Although the mayor’s race will grab headlines this year in Oakland, another big story is the potential walkout by Oakland teachers. The teachers are working without a contract after rejecting an offer by the district last spring which did not give them the pay increase and protected benefit package that they wanted.

For the teachers unions, it always comes down to money. That’s why the Oakland Teachers Association is talking more and more about striking, likely in the early part of 2006. They want district officials to restore a four percent cut in pay they agreed to 2003 and don’t want to pay any additional money for their health care coverage. Unfortunately, … Read More

Sacramento Bee’s veteran political columnist, Dan Walters, pens a piece today where he laments that that despite extremely low public-approval ratings for the legislature, the partisan redistricting plan ensures that virtually every legislative seat will be retained by the political party that holds it now.

He does note two areas where seats held by Democrats are in trouble — the upper San Joaquin Valley (Stockton area) and central Orange County:

There will be, as noted earlier, a few vacant districts in which there could be at least a ghost of partisan competition in November, the gerrymander notwithstanding. The suburban San Joaquin Valley seat held by termed-out Democrat Barbara Matthews of Tracy, for example, could turn over because the Democrats have lost four percentage points of their voter registration margin in the last four years.

… Read More

This June may feature the dirtiest campaign in the history of Los Angeles. How dirty? Just over 270,000 tons of sludge. That’s right, sludge created by the sanitation departments in LA and OC when they treat and "clean" the sewagedonated by some of the finest citizens in LA and Orange counties. Perhaps even some from yours truly. This sludge is then used as fertilizer on some farms in Kern County.

Some in Kern County don’t like getting dumped on from those down under. They have qulaified an initiative that will ban the import of sludge from outside Kern County. It appears tha Kern County’ssludge doesn’t stink and is far superior to others and will not be banned. G

The Kern County Board of Supervisors will vote shortly on whether to adopt the initiative or place it on the ballot. I hope they do the election. Imagine all the great direct mail!!!!! See the article here.… Read More

I am fond of saying that the only good laws are the ones that begin with:

We really don’t need more laws, do we? Yet, for some reason, the state legislature is bent on regulating us more and more.

That is why you should read a great editorial in the OC Register that ran today, listing the editorial staff’s favorite new silly laws.

Several of the laws making the Register’s list pertain to conferring the right on certain consumer groups to cancel contracts with those from which the consumer agreed to purchase goods or services. In my book government has become far too big when it starts taking sides in private contractual arrangements to permit one side to undo an otherwise legally binding contract.… Read More

I served as former state Sen. John Lewis’ press secretary from 1991 to 1994, and taming the SCAQMD was one of his top legislative priorities. The recession of the early 1990s had hit California especially hard, and the state emreged from it much more slowly than the rest of the nation.

Not that that mattered to the pollutocrats running the SCAQMD, who cared not a whit that they were heloing to drive businesses across the state line into the welcoming arms of Nevada, Arizona and other states that were actively recruiting California businesses to their friendlier climes.

After reading a Lance Izumi op-ed published in the Orange County Register a few days ago, it seems clear that while the personalities on the SCAQMD Board of Directors may have changed, the agency’s culture hasn’t.

I thought then, and I still believe, that a powerful regional government like the AQMD, which combines executive legislative… Read More