CEQA BATTLE LINES: ‘NEEDLESS DELAYS’ VS. ‘DO NO HARM’

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, MARCH 1, 2013, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“CEQA BATTLE LINES: ‘NEEDLESS DELAYS’ VS. ‘DO NO HARM’”

          The battle lines over what may become this year’s most contentious, intractable legislative battle began to form within a day or two of when Gov. Jerry Brown uttered two key sentences in his mid-January state of the state speech:

          “We also need to rethink and streamline our regulatory procedures, particularly the California Environmental Quality Act,” he said. “Our approach needs to be based more on consistent standards that provide greater certainty and cut needless delays.”

          A huge portion of the Internet chatter that followed Brown’s talk centered around those 34 words, which made up about one percent of what his talk.

          The two sentences embellished only slightly on Brown’s oft-quoted previous sentiment: “I’ve never seen a CEQA exemption I didn’t like.” That feeling stems from his eight years as mayor of Oakland, where, among other projects, his efforts to start a military academy for inner-city youth suffered CEQA-related delays.

          Brown’s speech spurred enthusiasm from major business groups who have never cared for the sometimes voluminous environmental impact reports (EIRs) required by the early 1970s law (originally signed by then-Gov. Ronald Reagan) for almost all significant projects.

          “Modernizing CEQA is essential if we’re to successfully grow our economy,” said Gary Toebben, president of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce. “…CEQA can be modernized in a way that contributes to, not stands in the way of, the economic and environmental vitality of California.”

          Chimed in Carl Guardino, head of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, “CEQA is a great law that has unfortunately been misused, discouraging investments in our communities that not only foster economic growth and job creation, but help us meet our environmental and greenhouse gas reduction goals.”

          When business leaders say CEQA discourages investment and has been misused, they mean there have been times when opponents of projects, often in the NIMBY (not in my back yard) mode, challenged the adequacy of EIRs and delayed things for weeks, months or years, costing developers large sums.

          Businesses sometimes also use CEQA to hold up their competitors’ projects and labor unions have been said to threaten developers with CEQA lawsuits (sometimes labeled extortion) and delays if they use non-union labor.

          But CEQA also has created open space and parks, as developers can use these kinds of amenities to mitigate some ill effects of their projects. It has helped cities and neighborhoods limit building heights and forced builders to provide adequate parking, organize carpools and expand streets and public transit.

          CEQA also has not prevented major projects like AT&T Park in San Francisco, the San Francisco 49ers new stadium under construction in Santa Clara, Staples Center and the LA Live complex in Los Angeles, Petco Park and a host of major hotels in San Diego. And much more.

          Just because Brown wants change does not mean it will take the precise shape he eventually recommends to the Legislature, which he has not yet discussed in any detail.

          Whatever he seeks will likely meet resistance from environmentalists there. State Senate President Darrell Steinberg and fellow Democratic Sens. Noreen Evans of Santa Rosa and Michael Rubio of Bakersfield, for example, told a meeting of the state Planning and Conservation League that they will approach any change with a “first do no harm” test.

          Like Steinberg, Democratic state Assembly Speaker John Perez has said he’s open to discussing CEQA changes that might make the law less of a tool for manipulative special interests than it sometimes has been. Perez says he wants full public discussion of proposed changes before allowing any votes.

          Steinberg, who last year blocked a last-minute, end-of-session attempt to make major changes easing CEQA without any public hearings or input, has said he feels similarly.

          It’s not certain yet just where the CEQA reform effort will lead, although the law has already been altered in the past few years to promote projects near public transit and speed up judicial reviews of projects.

          But momentum toward changing CEQA to streamline its processes and avoid duplication with other state and federal permitting requirements has probably reached the point of being unstoppable. The remaining question is how extreme the change will be.

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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

PUC ‘COMPROMISE’ LEAVES CUSTOMERS PAYING TAB FOR UTILITY NEGLIGENCE

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2013, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
          “PUC ‘COMPROMISE’ LEAVES CUSTOMERS PAYING TAB FOR UTILITY NEGLIGENCE”

          When Toyota or any other automaker is caught placing flawed parts in some of the models it builds, a recall ensues, with the car company often paying hundreds of millions of dollars to replace fuel injection systems, floor mats or whatever was wrong.

          Of course, there is plenty of competition in the car business, as relative newcomers like Hyundai, Kia, Tesla and others rise up continually to challenge the existing giants, forcing them to keep prices within reach and to respond when they’ve done something wrong.

          But utility companies in California are not like that. They are monopolies. If you live in Southern California Edison territory, you buy power from it or you install expensive solar panels on your roof. There’s no other company equipped to deliver electricity to very many homes or businesses.

          The only thing forcing the big utilities to keep rates reasonably affordable is the state Public Utilities Commission, whose mission is to prevent consumer rip-offs, with a secondary purpose of making sure companies like Edison, Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Gas and San Diego Gas & Electric remain financially strong.

          How the PUC lives up to its vital mission depends on who peoples the five-person commission, where members serve five-year terms. They are appointed by the governor and almost impossible to remove once in office. For most of the last half-century, they’ve almost always given more emphasis to the need for keeping utilities profitable than their central purpose of preventing utilities from ripping off the captive-audience customers.

          The latest example came with little fanfare this winter, when commissioners voted to assess PG&E’s customers two-thirds of the estimated $2.2 billion it will cost to upgrade that company’s admittedly decrepit gas pipeline system. Federal authorities found PG&E flat-out negligent while investigating the 2010 pipeline blast that killed eight people and destroyed 38 homes in San Bruno.

          Inspectors essentially determined that California is lucky similar explosions have not become commonplace. For it’s not just PG&E with pipeline troubles, but also SoCal Gas and SDG&E, both owned by San Diego-based Sempra Energy.

          If commissioners act as they usually do, the PG&E decision will set the pattern for repairs by those companies, expected to cost SoCal Gas about $2.6 billion and run to about $600 million for SDG&E.

          Dunning the customers fortwo-thirds is, of course, touted by the commission as a compromise. But it’s really the result of a kabuki dance the PUC and the utilities have performed for decades. Each time a utility applies for a rate increase, it gets one that’s about 25 percent to 30 percent less than what's requested. So the utilities invariably ask for higher rates than they know they need or can get, generally ending up with less than they ask but more than what’s required for them to be profitable. The process is a predictable joke for all involved, even if all parties maintain straight faces through all their convoluted hearings.

          So it was, too, with the PG&E pipeline expense. The company at first asked the commission to force its customers to pay 90 percent of the repair costs, then reduced its request to a mere 84 percent.

          Of course, for consumers to much of the cost is rank injustice. Gas customers have already paid more than $1 billion over the last few decades via monthly billing assessments to assure safety and reliability of pipelines.

          But that didn’t matter much in the eventual PUC decision. So customers are paying about 88 cents more per month this year and will pay $1.36 more each month starting in 2014 until the work on more than 900 miles of pipeline is complete.

          Customers in Southern California can expect the same sort of increases soon.

          All this will also guarantee about $400 million in additional profits to the companies each year until 2033. That’s because utility profits are based in part on a “reasonable rate of return” on their capital investments, now set at about 11.35 percent. In a spiraling process, customers will pay higher rates for years to come because the utilities are allowed to charge them for repairs caused by the companies' negligence – and their failure to properly use the maintenance money consumers have long been paying.

          If all this seems unjust beyond the level of absurdity, it is. But consumers will just have to pay the higher rates, for there’s now no apparent way to stop it.

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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

PRISON REALIGNMENT ALTERNATIVES COULD BE WORSE

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 22, 2013, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“PRISON REALIGNMENT ALTERNATIVES COULD BE WORSE”

          As crime statistics for 2012 gradually filter in from around the state, gripes about the 15-month-old prison realignment program have begun rising in newspaper headlines and talk show airwaves.

          There are two major complaints: One is that crime rose as realignment cut the inmate populace by more than 24,000. The other is that some criminals are being released earlier than before the program began in October 2011, in part because local jails in a few counties are overcrowded.

          A typical gripe comes from Tyler Izen, president of the Los Angeles Police Protective League, the state’s largest police union. “Our members are terribly concerned that we are allowing people out of prisons who are likely to recommit crimes and victimize the people of our city,” he said in a telephone interview.

He claimed probation departments have lost track of some former prisoners, but could offer no specific examples. “All I have is anecdotal information,” he conceded.

It turns out that only one of those big gripes has any proven merit: In a few counties, Fresno being a prime example, prisoners are often released after serving minimal jail time. But sheriffs and the state Department of Corrections insist the releases never involve violent or sexual criminals and that ex-convicts get the same level of parole and probation supervision they did before.

          As for the other complaint, it turns out the crime numbers reported so far are pretty mixed. Violent crimes in Los Angeles, for example, were down last year for the 10^th year in a row, dropping 8.2 percent to a total of 18,293, with significant decreases in robbery and aggravated assault and 152 gang-related homicides, the fewest in more than 10 years.

          But property crime was up slightly in L.A., by 0.2 percent, with Police Chief Charles Beck attributing the uptick to a 30 percent increase in cellphone thefts. Beck said some of the small increase in property crime might be due to realignment.

          In surrounding Los Angeles County, homicides were at 166, the lowest number since 1970.

          By contrast, murders were up in the San Francisco Bay area, increasing from 248 in 2010 and 275 in 2011 to 310 last year. Almost all the increase took place in three cities, San Jose, San Francisco and Oakland, where killings rose 52 percent over two years. Taken together, those three cities lost more than 850 police officers to budget cuts over the last three years, which may help explain some of their homicide increase. The other dozen cities in the region reporting had 24 percent less murders over that period, and overall, Bay area slayings remain well below historic highs.

          It’s a mixed bag, with preliminary numbers for the first six months of last year showing violent crime in major cities may have climbed 4 percent and property crime 9 percent.

          Even at that, crime overall appears to be well below the historic peaks of the 1980s. And in 2011, California crime ranked third from the bottom among the ten largest states.

          No one yet knows if the preliminary numbers will stand up or if any increases are due to realignment.

          But it’s certain that given the order to free thousands of prisoners that came from federal judges backed by the U.S. Supreme Court, things could be much worse.

          “The governor was presented with three choices,” his press secretary, Gil Duran, wrote in an email. Brown, Duran said, could have defied the order, precipitating a constitutional crisis. He also could have released prisoners willy-nilly, without concern for public safety. Or he could do something like the realignment program, which keeps all serious, violent or sexual offenders in prisons.

          The program transfers no present state prison inmates to county jails and allows no one placed there to be released earlier than they otherwise would have been. All felons sent to state prison will do all their time there.

          The inmate reduction stems mainly from two categories: About 14,000 are parole violators who previously would have been sent back to state prison and now go to county jails instead, if parole violation is their sole new offense. Another 10,000 staying in county jails previously would have gone to state prison for felonies that were not sexual, violent or serious, by legal definition. None of those inmates can have prior convictions in these three categories, either.

          “A mass release of serious felons was on the table due to the court order,” said Terri McDonald, undersecretary of the state prison system. “We had to find an alternative that left higher-risk offenders in state prison.

          “The crime numbers now are all over the place, so it’s far too soon to know what’s really happening on the streets,” she added.

          Which means no one knows yet whether realignment has caused crime to rise slightly or not. But one thing is certain: Most alternatives to doing realignment as it now works could have been a lot worse.

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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, go to www.californiafocus.net

ANTI-ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT TIDE ON THE WANE FOR A YEAR

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 2013, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“ANTI-ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT TIDE ON THE WANE FOR A YEAR”

          Elections matter, one reason for the immigration reform proposals coming from President Obama and a bipartisan panel of U.S. senators in recent days.

Here are a few facts behind those moves: Republican Mitt Romney won among white voters, rich and poor, male and female, by an overall 59-39 percent last November. Because Obama had far larger margins among Latinos, blacks and Asian-Americans, Romney’s strong showing among whites didn’t win him the presidency.

Meanwhile, voting by Latinos is on an upswing in many currently

safe GOP states like Texas and Georgia, causing freshman Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas to observe that unless the GOP does something to win them over, Texas will become Democratic before another decade passes.

But that’s only part of the picture. It turns out the strong anti-illegal immigrant feeling behind GOP platforms, state and federal, for most of the last 20 years was on the wane long before the fall election.

Before the spring of 2012, legislative action in Arizona and Utah, two states whose governments are firmly controlled by Republicans, saw an uninterrupted flow of precedent-setting moves against illegal immigrants.

          Police in Arizona now must stop anyone they so much as suspect of being in this country illegally, and demand documents. All employers there are required to use the national E-Verify system to determine whether any new hire was undocumented. And more. The U.S. Supreme Court ratified that E-Verify law.

          The results for Arizona have been decidedly mixed so far. The state lost a few conventions to boycotts by liberal-leaning organizations. Thousands of illegal immigrants moved to other states, including an estimated 20,000 coming to California.

          In Utah, where Republicans ousted two longtime GOP officeholders, Rep. Chris Cannon and Sen. Robert Bennett, because they did not vote for anti-illegal immigrant crackdowns, laws similar to Arizona’s had been moving through the state Legislature.

          But that suddenly halted last spring. One reason: Utah business leaders who usually back Republicans realized anti-illegal immigrant laws could hurt them.

          The Salt Lake City Chamber of Commerce noted a sharp increase in convention business after Arizona passed its stop-anyone-suspicious law. Hotels and restaurants didn’t want to lose that new business via Utah becoming a clone of its neighbor.

          In Arizona, E-Verify caused many illegals to become independent contractors rather than employees. A study by the Public Policy Institute of California using U.S. Census numbers last spring put the number of new independent contractors in Arizona at 25,000 since E-Verify took effect. Businesses still hire illegals to wash cars and pick crops, but it’s off the books to a much greater extent than earlier.

          Then Arizona’s anti-illegal immigrant leaders, notably former state Senate Republican leader Russell Pearce (author of the demand-documents law), failed miserably when they tried to expand their state’s push against the undocumented.

          Pearce was recalled from office. Arizona’s Senate voted down one bill aiming to make that state the leader in a national push to end birthright citizenship, which makes any child born in America a U.S. citizen. The idea was to have hospitals issue different birth certificates to children of illegals than to other newborns. One reason it lost: The notion that many Latino illegals come to America mainly to get citizenship for their babies has been largely debunked by a Census finding that illegals who give birth in America have been in this country, on average, well over three years.

          Also defeated were bills banning illegals from state universities and making it a crime for illegals to drive any vehicle in Arizona.

          Dozens of chief executives of Arizona companies including U.S. Airways, hospitals and real estate developers, signed a letter calling for defeat of those bills, with the Greater Phoenix Chamber of Commerce taking the lead.

          About the same time, Utah adopted a state guest-worker bill much like what many Democrats in Congress long have pushed, favoring amnesty for illegals who have worked long periods in America. Utah now allows illegals who commit no crimes and have held jobs for years to work within the state and get “driving privilege cards.”

          These moves came after the Salt Lake chamber and other organizations – in a move endorsed by the Mormon Church of Latter Day Saints – called for immigration laws to focus on families.

          It was a far cry from the “illegal means illegal” approach taken earlier by Arizona.

          So events in two very “red” Republican states signaled that the anti-illegal immigrant tide was fading long before anything happened at the national level. The fact that major Republicans are part of the new push for allowing amnesty does not mean anti-illegal immigrant feeling has disappeared. But it does indicate the wave has peaked and that GOP leaders know what they must do to survive in a changing America.

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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