Marin unions appeal pension ruling to state Supreme Court By Richard Halstead, October 4, 2016, Marin Independent Journal Four Marin labor groups have appealed a state appeals court decision that some say could radically alter the ability to reduce the retirement benefits of public employees who are still on the job. The plaintiffs — the Marin...

Government unions in California collect and spend over $1.0 billion per year. That’s just government unions. That’s just California. They use a small fraction of this money to engage in collective bargaining. They use about a third of it to engage in politics – that’s nearly $700 million per election cycle. The rest, well over...

For years, teachers’ unions have tried to kill charter schools—but only on odd-numbered days. On even-numbered days, they tried to organize them. Things lately have become very odd, at least in California; the unions are in full-assault mode. United Teachers of Los Angeles president Alex Caputo-Pearl has long groused about how charter schools don’t play...

On Halloween 2014, Stanton, California, city manager James Box wrote to the city’s residents. City officials were at the end of a year-long campaign to stampede residents toward acceptance of Measure GG, creating a one-cent city sales tax, the first of its kind in Orange County. They had warned residents that failure to approve the...

My colleague Matt Smith recently observed that Huntington Beach is following the model of Ferguson, Missouri: raising fines on misdemeanors in order to generate more revenue for a cash-strapped city. The Department of Justice found that strategy was a contributing factor to rioting that followed the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson on August...

Los Angeles school teachers gathered in August in the posh, iconic – and for the group, weirdly ironic – Westin Bonaventure Hotel. They heard their union’s leaders extol their role as revolutionary defenders of the city’s poorest communities against the wealthy. But that’s not how the city’s poor have seen it. The poorer you are,...

CUSD’s Kirsten Vital  In the space of just a few months, state officials have suddenly turned their attention to a problem in the public-educational shadows: insider dealing among California school district officials and outside vendors. In a January opinion, state Attorney General Kamala Harris concluded that school officials had become too cozy with companies that...

Officials of the Orange Unified School District have spent more than $50,000 to support a $288 million bond measure on the November ballot. Expenses include $23,200 for opinion polling and $6,000 per month for campaign consultants, according to documents reviewed by the California Policy Center: School board members authorized the district to spend up to...

Capistrano Unified HQ: More like a Four Seasons resort. Anyone looking down the barrel of an $889 million school bond should consider what the Capistrano Unified School District did with its last bond, in 2002. After issuing the bond – called a certificate of participation (COP) – the district began constructing a $35 million administration building...