Our take on today's issues
CPI BLOG
With Peter Dreier
California is broken — and broke. Its K-12 public schools, roads, levies, aqueducts, parks, and bridges; its health-care system; home health care for the elderly and disabled; and even its once-envied public universities are all crumbling from long-term neglect and underfunding. State employees have been forced to take three unpaid furlough days per month — equal to a 14 percent pay cut.
If there was an animal to describe the mayor’s state of being in the State of the City address, it would be the tiger. Probably an old Siberian tiger marking his territory, whose growl is resonant, whose diet is stray stag (and occasionally a wild boar), and whose beaming bulk awes its privileged audience. Not only that the tiger is an apt animal for welcoming the Chinese year ahead, but that it epitomizes the valiance and the vanity in the show this week.
The talk about the city going into bankruptcy to solve its budget woes is as flippant as talk about a family going to Las Vegas, so they can pay off their grocery bills. With a revenue stream of more than $1 billion annually, a pooled investment portfolio of $2 billion, and a tax-base with healthy GDP of over $50,000 per capita and rising, San Diego has few excuses.
The painful cuts to city services over the past three years would be akin a family starving itself to save dollars and cents, so that someone can go to Vegas to gamble it off.
The bottom line is that businesses in San Diego pay the least for license fees among any of the cities for any type of business, at an average of a fifth of the average paid by businesses in the 10 largest cities in California.
Growth of business generates a demand for city services such as police, fire fighting, libraries, parks and road maintenance, for which the city cannot raise revenues except through a ballot measure. The post Proposition-13 dilemma that the city faces is to either stop business expansion, or undergo an expensive and politically charged election.
One of the most significant embarrassments of public service is transparency — the government truly does not have much to hide behind. Transparency is the ability of anybody, anytime to peer into the privacy of any public employee, which is unparalleled in the private sector. Everything from how much the employee makes, to how she does her work is public record. The naked intrusiveness of Public Record Act (PRA) requests in regular business would make major corporations and their executives blush.
The city attorney’s opinion itself is a legal question mark. His argument is that the majority of an electoral membership, rather than the majority who voted in an election, is required to pass something. If we held our politicians and propositions to that standard, democracy would grind to a halt. The “yes” votes on Prop 13 (People’s Initiative to Limit Property Taxation) constituted only 43% of all registered voters, in an election in which voter turnout was 69%. In the revisionist Goldsmithian logic, Proposition 13 in 1978 that is the root cause of our statewide fiscal distress, never passed.
When I think about election day next week, the mental image I find most fitting is in the 1954 classic, the “Lord of the Flies,” about a group of teenagers stranded on a desert island that revert to savagery in their struggle for survival.
Californians struggling to keep important programs are on a different kind of island. The metaphorical island that we are on now is the one built by Proposition 13 and the Howard Jarvis tax rebellion of the late 1970s. That was the beginning of California’s descent from a once golden state of opportunity to a land starved of investment and resources.
Proposition 13’s tax caps, along with the requirement for budgets to be passed with a two-thirds supermajority, mean that a minority could thwart the aspirations of most Californians’ desires for high-quality services; great education that is the envy of the nation; a world-class infrastructure that is clean, green and essential for a productive business climate; and a health care system that meets the needs of all.
The Mayor is taking a $6,000 cut, after giving himself a $65,000 raise.
Remember that last year, the Mayor was drawing a salary of $35,000. After he was re-elected Mayor on December 8th, he awarded himself a raise, without so much as squeaking to the press, whilst parks and libraries were being shut down. Now he announces a 6 percent cut to the world. Here is my calculation assuming the annual salary points at the beginning of the fiscal years:
$35,000 (2008 salary) + $65,000 (2008 raise) – $6,000 (2009 cut) = $94,000 (2009 salary)
Difference between July 2009 and July 2008 salary = +$59,000
It’s the next big mega-moment for the American news media: Obama’s 100-days report card.
So, this is my take. But first, let’s start with two steps.
First step: As you read this, think about the challenges you’ve faced in the last 100 days to reflect on what you’ve been able to accomplish. Doesn’t seem like a lot of time, does it?
Second step: While my Republican friends say that we shouldn’t spend time bemoaning the past, a respect for history’s role in understanding the present and plotting the future requires that we at least recognize the position the Bush administration got us into.
President Obama announced that we would add 4,000 more troops to the 17,000 he already ordered to Afghanistan.
In his address to Congress, he also announced that he would restore honest and transparent budgeting to pay for our military commitments. “This budget,” Obama said, …. for the first time, includes the full cost of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. For seven years, we have been a nation at war. No longer will we hide its price.”
Obama’s declaration was a clear rejection of George Bush’s supplemental off-budget appropriations designed to make it hard to oppose without being accused of abandoning the troops. Given estimates that the Iraq war may ultimately become the most expensive in U.S. history, Bush’s approach was fiscal irresponsibility wrapped in post-9/11 “yellow ribbon” patriotism. It saddled us with massive deficits and avoided the hard choices of balancing national priorities.
San Diego political community is buzzing with rumors that long-time County Supervisors Greg Cox and Ron Roberts will retire sometime soon. The heart of the story is that instead of serving out their remaining years, one or both might resign mid-term allowing the County Board to appoint a successor.
This would presumably be the preferred choice of the local Republican establishment, increasingly worried about San Diego’s “blue-ward” shift after Obama’s first-time-since-FDR county democratic majority last November. Since Cox and Roberts are both Republicans in districts with massive Democratic registration advantage, a mid-term appointment may be the only way for the party to hold on to the nominally non-partisan seats. Especially if their replacements were ‘elected’ by the four remaining members of the Board of Supervisors – all Republicans.
