Bee Opinionated: Newsom makes news + Sneaky Sac Supes raise salaries + Smoke in the East
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Hello, it’s Robin Epley with The Sacramento Bee Editorial Board. It’s Pride weekend in Sacramento, did you go to the festival or the parade today? I was there!
Lots of news came out of California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office last week, not the least of which was the shocking news regarding two plane loads of Venezuelan and Colombian migrants that were sent to Sacramento. Apparently the stunt was perpetrated by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, in the latest ploy to dump migrants onto liberal California’s shores.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta called the incidents “disgusting and morally bankrupt” in a tweet.
Newsom threatened to sue DeSantis under kidnapping charges and said the Florida governor was “a small, pathetic man.”
“The act of shipping humans across state lines under false pretenses is akin to state-sanctioned kidnapping. It is reprehensible and it demonstrates how sick American political discourse has become,” wrote The Bee Editorial Board.
DeSantis has already been named as the perpetrator behind a similar incident in September of last year, when approximately 50, primarily Venezuelan, asylum seekers were flown from San Antonio, Texas, to the island of Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts. The New York Times found that the migrant flight program instituted by DeSantis has cost Florida taxpayers at least $1.5 million so far.
“Californians are not as impacted by the crisis of migrants massing on the Mexican side as other states are. But California is home to more than 10.5 million immigrants, and nearly a quarter of the nation’s undocumented immigrants reside in California, where they constitute more than 6% of the state’s population, according to the Public Policy Institute of California,” the board wrote.
“Sacramento will care for these migrants, not because they were dumped on our doorstep, but because California does not have a political culture that rewards inhumanity.”
Elsewhere on the opinion pages: “Gov. Gavin Newsom is running for president, but not in the way you might think” by Bee Opinion Writer Tom Philp and “Gov. Newsom’s call for a constitutional convention is a well-intentioned, terrible idea” by contributor Erwin Chemrinsky.
Supe-r Shenanigans
“The consent calendar process is common to local agencies, such as city councils and boards of supervisors, ‘to expedite meetings and reserve time for matters that need to be discussed,’ and, if you’ve ever attended one of those meetings, it’s usually dispensed with fairly quickly compared to regular agenda items, and often with no public comment period.
“So when the Sacramento County Board of Supervisors decided to give themselves a tasty 36% raise, you would think that the topic would be a regular agenda item subject to public comment and public approval. But apparently not.”
As I wrote last week, it seems as though the supes were simply hoping no one would notice. But let’s take a look at the more than 50 consent calendar items at the Board’s meeting on May 23:
There was an item to authorize the County Purchasing Agent to negotiate an update to a financial lease agreement — not to exceed $26 million.
The board authorized a contract for disaster recovery support and consulting for two years, for an amount not to exceed $640,000.
The board accepted a bid by a local construction company for more than $5.7 million, to repave and repair roads in several sites across the county.
And, of course, item No. 14 of 59: Oh-so-quietly approving that 36% raise to the supervisors’ salaries, for a total of nearly $250,000 across the board.
Sacramento County Supervisors Phil Serna, Rich Desmond, Sue Frost, Pat Hume and Patrick Kennedy will now make $173,000 per year; a $46,000 increase from their current $127,000-per-year salaries. (The average salary of a Sacramento resident, for comparison, is about $65,582, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.)
“While pay raises within the county’s administration are usually placed on the consent calendar, that’s a different beast: The supervisors approving the pay raise of their employees is not self-enrichment. This looks a little too much like the supervisors were trying to hide a surreptitious raise,” I wrote.
Pay raises and lack of introspection aside, this is indicative of a much larger problem on the board: There were 60 items on the consent calendar on May 23. Prior to that, there were 55 consent items at their May 9 meeting, and there are 45 items on the consent calendar at their most recent meeting on June 6.
For comparison, Yolo County’s Board of Supervisors had about 38 items at their May 9 meeting, while the Placer County Board of Supervisors only had about a dozen on May 23.
“The consent calendar can be a great way to cut through the jungle-like density of a local agency meeting. Their time is limited and so are their audiences’ attention spans. But the Sacramento County Board of Supervisors have clearly been abusing the privilege.”
Oh No, Canada
“Manhattan’s hazy brown skyline this past week looked eerily similar to that in Sacramento during a bad August, when too much of the Sierra is on fire. The ghastly smoke that recently plagued much of the Northeast started in eastern Canada. California’s mild spring is in stark contrast to a hot and dry pattern in Canada that’s the root cause of an estimated 400 fires now burning.”
Eleven years ago, it might have been easier for some to dismiss the influence of climate change. But there’s nothing like a June sky full of soot to bring that message home, wrote the editorial board last week.
New York Rep. Marc Molinaro (R-NY) said that this is “not the moment to start lecturing people” about climate change.
In a way, Molinaro is absolutely right, wrote the board. That moment has long passed.
Now, 90 million Americans not accustomed to the inferno the West has endured can experience with all their senses what the future will bring if we don’t act as a nation:
“It is a reminder that change must happen in steps big and small: from a single commuter changing to a healthier pattern to societies the size of California converting to renewable energy sources as quickly as possible.”
Opinion of the Week
“...the worst Sister Roma did on Monday was offend some grown-ups who got to go home at the end of the day and live their lives. What happened to the immigrants who found themselves in Sacramento, hapless pawns in some political game, is so much worse.” — Tom Philp on Sacramento as the frontline in the latest culture war, and how each side in this war so “willingly enrages the other.”
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Happy Pride!
Robin
