Archive for January 25th, 2010

Pima County is being run by, controlled and directed by a very strong environmental lobby that has the singular focus of keeping the environment priority one and jobs, affordable housing and strong families a distant second.

PIMA COUNTY:
• Covers 9,184 square miles
o 42.1%  is owned by the San Xavier, Pascua Yaqui and Tohono O’odham
reservations.
o 14.9%  is owned by state of Arizona
o 14.9% is Forest and BLM Land
o 12.1% other public lands
o 17.1% is individually or corporately owned
o Current indebtedness $757 million, if include bonds passed but not sold it goes over $1.07 billion

BOND FUNDS:  Approved by 66% of voters – no budget crisis in 2004.

• All $174.3 million of the 2004 Open Space Bond funds have now been spent.
o $164.3 million for open space and habitat protection and another
o $10 million to protect Davis-Monthan Air Force Base from urban encroachment.

o Purchased over 51,000 acres of private land
o 127,000 acres of leased State Trust Lands
• PAY BACK: with interest that is $226.59 million dollars ($1.30 payback per $1 spent according to letter Ray Carroll to Chuck Huckelberry, December 29, 2009)

NEW BOND REQUEST FOR NOVEMBER 2010:  $285 million
• The Conservation Acquisition Commission (CAC) Recommending a new bond for $285 million for more open space
• PAYBACK: with interest that is $370.5 million.

• County Administrator Chuck Huckelberry is recommendation $120 million.
• PAYBACK: $156 million

Take a look at Boulder Colorado, the first municipality in the US to embarked on an aggresive no growth policy in the 1960′s.  

In the decade of the 1950s, Boulder’s population grew from 25,000 to 37,000 and during the 1960s it grew by a whopping 29,000 to reach 66,000. Some initial efforts to manage this growth included the “Blue Line,” a citizen-initiated amendment to Boulder’s charter in 1959 that restricted the extension of city water service above an elevation of 5,750 feet. It was later extended by ordinance to sewer service. While a few exceptions have been granted at the ballot box, the effect of this measure was to limit the city from extending water service to properties along the mountain backdrop. Property owners can still develop in the county, but at much lower densities than is typical in the city and only with individual water and septic systems.

Another important growth management program began in 1967, when Boulder became the first city in the United States to pass a tax specifically dedicated to preserve open space. This open space system forms the outer extent of the Boulder Valley, a joint planning area between the city and county.

What are the results after 50 years of restricting land use?

What Are the Pitfalls?
· Boulder’s region encompasses the whole county. Therefore, the city’s surging job growth and limitations on residential growth have had a significant impact on housing demand in adjoining communities. The most striking example is the nearby town of Superior. In 1990 the population of Superior was 255; in 1996 it was 3,377. It has practically no jobs and no sales tax base. This regional imbalance between jobs and housing has created tremendous problems with traffic congestion, lack of affordable housing and school facility needs.
· Getting a hold on sprawl is only half the equation. What happens within the urban service area is the other. In Boulder’s initial planning efforts, there was a clear expression of a preference for infill and redevelopment over sprawl. Since there is no requirement that a certain amount of land be contained within its service area (such as the 20-year required land supply within Oregon’s urban growth boundaries), Boulder does not have to make a trade-off between expansion versus infill and redevelopment. However, it is increasingly difficult to convince specific neighborhoods and the community as a whole that additional density is in their best interests.  not grow.

By STEVEN GREENHUT

Sacramento

An old friend of mine has a saying, “Even the worm learns.” Prod one several hundred times, he says, and it will learn to avoid the prodder. As California enters its annual budget drama, I can’t help but wonder if the wisdom of the elected politicians here in the state capital equals that of the earthworm.

The state is in a precarious position, with a 12.3% unemployment rate (more than two points higher than the national average) and a budget $20 billion in the red (only months after the last budget fix closed a large deficit). Productive Californians are leaving for states with less-punishing regulatory and tax regimes. Yet so far there isn’t a broad consensus to do much about those who have prodded the state into its current position: public employee unions that drive costs up and fight to block spending cuts.

Earlier this month, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed a budget that calls for a $6.9 billion handout from Washington (unlikely to be forthcoming) and vows to protect current education funding, 40% of the state’s budget. He does want to eliminate the Calworks welfare-to-work program and enact a 5% pay cut for state employees. These are reasonable ideas, but also politically unlikely.

Associated Press

Los Angeles County employees rally for a new contract.

 

As the Sacramento Bee’s veteran columnist Dan Walters recently put it, the governor’s budget is “disconnected from economic and political reality.” Mr. Walters suspects what will happen next: “Most likely, [the governor] and lawmakers will, to use his own phrase, ‘kick the can down the road’ with some more accounting tricks and other gimmicks, and dump the mess on whoever is ill-fated to become governor a year hence.”

Mr. Walters’ Jan. 10 column was fittingly titled, “Schwarzenegger Reverts to Fantasy with Budget Proposal.” Shortly before releasing his budget, the governor and Democratic state Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg held a self-congratulatory news conference. Mr. Steinberg used the spotlight to bemoan what he deemed to be unfair attacks on California. Mr. Schwarzenegger told a hokey story about his pet pig and pony working together to break into the dog’s food. It was an example, he said, of how “last year, we here in this room did some great things working together.”

Meanwhile, activists are fast at work. For example, the Bay Area Council, a moderate business organization, is pushing for a constitutional convention to reshape California’s textbook-sized constitution. The council’s aim is to ditch a constitutional provision that requires a two-thirds vote in the legislature to pass budgets. Other reforms being proposed include a plan to institute a part-time legislature and another plan to require legislators to pass drug tests. None of these ideas will ratchet down state spending.

To do that California needs to take on its public employee unions.

Approximately 85% of the state’s 235,000 employees (not including higher education employees) are unionized. As the governor noted during his $83 billion budget roll-out, over the past decade pension costs for public employees increased 2,000%. State revenues increased only 24% over the same period. A Schwarzenegger adviser wrote in the San Jose Mercury News in the past few days that, “This year alone, $3 billion was diverted to pension costs from other programs.” There are now more than 15,000 government retirees statewide who receive pensions that exceed $100,000 a year, according to the California Foundation for Fiscal Responsibility.

Many of these retirees are former police officers, firefighters, and prison guards who can retire at age 50 with a pension that equals 90% of their final year’s pay. The pensions for these (and all other retirees) increase each year with inflation and are guaranteed by taxpayers forever—regardless of what happens in the economy or whether the state’s pensions funds have been fully funded (which they haven’t been).

A 2008 state commission pegged California’s unfunded pension liability at $63.5 billion, which will be amortized over several decades. That liability, released before the precipitous drop in stock-market and real-estate values, certainly will soar.

One idea gaining traction is to create a two-tier pension system to offer lesser benefits to new employees. That’s a good start, but it would still leave tens of thousands of state employees in line to receive lucrative benefits that the state must find future revenues to pay for. Another is to enact paycheck protections that require union officials to get permission from their members before spending union dues on politics (something that would undercut union power).

My hope is that these and other reforms find support in unlikely places. Former Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, a well-known liberal voice, recently wrote this in the San Francisco Chronicle: “The deal used to be that civil servants were paid less than private sector workers in exchange for an understanding that they had job security for life. But we politicians—pushed by our friends in labor—gradually expanded pay and benefits . . . while keeping the job protections and layering on incredibly generous retirement packages. . . . [A]t some point, someone is going to have to get honest about the fact.”

State Treasurer Bill Lockyer, another prominent liberal Democrat, told a legislative hearing in October that public employee pensions would “bankrupt” the state. And the chief actuary for the California Public Employees Retirement System has called the current pension situation “unsustainable.”

As the state careens toward insolvency, these remarks are the first sign that some people are learning the lesson of the earthworm.

Mr. Greenhut is director of the Pacific Research Institute’s journalism center and author of the new book “Plunder! How Public Employee Unions Are Raiding Treasuries, Controlling Our Lives and Bankrupting the Nation” (The Forum Press).