Los Angeles County government does plenty of things wrong: It has struggled with overcrowded jails, dithered over how to protect the young people in its foster care system and made a mess of running Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center. But one thing it's done right, at least compared to city government, is to manage its budget.
In recent years, the city — which has an annual budget of $6.75 billion and about 34,000 employees — has faced mounting shortfalls. It has responded by giving raises to some workers while laying off others, and adopting a revenue strategy that combines nibbling at the margins and praying for help. The county — which employs roughly 100,000 people and oversees a budget of $23 billion — has trimmed vacancies and held the line on raises. It has not furloughed or laid off a single worker. Not many organizations, public or private, can say that.
Much of the county's relative success is attributable to fiscal discipline not shared by the city. While the county was holding down salary hikes during the mid-2000s, the city gave its workers healthy increases — many got annual bumps of 3% or 4% year after year. And given that every 1% of salary increase for city workers costs taxpayers about $15 million, those raises add up. Today, Los Angeles city government faces a projected shortfall of more than $300 million for the coming fiscal year. It is a crisis of epic proportions, and one that is largely self-inflicted.Republican stonewalling won't close the state budget gap
The role that Republicans in the Legislature play in the great scheme of California government is becoming harder and harder to discern.
They do not legislate; neither do they allow the people of California to legislate at the ballot box. The Republicans are giving negation a bad name.
Faced with a $25-billion budget shortfall over the next 18 months, Gov. Jerry Brown has proposed spending cuts for about half that amount, which will take a major toll on the state's universities and colleges, parks and healthcare coverage. He has proposed making up the other half of the shortfall by extending for the next five years the $12 billion in tax hikes that the Legislature enacted in 2009.
California’s landmark law on curbing greenhouse gases, which is well on its way to taking effect, has hit a legal snag in the form of a tentative judicial ruling that state environmental regulators failed to follow legally required procedures.
Judge Ernest H. Goldsmith of San Francisco Superior Court issued a tentative opinion — a rarely used procedure that gives the prospective loser in the case a chance to make new arguments or take new actions before a final decision — saying that the rules creating a cap-and-trade system were adopted without proper analysis of alternatives.
It is unclear whether the decision, if made final, represents a major obstacle or just a speed bump as the regulations carrying out the 2006 Global Warming Solutions Act go into effect. Judge Goldsmith’s ruling was made on Jan. 24, but not publicized until Thursday.GOP lawmakers and Jerry Brown have faulty logic
California prison guards union called main obstacle to keeping cellphones away from inmates
Lawmakers struggling to keep cellphones away from California's most dangerous inmates say a main obstacle is the politically powerful prison guards union, whose members would have to be paid millions of dollars extra to be searched on their way into work.
Prison employees, roughly half of whom are unionized guards, are the main source of smuggled phones that inmates use to run drugs and other crimes, according to legislative analysts who examined the problem last year. Unlike visitors, staff can enter the facilities without passing through metal detectors.
While union officials' stated position is that they do not necessarily oppose searches, they cite a work requirement that corrections officers be paid for "walk time" — the minutes it takes them to get from the front gate to their posts behind prison walls.
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