Archive for the ‘local’ Category

Apres Moi, Deluge

Wednesday, July 8th, 2009

UPDATE: There is a state that is working. It is called Texas, and the Economist has a report.

The French king, Louis XV, is said to have predicted that “the deluge” would follow his reign. His great grandfather, Louis XIV, the “Sun King” had reigned for 72 years, from the age of five. he left France glorious but financially ruined. One wit of the time said if the courtiers could be convinced to put paper on their walls and gold in their pockets, the kingdom would be far better off. They did not and profligacy continued. Finally, it all ended with the hapless grandson of Louis XV when he ( Louis XVI) and his young wife, Marie Antoinette went to the guillotine.

Something like this is happening in California as the public employee unions are determined to prevent any attempt to rationalize the state’s finances. Now, they will try to block insolvent cities from filing bankruptcy.

Mendoza’s bill would not only empower the commission to regulate bankruptcy filings but allow it to impose conditions on the filings they do allow, which is the nut of the issue. Local governments that file for bankruptcy may be able to abrogate their labor contracts, but if AB 155 becomes law, the debt commission could – or at least the unions hope they would – block abrogation.

You’d think IOUs would be enough to convince them of the seriousness of the problems. Louis XVI wavered and almost was persuaded of the necessity for financial reform but his arrogant nobles were convinced they could overcome the rabble.

Tumbrils, anyone ?

Newspapers and local politics

Monday, June 15th, 2009

As a brief diversion from the world-shaking events going on right now in Iran, I have a small tale of local politics. I have lived in Mission Viejo most of the past 37 years. I moved here in 1972 and opened my medical practice when this was a small new development, one of the first master-planned developments in the west. The Mission Viejo Company developed a portion of the family ranch into this city. The ranch extends from El Toro on the north to Camp Pendelton on the south, to the Cleveland National Forest on the east and the Santa Fe Railroad tracks on the west. Since the tracks run along the beach south of San Clemente, the ranch extends almost to the ocean. Originally, the ranch was twice as large and extended to Oceanside but in 1942 the owners donated/ sold the land to the Marine Corps for Camp Pendelton.

Mission Viejo prided itself on the planning that went into its city and there is considerable pride on the part of residents. About nine years ago, I got interested in local politics. The city council had been taken over by a small clique in the city and had begun to make decisions that did not follow the master plan. The first I became aware of this was when the planning commission decided to rezone some land that was planned for office buildings to multifamily residential. They were going to approve a 700 unit apartment complex in an area zoned commercial. The significance of this includes the requirement for services, such as schools, plus the volume of traffic and parking and even crime. Prior to that time there were very few apartments in the city. The residents were unhappy with the proposed zone change and I attended a planning commission meeting where the matter was to be considered. In an effort to avoid citizen involvement, the commission placed the matter last on their agenda and it was after midnight before the matter came up. They squelched comments and voted to approve the project in spite of local opposition. The residents, led by a small group of activists, took up a petition and got nearly 8,000 residents to sign it. The city ignored the petition and the residents wishes and the project was built.

Several years later, there was another controversy over the cost of a new city hall. The city council placed an item on the ballot with a low ball estimate of the cost and voters approved the project. Activists, and by this time I was starting to pay more attention, opposed the measure suggesting that the city hall project would cost far more than the estimate in the ballot measure and, sure enough, it turned out be almost twice the cost. Finally, in 2000, I joined a group called the Committee for Integrity in Government and we managed to oust the majority of the old city council in 2002. Some of that history is here although you won’t see that history on the official city web site.

We are now in an era where the traditional newspapers have less and less excuse for their existence. One of the remaining best excuses is local coverage of local issues and local government. The Orange County Register has done an excellent job over the years of doing so but that seems to be waning and it is a damned shame. Read this. We had a local reporter who was actually ferreting out some of the ugly little local stories.

The OC Register announced new staff assignments last week. For more than a year, reporter Lindsey Baguio covered Mission Viejo for the Register and Saddleback Valley News. She has been reassigned to Laguna Niguel.

In April 2008, Baguio exposed the city staff’s wasteful spending on 500 custom-built easels. She followed the city’s 20th anniversary spend-a-thon, which ended with easels thrown in a heap on a hillside. A city contractor took up to 200 of the easels to a county dump while city employees claimed the trashed easels were being “stored for future use.” City administrator Keith Rattay lied to Baguio – she quoted him – about costs and volunteer participation, and activists combed city records to expose the true figures. For a brief time, residents saw the real city hall through SVN coverage.

Baguio at first reported both sides – activists’ statements alongside city hall’s spin. But before the dust settled on Easelgate, City Manager Dennis Wilberg invited Baguio to his office. Baguio’s investigative reporting ended, and SVN published almost no letters about city hall after July 2008. Requests for public records revealed an email trail in which Wilberg pressured Baguio for favorable reporting. Records show he directed her to solicit community comments from a list of people he identified as supportive of his staff and how city hall spent taxpayer funds.

We finally get a local reporter who cares about these local issues and reports the facts. So what happens? The overstaffed and lazy city government calls her in for a “talk” and the reporting stops. This is why newspapers are dying, although on a very small scale. Still, this is where that reporter was learning her career and this is what she learned. What a shame.

Zombietime San Diego

Sunday, April 19th, 2009

By Brother Bradley J. Fikes, C.O.R.

For a look at the follies and evils of the far left — support of terrorists, anti-Semitism and plain old hatred of the United States — the Web site Zombietime is one of the best. The pictures are most eloquent in documenting the dementia.

Well, I tried to do my homage today, snapping some photos at Earth Day Sunday in Balboa Park. To be honest, most of the exhibits were inoffensive. A little bodywork here, an electric vehicle there.

But there were enough of the demented left to make a good mini-photo essay. Here it is:

Veganazis were prominently in view, telling the horrors of eating meat. It’s not just cruel to animals, it’s bad for your body. So said a speaker in another area of Balboa Park, telling listeners to not turn your stomach into “a graveyard”

I longed for a nice chicken burrito.

Tasteful comparison of slavery to animals in a circus. How historically apt for those who equated blacks with animals. That’s the PETA way.

Where would we be without a protest against those evil Israelis?

My brush with leftist fascism. Picking up after yourself is not good enough. You must dispose of the trash into the proper recycle bins. There were in groups of three, and as I went to dispose of some trash, I was lectured by the woman who policed one trio as to what belonged where.  I ended up getting hopelessly confused and just tossed my trash into what I thought was the right receptacles. You can see from the photo that some festival-goers ignored the advice on the regular trash bins, which were boarded up to prevent any horrible unsorted trash from being thrown away.

They’re just asking questions.

Physics lecture, courtesy of the 9-11 truthists. These folks were next to the Peace & Freedom party table, FWIW.

The woman in the red dress was translating into English the speech of the man next to her, who apparently was some kind of Chinese mystical healer, He was introduced as “Grand Master Ca-Ching”, or that was what it sounded like to me.

He spoke a lot about how positive energy is needed to heal ourselves and the world. Global warming, trash, war, it’s all about negative thoughts and our desire to hold onto material things. And it’s not just us who are thinking negative thoughts: “In addition, there are spirits and beings all about us, without a body, that also have negative energy. They need to be healed as well,” said the translator.

So to heal the world — and these bodiless spirits and beings, we should think positive thoughts and reject materialism.

After he spoke, donations were solicited.

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As with everything I write here, this is my personal opinion and not associated with that of my employer, the North County Times.

Mission Viejo tea party

Wednesday, April 15th, 2009

UPDATE #4:For those of you who are alarmed by the tea party phenomenon, here are instructionson how to reduce your risk.

UPDATE #3: For those of you who still don’t know the little joke the MSM was playing on the normal people at tea parties, this explanation of what “teabagging” is might help. Ugh !

UPDATE #2: Here is somebody who does understand what this tea party phenomenon is about.

In the last few days before Wednesday, I began to hear rumblings that the virtually-0rganized Tax Day protests had finally grown to such an extent that the Republican Party wanted to jump on the bandwagon. It was too late. Even the head of the RNC was denied a speaking role. This was a movement that had already grown outside the mainstream of American politics.

Oprah Winfrey, accustomed to giving unknown authors a portion of her prominence by featuring their works, felt compelled to jump on the Boyle bandwagon after only one song. It was only two years ago when, it took until Paul Potts that years’ BGT winner, was already crowned, before Oprah, then still ahead of the new media curve, introduced him to an American audience. Now, Oprah has to make the introduction early–or at least as early as she can, since millions of Yankees have already seen Ms. Boyle, even though her singing career spans a grand total of two minutes and twenty seconds.

This is the speed of the modern internet. Instead of needing the establishment to give credibility to a movement–be it political or cultural–the establishment needs those movements to keep them relevant.

I was wondering if anyone would figure this out besides me.

UPDATE: Not everybody thinks that the tea parties were a good idea.

Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) blasted “tea party” protests yesterday, labeling the activities “despicable” and shameful.”

Of course, her opinion might be affected by the fact that her husband is going to jail for fraud and tax fraud. That will color your attitude toward tea parties, I guess.

I arrived at the tea party in Mission Viejo at 5 PM. There were between 400 and 500 people standing on the four corners that intersect adjacent to the City Hall and LIbrary. I thought I had taken a bunch of photos with my iPhone camera since I had forgotten my camera. Then I went home and attempted to download the photos. It was then that I learned that I had been pushing the wrong button, turning the camera off instead of snapping a photo. I was fooled by the shutter sound that apparently was the camera turning off. I went back at 6:30 PM and took these photos when the crowd was down to about 100.

Here is the rear view of one group that was about 150 people at 5 PM

This is the opposite corner and still has about 100 people at 6:30.

That corner is down to a few but had about 100 people at 5 PM.

This is a small table when attendees could sign a petition to recall a city councilman. They got 60 signatures today. Many of us had already signed. There was another petition for Obama about spending. I doubt it will do much good but the numbers were significant for a small city in Orange County.

This one is included because I liked the sign “Tax and spend has got to end.”

I would call this a success although Mission Viejo has a tradition of community activism which is bipartisan.

On the other hand, we didn’t have anything like this.

The robber, a 32-year-old man identified by Life.ru as “Viktor,” burst into the salon at around 5 p.m. waving a pistol and ordered all of the stylists and clients to hit the floor and toss him their money.

At this point, 28-year-old Olga, whom Life.ru describes as a “delicate” girl trained in martial arts, was apparently still standing when she offered to hand over her cash. But when Viktor tried to accept her contribution, Olga surprised him with a quick punch to the chest, knocking the wind out of him before she flipped him to the ground.

Olga proceeded to tie Viktor up with a hair-dryer cord, gagged him and dragged him into a storage room…

She tied him to the radiator with handcuffs covered in frilly pink fabric, gave him some Viagra and had her way with him several times over the next 48 hours. When she finally let him go on the evening of March 16, Viktor had been “squeezed like a lemon,” Life.ru reported.

The coming California bankruptcy

Thursday, December 25th, 2008

Governor Schartzennegger has announced a huge budget deficit this year. He tried to cut spending a year ago, and got nowhere.

Schwarzenegger’s $141 billion budget for the 2008-09 fiscal year proposes cutting 10 percent from every state agency, even as California struggles to provide for millions of [illegal] new residents, fix failing schools and address myriad problems in its overcrowded prisons.

The across-the-board spending cut is the kind of draconian tactic his Republican Party colleagues have long sought to realign state spending and revenue.

But it touched off a firestorm of criticism among the state’s ruling Democratic majority in the Legislature and promised to put his pledge to move California beyond partisan politics to the ultimate test.

If ultimately passed, Schwarzenegger’s budget would cut hundreds of dollars in classroom spending for every California student and release 22,000 inmates back to the streets. It also would close nearly one in five state parks and eliminate dental coverage and other benefits for millions who rely on the state for health care and welfare.

The governor painted his spending plan as tough love and the only option left for the state after a housing market meltdown and years of deficit spending by California lawmakers. It was a pattern he helped perpetuate by borrowing to cover past deficits and increasing spending for popular programs on the eve of his 2006 re-election bid.

Now the deficit is three times as large. He has said that, by March, the state will no longer be able to pay its bills. One option, used in past budget crises, is to pay with IOUs or scrip, redeemable after the crisis is over. The public employee unions have already announced that this is illegal and they plan to fight any attempt to cut salaries, such as with unpaid days off. It must be reassuring to have the power to demand to be paid, no matter what is happening to the employer. The alternative for the state, becoming more likely as the unions dig in, is bankruptcy. The more one looks at this option, the more it seems the only one available.

The city of Vallejo—population 120,000—declared bankruptcy earlier this year because it was locked into spending 74 percent of its $80 million general fund budget on public-safety salaries. Police captains were entitled to receive $306,000 annually in pay and benefits, while 21 firefighters earned more than $200,000 a year, including overtime. After five years on the job, all were entitled to lifetime health benefits. Now two smaller towns north of San Francisco, Isleton and Rio Vista, also appear on the brink of bankruptcy.

My own small city of Mission Viejo has similar problems with pensions and excessive employees. I have been a member of a local activist group trying to get control of the city council but the group has found that, even if we succeed in electing our own candidate, the new council members quickly adopt all the bad practices of the old guard. The city has seen its reserves fall steeply over the past eight years and it has become dependent on sales tax revenue, dangerously dependent on retail sales, especially auto sales.

What will happen ?

In a preview of political fights to come, both New York State and California budgets are being crippled by outsized public sector union pension obligations that are now coming due in a perfect storm—a combination of an aging population, a declining tax base, and a fiscal crisis.
The Democrats who narrowly control both state legislatures have a notoriously cozy relationship with unions and they will be unlikely in the extreme to bite the hands that feed. But the unsupportable absurdities of the current arrangement are becoming evident.

The average state and local government employee now makes 46 percent more in combined salary and benefits than their private sector counter-parts, according to the Employee Benefit Research Institute—including 128 percent more on health care and 162 percent more on retirement benefits. New York City, for example, not only spends 10 times more on pensions than it did ten years ago, it now spends more on pensions and benefits for firefighters than it does on firefighters’ salaries.
These tax-payer sponsored paychecks cannot be renegotiated in tough times to balance a budget. They can only go up, never down.

This will head to a showdown in March and bankruptcy seems inevitable. California is the 8th largest economy in the world but Democrats can spend faster than an economy can generate tax revenues. One major factor is the erosion of the tax payers class in California. Millions of illegals exist in an underground economy like that of a south American banana republic. Middle and upper class taxpayers are leaving. The tax base is dangerously narrow with 380,000 Californians paying 40% of all income tax revenue. That is down from ten years ago. People are leaving and the state can’t afford the loss.

With large employers leaving the state, fed up with the tax burden and offered better business environments elsewhere, we have to protect the jobs we have. We just lost 1,000 jobs when the largest manufacturer of hybrid cars chose business-friendly Mississippi. The increased business tax rate proposed as a Democratic budget “fix” didn’t appeal to Toyota any more than it did to a major California employer, AAA auto club. The company is taking its business — and 900 jobs — elsewhere.

But the taxes do not stop there. The tax rate on the citizens who together already pay $9 billion of our state’s revenue will become twice the national average. It is clear why wealthier Californians choose to leave for economically sunnier pastures, leaving even more of the burden on middle income workers.

When the rich leave the state, those in control of the legislature simply change the definition of rich. Democrats have proposed to stop accounting for inflation when defining “middle income” Californians. Conveniently, this allows higher tax brackets to apply to more and more people every year, including those earning more than $100,000 — despite the fact that they already foot almost 85 percent of the state’s tax bill.

Soon the absence of taxpayers will be irreversible. My chief concern is to sell my house while there are still buyers. Then I’ll be gone.

A cautionary tale

Friday, June 20th, 2008

Urban renewal was a big subject 20 years ago. The big downtown housing projects that had been built in the 1950s were being torn down. They had turned out to be too big and the residents had become hostages to the criminal element, unless they joined the crooks. The high rise projects had replaced low rise “slums” that, it turns out, were more people friendly. The next big thing was called SEction 8. This was a program that provided poor people with vouchers which they could use to rent housing in nicer neighborhoods. As a member of the Planning Commission in Mission Viejo, I saw the intense pressure being put on all small cities to build more “affordable housing,” usually in clusters so developers can maximize profit from the subsidies.

The results of all this are now coming in. It is not good.

This will not be the last such story

Friday, May 23rd, 2008

Today, the city of Vallejo, California filed for bankruptcy due to excessive city employee costs and pension obligations. The public employee unions have had a merry time, bidding up salaries and pensions by supporting enabling politicians. Now, the real estate crunch may be the straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back. This will not be the last municipal bankruptcy. A few elected officials have recognized the danger and tried to do something about it, but they are few, far too few.

Socialism coming to a city near you

Sunday, March 16th, 2008

George Will today, recounts a story about subsidized development in Phoenix as though it was a new thing. Apparently, Mission Viejo, California, where I live, is well ahead of Arizona in imaginative ways to spend taxpayer money. Mission Viejo has a shopping mall somewhat similar to the one in the Phoenix story. It was remodeled about ten years ago and the city agreed to subsidize the parking structure with city guaranteed bonds. This was controversial but the City Council at that time was dominated by a small group that was cozy with developers.

All this is due to the unhealthy attachment of small cities to sales tax revenue. Many years ago, cities were funded by property taxes. In California, the voters passed Proposition 13 in 1978 that froze property taxes by freezing assessment increases and by limiting the tax rate to 1 1/4 percent of assessed value. This action, which is often blamed for the reliance on sales tax revenue, did not occur in Arizona so it cannot be blamed for Phoenix’s subsidy of the shopping mall. In fact, 20 years ago, Arizona did not have a sales tax.

What we see is the compulsive need for any government entity to spend money. Why would anyone sit on a city council merely to preside over a stable budget and fiscal responsibility ? Instead we see council members naming new public buildings after themselves. We finally got an ordinance barring the practice for sitting officials but it took a hotly contested election to do so. We see council members doing favors for friends who just happen to contribute to their campaign funds. Sometimes they overrule their own planning commission to do favors for friends from church or other social groups. That happened here a few years ago after weeks of work and public hearings by the planning commission. All for naught. It doesn’t make the newspapers, at least the real story doesn’t, so the stories cannot be linked here.

If this where new public officials learn their politics, no wonder the country is in the shape it is.

A step back in California’s quality of life.

Sunday, February 10th, 2008

UPDATE: Here is a useful piece on the tollroad issue from a local blog concerned with Mission Viejo.

Last week, the Coastal Commission voted with the enviro community to block a toll road that would provide a parallel route to Interstate 5 in Orange County. This, of course, is celebrated by the 1500 people who use the San Onofre State Beach to surf or sunbathe. The 15 million who would use the route to get to work or home more quickly are ignored. The route in question is called the 241 Toll Road, or State Route 241. It runs east of Interstate 5, the only highway connecting Orange County to San Diego County and the only north-south route to San Diego on the west side of the coastal mountains.

I live in Mission Viejo, a pleasant small city 60 miles south of Los Angeles and 60 miles north of San Diego. When I moved here in 1972, it was a middle class “bedroom” community, most of whose residents commuted to Los Angeles to work. It is situated just east of Interstate 5, which was convenient then and a threat to the community now. The city was a master-planned development and part of one of the great land grant ranches of southern California. After Mission Viejo was pretty well built out in the late 1970s, the remaining vacant land was sold to Phillip Morris, the tobacco company which was diversifying, and the O’Neill family began to plan other development of the remaining ranch lands. All the undeveloped land lay to the east of Mission Viejo and it should have been apparent that access to the land-locked eastern area would be a problem for the residents of Mission Viejo.

We now have the potential of 24,000 homes being built in the area east of Mission Viejo and their access to the freeway will be either the 241 toll road or Interstate 5. To get to Interstate 5, they must go through Mission Viejo. The long term project is called “The Ranch Plan” but notice there are no maps. If you go to all the web sites of the developers in this area there are no maps. Why?

The original master plan for Orange County had additional freeways that were never built once Jerry Brown became governor. He apparently believed that, if he did not build the infrastructure, the people would not come. Sort of the reverse of the baseball movie. He was wrong and the quality of life in southern California has steadily declined as the years went by.

The failure of the political left to secure the cities is at the root of much of the suburban sprawl they now decry. I grew up in Chicago in a pleasant middle class neighborhood. By the time I left for college in 1956, many of the older families, especially the more prosperous ones, were leaving for the suburbs. In 1962, when I came home to visit, the neighborhood was already showing visible tension. Much of this showed as racial tension as blacks moved into white neighborhoods and the whites began to flee when crime, not always the doing of the black residents, quickly climbed. The mythology of suburbia rarely mentions this aspect of the shift.

When I moved to Mission Viejo in 1972, one of my reasons was to escape the traffic. It followed me but it took 30 years. Another reason was to find a more comfortable place to practice surgery, away from the pressures involved in joining an older surgeon in practice. I began by joining a group in the San Fernando Valley and would probably have remained there except for some inter-personal issues and the problems of traffic in a vocation that does not lend itself to commuting.

In recent years, as local traffic increased to uncomfortable levels, I joined the city Planning Commission. Here I had an opportunity to see what could be done about the situation. The result was not encouraging. The original course of the 241 route would have joined the Interstate 5 near the intersection with the 55 freeway, providing a reasonable parallel route for the residents of the eastern developments. That was changed years ago at the instigation of residents of affluent suburbs further north, such as Lemon Heights and several other small but powerful cities. I don’t blame them for using influence to avoid a freeway in their midst but too much of the planning of Orange County has been done this way. Now, the 241 is less useful for commuters than it might have been. The decision not to extend it to meet the I-5 south of San Clemente is another short-sighted decision that will reverberate for decades unless it is reversed.

Small cities are often at the mercy of real estate developers and real estate interests. One reason is because the city councils of these small cities are susceptible to pressure as these are often thankless jobs with small salaries, if any. It takes a dedicated and selfless city official to look out for the future (Or one with ambition for higher office, which is worse). Often, the residents care too little about their local politics and the result is not seen for many years. When it finally comes, it may not be pretty.

One such rare citizen was Norm Murray, the first mayor of Mission Viejo and a man who was involved in city government for over 50 years . Norm was the mayor of a small southern California city when John Kennedy was nominated for the presidency at Los Angeles Sports Arena, the site of the Democratic convention that year. Norm was one of the mayors introduced to the future president in 1960. In 2006, he was still serving, this time on the Planning Commission with me. I learned a lot from Norm but unfortunately, he was only one man and there were not enough Norm Murrays in Orange County. Things are bad but they will get worse.