Class conflict: Santa Ana schools are spending more and more on fewer students. (U.S. Air Force file photo) School officials in California’s sixth-largest school district are working overtime to promote a massive $1.2 billion bond tentatively scheduled for a districtwide vote in November. Yet behind their chatter about improving Santa Ana Unified facilities is a...
Call it a tale of two school districts: The Santa Ana Unified School District (SAUSD) is sending out conflicting messages regarding the status of its schools: their facilities are amazingly good — unless they’re amazingly bad. According to the School Accountability Report Cards (SARCs) posted on the SAUSD website, all of the district’s high schools...
Sacramento — In its argument in the U.S. Supreme Court’s Janus case, which challenges the right of unions to collect union dues for collective-bargaining purposes, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees argues that collective bargaining is not inherently political. But the plaintiff Mark Janus, an Illinois state employee, argues that everything a...
Sacramento – In the seven years since Gov. Jerry Brown shut down California’s redevelopment agencies, their defenders have managed to resuscitate their image. Never mind that these controversial agencies ladled out corporate welfare, wantonly abused eminent domain on behalf of developers and diverted $5 billion annually from public services. A new bill would bring them...
When speaking about pension burdens on California’s cities and counties, a perennial question is how much are the costs going to increase? In recent years, California’s biggest pension system, CalPERS, has offered “Public Agency Actuarial Valuation Reports” that purport to answer that question. Notwithstanding the fact that CalPERS predictive credibility is questionable – i.e., they’ve...
As of a few days ago, high-wage earners have a new reason to leave California: their state income taxes are no longer deductible on their federal income tax returns. Can California’s union-controlled state legislature adapt? Can they lower the top marginal tax rates to keep wealthy people from leaving California? The short answer is, no, they cannot. They cannot conceive of the possibility that California's current economic success is not because of their confiscatory policies, but in spite of them.
Sacramento As Napa’s deadly wildfires have subsided, newspapers and politicians are asking an interesting question in an indelicate way. How come the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or Cal Fire, relies so heavily on thousands of prison inmates to battle the blazes alongside well-paid professional firefighters? Many observers have even used the term...
Sacramento — After reading through the recently completed state audit of “improper activities by state agencies and employees,” one might wrongly conclude that California’s massive bureaucracy of 131,000-plus employees is a well-oiled machine. After all, if this is all they could find, then the problems in state government must not go very deep. The California...
“A public employer shall provide all public employees an orientation and shall permit the exclusive representative, if applicable, to participate.” – Excerpt from California State Assembly Bill AB 52, December 2016 In plain English, AB 52 requires every local government agency in California to bring union representatives into contact with every new hire, to “allow...
California’s minimum wage is set to gradually increase to $15 by 2022, following in the footsteps of minimum wage pioneer city Seattle. Unfortunately, the unintended consequences of Seattle’s minimum wage experiment are starting to show, both in deteriorating restaurant quality and in decreasing wages for low-income workers. According to the latest study, Seattle’s 2016 minimum...
Sacramento More than a decade ago, the Orange County Sheriff’s Department offered a good value to cities that wanted to provide police services without having to operate their own departments. However, years of excessive salary and pension increases have driven up the costs of the contracts and could drive cities toward the brink of bankruptcy....
Beginning around 2009 it became clear to civic leaders and councilmembers that the City of San Diego faced serious financial challenges. A San Diego County Grand Jury in that year released a report that recommended the city file for bankruptcy. The report cited the underfunded City’s pension system as the primary underlying cause of their...
Sacramento — Observers have wondered in recent months why the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, the nation’s largest state pension fund and one of Wall Street’s most muscular financial players, has taken such a hamfisted approach toward one of California’s tiniest and least-powerful cities. There’s a rational, albeit troubling, reason for its approach. After the...
WORKERS OF THE WORLD: San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee, bottom center, walks with protesters during a march in San Francisco, May 1, 2017. Despite San Francisco’s pension disaster, Lee was one of several local officials who recently received a massive salary bump. By Steven Greenhut and David Schwartzman Sacramento — Pension reformers had for years...