Since 2008, according to the Judicial Council of California, thousands of court staffers have lost jobs while 52 courthouses and more than 200 courtrooms have been shuttered. In some counties, residents must now make a long drive to a different city to simply pay a fine; in all, the council estimates that 2.1 million Californians have lost access to a courtroom in their community.
The General Fund has different responsibilities today than it did in 2007 and, therefore, the level of General Fund spending today is not easily comparable to that discussed in our November 2007 Fiscal Outlook. In several key areas of public services, the state has shifted funding responsibilities from the General Fund to (1) other state and local government accounts or (2) individuals and families. Because of these shifts, current General Fund spending arguably is understated relative to what might have been expected prior to the recession. . . In a hypothetical world in which none of the shifts above occurred and the General Fund still paid for all of these expenses, General Fund spending in 2015-16 might be somewhere between $125 billion and $130 billion, much higher than the $113 billion reflected in the Governor’s recent spending proposal.
The district and the teachers union announced this month that they had reached an impasse in contract negotiations. Each side argues that the other is being unreasonable. The union is seeking a pay raise of 8.5%; the district has offered 5%.
In 2014 teacher pension systems had a total of a half trillion dollars in unfunded liabilities — a debt load that climbed more than $100 billion in just the last two years. Across the states, an average of 70 cents of every dollar contributed to state teacher pension systems goes toward paying off the ever-increasing pension debt, not to future teacher benefits.
California’s legislative analyst on Tuesday proposed a new system for funding school facilities: grants to districts based on enrollment.
The Board of Equalization released a proposal on Friday to reduce the per-gallon tax Californians pay on regular gas by 7.5 cents per gallon, a 21 percent cut from the current 36-cent excise tax. The new rate of 28.5 cents per gallon could be approved Feb. 24 and take effect July 1, the start of the 2015-16 fiscal year. Californians will still pay some of the highest gas taxes in the nation, based on sales tax, federal taxes, and other fees.
Slowly, quietly – but unmistakably – California’s education establishment is dismantling or softening state and federal testing-based “accountability” systems that were imposed on public schools more than a decade ago.
Lawmakers, educators and representatives of the homebuilding industry pushed back Wednesday against Gov. Jerry Brown’s proposal to end a long-standing state policy of issuing bonds to help pay for school construction.
Total state government revenue rose by 16.3 percent, from $1.9 trillion in 2012 to $2.2 trillion in 2013, according to the latest findings on state government finances from the U.S. Census Bureau.
California contains 12.2 percent of the nation’s population but its state government accounted for 13.8 percent of all state spending in the 2012-13 fiscal year, according to a new Census Bureau report.
With the trends moving in opposite directions, Texas now has a larger share of its workforce in government jobs than California. With a civilian workforce of just over 13 million, about 14.3% of all working Texans have government jobs.
A panel created by the Legislature to review state parks operations will report Friday that the Department of Parks and Recreation is underfunded and mired in outdated bureaucracy, and that the parks system is out of reach for many poor people in urban areas.
Significant new spending commitments could represent a failure of the state to heed the lessons of its past if they were to come at the expense of its budget reserve or rested on aggressive future revenue assumptions, the report says.
Across the state, report cards are undergoing a sea change in how students are measured for academic performance. Where teachers once graded students on traditional math or English skills, they now judge attributes such as grit, gratitude or being sensitive to others.
California state workers’ salaries rose a total $1.1 billion last year, according to new payroll data, while the number of state employees also grew.