Legislature – Page 29

Anti-Taxpayer Forces Hit New Low in Special Election

March 10, 2015 By Jon Coupal 1 Comment

Last November’s election saw some of the most craven political tactics ever seen in California. Fearful that they would lose the two thirds supermajority in both houses, many anti-taxpayer candidates – usually Democrats – attempted to portray themselves as friendly to taxpayers and in favor of Proposition 13 when, in fact, the exact opposite was true. Perhaps the worst example of this was the race between Proposition 13 ally Janet Nguyen and Jose Solorio for a Senate seat in Orange County. Democrats were so fearful of losing this seat that Governor Brown unleashed radio advertising claiming that Solorio was the candidate who would protect Proposition 13. Thanks in large part to the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association Political Action Committee, voters were informed that Nguyen was by far the superior candidate over the proven tax-and-spend Solorio. Thankfully, she won the election handily receiving more than 58% of the vote.

Well, to paraphrase Ronald Reagan, here we go again.

Next week, on March 17th, voters in the East Bay area of Northern California will decide who will fill a state senate seat. Or, more likely, they will pick two candidates who will face one another in a runoff election. In this race, there are three viable candidates – all Democrats. The lone Republican candidate, Michaela Hertle, dropped out of the race and threw her support behind Steve Glazer, a moderate pro-business Democrat who appears to be a good fit for this fiscally conservative, socially moderate district.

The problem is that Glazer is hated by powerful public sector labor organizations. From their view, he had the audacity to oppose a BART strike – which inconvenienced tens of thousands of Bay Area commuters – and, even worse, he said he would not support a change in Proposition 13’s rules regarding property owned by businesses.

Labor organizations would like nothing more than to prevent Glazer from being one of the top two vote getters next week. If that occurs, then the only candidates appearing on the ballot in the May runoff election would be two tax-and-spend, labor compliant, left leaning Democrats. For Proposition 13 supporters, this is the worst case scenario.

So, rather than tell the truth about their anti-taxpayer agenda, the labor organizations have financed an expensive mail campaign in favor of the Republican who has dropped out of the race. This may seem crazy, but the goal here is to confuse Republican voters into voting their party as opposed to a moderate Democrat who actually has a chance to win.

This strategy reveals two things. First, powerful public sector labor organizations will stop at nothing to advance their narrow interests. Second, they recognize – as do most political observers – that Proposition 13 and the interests of taxpayers still resonate powerfully in California.

While the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association PAC has not endorsed a candidate in this special election, we reserve the right to do so in the runoff election. But one thing is certain. Of the candidates, Steve Glazer appears to be the most sympathetic to the issues of concern to California taxpayers – including the preservation of Proposition 13. At a minimum, he is the least beholden to unions. And in this state, that is saying something.

Jon Coupal is president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association — California’s largest grass-roots taxpayer organization dedicated to the protection of Proposition 13 and the advancement of taxpayers’ rights.

Filed Under: Top Stories Tagged With: CA Senate, HJTA, Jon Coupal, Legislature, Special Election, Steve Glazer, taxes

CA Legislature Will Debate “Homeless Bill of Rights”

March 8, 2015 By James Poulos 6 Comments

It could soon get easier to live on the streets in the Golden State. As controversy swirled around the police shooting of a homeless and mentally ill man on Skid Row in Los Angeles, legislators in California considered a new set of regulations activists said would “decriminalize” homelessness by providing a so-called “right to rest” in public.

The “right to rest” movement has picked up steam first on the West Coast, with similar bills under review in the Hawaii and Oregon legislatures.

Following suit, state Sen. Carol Liu, D-La Cañada-Flintridge, introduced Senate Bill 608, known as the Right to Rest Act. Using broad language written by the Western Regional Advocacy Project, the bill would enshrine such actions as eating in public and occupying legally parked cars as “basic human and civil rights.”

What’s more, SB608 would authorize someone discriminated against in the use of public space to sue to enforce their newly codified rights in a civil action.

In a statement, Liu described homelessness as a “social,” not criminal, issue. “Citing homeless people for resting in a public space can lead to their rejection for jobs, education loans and housing, further denying them a pathway out of poverty,” she said.

Last month, Berkeley Law’s Policy Advocacy Clinic released a report on “the growing enactment and enforcement of anti-homeless laws in the Golden State.” In a forceful denunciation of California’s current homeless policies, the Clinic pushed for the kind of changes WRAP helped draft into model legislation:

“Without state-level intervention, California cities have been engaged in a race to the bottom by increasing criminalization, hoping to drive homeless people elsewhere and make them someone else’s problem. Comprehensive reform must target the full range of state codes and municipal laws that criminalize homelessness.”

A pressure cooker

SB608 comes at a time when homeless issues in cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles have gained a higher profile as a result of rising rents in urban cores.

As CalWatchdog.com reported, the Skid Row shooting of the man known as Africa drew sharp rebuke from community activists in downtown Los Angeles, some of whom pinned blame on the LAPD’s new Safer Cities Initiative. That effort targeted Skid Row — now at the frontier of downtown’s gentrification — with increased monitoring conducted in part by cops with beefed-up training in how to interact with the homeless and mentally unwell.

Critics noted that, although the initiative launched in 2006 by then-police chief William Bratton cut crime, it imposed an unending series of infractions on the homeless. Activists complained that more than half of Skid Row-area homeless had been arrested in the past year.

The problem seemed cyclical: one reason why Skid Row hosted one of the densest populations of homeless in America was because the surrounding areas had seen a robust influx of new renters and owners, raising housing costs.

Mainstreaming a worldview

Despite the fairly radical, social-justice approach taken by the activists who are shaping “right to rest” legislation, the agenda found an advocate in Liu, widely perceived as safely mainstream. On her official website, Liu recently touted her perfect legislative track record last year, when she went eight for eight of her bills enacted into law.

For Paul Boden, director of WRAP, activists’ appropriate ambitions reached nationwide. Himself homeless as a teen, Boden has volunteered and worked on homeless issues for 30 years.

Now he has sensed the stars are aligning for a push that extends far beyond the West Coast. Boden insisted, “From Hawaii to New York and from Maine to Texas, it’s time for this to stop.”

Originally published by CalWatchdog.com

Filed Under: Top Stories Tagged With: Carol Liu, Homeless, Legislature, Rights

Which CA Legislators Received Most Gifts in 2014? Find Out Online

March 6, 2015 By Steve Miller Leave a Comment

Mike McGuire made over $100,000 in 2014 as a Sonoma County supervisor and another $525 in parting gift certificates as the young Democrat left to take a $95,291-a-year job as a state senator.

Richard Pan, a physician, took in just over $2,800 in gifts and travel payments, including a $440 outing at a San Francisco Giants baseball game, compliments of the Pacific Gas and Electric Co. Pan is now a Democratic state senator representing a Sacramento district.

And Jeff Stone, whose business, Innovative Compounding Pharmacy, is worth over $1 million, took 25 pages to document his property holdings, including a number of manufactured home rentals. The Riverside County Republican, too, is part of the state Senate’s freshman class.

Their financial information is part of the new filings of statements of economic interest for 2014, which went online Tuesday and are available for public perusal.

It’s the first filing for the freshman class of both the Assembly and the Senate — and for the public, it’s the first time to get a glimpse of their wealth as well as their perks.

Elected in November, taking gifts in December

Some got off to a quick start. Ling-Ling Chang, a new Republican assemblywoman from Chino Hills, declared $2,433 in travel payments over four days in December. In that period, she participated in an education symposium for the California Charter Schools Association for $1,258 and a policy summit for TechNet, a group that lobbies for tech giants with a hub in Los Altos, for which she claimed $1,175.

At the same TechNet event, freshman Assemblyman Bill Dodd, a Napa County Democrat, received $340. Both Chang and Dodd noted the money was for speech/panel participation.

Some like gifts in keeping with their interests. State Sen. Bob Hertzberg, a Los Angeles Democrat referred to as a “deal-making, cigar-smoking” guy in a 2004 L.A. Times profile, disclosed $765 in gifts involving cigars.

Hertzberg, a former speaker of the Assembly, is back in Sacramento after spending 13 years in the private sector.

Some of the financial disclosures are on the quirky side: Kansen Chu, a San Jose Democrat Assembly member, holds a financial interest of between $10,000 and $100,000 in NeuroSky, a company that sells a product that claims to use electrodes on your forehead to interpret brainwave electricity – and, yes, to read your mind.

Like most states, California requires annual disclosure of gifts as well as income and property interests. They are submitted to the state’s Fair Political Practices Commission, or FPPC, which also polices alleged violations of the state’s campaign laws.

At the state Assembly level, 18 of the 27 new state Assembly members come from the ranks of city councils. At the upper ranks, five of the 10 new senators are former Assembly members.

Lawmakers with a history of having hands slapped

The FPPC sends warnings to lawmakers who have violated the rules in the form of a public letter. And some taking new offices have already been warned of potential malfeasance.

Jeff Stone received a warning in 2010 about a 2009 vote when he was a supervisor in Riverside County, in which he “may” have violated conflict of interest provisions by awarding funds to a nonprofit that stood to benefit him.

“However, we have determined that an enforcement action for a violation is not warranted, because the funds awarded were restricted and could not be used for administrative costs of your source of income,” the note from the commission stated.

Pan has also received a warning about political behavior when he allegedly received services worth over $500 from a lobbyist who hosted a fundraiser for him in 2012.

Much is made of the staggering wealth of members of Congress, where California Sen. Dianne Feinstein is among the richest senators and Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Vista, is noted as the wealthiest among U.S. representatives.

At the state legislator level, wealth is not so easily tracked in California. Filers must note holdings in both real estate and stock ownership, which can indicate in increase in wealth.

Gifts, though, are more readily tracked. In California, the gift limit for 2013-14 was $440 for goods from a single source.

State Attorney General Kamala Harris in her filing for her final year in 2010 as district attorney in San Francisco reported no personal stock holdings. It was her last year before taking her current office and she received $1,869 in gifts, mostly flowers as a departure present.

In the previous year, 2009, she noted that her book, “Smart on Crime,” had earned her between $10,000 and $100,000 in royalties, although the book was released in October.

Book royalties are usually paid on a semi-annual or quarterly basis.

Newsom likes gifts; Harris, not so much

This year, Harris, the leading Democratic nominee in the race to replace retiring U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer, has more holdings to declare due to her marriage in August to fellow attorney Douglas Emhoff.

Harris’ filing shows holdings in Comcast, Costco, Home Depot, Nike, Verizon and Visa, which she notes were held in Emhoff’s IRA and are held separately. Harris, as the state’s chief law enforcement officer, could potentially oversee activity involving some of those companies.

Her gifts this time around are more modest: just one receipt of flowers, from Fox Entertainment, declared at $101.

The man initially seen as her rival for Boxer’s U.S. Senate seat, Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, has for years accepted more lucrative gifts.

In 2010, Newsom’s last year as mayor of San Francisco, he declared $3,512 in gifts, including tickets to the opera, symphony, sporting events and Cirque du Soleil.

Last year, Newsom, who declared in January that he would not run for Senate, reported $3,781 that again included tickets to sporting events, a crystal trophy and a Christofle tray.

Originally published on CalWatchdog.com

Filed Under: Top Stories Tagged With: Elected Officials, Gavin Newsom, Jeff Stone, Kamala Harris, Legislators, Legislature

Why Don’t California Lawmakers Want Residents to Buy Earthquake Insurance?

February 22, 2015 By Ian Adams 3 Comments

“California Rocks.” That’s the clever slogan for a new advertising campaign by the California Earthquake Authority (CEA), the state’s privately funded, publicly managed earthquake insurance fund. The message is both an allusion to the Golden State’s culture of musical cool and a literal statement of fact: California is earthquake country. The state experiences hundreds of tiny temblors every day that most people never notice. But it’s only a matter of time before a destructive quake rocks the Golden State. The Southern California Earthquake Center estimates that the state has a 99.7 percent chance of experiencing an earthquake of magnitude 6.7 or greater within the next 23 years. Yet, thanks to shortsighted public policy, only about one in ten Californian residents holds an earthquake-insurance policy.

Until recently, California’s insurers struggled to align their premiums with the actual peril that earthquakes represent. Insurance companies discovered after the 1994 Northridge earthquake that their estimates had been much too low. That magnitude 6.7 temblor killed more than 60 people, injured 9,000, damaged and destroyed thousands of buildings, and left parts of Los Angeles’s freeways in ruins. The losses suffered by insurers—$12.5 billion in all—were greater than the sum of earthquake insurance premiums they’d collected over the previous 25 years.

Politicians have always recognized that earthquakes pose a long-term problem, but their solutions have tended to be ad hoc and counterproductive. Two developments in particular made earthquake insurance less attractive to California homeowners. First, in 1985, the state took the unusual step of mandating that insurers offer earthquake insurance anytime they sell a residential insurance policy. At the time, an estimated 5 to 7 percent of homeowners had earthquake insurance. Publicly, legislators maintained that the goal of linking residential policies with earthquake policies was to raise awareness of earthquake insurance and encourage more people to purchase private coverage. But the underlying reason for the mandate was a state court decision that dramatically expanded insurer’s civil liability for damages not covered under existing policies.

The legislature had at least two choices in responding to the court’s ruling: take a free-market approach while limiting liability, or link the earthquake insurance to residential policies. Lawmakers went with the second, with the encouragement—later regretted—of some in the insurance industry. Insurers believed that most customers would turn down an offer of earthquake insurance, seeing it as an expensive option to hedge against a remote risk; meanwhile, the insurers would have insulated themselves from liability. In fact, the problem worsened: after Northridge, spooked insurers scrambled to limit their exposure to future quakes by refusing to sell residential policies. As a result, the real estate market ground to a halt.

In 1996, looking for a way to get insurers to issue policies again, legislators established the state earthquake authority, which offers earthquake insurance to satisfy the 1985 law. Participating insurers fund the CEA by pooling premiums in the state fund. The CEA’s earthquake insurance is better than what came before, but it’s still expensive, with high deductibles and limited coverage. So it’s unsurprising that only 10 percent of homeowners today are willing to pay for it.

The best way to control costs related to earthquake damage is to restrict development in earthquake-prone areas, but that opportunity passed long ago; the most dangerous areas in California are among the most densely populated. The most realistic and effective way to control earthquake exposure is to distribute the risk privately. Privately financed insurance policies aren’t susceptible to the political whims of state officials and regulators. They have the added virtues of scale, speed, and sensitivity to individual claims.

State senator Bill Monning, a Democrat from Carmel, has taken the lead on reforming the CEA and seeking ways to encourage more homeowners to buy insurance. But he’s found little support from his fellow Democrats. The best Monning could manage last session was a resolution encouraging Congress to pass the Earthquake Insurance Affordability Act, a taxpayer-funded insurance backstop. If lawmakers really wanted to see the public covered, they would liberalize the state’s insurance market and compel companies to innovate and compete. If they considered earthquake peril a statewide risk worthy of universal sacrifice, they might even make buying earthquake coverage a requirement for obtaining a mortgage, not unlike the mandate to purchase flood insurance in flood-prone areas. But until such changes come into effect, homeowners and taxpayers will wind up paying a steep price when California rocks again.

Ian Adams is California director of the R Street Institute and author of a new policy paper, “Insuring a Way Out: Modernizing the California Earthquake Authority.”

Originally published by City Journal

Filed Under: Top Stories Tagged With: Bill Monning, City Journal, Earthquake, Insurance, Legislature

Proposed Bill Will Force Parents to Choose: Vaccinate or Homeschool

February 21, 2015 By James Poulos 25 Comments

The measles outbreak has injected the California Legislature with a new urgency in dealing with vaccine issues. First up is a new bill, as yet without a number, by state Sens. Ben Allen, D-Santa Monica, and Richard Pan, D-Sacramento, the latter a pediatrician.

According to Pan’s website, the bill “will repeal the personal belief exemption that currently allows parents to effectively opt their child out of vaccines in our schools.” Under the exemption, “a parent may choose to opt their child out of school vaccine requirements that bi-partisan legislative majorities passed to protect students.”

As the Sacramento Bee reported, the vaccination issue has roiled California in unexpected ways, with “anti-vaxxers” cutting across familiar ideological and political categories. “I’m a registered Democrat, but that could possibly change,” one parent told the paper. “I could never be with a party that mandates, and takes away freedom from people.”

But Republicans have been wary of championing residents seen as directly responsible for the outbreak of major diseases. Some GOP officeholders in Sacramento have begun to reverse their earlier support of California’s relatively broad personal belief exemption, which extends beyond a carveout for religious beliefs. Others have reaffirmed a measured commitment to both vaccination and parental choice.

According to the Los Angeles Times, however, the bill would nevertheless extend some political cover to conservatives whose constituents favor close parental control of medical choices:

“The legislation does not address children who are completely home-schooled. It would still allow children to avoid vaccination for medical reasons including allergic responses and weak immune systems. The mandate only applies to children attending public or private schools.”

Democratic divisions

Perhaps surprisingly, Republicans may have already felt the worst of the political awkwardness — while Democrats face more internal disagreement. As the Wall Street Journal reported, “Dr. Pan wrote a 2012 law that went into effect last year that required a consultation with a health care practitioner to obtain the personal belief exemption. Gov. Jerry Brown added an exemption based on religious beliefs upon signing that law.”

Now, Brown’s office has indicated the governor is open to erasing the personal belief exemption.

Both California’s U.S. Senators, Democrats Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, also have urged their fellow party members to consider eliminating the religious-belief exemption. In a letter to California Health and Human Services Secretary Diana Dooley and other officials, the senators set out an uncompromising position:

“California’s current law allows two options for parents to opt out of vaccine requirements for school and daycare: they must either make this decision with the aid of a health professional, or they can simply check a box claiming that they have religious objections to medical care. We think both options are flawed, and oppose even the notion of a medical professional assisting to waive a vaccine requirement unless there is a medical reason, such as an immune deficiency.”

What’s more, Boxer and Feinstein went after parents who sought modified or delayed vaccination schedules even for preschool children — a move that could unsettle the swift but fragile bipartisan consensus forming around the Pan-Allen bill.

As BuzzFeed reported, the response among Democrats has not been as crisp and confident as Boxer and Feinstein might have hoped:

“Several liberal lawmakers unequivocally said parents should vaccinate their kids. But when pressed further on the state laws that allow parents to skip vaccinating their children if they have a medical, religious, or ‘personal belief’ reason not to do so, their answers became less clear.”

Nationally prominent California Democrats, from Rep. Maxine Waters to House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, couched their language in a way that steered clear of Boxer and Feinstein’s vaccination absolutism.

The office of California Attorney General Kamala Harris — who hopes to replace Boxer in the Senate — declined to answer any questions about Harris’s own stance.

Originally published on CalWatchdog.com

Filed Under: Top Stories Tagged With: Kamala Harris, Legislature, Measles, Richard Pan, Sacramento, Vaccination, Vaccine

Sen. Leno’s “Income Inequality” Lost Cause

February 20, 2015 By Michael Saltsman 3 Comments

California’s minimum wage is set to rise to $10 an hour on January 1^st of next year. But for Senator Mark Leno (D-San

CA State Senator Mark Leno, D-San Francisco

Francisco), this already-dramatic wage hike isn’t nearly dramatic enough.

Citing an “income inequality crisis,” Sen. Leno has called for a minimum wage increase to $11 an hour in 2016, followed by another jump to $13 an hour in 2017. Unfortunately for the senator, the evidence suggests a hike in the base wage will do very little to solve this crisis — and might even make it worse.

San Francisco, which Sen. Leno represents, has one of the highest minimum wages in the country — and one of the country’s most dramatic gaps between the rich and the poor. (One analysis last year compared the city’s inequality level to that in a developing nation.) City voters in November resolved to fix this problem by approving a proposal to raise the city’s minimum wage even higher, to $15 an hour, by 2018.

Thus far, the looming $15 minimum wage only seems to be worsening the city’s inequality crisis. Several small business owners have been forced to close their doors as a consequence of the coming cost hike, hindering their own entrepreneurial dreams and those of the people they employed. This trade-off isn’t unique to San Francisco. If you’re an employee working at a business with small profit margins, your employer will be faced with one of two difficult choices when the minimum wage goes up: Either raise prices, or cut labor costs by reducing staffing levels or employees’ hours.

If the wage goes up and the terms of your employment don’t change, you may be better off; if you lose job and your co-workers do, too, then you’re most certainly worse off. That means Sen. Leno’s plan for a statewide $13 minimum wage will create winners and losers in the entry-level workforce. Unfortunately, a team of economists writing in the Journal of Human Resources discovered that the “losers” from a wage hike — employees who are pulled below the poverty line, or at least closer to it, as a consequence — outnumber the “winners.”

Put differently: Instead of redistributing income from the top 1 percent, Sen. Leno may unintentionally redistribute it among the bottom.

The Senator’s office has pointed skeptics to comforting studies from a team of ideological researchers at the University of California-Berkeley, suggesting that the negative impact of a higher minimum wage in California—both on the city level, and statewide–would be minimal or nonexistent. But the Berkeley team’s estimates are looking less and less credible in the face of real-world evidence.

In San Francisco, for instance, one bookstore reported that the $15 minimum wage would cause a fatal 18 percent increase in operating costs—90 times greater than what UC Berkeley projected for city retailers. And in Oakland, where the minimum wage is rising to $12.25, restaurants are reporting price hikes of up to 20 percent—far greater than the 2.5 percent that the Berkeley team predicted.

These real-world examples are no doubt unsatisfying to the most dedicated ideologues, and it’s unsurprising that one of the Berkeley researchers insinuated employers might not be telling the truth. But spin like this only goes so far, especially in the face of real flesh-and-blood employees who no longer have jobs.

If Sen. Leno is serious about reducing income inequality and increasing opportunity, he owes it to the California residents who need those opportunities to examine the best way to help them. That starts by acknowledging that we should judge public policy by its outcomes rather than its intentions.

Michael Saltsman is research director at the Employment Policies Institute

Filed Under: Top Stories Tagged With: CA Senate, Legislature, Mark Leno, Minimum Wage, san francisco

Government fails to earn respect of Californians

January 31, 2015 By Dave Roberts 12 Comments

Nine out of 10 Californians believe state government wastes their tax dollars. Two-thirds believe state government is run for the benefit of a few special interests and state officials cannot be trusted to do the right thing.

Those results from a Public Policy Institute of California survey are similar to the dissatisfaction with and distrust of state government that Californians expressed 10 years ago. The reason for that disaffection and what should be done about it was the focus of the Jan. 22 meeting of the state watchdog agency the Little Hoover Commission.

The findings in the survey of 1,704 adults conducted from Nov. 10-17 (with a sampling error of 3.7 percent):

“Do you think the people in state government waste a lot of the money we pay in taxes, waste some of it, or don’t waste very much of it?” 54 percent – waste a lot, 35 percent – waste some of it, 8 percent – don’t waste very much of it. Seventy-eight percent of Republicans, 60 percent of independents and 46 percent of Democrats believe state government wastes a lot.
“Would you say the state government is pretty much run by a few big interests looking out for themselves, or that it is run for the benefit of all of the people?” 67 percent – run by a few big interests, 28 percent – run for the benefit of all of the people.
“How much of the time do you think you can trust the state government in Sacramento to do what is right?” 61 percent – only some of the time, 25 percent – most of the time, 7 percent – just about always, 5 percent – none of the time.

The results were similar for all three questions across regional and demographic groups and similar to a survey conducted a decade ago. But they are slightly better than an even worse skepticism of state government in an October 2010 survey.

Federal and state governments

State officials can take minor consolation that Californians are even more skeptical about the federal government. On the other hand, Californians are less distrustful of local government, particularly in the area of wasting tax dollars, according to a May 2011 PPIC survey.

“In summary, negative perceptions about the effectiveness, responsiveness and efficiency of state government are pretty consistent over time and widely held in the public today,” PPIC President/CEO Mark Baldassare told the commission. He listed four implications of the results:

“Californians will continue to value the citizens’ initiative process as they seek to have a say in the major decisions made by their state government.
“Many Californians will be skeptical about the need for higher taxes and more state revenues, given their feelings about waste.
“Proposals to move authority and control to the local level from the state level are the kinds of proposals that will resonate with Californians today.
“Last but not least, civic disengagement will continue to be a problem. The kind of civic disengagement that we saw in the record low turnout in last year’s election. And we may not have seen the lowest of low turnouts yet, given the disengagement Californians feel from state government today.”

Only 30.9 percent of California adults voted in the Nov. 2014 general election and just 18.4 percent in the June primary, according to Baldassare, who said in his blog: “Millions of Californians who could register to vote did not, and millions of Californians who could vote opted out. These numbers clearly point to a California public that is disconnected from their state government today.”

Hopeful

But Baldassare, perhaps anticipating the PPIC survey released this week showing increased optimism that the state is heading in the right direction, closed his remarks on a more hopeful note.

“In the wake of a growing improvement in our economy and fiscal situation, which has led to higher approval ratings of the governor and Legislature than we’ve seen for several years, and also at a time when we’ve just gone through a series of major legislative and fiscal reforms that the voters have approved in recent elections, the public is signaling their support for those reforms as well as efforts to move some activities from the state to the local level through both the local control of school funding and our corrections realignment,” he said.

Asked to explain the reasons for residents’ disconnection with government, Baldassare said part of it is a general skepticism of all institutions, particularly by independent voters. He added it’s also due to Californians’ unsatisfactory experiences dealing with state government. “They do have real experiences which confirm these broadly held beliefs,” he said. “That’s where you have control.”

The question of what the state can do to win the confidence of residents became the focus of the rest of the 2½-hour hearing.

“We should focus on the things which state government can directly affect,” said Commissioner David Beier. “To me that’s the building of trust through the delivery of governmental services. One of my business school colleagues said, ‘Building trust is a question of two things: intention and competence.’ I don’t think anybody has any question about the intention of state officials to deliver high quality services and positive outcomes.

“The question is one of competence. And it’s not a question of the qualification to deliver high quality goods and services. There are better, smarter ways to deliver service. And if we can identify the top agencies and the frequency of interaction with citizens, I think we can affect at least that component of government trust.”

No respect

A big part of the problem is that the message Californians receive from state government, whether via the Internet or waiting in line at the DMV, is that state officials don’t respect them, according to Cyd Harrell, a user experience expert with Code for America, which specializes in government technology.

“Design sounds like icing on the cake or making things pretty,” she said. “But at the core, design is creating an effect on purpose. People compare the best the private sector has to offer in the same space, the five-inch screen, where it gets Facebook, Amazon or an online game. When the government experience doesn’t live up to the level of experience of the other institutions they interact with, there’s an assumption that the effect is being created on purpose.

“That’s part of where that distrust in government comes from. There’s an assumption that if I have difficulty reading it or difficulty filling out a form or it doesn’t speak in a language that I easily understand, then that’s an effect the government intends, or at least is comfortable creating as part of the design.

“In the private sector, we have companies competing to offer people the best experience for their money. Government is different, naturally. If I don’t like the experience of interacting with the government when registering my car or seeing if I’m eligible for benefits, I can’t exactly take my business elsewhere. So in some ways that can be seen as a free pass [for government officials]: ‘Don’t worry about it, where else can they go?’

“But I truly think there’s a moral imperative. Government needs to serve all of the people. It needs to offer them experiences that respect their time and dignity and their abilities, whatever those may be.”

Currently, few government agencies practice what Harrell calls human-centered design. But she said it’s not that expensive to implement. It just takes commitment from top government officials to want to do it. “So the critical thing, in my opinion, is a mind shift,” she said.

Worst enemy

Other experts at the meeting agreed that government is often its own worst enemy when it comes to working smarter and better. Bob Stone, a performance adviser for the city of Los Angeles, provided an example of the Los Angeles Fire Department’s procedure for providing two replacement pieces of uniform for each firefighter annually.

“If you were to be awarded two pieces of clothing, most people would go to the Internet, Amazon or Wal-Mart and they would buy it,” said Stone. “What the city does: the firefighter fills out a form, gets a supervisor to approve it, gets a station chief to endorse it. It’s sent to the battalion chief across town, he endorses it, sends it to the procurement office. They gather up all these things and put in an order with the supplier. A big box of supplies comes into the central yard. We pay somebody to unpack the boxes, and these go to Van Nuys and these to San Pedro, send these to West Los Angeles. That’s the way we do things.

“It’s crazy. It was a sensible way to do things in the 1950s. What they are doing, and they are going to start hopefully in the next month, they are going to give the supplier a list of fire department members who have this entitlement. And they are going to tell each of these people, ‘You’re entitled to two pieces of clothing that we’ll pay for. Go to the supplier’s website, they know who you are, identify yourself and order what you want. If you want more than two, you can buy whatever you want, you just have to pay for it. We’ll pay for the first two.’

“And this happened because we told the people that were working there, ‘Don’t do anything crazy on purpose. We do enough things crazy by accident. If you’re doing something dumb, stop it and do something smart.’ So they did this. And I’m hopeful that there are going to be thousands of examples like this.”

The Little Hoover Commission plans to submit its recommendations to the state in a report, probably later this year.

Originally published by CalWatchdog.com

Filed Under: Top Stories Tagged With: Government, Legislature, Little Hoover Commission, PPIC, Trust

Anti-Taxpayer Forces Hit New Low in Special Election