dkos’ dday joins chorus for a constitutional convention to fix sacramento

Why California Needs A Constitutional Convention

Then there’s our failed experiment with direct democracy, which brought about many of the constrictions under which current government now labors, such as the crazy 2/3 requirements, which allow the majority to say that the minority blocks their wishes while allowing the minority to claim that they have no power because they’re in the minority.

What do I think a Constitutional convention needs to include?

• ending the 2/3 requirements and restoring democracy to the fiscal process over the tyranny of the minority, and returning decisions for spending and taxation to elected representatives 
• two-year budget cycles and performance-based budgeting to try and engender a long-term approach 
• indirect democracy, where the legislature can either work out the item on the ballot with proponents and pass it through their chamber, or amend items that reach the ballot.  In addition, we need a higher barrier for Constitutional amendments and changes to the process of signature gathering. 
• any ballot-box budgeting must include a dedicated funding source – “paygo for initiatives” 
• smaller legislative districts, either by expanding the Assembly or moving to a unicameral legislature with 150 or more members. 
• elimination of the current term limits, the tighest in the nation, with more of a happy medium 
• instant runoff voting for state legislative vacancies to speed the process of filling them 
• local government gets the local resources they collect without them routing through Sacramento

Those are a few of the things I’d like to see addressed, and I’m sure people have additional ones.  The crisis we currently have in California presents an opportunity for new thinking about government and how to manage the largest state in the union and one of the largest economies in the world.  Despite the doom and gloom, California retains its vibrancy, its diversity, its abundance.  Only the structure under with it governs itself has failed, and that failure has seeped into everyday life.  Lifting that structure will be like lifting a heavy weight off the backs of the citizenry.  We can lead a path to a better future.

Read Full Post Here.

see the 2/3 rule in action

more about “see the 2/3 rule in action“, posted with vodpod

WSJ on the fiasco, CCWC R: are oil and tobacco the keys to fixing what’s broken?

California Budget Woes to Persist

The budget mess is already taking center stage in the race to succeed Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who must leave office after the November 2010 election because of term limits. “It’s the issue that transcends all other issues,” San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, a Democratic candidate, said in an interview Thursday. “You can’t talk about issues in health care, education and infrastructure improvement until you focus on the issue of these structural imbalances in the budget.” Mr. Newsom blasted the spending plan for taking $4.7 billion from local governments, saying the governor should have been open to new taxes on tobacco and oil extraction instead.

Read Full Article Here:

66% is not democracy

AFSCME to sacramento, “we can do better”

wa post’s harold meyerson on the un-democratic 2/3 rule

GOP: Going Over the Precipice

Because of a quirk in California’s Constitution, the minority Republicans have managed to push through a budget that makes the state sicker and dumber. Where is the Democrats’ white knight?

The most basic principle of any democracy is that of majority rule, with minority rights running a clear but close second. Simple though this precept may be, California seems to have gotten it backward. The budget deal that emerged from Sacramento on Monday was the result of minority rule — the consequence of a state Constitution that vests more power in the minority party than the constitution of just about any other state. 

Under normal circumstances, this constitutional anomaly doesn’t result in minority rule. But during the budget impasse of the last several months, it did.

The 2/3 rule is un-democratic plain and simple.  When will a democrat stand up and make this THE issue?  Any meaningful campaign for 2010 must confront this head on. It is an outrage that a majority party throws up its hands and claims we are helpless.

The Republicans’ California isn’t a state that most Californians want to live in. Given a choice between creating an extraction tax on oil companies (a tax that every other state with oil already has, but which the Sacramento Republicans rejected) and decimating the state’s universities, I think Californians would opt to tax Exxon rather than reduce the number of science students. But how do we stop the downward spiral before Republicans reduce the state to the status of an Oklahoma or Alabama or the other GOP garden spots? 

First, Democrats in the Legislature should consider calling the GOP’s bluff and voting against the budget deal — but they can’t make their case absent a public spokesman. It’s time for Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsom to rise to the challenge that Clinton did when he stood down Gingrich. And second, Californians need to amend their state Constitution, in convention if need be, to end the practice of minority rule. Democracy — not to mention the future of the state — depends on it.  

AMEN!  Candidates who want to lead our state should start leading today.  There is no tomorrow.

Read Full Editorial Here.

mighty mike, “their not doing the cuts that they need to do” “maybe they will say no” CCWC rhetorical Q: do you agree with mighty mike?

here is the capture from our first “twitter talk”, #TTprop13. please join us next tuesday at noon PST for our discussion on sf mayor newsom at: #TTnewsom.

Real-time results for #TTprop13

1. msghens @CCWC #TTprop13 That 50K house has not changed one bit. The value was cause by runaway property inflation.about 7 hours ago from twhirl  
2. msghens @CCWC #TTprop13 Why do you support the theft of family homestead through taxes?about 8 hours ago from twhirl
3. msghens @CCWC The irony of Property, a house in S. CA when I was growing up worth less than $50k is now worth $900K #TTprop13about 8 hours ago from twhirl
4. CCWC @CobyRudolph will let you know. next week’s tues noon topic: TTnewsom. see you there and maybe he will show up. #TTprop131 day ago from TweetDeck
5. CCWC thanks for showing up. if you know of any groups or links that might be helpful to getting this issue into the campaign, share. #TTprop131 day ago from TweetDeck
6. CobyRudolph @bishport I know @GavinNewsom has townhalls this week in San Fernando Valley San Diego. Will anyone be there to ask him about #TTprop13 ?1 day ago from twhirl
7. bishport @colinwords when you have to compete as a start up with a business that doesn’t pay equitable rates, you can’t.#TTprop131 day ago from web
8. bishport @colinwords i agree. #TTprop13 is ant-growth. it gives an unfair advantage to long term land owners, corporations.1 day ago from web

sf gate’s pender responds to reader tim zuffi

Property owners save big thanks to propositions

Under Prop. 13, real property in California is reassessed only when it is sold or transferred. Between sales, the assessed value can be raised by no more than 2 percent a year plus the value of improvements.

In the wake of Prop. 13, California voters approved two propositions that exclude from reassessment transfers of certain real property between parents and children and – in limited circumstances – from grandparents to grandchildren. (Transfers between spouses were already exempt from reassessment.)

Read Full Article Here

mike malloy on prop 13 and ca budget crisis

sf tax assessor phil ting on prop 13

new america foundation’s joe mathews on challenging the legality of prop 13

A Drive By Shot at Prop 13

Your blogger is all for overturning Prop 13, particularly the piece that required a two-thirds vote of the legislature to raise taxes. But Prop 13 is sturdy, both legally and politically. Overturning it will require sustained public education and organizing. It’s a waste of time to try out discredited legal theories to defeat it. But that’s what former UCLA Chancellor Charles Young did last week by suing under the theory that, 31 years after it passed, Prop 13 was an unconstitutional revision to the constitution, rather than amendment. Call it a drive-by shot. That’s now how you kill the king.

Young’s argument is the same theory that didn’t work when it was used to challenge Prop 8, the ban on same-sex marriage. In fact, it’s a theory that hasn’t worked because the California constitution and the judiciary have always been reluctant to overrule a vote of the people.  If you read the state constitution — particularly the second article — you’ll see why. The people really are sovereign in California.

What’s more, as former Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn president Joel Fox points out correctly in this post, Prop 13 already survived a challenge under this same legal theory.

LAT’s michael hiltzik on prop 13 today, “…that 31-year-old wolf in sheep’s clothing…”

It’s time to close a big tax loophole for businesses

Of all the ways in which California residents have slit their fiscal throats over the last 30 years, surely the most inexplicable is the bestowal of a gaping tax loophole on commercial and industrial property owners.

The culprit, no surprise, is that 31-year-old wolf in sheep’s clothing, Proposition 13, which prohibits the reassessment of any property except at the time of a change in ownership.

Read Full Article Here

call the governor!

pasadena star-news’ larry wilson chimes in on governor’s race and prop 13. CCWC R: Larry join the discussion.

Larry Wilson: Calling all candidates for governor

It doesn’t much matter whether as a pol or pundit or curmudgeonly homeowner you’ve saluted Proposition 13 for three decades now. When the gavel goes down on this California Constitutional Convention we’ve all agreed is necessary, all bets are off.

Read full article here.

Larry, join us next Tuesday for lunch!

So our members, followers and readers might gain a better understanding of Prop 13, we are holding a “twitter talk” next Tuesday, 07/14/09.  The topic tag inside twitter is #TTprop13.  Please join us for a lunchtime discussion from 12:00 – 1:00 PST and share your ideas on how best we can change Sacramento.

fast company on the sf mayor, “would you hire him?”

Gavin Newsom Wants to Be Governor of California. Would You Hire Him?

Newsom needs to prove that he can garner the support of business titans both to fill his coffers and to help him make his case. One local CEO echoed a common refrain: “What’s he done? He’s never here, and when he is, he’s grandstanding.” And the venture capitalists I’ve spoken to aren’t sure they’ve seen their candidate yet. “This is a leadership issue,” says Mitchell Kertzman, managing director at Hummer Winblad Venture Partners. With the onerous budget-making process and the remnants of Prop 13 (which limits property taxes) creating funding logjams, “someone has to be courageous and modify these things.” If California were a business? “I’d wipe the slate clean,” says Kertzman, “bring the valuation down at near zero, and agree to start again. But this isn’t Chrysler or a startup we’re talking about.”

Fixing government by making it run like a business is the strategy Newsom originally campaigned on, and it’s the one Whitman seems to be sticking with. Long married and congenitally buttoned up, Whitman is emphasizing her “strong values” and business record while she formulates an expanding portfolio of views and solutions. “Growing the economy, creating jobs will be a big priority,” she told me recently, reverting effortlessly to her talking points.

Newsom, who has business credentials of his own, concedes that in a campaign, “you can usually get away with the ‘I’m going to run government like a business’ thing. It’s an applause line.” And then, he says, you get into office. “It’s a civil-service system. It’s not just a right/left advocacy thing. It’s nuanced. And it takes time not just to fire people, but to hire them.” You can either legislate change or go to the voters. By then, new economic realities hit. “And you have to react to that,” he says. “You have less influence outside your realm than you think.”

Read full article here.

CCWC is hosting a candidate forum on SF Mayor Newsom on Tuesday 07/21/09 in twitter.  Please join us at #TTnewsom for lunch, 12:00 – 1:00 PST, and share your thoughts.  Would you hire him?

sfgate, prop 13, frankenstein and tuesday lunch with CCWC

No more superhero solutions

Face it: We are collectively in a financial disaster and the consequences of ignoring reality – reflexively opposing tax increases or simply failing to care – just won’t cut it. If the world’s seventh-largest economy freezes up, the financial consequences will have the potential to kill a nationwide economic recovery.

How is it that we’re surprised that no superhero action figure, no matter how toned, tanned and charismatic, could solve a crisis that has been in the making since voters passed Proposition 13 in 1978? Then, the lure of something for nothing was irresistible. Today, like some political Frankenstein’s monster, Prop. 13 has outlived its creators and its usefulness; it stalks the state, unchallenged by fearful officials. Perhaps now, with the wolf baying on the Capitol steps, some incensed Californian will step forward and show the political courage and say: Prop. 13 must go.

Is anyone willing to take on the ghosts of Prop. 13? Not, it seems, among the 2010 gubernatorial candidates. They pretend that the fiscal crisis has hit some other, vaporous, California. Isn’t there someone willing act as fiscal “truth-teller-in-chief”?

Will it be U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who is too smart to get sucked into the vortex of state politics? Or state Attorney General Jerry Brown, atoning for his lack of courage in 1978, when as governor, he became a born-again cheerleader for Prop. 13? Could it be Tom Campbell, the academic and former member of Congress who is the Democrat’s favorite Republican, Mayor Gavin Newsom, who has shown courage supporting same-sex marriage, or Meg Whitman, who understands how to meet a payroll?

The problem? The candidates are listening to handlers, who are listening to polls. Perhaps it will take the candidates to collectively provide political cover for legislators to pass an honest budget that includes both service cuts and new taxes. Sheer self-interest ought to take over, as one of them will inherit a moribund state.

This is certain: There are no superhero solutions to this crisis. It will have to be Californians who fashion a compromise between “no new taxes” and “cruel cuts.” It’s time to recognize that this is a political crisis that simply cannot be solved by a man, or woman, in colored tights.

We agree with SFGate writers Richard Rapaport and Peter B. Collins that the candidates are awol on the budget crisis and any discussions about reforming Sacramento are presented in short shrift without meaningful details.  We also agree the changes needed to fix our state will come from the bottom up.

Join us next Tuesday for lunch!

So our members, followers and readers might gain a better understanding of Prop 13, we are holding a “twitter talk” next Tuesday, 07/14/09.  The topic tag inside twitter is #TTprop13.  Please join us for a lunchtime discussion from 12:00 – 1:00 PST and share your ideas on how best we can change Sacramento.

salon’s gary kamiya: californians are sinking themselves

An inflexible right wing is allowing the Golden State to drown in debt. But it’s not alone

The world’s eighth-largest economy has just gone belly-up. When midnight tolled on Tuesday night with legislators and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger still deadlocked over how to resolve the state’s staggering $24 billion budget shortfall, California became unable to pay its bills. The state will have to begin issuing IOUs to its creditors as early as Thursday. It is the worst budget crisis in the state’s modern history.

There is an unreal, almost dreamlike quality about this moment. Dreadful things are about to happen: Hundreds of thousands of children will lose their healthcare. Five thousand state workers will be laid off. Massive cuts will decimate education at every level. Social services will be slashed. Two hundred and twenty-nine parks, out of a total of 280, will be shut down. Even some of the state’s landmarks may go on the auction block to raise money.

Read Full Article Here

wa post’s harold meyerson on ca budget, “schwarzeneggar is proposing…to throw 1 million children off the rolls of the state’s healthy families program.”

California: A Dream Decimated

Right-wing ideologues see the crisis as an opportunity to shrink government regardless of the consequences. Schwarzenegger is proposing to end welfare, not just as we know it but altogether, and to throw 1 million children off the rolls of the state’s healthy families program. But the consequences of closing the deficit simply through cutbacks will be felt by more than the poor. Already reeling from $15 billion in cutbacks that the state put through in February, many school districts, including that of Los Angeles, have canceled summer school this year. Scholarships that enable students of modest means to attend California’s fabled university system have been slashed. Most of the state’s parks may have to be closed as well.

The terrible irony in decimating the public sector to save the state is that the California that was the epicenter of the postwar American dream was fundamentally a creation of government. Fighting a Pacific war during World War II compelled the federal government to spend billions on California industry and infrastructure, and the state was the leading beneficiary of Pentagon dollars during the Cold War. As Kevin Starr, California’s leading historian, points out in “Golden Dreams,” his brilliant new history of the state in the 1950s and early ’60s, fully 40 percent of all defense dollars for manufacturing and research in 1959 went to California, anchoring the state’s booming economy in a well-paid workforce that was either unionized or professionalized, and seeding an electronics and high-tech sector that was to blossom in the following decades. Building on that prosperity to create more prosperity, Earl Warren, Goodwin Knight and Pat Brown — two Republicans, one Democrat — invested state dollars in schools, universities, freeways and aqueducts that were the best in the world. The Golden State was never more golden.

Today, its governor seems determined to turn that gold to dross. On Monday, the Democrats in the legislature passed a budget that included cuts of $11 billion, levied a tax on oil companies and tobacco, and raised auto registration fees by $15 per car to keep the state parks from closing. Schwarzenegger reiterated his refusal to raise any taxes or fees and said he would veto the budget.

From a model for far-sighted investments in the future, California has become a state that uninvests in the present and has no vision at all for the future. Proposition 13, enacted by state voters in 1978, effectively blocked its cities and counties from funding their own endeavors, and the Republican minority in the legislature, abetted by Schwarzenegger, has made it all but impossible to invest in the kind of projects that Warren, Knight and Brown undertook. Today’s California visionaries are calling for a constitutional convention to rewrite the plainly dysfunctional rules by which the state governs itself. It is not only Californians but also America that has a stake in their success. A California that decimates itself during recessions drags the rest of the nation down with it.

ca senator jenny oropeza on senate floor, “people in wheelchairs to go unbathed” “it’s not what our constituents elected us to do” “think about the human beings…the real people we are going to hurt”

senate president pro tem steinberg calls for “change to the system”

pacific business news on minority party obfuscations in sacramento. CCWC R: the republican party is hazardous to the health of california.

California budget crisis gets $3B harder to solve at midnight

If California’s political leaders fail to balance the state’s budget by midnight Tuesday they might need to trim about $3 billion more.

That’s because the plans by both Democratic leaders and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger include about $3 billion in spending cuts in the 2008-09 fiscal year that ends tonight.

If those cuts are rolled over into the new fiscal year’s budget, the state’s constitutional funding requirements would have to be suspended and $10 billion expected from the federal stimulus package would be lost.

The republican minority and governor are blocking a balanced budget in Sacramento that is going to cost California an additional $3,000,000,000.00 at midnight tonight.  The party of “no” is destroying our state’s safety net and credit rating by design.  Who is going to hold these anti-government tax obsessed incompetents to account?

SFgate’s marinucci and yi get to the root causes of california’s structural failures.

If there is an upside to the failures of the current administration in Sacramento, it is the chorus coming out of the press, progressive blogs and grassroots organizations of all stripes that the time has come to fix our government.  CCWC will support the candidate who brings these reforms to the forefront of their campaign.

There are several factors that contribute to the state’s recurring inability to deliver an on-time, balanced budget. Among them:

– Partisanship: California’s gerrymandered legislative districts tend to protect incumbents and encourage more political extremes – Republicans on the right and Democrats on the left with less incentive to reach out to the political middle, much less compromise at the Capitol.

– Term limits: Proposition 140, passed in 1990, limits legislators terms to six years in the Assembly and eight in the state Senate.

– Ballot-box budgeting: Initiative-loving Californians mandated set-aside funding for all kinds of single-interest issues, from education to stem cell research.

– Prop. 13: The 1978 landmark law slashed commercial and residential property tax rates, shifting state reliance to other more volatile sources.

– The two-thirds majority rule: The Golden State is one of just three states that require a two-thirds majority vote from each legislative house to pass budgets.

Read full article here.

To all candidates considering a run, we are committed to these reforms.  We are less interested in what you have accomplished in the past and are focused squarely on what you plan to do to “fix” our government.  

ca governor, “why waste the time?” CCWC R: california’s neediest are at the mercy of the minority party of “no”. wake up california!

huffington post’s joseph palermo on california budget, 2/3 rule and the eye of the republican storm bearing down on sacramento

Arnold Schwarzenegger: Sticking It to “America’s Best”

Newspapers are falling by the wayside and there’s very little coverage of state government aside from some good reporting in the Sacramento Bee, Los Angeles Times,and San Francisco Chronicle. Few Californians are paying attention to the kind of reckless brinkmanship Schwarzenegger and his Republican allies are playing in Sacramento. And this lack of attention doesn’t mean what’s happening is not going to change the social climate of the state. Normally, with divided government a legislature throws bills on to the executive’s desk and sends the ball into the governor’s court to veto them and take the political heat. But in California the two-thirds rule in the legislature means the Republican minority can kill any bill before it reaches the governor’s desk thereby shielding the Terminator from being the focus of the voters’ wrath.

Schwarzenegger can sit back and point fingers at the Democrats without suffering the political consequences that his authoritarian demands and cruel budget cuts would elicit if the public could see what he’s doing. A strange, Austrian sadism has surfaced as Schwarzenegger reaches the waning period of his first venture into politics. The sooner the state is rid of this man the better. The correctional officers’ union last fall had the right idea when they launched a short-lived effort to recall Schwarzenegger. I wish the rest of the labor unions in the state had had enough sense to join them.

Schwarzenegger’s budget cuts are going to be devastating to the city of Sacramento because there are over 80,000 state workers in this region. At a social gathering this past weekend I spoke to a California Highway Patrol officer who is worried about the local layoffs of sheriffs and police and how they are going to increase his work load. Another person I spoke with is a probation officer and he told me his work load is going up from about 105 cases to 180, and most of those are just going to be more paperwork without any real outreach because he has to spend the bulk of his time tracking sex offenders. I met two other people who are “furloughed” from their state jobs and since they’re a couple their family has been hit with about a 25 percent cut in pay (and Arnold is threatening even more furlough days for state workers). It’s a Republican wet dream in the Golden State and they’re not even in the majority!