Second cup of California politics

I’ve been complaining far too long about the coverage of California politics in our newspapers. You shouldn’t have to be a political junkie like me or live in Sacramento to know what’s going on in Sacramento.  So, in the spirit if you aren’t part of the solution, you’re part of the problem here goes.

The state of education funding in California from Joan Buchanan’s pancake breakfast in San Ramon: 

 Assembly member Buchanan spoke about California’s education and its funding.  With an adept use of graphs she illustrated her point that Proposition 30 has only stopped the bleeding from cuts to education.  We are not yet funding to recover previous losses nor meet past goals. She pointed out current inequities in funding due to old and complicated formulas which are not scheduled to change.  One striking example included two Southern California districts with similar numbers of students, similar numbers with special needs, indeed similar in all aspects that might affect funding, yet one district received $300,000 in extra assistance from some program and the other over ten times that amount.  She called attention to the problem no doubt to elicit support for her efforts to create more equitable formulas.

She talked about the unwise use of capital appreciation bonds by some school districts which hugely increased interest costs by postponing payments for two decades. She would like to make the practice illegal and limit school bonds to a life of 25 years.  She talked about her education bills to reform outdated requirements for evaluating teacher performance, mandated reporting for abuse, and other.

In a private conversation before my pancakes arrived I was surprised at Joan’s honesty in admitting that some of her colleagues were more about getting headlines about solving problems than creating sound policy which would genuinely solve the problems.  Joan calls herself a policy wonk.  I say thank
god for the wonks.  She’s a gem.  Let’s invest in cloning.

Stay tuned for:

California Disclose Act SB52 ---tired of those flowery committees for mother pie and applehood?  Want to know who is really buying ad
time?  SB52 will fix that. 

Delta Tunnels destined to be white elephants? 

DMV debacle mentioned in a talk by Gavin Newsome along with his ideas to use technology to increase citizen participation in government from his new book, Citizenville. 

Does Fremont Assembly Member, Bob Wieckowski’s bill to ask Californians to advise the legislature on getting big money out of politics via a constitutional amendment to the U.S. constitution ask enough?