In an interview with the LA Weekly, California League of Conservations Voter SoCal director, David Algood, expanded on his organization's decision to back Debra Bowen over her rival Janice Hahn.
"Debra has a much longer record on the environment," said David Allgood, CLCV's Southern California director. "We know her to be a leader that doesn't knuckle under to pressure from special interests."
Allgood said the League had taken note of Hahn's flip-flop-flip on the L.A. oil severance tax. She proposed the tax last fall, before changing her mind and trying to keep it off the ballot. When it went on the ballot anyway, she then supported it. (It narrowly failed.)
"One of the things we considered was the ability of somebody to put their finger in the wind and change positions that quickly," Allgood said. "For her to have one position one day and the opposite position the next -- that was a big concern."
When it comes to Measure O, the ballot initiative to tax oil taken from within LA City limits, Janice Hahn was for it before she was against it before she was for it.
Responding to reports in Venice For Change and also at Calitics , Janice Hahn is apparently trying to rewrite history in regards to Measure O, the oil severance tax she opposed putting before voters for the March 8th special election.
The City Maven wesbsite is reporting tonight that Hahn is once more reversing her position on Measure O, releasing a statement in support.
"I've always supported an oil extraction tax, and I continue to support it. In fact, during my recent campaign for lieutenant governor, I proposed a statewide oil extraction fee to help fund higher education," Hahn said. "I support Measure O. I proposed Measure O. I will vote for Measure O. I hope Measure O passes."
Quibbling with the past, Hahn went on to say that her no vote was out of an abundance of concern regarding voter turnout.
"I supported placing Measure O on a regular election ballot where turnout and participation is higher and it would have a greater likelihood of passing. I opposed placing it on the March ballot because turnout is substantially lower and less representative of the electorate as a whole," Hahn said.
According to City Maven a review of of the November 17th council meeting shows there was no mention of voter turnout in regards to the oil tax. At the time, Hahn was quoted as saying,
"I've reconsidered this and I have heard from various business groups who do feel like this might be the wrong climate to put this on the ballot. We know the oil companies are probably going to mount a massive campaign to defeat this and at the end of the day, the way we've structured it, really would only generate around $2 million to the city of Los Angeles. So, at this time, it is my recommendation that we don't put this forward on the ballot."
KCET reports that the measure is opposed by the California Independent Petroleum Association, which has lobbied extensively to expand offshore drilling off the coast of California and in ANWAR, opposes Cap and Trade, and any limits to hydraulic fracturing (aka "fracking"), a controversial and dangerous means of natural gas extraction made famous by the HBO movie, "Gasland"
According the KCET, CIPA has given more than $400,000 to California candidates from 2001 to 2010. Sixty-two percent of those candidates were Republicans.
Some of Measure O's opponents have gone on to endorse Janice Hahn in her bid to win the Congressional seat vacated by Jane Harman.
On March 8th, Los Angeles voters will have the opportunity to vote on a variety of ballot initiatives, everything from a proposal to tax medical marijuana dispensaries to a hike in property taxes to fund public libraries.
One of the most popular initiatives - Measure O, a proposal to impose an oil severance tax for oil extracted within the city limits of Los Angeles - was introduced by LA Councilwoman (and current candidate in the CA36 Congressional race) Janice Hahn. The measure is projected to bring in about $4 million in revenues annually. Neighboring cities of Beverly Hills, Inglewood, Long Beach, and Seal Beach already impose a similar tax.
Measure O is endorsed by the California Courage Campaign , the LA Conservation Corps, the Sierra Club, and other environmental organizations.
Yet a year after Hahn first proposed the idea, she now stands as the only LA City council member in opposition to the measure.
Hahn's turnabout shines a rare spotlight inside the world of LA City politics, where interest groups often create chaos with the legislative process.
John Garamendi has been seeking votes in California for well over 30 years. He first took a run for the Governor's mansion in 1982, and was set to do so again in 2010 until the seat in CA-10 opened up, and he was inspired to return to Washington, where he served in the Clinton Administration in the Department of the Interior. He has the most diverse record of anybody in the race, with stints at the federal level, the state legislature, and in two statewide offices, as the Insurance Commissioner and now Lieutenant Governor. In our interview, we discussed health care, lessons learned from regulating insurance, No Child Left Behind, saving the NUMMI plant in Fremont (more on that from Garamendi here), and foreign policy in Iran. I found Garamendi to come at issues in a very comprehensive and thoughtful way, and you can see this for yourself below. A paraphrased transcript follows. (flip it)
Forty years ago, one man took a small step that inspired a country. The Apollo 11 mission to the moon was a great moment for America as viewers across the nation, in unison, watched one of our own step foot on an otherworldly body for the first time. America's potential was limitless.
I still remember the journey of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. I had just returned from my own life-changing adventure: a two-year stint serving Ethiopia in the Peace Corps. I served in a country that could not afford to feed its population, let alone educate them, and this loss of human potential still slows progress there today. A quality education is important not just for the betterment of individuals but also for society as a whole. In my decades of public service, I have worked tirelessly to ensure that we provide our children with the highest quality education, because I know that our economic growth depends on their intellectual growth.
The success of Apollo 11 would never have happened without the work of America's best and brightest scientists. They were the product of our country's commitment to STEM - science, technology, engineering, and math education. America led the globe in science education, but due to funding cuts and increased international competition, we're falling behind the curve.
The plot thickens. The Governor today threatened to veto the work of the bipartisan Budget Conference Committee and reject any bill that, essentially, doesn't hew to his desire to destroy the social safety net of the state. The Democratic leadership countered that they'll pass the bill anyway.
Democratic legislative leaders vowed today that the Legislature will pass a "share the pain" budget-balancing plan early next week - with or without tax increases -- that will close the state's spending deficit without completely shredding California's social services safety net.
The vows by Senate President Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, and Assembly Speaker Karen Bass, D-Los Angeles, came about an hour after Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said he wouldn't sign a plan that was balanced with tax increases.
The rhetorical staking out of ground by the key figures in the current version of the state's ongoing fiscal melodrama came a day after the Legislature's joint budget conference committee, on a party-line vote, adopted a plan that included about $2 billion in new oil production and cigarette taxes to help bridge a $24 billion budget gap.
Let's take a brief look at what else the conference committee has done. They resisted some of the worst health care cuts, including the total elimination of Healthy Families (the SCHIP program). They reduced education spending significantly in both K-12 and higher ed. They reduced corrections spending by a fairly large amount. Despite the fact that state parks pay for themselves, Democrats agreed to cut state participation in park funding, replacing it with additional fees on park admissions. They agreed to increasing withholding by 10%, which amounts to an interest-free loans from citizens to the state. According to Karen Bass, they agreed to 45% of the Governor's proposals in full, and 93% in part.
So the idea that Democrats are not cutting spending is simply unreasonable and wrong. At the same time, they rejected additional cuts to state worker salaries. They rejected the end of Cal Works or Cal Grants or In-Home Support Services. And some of the Governor's proposals, like borrowing from local governments, were rejected unanimously.
I don't even much like what the Democrats came up with. But they did not agree to completely wipe out the social safety net, calling for moderate increases in revenue on constituencies who have been getting away with murder, pretty much literally, for decades, to pay for the externalities in health care costs that they impose on the public. As Noreen Evans explains:
Californians expect their schools to be good, a safety net to be available to the needy, a college education to be affordable for working families, their air and water to be clean, and their parks to be open and kept up. In order to meet their expectations, we must to pursue new revenues. Today, for the greater good, we approved two new tax proposals that won't impact most Californians.
Establishing a 9.9 percent tax on oil extracted from California would generate $830 million in FY 2009-2010 and $1.1 billion in future years. This precise proposal was part of the governor's budget proposals last year. Increasing the excise tax on cigarettes by $1.50 per pack generates $1 billion in FY 2009-2010.
Tax increases require a 2/3 vote. Absent the pursuit of new revenues, wider and deeper cuts will be required. Getting new revenues requires a mere 6 Republican votes: 2 in the Senate and 4 in the Assembly. It is undemocratic that the votes of 6 Republicans can veto the votes of 75 Democrats.
But Arnold wants to destroy the state of California like a good little neo-Hooverist, so he said no.
The Dem leadership appears to want to have this fight for the moment, so they ought to realize one thing: Arnold will ultimately be responsible - and reviled - in a government shutdown situation. No question about it. Not 1 in 10 Californians can even NAME a Democrat in the legislature. If the ship sinks, Arnold will be perceived as the skipper. And so, if and when Arnold vetoes the bill, the Democrats should send it back - with MORE tax fairness solutions, daring Arnold to prolong the agony. That resets the battle and draws clear lines between those who want the richest companies in America to sacrifice along with ordinary Californians, and those who want to protect the rich completely. Unfortunately, the Dems are tipping their hand that this will not be the case.
But Bass and Steinberg seemed to be reconciled to the likelihood that the tax hike proposals would fail next week. Steinberg said that if they did, the package they sent the governor would have a reserve $2 billion smaller than he had sought.
We have a couple days to change this dynamic. The progressive movement around the budget has stiffened spines a bit so far. Time to make the calls and emails.
This is funny:
Schwarzenegger added that he wants a budget plan that will bridge the entire projected deficit of $24 billion, not a stopgap measure to "kick the can down the alley."
The plan must consist of permanent solutions to the state's fiscal problems, not one-time revenue that sparks ongoing spending commitments, Schwarzenegger said.
When Schwarzenegger was reminded that his own budget plan contains some one-time revenue proposals, such as acceleration of income tax payments, he smiled.
"Very good point," he said. "We don't want to add to the problem."
The cyborg is not running on all cylinders. He has a single-minded purpose to kill the California dream and even these extremely moderate revenue enhancements.
As Brian noted, in the full list of the Governor's slash and burn budget, the offshore drilling proposal in Tranquillon Ridge off the Santa Barbara coast remains. After a key environmental group backed away from the plan, which originally was structured as a compromise proposal to allow an additional rig in exchange for ending all drilling in the channel by 2022 (which the Lands Commission determined was unenforceable), many expected the plan to be scrapped. But it remains, despite the fact that the California Lands Commission spoke out yesterday, calling on the legislature to put a stop to this power grab.
The State Lands Commission on Monday lashed out at an attempt by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to allow the first new oil drilling in California waters since 1969.
Lt. Gov. John Garamendi, chairman of the three-member panel, called the governor's effort "a naked power grab." At a contentious hearing in Santa Monica, the commission passed a resolution urging legislators not to go along with the plan, which would revive a drilling proposal off the Santa Barbara County coast that the commission killed in January.
The Commission doesn't out-and-out call this illegal. But they hold jurisdiction over oil drilling, and the Governor is simply trying to go over their heads. You can basically shut down the California Lands Commission if this goes through, because they will be rendered impotent.
And of course, while the Administration foregrounds the $2 billion dollars to be gained from allowing the leases in Tranquillon, he does not make a peep about charging an oil severance tax, to actually make the oil companies pay to take California's natural resources out of the ground.
It was hard to follow what was in and out of the budget in those final hours, but as it turned out, the oil severance tax, which at some point was part of the negotiations, ended up out of it. So we remain the only oil-producing state in the country to not charge corporations for taking our natural resources out of the ground. Assembly Majority Leader Alberto Torrico is trying to change that by introducing a bill that would tax oil companies and use the proceeds to fund higher education. This was first reported on John Myers' Twitter feed, but now California Chronicle has a full report.
With California spending almost as much incarcerating inmates in prisons as it does educating students in higher education, Assembly Majority Leader Alberto Torrico introduced legislation today to expand funding for community colleges, the California State University and University of California.
"California is on the wrong track heading in the wrong direction," Majority Leader Torrico said. "Our prisons are overflowing and yet we are turning away students at our universities. The Master Plan for Higher Education is becoming a distant memory. This is not a sustainable path for California. We must invest more in higher education. It is a solid down payment on our economic future."
The recently passed state budget contained a 10 percent across the board cut for the UC and CSU systems and reductions for community colleges.
The increased funding from the bill, AB 656, would be derived from a severance tax on oil extracted within California. California, the third-largest oil producing state in the country, is the only state where oil is extracted without a tax.
"My bill will bring California in line with more than 20 other oil-extracting states," Torrico said. "When other states are charging over 12 percent from multi-billion dollar oil companies, we should be doing more to receive funds for our natural resources."
While I'd rather put the money into the General Fund rather than a specific sector, I can't imagine a more rational and simple idea. Nevertheless, I'm sure the Yacht Party will try to block it, as they did successfully last year. That can be a useful vote for the future ("Which side are you on, students or the oil companies"), but it does nothing to move us forward. Only by ending the conservative veto can common-sense solutions like this help California progress.
