CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, APRIL 12, 2013, OR THEREAFTER
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, APRIL 12, 2013, OR THEREAFTER
BY
THOMAS D. ELIAS
“STATE MONEY SWITCHES ROUSE VOTER
SUSPICION”
One reason Gov. Jerry Brown’s
Proposition 30 tax increases passed so handily last fall was that many voters
became convinced that if they didn’t say yes to the new levies, the sky would
fall.
Schools would suffer, services for the
elderly – already devastated by previous budget cuts – might disappear. Police
and fire personnel levels could be devastated. And much more.
Those fears were enough to overcome
the revelation of only a few months earlier that state the Parks and Recreation
Department secretly squirreled away more than $53 million by underreporting the
amounts it held in special funds for 12 years.
Private donors who ponied up millions
of dollars to stave off budget-crunch closings of many park units were
infuriated; some demanded their money back but didn’t get it.
Brown’s office investigated and heads
rolled. The state parks director was forced out, along with her
second-in-command. But one finding of the investigation was that the Parks and
Recreation malfeasance was an isolated case, even though department managers
often hustle to spend every available dollar before the end of a budget cycle
so those funds don’t automatically revert to the state’s general fund, as is
supposed to happen with unspent dollars not sitting in special funds like the
parks department’s Off Highway Vehicle Trust Fund, where $33.5 million was
stashed.
But a series of revelations since then
give cause to question the notion that the parks department was all that
unique.
One example: Since 2005, the state
Department of Forestry and Fire Protection maintained a separate account
containing $3.66 million with the California District Attorneys Assn., paying
the prosecutors’ group more than $370,000 in management fees. Some of the money
was used to buy GPS monitors, printers and cameras, but the fund also paid for
gatherings of firefolk around the state, including $33,000 for one conference
in Pismo Beach.
It’s unclear why that money was
hidden, but this question didn’t much interest Brown, who called the whole
story “relatively boring, to tell you the truth.”
Then there was the underplayed story
of misused school lunch money, with more than $165 million meant for free or
reduced-price student lunches going for other purposes over the last few years.
Meal money over the last decade was not stolen, but spent on other school needs
like sprinkler systems and salaries of employees of one district’s television
station. No one knows how widespread the misappropriation has been, but the
state has already gotten refunds from school districts in Los Angeles, San
Francisco, San Diego and Santa Ana, among others.
Those were bait-and-switch style
operations which deprived many poor kids of nutrition they needed to learn
effectively.
It would be surprising if, taken
together, all these incidents didn’t cause voters to wonder where else money is
being hidden or misspent.
And there’s at least one more possible
switcheroo in the works. This one involves the more than $1 billion a year to
be raised by last fall’s Proposition 39, which closed some three-year-old corporate
tax loopholes.
The measure promised that money would
go to “energy efficiency projects at schools and other public buildings…all
projects shall be selected based on in-state job creation and energy benefits…”
But just two months after 39 passed,
Brown allocated all its money for energy projects at public schools and
community colleges, the funds to passed out on a per-student basis.
Brown gave no reason for leaving out
all other public buildings and in a post-budget presentation press conference,
Michael Cohen, chief deputy director of the state Department of Finance, said
the per-student allocation was because “The data is not going to be there to
weigh everything you want to weigh correctly.”
So job creation would not be a
criterion for this spending, as promised. Neither would maximum energy
efficiency. At least on this one, there’s a credible solution in the works: a
bill by Democratic state Sen, Kevin De Leon of Los Angeles to give all the
money to K-12 schools, but specify the kinds of energy retrofits and let the
state’s Office of Public School Construction – not local districts – manage the
program.
Besides that, Brown now proposes at
least some reporting requirements for schools that will benefit from the extra
money his budget would give schools with high percentages of English learner
students.
He’s asking that each school district
create a yearly “local control and accountability plan” for the extra dollars.
He would have the state Board of Education create new spending guidelines and
require each plan be approved by the local county schools superintendent.
School officials would also have to consult with parents, teachers and others
in making their plans.
Only time will tell if those
requirements are enough to prevent part of the new English-learner money from
being switched, as some lunch money was. But at least they figure to be a start
toward the kind of transparency the fund-hiding and money-shuffling revelations
of the last year demonstrate is a crying need.
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Email
Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough:
The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch
It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias
columns, visit www.californiafocus.net