort of challenge, and Sen. Feinstein will have some cash to deal with it.  I suppose it is time to give up on that whole debate on who should replace her for the time being.

Budget, Jerry Brown

Brown’s Approval Stable

Governor somehow maintains strong plurality of support

by Brian Leubitz

In the latest Field poll (PDF), somehow Gov. Jerry Brown has managed to maintain a plurality of support.  His September numbers are actually slightly better, from 46 to 49 % approval from June.  Despite lying down in the stink that is Sacramento politics right now, it seems the putrid stench seems to linger on the Legislature rather than in the Horseshoe.

To some extant, he is getting an “independence” streak.  Although, I’m not sure this is the quote that he would like to describe that:

Bower, a Democrat, said he found Brown a “little flaky” last time he was governor, but he thinks Brown is more focused now that he is 73 and in his third term.

“He’s one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel,” Bower said. “He doesn’t have a thing to lose. … I think he just kind of tells it like it is.”

Brown likely is benefiting from that image and, among other things, from the popularity of a series of symbolic measures he used early this year to demonstrate his frugality in the state’s budget crisis, including recalling thousands of state-issued cellphones and cars. (SacBee)

Ah, yes, the most famous of poll bounces, the “almost dead” bounce.  And it seems right that people give Brown a bit more slack for trying to work with what the people consider an ineffective Legislature.  Points for trying, I suppose.  However, at some point, Brown will need to push some substantial initiatives through this reticent Legislature with a 2/3 majority.  And that’s when things get really tough.

For the time being though, Jerry’s in some smooth sailing.