Union chief Caputo-Pearl: “This agreement is horrible,” a teacher wrote on UTL:A’s Facebook page. “It was not worth striking 7 minutes let alone 7 days!!! Our union has let us down once again.” (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes) LOS ANGELES — L.A. teachers on Tuesday voted on a deal their union calls “historic.” But by then, the...
CLASS WAR: Teachers union activists and supporters surround Santa Ana school district candidate Angie Cano, April 2018. Cano, a school choice activist, was attempting to speak at a district board meeting. Police escorted her into the building. Union membership in California’s sixth-largest school district fell rapidly in 2018, perhaps signaling a broader statewide decline following...
When evaluating the financial challenges facing California’s state and local public employee pension funds, a compelling question to consider is when, exactly when, will these funds financially collapse? That is, of course, an impossible question to answer. CalPERS, for example, manages hundreds of billions in assets, which means that long before it literally runs out...
California law prohibits government officials from using taxpayer dollars “for the purpose of urging the support or defeat of any ballot measure.” But on February 13, in the meeting room of the Santa Ana Unified School District, school officials revealed a political campaign that began with shaping public opinion and will end in November with a district-wide vote on a bond measure that will cost residents hundreds of millions of dollars.
Survey says? Whatever they want it to say. Under the guise of measuring public opinion, Santa Ana school officials are trying to shape it – and they’re using taxpayer dollars to pay for it. In April and May, Santa Ana Unified School District officials papered the city with mail that looks like a poll. The...
1999: Kelly Rowland, LaTavia Roberson, Beyonce Knowles and LeToya Luckett, of Destiny’s Child, perform at the Woodlands Pavilion at Jump Jam. Santa Ana Unified was asking taxpayers to pay its unplayable bills. (AP Photo/Houston Chronicle, Steve Campbell) It’s 1999, and Bill Clinton is one year removed from his affair with Monica Lewinsky becoming public. Destiny’s...
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...