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The teacher shortage in the K-12 system has become so critical that a local school district is offering a $10,000 signing bonus for its next math and science teachers.

The initiative was sold to voters in 2012 as a way to generate billions for green energy projects at California schools and create 11,000 jobs each year. The Associated Press reported in August that less than $300 million had been distributed to schools and only 1,700 jobs created in three years.

Federal judicial orders are mostly to blame for a $3 billion drop in the budget savings that California prison officials promised four years ago, corrections officials said Wednesday. . . But instead there is a $3 billion annual difference between the promised savings and the $10.5 billion corrections department budget Gov. Jerry Brown proposed earlier this month, in part because the state also chose to boost the number of prison beds available.

“We can see from where the numbers are going how it’s going to crowd out education and all the other California services, and it’s ultimately unsustainable,” said Rob Lapsley, president of the California Business Roundtable. “The governor has to address it now, and he’s been clear that he’s going to try to do that.”

California has a decades-long history of switching not only its entire budget but particular revenues and expenses back and forth between cash and accrual – and hybrids – in response to current fiscal and political conditions.

The increased pension payment is projected to consume about 38 percent of growth in the education budget between now and 2019. In other words, school districts will pay $3.1 billion more to the pension system in 2019-20 than they do today while the state’s minimum school funding guarantee, called Proposition 98, is projected to be about $8.3 billion higher in that same year.

Each of the two major lawsuits, introduced within weeks of each other 27 years ago, offers enduring lessons – in law, in politics and in the long, long time it takes to get things done in Washington.

It turns out “emergency drought relief” can take up to two years to distribute. On Wednesday, California regulators awarded the final pieces of the $680 million drought aid package Gov. Jerry Brown and state lawmakers approved in March 2014.

The administration’s revenue estimates for 2015–16 and 2016–17 are billions of dollars higher than they were in last year’s budget act. Higher revenues generate significant increases in Proposition 98 funding—$4.3 billion over the 2014–15 through 2016–17 period. After satisfying Proposition 98 and Proposition 2 requirements and funding adjustments to existing programs, the Governor’s plan allocates about $7 billion in discretionary General Fund resources.

School spending is also projected to go up whether or not the Proposition 30 taxes are extended. The Legislative Analyst’s Office, the state’s nonpartisan budget analyst, projects the minimum funding guarantee for public schools and community colleges is projected grow to $77.5 billion in 2019.

The birds I’m talking about are programs, mostly worthwhile, that Sacramento previously enacted. Now they have to be paid for.

A Milliman actuarial report three years ago said if CalSTRS were still operating under its 1990 structure, without the changes made in the late 1990s, pensions would have been 88 percent funded instead of 67 percent.

The Los Angeles City Council in recent years has repeatedly settled costly, high-profile lawsuits, agreeing to spend millions of dollars to end litigation brought by grieving families, disability-rights groups and people wrongfully convicted of crimes.

Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr. today proposed a $122.6 billion General Fund budget plan for 2016-17 that makes significant increases in funding for education, health care and state infrastructure, while bolstering the state’s Rainy Day Fund and paying down state debts and liabilities.

Gov. Jerry Brown, issuing a $170.6 billion state spending plan Thursday, proposed billions of dollars in new funding for schools, climate change programs and services for the elderly and disabled.