At a Capitol hearing on Thursday, that nearly forgotten idea reared its head as the state’s government-reform agency, the Little Hoover Commission, examined why Californians don’t trust their government. TQM was on a list of one speaker’s management fads that, over the years, failed to improve services enough to restore the public’s confidence in its governments.
Determined to shed long-term state debt, Gov. Jerry Brown wants the state to cease issuing K-12 school construction bonds, leaving school districts to pay the tab for building and renovating schools. A coalition of school districts and the building industry has responded with plans to go straight to voters with a $9 billion state school building bond in 2016.
California’s watchdog agency recommended on Wednesday that the legislature repeal a new law that caps the size of school district budgets, warning that over 91 percent of the state’s districts would have violated the new rules if they had been in place in 2014.
Much noise has been made over the years about California’s unfriendly tax environment. But an ongoing mantra at Beacon Economics is that California is not so much a ‘high’ tax state as a ‘dumb’ tax state. In other words, it is the structure of revenues that creates the problem, not simply the quantity being collected. This is important because it suggests that if we make certain logical changes to the structure of taxes in the state, it could simultaneously make California more business friendly while helping to cure the long-term deficit issues we still face – despite the current ‘balanced’ budget.
Even after California’s most massive public pension system reported that it’s regaining ground lost in the recession, many Orange County cities continue to grapple with painful shortfalls, especially the older burgs sporting their own police and fire departments. The newer, contract-heavy cities look lean and mean by contrast.
But that was then. What passes for oversight these days are often brief, highly orchestrated hearings that curry favor with some interest group.
Sometime in the next few weeks, the lead contractor for the Bay Bridge’s new eastern span will finally declare that the most complex public works project in California history is done — and state and local authorities will be solely responsible for a landmark beset by problems that trace back more than 16 years, to the day a handful of experts picked a design that bordered on the experimental.
Strong financial results, fueled by bullish stock markets and income-producing real estate, helped boost CalPERS’ funding level to 77% at the end of the 2014 fiscal year, up from 69.8% on June 30, 2013.
But, as Brown warns in his proposed 2015-16 budget, “economic expansions do not last forever. In the post-war period, the average expansion has been about five years. The current expansion has already exceeded the average by nine months. While there are few signs of immediate contraction, another recession is inevitable.”
They are the top vacation hoarders in a state bureaucracy with a lot of them. Tens of thousands of state employees have exceeded the official limit of 80 banked vacation days, leaving the state on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars.
Gov. Brown wants state workers to begin paying half the cost of their future retiree health care — a big change for workers making no payments for coverage that can pay 100 percent of the premium for a retiree and 90 percent for their dependents.
The governor also wants state workers to be given the option of a lower-cost health insurance plan with higher deductibles. The state would contribute to a tax-deferred savings account to help cover out-of-pocket costs not covered by the plan.
The CBP’s report shows that even with increased state revenues and a continuing economic recovery that has yet to reach many Californians, the Governor’s proposed budget prioritizes fiscal austerity over investing in broadly shared prosperity. The Governor’s proposal does reflect a focus on policy changes enacted in prior years — such as California’s new K-12 funding formula and the state’s implementation of federal health care reform — that move the state forward in important ways. Yet, while the Governor’s proposal includes long-term plans for paying down budgetary debt and saving for a rainy day, it does not present a similar vision for tackling California’s biggest challenges: still-high levels of unemployment and poverty, widening income inequality, and a safety net severely weakened by years of funding cuts.
School-construction and home-building groups Monday launched an effort to qualify a $9 billion school bond for the November 2016 ballot, only days after Gov. Jerry Brown released a budget plan that minimized the state’s role in paying for building new classrooms and modernizing existing ones.
Despite signals that his administration was ready to undertake a sweeping change for how new schools are paid for and older ones updated, Gov. Jerry Brown unveiled Friday a far less substantial facilities program, pushing the larger policy debate off for another time.
The idea, he said, is to broaden the sales tax to possibly include legal work, advertising, Internet usage, dry cleaning and other services. At the same time, he would lower the personal and corporate income tax and even boost the minimum wage.