Adventures in Bureaucracy

American Association of Independent Voters ^ | Apr 13, 05 | Chris Shugart

[Chris_Shugart]

Adventures in Bureaucracy
By Chris Shugart, April 13, 2005

Out of the 50 states in the U.S., half of them have a legislative process that allows voters to directly ratify laws through state ballot initiatives and referendums. In my state of California, voters pass a handful of assorted laws and regulations via this process every state election.

Years ago I began wondering what sort of results we get out of this process. Does it actually do any good? In the three decades that I've been a California voter, I sometimes ask myself, has the state actually improved itself due to so many new laws every year?

The question recently occurred to me when I started hearing public service announcements on radio and TV by a California organization that calls itself First 5. They were promoting the benefits of sending young children to pre-school. I wondered who was really behind the message. My first suspicion was that First 5 was funded by taxpayer dollars, or at the very least was part of a scheme to extract taxpayer dollars.

I did a little investigating, and learned that First 5 was established by California State Proposition 10, or the California Children and Families Act passed by the voters in 1998. Californians might remember that actor and director Rob Reiner was its principal and most recognizable spokesman.

I've lost count of how many initiatives have been passed in California over the years. It's always seemed to me that once they're approved by the voters, we never hear about them again. So I decided to track this particular proposition as an exercise in government accountability. Seven years later, did Prop. 10 deliver? Did it do anything at all?

First a recap: Prop. 10 put a fifty cent tax on each pack of cigarettes sold in California. The tax was originally expected to bring in about $700 million annually, and current estimates show that the total revenue generated has reached $3.5 billion. The proposition also mandated the formation of a new government bureau: The California Children and Families Commission.

According to their website, the purpose of the CCFC is to "provide funding for community health care, quality child care, and education programs for young children and families." The CCFC wants to provide such services as "education on the importance of nurturing children," "child care skills for parents and child care providers," and "education and training on the avoidance of tobacco, drugs and alcohol during pregnancy."

Two obvious questions follow. What does this Commission actually do to achieve these ends, and more important, what exactly do they do with all the money they get? A short answer handles both questions. They hold monthly meetings to decide how to spend all their money.

Most of the money that the Commission receives (about 80% annually) gets deposited in a trust fund for future allocations, which one might assume-as their name implies-is used to fund organizations that assist children and families. But this is a regular government bureaucracy, and the process of handing out the money follows a somewhat involved procedure.

Although the CCFC ordinarily consists of nine members at the state level, it's a much larger organization. Prop. 10 additionally mandated the formation of county-level Commission offices to assess and propose specific preschool child development needs. That amounts to 58 county offices, and hundreds of bureaucrats busy at work figuring out how to get their piece of that $700 million a year.

How does this improve families and children? That's what some California officials wanted to know. In May 2004, the Associated Press reported that some First 5 funds were being used for items that might not have met the law's "early childhood development" requirement. Also, a state audit released in July of the same year found that some counties were unable to account for their expenditures.

In typical government fashion, the California State Assembly determined that in order to solve their bureaucratic oversight problems, they needed to create a-well-bureaucratic oversight committee to investigate the problem. Enter Wilma Chan, Assemblywoman D-Oakland who introduced new legislation that would require the state controller to audit the CCFC every three years. Following the unveiling of the new assembly bill, spokesman Rob Reiner offered this understatement: "There's no such thing as perfect legislation."

In one sense, the California Children and Families Commission is a taxpayer funded special interest lobby. Not only do they advocate preschool education, their goal is to implement free preschool education into California's public education system. In effect, they're spending tax dollars in an effort to promote new ways to spend our tax dollars.

The California Children and Families Commission has been in place for seven years now as the tobacco tax dollars continue to come in. In that time, how many children have benefited, and in what way? The CCFC is a little vague on those kinds of details. However, they do report that they've spent $164 million on PR and advertising.

Keep in mind that Proposition 10 was approved by a majority of California voters. This might serve as a reminder to all voters everywhere that what we vote for is not always what we end up getting. That might be worth remembering the next time you go to the polls.

 

[EagleUSA]

Voter complacency and ignorance is killing not only our state, California, but the country as well -- just look at what the Congress is trying to do to us now!!! (illegals issue)

I have seen surveys that state that most voters rarely STUDY the propositions and referendums that come before them. If it says "education" on it -- they vote for whatever it is -- not really knowing what their vote means, or what the real content of the measure is. It is true. Many propositions are deliberately written upside down, because slimey politicians realize that the votes this "yes" means for, and "no" means against. Not so in an "upside down" written proposition. It is an old trick.

In our state, we are taxed to confiscatory levels, paying in many cases for things we should not, and do not, want to pay for --- like $10 billion dollars per year to reward illegal criminal aliens in our state. This, nowadays, with our liberal state govenment working against every element of sanity left in the voting base, my voting is simple. If a measure creates more debt for the taxpayers, it gets buried -- if the opposite is true, it gets supported. Most items voted for are buried because of this -- and government, especially our flaming liberal government of this state, just does not get it. To them, the voting taxpayer is an infinite resource of money, never-ending.

[marsh2]

I serve on my County's First Five Commission. We are classified as a "frontier" county with more than 6,000 square miles and about 43,000 total population. 30% of our children live below the federal poverty line and 53.9% of our children live in low income households.

We have established 10 community teams in the various far- flung communities in our county. They have all evolved to establish Family Resource Centers. These provide a variety of services, including parenting kits and home vists for new parents; parenting classes; anger management and child abuse prevention; play groups; resource and referral services; school readiness (health, oral health, early literacy, assistance with Healthy Family Insurance enrollment); nutrition education; education incentives for childcare providers; training (including first aid) and certification for babysitters.

They also receive funding from other sources for things like teen programs, family based substance abuse counseling, adult literacy, after school tutoring, art and recreational activities.

We do have a paid contractor that implements Commission decisions and manages contracts, but none of the Commissioners are paid for their time out of First 5 funds.

To be honest, I did not vote for Prop. 10, nor did I vote for the Prop. 63 mental health initiative, althouigh I am involved in both. As a fiscal conservative, however, I am tough on accountability and demand collaboration among agencies and non-profit organizations. I believe in the Family Resource Center Concept and see it as community infrastructure to which we can hand off many of these social programs once volunteerism and organizational capacity is in place and adopted by the various communities.

First 5 has been a good program for our County. Trick is for these programs to become sustainable on their own as public funding is phased out.