In a bit of irony, this March there will be a Proposition 13 on the California statewide ballot. But unlike the landmark taxpayer protection of 1978, the Prop. 13 of 2020 will put taxpayers on the hook for $27 billion.

There’s another big difference between Prop. 13 (1978) and Prop. 13 (2020). The first was the result of a massive grassroots campaign by citizen taxpayers and homeowners striking back against out-of-control property taxes while the fake Prop. 13 was put on the ballot by the California legislature.

Prop. 13 (2020) is a huge $15 billion statewide school bond chock full of hidden traps for taxpayers. First, it reflects typical credit card math by Sacramento politicians because it would borrow $15 billion from Wall Street and then make taxpayers pay it back plus 80% in total interest costs. That’s an additional $12 billion we’ll be forced to pay, bringing the entire bill to $27 billion.

While no one disputes the need for adequate school facilities, the problem is that the state’s education establishment has failed to show that it uses existing school facility bond money effectively. California voters already have approved big school bonds, including a recent 2016 $7 billion measure, only to see much of those funds squandered. (Remember the infamous Belmont High School scandal when LAUSD wasted hundreds of millions building the nation’s most expensive high school on top of a toxic waste site?)

But this measure also presents a huge threat to homeowners.

To read the entire column, please click here.

San Francisco made headlines recently with the election of Chesa Boudin as district attorney. Soon to be sworn in as the city and county’s top prosecutor, Boudin, a public defender, holds radical views on prosecution and law enforcement. Though his victory has been seen as evidence that famously progressive San Francisco has lurched even further left, Boudin was an outlier candidate even by local standards, and he won with a margin of less than 1 percent. His victory was largely due to San Francisco’s use of Instant-Runoff Voting, a poorly understood alternative-voting system used nationally in about two dozen city elections—including in New York City—and one state system.

IRV is a variation of ranked voting. In ranked-voting systems, instead of selecting for one candidate, voters rank the candidates in order of their preference, from first choice to last. If a candidate has a majority of first-choice ranks, he wins the election outright. But if no candidate wins a majority, IRV automatically runs a series of virtual runoff elections by eliminating the candidate with the fewest first-choice votes and redistributing those votes to each voter’s second-choice candidate. The system redistributes the votes through multiple rounds until a winner emerges.

IRV remains rare, but it has become the alternative-voting method of choice in the United States. The ability to vote for a candidate with little chance of winning, then have that vote transferred to a more viable candidate, is said to encourage participation by allowing people to support their first choice without feeling that their vote was wasted. In an IRV system, Al Gore could have won Florida (and with it, the presidential election) in 2000 when Ralph Nader voters might have picked Gore over George W. Bush as their second choice; in 2016, Donald Trump would have won the popular vote (and a few states that he barely lost, like Minnesota) when Gary Johnson and Evan McMullin voters could have chosen him as their second choice over Hillary Clinton. In these hypothetical cases, IRV could have reduced the claims that the election was unfairly decided.

IRV also allows compromise candidates (“everyone’s second choice”) to rise from crowded fields. Imagine an electorate 20 percent far left, 30 percent center left, 30 percent center right, and 20 percent far right. With IRV, centrist voters can rank centrist candidates higher, and as counting rounds continue, presumably a centrist candidate eventually wins. Alternatively, an electorate 30 percent left, 40 percent center, and 30 percent right ends up with an extreme winner if two centrists split the initial vote and only the far-right and far-left candidates proceed to a run-off. With IRV, after one centrist is eliminated, the other presumably gets his votes, leading to a centrist win when one of the more ideological candidates is eliminated next.

So what happened in San Francisco? How did the most extreme candidate end up winning, instead of the centrist, establishment-approved Suzy Loftus or the law-and-order-focused candidates Nancy Tung and Lief Dautch? The answer lies in what are called “exhausted” votes. IRV does not require that voters rank every candidate; in a field of four, they can rank all four or choose to rank only one, two, or three. But if a voter’s first choice is eliminated, and the voter doesn’t mark a second choice, then his vote is not counted in subsequent rounds. As a result, the simplistic examples above (all center-left voters mark the center-right candidate as their second choice) break down in a real-world application.

This is what happened in San Francisco, as the detailed Board of Elections results show. First, not all voters rank their choices in ways that mirror logical examples like those above. Almost 5,000 of those who voted first for Dautch, endorsed by the Deputy Sheriffs Association, voted second for Boudin, though Boudin was strongly opposed by law enforcement. Even more significant are the exhausted votes. Over 6,000 of Dautch’s votes, and almost 16,000 of Tung’s, didn’t count in the final tally. Considering that Boudin won over Loftus by a margin of less than 3,000 votes, a fraction of those 22,000 exhausted votes could have tipped the election to Loftus had voters marked her as their second choice instead of leaving that spot blank.

Several factors could explain why so many voters for Dautch and Tung didn’t rank Loftus as a later choice even though she was closer to their views than the radical Boudin. First, some voters might not understand how the system works, especially newcomers to San Francisco from jurisdictions with traditional voting systems. More significantly, to fill a vacancy, Mayor London Breed controversially appointed Loftus as acting district attorney a few weeks before the election. Breed’s support for Loftus was heavily criticized as a presumptuous power grab by the mayor and may have influenced voters to avoid ranking Loftus.

IRV’s advocates tout it as a system that ensures a clear majority winner and produces elected officials in tune with the broad electorate, rather than with one extreme or the other. This is probably true; IRV has many positives compared with traditional voting. In San Francisco, however, it failed. Due to ballot exhaustion, Boudin—who, even in left-wing San Francisco, held views outside the mainstream—won with less than 45 percent of valid votes cast. San Francisco’s lesson, for jurisdictions considering adopting IRV: no voting system, no matter how ingenious, can take the place of informed and active voters.

Phillip Sprincin is a veteran of the United States Marine Corps who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

This article was originally published by City Journal Online.

The news that Apple had pledged to give $2.5 billion to address housing needs in the San Francisco-Silicon Valley region and California in general – on top of $1 billion each previously promised by Google and Facebook – led to praise from politicians as well as from civic groups and housing nonprofits. Gov. Gavin Newsom called the announcement “proof that Apple is serious about solving this issue.”

But news analysis pieces prompted by the announcement were downbeat on the likelihood that it would bring any significant relief to a housing market that is so expensive that nearly half of Bay Area residents say they want to move – much less “solve” the crisis.

Leslye Corsiglia, executive director of the San Jose-based housing advocacy group SV@Home, told the San Francisco Chronicle, “It’s really great to get all this land and money, but in order to get units under construction and moving forward, we need to get project approvals. That does require policy and advocacy work to get the votes to move forward.”

Getting projects approved can take many years

The difficulty of getting projects approved in the Bay Area and Silicon Valley was cited in virtually all coverage of Apple’s pronouncement. Some cited the fate of the Vallco mall in Cupertino, less than a mile from where Apple opened its $3.6 billion headquarters in 2017.

Developer Sand Hill Property Co. acquired the mostly vacant 58-acre mall in 2014. But despite the region’s housing shortage, Sand Hill faced bitter opposition from the Cupertino City Council and local activists to its plans to build 2,400 residential units (half considered affordable), 400,000 square feet of retail space and 1.8 million square feet of office space on the site.

The $4 billion project was rejected first by local planners and then by voters in 2016. In early 2018, after state officials listed Cupertino as one of the hundreds of cities in California that had not built enough housing, Cupertino Mayor Darcy Paul defiantly said his city would not be pressured to respond to a housing crisis that he suggested was exaggerated.

City officials finally gave approval to the project a year ago after an analysis concluded that under Senate Bill 35 – the measure by Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, that bars cities from rejecting certain projects that are properly zoned and include affordable housing – they had no choice. But because of further foot-dragging and legal threats, demolition of the main mall building was delayed until Oct. 2018 – four years after Signal Hall bought the property.

‘Affordable’ housing costs $700,000 in Bay Area

The second reason that Apple’s pledge was downplayed has to do with the extreme cost of building even what’s considered affordable housing in the Bay Area. While the average cost for a subsidized housing unit in California is about $420,000, housing officials say the cost is about $700,000 in the Bay Area and Silicon Valley.

If all $4.5 billion pledged by Apple, Google and Facebook were spent on such housing, that would add about 6,300 homes. Housing advocates say at least 54,000 such units are needed in the region – and far more if there is going to be enough supply to actually bring down rents that average more than $2,500 for small studio units.

Apple plans to provide a $1 billion line of credit for affordable housing projects. It also will set up a $1 billion fund to help first-time home buyers with down payments.

“We know the course we are on is unsustainable, and Apple is committed to being part of the solution,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said in a statement.

Nonetheless, the view that Apple was addressing a problem its explosive growth helped create was common – especially among progressives who see tech giants as a malign force. Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent who is running for the Democratic presidential nomination said Apple’s announcement  “is an effort to distract from the fact that it has helped create California’s housing crisis.”

This article was originally published by CalWatchdog.com

To be fair, California’s politicians aren’t alone in their quest to destroy America’s rights, freedoms, prosperity, culture, traditions, and pride. They’re just more advanced in their quest. But since what happens in California often ends up happening later in the rest of America, it’s important to highlight just how bad it’s gotten in the Golden State.

Just as a theologian might argue there are more than seven deadly sins that are fatal to spiritual progress, there are more than seven policy areas where California’s political leadership have fatally undermined the aspirations of ordinary Californians. But in the interests of brevity and clarity, here are what might be the most damning seven deadly sins of California’s political establishment.

Law and Order – Californians have prided themselves on being trendsetters in human rights, but the pendulum has swung too far. Thanks to Prop. 47, the “Reduced Penalties for Some Crimes Initiative” approved by California’s voters in 2014, it is nearly impossible to arrest and hold anyone for possession of hard drugs, so long as they claim the drugs are for personal use. Prop. 47 also downgraded the punishment for property crimes if the value of the stolen goods are under $950 per offense.

The consequence of these laws are public drug use and rampant theft to support these drug habits. Other ridiculous laws include AB 953, the “Racial and Identity Profiling Act” (2015), that requires police to fill out an extensive questionnaire after every encounter with a member of the public, even if it doesn’t result in an arrest. The purpose of this is to prevent disproportionate encounters with members of disadvantaged groups, and the consequence of it is fewer stops, fewer arrests, and more crime.

Environment – It’s hard to know where to begin when it comes to environmentalist extremism that tyrannizes ordinary Californians. Central to California’s central planning state is AB 32, the “Global Warming Solutions Act” (2006), and follow on legislation. These laws aim to reduce California’s net “greenhouse gas” emissions to zero by 2045.

To accomplish this, it is becoming almost impossible to develop land outside of existing cities in California, which is driving the price of land and housing to unaffordable levels. Next on the “climate change” agenda is to charge Californians for “vehicle miles traveled,” wherein everywhere people go in their cars will be monitored and taxed.

Well before AB 32 came along, though, California’s gone overboard with environmentalism. The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), passed by the state legislature in 1971, requires environmental impact reports to accompany any building permit. Since a separate report is required for every permit application, and since major building projects require approval from dozens of agencies, in California, the costs to file applications and pay fees often exceeds the cost of the actual construction itself.

Then there’s forestry management, taken over by environmentalist zealots who prohibited logging, suppressed controlled burns with byzantine application gauntlets and endless litigation, and turned California’s forests into tinderboxes.

Energy & Water – Californians pay among the highest prices for gasoline, electricity and natural gas in the United States, despite the fact that California has abundant reserves of oil and gas.

But instead of approving new refineries, more connecting pipelines, oil and gas drilling, and clean natural gas power plants, California’s policymakers are shutting down conventional energy in favor of “renewables.” Even clean, emissions free nuclear power is forbidden, as California’s last nuclear power plant, Diablo Canyon, is scheduled to be shut down by 2025.

Not only does this leave Californians without affordable energy, as they’re herded to the nearest retailer to purchase “demand response” appliances that don’t work very well, but utilities investing in renewables don’t have money left over to upgrade their power lines to better manage wildfires.

As for water, instead of storing more storm runoff behind dams and within aquifers, and investing in reuse and desalination, California’s turned to rationing. Starting in 2020, Californians will be restricted to 55 gallons of indoor water use per person per day, with that amount being lowered in subsequent years.

Transportation – Freeways in California are among the most congested in the nation, but instead of widening roads and building new freeways, California’s policymakers have declared war on the car. Never mind that cars are the future of transportation, destined to be entirely clean, autonomous, capable safely driving at high speeds while their occupants work, sleep, or entertain themselves.

Instead California’s political leadership remains committed to a high speed train that will never pay for itself, light rail when light rail ridership is in decline, and zoning that will make it impossible for people to park their cars where they live. California’s transportation policy is misanthropic and misguided. Meanwhile, ordinary Californians cope with super commutes on neglected roads.

Housing – Despite the fact that most young married couples, given a choice, would prefer to raise their children in a single family home with a yard, California’s elite have decided that single family homes and suburbs are “unsustainable.” This despite California sprawling over 160,000 square miles, of which only around 5 percent is urbanized.

Californians instead are expected to construct all new housing via high density “infill,” where there is minimal open space, parking is unavailable, and prices are sky high thanks to the artificially created shortage.

As noted, the costs to prepare permit applications and pay fees often exceeds the construction costs, notwithstanding the fact that high rise and mid rise construction always costs far more per square foot than what it costs to construct one or two story wood frame homes.

Homeless – In a state where you can’t build anything without paying fees that cost more than the construction costs, and where utility bills and other hidden taxes make the cost-of-living the highest in the nation, it should be no surprise that California has a homeless crisis.

Add to that the best weather on earth, and laws that permit public consumption of hard drugs and prevent detention of petty thieves, and you have a recipe for a homeless population explosion. Moreover, court rulings make it impossible to remove homeless encampments unless you can offer them “permanent supportive housing,” and rampant (totally legal) public sector and nonprofit corruption have driven the costs for such housing to exceed on average $500,000 per unit.

To top it off, state laws make it, for all practical purposes, impossible to incarcerate the mentally ill. If these laws and court settlements were overturned, overnight, half of California’s homeless would find shelter with relatives and friends, and the rest would get cost-effective help. But it’s a meal ticket for the corrupt public sector.

Education – Save the worst for last. This is perhaps the most unforgivable sin of all in California. Instead of teaching children to read and write, they are being indoctrinated. Instead of being held accountable, incompetent teachers are protected by union labor laws, and disruptive students are kept in classes in order to fulfill quotas designed to prevent “discrimination.”

The University of California, which – under threat of lawsuits – is about to abandon using SAT scores entirely, has already engineered its admissions policies to circumvent federal prohibitions on affirmative action. From higher education down through the K-12 public schools, leftist propaganda and identity politics are the goal of California’s unionized public education system, instead of teaching children the skills they will need to become more productive graduates.

This is the future that awaits America. It is a future abetted by a complicit media, an activist entertainment industry, a unionized public bureaucracy and public education system, and nearly every significant corporate and financial player. The political model it embraces is often labeled as socialist, but might more accurately be described as economic fascism – a merging of public and private, a partnership of corporations, oligarchs, and the public sector.

While people typically cringe at use of the term “fascist,” the fascism we’re seeing in California is not the hardcore fascism of WWII era Germany, but rather a soft fascism as envisioned by Aldous Huxley in his novel Brave New World. California’s citizens are being channeled into high-density apartments, forced to use mass transit, and increasingly made dependent on government subsidies, in exchange for the illusory freedoms of legal drugs and anything-goes gender exploration.

At the same time, Californians are deluged with fearmongering propaganda – a classic fascist tactic – concerning the rise of the oceans thanks to “climate change” and the rise of “white nationalism” thanks to President Trump. Both of these threats are preposterously overstated, but when that’s the only message you ever hear, it feels very real.

This 21st century fascism being pioneered in California touts itself as “anti-fascist” at every opportunity, but the system nonetheless fits the definition of fascism. It is corporate, collectivist, centralized, and autocratic. With an equally unhealthy and excessive fervor, it exalts the planet instead of the nation, and celebrates “diversity” instead of one culture. It punishes dissent, protects the oligarchy, and deludes the overtaxed, over-regulated, overpaying majority.

In a world where truth, justice, and the American Way still exist, an America that believes in God, or at least believes in good, evil, and some sort of ultimate accountability, what California’s elites are doing is literally sinful. Their path to salvation is simple:

Enforce common sense drug laws and punish thieves. Quit using environmentalism as a punitive religious faith and start logging the forests, building roads, drilling for oil and gas, and approving nuclear power plants instead of shutting them down. Stop extorting more money in permitting costs than it costs to construct homes, and start building them again on open land. Get vagrants off the streets, build cost-effective shelter for the truly needy, and put the mentally ill back into institutions. Fire incompetent teachers and hold our students to immutable, objective academic standards instead of filling their heads with divisive nonsense.

Americans would do well to look to California today, and whatever they’re doing, do the opposite. Before it’s too late.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

The Assembly Transportation Committee High Speed Rail oversight hearing of Tuesday (11-12-2019) exposed a regional funding war. 

The project’s leadership, Brian Kelly (CEO) and Board Chair Lenny Mendonca, are pushing the present “spend all existing funds in the Central Valley (CV) agenda”.  Governor Newsom, who “flip/flops” with his position on HSR depending on the season of the year, right now does endorse Kelly’s leadership and the present plans.

However, HSR Board Director Danny Curtin and others and are also now supported by some Democrat Legislators, support an effort to divert some funding (around $5 billion) away from the present plans to spend all funding in the Central Valley. They would rather divert these funds to other projects and regions in Northern and Southern California. 

Kelly strongly defends his position by stating:

“The idea to divert money from what we’re doing now and spend it on regional services, to me, is not consistent with the mission of high-speed rail. That’s my opinion.”

But what is the mission of the High Speed Rail Authority?

Actually one clear mission of the  HSR Authority, as stated in the 2008 Prop 1A bond measure, is to connect Northern and Southern California on a high speed train, taking no longer than 2 hours and 40 minutes between San Francisco (Trans Bay Terminal, not 4th and King), and Los Angeles, with a one-seat train trip.

The present plan, directs all existing funds to the CV, and certainly fails to accomplish that goal in the foreseeable future; not being mentioned is the over $50 billion short fall in existing funds as mentioned by the State Auditor, to fulfill that goal. 

The Federal Rail Administration (FRA) certainly no longer believes this will be accomplished and has cancelled $929 million in previously obligated funding for the project. The FRA has also announced its intention to attempt a “claw-back” of $2.5 billions in Federal ARRA funding, which has already been spent on the project. 

Kelly’s agenda, which would start operation on the segment from Merced to Bakersfield, by his own admission, requires an operating subsidy; this is a clear violation of Prop 1A which allows for no operating subsidy for the train, which was a prime selling point back in 2008, inducing the voters to pass the Prop 1A bond measure.

Kelly tries to make the case that future federal funding and private investment will appear as soon as the present plan is completed.

Elaine Chao, Federal Secretary of the Department of Transportation, has called Kelly’s plan, a “bait and switch”.  In addition the Federal Transportation Inspector General is conducting an audit of the Authority, which is due to be reported in this winter quarter.

Rarely has any dissention among HSR Board Members become public. The most notable was probably Director Lynn Schenk in March 2013, failing to endorse the “blended plan” for the project because she didn’t believe it was truly High Speed Rail. 

At the hearing, Director Curtin with back-up from Assembly Woman Laura Friedman (see Fresno Bee Article of 11/13/2019) stated powerful arguments that better and much sooner results would happen by diverting some funding to solving regional problems.

It should really be noted, that Kelly has “slow-rolled” the original dissent, which was initiated when the board approved, a Side-by-Side study which was to examine the possibilities of diverting funds at the May Board meeting. The study was to be completed within 60 days. Kelly pushed off the time line for the study and appointed the Early Train Operator (ETO) to perform the study. The ETO is hardly un-biased, since they are on a fast track to be awarded lucrative contracts for CV work. The study is now months over due, and released thus far is only a qualitative, biased study, with a full report delayed to be delivered sometime next year.

Where all of this will lead is, at this time, not known.  The Legislature will be asked to approve sometime, probably early next year, the appropriation of the remainder of the un-allocated Prop 1A funds (about $4 billion).  Will the Governor and CV advocates succeed in getting all of these funds directed to the CV or will other regional interests prevail and have these funds directed their way?

In either scenario, the voters of California have been defrauded! Kelly’s agenda, which would start operation on the segment from Merced to Bakersfield, would result in having spent over $20 billion and having constructed only an isolated High Speed Rail segment, which certainly does almost nothing to connect North California and Southern California.  

Back in 2008, the whole 800 mile project stretching from Sacramento to San Diego was estimated to cost $45 billion. (There is no current cost estimate for the full build)

Back in 2008 the SF to Los Angeles build was to cost $33 billion and would be completed in 2020. (The current estimate now is $80 to $100 billion)

Back in 2008 the promise was the train would run on grade separated, dedicated HSR tracks and not interfere with local auto traffic.

Back in 2008 the voters were promised that passing the Prop 1A almost $10 billion bond measure, would be all the funding from California voters ever required. Remaining funding was promised to come from private investment (none existent to this date) and Federal matching funds. 

It is no wonder the project has lost its appeal to so many California residents.

Morris Brown is founder of DERAIL, a grassroots effort against the California high-speed rail Project.

This article was originally published by Fox and Hounds Daily.

In football, defensive coaches tell their players that the best way to avoid missing a tackle is to keep their eye on the ball carrier’s belly button.

The runner may duck, weave, or spin but the belly button is always at the center.

This is a fitting metaphor for the annual Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association legislative scorecard.

Politicians will try all the dance moves they know in an effort to get to the tax-and-spend end zone, but report cards like ours hold them accountable to the people who matter most: the taxpayers who elected them.

In 2019, many taxes were stopped short of the goal line.

Assembly Constitutional Amendment 1 would have lowered the two-thirds vote for bonds and parcel taxes to 55 percent and thus fundamentally altered Proposition 13 in the process.

Had it been approved, it would have resulted in billions of dollars of additional property tax increases, above and beyond the one percent cap established by Proposition 13.

Thankfully, it fell ten votes short of passage and was therefore defeated.

Other taxes that were tackled in the 2019 session included taxes on handguns and ammunition, water, soda, a sales tax on services, and a severance tax on oil, taxing it as it comes out of the ground.

However, victories in the Capitol are always short-lived.

To read the entire column, please click here.