Monday’s report, based on data gathered in the last year, follows an earlier study by the group that found more than 4 million Californians had their licenses suspended for unpaid tickets since 2006. The cost of tickets soared during the state’s budget crisis because a variety of fees were added to the fines to pay for state programs.
The latest tentative labor agreement with California’s correctional officers proves that there’s more than one way to boost employee compensation without calling it a “raise.” . . An analysis by the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office figures that, if approved, the contract would incrementally add annual costs that top out at $588 million in fiscal 2018-19.
The project, put out to bid in 2007 and still far from completion, was finally put to rest on Monday when the state Department of Health Care Services announced a legal settlement with Xerox Corp., the project contractor, under which Xerox will pay the state approximately $120 million.
The key foundation for promoting this new plan, is that ridership will be greatly enhanced with commuters using this High Speed Rail section to commute from the Central Valley to Silicon Valley. The Authority and others are promoting this projection as a major improvement to the jobs / housing imbalance that currently prevails in Silicon Valley. . . The projected HSR fare from Fresno or Bakersfield is $68 each way. For a daily commuter that is $136 per day, or about $34000 per year to pay for the HSR train ride. This does not include other charges like parking or transportation from Diridon to a final working destination.
To little fanfare and virtually no media coverage, the Congressional Budget Office sharply downgraded its forecast for ObamaCare in its latest report, issued in late March. By just about every measure, things are looking worse than they did a year ago.
Just days before California State University professors were expected to walk out on the job, Chancellor Timothy White and the California Faculty Association jointly announced Friday a tentative contract agreement far more expansive than the 5 percent raise teaching staff sought for nearly a year. . . In order to minimize salary compression that has seen some faculty paid lower than more recently hired colleagues, additional 2.65 percent bumps will be available to thousands of instructors in 2017-18 based on their years of service. . . In an interview with The Bee, White said the agreement would help students by pouring more resources into the classroom while also giving the university more time to figure out how to pay for it.
The Sacramento Bee story proves that the state’s public employee unions will use the increase in the minimum wage at the bottom-rungs of a pay scale to push for across the board wage increases for most public employees. And they will likely get it, given how public compensation practices work for public agencies in California.
The proposed spending is more than double the $3.09 billion in cap-and-trade auction spending included in Governor Jerry Brown’s proposed budget, and comes at a time when the spending of auction revenue is under scrutiny. The auctions are generating billions of dollars a year for programs that are unrelated to those who are required to pay, but the process was not approved by a two-thirds majority of lawmakers, as the California Constitution requires for tax increases.
Billionaire David Tepper is moving from New Jersey to Florida this year — and so is his tax contribution to New Jersey, which is so large the move threatens his former home’s state budget.
Shortly before Brown signed the California law on Monday, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed a similar measure for his state. During the ensuing public celebration, New York state’s AFL-CIO President Mario Cilento said, “When we raise the floor in wages, we raise the ceiling. … Those of you making 16 or 17 or 18 dollars an hour, the next time your union goes in to negotiate, they’re going to ask for 19 and 20 and 21 dollars and up!”
By law, the state Controller’s office is supposed to audit Proposition 30’s Education Protection fund, which doles out the funds according to a strict formula. Although the law gave no time requirement, the audit has not yet happened and isn’t projected to be complete until around a month before the November election, which one critic says shows a lack of transparency.
State officials certainly have moxie. As of 2014, California’s unfunded pension liabilities were $170 billion, according to a new study by Wayne Winegarden for the Pacific Research Institute. With additional risk taken into account, those numbers can soar to $600 billion, threatening to crowd out services and stifle economic growth. The same officials who refuse to rein in the pension debts they created presume to fix the pension problem for everyone else.
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
So cities need to keep in mind that if they build a rail system, they not only have to pay to build it, they pretty much have to pay to rebuild it every 40 years. This is a challenge because as we see it’s easier to muster the will to build something new than to maintain something you already have. . . The problem comes in for cities that aren’t NYC, Chicago, Boston, Philly, DC, and San Francisco. Once you get below that group, the value starts becoming more debatable.
BART is on track to award $1,000 bonuses to each of its 3,357 employees for meeting a ridership threshold, it’s second such payout in two years after paying them $3.3 million last summer, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. . . The news comes amid growing commuter frustration with the system, which was partially sidelined for much of last week after an electrical surge fried 50 cars and resulted in limited bus service on parts of the Pittsburg-Bay Point line.