The Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court is paid $223,500 per year, while the General Manager of the Bay Area Rapid Transit District is paid $318,000 a year. That might seem like an imbalance of pay for public servants, given the very serious qualifications required to become a Chief Justice and comparing the responsibilities involved for the BART manager. It is a fact that the General Manager of BART must manage a huge agency. But the fact is she and her predecessors happen to be managing BART very badly. The agency is $3 billion in debt and later this month its contracts with four fairly rowdy public employee unions will expire, putting BART’s awful management and pay policies squarely in the public eye.

And out of touch BART GM Grace Crunican is not setting the stage very well for these critical union negotiations, where give backs should be on the agenda rather than pay increases at the financially crippled agency, whose salaries are already grossly bloated and whose underfunded pension liabilities… Read More

California’s nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office estimates that the state will enjoy an unexpected $4.4 billion tax revenue gain through June 2014. If you think that means a tax cut in your future, think again. Politicians already have plans to spend it, laying the groundwork for the next huge budget deficit.

The revenue gain resulted from three factors: increased state capital-gains taxes from California residents who sold investments at the end of 2012 to avoid the higher federal taxes that took effect January 1, when… Read More

Democrat State Sen. Ron Calderon returned to work this week, just a few days after FBI agents raided his Capitol office and removed numerous boxes in what was at least the appearance of an extensive criminal investigation. It sure wasn’t spring cleaning.

Perhaps you may be thinking you missed the wall-to-wall news coverage and breathless newspaper reporters pursuing this story with Watergate-like zeal. Well, don’t bother to go to Google now – you didn’t miss much.

Showing the absolute minimum journalistic curiosity, the Capitol press corps hasn’t had much to say about this and even less to report. No matter your politics, this is a disappointing shortfall of public information.

Too harsh an assessment? After being… Read More

On the way to our spring vacation, I wanted to choose a book that had some ties to the region we were visiting – China. I could not put my fingers on my copy of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book, so I grabbed Stephen Ambrose’s Nothing Like It In The World, about the building of the Transcontinental Railroad. I thought it would be interesting because of how the Chinese had participated in the construction. Little did I know how much I would learn about Governor Brown’s $100 billion high-speed train folly.

First, if you are interested in the development of this country and emergence of California as a powerhouse,… Read More

A bill written and sponsored by the union labor group State Building and Construction Trades Council of California, appears to be an effort to eliminate from monitoring and enforcing prevailing wage laws through independent compliance audits and enforcement of building contractors.

SB 776 by Sen. Ellen Corbett, D-San Leandro, will be heard today in the Assembly Labor and Employment Committee. This should be interesting.

According to the non-union California Construction Compliance Group, the audits always find labor violations, and particularly those involving employee prevailing wage requirements. It’s ironic that the prevailing wage is supported entirely by unions, but it’s usually union contractors which violate this rule and do not pay prevailing wage to construction workers.

Once an audit is completed, employees receive substantial amounts of back wages they were cheated out of through fraudulent labor practices, or just sheer incompetence by the contractor employers.

If the wages were underpaid due to fraud, the State of California Labor Commissioner assesses fines and penalties on the employer commensurate with the level of fraud or… Read More

[Publisher’s Note: We are pleased to feature this column from Steven Foley of the Minority Report website. I would remind you that the opinions expressed are those of the author only, not necessarily mine – Flash]

Legislation To Alter Traffic Signals: Dubious And Dangerous

By Steven Foley

How do traffic lights best keep the greatest number of people from having the least number of accidents?

This is the question at the heart of the current debate over AB 612 (Nazarian). The bill is expected to be heard in the Senate Committee on Transportation and Housing next week, Tuesday, June 18th.

AB 612 aims to lengthen a yellow signal by approximately one second. It assumes that giving motorists a greater amount of time to slow the speed of their vehicle and come to a stop would prevent more accidents. And yet, oddly, the change is only called for at intersections at which a red-light camera is already in place. Whytarget only intersections where safety measures have already been implemented? Why not other intersections or all… Read More

[Publisher’s Note – We are pleased to offer this column from San Diego City Councilman Kevin Faulconer, which is cross posted with our local partner – San Diego Rostra — Flash] San Diego Labor Deal Locks in $1 Billion of Pension Reform Savings

By Councilmember Kevin L. Faulconer

The promise of voter-mandated pension reform in California was on the line in San Diego this week. San Diego’s 2012 Comprehensive Pension Reform… Read More

California’s November 2012 statewide ballot included Prop. 32, the “Stop Special Interest Money Now” initiative. Among the provisions included in this campaign finance reform measure was the requirement that public sector unions obtain permission from each member prior to using a portion of their dues to support political campaigns.

It’s hard to precisely determine just how much public sector unions spent to immolate Prop. 32, since their campaign material often combined “Yes on 30” (new taxes), with “No on 32,” meaning resources were being directed at both initiative campaigns. Also, hard dollar campaign spending was only part of the effort; an army of union operatives were activated to defeat Prop. 32 – from public school teachers influencing students and parents to precinct walkers to labor friendly slate mailings. Overall, the unions probably spent about $100 million to defeat Prop. 32.

And their message was consistent: Prop. 32 targets “working families,” it attempts to “silence our voices,” it is “deceptive,” it provides “special exemptions” to the real… Read More