Arnold’s Comeback
Just a year ago, the Schwarzenegger administration was atrophying, voters had just rejected the governor’s four special-election ballot measures, his approval ratings had plummeted to record lows and political pundits were ribbing him with the brand “”One-terminator.”” But Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has since managed to shake his political trouncing from last November, proving that through centrist policy and philosophy he should receive another term at California’s helm.
In seeking re-election, as in the 2003 recall, Schwarzenegger is assuring a bipartisan Sacramento by displaying both drive and compromise to oft-stubborn Democrats. The only difference, this time, is his track record.
Schwarzenegger’s strongman stance against unions and the Legislature during last November’s election proved a disaster, and the governor admitted it. He has since reconciled with his constituents, and his achievements in the last year have proven that his flexible agenda can weaken the state’s party lines for a greater good. Schwarzenegger’s pragmatism has allowed him to maneuver hot-button issues with less flak. For example, he assumed a conservative stance on gay marriage while distancing himself from Republicans on stem cell research. In the meantime, Schwarzenegger has delivered a state budget on time for the first time in years, raising the minimum wage and establishing long-term initiatives to battle global warming and improve state health care.
The challenging candidate, Phil Angelides, calls Schwarzenegger’s leadership a fraud. The Democratic state treasurer’s campaign has tried to appeal to California’s scorn of conservatives by connecting Schwarzenegger to President George W. Bush, as if the governor had been parading a bipartisan facade.
While it is true that Schwarzenegger has proven politically cloudy on some issues — such as the looming state budget deficit as well as his inconsistencies and nonspecific plans on immigration — Angelides still has no definitive answers for his opponent. To solve the budget gap, Angelides has taken the politically unpopular route of taxation. His straight-shooter image will not match the legislative camaraderie Schwarzenegger has built. Even Democrats show no spark in their support of Angelides, marked by Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s endorsement holdout until September.
Schwarzenegger, however, has been able to walk both the conservative and liberal worlds since his election in 2003. While his midterm experience proved rocky, the governor has demonstrated a politically balanced tenure and mentality that earns him the right to another term.
YES: Prop 1A
WHAT IT DOES:
Earmarks fuel tax revenues for various transportation projects.
WHY WE SUPPORT IT:
The bill encourages fiscal responsibility with only a small cost in liquidity.
In 2002, Californians passed Proposition 42, which specifies that most of the state’s fuel taxes — about $3 billion annually — be used for transportation improvements instead of going to the state’s general fund. But in the face of a budget crisis, Sacramento has suspended this transfer twice in four years, siphoning funds from transportation into education and social services.
Proposition 1A would make such reallocations more difficult, treating those transfers as loans to the general fund that would need to be repaid in full — with interest. While the Legislature could still pull an emergency loan with a two-thirds majority, the state would not be able to draw from the Proposition 42 money unless previous emergency transfers had been repaid in full. Furthermore, only two such transfers would be permitted every 10 years.
Proposition 42 dedicated fuel taxes to transportation projects for a reason: so that new freeways, road improvements and transit systems would be paid for by the people who use them. Proposition 1A would lock this sensible system into place.
It’s become common practice during hard fiscal times to transfer money from transportation to whatever other program needs the cash. But doing so makes it easier for the legislature and the governor to gloss over poor budgetary decisions in other areas.
While budget flexibility is a good thing to have in an emergency, Sacramento needs fiscal discipline — and Proposition 1A is a good compromise.
YES: Prop 1B
WHAT IT DOES:
Provides $19.9 billion in bonds for road, highway and public transportation projects.
WHY WE SUPPORT IT:
The state’s transportation infrastructure is in dire need of proper maintenance.
Proposition 1B is part of the “”Rebuild California”” package promoted by the state Legislature and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Such bipartisan cooperation is rare in California, and voters should recognize the reason for its existence — California’s huge transportation infrastructure badly needs updating and maintenance. As the population continues to surge, congestion becomes an ever-worsening problem that requires more than the currently inadequate funding to alleviate. As a result of years of neglect, California’s roads and highways are sliding into disrepair, something all Californians, who spend an estimated 500,000 hours per day sitting in traffic, must recognize. The need is clearly demonstrated by the wide range of support for the measure, including both major political parties and the state Chamber of Commerce.
Although Proposition 1B is the largest bond measure ever put before California voters, it is a crucial one, and even if voters pass all of the “”Rebuild California”” bond measures, the state will remain below the recommended 6 percent debt ceiling. The measure’s balance between funding for highway congestion relief and road improvements — just over $11 billion — and funding for public transportation — $4 billion — adequately represents both sides of the private/public transportation debate without sacrificing either. It also provides funding for decreasing pollution and improving port safety and security, a critical concern for a state that houses two of the largest ports in the country.
The funding will also be distributed fairly evenly across the state, making a true investment in the entire state’s infrastructure as opposed to a few large cities, an important reason why the dollar amount of the bond needs to be large to accomplish such a goal. Since 1990, voters have approved only $5 billion in state bonds for transportation, which is one reason California has an estimated $160-billion need for upgraded transportation and infrastructure. Proposition 1B is an important step forward in rectifying one of California’s most pressing statewide problems.
NO: Prop 1C
WHAT IT DOES:
Creates $2.8 billion in bonds for development and homeownership programs.
WHY WE OPPOSE IT:
For the money, 1C’s housing programs are ill-defined.
Housing for the poor and emergency shelters for groups such as battered women have always been touchy issues, and should be addressed in a fiscally responsible, realistic manner — thus, Proposition 1C is not the answer. The initiative adds $3 billion in new state government debt and will do little to help low-income California families afford housing.
When the state buys bonds, California taxpayers pay back the money to the tune of about $2 for every $1 spent. Another government housing program will spend too much money on bureaucracy, making it difficult for every family that needs the money to actually obtain it. Also, hidden in the proposition — designed to create affordable housing and help seniors and the disabled pay for their own homes — is an irrelevant $400 million project to improve parks across the state.
If we’re going to add more debt to California’s credit cards, it should be for a well-planned and well-written measure, which this proposition is not. Responsible voters should vote no on Proposition 1C.
YES: Prop. 1D
WHAT IT DOES:
Issues a $10.4 billion bond to be used in K-12 and college facilities repair and construction.
WHY WE SUPPORT IT:
California’s education facilities are in poor shape and desperately need the cash.
When it comes to education, fiscal liberalism is an easy sell. Investment in today’s classrooms will allow us to reap the rewards of economic success in the future. Spending correctly, however, has made Proposition 1D’s passage more contentious.
Overall, Proposition 1D will repair 31,000 classrooms and build 9,500 new classrooms. The University of California, specifically, would receive a much-needed windfall of cash with Proposition 1D, which would provide $890 million to the system. (UCSD would get about $94.5 million from the bond.) The university’s facilities, along with those of its sister systems, California State University and California Community College systems, are fading in terms of technology and architecture.
Opponents of Proposition 1D contend that the initiative is needlessly careless, forcing California into a deeper budget hole. Critics are instead advocating more efficient use of existing facilities. But some necessities go beyond improvement, including roofs and bathrooms that don’t leak, two problems that have become an unfortunate staple in California classrooms.
Budgetary responsibility is key here, and the colossal financial scope of Proposition 1D could easily lead to slapdash spending. But withholding much-needed funds from California’s ailing education system in the name of caution is sinful.
NO: Prop. 83
WHAT IT DOES:
Enacts harsher punishments for sex offenders, including lifetime GPS tracking.
WHY WE OPPOSE IT:
Despite a handful of good points, the measure is wildly unrealistic.
Although increasing punishments for sex offenders is a worthwhile goal, the supporters of Proposition 83 have chosen a faulty vehicle.
Aside from the potentially constitutional issue of lifetime GPS tracking, the measure has several flaws that prevent this board from endorsing it. Most importantly, the proposition prevents registered sex offenders — including those who have not molested children — from living within 2,000 feet of any school or park, essentially forcing them to relocate to more rural and suburban areas, which generally have less policing ability because of smaller programs with fewer staff and less funding, or into homelessness. Data also demonstrate that the vast majority of child sex offenders molest children who are known to them personally, usually a family member or friend, not strangers. Under the measure, communities are also allowed to set further boundary restrictions, pushing past offenders into even smaller areas.
Proposition 83 would also have unknown fiscal effects up to several hundred million dollars per year for the state, according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office, as a result of an increased prison population, building and staffing mental hospitals, court costs and lifetime GPS tracking for offenders. The increased GPS network demanded by the measure, which would lump lower-risk and higher-risk offenders into the same group, would impose a formidable cost on the state. Even though the state would be allowed to recoup some costs from the offenders, their ability to pay would likely be significantly limited.
Prosecutors in Iowa, where legislators passed a similar 2,000-foot boundary in 2001, are now calling for the repeal of the measure, saying that the false sense of security it has caused and the high cost of implementation warrant replacing the law with “”more effective protection measures.””
Despite these flaws, the measure beneficially increases penalties, providing longer sentences for some sex offenses and prohibiting probation for others, including spousal rape, as well as focusing more attention on habitual offenders. However, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the California state Legislature have already addressed many of these concerns in SB 1128 and SB 1178, which accomplish most of the same things as Proposition 83 with reduced state cost, including eliminating early release credits for habitual offenders and providing GPS tracking of high-risk offenders, a more logical use of resources. Following the enactment of this legislation, Proposition 83 is expensive and unnecessary.
NO: Prop. 85
WHAT IT DOES:
Requires parental notification of a minor abortion 48 hours before the procedure can be performed.
WHY WE OPPOSE IT:
This measure wasn’t worth supporting in 2005 and its potential effects haven’t changed.
Proposition 85, a measure nearly identical to 2005’s failed Proposition 73, is back, another attempt at changing the California constitution to require parental notification 48 hours before a minor can receive an abortion unless she receives a judicial waiver. This year, supporters have attempted to soften the political controversy of the initiative by removing the language defining a fetus as an “”unborn child,”” but the measure remains part of a broader attempt to restrict reproductive rights.
This obstacle to a safe, legal abortion would only increase the risk of physical harm to any California teen seeking one. Most pregnant teenagers, around 70 percent, according to researchers from UC San Francisco, already involve their parents in decisions about their pregnancies (even more involve some trusted adult). Teens who don’t may have an important reason, including abuse in the home or extremely anti-abortion parents whose notification would effectively result in a consent requirement. Notably, Proposition 85 provides protection to minors who are coerced into having an abortion, but not those who are subjected to force intended to prevent them from seeking one.
Judicial waivers do not lessen these problems. The delay from pursuing even a successful waiver within an intimidating, confusing system may result in more dangerous second-term abortions and unnecessary emotional and physical harm.
Although Proposition’s 85’s authors have somewhat protected the identity of the minor in response to a negative reaction in 2005, the burden that the extensive reporting requirements would place upon doctors and judges remains. With the purported purpose of providing an annual report on minor abortions to the public, the measure requires additional paperwork from doctors willing to perform abortions, whose number is already limited. The proposition also attempts to hold judges in a political trap with publicly filed reports detailing the number of petitions and their rulings — something anti-abortion activists could attempt to use for political gain in attacking judges, who must face election in California.
The California Supreme Court has found “”overwhelming evidence”” that similar laws in other states are harmful, not beneficial, and many California medical groups oppose the measure, saying it will cause delays in critical medical care. California’s teen pregnancy rate is declining without the existence of such a measure — increased access to sex education and birth control are proven effective mechanisms for preventing teens from seeking abortions. Supporters of Proposition 85, including Evangelicals for Social Action and the Traditional Values Coalition, are dedicated to their larger political goal of restricting access to abortion, not caring for the physical and emotional safety of California teens.
NO: Prop. 86
WHAT IT DOES:
Raises the excise tax on cigarettes by $2.60 a pack; provides $2 billion for various health services.
WHY WE OPPOSE IT:
A tax hike is unlikely to discourage smoking; the bill also lacks spending guarantees; too many riders.
Come November, California voters should grind Proposition 86 into the ground like a dying cigarette butt. Although a tax that goes toward such causes as helping kids stop smoking and improving the state health care system seems noble, any voter who reads between the lines can see that it is a loophole-ridden, bureaucratic attempt at regulating tobacco that ends up feeding special interests.
Although evidence shows that increasing the cost of cigarettes prevents people from beginning to smoke, especially people with low discretionary incomes like children, the prohibitively expensive $2.60 tax is unlikely to result in vast numbers of quitters, especially since nicotine has been proven extremely addictive — in fact, the measure unfairly targets this often-scapegoated population.
Perhaps the most negative aspect of Proposition 86, however, is the fact that it will increase crime and smuggling — from both Mexico and states bordering California — because such a huge price increase would create an increased black-market demand for cheap tobacco.
Although some of the funding would go to tobacco-use prevention programs and health insurance programs for children, the vast majority would be funneled to hospitals for emergency and trauma care — an important destination for funding, to be sure, but not something for which smokers alone should be forced to pay. Also, buried in the bill are provisions that allow hospitals to avoid antitrust laws under certain circumstances — ideas that might deserve more exploration, but do not belong in this measure.
NO: Prop. 87
WHAT IT DOES:
Taxes state oil production to fund a variety of alternative energy programs.
WHY WE OPPOSE IT:
The tax will encourage more oil imports instead of discouraging petroleum use.
Backed by big-name star power — former President Bill Clinton appeared in a pro-87 TV spot, and Ben Affleck and Barack Obama have toured the state in support of the bill — Proposition 87 is being sold as part of a larger effort to reduce the use of petroleum. While it is a worthy goal, the bill is worked out in such a way that it will do very little to reduce demand.
The meat of Proposition 87 is a 1.5 to 6 percent tax to be levied on California oil production, with the rate varying with the amount of oil produced in the state. The funds from this tax — between $225 million and $485 million, according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office — would be spent on research and production incentives for alternative energy sources, as well as energy-efficient technologies and alternative-energy vehicles.
But instead of encouraging oil companies to gradually wean themselves from petroleum, the tax pinch will most likely end up pulling dollars from the average consumer’s wallet. Proposition 87 tries to protect Californians from inflated gasoline prices by prohibiting oil producers from simply passing the extra costs on to consumers. But oil refineries face no such restriction, and rather than discouraging oil consumption, the tax will simply encourage refineries to import gasoline from out of state.
Reducing both our dependence on petroleum and the amount of carbon dioxide we produce is an admirable idea, but Proposition 87 is not the way to do it. If the state wants to use market forces to reduce petroleum use, it should implement a “”carbon tax”” on carbon dioxide release, like the BTU tax Clinton proposed during his presidency. Production-based oil taxes simply won’t work.
Sorry, Willy, Ben, Barack: Californians should vote no on Proposition 87.
NO: Prop. 89
WHAT IT DOES:
Establishes public funding for qualified political campaigns; limits some contributions.
WHY WE OPPOSE IT:
Singling out corporations to pay for the measure is wrong; special interests still too powerful.
Proposition 89 has at its core a noble goal — public financing of campaigns — but the devil is in the details. Scaling the number of required signatures and donations to fit different positions also makes a lot of sense, with 25,000 donations and signatures needed to get state money for a gubernatorial campaign and lower amounts for other political offices.
While the idea of collecting $5 donations and signatures before a candidate can receive public financing is a good way to ensure that the candidate actually has a broad base of support, this can be exploited.
The money for the financing would come exclusively as a tax increase on corporations and financial institutions, since California isn’t losing enough businesses and jobs as it is. Singling out corporations isn’t the only thing wrong with this bill — there’s more.
The public should actually finance public financing, which isn’t what this proposition would do. Spreading the costs of public financing would make sure that no special-interest group could control the elections, and would also ensure the burden is spread among all groups that benefit from this reform.
One of the proposition’s sponsors is the California Nurses Association, which would be able to use its weight of numbers to ensure that candidates friendly to it would be able to get public funding almost automatically. This drastically skews the way candidates would be able to gain money: Instead of appealing to many different groups to provide funding for campaigns, all a candidate would need to do is promise their undying loyalty to a large union to gain the requisite amount of signatures and donations in order to unlock the large amounts of money from public financing.
Proposition 89 may not even be constitutional, since it would infringe on freedom of speech by limiting the amount that can be contributed to a political campaign, hence silencing some voices in favor of making other voices louder.
Even other unions, such as the California Teachers Association, find the proposition worrisome, unsure if the donation limits for individuals and groups apply to them. If the restrictions do apply, it would dramatically lower their voice of their union compared to others — probably a reason why the CTA is opposed to the proposition.
Proposition 89 also does nothing to prevent wealthy candidates from using as much of their own money as they want in a public campaign. This means a less wealthy candidate who manages to get public financing could still face an uphill battle running against a rich candidate who could outspend a public candidate many times over.
This is one of the goals of public financing in political campaigns: to make sure that candidates aren’t just wealthy individuals who want to maintain their own power. Without a provision to this effect, Proposition 89 lacks teeth serious enough for real reform.
While political fundraising desperately needs reform, Proposition 89 is not the answer. California needs to rework political fundraising in a way that guarantees that the public, and not unions or any other special-interest groups, funds campaigns.
NO: Prop. 90
WHAT IT DOES:
Prohibits use of eminent domain for anything but direct public use of property; redefines “”just compensation.””
WHY WE OPPOSE IT:
The law, while well-intended, would make even basic regulation prohibitively expensive.
The authors of Proposition 90 mean well. But instead of reducing the abuse of eminent domain laws — the intent of the measure — the law would greatly complicate the process of regulation, and probably end up costing the state billions of dollars in lawsuits.
The proposition is a response to a 2005 U.S. Supreme Court decision that greatly expanded a government’s ability to use its right of eminent domain — a government’s ability to seize private holdings for public use. The court ruled 5-4 that private land could be seized and turned over to private developers, greatly expanding the meaning of “”public use”” in such cases.
Proposition 90 attempts to limit that broad power, prohibiting state and local governments from seizing or condemning private property to promote a private project. It puts the burden of proof of public use on the government, ensuring that eminent domain will not be used lightly. Had the bill stopped there, it might have earned this board’s endorsement.
But Proposition 90 also has significant flaws. It defines “”just compensation”” in such a way that governments might be liable for “”theoretical”” property value loss. For example, it might be argued that a commonplace zoning ordinance would lower property values, opening governments up to massive numbers of potential lawsuits. Such a definition would make many necessary zoning and environmental regulations almost impossible to implement, especially for smaller municipalities.
While the idea behind Proposition 90 is a good one, the bill is a poor implementation.
