That big savings that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and lawmakers estimated taxpayers would get by furloughing state workers - wait for it - could amount to nothing at all. At the most, it's a short-term benefit to balance the books.
Jon Ortiz and Phillip Reese at the Sacramento Bee pulled together data from the state Controller's office and found that furloughs "have pushed many state workers to sock away time, producing a larger state liability at a higher eventual price." Here's what they found:
The number of vacation hours used by state employees fell 31 percent from 2008 to 2009, according to a Bee analysis of state controller data. Government workers used 58 percent of the vacation time they accrued during 2009, down from 86 percent a year earlier. ...
'All that (the state) did with furloughs was borrow money," said Marcia Fritz, a Citrus Heights accountant and a former CalPERS consultant who advocates for less lucrative public pensions. 'They didn't reduce cost. They just closed a cash-flow gap.'
When state employees don't use up vacation days, they're allowed to "bank" those days and get paid for them when they leave state service. It's a benefit they're entitled to receive, just like at most private jobs. Here's the extra cost: The state pays for that vacation day at whatever salary the state employee is receiving when they retire; a vacation day in 2010 could cost the state much more in 2020.
Medicare officials announced this week that they are tearing up their contract with a New York-based company – with 4,100 California clients – that delayed or denied patients access to medications they needed.
Fox Insurance Co. let down its 123,000 enrollees by putting obstacles between patients and costly but life-sustaining medications for cancer and HIV, according to a release by Medicare.
Medicare falls under the supervision of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, who has been a vocal critic of Anthem Blue Cross over its move to hike some patient's premiums by 39 percent.
Medicare spokesman Peter Ashkenaz said the Fox contract termination was the first of its kind under Medicare Part D, the program put in place by George W. Bush to ensure prescription drug access to Americans older than 65.
Medicare, a massive government agency, contracts out the day-to-day work of getting those medications to seniors to private, mostly for-profit companies like Fox.
San Diego State University students voted this week on a fee increase to build a new student union, marking the third such vote since 2002, the Daily Aztec reports.
Students already approved a fee increase of $56 in 2006 to pay for the new center, but the revenues are no longer expected to cover the project's price tag. Now students have to decide whether to approve another fee hike of $94, bringing the total semester fee to $237. (The first time students voted on a fee increase in 2002, they rejected it.)
It turns out that the original 2006 fee increase won't cover the cost of the project because bond interest rates have increased, while student enrollment has decreased, university officials say. The project, called Modern Space, is now estimated to cost $98 million.
The new fee would provide $58 million in project revenues.
Students participating in last week's March 4 Day of Action handed out fliers protesting Modern Space. And the Daily Aztec editorial staff rejected the idea:
"We don’t need a brand new Aztec Center right now, and we don’t need any more fees than we’re already paying,"...
California Watch wasn’t the only one trying to pry loose government documents on the Alaska Native Corporation that got a $54 million federal stimulus contract to relocate the tracks for the Napa Valley Wine Train.
It turns out that Napa County – the project’s co-sponsor – attempted to learn more about Suulutaaq Inc. last year via the federal Freedom of Information Act.
In a FOIA letter to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the lead agency on the project, the locals asked for "a copy of the proposal" submitted by Suulutaaq, the Alaska firm that got the job without competitive bidding.
The Corps refused.
Reporters think this only happens to them.
But in an Aug. 26, 2009, reply, Corps district counsel Carl Korman said the government was legally prohibited from disclosing Suulutaaq’s proposal to anyone – including the local point-person on the Wine Train project, Julie Lucido of the Napa County flood control district.
Perhaps trying to be helpful, Korman told Lucido her appeal rights, and said there would be no fee for processing her request.
In a phone interview Wednesday, Lucido said she sought the proposal in hopes of learning how Suulutaaq intended to sequence street-closings in downtown Napa for construction – a huge local issue.
“I wanted more details about … the fluffy part of construction,...
What kind of money do professional athletes make? Check out USA Today's searchable pro-sports databases to find out.
The 2009 numbers for the National Football League are in, and San Diego quarterback Phillip Rivers came in as the top earner at $25,556,630, thanks to a hefty $19.5 million signing bonus, according to the data.
Makes you wonder what Drew Brees can pull in when he re-ups with the Saints, as Jarrett Bell pointed out in an article summarizing the new NFL data.
"The NFL's average salary for 2009 was $1.896 million, with a median of $790,000. Of the 118 players selected to the Pro Bowl (including replacements and non-participants), more than half carried contracts averaging at least $4 million a year, including 15 with averages of at least $10 million," according to the article.
The Oakland Raiders had the 11th biggest payroll in the NFL in 2009, and the San Francisco 49ers had the third highest median salary for 2009, according to the data.
The question has loomed large for years: Is the Los Angeles Unified School District neglecting its non-English-speaking students? A study last year by the Tomás Rivera Policy Institute at USC seemed to think it was possible.
After tracking an entire group of students who started out as sixth graders in 1999 and graduated in 2005, TRPI researchers found three-fourths of the students, despite being in U.S schools for eight years or more, were still classified as "English language learners" by the time they entered ninth grade.
Moreover, nearly 30 percent of LAUSD students placed in English language-learning programs didn't get reclassified as English proficient by the end of middle school. Studies suggest learning English should take about five years, the report said.
The group's study, called "¿Qué Pasa?: Are English Language Learning Students Remaining in English Learning Classes Too Long?," found that multi-lingual students who transitioned into regular classes at LAUSD had dramatically better academic outcomes than those who were stuck in the English language-learning classes.
Inherent in the results were questions about whether LAUSD was, in effect, discriminating by not giving non-English-speaking students enough opportunities to integrate into the mainstream of their schools.
A bill passed by the Legislature this week that would end furloughs for upwards of 80,000 state employees could save millions in banked vacation if Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger chooses to sign it.
Of course, chances of that are slim. Schwarzenegger has stuck to his guns where furloughs have been concerned, and his spokesman, Aaron McLear, said earlier this week that the governor would probably veto the bill.
As we reported last week, one of the concerns about furloughs is that they have caused many state workers to bank more vacation than ever before.
The bill, known as SBX8 29 and carried by Senate President Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, would exempt employees from furloughs if their salaries are paid with 5 percent or less from the state’s general fund.
Only a "small fraction" of patients who lost their health insurance after getting sick received money from settlements negotiated by Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner and the Schwarzenegger administration's insurance regulator, Assembly researchers say.
Poizner, who is running for governor, and leaders of the state’s Department of Managed Health Care have announced major settlements in recent years with health insurers who cut off the coverage to about 6,000 patients, even though many were dealing with debilitating and costly illnesses.
But Assembly researchers dug further and found that few of the consumers entitled to a portion of the settlement money actually got anything.
Poizner’s office claimed in a 2009 press release that it had reached a settlement with Anthem Blue Cross to reimburse the expenses of 2,330 patients whose coverage was cut off – to a tune of $14 million.
It turns out that consumers have only since recouped 6 percent of the settlement money, about $798,000, according to the report by the staff of the Assembly Committee on Accountability and Administrative Review. The money went to 78 of the 2,330 patients who were eligible to collect from the pool of money.
Former University of California regent and affirmative action foe Ward Connerly is jumping into the fray at UC San Diego, where the chancellor has vowed to increase black student enrollment in the midst of several racially charged incidents at that campus.
Ward Connerly
City News Service reports that Connerly wants to review an agreement recently formed between UCSD and its Black Student Union to see if it violates the state constitution. Connerly helped win passage of Proposition 209, the California measure that banned the consideration of race, sex and ethnicity in campus admissions in 1996.
Senior UCSD administrators, faculty and students, led by Black Student Union co-chairs David Ritcherson and Fnann Keflezighi, came to an agreement last week. Under the plan, the university will try to improve the campus climate by increasing diversity on the campus, in the curriculum and throughout the community, according to a statement released by the university.
Attorney General Jerry Brown last week announced his bid for governor, and his office didn’t miss a beat in issuing press releases about his accomplishments as the state’s top cop.
But a release issued yesterday about the money recovered by the Medi-Cal Fraud and Elder Abuse Unit made no mention of another trend: Brown's office had filed fewer elder abuse cases than the previous Attorney General.
In 2006, the office (under Bill Lockyer) filed 93 criminal elder abuse cases and four civil complaints for the offense. But in 2007, after Brown took office, the corresponding numbers were lower – 75 criminal cases and zero civil suits for elder abuse violations, according to the Medi-Cal Fraud and Elder Abuse unit's annual report.
Brown's office secured five more elder abuse criminal convictions than Lockyer's had in 2006, a total of 88. But the press release – making no mention of the prior year's numbers – says Brown secured 47 criminal elder abuse convictions in 2009. That would be roughly half as many as during the prior year.
Orders for restitution stemming from these types of cases faced an even steeper decline. For both civil and criminal elder abuse cases, the amount of restitution ordered fell from about $443,000 under Lockyer in 2006 to $88,000 in 2007, the report says.
In her campaign for the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate, former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina spins her stormy six years at the Silicon Valley tech giant as a story of unbridled success.
Carly Fiorina
Fiorina “led the reinvention of the legendary company, successfully steering it through the dot-com bust and the worst technology recession in 25 years,” she claims on her campaign web site.
Her insistence on pushing HP’s controversial merger with Compaq Computer -- the source of so much conflict on the HP board, and the cause of mass layoffs after it went down– “is now acknowledged to be the most successful merger in high-tech history,” she also says.
Before she was fired in 2005, Fiorina had “positioned HP to become the first $100 billion information technology company, creating market leadership positions for the company in every one of its product lines,” she claims.
At the time of the merger, one of the leaders of shareholder opposition was David Woodley Packard, the son and namesake of HP’s co-founder.
On Monday, at about the time the candidate was taking out her nominating papers in Santa Clara, Packard’s daughter, Arianna, unloaded on her, telling California Republicans that Fiorina was a “greedy, out-of-touch CEO” whose tenure at HP was a disaster.
After acknowledging yesterday that he was gay, Republican state Sen. Roy Ashburn then turned to justifying his long record of voting against gay rights. The Bakersfield politician said that he'd just voted the wishes of his conservative Bakersfield district:
I have always felt that my faith and allegiance was to the people, there, in the district, my constituents. As each of these individual measures came before the Legislature I cast 'no' votes, usually 'no' votes, because the measures were almost always about acknowledging rights or assigning identification to homosexual persons.
Shortly after Asburn assigned to himself his own identification as a homosexual person, some critics quickly pointed out that he had in fact not always voted the wishes of his district. Charles Moran, the national spokesperson for the Log Cabin Republicans, noted that Ashburn had crossed party lines to approve a state budget that included tax increases.
The public outing of 188 under-performing schools on Monday was more than an exposé of weak educators: It is part of a frantic state push to qualify this week for close to $400 million from a federal alternative to Race to the Top.
The much-sought-after funds are called School Improvement Grants. They have been around since the 1960's but have been revamped under the Obama administration. Backed by federal stimulus dollars, the Department of Education is offering up to $4 billion in SIG funding to turnaround schools that are deemed consistently low performers.
The state Department of Education missed the original Feb. 8 deadline to compete for the grants but was given an extension to reapply. The extension's deadline is March 15.
The state released the names of the schools on Monday, in part, to fulfill the transparency requirements for the grant. Some have questioned whether the state's methods for creating the lists truly represent all the failing schools. You can see the lists for yourself here and here.
On Thursday, the State Board of Education will decide whether the lists are adequate or in need of adjustment. The board is also...
Compared to the rest of the nation, California ranks relatively low in the number of sexual assaults among its juvenile wards, according to a first-ever national report on the problem.
O.H. Close youth facility, Stockton
Five California facilities reported a rate of sexual assault slightly above the national average, but the rest of the 16 facilities in the survey had lower rates. One lockup, the Heman G. Stark Youth Correctional Facility in Chino, ranked among the nation's safest, with 3.5 percent of wards reporting they had been sexually abused.
The National Survey of Youth in Custody, released through the Bureau of Justice Statistics, showed that an estimated 12 percent of juvenile wards nationwide had reported one or more incidents of what the DOJ calls sexual victimization.
About 4.3 percent of inmates reported they'd been raped or sexually assaulted by facility staff, while 6.4 percent reported sexual contact with staff members without any force, threat, or other explicit form of coercion. Approximately 95 percent of these abusers were female staff members, the report said.
It’s still t-minus eight months until Election Day, but candidates have already begun spending millions to flash their plumage in front of CSI and Price is Right devotees in the annual election year ritual known as the "Air Wars."
But there’s been something different this time around. Something special.
It could be cabin fever from a seemingly interminable winter, or maybe the sinister influence of a red-eyed demon sheep, but political ads this year have taken a remarkable turn toward the bizarre.
Like a lot of wonks, we’ve been following the action since it started. We wanted to share some of our favorites so far, from California and beyond:
Demon Sheep
On the off chance you haven't seen it, either check out the video below, or simply Google "weirdest political ad ever" and click on anything that comes up.
In a post on the CNN Entertainment site in February, a writer from The Frisky predicted that Jeff Bridges was the most likely candidate to win best actor because, "The Oscar generally goes to the dude who has the most best actor and best supporting nominations under his belt already."
The Dude vacuums
Using this logic, Bridge's four prior nominations – one for best actor and three for best supporting actor – would make him a shoo-in.
To test the pre-Oscars hypothesis, Flowing Data's Nathan Yau crunched some numbers and found that, "Only 10 out of the past 29 winners, or just over a third, had the most nominations their year. Take a look at the data since 1980."
Yau also noted that "Didn't Forest Whitaker, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Jaimie Foxx recently win on their first nominations for the coveted award?"
Jeff Bridges won.
But Yau was steeled for this eventuality. "Of course when Jeff Bridges wins tonight, the theory authors will declare victory, but oh well," he wrote...
Two Texas oil companies have been evasive about whether they are backing a California ballot initiative that would suspend the state's landmark global warming law, signed with fanfare by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2006.
But it wouldn't be surprising if Tesoro Corp. and Valero Energy Corp. were behind the initiative to delay AB 32.
Logue
The Texas companies – which operate refineries in Benicia and Wilmington, Martinez and Los Angeles, and hundreds of gas stations throughout California – have been well-known players in the fight to weaken global warming legislation at the federal level, and they are major donors to state politicians working for the same goals.
The California ballot initiative – which would suspend AB 32 until the state unemployment rate falls to 5.5 percent – is being sponsored by Assemblyman Dan Logue, R-Chico, as well as Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Rocklin.
Last year alone, the oil and energy industries donated $14,200 to Logue's campaign coffers, including $2,000 from Valero. Other Logue donors in 2009 include Chevron, Occidental, and the California Independent Petroleum PAC.
But that's small change for the Texas-based oil companies.
In 2009, Valero donated $160,450 to more than 40 other California politicians and political action groups, including $85,000 to the state Republican Party.
The final door to the State Board of Education has been closed for Rae Belisle, the former CEO of EdVoice. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's one-sentence letter to the Senate didn't elaborate on the reasons for withdrawing Belisle's nomination.
California Watch reported last Thursday that Belisle, who had served as a board member since March 2009, was not going to be reappointed due to heavy opposition from a wide array of education and minority groups.
Belisle said she was told by Senate leader Darrell Steinberg that she wouldn't get a confirmation hearing because he felt she was too close to charter schools, was too uncompromising overall and didn't work hard enough to build consensus.
She denied the claims and accused her critics of seeking revenge for past policy battles. There has been no word on any replacement for Belisle or Jorge Lopez, another Schwarzenegger appointee to the state board who resigned on Feb. 12.
Belisle said Lopez, an executive director of a charter school academy in Oakland, decided to step down after being questioned by the Senate over his financial dealings at his schools. Lopez has not been accused of any wrongdoing.
Lopez didn't respond to California Watch's requests for comment.
Malcolm “Scoop” Glover, who died March 1 at age 83, was a police reporter for the San Francisco Examiner in the frantic heyday of newspaper journalism in The City.
William Randolph Hearst
During Glover’s glory years, in the 1940s and 1950s, four local newspapers fought it out each day for exclusive stories to splash across page one.
His nickname was hard-won. As point man on the cop beat for William Randolph Hearst's Monarch of the Dailies, as the old man styled the Ex, Glover prevailed for many years in what must have been an insanely competitive environment.
In 1957, one of Scoop’s scoops – an insiders’ account of the arrest of a gun-toting parolee who had shot a policeman – was dramatized on a TV show called "The Big Story." A young Steve McQueen played the desperado. Glover got $500 from Pall Mall cigarettes, the show’s sponsor.
He stayed in the business for more than 40 years after that, outlasting not only all of his rival reporters but the Examiner itself, which Hearst Corp. spun off in 2000 to buy the San Francisco Chronicle. Glover retired from the Chronicle two years after the merger.
A recent energy study determined that 60 percent of states have the potential to be "energy self-reliant." This refers to the ability of states to meet their entire energy needs using sources within their own borders.
The study culled through data and reports to determine the ability of each state to use renewable electricity sources, which are "found everywhere and in most cases can be economically harnessed everywhere."
While the study aknowledges that different alternate-energy technologies may be better suited to certain states, the report argues for a decentralized grid where each state makes use of the renewables cheapest for it to harness.
"As we shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy a new question looms before us," the report says. "Will we embrace a centralized renewable energy future characterized by greater federal involvement in planning, or will we meet local and state needs with local and state-based strategies? The ubiquitous nature of renewable energy argues for a decentralist energy approach."
