Despite getting an extra $187,000 this year to help at-risk kids — the state’s new way of handing out money — Oak Ridge still has to make cuts because several other streams of funding are drying up. . . A big chunk of the state money next year is paying for the school’s assistant principal. But some teachers argue specialists are more critical.
Despite lowered state revenue projections and Gov. Jerry Brown’s prediction that an economic recession could come any moment, state funding for K-12 and community colleges will rise nearly $3 billion for the fiscal year starting July 1, under the May revision of the 2016-17 state budget released on Friday.
Days after the state’s biggest revenue month fell significantly short of his office’s expectations, Gov. Jerry Brown released a $169.3 billion revised spending plan Friday that assumes nearly $2 billion less revenue through June 2017, with the governor warning that people need to prepare “for a time of necessity.”
States’ actual expenditures for OPEB totaled $18.4 billion in 2013, or 1.6 percent of state-generated revenue. . . . If states had instead set aside the amount suggested by actuaries to pay for OPEB liabilities, their total payments that year would have more than doubled to $48 billion—4 percent of state-generated revenue—and spending to fully fund OPEB obligations would have outpaced what states contributed to active state employee health premiums.
However, the state would have to spend over three times as much – $6.6 billion a year – to fully cover current health care costs and whittle down its $80.3 billion unfunded liability for future health care obligations, according to a new report from Pew Charitable Trusts.
If all of California’s public pension debt were divided evenly by household, each house would need to pay $77,700, according to a new study by Stanford University.
The California State University faculty union announced Tuesday that its members overwhelmingly approved a new contract that will raise salaries by more than 10 percent over the next two years.
Preliminary numbers show California’s personal income tax collections were about $1 billion short of Gov. Jerry Brown’s projections during the pivotal month of April.
Indeed, our state government seems designed with the opposite of one-stop shopping as its guiding principle. California has more permitting agencies than most other states, all sorts of strange regional bodies, huge incentives for endless litigation, a divide between local governments that oversee land use and state agencies that regulate what you can do on the land, and the California Environmental Quality Act, which can kill almost any worthwhile project.
But rising energy costs are not the only cost increases we are seeing in the state. California businesses on average already pay 19% higher operating costs per job than the rest of the country in addition to paying 53% more in workers’ compensation. Corporate income tax is 43% higher than the national average and per employee is the ninth highest in the nation. Meanwhile, California has a poverty rate of 23.5%, the highest in the nation.
A fiscal-stress test by the credit ratings agency ranked the Golden State last among populous states for ability to mitigate the next economic crises. Texas placed first, followed by Missouri and Washington. California’s weak rating came from high revenue volatility and low budget reserves and fiscal nimbleness.
California, whose state budget is highly dependent on volatile income taxes, is the least able big state to withstand a recession, according to a “stress test” conducted by Moody’s Investor Service.
A week after California Gov. Jerry Brown signed the state’s $15 minimum wage boost into law, UC Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks sent a memo to employees announcing that 500 jobs were getting cut. . . Last year, University of California President Janet Napolitano announced plans to boost its minimum wage to $15 at the start of next school year, independent of the state law. Since UC Berkeley was already in financial trouble — it ran a $109 million deficit last year and is projecting a deficit of $150 million this year — number crunchers there had to have factored in the higher mandated wage when making their layoff decisions.
Having witnessed teaching “fads” since the 1950s and running charter schools as Oakland mayor, Gov. Jerry Brown doesn’t expect his own key education policy — called the Local Control Funding Formula — to close the academic performance gap between African Americans and Latinos and other student groups.
The state’s contribution will increase by an estimated $602 million, to $5.4 billion a year. School districts will be charged an additional $342 million, to a total of nearly $1.7 billion a year. While teachers are covered by CalSTRS, other school employees get their pensions from CalPERS.