On Friday, May 1st, I attended a town hall meeting on education in Ventura

The guest of honor was State Senator Gloria Romero,  current chair of the Senate Education Committee and the Senate Finance Subcommittee on Education.

http://dist24.casen.govoffice….

She shared the stage with Hannah Beth Jackson, our recent Assembly Rep, and Das Williams, member of the Santa Barbara City council and legislative analyst for the Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy.

http://www.coastalalliance.com…

Other speakers included the Dean of SB City College and the Super of the Ventura Unified School District.

Sadly, there were only about two dozen people in the audience, I only heard about it from an Email sent out Thursday. Most of the attendees were educators.

Romero was inspiring. She’s fully committed to education as the engine of equality and prosperity. She’s reminded us that the economy has changed and that education must change with it. And she also pointed out that 1/3 of all American children live in California…wow!

more…

Romero said that California has a state education code that details everything from textbooks to district management, but it has no preamble and no mission statement. She believes that beyond the current funding crisis, our education system has an identity crisis. She believes that public education must be “sold” again to a new generation of taxpayers who have come to take it for granted.

I was totally impressed by her commitment to this cause. Most of the meeting was devoted to the current problems and possibilities of public education. But we did talk about special election too.

Romero stated her “disgust” with the budget deal. She described her 15 minutes of fame when CNN broadcast her 3 AM address to the Senate articulating that disgust. She recounted Able Maldonaldo’s reports that his Republican colleagues were willing to push the state “off a cliff” to prevent tax increases. But she’s supporting Props 1A-B.

I missed Hannah Beths’s opening remarks, but she later reminded us that the budget “deal” included 1.5 billion dollars of corporate tax breaks – for which the state received nothing in return.

The educators did not take sides on the props. They told the group how their institutions are already stuggling, but refrained from saying “you must vote yes… for the children”.  But the Dean of SBCC did express some doubts about the future of the spending cap, and a member of CTA stood up in the audience and itemized her union’s opposition to 1A

I asked one question: Being dead-set against political blackmail, I intend to vote No on the 1A. But, being the parent of one college student and one high schooler, I am wavering. I don’t want to condemn the current generation of students to a third-rate education so I could play chicken the the kamikazi wing of the Republican Party. I wanted to know if anyone on the panel  thought that the spending cap was a problem that could be “managed” in the future, after 1A got us past the current crisis.

Romero believes that if the Props fail, the ‘Pubs will gain political advantage. She said It will be very hard for the Dems to juggle another “fees for taxes” deal like the on the Governor vetoed last fall. She feels that the Dems will benefit by taking the issue of “fiscal responsibility” away from the Pubs by supporting the spending cap. Das William said that the cap is a “soft” one, which I understood to mean that yes, there will be room to manuever the budget after 1A passes. They’re both for the compromise, but they agree that it’s really up to the voters.

Romero got a little heated when she spoke about Prop 1F. Before she was elected to the Assembly, she earned $52,000 a year as a college professor. She got a small pay raise by becoming a legislator. The idea of millionaire Able Maldonado, flying around in his private jet,  telling people that legislators aren’t earning their pay really burns her.

It burns me that she’s going to be termed out in a couple of years.

It was terrific of Romero to make the drive and bring a bit of Sacramento to Ventura County. I’m sorry it wasn’t better publicized. I hope Pedro Nava follows her example… and Tony Strickland too.

Altho I expect his appearances will be limited to a work-day, mid-afternoon, country-club setting in Simi Valley, attended by no one but retired Republican faithfuls.

Two big revelations came to light as the Senate conducted oversight over the ‘secret’ plan to build a new death chamber at San Quintin.

1. Governor Schwarzenegger’s staff knew about the plan before it became public, something he contradicted in his own public statements on the matter.
2. U.S. District Court Judge Jeremy Fogel did not order the state to build a new death chamber.  He merely required that the state keep him apprised of what it does with regards to the death penalty process.

More on the flip courtesy of John Meyers.

This afternoon Kingston “Bud” Prunty, the undersectetary of the CA Dept. of Corrections of Rehabilitation testified, bringing the subject of what did they know and when did they know it to the forefront.  Meyers has audio of Prunty’s back and forth with Sen. Gloria Romero.

As for the second:

And one of the key topics of the hearing was that U.S. District Court Judge Jeremy Fogel had never demanded that the state needs a new death chamber, but rather that the state needs to inform him of what changes the state plans to make to the death penalty process. Nonetheless, several internal state documents show that CDCR officials claimed that Judge Fogel had “ordered” them to create a new death chamber.

But then the questions went beyond who gave the OK… as senators asked Prunty who else had been at the meetings where the decision was made.

Undersecretary Prunty said that there were several meetings (which another witness said began the first week of January) about how to comply with Judge Fogel’s wishes. And he said that one result of those meetings was an agreement to build a new death chamber.

And was the plan, asked Sen. Mike Machado (D-Linden), discussed in the presence of staffers from Governor Schwarzenegger and Attorney General Jerry Brown?

“Yes,” said Prunty.

That flatly conflicts with what the governor said at an April 24th press conference, two weeks after the death chamber was made public.

“They went about it in the wrong way by not sharing the information and including the legislators,” he then told reporters.

Late this afternoon, the governor’s press secretary said that while top Schwarzenegger advisers knew that a new death chamber was the preferred plan, they did not know that it was actually being built.

Let’s recap here shall we… 

The judge never told them to build it.  The corrections department had several meetings about it, which included Schwarzenegger’s staff.  They decided to build it anyway and tried to claim it would cost less than $400k so the legislature would not have to be informed.  It runs over, to the tune of $850k.  The legislature finds out, gets pissed.  Arnold say he knows nothing.  The legislature decides to shine a little light on the subject, thereby exposing the above.  Fan-flippin-tastic.

And we are now supposed to trust Arnold and the prison system to adequately administrate the spending of billions of dollars in new construction.  Like Frank says, we need some serious sunshine on our prison system.

One hopes that the latest revelations over the death chamber will cause the Governor to reconsider his actions of last year. They show how systemic the problems are in the prisons and that even the head of the CDCR does not know what is going on inside the massive bureaucracy under his charge. No one man or woman can ferret out what is going on, and that is where the media–as the public’s eyes and ears–and the legislature’s and Governor’s first line of warning–come into play. Without this, even people of good will, in which the committee appeared to include Tilton, will have abuses and problems hidden from them.