Thousands of California teachers were given layoff notices a few weeks ago because state law requires the slips to be sent out each spring if administrators and trustees believe cuts are needed to balance their budgets.
This month, the districts must decide whether to continue or rescind those layoffs on the assumption that by then they’ll know the state of their 2012-13 finances.
That’s problematic in any year, because the Legislature, which supplies most of the schools’ money, typically doesn’t settle the state budget until weeks or even months later.
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Two years ago, when Gov. Jerry Brown was trying to reclaim the governorship he had left 28 years earlier, he often said that his age, maturity and lack of political ambition would allow him to succeed where others had failed.Brown said he would patiently attack the state’s political issues, especially the deficit-ridden state budget, vowing, “I will tell the truth in ways [that hadn’t occurred] in years past.”
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California’s Department of Motor Vehicles probably touches more state residents than any other state agency, and therefore has become the bureaucracy that everyone loves to hate. At one time, that disdain might have been warranted. But under several past governors, and continuing under Gov. Jerry Brown, the DMV has become a model of consumer-friendly service and the intelligent use of technology that seems to escape other agencies.
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Gov. Jerry Brown is scaling back the state’s highly controversial bullet train project to keep it alive.
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The big news in Central California’s Stanislaus County these days is that a big Internet retailer — almost certainly Amazon — will establish a huge distribution center in Patterson that would employ at least 1,500 workers.Meanwhile, California new car sales reached nearly 1.3 million vehicles last year, a 9.9 percent improvement over 2010, and the state’s unemployment rate dipped in December to 11.1 percent, down 1.4 percentage points from the previous December, with at least a quarter-million more working.
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California’s budget contains hundreds of specific provisions, but none is bigger, more complicated, more politicized, more emotional — or more important — than the $30 billion or so it spends on K-12 education.That was true even before Gov. Jerry Brown proposed to increase state school aid and raised its political and societal stakes even higher, although he claims it would be less complicated.
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‘Soak the rich” has a populist ring that resonates in a period of economic uncertainty, and making the rich pay their “fair share” of taxes has become a rallying cry for those on the political left with no small appeal to those in the middle.California Gov. Jerry Brown hopes to tap into that sentiment with a ballot measure that would increase everyone’s sales taxes a bit while hitting the very affluent with higher income taxes.
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The three-pronged battle over which California Senate districts will be used for this year’s elections is reaching a climax that will determine whether Democrats can achieve a two-thirds majority in the upper legislative house.The state redistricting commission released maps for Senate, Assembly and congressional districts in August. It immediately became evident that with a little luck, Democrats could gain two seats in the 40-member Senate, thus reaching the two-thirds threshold and empowering them to pass tax bills without Republican support.
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Gov. Jerry Brown’s new budget says the state’s shaky finances are “exacerbated by an unprecedented level of debts, deferrals and budgetary obligations,” which he describes as “a wall of debt.”However, California’s debt, much of it run up over the past decade, is more like a mountain, at least a Mount Whitney and perhaps a Mount Everest.
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California’s public schools received a rare bit of good news Tuesday when Gov. Jerry Brown largely exempted them from automatic reductions in state aid, citing improvements in the economy.However, Brown’s declaration that the economy is getting better and he doesn’t have to squeeze all automatic spending-cut “triggers” also lessened the air of crisis and therefore complicated Brown’s efforts to persuade voters to raise taxes next year.
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Jerry Brown made a rare gubernatorial appearance this month before a joint legislative committee that was delving — with obvious reluctance — into whether California’s public employee pension benefits should be overhauled.While seeking his second stint as governor last year, Brown had pledged pension reform and has since offered a 12-point overhaul that attempts to strike a middle ground between the defenders of the status quo and the radical changes that outside groups want.
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Demography, it’s been said, is destiny — a society’s age cohorts, genders, ethnicities, income distributions, home ownership, education levels and other characteristics determine its place in the larger scheme of things.While California’s demographics are always changing, we are now experiencing one of our periodic, destiny-changing evolutions:- Our population growth has slowed markedly, from about 2½ percent a year during the 1980s to scarcely 1 percent today.
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Gov. Jerry Brown has formally proposed a $7-billion-a-year increase in sales and income taxes to close the state’s chronic budget deficit.
Whether it will be the only tax increase on the November ballot is uncertain. Several others are in the works, and if they reach the ballot as well, voter confusion could doom all. But assuming that Brown’s stands alone, how would the campaign shape up?
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California budgets used to be fairly simple documents, fundamentally allocating whatever financial resources the state might have at the moment among its various well-delineated responsibilities.No more.Proposition 13, enacted in 1978, had the indirect effect of centralizing major financial decision-making affecting local governments and schools in the Capitol.Those decisions were affected by subsequent ballot measures, and volatile revenue swings put the budget in a more or less permanent deficit condition.
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California’s population increased by 10 percent between 2000 and 2010 but the number of Californians living in poverty grew more than three times as fast, a new U.S. Census Bureau report reveals.
The data are found in a massive compilation of poverty statistics broken down by state, county and school district. And if the Census Bureau adopts a proposed new method gauging poverty, which takes into account regional and local costs of living and other factors, the state’s poverty rate may climb even higher.
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URL: http://www.sfexaminer.com/people/dan-walters
