GOV. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s call for a special election has plunged California into what promises to be a four-month frenzy of political posturing and 30-second television spots.
The subtext of this election is all about power: Can the governor seize a significant chunk of budget-writing authority from the Legislature? Can he peel away the influence of public-employee unions? Can he take away the ability of legislators to draw their own district boundaries?
What the election over these particular ballot measures will not promote is a discussion of the daunting challenges facing this state in the next two decades.
By 2025, California is projected to add between 7 million and 11 million new residents — a population roughly the size of Ohio’s, according to a new report by the Public Policy Institute of California. The PPIC study tapped some of the state’s leading researchers to identify and analyze the state’s biggest challenges in an attempt to draw a sharper public focus on them.
The tone of the nearly 300-page report was decidedly nonalarmist. It suggested the nation’s largest state could continue to grow and prosper — but it would take strong leadership to address myriad complications related to the pressures of local growth and a rapidly evolving global economy. The report described how the state might have to change its approach education, transportation, water and the basic structure of public funding in order to support a vibrant economy.
It also suggested that policy-makers would have to transcend short-term political considerations to engage in more long-term planning.
Perhaps most striking was the comparison between the type of leadership the PPIC envisioned as the critical element to guiding the state at such turning points — “to forge consensus and to prod key interests to negotiate so that public investments can move forward” — and the current polarization in Sacramento.
If anything, the special election appears to be aggravating the partisan tensions in California. It was discouraging to see Republican Schwarzenegger open the campaign with a cheap scare tactic: warning homeowners that Democrats and union leaders would undermine Proposition 13 if he did not prevail.
The fact is, top elected officials in both major parties are unwilling to have a serious talk about the unintended consequences of Prop. 13 for fear of being slammed with the type of demagoguery Schwarzenegger employed last week.
As the PPIC report noted, Prop. 13, approved by voters in 1978, has become a disincentive for local governments to approve new housing, because the additional property-tax revenue would not come close to covering the cost of the required infrastructure and services. Also, the extension of Prop. 13 limits to corporate property was not anticipated by most voters in 1978.
A state whose future ability to attract and retain workers is being hamstrung by a housing shortage — resulting in stratospheric housing prices — must be willing to discuss how its tax structure may be contributing to the problem. There are many potential ways to modify Prop. 13 while buffering homeowners from the sharp tax spikes that produced a revolt that brought the 1978 initiative and a succession of other initiatives that have constrained local and state governments’ ability to raise revenue to meet basic needs.
The PPIC report suggested that governments need to be more efficient and adaptive, but, even so, it pointed out that the state may have to spend more money on education to calibrate its workforce for the changing economy. It noted that higher education has been hit by the lean times and that “funding cuts have been hardest on the least-prepared students” at community colleges, who “tend to be first-generation, low-income and minority.”
As the report emphasized, concern about the inequities along demographic lines in this state is not a matter of idealism or benevolence: It is a strategic imperative for a state that hopes to remain competitive two decades from now. Latinos will become the state’s largest ethnic group by 2011, yet they remain greatly underrepresented in the state’s colleges and universities. An increasingly service-oriented economy will require a college-educated workforce to fill the available jobs…..
We can’t continue in the divisive way we have been – there has to be an effort to look at the real issues we are facing – not “gay marriage”, not ” people using medical marijuana”, not “the cross on the hill”, etc. Hey, people – we have IMPORTANT stuff to deal with – jobs, housing, making a living and having a decent lifestyle. WAKE UP – and stop fighting about the trivial stuff, or your job will be overseas, your SUV will be undrivable because you can’t afford the gas, and there will be squatters in your pool house because they can’t find a place to live.
Start sharing, you rich folk, or be forced to. And yeah, I’m one of you, so there. I don’t mind higher taxes to have decent schools and great universities and a summer job for my kid, instead of having people trying to support families on three minimum wage jobs. Let’s start making this a country we ALL can enjoy, instead of a national Country Club.
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