California Insider

By Daniel Weintraub

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May 13, 2008

Plug and play

Nissan plans to mass market an electric car by 2010.

Posted by dweintraub on 05:39 AM | Comments

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May 12, 2008

Nestle scales back bottled water plant

Responding to environmental concerns, Nestle has scaled back its plans for a huge water bottling plant at the base of Mt. Shasta.

Posted by dweintraub on 03:55 PM | Comments

Zero-emission power plant

A Rancho Cordova company is designing one of the largest experiments around to inject CO2 from a power plant into the earth rather than emitting the gas into the atmosphere.

Posted by dweintraub on 05:39 AM | Comments

Those $10,000 teacher bonuses

One detail I wasn't able to cram into this column on fourth-grade teacher Elizabeth Nesci: she says she moved to California from Florida after seeing former Gov. Gray Davis touting education reform in a speech on C-Span. Davis was laying out his accountability plan and proposing a $10,000-bonus for teachers with certificates from the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards.

Posted by dweintraub on 05:32 AM | Comments

Charter schools work

This story on a new school-within-a-school at LA's notoriously bad Jefferson High School is interesting not just because the students in the smaller school are doing so much better. It's interesting because it shows that LA Unified is focused on competing with private and especially charter schools that are taking enrollment away from the district's traditional campuses. And that kind of competition is exactly what charter schools were designed to create.

Posted by dweintraub on 05:28 AM | Comments

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May 07, 2008

Vallejo's revenues

The city council of Vallejo voted Tuesday night to file for bankruptcy protection. FYI, the most recent annual reports from the state controller show that the city's general purpose revenues climbed dfrom $42 million in 1998-99 to $62 million in 2004-05, a 50 percent increase. Restricted revenues grew at an even greater clip. I'd like to see the figures for the current year to see how they fit that trend.

UPDATE: Vallejo's city website has a different set of revenues numbers that go back to 03-04. According to their chart, general fund revenues were $70.2 million in 03-04, $82.8 million in 04-05, $81.1 in 05-06, $84.8 in 06-07 and $85.8 in the current year.

Posted by dweintraub on 09:56 AM | Comments

Pomona bans sex offenders

Pomona has essentially banned convicted sex offenders from legally moving into the city. Opponents of Proposition 83 on the 2006 ballot, known as Jessica's Law, warned that the measure would lead to this and now it has. First came registration, then disclosure, which was great. Then came GPS. Now a ban (accomplished by extending the perimeter around schools, parks and other "sensitive areas" within which sex offenders may not live). Prosecutors in other states that have tried similar approaches have warned that the policy is counterproductive because it drives sex offenders underground -- they live where they can get a place and just don't register. And if they do comply, they are forced to live in rural areas far from their families or the kind of services that might help them deal with their problem. Seems like we should keep criminals locked up until they have done the time society deems appropriate or we consider them safe to be on the street.

Posted by dweintraub on 09:39 AM | Comments

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May 06, 2008

Nunez reform ideas

Outgoing Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez has introduced a three-part political reform proposal that includes a redistricting commission, a liberalizing of term limits and a ban on fundraising from May 15 until a budget is enacted. Nunez released his proposal on the same day that a bipartisan coalition of political and civic leaders (including Gov. Schwarzenegger and former Gov. Gray Davis) and government reform groups submitted what they say will be enough signatures to qualify their redistricting measure for the November ballot.

The key to understanding Nunez's redistricting measure is what he says is its most important feature: it requires that "communities of interest" take priority in drawing district lines over existing city and county boundaries or geographic features. The problem with that idea is that communities of interest can mean pretty much anything, so if your first priority is to keep a "community" together, you could meander half way across the state to do so, ignoring all other traditional methods of political or civic organization.

In the proposal that appears headed to the ballot, communities of interest get equal weight with the other factors, an idea that some Republican insiders already fear is a way to allow Democrats to pick up more seats and possibly win a two-thirds majority in one or both houses of the Legislature. Putting communities of interest at the top of the list (after the federal Constitution and the Voting Rights Act) is an absolute non-starter for most Republicans and many independents and government reform groups.

The Nunez measure also states explicitly that the districts would not be nested, where each Senate district consists of two Assembly districts combined. When you don't have nesting, and you have three or four or more assembly members representing pieces of one Senate district, you create an disincentive for members to work with each other, even and sometimes especially within the same party. Nobody wants to help a fellow member against whom they might be running next month.

On the bright side, the term limits proposal looks fairly sound -- the shift applies only to future members -- and the fundraising ban is harmless if also largely meaningless. Most of the money would simply be donated anyway, before or after the black-out period, but lobbyists would certainly be grateful to be free or mostly free of fundraising pitches while they are working on budget issues.

But on redistricting, Nunez had a chance to lead and didn't do it. Same for term limits. Unfortunately, his time is now past.

Posted by dweintraub on 02:25 PM | Comments

Between a rock and a hard place

This fight over a quarry proposed near Temecula might be a sign of things to come as the cosntruction industry searches for new sources of gravel to build all the highways and bridges that will be funded by the Prop 1B transportation bond.

Posted by dweintraub on 11:29 AM | Comments