News and Commentary on the California Crackup
News and commentary on the world of California politics, policy, and governance, the California Crackup.
For people within radio listening distance of San Jose, I’ll be talking about California’s various crises on Friday night, May 4, 7:00 p.m., as Russell Hancock, President and CEO of Joint Venture Silicon Valley, interviews me on Inside Silicon Valley on KLIV 1590. The show repeats at noon on Sunday, May 6.
The interview is now available as a podcast at Joint Venture Silicon Valley’s website.
Can we fix the California Crackup using "clean money"? That's one of the questions Joe Mathews and I have been asked most frequently as we've talked around the state in the last year. Our answer, based on anecdotal evidence from Arizona, has been "no." Now there's evidence to back up our impressions.
Read MoreThe news of a deal struck between Sacramento and the NBA for a new arena for the Kings brought “elation” to City Hall, the Sacramento Bee reports. If so, it’s the kind of cartoon elation Wile E. Coyote feels in that moment when, having run off the edge of the cliff, The Road Runner hands him an anvil.
Read MoreThe Sacramento Bee asked me for my take on the question of whether Sacramento ought to spend $200 million to subsidize a new arena for the Sacramento Kings and the National Basketball Association. You can read my answer on the Bee’s site.
The Bee gave me only 800 words, so I wasn’t able to flesh out the argument as well as I would have liked. Fortunately, we have the web for that.
If you want to understand the economics better, you can check out the longer reporting piece I wrote for the Bee when I worked there. The most accessible book on the subject is Neil deMause and Joanna Cagan’s splendid Field of Schemes: How the Great Stadium Swindle Turns Public Money into Private Profit. Neil deMause also runs a companion web site, Field of Schemes, where he tracks and analyzes the money grabs of welfare-seeking sports owners around the country.
Given more space, I would have also repeated what I wrote here last spring: The best way to limit the extortion game is for the California Legislature to prevent the billionaire sports owners and their leagues from playing city against city. It should ban any local jurisdictions from using public funds to subsidize professional sports teams.
California is at a critical moment on this issue.
The extortionists are on the attack right now all over the state: Sacramento, San Diego, Santa Clara, Anaheim, Los Angeles. But as we all know, from the news and daily life, core California public services reducing the state’s quality of life. Every public dollar extorted today steals from California’s future.
Ideally, local politicians would do the right thing. But there’s something about sports that makes them go weak in the knees and soft in the head. (My wife blames it on testosterone poisoning.) They need to be saved from themselves with a law that protects them against their worst instincts.
That law would set budget priorities right at a time when we need to be putting first things first. But it would also send a bracing message to the rest of the country. If California cities, home to one in eight Americans, can no longer be used as leverage in the extortion game, other states will gain some protection, and perhaps even be encouraged to protect their taxpayers as well as California does.
Contrary to the moans of the extortionists, that wouldn’t mean the end of pro sports. As Scott Lewis points out, at Voice of San Diego, we would then be on track to replace sports socialism with true sports capitalism. And who can disagree with that?
Now that California redevelopment agencies, and tax increment funding, look headed to the dust bin of history, Zócalo Public Square asked me what redevelopment looked like on the ground, from the perspective of a single place, and what might replace it.
You can find my answer here, on Zócalo's site.
The best thing about the California Supreme Court redevelopment decision isn’t that the justices upheld the power of the Legislature to abolish the agencies that suck up and waste billions of tax dollars. No, the best thing was how the court did it: by picking up Proposition 22—the 2010 measure the redevelopment agencies wrote to exempt themselves from California’s budget crisis—and shooting the agencies with their own gun.
For those who haven’t been scoring at home, here’s the two-minute recap of the issue:
• Redevelopment agencies are devices for grabbing property tax dollars that would otherwise go to schools, colleges, and other useful public services. The agencies instead use them to subsidize development that voters would be unlikely to support if they had to pay for the projects with new tax dollars.
• Faced with diminished revenue and the prospect of deep cuts in essential programs, state lawmakers decide schools are a higher priority than downtown hotels, convention centers, and ornamental street lights. They shift the money grabbed by redevelopment agencies back to education.
• Redevelopment agencies fight back by writing and passing Prop 22, which bars the Legislature from taking away from redevelopment agencies the money they are taking away from schools.
• New Gov. Jerry Brown responds by proposing, in his 2011-12 budget, to abolish redevelopment agencies in their current form and reclaim, once and for all, the money for schools. He proposes a constitutional amendment to allow communities to pursue future redevelopment projects, but using their own money.
• Legislature enacts a two-bill compromise. One bill abolishes redevelopment agencies; a second bill hands them a lifeline, rescinding the death sentence of redevelopment agencies that agree to shift their tax booty to schools.
• Redevelopment agencies sue, arguing that Prop 22 prevents the lawmakers from mucking with their money or their fate.
Not so, the Supreme Court has now decided. The Legislature had the constitutional authority to create redevelopment agencies and likewise has the authority to end what it created. Prop 22 did not change that. But what Prop 22 did change, the justices found, was the Legislature’s power to shift redevelopment property tax dollars to higher priority uses. It therefore found that, under Prop 22, the Legislature no longer has the power to offer them a conditional lifeline.
“The irony of these circumstances concerning Proposition 22 should not be ignored — the very measure that was crafted to protect financing for new redevelopment projects has been broadly interpreted in a manner that effectively ends all financing for new redevelopment projects,” Chief Justice Cantil-Sakauye wrote. “This cannot be a necessary result intended by the proponents of Proposition 22 concerning redevelopment.”
Not the intended result, perhaps. But certainly the result they deserved.
Try to imagine Lady Chatterley’s Lover written by the Anti-Sex League. If you can, you’ve grasped the basics of ProPublica’s story on California redistricting, which floats a few morsels of detail in a broth of disgust and ideological loathing that renders it worthless and misleading.
The gist of the (badly edited) ProPublica piece is that, while the Republicans who control the House of Representatives sat helplessly on the sideline, “savvy” House Democrats “fooled” a hapless and self-blinded California Citizens Redistricting Commission into drawing a congressional district map that helped some incumbent Democrats at the expense of the public interest.
I’ll refer you to others more steeped in the intricacies to see show how flimsy the ProPublica piece is in some of its particulars:
What interests and appalls me most is the craziness of that perspective—that you can have politics without politics. It pervades the story and explains why it has the elements and all of the subtlety of an old-fashioned melodrama of virtue debauched: wily seducer slips by inept chaperone to ravage the unprotected virgin.
The ProPublica reporters go to great lengths to tell us the villains plotted their debauchery in “secret.” (As opposed to all the times that political or business operators conduct their strategy discussion in public?)
They tell us that Democrats slipped by the commission’s defenses to testify at hearings in the guise of “ordinary citizens.” Such language betrays how deeply ideological is the reporters’ anti-partisan view. The most ordinary and common activity of a citizen in a democracy is to advance his or her partisan political identity by organizing, arguing, contributing, or voting. Yet to ProPublica, that activity is less legitimate than that of the economic and ethnic groups that went before the commission to plead for narrower and more selfish interests.
They tell us how the seducers inveigled the virgins with the sweet words of “communities of interest” that they wanted to hear, when all the seducers really wanted was to get into the commission’s maps.
If the ProPublica reporters had approached the story without anti-partisan ideological blinders, they might have seen the meaning and irony of this. After all, political parties are the largest and most pervasive “communities of interest” in our politics. But the law creating the commission, written from the same anti-politics, anti-partisan ideology that blinds ProPublica, explicitly prohibits treating parties as such. So California was trying a grand experiment: What happens when you piss into the wind?
We can see pieces of the answer to that question in ProPublica’s story. Politics doesn’t go away. Parties and incumbents adapt and jostle for advantage as they always have. Though the law tries to elevate other redistricting criteria over party, the thing that continues to matter most in public discussion—to activists, voters, and journalists, including ProPublica—is how redistricting affects partisan balance and the careers of incumbents.
But someday we’ll get the fuller answer, told by someone competent, who both understands and doesn’t hate politics. In other words, someone other than ProPublica.
Some of California’s editorial writers and political consultants have worked themselves into a tizzy over the crash and lengthy outage of the California Automated Lobbying and Campaign Contribution and Expenditure Search System (Cal-Access to its friends.)
As Joe Mathews explained yesterday at Prop Zero, Cal-Access, a database of campaign/lobbying contributions and expenditures, is powered, as is much of the state government’s information infrastructure, by aging 2oth-century technology. When the system crashed a few weeks ago, the Secretary of State’s office found itself with an expensive and technically tricky repair job on its hands.
There seems little disagreement that the state needs to buy a new system to run Cal-Access. But California, with a broken system of government that leaves it in perpetual budget crisis, has no money sitting around to invest in such things. And at a time when the state is making cuts that jeopardize the public safety, health, and education of its citizens, no sane person would suggest that buying a new Cal-Access system would have a high claim on any new general fund revenue that might become available.
That makes Cal-Access a perfect candidate for user financing.
Although it is offered as a general public service, it is used most heavily by a small and selective group of inside political players: media companies, political consultants, lobbyists, special interest donors, vendors of political services, non-profit organizations. It is how they keep track of the political money game, monitor the moves of rivals, and check the prevailing prices and wages in the political game. You can tell how much the inside players value the service Cal-Access provides by the volume of their complaints over its absence. Here is a market opportunity for government.
So, by all means, let’s get Cal-Access up and running, and then invest in a modern system. And let’s do it by having the users pay.
People who want to use the system would set up accounts. As at many media sites, there would be tiered pricing. Users would get a small amount of access free, enough to meet the needs of ordinary voters. Heavy users would pay according to their usage. Nonprofit organizations that repackage and interpret the information in forms freely available to the public would get free access. The money paid by users would support both the capital and operating costs of the site.
This is a solution everyone should love. Liberals will get political transparency. Inside political players will get a modern and reliable Cal-Access system. Conservatives will get an example of government's operating like a business and responding to the demands of the market. Policy wonks will move closer to their goal of having user-financing for non-general services, reserving general revenue for general needs.
And California will have made an important point: You can’t have something for nothing, even if you’re an editorial writer or a political consultant.
You’d think Jon Fleischman, guru of Flash Report and former consigliere to convicted Orange County Sheriff Mike Carona, would have a stronger stomach. But the delicate Fleischman reports himself sick over news of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s love child. “I mean, the fact that that I voted for him twice makes me nauseous,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle.
Sorry, I’m not buying it, not from Jon and from any of the others who once supported the former governor and now claim to feel soiled by him.
The news may add a previously invisible branch to the Schwarzenegger family tree and a detail to Arnold’s biography. But it doesn’t say anything new about his character.
The full Arnold Schwarzenegger was on display, naked and oiled, before anybody ever cast a vote for him. The narcissism of a life lived in front of movie cameras and the mirrors of body-building gyms. The hunger to hear the roar of the crowds. The appetite for pleasure and sensation. The delight in bullying and humiliating opponents. The chameleon politics. The sense of entitlement of someone who believes he is above others and doesn’t have to live by the rules. And, of a piece with everything else, the abuse of women and particularly, as we learned through the 2003 reporting of the Los Angeles Times, of female underlings powerless to fend off or report his advances.
Californians knew all that in 2003, or could have. And nothing they knew was inconsistent with the possibility of secret love children. They voted for Schwarzenegger anyway.
Indeed, as Joe Mathews reports in The People’s Machine, the Times’ reporting of Schwarzenegger’s sexual misconduct validated his standing among conservative voters and led many to give him their votes in the 2003 recall. In other words, some people voted for him not in spite of his character flaws but because they saw the revelation of those flaws as a signal that Schwarzenegger was one of them. And among those voters was Fleischman, who went with Schwarzenegger, an abuser of women and a Republican “squish,” over the principled and upright (but less electable) conservative Tom McClintock.
The transaction was clear from the start. Republican political pros were using a celebrity of dubious character for their purposes even as Schwarzenegger was using them for his. It’s politics as usual. What’s strange here is for a journalist to cooperate in the charade that the transaction made them queasy. If that were so, there would not be enough marijuana in all of Humboldt County to quell the nausea or priests enough to take the confessions.
In California Crackup, Joe Mathews and Mark Paul provide clear and informed answers.
Their fast-paced and often humorous narrative deftly exposes the origins of our current political and fiscal problems—from the ugly 1879 constitutional convention to Hiram Johnson’s Progressive reforms to the Prop 13 tax revolt and its legacy of supermajority requirements and voter initiatives.
Mathews and Paul then furnish an uniquely California fix: innovative solutions that allow Californians to debate their choices, settle on the best ones, hold elected officials accountable for results, and choose anew if something doesn’t work.
Concise, lively, and provocative, California Crackup offers something new: a genuinely democratic operating system for the state.
