Officials at California’s second largest school district, San Diego Unified, are now openly discussing the possibility of insolvency.

Predictably, district officials are blaming state education cuts for the district’s massive financial problems, including the prospect of a $118 million deficit this year. To put that amount in perspective, when I served on the Grossmont Union High School District Board of Trustees, our entire annual budget for a district of 24,000 students was $140 million.

So, are state education cuts alone to blame for San Diego Unified’s woes? Not so fast.

Two years ago, well before the current round of education cuts went into effect, district officials were already seeing the financial warning signs of trouble ahead.

Did the district take every possible step to bring costs down when the insolvency warning light started blinking on the dashboard? It doesn’t appear that way.

Earlier this week I discussed on this site how despite the warning signs, the union-dominated board voted to… Read More

Earlier today a FlashReport reader emailed me, surprised that the public employee union bosses would agree to any kind of pension reforms, not matter how insignificant. He pointed out that any reforms are routinely killed by the legislature — and he pointed to legislation by Senator Tony Strickland this year, killed by Democrats, that would have caused a public employee’s pension benefits to be taken away if they were convicted of a felony in the conduct of the very job from which the benefits were derived. Good points.

My response to him was that the reason why the union bosses will be willing to support some minor reforms (addressing some… Read More

MEANINGFUL PENSION REFORM NOT LIKELY FROM UNDER THE DOME

The Sacramento Bee Capitol Alert Blog reports that tomorrow Governor Brown is going to announce some sort of public employee pension reform plan. The presumption is that Brown is going to formalize what he referred to last March as his “no loggerheads” faux pension reform — the folly of which I wrote about at the time. This is where you throw out some common sense ideas to curb some egregious abuses of the system, maybe combined with some changes for new hires. The problem, of course, is that there is only one real yardstick to measure a public employee pension reform proposal…

Last year a study out of Stanford University pegged the state’s unfunded pension liability at a 500 billion… Read More

The San Diego Unified School District is in big trouble financially, and the district now faces the prospect of a state takeover amid a deteriorating financial situation for one of the largest school districts in the state.

While recent changes in state education funding are being blamed for the districts poor financial condition, reports have emerged that there have been discussions within the district for at least two years concerning the potential for insolvency.

The time frame for these discussions is noteworthy because it turns out that at roughly the same time there were internal warnings about the possibility of the district becoming insolvent, the union-backed board majority voted to impose a Project Labor Agreement on $2.1 billion in new construction approved under Proposition S, passed in 2008.

As a former school board trustee, I’ve seen first-hand how powerful interests line up to pass school bonds. Unfortunately, many districts rack up big maintenance backlogs as a result of political pressure to dump all available resources into… Read More

OK – not really a blog, just something I wrote; but pertinent just the same. Feel free to share – others have been.… Read More

The 2012 San Diego mayor’s race began like other love affairs – lots of hope and promise for the future. Then, the sparkle and shine of courtship faded quickly into the same old dull routine.

No more flowers. No more moonlight and love songs.

Seems I’m not the only one who noticed our romance is fading.

Even the candidates can’t muster the enthusiasm. Both Councilman Carl DeMaio and District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis skipped a second, high-profile debate last week and the fall out has been notable.

One Rostra blogger called the no-show candidates “disappointing” while a San Diego Union-Tribune columnist floated the sweat-inducing idea of forcing all the candidates to participate in at least one debate.

[I witnessed what came close … Read More

It will take a college degree to understand the Secretary of State’s voter information pamphlet for the November, 2012 election, given the partisan, pro-union move by the Legislature and the Governor to force measures off the ballot next June, and lump them all together in November. But history demonstrates the crowded ballot really helps Republicans, whom demographics demonstrate are better educated and more prepared to comprehend the information and actually vote than voters registered in other parties in California.

The Democrats changed the balloting on propositions because they were afraid an “anti-union”… Read More

Sing again: The last laptop report, entitled “Song of the Shopkeeper”, engendered more positive responses than anything I have written in a couple of years. It wound up being published as a front section editorial in The Washington Times, and received some radio coverage as well. It seems that almost everyone has a “shopkeeper” in their family’s past or present or knows of one. I thank you all for your comments and stories. I am honored to give voice to all you shopkeepers out there. One regular reader of these missives suggested a quote that I should have put in the original tome. Napoleon Bonaparte is said to have once derisively described England as, “a nation of shopkeepers”. It was meant as an insult. I wonder if Napoleon remembered these words when his army was later defeated by those very same “shopkeepers” at the Battle of Waterloo?

The Numbers are In: The federal deficit for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2012 was $1.298 trillion. That is the second highest deficit ever. Here is a chart of the deficits for the last 5 years, in billions of dollars:… Read More