NO on 92 to Stop Ballot Box Budgeting

Community colleges are terrific and vital parts of our education system. They provide a LOT of bang for the buck, and I'm sure they need better funding. They serve lots of students of all backgrounds, giving a chance to gain skills and education, sometimes as an inexpensive precursor to 4-year college. They're a big part of why California does have economic mobility.

But this is a bad law.

Most importantly, it is ballot box budgeting. This would write into the state constitution a very specific formula for how to distribute money. Formulas like this are bad for us. Collectively, they create the budget mess we get every year. The more formulas we get, the harder we all have to fight over the smaller and smaller discretionary part of the budget. And the less ability we have to respond to crises. If this passes, it will hurt health care, housing and other social services, and maybe also the CSU and UC systems (although I'm less worried about them).

There are also other things to dislike, if you need more reasons:

• Prop 92 could only be changed by a 4/5 vote (!) of the legislature. C'mon - that's a preposterous super-duper majority rule.
• The funding formula is wacky. It determines funding based on the number of young adults, not enrollment. But a CBP analysis found there's a big disconnect between those two variables [link - PDF]. The formula also requires spending to grow even when the number of young adults decreases, but it wouldn't keep pace when enrollment spikes.
• The fee reduction is not a good idea either. Okay, this seems crazy, but bear with me. It is true that many low-income students can't afford to go to school. But at community colleges, it isn't the fees that get them. It is the overall cost of living, most especially the cost of housing, which is often ten times higher than community college fees. Plus, half of full-time community college students already pay nothing, because they have low-income fee waivers. So lower fees only helps people for whom fees are a tiny drop in the bucket: 1% on average of total education and living expenses for a full-time student living on his/her own. [link-PDF]

I know, lots of other liberals support this. I'm sure I'll catch flak from friends who teach at or go to community colleges. But the law just doesn't make sense to me. I could forgive some of the latter features if this wasn't a constitutional amendment that will harm other services for the poor and make it even more impossible to settle our budget. If you're really interested, I really encourage you to read CBP's analysis, linked above in a couple spots. As usual, they don't take a position, just analyzes the impacts. And those impacts look bad to me.

YES on 93 to Reduce the Power of Lobbyists

Term limits are bad. This loosens them a little.

Term limits give more power to lobbyists, who stay in Sacramento for decades while legislators are termed out.

Prop 93 would allow someone to spend up to 12 years in the Legislature as a whole, rather than individual limits in each house. This will reduce the crazy musical chairs of people jumping from one house to another. And no, it doesn't bug me that Perata and Nunez, and some other legislators, will get a few more years in office. This law is only a minor tweak, but it is a good tweak.

If you like term limits - which means that you must trust lobbyists and the governor more than you trust your legislators - then go ahead and oppose this. But if you want the legislature to have more ability to actually make decisions, vote Yes on 93.

NO on 94-97 to Stop Bad Deals

These were the hardest to figure out. If you don't agree with me, or I'm missing something, please educate me.

This looks like a bad deal, or at least a not-good-enough deal. It appears to mostly benefit four tribes in Southern California who negotiated these compacts. Plus of course it would give huge benefits to the corporations who run the tribes' casinos. It does not appear to provide much benefit to other tribes around the state, although I'm not completely clear on that. Yes, there's some more money to other tribes, but I can't tell how much in the grand scheme of things.

It also looks like a not-good-enough deal for the state of California. At first I considering supporting them because they would provide lots more money for the state and because the legislature passed them. But after reading several other analyses, I think the state could get a better deal.

Plus gambling is a social bad. It is like tobacco: addictive, harmful, and very profitable for the people who sell it. If we aren't going to ban it, we should tax it heavily to discourage people from doing it and to use the tax revenues to do social good. To me, that means more than a 15% tax rate. I pay more than 15% of my income in taxes. So should these casinos.

I also read about problems with the environmental and labor safeguards from people I trust (APEN, for example).

Oh, and who's paying for the ads, one way or the other, doesn't bug me. Of course people who have an economic interest on both sides are going to advertise. These compacts are bad, no matter who says so.

NO on 91, a no brainer

The people who put this on the ballot are now campaigning against it. It was a bad idea in the first place (ballot box budgeting, bad for mass transit, don't get me started). They got something similar on the November 2006 election, but they still ended up wasting everyone's time and money by leaving this on the ballot. And people wonder why voters are turned off by politics?

NO on Alameda County Measures A+B: Children's Hospital Construction Measures

Here's another case of crazy election shenanigans: putting something on the ballot, realizing they're going to lose, and putting a second - compromise - measure on the ballot. I say NO on both.

First Children's Hospital (which is, by the way, a private hospital, not a public one) paid signature gatherers to put Measure B on the ballot. But they didn't even bother to talk with the county supervisors first. And this is key, because the flaws in Measure B would've meant that the county had to spend extra money to collect the tax, and there was no guarantee the money would be spent within Alameda County! It was doomed, but it was also already on the ballot. So definitely vote NO on B.

Once the hospital realized they were going to lose, they hastily worked with the county supervisors to craft a compromise. Measure A is a 35-year parcel tax, expected to raise ~$300 million to build a new Children's Hospital, which needs a seismic upgrade by 2013. But the county's public health system has many needs of its own, including the seismic upgrade to Highland Hospital.

They just didn't think this out very well. The county supervisors haven't even endorsed the measure. There's no real danger that Children's will close, as the hospital claims. It brings in LOTS of money. It will find the money. They just need a better thought-out public process to figure out how, or whether, to commit public money to rebuild this private hospital.

Further reading:
- Confusing ballot measures on hospital, San Francisco Chronicle, 1/18/08 [link]
- Children's Hospital makes end run seeking parcel tax, Matier and Ross, San Francisco Chronicle, 12/23/07 [link]
- San Francisco Bay Guardian says No on A and B [link]

What do you think?

For the past several years, just before each major election in California, I have sent an analysis and recommendation to friends and family on how I'm going to vote. Now it is online.

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