San Francisco Chronicle: "How liberal Democrats hijacked California"

San Francisco Chronicle ^ | Aug. 17, 2003 | David Stirling

[newyearling]

It's time to split the state. Power concentrates where the capitol is placed.

[PeoplesRep_of_LA]

Thank you! Imagine if we caved in to England during the Revolutionary War, because it was just too tough to fight a standing army? If our founding fathers had an attitude like that, we'd all be swilling warm beer singing, "God Save the Queen". and "Hail Brittanica".

We've allowed the constant cynicism of the Left to infiltrate our ranks like a 5th Collumn. We are the optimists. And whats more, what you and I know about *ahem* our state is that the only thing that can and will turn our economy from bust to boom yet again is the often cynically downplayed Supply Side Reaganomics Liberalism's kryptonite, it works everywhere its tried and scientifically disproves everything on their platform.

God Bless America, vote McClintock on Oct 7.

[Eva]

Liberal Democrats did not highjack California, the Democratic Socialists of America, highjacked the Democrat Party and these are extreme leftists who have highjacked California. These people need to get their terminology right if they are going to unravel the tangle of socialist programs that is choking the California economy and educational system.

[RGSpincich]

This is one of those pre-penned obituaries that has slipped out before the Dems have been officially declared "dead" in California. It will run again...soon.

[Timesink]

You couldn't be more wrong, David. They'll take a lot more. Millions of Californians are prepared to vote more Democrats into office. They would gladly wreck the entire United States, just as they have wrecked California, by voting Democrats into national office. These people have not learned their lesson--not by any means!

I have to admit I'm starting to come to the same conclusion. I'm beginning to agree with those that argue that the California Legislature is so out of control that no Republican who wins - whether it's Arnold, McClintock or anyone else - will be able to put the brakes on the runaway train, and thus it will be best if Bustamante wins and the RATS are left holding 100% of the bag when the inevitable financial collapse occurs.

Better for us to lose California again for another couple of two-year election cycles (we've already proven we don't need them to retain the presidency) and let the train wreck happen so that in the aftermath, a clean sweep can take place across the board.

[Kay Soze]

"California voters may recall Gov. Davis over the mess the state is in, but, in fairness, they ought to recognize that liberal-dominated leadership in the Legislature has helped turn the Golden State into a dysfunctional state.

My father was a Hungarian freedom fighter and knew all too well that the only good socialista was a dead socialista.

[stripes1776]

" vote for only conservative Republicans."

Won't make any difference in California.

The recall is a good thing, but it's only an exclamation point behind the mess that California is in. Voters have cut off their nose to spite their face. Only a Republican controlled legislature and a conservative Republican governor like McClintock can fix the problem. Voters will do neither.

The only thing is to let the crisis proceed to total collapse and hope for good people to step forward with real solutions at that time.

[Kay Soze]

And this entire disaster will be repeated in all fifty if we allow the continued dominance of the liberal national leaders and a go along to get along Republican party.

Rush is right Reagan did NOT go along to get along and was far far outnumbered.

Bu then Reagan was a conservative and then a republican.

[Lancey Howard]

We have nothing to feel superior to CA voters about.

Whoa...! Get a hold of yourself!

[Lancey Howard]

Better for us to lose California again for another couple of two-year election cycles (we've already proven we don't need them to retain the presidency) and let the train wreck happen so that in the aftermath, a clean sweep can take place across the board.

Yes!
The election of a liberal Republican would only embolden other "moderate" scumbags across the nation to think they can win as "moderate" Republicans when what we need is to continue moving right. I would prefer to see California disintegrate completely under a Democrat who at least calls himself a Democrat than under a Democrat who call himself a Republican.

[Timesink]

I have located and posted the full and complete article on which this op-ed piece was based. It is MUCH longer than the article that started this thread, and is even more of a MUST-READ than the article in post #1!

[FairOpinion]

"Have you ever wondered why, all conservatives are not Republicans? Because we don't subscribe to the "my mother-drunk or sober" attitude adopted by so many, for whom accomodation is the way. Conservatism and Conservatives do not, neccessarily, BELONG to the Republican Party! "

===

This is exactly why the Democrats keep winning and are controlling California. Conservatives insist on running unelectable candidates, because they rather see the liberals hijack California, than vote for a moderate Republican.

[Eva]

Thanks.

[FairOpinion]

"The election of a liberal Republican would only embolden other "moderate" scumbags across the nation to think they can win as "moderate" Republicans when what we need is to continue moving right. "

--

And what would the election of a leftist socialist proponent of illegal immigration, like Bustamante accomplish?
It would show all the socialists that they can indeed win, by splitting the Republican party.

[Republic]

....with the concrete wall of reality

Best line in the article-well written, full of perspective and astoundingly powerful.

[dc27]

It will be forever a Democrat-controlled state now that Davis has agreed to give illegal aliens a driver liscence. Now they can register to vote. All Davis nees to do is get the recall election postponed long enough for the D.L. to come in the mail.
I work with lots of flaming liberals at work. Listening to the crap they spew is too much. They do not blame Davis or the Dem controlled House and Senate. They keep blaming Bush and all the tax cuts and the war. California is lost because the majority of the people in the high population areas have their collective heads up their a$$.

[dc27]

What about the election in 2002? The voters approved over $30 billion in bonds during the largest budget deficit in history? One of the bonds, was that crap from Arnold. The ads for the school bond were great. Build new schools without raising taxes. How the hell does a bond get paid back, the money tree? The three key words to get any bond measure passed in California is "clean-water, schools, and of course the children."

[churchillbuff]

One of the bonds, was that crap from Arnold.

Is Arnold less of a spender than Davis?

[churchillbuff]

x - close Recent Stories By Mary Lynne Vellinga




1999 pension law bites local budgets
By Mary Lynne Vellinga -- Bee Staff Writer
Published 2:15 a.m. PDT Sunday, August 17, 2003
In 1999, while stock prices boomed, the state slipped California's local governments a multibillion-dollar time bomb wrapped in a tempting package.
Gov. Gray Davis signed a bill sponsored by the California Public Employees' Retirement System, or CalPERS, that boosted state employee pensions. The legislation, SB 400, contained a clause allowing local governments to follow suit and raise retirement payments for their firefighters and police officers by 50 percent.

Police officers with several decades of service could now conceivably walk out the door at age 50 with 90 percent of their salaries -- 3 percent of their annual wages for every year worked.

A subsequent, labor-sponsored bill, also easily passed by the Legislature, permitted cities, counties and special districts to grant their other employees pension increases as well.

Times were good. The state pension fund had grown so fat with investment gains that many local governments whose pension funds are administered by CalPERS had long since ceased having to make contributions.

"Money was pouring in from the investments, and the employer contribution rates (often) were held at zero," said Reina Schwartz, budget manager for the city of Sacramento.

CalPERS predicted the state's retirement costs would keep dropping, despite improved benefits and downplayed the likelihood of an extended market slide. Local governments, including most of those in the six-county Sacramento region, took the deal.

Now they are paying the price.

Tumbling stock prices caused the value of the CalPERS portfolio to drop from a high of $172 billion in early 2000 to $133.8 billion in 2002. The decline, combined with the benefit boost, has forced local governments to pay out millions of dollars in pension contributions during an already dismal budget year.

And because of the way investment performance is "smoothed" out over several years, next year's bill will be even higher for many.

"It's a financial disaster waiting to happen," said Geoff Davey, budget chief for Sacramento County, which administers its own pension fund.

The city of Sacramento's contribution to CalPERS for public safety pensions jumped from zero in fiscal 2001-2002 to nearly 8 percent of payroll this fiscal year. CalPERS has warned the city to expect premiums to jump again next year.

In dollar terms, the city's pension costs have climbed about $5 million in the past two years. Schwartz said she expects additional rate hikes of $5 million to $10 million a year for at least the next couple of years.

"Then it might level out," Schwartz said.

So far, the city -- with a $302 million operating budget for the current fiscal year -- has paid for the rate increases out of reserves. But that cushion is rapidly eroding.

"I hope it doesn't continue to increase by $5 million a year (indefinitely)," Schwartz said. "That would be really horrible."

Other governments that negotiated the benefit increases with their unions are seeing similar rate hikes.

Two years ago, West Sacramento was paying 4.7 percent of payroll to fund the pension plan for its firefighters. By this July, the figure had risen to nearly 19 percent.

"The budget impact for the city of West Sacramento will be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars," said Mayor Christopher Cabaldon, whose city adopted a $70 million budget in July.

In Roseville, a $7 million jump in CalPERS payments, combined with court decisions that forced the city to refund $9 million in utility user taxes, has forced painful trade-offs.

"We wanted to open up a new fire station this coming year, and that's on hold," said city finance director Russ Branson. "We've had scheduled for years a new branch library, and that's on hold. We probably would have hired five or six police officers; we didn't."

CalPERS officials point out that local governments were not forced to sweeten their pensions.

"We set the table; it was up to them to decide whether to come to dinner," said Bob Walton, assistant executive officer of the pension fund.

But some local government officials maintain they had no choice if they were to remain competitive in the employment market, especially in Sacramento, where state government exercises a big influence on labor market rates.

"It's not like we could just ignore what they did and forever have a benefit that was lower than theirs," Davey said.

He predicted more public pension increases are on the way, despite the fact that more than two years of market declines have yet to be figured fully into rates, and the anemic recovery of Cal-PERS' investment portfolio still falls far short of fund projections.

"There are local jurisdictions that, as we speak, are approving pension increases despite the stock market performance," Davey said.

The increased benefits granted by Sacramento County were "the largest single item" forcing the county to make $77 million in budget cuts, Davey said. The county's current general fund of $1.7 billion is about $100 million less than the previous year.

Three hundred people have retired from the county since the higher pension benefits took effect June 29, and another 300 to 500 are expected to retire in 2004, he said.

Paying higher pensions to all those people, as well as all those working who will eventually retire, will be a significant cost in the future.

"We're probably looking at $67 million (annually) for the next 20 years," said John Descamp, chief executive officer of the Sacramento County Retirement System.

Descamp and Davey said it was inappropriate for CalPERS, supposedly a neutral fund administrator, to push for the increases.

"I believe the philosophy behind the board of trustees for a public pension plan should be how to properly administer the system," Descamp said. "I don't believe the trustees should become advocates for more or higher benefits."

But that's what happened, Descamp said: "The PERS board became advocates."

Six members of the 13-member board represent active or retired public employees. One is appointed by the Legislature. Two constitutional officers, the state treasurer and the controller, also serve. The four remaining members either come from the executive branch or are appointed by Gov. Gray Davis.

The Legislature has been almost universally supportive of benefit increases. So have public employee unions, which Davis has long relied upon for a significant share of his campaign funds.

"It's the fox in charge of the henhouse," Davey complained.

But CalPERS officials say it was their duty to push the benefits changes and that SB 400 makes up for disparities that had crept into the retirement system.

"Over the years, inequities were created as benefits hodgepodged their way to adoption," said CalPERS spokeswoman Pat Macht.

One example is a second-tier retirement program adopted during the lean days of the Wilson administration that resulted in a situation where two people doing the same job could receive different pension benefits. SB 400 did away with the inferior plan.

State employees also had gone years without any cost of living raises during the 1990s. Meanwhile, said CalPERS' Walton, pensions hadn't changed substantially since 1971.

Marty Morgenstern, the governor's director of personnel administration, said the pension benefits granted in 1999 staved off demands for larger wage increases.

"Wilson had not given most state employees a raise in four years," Morgenstern said. "They had serious demands."

State Sen. Tom McClintock, R-Simi Valley, was one of the few legislators to vote against the pension increases. Now a candidate for governor, McClintock said SB 400 was based on "wildly unrealistic" predictions of the fund's performance.

Walton said CalPERS used conservative assumptions when making its predictions. "I don't know that anyone could have projected that we would have negative returns," he said.

When SB 400 was introduced, CalPERS actuaries predicted that the state would have to pay $138.9 million in premiums to CalPERS in fiscal 2003-2004 if the new benefits were adopted.

But when CalPERS investments slid in value, the state had to contribute far more -- $2.2 billion this fiscal year, together with $1 billion more for school employees. SB 400 accounts for about $500 million in increased costs annually, Walton said.

The bill was authored by state Sen. Deborah Ortiz, the Sacramento Democrat who chaired the pension committee at the time. While she said she's not sure how the language offering the higher benefits to local governments made it into the state bill, she's long supported higher wages and benefits for public employees.

"The history of my family in this town is they went from farm workers to cannery workers to state employees," Ortiz said.

---

[churchillbuff]

Daniel Weintraub: Davis finally gets religion on reforming worker comp
By Daniel Weintraub -- Sacramento Bee Columnist
Published 2:15 a.m. PDT Sunday, August 17, 2003
If it's true that nothing so wonderfully concentrates the mind like the prospect of a hanging in the morning, Gov. Gray Davis might be forgiven for focusing more than usual on his remaining legislative priorities. This is the governor's fifth year in office, and he's become famous in the Capitol for keeping his agenda a secret. Now, facing what he perceives to be a political lynching, Davis has issued a list of the things he'd most like to accomplish after the Legislature returns Monday from its summer recess.
One of his goals is to overhaul the state's workers compensation system, which is supposed to help injured workers return to the job and compensate them for wages lost. California's program is badly out of whack and nearing collapse, with employers paying the highest premiums in the nation and workers getting benefits that have been among the lowest in the country.




Premiums have been rising fast for several years. The owner of a Stockton hair salon told me the other day she pays $7,000 a year for three employees in low-risk jobs, about double what she paid two years ago. I've heard similar stories from all over the state. Injured workers, meanwhile, complain that the system grinds them down in endless confrontations with insurance companies, who take their own cut in the exchange.
"There's a recognition that something has to be done to bring costs under control," Daniel Zingale, the governor's cabinet secretary, told me in an interview.

Of course, the problem didn't appear overnight, and Davis should have worked harder to fix it earlier. But as with many of the state's problems, workers compensation to him was not so much about real people suffering but an insiders' game, labor versus business, or insurance companies against the lawyers.

Last year, when lawmakers passed a bill increasing benefits for the injured workers, Davis could have insisted that they include major reforms to cut costs in the system. But he mostly stayed out of that fight and let the Democrats who control the Legislature work it out. The result wasn't pretty.

Now he is clearly focused. The governor has endorsed about a dozen bills pending in the Legislature, and has given Zingale his proxy to oversee his end of the negotiations. Zingale, in turn, has worked closely with Insurance Commissioner John Garamendi and the members of a legislative conference committee to try to fashion a comprehensive package of reforms that could save as much as $3 billion in the $15-billion-a-year system.

"The one principle the governor has made clear is that we won't do it on the backs of injured workers in need of health care," Zingale said.

Before he took his current job in the governor's inner circle of aides, Zingale was head of the Department of Managed Health Care, where he got generally high marks from consumer groups and insurers. He noted that many of the factors driving up the cost of workers compensation might actually be bad for health care, including over-utilization and inappropriate medical treatment. Doctors, in other words, running up their bills at the expense of the rest of us.

The governor hopes to reduce medical costs by doing more to detect unusual and unnecessary medical practices. He would also ease the confrontational nature of the system by allowing independent medical review, which has worked in managed care to give patients more comfort that their health plans were basing decisions on medical necessity and not finances.

Another cost-saver might be a proposal to tie fee schedules for workers comp health care to the federal Medi-Care program. Although considered stingy, those rates would help prevent the sort of runaway costs now plaguing the system.

The talks have been bipartisan, but some Republican-backed measures already have been tossed aside. Among the rejects: a proposal to prevent the payment of permanent disability benefits for injuries that can't be verified by objective medical evidence. "There was not sufficient support for that," Zingale said. "There are conditions where a self-report should be allowed, for debilitating pain that doesn't show up on an X-ray."

Zingale says he doubts Davis will get everything he wants from the Legislature. But he is confident that a solid package of bills will emerge before the end of the session. "The struggle is, when you get down to the details, everybody has to sacrifice something to bring costs under control," he said.

An effective fix for the troubled work comp program would be a big victory for Davis, and Californians, heading into this historic election season. In a way, that would be fitting. The voters added the workers comp system to the state constitution at a special election in 1911, on the same day they approved another set of reforms aimed at helping working people fight powerful interest groups: the initiative, the referendum and the recall.