This is the legacy of historically unpopular Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and his friends in the Yacht Party – corporate sponsorships for state parks.

State parks officials and nonprofit organizations scrambled Wednesday to find funding and possibly new corporate sponsors to keep as many as 100 parks and beaches open after Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger slashed an additional $6.2 million out of the state parks system […]

State officials won’t finalize a list of park closures until Labor Day and said they hope to see the parks reopened in one to two years.

“We are actively seeking anyone who can help us with these places, all of them jewels, at a time when people need them most,” said state parks Director Ruth Coleman.

“There are many groups and corporations that will step up to the plate and try to help,” said Elizabeth Goldstein, executive director of the California State Parks Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting state parks. “But it would be a mistake to think that these efforts will be sufficient to replace the public funds being extracted.” […]

The crisis also triggered debate over the kinds of recognition corporate sponsors could expect in return for helping to subsidize a state park.

“We’re reaching out to all possible partners — cities, counties, nonprofits, banks, corporations, newspapers, individuals — who would be interested in helping us,” said Roy Stearns, spokesman for the state parks department. “Maybe we can find agreements that don’t alter, commercialize or degrade our state park system.

“For example, if Budweiser came forward with money for Malibu Beach State Park, we wouldn’t change the name to Budweiser Beach,” he said. “But why not put up a banner saying, ‘This park is kept open by Budweiser’ for as long as they continue helping us?

If this isn’t a hop, skip and a jump to unique licensing agreements to sell products on site, I don’t know what is.

The article makes pretty clear that, while state parks and beaches may not be financially self-sustaining, they generate major amounts of economic activity.  In fact, over the past year, the system “is currently packed with the highest visitation rates ever recorded,” according to the parks director.  This leads to residual spending in the areas around parks and beaches, increased tourism, etc.  The natural beauty of California is a major attraction throughout the world.

Thanks to Governor Hoover we must lock them up or turn to the private sector to sustain them.

All part of his plan.

…I want to also address George Skelton’s complaint that progressives somehow made their bed by voting down the May 19 ballot measures and now they must lie in it.  I’ll ignore for the moment this major error in the piece, the assertion that “state revenue has been plummeting, down 13% in the last two years even with February’s tax increases.” (um, they didn’t take effect until April, not over the “last two years”) And I won’t comment on his barely suppressed glee over eliminating cost-of-living adjustments for poor people on welfare.

Schwarzenegger and the Legislature were widely accused of scare tactics — crying wolf — when they warned about the consequences of voters rejecting the May ballot measures. The wolf just broke down the door.

So let’s do Skelton’s counterfactual.  Let’s envision a world where the ballot measures that impacted the bottom line passed.

Those were worth a little less than $6 billion.

The deficit was $26 billion.

$1 billion of those $6 billion were cuts to different programs.  If a world where cuts to certain programs means we wouldn’t feel cuts to other programs is a world you populate and exalt, I think you’re alone.

The other $5 billion was dubious borrowing.  The most contentious item in the budget, and the most likely to have been dropped in your counterfactual… was $5 billion in dubious borrowing, only to local governments.

So the consequences of voting down very unwise ballot measures was… what, exactly?  Different cuts to vital services and different dubious borrowing?

(And of course, we’d have a permanent spending cap, rather than the political spending cap we have now thanks to the conservative veto.)

On occasion, Skelton’s villager columns get it dead wrong.  And on occasion, he nails one.  And then there’s the columns that have you nodding your head in agreement until you smack dab into one of his Villagisms. That’s where he’s at today.

Today, he starts off on a tear, ripping into Arnold’s arbitrary distinctions between “special interests” and “partners.” Other people know these two groups as “people who oppose Arnold” and “the business lobby”:

But Schwarzenegger’s pattern — the pattern of most politicians — is to use the tag “special interest” as a synonym for “enemy.” Schwarzenegger refers to allies as “partners.” Several special interests are Schwarzenegger partners, notably the state Chamber of Commerce and the California Business Roundtable.

His current enemies include Health Access California, a liberal advocacy group that detests the spending cap offered by the budget package’s linchpin, Proposition 1A, and the conservative Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn., which staunchly opposes 1A because it would extend temporary tax increases an additional year or two. (LA Times 3/23/09)

Health Access California is, of course, a friend of this blog. They have the temerity to fight for the “special interests” of children’s health care and equal access.  How dare they fight to improve Medi-Cal? And the audacity of reducing health insurance? Screw those jerks!  

(Although, I’m with Arnold on HJTA.)

Skelton’s argument continues with what any keen observer of California politics knows: the special interests know how to wag the dog of California. He even got one of them to go on the record with how he subverted democracy:

David Ackerman, a highway construction lobbyist, acknowledges that he relied on the two-thirds budget vote to leverage passage of some hotly debated bills. They softened diesel emission requirements for construction equipment, exempted some highway projects from environmental hoops and — over the opposition of Caltrans engineers — allowed some road projects to be designed by the builders.

“These probably wouldn’t have happened in a ‘functional’ legislature,” Ackerman concedes. (LA Times 3/23/09)

This won’t surprise anybody who saw more than 20 minutes of the last budget battle, but Republicans and conservative use the fact that we have a broken system.  I know, how very cynical, but it happens.  Gasp! But, at least Skelton said it.  It needs to be said in one form or another regularly, so that Californians understand just how messed up Sacramento really is.  So, right on Mr. Skelton.

And there I am, at the very end of the article, and all content to be like Amen. And then, Skelton had to, just had to close with David Brooks-ian nod to the mushy middle about Prop 1A.

Prop. 1A will help control spending. But it will take a lot more than that to make the Capitol once again functional.

Well, that’s the understatement of the year. Not only will 1A not make the Capitol functional, it will do just the opposite. It will permanently set the state backward, block any sort of permanent investment in our labor or physical infrastructure. Forget about health care reform, forget about improving our K12 education.  Flush it all down the toilet.

I guess, with Skelton, you take the good with the gross understatement.

The weekly Democratic radio address (which ought to be a YouTube address, come on guys) called for an end to the 2/3 requirement for budget and tax increases.  This is the first time in my memory that so many lawmakers are openly talking about revising 2/3.  It’s not a new problem – 28 of the last 32 budgets have been late due to legislative squabbling, with the fights becoming more protracted than ever over the past decade.  And every economic downturn, no matter how slight, sets off a crisis.  Assemblyman John Perez made it clear:

The budget would not have taken so long and would have not included non-budget related issues like an open primary if California did not have the unusual requirement of a two thirds vote for budget approval.

Reforming this two-thirds requirement should be a priority for all Californians.

Perez did not reference whether the new requirement should be the arbitrary 55% number, which is what the current initiative being circulated states, or a simple democratic majority.  We’ve learned where a number of Democrats stand this weekend:

• Darrell Steinberg decided not to mention 2/3 hardly at all in his op-ed in the Sacramento Bee.  That’s a lack of leadership.  No elected official should be speaking in public and pass up the opportunity to advocate for majority vote.  He instead opted for a Broderist call for working together and the awkward tag line “Smarter going forward.”

In comments to David Greenwald, Steinberg did call for repeal, but failed to pick a side.

“The answer in my view is to take this two-thirds supermajority requirement. We are one of three states in the country that allows a small minority of members to hold up the progress…. It doesn’t really work for California; it worked this time barely because of the magnitude of the crisis… We need to take the question this two-thirds supermajority to the ballot. I feel even stronger now than I did when I started on December 1.”

• Karen Bass is also talking about 2/3, but she is looking at the arbirtrary standard:

Assembly Speaker Karen Bass, D-Los Angeles, has proposed one that would allow lawmakers to approve budgets with 55 percent majorities if they do it by June 15. After that, it would take two-thirds votes.

It’s not necessarily that this kind of measure would definitely not pass because all the thrust of majority democratic rule is lost, but that’s certainly a factor.

• In that same article, Loni Hancock calls for a simple majority:

Hancock has introduced a constitutional amendment that would require only simple majorities to approve budgets.

“California needs to have a normal democracy like every other state in the nation except Rhode Island and Arkansas,” she said.

That’s a talking point.  55% is mush.

The point is that we have the Democratic leadership finally talking about the main impediment to the perpetual budget crisis.  Without two-thirds, you can fix a tax system that is too closely tied to boom-and-bust economic cycles.  Without two-thirds, you can end the virtual bribery of Yacht Party and moderate lawmakers.  Without two-thirds, you can end the Big Five process that facilitates official secrecy and backroom deals and use a deliberative process involving the committee structure and relying on the input of the entire caucus.  And without 2/3, you won’t have to hear from high Broderist windbags tinkering on the margins with proposals that make them feel good but will do absolutely nothing to solve the problem.  It’s kind of hilarious that the LAST proposal in George “Can’t We All Get Along” Skelton’s long list in today’s column is this:

* A simple majority vote for budget passage; 55% at most. Scrap the two-thirds vote requirement.

Just a thought or two on this whole mess while we wait for the Senate to reconvene.  While I didn’t think it was the best strategy to announce a deal and start voting on it before there was an actual deal in place (although the rumor that Dave Cox reneged on a handshake deal changes my perspective a bit), Darrell Steinberg seems to have backed into a strategy of playing Yacht Party obstruction out very publicly, so that the essential insanity of their anti-tax, sink-the-state agenda can be well-described by what’s left of political state media.  So George Skelton does the math and refutes the Yacht Party assertion that cutting spending alone can solve the budget crisis, and Dan Walters manages to describe the situation accurately.

And we all sit at our computers and type out our “even Dan Walters and George Skelton believe” articles, eternally hopeful that this is the corner-turning event, that the public will find the right people to blame for the sorry state of affairs, and punish them repeatedly forever more.  Only it’s wishful thinking.  First of all, I hate to break it, but nobody reads George Skelton and Dan Walters.  They are opinion leaders to about .001% of the electorate.  Second, there was another audience watching Sacramento this weekend, and they were the bondholders, who would be crazy to allow California to borrow one more red cent from them given the political fracturing (and this budget calls for 1.1 trillion red cents, or $11 billion dollars, to be borrowed).  Even if this passed tomorrow there would need to be lots of short-term debt floated to manage the cash crisis until new revenues actually reached state coffers, and with the bond rating the lowest in the country and the dysfunction being played out, I don’t see it happening.

The other point is that this is, let’s face it, a bad deal for Californians.  Among the sweeteners thrown in the deal to attract that elusive third Republican vote are a $10,000 tax break for home buyers to re-inflate the bubble and set the state economy up for an even bigger crash; weakened anti-pollution laws that will cost the state additional public health and environmental cleanup spending in the long-term; a potential budget cap that will make it impossible for public schools and social services to meet demand; and much more.  The tax changes, which are short-term except for a huge break to multinationals, tax things that we want to encourage in a downturn, work and consumption.  What the federal government is offering to spur demand and get the economy moving again is exactly what the state government will be cutting to balance the budget.  That’s not an argument to kill it, but it’s a reflection of reality.

So there will be at best a kind of zero-growth stasis, and at worst a further crumbling of the local economy, with shrunken revenues likely to require another round of this by summer.  Ultimately, the media cannot help the Democratic Party solve this problem.  The bill is coming due for 30 years of anti-tax zealotry and the belief that we can provide whatever citizens need without paying for it.  There isn’t a light at the end of the tunnel.  That some opinion leaders are coming around about 20 years to late doesn’t wash the blood from their hands.  And that the Democratic Party is finally thinking that they should maybe fight against the 2/3 requirement that has relegated them to a functional minority in Sacramento since is was instituted doesn’t absolve them for 30 years of inattention.

It gives me no pleasure to bear the bad news, but there’s no wake-up call on the horizon.  Even all 38 million Californians coming to the same “Hey, GOP is suxxor” conclusion at the same time doesn’t change structural realities.  Those must be fought for over years if not decades, and it is not defeatist to wonder whether it’s too late.

…I think Joe Matthews says it fairly well.

As the countdown to insolvency continues….

• George Skelton occasionally gets a good column in with all the High Broderism, and in today’s, he recognizes that the Governor is all talk when it comes to “blowing up the boxes” of waste in Sacramento.  Not only that, the ideas he does champion, like eliminating the California Conservation Corps, are really stupid.  And that’s not me with the ad hominem attack, that’s me quoting Cal State Sacramento political science professor Barbara O’Connor.

• At the new site CalPensions, there is talk of former Republican Assemblyman Keith Richman using the Internet to gather signatures for an anti-worker “pension reform” initiative.  OOOH!!! Using the Internet!  Next thing you know Richman will get wise to the Facebook and the Twitter!

Thing is, Internet or no Internet, Californians like workers because by and large they ARE workers.

• There’s another powerful special interest waiting to argue their case in the halls of the legislature: say hello to Big Golf, which doesn’t want increased taxes on golf-related activities, which are currently exempt from sales tax.  Don’t make me change the name of Republicans to the Golf Party!

• Arnold’s spending cuts are incredibly painful on the least of society.  The LAO is offering a more sensible and less punitive alternative.

• The San Diego Chargers are looking to “expand” into the LA Market. You have to wonder if San Diego can compete with LA to hold onto the Chargers, if a competition begins.

• This has got to be the coolest photo of the inauguration ever. You can pan around and find some crazy stuff.   Yo Yo Ma taking an iPhone photo, Dick Cheney looking, well, evil, and what I think is a sleeping Clarence Thomas. Really, really cool.  If you were there, can you find yourself?

• The SacBee has a nice little comparison between the three budget plans, Arnold’s, the Democratic conference committee’s, and the GOP borrow and spend “plan.”

• Are we a “high-tax” state? George Skelton takes a look at some of the numbers.  It’s not such an easy question.  You can get numbers anywhere from 6th in the country to 45th on different metrics.  Take a look at the article, there’s a lot of data there.

• Josh Richman of the MediaNews Group of newspapers in the Bay Area, puts the lie to the McCain campaign’s argument of sexism over the lipstick comment. Somehow it’s cool for McCain to talk about putting lipstick on a pig about Hillary Clinton’s (video here). It’s good to see there are some journalists still willing to call a lie for what it really is.

• An interesting method of clearing a hillside in downtown LA: 100 goats. Photo courtesy LAist contributor  Jonathan Alcorn.

• There’s a fundraiser for Ginny Mayer for State Senate on September 14th. Ginny Mayer is running for the 35th District, which runs along the coast from Seal Beach to Irvine and Newport Beach, currently held by Tom Harman.

Maybe George Skelton took my post last week to heart, or maybe the self-evident truth smacked him upside the head, but in today’s column Skelton calls for eliminating the 2/3 rule:

It’s a good bet that 51% of the Legislature would have voted for a budget by now — maybe even had one in place for the July 1 start of the new fiscal year. But 67% is required.

Only two other states have such a monstrous hurdle. And both are better positioned to deal with it because, unlike California, their legislatures are lopsidedly dominated by one party….

State Sen. Tom McClintock (R-Thousand Oaks), a hero of fiscal conservatives, long has favored allowing a majority budget vote.

“The two-thirds vote for the budget has not contained spending, and it blurs accountability,” McClintock says. “If anything, in past years, it has prompted additional spending as votes for the budget are cobbled together.”

The rub is that while McClintock is willing to support a majority vote for a budget he is not willing to support majority vote for taxes. That is the one that really matters. If we had a majority rule for the budget but 2/3 for taxes, it would do nothing to change the current budget standoff as Republicans would still use their numbers to block a tax increase and therefore block a budget.

The column has some good quotes from Steinberg and Bass, who are showing welcome interest in fixing the odious 2/3 rule:

Both incoming Senate leader Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) and Assembly Speaker Karen Bass (D-Los Angeles) say they’ll consider developing a 2010 ballot initiative to permit majority-vote budgets.

“I’m telling you, I’m very serious about it,” Steinberg says. “We can’t keep doing this. This is ridiculous. It’s unproductive.”

Bass figures there would be plenty of financial support for a ballot campaign from labor unions, healthcare providers and others who rely on public funds and are frustrated by incessantly tardy budgets.

“This budget crisis we’re in is a perfect example of why we need to be like 47 other states,” Bass says. “I’m not sure what we have in common with Arkansas and Rhode Island. . . .

“We would have had a budget by the constitutional deadline, June 15.”

Both Bass and Steinberg need to move on a fix for the 2/3 rule. But since that won’t happen until 2010, we need a solution to THIS budget crisis – a solution which will require voters to hold Republicans accountable for their hostage tactics.

Lest we let Skelton off easy today, he still shows he believes in the Media’s First Commandment: Thou Shalt Not Speak Ill of Republicans:

Don’t blame Republicans either. They’re being asked by the governor to break their pledges — however misguided they were — not to raise taxes. Moreover, most are philosophically opposed to taxing people more — particularly during a recession — and are sticking to their principles. That’s supposed to be an admirable trait.

Nonsense. The 2/3 rule isn’t a problem unless one party makes it a problem. The Republicans are using the 2/3 rule as a weapon to destroy this state and make its residents suffer. Don’t let them get away with it.