Our take on today's issues
CPI BLOG
This week, even as we celebrate the 5th anniversary of San Diego’s Living Wage Ordinance, special interests are ramping up a stealth campaign to kill the Living Wage.
City contractors and developers are pushing a deceptively named ballot initiative that would repeal and outlaw the Living Wage Ordinance.
The Living Wage Ordinance is under attack! Don’t give money or your signature to the misnamed “Competition and Transparency in City Contracting Initiative.” Read more »
A misleading campaign has begun for a San Diego ballot measure that would reverse a decade of CPI progress for workers and their families, including the Living Wage Ordinance.
City Councilmember Carl DeMaio, with funding from contractor groups, is collecting signatures for a November ballot initiative that would force privatization of city services and make San Diego the only city in the U.S. to ban Living Wage laws.
New CPI study finds construction training programs key to economic recovery
CPI released a report today linking quality apprenticeship programs in the building trades to the future of California’s green economy and economic recovery.
The report, Construction Apprenticeship Programs: Career Training for California’s Recovery, demonstrates that apprenticeship training is most effective when run collaboratively by labor and management.
Reform that rewards insurers could be worse
In recent weeks, orchestrated outrage and loony scare tactics have drowned out the most basic fact about health reform: The status quo is far more frightening.
High and escalating costs. Rationing of care. Restricted choice. Long waits for care. Even “death panels” (read: insurance claim-review departments). Our private insurance system imposes all this already — on people lucky enough to be insured.
As San Diego County supervisors seek to privatize more services, public officials elsewhere are reading the danger signs and starting to move in the opposite direction.
“San Diego is changing,” as John Lee Evans told the crowd at the San Diego Unified school board meeting Tuesday night. Developers and builders, accustomed to calling the shots here, are losing their grip in a sea change of increased community involvement and attention to the needs of working people.
Evans and his fellow board members Shelia Jackson and Richard Barrera are part of that change. They voted Tuesday to make sure the money from school construction and renovation bonds stays in the community and gives youth and families in the district a chance at quality jobs with health insurance and stable, middle-class careers.
The San Diego Unified School Board is closing in on a crucial decision, a chance to ensure that the spending of $2.1 billion in bond funds benefits the local economy and local families as much as possible.
On the board’s agenda next Tuesday is a Project Stabilization Agreement (PSA) for school construction and renovation projects funded with Prop S bonds. Approving the negotiated agreement will mean that more of the 10,000 new jobs will:
The carbon footprint of the average San Diegan — including residential energy use and transportation — is larger than that of the average resident of Los Angeles, CPI documents in an Earth Day policy brief. The paper also shows that the City of San Diego lags behind LA in policies to reduce energy use.
San Diegans travel 23% more road miles per year than our notoriously car-reliant neighbors in LA – 9,463 miles per capita. Less than 6% of San Diego’s energy comes from renewable sources, far below the state-mandated 20% utility companies are required to reach by 2010.
Those are among the findings in Climate Change Performance and Policy: San Diego versus Los Angeles, issued today by CPI.
Building industry interest groups are financing a desperate attack on the San Diego school board, trying to block an important opportunity to create middle-class careers for students and the low-income San Diego communities that need them most.
The democratically elected board members of the San Diego Unified School District had the good business sense to vote to negotiate a Project Stabilization Agreement for all construction projects funded with the $2.1 billion from Proposition S.
