Free Republic

WASHINGTON – California and other financially strapped states will lose tens of millions of federal dollars that they spend to jail illegal immigrants charged with crimes, under Congress' latest spending bill. The $1.1 trillion plan, finalized by House and Senate negotiators Tuesday night, combines six of the large yearly appropriations bills passed by Congress to keep the government running. State officials and members of the California congressional delegation had lobbied hard once again to increase aid to the states for the program, hoping to cash in on California's increased clout in Washington this year. But their efforts fell flat, with...

The California Air Resources Board gave truckers a break Wednesday on the state's tough diesel emissions rules, acknowledging that the bad economy has both improved the state's air quality and made anti-pollution upgrades unaffordable. After a nearly seven-hour public hearing in Sacramento that featured more than 80 speakers including truckers, health and environmental advocates and even high school students from Oakland, the air board ordered modifications to the rules drawn up for consideration in April. Those changes could include significant delays in enforcement of the rules, depending on how quickly the economy recovers. The board also could add new exemptions...

Barack Obama's faux populism is beginning to grate, and when yet another one of those "we the people" e-mails from the president landed on my screen as I was fishing around for a column subject, I came unglued. It is one thing to rob us blind by rewarding the power elite that created our problems but quite another to sugarcoat it in the rhetoric of a David taking on those Goliaths.In each of the three most important areas of policy with which he has dealt, Obama speaks in the voice of the little people's champion, but his actions cater fully...

BERKELEY -- The city of Berkeley mailed coat hangers to 20 members of Congress today in protest of the anti-abortion amendment in version of the federal health care bill.

The California Air Resources Board must decide today whether the bad economy justifies giving truckers and construction firms more breathing room on the state's toughest-in-the-nation diesel pollution regulations. By cutting diesel consumption, the recession has likely improved the state's air quality, air board staff say. Fleet owners hope to use that evidence to convince the agency that it should delay mandated retrofits and upgrades they say the recession has made them unable to afford. "They could not have put enough regulations in place to do what this slowdown has done," said Felipe Martin, chief financial officer at Sacramento's Martin Bros....

Los Angeles, CA (AP) -- California officials plan to suspend new enrollments for a program that tests low-income women for breast cancer and to tighten eligibility standards when the program reopens. The Every Woman Counts program won't enroll new clients from Jan. 1 until July 2, 2010, and will restrict enrollment to women over the age of 50 thereafter. Previously, women had to be 40 years old to be eligible for the program. California Department of Public Health director Dr. Mark Horton said in a statement that declining state tobacco tax revenues and increased demand were to blame for cutbacks.

WASHINGTON, (AP) -- House and Senate leaders proposed a compromise plan Tuesday to give shuttered General Motors and Chrysler dealers an appeals process to keep their showrooms open. Congressional aides said a broad $1.1 trillion spending bill would include language providing 789 Chrysler dealers closed in June and more than 1,350 GM dealers expected to be shut down next year an improved binding arbitration process to challenge the automakers' decisions. General Motors Co. and Chrysler Group LLC said last week they would reconsider decisions to close the dealers as part of a compromise meant to set aside action by Congress...

OAKLAND -- KTVU News has learned a key section of that bridge has been delayed again and Caltrans now is bracing for a new cost over-run in the tens of millions of dollars. The history of the new Bay Bridge has been a troubled one from the time the state decided to replace the old eastern span after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. The original price tag of a little more than $1 billion has exploded into more than $6 billion along with numerous delays. Now Channel 2 News has learned that next Wednesday, state and local transportation officials are...

The Free Speech Movement lives on at UC Berkeley - 45 years to the day after a barefoot, 21-year-old student named Mario Savio energized thousands from atop a police car by exhorting them to do all they could to stop the administration's restrictive policies. Today the issue is less about freedom of speech than about freedom of access to a quality education, as thousands of students have protested rising tuition, employee layoffs and course cutbacks in recent weeks. "We're the ones fighting for this to be a public university that everyone can afford!" Ronald Cruz, a Berkeley activist, told a...

A year ago, high officials of the California Air Resources Board learned that the author of a statistical study on diesel soot effects had falsified his academic credentials. The CARB researcher, Hien Tran, acknowledged the deception and agreed to be demoted, but after his data were given another peer review, they remained the basis of highly controversial regulations that will cost owners of trucks, buses and other diesel-powered machinery millions of dollars to upgrade their engines. The Tran study concluded that diesel "particulate matter" was responsible for about 1,000 additional deaths each year. Only recently, with the rules on the...

One of the many contentious issues in the national health care debate is something that began 34 years ago in California when Jerry Brown, in the first year of his first governorship, signed legislation imposing a $250,000 limit on pain and suffering damages in medical malpractice cases. The version of a national health care bill that Speaker Nancy Pelosi pushed through the House contains a provision that would push – but not quite compel – California and other states with malpractice damage caps to repeal them.

Just days before Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and legislators finalized a water package, including an $11.1 billion bond issue, state Treasurer Bill Lockyer warned them not to do it. California is already deeply in debt, Lockyer warned, has huge budget deficits and can't afford another big bond issue. "The days of blithely heaping more and more debt burden on the general fund are over – at least they should be," Lockyer said. The earmark-laden bond issue, the package's single most controversial element, raises an interesting question: Just how deeply in debt are our state and local governments? The answer: No one...

SAN FRANCISCO -- Let's hope you weren't planning to cook that turkey over an open fire. Air quality officials have called a Spare the Air alert for Thanksgiving, meaning the burning of wood and manufactured fire logs is banned both indoors and outdoors from midnight tonight until midnight Thursday. The use of any wood-burning device, including fireplaces, wood stoves, pellet stoves and outdoor fire pits, is illegal during that period, the Bay Area Air Quality Management District said. The wood-burning ban covers Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, southern Sonoma and southwestern Solano counties.

A student group at UC Berkeley’s school of law Tuesday called on the U.S. Justice Department, the Pennsylvania Bar and the University of California to “conduct full and thorough investigations” of former government lawyers who crafted the Bush torture memos, including John Yoo, a tenured faculty member at their school. Comprised of a coalition of student groups and individuals, the Boalt Alliance to Abolish Torture (B.A.A.T.) has gathered over 275 signatures which call for investigations into “potential violations of professional and ethical duties, as well as possible criminal conduct.” Both the Pennsylvania Bar Association where John Yoo is registered and...

Before the economy went bust, California voters authorized multibillion-dollar charges on the state's infrastructure credit card. They approved generational investments in roads, schools and levees, as well as hospitals and stem-cell research. At the time, fiscal experts projected that California at most would have to spend roughly 6 percent of its annual budget on payments. But after an economic collapse, estimates now show that debt service could consume as much as 10 percent of the annual general fund budget by 2014-15 – an "unprecedented" ratio, according to the Legislative Analyst's Office. The latest debt warning comes weeks after lawmakers and...

Sacramento -- The number of public safety jobs created or saved with federal stimulus dollars has been vastly overstated in California, according to the state auditor. In a letter sent to leaders at the Capitol on Monday, State Auditor Elaine Howle said that the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has overstated by as many as 13,000 the number of jobs saved by federal stimulus dollars. That represents more than 10 percent of the jobs California reported saving with the federal funds. Howle said the department appears to have counted employees who were not at risk of losing their jobs. The...

Unionized city employees protesting layoffs and wage reductions marched from San Francisco City Hall to Market Street this afternoon, blocking off a busy intersection during rush hour.

For years California has courted a reputation as an eco-friendly, green-minded leader, but the state now finds its most basic program of recycling beverage bottles and cans mired in debt and litigation. Dozens of supermarket recycling sites have shut down recently as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and state legislators spar over how to close a massive gap in the program's budget. California's 23-year-old recycling program, managed by the Department of Conservation through fees charged to beverage buyers, has been hurt this year by recession, rising redemption rates and raids of its coffers to help ease the state's budget woes. Schwarzenegger and...

Nine months after President Obama promised that his $789 billion stimulus package would be the most transparent spending bill in history, much of the information available to the public for the Bay Area and the rest of the nation is incomplete or inaccurate. The White House's Recovery Act Web site - www.recovery.gov - shows that $660 million has been awarded to Bay Area transportation projects to create 997 jobs, which amounts to a staggering $661,986 per job. Last week, the site showed that California Congressional Districts 00 and 99 received millions of dollars in stimulus funding even though neither district...

When Mac Taylor, the Legislature's chief budget adviser, declared this week that the state budget enacted just four months ago is already billions of dollars upside down, no one in the Capitol should have been surprised. Anyone with half a brain and a hand calculator could figure out that many assumptions on which the budget was based, both spending and revenues, were unrealistic, some of them conjured out of thin air to "balance" an inherently unbalanced budget for political reasons. Taylor told legislators that the current budget is $6.3 billion out of balance and the 2010-11 budget has another $14.4...

Somewhere in the bureaucratic haze of Oakland city government, in a spacious office with views of Frank Ogawa Plaza, there is a holiday grinch who has actually succeeded in swiping a slice of Christmas spirit from city residents. Now I already know what you're thinking, so let's get it out of the way. It is not Mayor Ron Dellums. He has been out of town since Saturday attending to a death in the family, said Paul Rose, the mayor's overused, underinformed press secretary. On Monday, Oakland city officials informed Marco Li Mandri, executive director of two business community benefit districts...

State Budgets: California's slide into fiscal oblivion continues, with no end in sight. Despite lots of budget cuts this year, a $21 billion deficit looms. The politicians' solution? Stop selling high-definition TVs in the state. It's starting to become routine. Last February, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a new spending plan with "real, lasting reforms" that would help close its $36 billion-plus deficit and ensure the state never got so out of fiscal whack again. And just four months ago the Governator and California's worst-in-the-country legislature agreed to a plan to close a $24 billion budget gap by cutting spending amid...

More grim news Wednesday for state workers: California's general fund faces a $21 billion deficit through the middle of 2011. The red ink could flow for years to come, according to a forecast by the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst's Office.The state's 200,000 or so workers, already taking a 15 percent pay hit from three furlough days per month, knew this was coming. What does the state's rotten financial picture mean to them?• Real job cuts. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger already has ordered 7,000 jobs eliminated from the deficit-ridden general fund. And as this column reported a few months ago, the administration has...

California again is facing a mammoth budget deficit and the prospect of more severe cuts to state services, the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst's Office warned in a report released Wednesday.Legislative Analyst Mac Taylor said the state will face a $20.7 billion deficit next year and that the Legislature and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger need to start work to fill that gap "as soon as possible." He also noted that many one-time fixes state leaders have relied on in the past to close deficits are not available. The state will face $20 billion annual deficits through 2015 if permanent fixes are not made,...

New Orleans (AP) -- A federal judge has ruled that the Army Corps of Engineers' failure to properly maintain a navigation channel led to massive flooding in Hurricane Katrina.

San Francisco, CA (AP) -- A federal lawyer who was prevented from enrolling his same-sex spouse in his government-sponsored health plan must be reimbursed the cost of outside insurance and other medical expenses, a California judge ruled Tuesday. Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Stephen Reinhardt said Brad Levenson, a public defender in Los Angeles, is entitled to the money because the Office of Personnel Management refused to authorize health coverage for Levenson's husband of 16 months. That violates both his constitutional rights and the court's anti-discrimination rules, the judge ruled. "The denial of federal benefits to same-sex spouses...

California faces annual budget deficits of $20 billion even while assuming state employees would receive no salary increases through 2014-15, according to a forecast issued today by the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst's Office. The fiscal report also assumes that the state would not provide automatic cost-of-living adjustments to social service programs, courts and higher education -- just as the University of California system today is considering raising tuition 32 percent over the next year to compensate for state budget cuts. Legislative Analyst Mac Taylor said today that his projections assume that state worker furloughs will end in June 2010. In the...

When California's political consultants share war stories, 1988's immensely expensive, multifront battle between insurance companies and lawyer-backed consumer groups takes center stage. Tens of millions of dollars were spent on a confusing array of competing ballot measures, and when the dust had settled, insurers had lost big, particularly with passage of Proposition 103, which made the state insurance commissioner an elected official and dramatically increased insurance regulation. It was a big battle in the decades-long "tort war" over rules governing who can sue whom for personal injuries, including auto accidents – a war fought in the Legislature, on the ballot...

A federal agency says it is conducting a civil rights review of BART service and fares in part because of a complaint that a planned rail extension to the Oakland International Airport would unfairly benefit affluent airline travelers over minority public transit riders.

Despite revenue projections that are holding relatively firm, California faces a $21 billion state budget shortfall over the next year and half, according to sources who have been briefed on a projection from the Legislature's budget analyst. The shortfall will be detailed in a report due to be released Wednesday by Legislative Analyst Mac Taylor. Sources said the report will show the state will fall short by $6.3 billion in the fiscal year that began July 1, due largely to failed projections in the spending plan lawmakers cobbled together in July. Lawmakers and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger failed to reduce the...

Union Bullies Boy Scout for Dastardly Good Deed 17-year-old's 250 of community service angers Allentown union By TERESA MASTERSON Updated 12:30 PM EST, Tue, Nov 17, 2009 A 17-year-old Boy Scout worked more than 200 hours to clear a path in his local park so that people could enjoy walking and biking along the river. Bad move Boy Scout. Now grown men who didn’t get around to doing it for a paycheck are after you. Kevin Anderson, a junior at Southern Lehigh High School, a varsity soccer player and a Boy Scout hoping to get his Eagle Scout badge, spent...

EAST PALO ALTO – At the top of the real estate bubble, CalPERS invested $600 million in two deals that were 3,000 miles apart but linked by a common vision: Buy apartments governed by rent-control laws and turn them into cash cows. The plan failed in a flurry of litigation and bad debt. A project in East Palo Alto is in default. The second deal, in New York, is likely headed that way. CalPERS could lose most or all of its money. What's more, critics say the deals might sully CalPERS' reputation as a champion of socially responsible investing, a...

When the state assumed full financial responsibility for the court system a decade ago, it was billed as a way of relieving pressure on county finances. However, much like the state's shouldering the financial burden for schools, judicial centralization has created unintended consequences. In both cases, hitherto independent systems have found that shifting financial responsibility to Sacramento puts them in competition with other sectors of the state budget for increasingly limited dollars. That's why the California Teachers Association and other school interests created an Education Coalition that wages constant war in political and legal arenas to protect its share of...

A proposal to allow students in the San Juan Unified School District to be excused from school without parental consent for "confidential medical services" has stirred up a debate that's been playing out throughout the state. The Pacific Justice Institute – a conservative legal nonprofit – is expected to square off against Planned Parenthood and the nonprofit National Center for Youth Law on the question of whether students in grades seven to 12 can leave campus for medical services that generally include abortions, acquiring birth control and treatment for sexual assault, drug and mental health issues. Parents on both sides...

WASHINGTON – Reps. Doris Matsui and Dan Lungren are polar opposites on Capitol Hill, but they agree on one point: House approval of a trillion-dollar health care overhaul marked a victory for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco. "She is the central player in this. … I don't think anyone else could have done this," Matsui, a Sacramento Democrat, said Thursday. Lungren, a Republican from Gold River, called it "a Pyrrhic victory" for Pelosi: "She won that battle, but she may inevitably lose the war. She pulled out all the stops." Love her or hate her, Pelosi is at...

Advocates of overhauling California's troubled pension system for public employees couldn't have chosen a more providential moment to launch their reform campaign. The huge California Public Employees' Retirement System is in deep financial doo-doo, having lost tens of billions of dollars in often-speculative investments, and is telling state and local officials it will need more "contributions." Meanwhile, investigations are under way into multimillion-dollar payments to placement agents who arranged some investments. With a public pension scandal simmering and their private pension benefits shrinking, voters will resent a CalPERS bailout. Indeed, a recent Field Poll indicates that voters are inclined to...

The grim reality of San Francisco's gasping economy took center stage at City Hall this week when the Board of Supervisors failed to muster enough votes to protect more than 500 workers in the city's largest union from layoffs, pay cuts or job reassignments. Without last-minute intervention by Mayor Gavin Newsom - which his chief of staff has hinted is unlikely - the budget-balancing cuts aimed at nursing assistants and clerical workers will start to take effect next week. The cuts are a direct result of the city's chronic budget problems. This summer, the mayor's office and supervisors faced a...

Early – very early – one morning last week, state Sen. Gloria Negrete McLeod wandered to the back of the ornate Senate chambers and expressed a feeling shared by many of the other people in the room. "I would rather stick my finger in a light socket," she said, "than spend another hour in here." The Chino Democrat's observation was colored by the fact that it came at around 3 a.m., during an 18-hour legislative session on overhauling the state's water system. But it also reflected a sentiment that could cover a growing number of marathon meetings by California lawmakers...

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger estimated Monday that California's budget will fall out of balance by $5 billion to $7 billion this fiscal year, on top of a $7.4 billion gap already projected for 2010-11. If true, state leaders would confront at least a $12.4 billion to $14.4 billion problem when Schwarzenegger releases his budget in January. California currently has an $84.6 billion general fund budget. The Republican governor spoke with The Fresno Bee editorial board Monday after signing a bill placing a water bond on the November 2010 ballot. He emphasized deep spending cuts as a budget solution but did not...

Near Mark Oldfield's desk at the California Department of Conservation sits a ream of copy paper that is more than a routine office commodity. Made in part from recycled fiber, it is a symbol of the state's green spirit, one ream among thousands backing the department's claim that it is a champion of the environment – and complies with state law requiring it to buy recycled paper. There is a dark side to those sheets of bright, white paper: the part that isn't recycled comes from trees logged in the biologically rich but endangered forests of Indonesia. Oldfield, a public...

Mike Genest, who announced recently that he's resigning as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's budget director, deserves a respite after four years of dealing with the state's chronic fiscal crisis. Genest is a genuinely nice guy,... His imminent departure, however, is a reminder that as Schwarzenegger settles on what he'll propose on state spending two months hence, California is still speeding toward a train wreck. The Legislature's budget analyst, Mac Taylor, will issue his appraisal soon. He'll probably tell his bosses what they don't want to hear – that things are getting worse, not better. State revenues are running billions of dollars...

Washington - -- President Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi were poised to win a stupendous - but still incomplete - victory Saturday, predicting House passage of the biggest expansion of health care coverage since Medicare's creation in 1964, in the face of unanimous Republican opposition. As a matter of policy and politics, the 10-year, $1.05 trillion legislation is among the most complex and difficult Congress has ever considered. Enactment would prove the signal achievement of Pelosi's speakership. Success or failure will define Obama's presidency. In the hours before the vote, Obama traveled to Capitol Hill to urge fellow Democrats...

Up to one-fourth of the 110,000 jobs reported as saved by federal stimulus money in California probably never were in danger, a Bee review has found. California State University officials reported late last week that they saved more jobs with stimulus money than the number of jobs saved in Texas – and in 44 other states. In a required state report to the federal government, the university system said the $268.5 million it received in stimulus funding through October allowed it to retain 26,156 employees. That total represents more than half of CSU's statewide work force. However, university officials confirmed...

Washington -- House Speaker Nancy Pelosi gladly pocketed one more precious Democratic vote for health care legislation Thursday, swearing in Bay Area Rep. John Garamendi as key Republican gubernatorial victories this week in Virginia and New Jersey rattled moderate Democrats before a showdown vote set for Saturday. Two California Democrats, moderates Dennis Cardoza and Jim Costa from the San Joaquin Valley, remain uncommitted. "We are right on the brink," Pelosi said. "We have a historic opportunity for us to again provide quality health care for all Americans. It is something that many of us have worked our whole political lifetimes...

Welcome to California government, 80 percent-style. This is the first of 12 weeks in a row that the state will shut down every Friday. Between unpaid furlough days and paid holidays off, most California civil servants won't work a five-day week again until Jan. 29. But how much will the public notice – or care? We've had nine months to adjust to a part-time state government. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger started furloughing workers two days per month in February and upped it to three "Furlough Fridays" in July. Meanwhile, the public's most acute fiscal pain is closer to home. "Cities, counties,...

It's Barbara Boxer's big moment on Capitol Hill, and Republicans want nothing to do with it. The California Democrat, who heads the Senate's environment committee, wants to begin marking up her long-awaited climate-change legislation on Tuesday. But Republicans are planning to boycott the meeting. Sen. James Inhofe . . . wants the Environmental Protection Agency to do more analysis of the bill, which would place mandatory limits on the emission of greenhouse gases. Boxer today urged Republicans on the committee to "come back to work" and help Democrats pass the legislation.

Berkeley once again dipped into U.S. foreign policy Tuesday when its City Council unanimously passed a resolution asking the Obama administration to withdraw troops and private armed contractors from Afghanistan and cease drone attacks on Afghanistan and Pakistan. The issue proved to be the liveliest of the evening, with members of the public protesting when councilmembers Susan Wengraf and Linda Maio suggested postponing the item to correct ambiguous wording in the resolution. Code Pink, CopWatch and Berkeley’s Peace and Justice Commission, which recommended the resolution to the council, voiced their support for immediate troop withdrawal. Melody Ermachild Chavis, author of...

Light a fire at home, pay a $400 fine.Burning wood fires in home fireplaces and stoves on bad air nights in the Bay Area becomes illegal again as of Sunday, when the region enters its second cold-weather season with lighting up banned during Spare the Air alerts. The crackdown, aimed at protecting public health from smoke, has two significant changes this year, the Bay Area Air Quality Management announced Wednesday: The district will slap a fixed fine of $400 on second-time violators, who received a written warning the first time they burned on a dirty-air night. Violators last year were...

California has two governments – the people we elect and the people who decide what really happens. Case in point: This week's revelation that the state has spent millions of dollars on vehicles that have sat idle, in some cases for years. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger made a big deal a few months ago about cutting down the number of cars and trucks the state owns. He signed an executive order to trim the state's vast fleet by 15 percent and touted a big state car sale. The "Terminator" star even autographed some of the vehicles to help sell them. Earlier...

DETROIT, (AP) -- Former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick filed a lawsuit Wednesday against a lawyer who leaked racy text messages to the Detroit Free Press and kicked off a scandal that brought down Kilpatrick's administration and sent him to jail. The lawsuit, filed in Wayne County Circuit Court, cites recent testimony by attorney Mike Stefani before a disciplinary board that he leaked the messages to the newspaper. The suit says Stefani violated a confidentiality agreement requiring him to turn over all copies of the explosive messages in exchange for settling police whistle-blower lawsuits involving three ex-Detroit officers he represented. James...