MARSY’S LAW: A PROPOSITION WORKING WELL

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, MAY 24, 2013 OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
          “MARSY’S LAW: A PROPOSITION WORKING WELL”

          On a sunny California day in 1983, a woman loading bags into her car trunk in a supermarket parking lot was suddenly confronted by a gunman who forced her into the car, tied her up and drove her away.

          Minutes later, in another parking lot, he blocked another car’s attempted exit from a space and, with help from an accomplice, kidnapped one of the two women in it. He then drove both his victims to a remote canyon, where he and the accomplice and one other man repeatedly raped the women before stealing their purses and leaving them behind.

          The gunman, Michael Vicks, was convicted of these and other crimes and sentenced to life in prison thanks to laws that provide enhanced sentencing in cases involving guns.

          Imagine, now, that you are one of those rape victims and encounter Vicks – who you believed was behind bars for good – in a random encounter in a store.

          That sort of thing happened to another woman, Marcella Leach, whose daughter Marsalee (Marsy) Nicholas, was stalked and murdered by an ex-boyfriend, coincidentally also in 1983. Only a week after that killing, Leach entered a grocery store after visiting her daughter’s fresh grave and was stunned to be confronted by the accused killer, freed on bail without any notice to the victim’s family.

          A desire to minimize those sorts of encounters was behind the 2008 Proposition 9, also called Marsy’s Law and the Victims’ Bill of Rights Act, sponsored primarily by Marsalee’s brother Henry, now an electronics multimillionaire.

It requires that victims and their relatives be notified of every bail or parole hearing involving persons accused of harming them.

          Prior to this law, also, inmates found unsuitable for parole by the state Board of Parole Hearings had the right to a new hearing within five years if convicted of murder , or within two years in lesser crimes. That’s one reason the likes of Charles Manson and his followers have come up for parole consideration repeatedly in recent years.

          Michael Vicks (no relation to the similarly-named Philadelphia Eagles quarterback) was convicted long before Marsy’s Law passed, so it was somewhat reasonable to expect that after he was denied parole in 2009 because of the “horrific” nature of his crimes, he would get another hearing two years later. He did not, because of Marsy’s Law, and he sued.

          Vicks claimed that to subject him to the provisions of Marsy’s Law violates the Constitution’s prohibition on ex post facto laws, those that apply to events which occurred before the law passed.

          Now the state Supreme Court has ruled his claim utterly without merit. Marsy’s Law, wrote Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye is not ex post facto because it does not increase the punishment for his crime. “In light of the circumstances of his kidnapping offenses,” said Cantil-Sakauye, “such as the movement of the victims, the sexual assaults and the use of a firearm, it appears…that he would be required to remain incarcerated even if he were found suitable for parole.”

          So Marsy’s Law now applies not just for crime victims from late 2008 and beyond, but also for those whose lives were blighted many years earlier.

          What’s more, the law ensures that Vicks’ victims will always know about it long in advance when he gets a parole hearing or there is any other legal proceeding in his case. They are also guaranteed the right to be heard at any parole hearing in his case.

          As for more recent victims, they will always be informed of bail hearings, trials or sentencing hearings in their cases. Any parole and probation decisions must also take into account victims’ safety and preferences.

          Which means there should be no more encounters like the one Marcella Leach endured. For this is one law that appears to be working exactly as the voters intended when they passed it. And maybe even a little better than expected, now that the springtime Vicks decision is in.

         

          -30-

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

TOLL ROADS, LANES SOUND WARNING NOTE FOR HSR

CALIFORNIA FOCUS

FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, MAY 21, 2013, OR THEREAFTER
 

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

          “TOLL ROADS, LANES SOUND WARNING NOTE FOR HSR”

          Gov. Jerry Brown, construction labor unions and some others are determined to proceed with California’s nascent bullet train, with the first tracks scheduled to be laid later this year between Madera and the south end of Fresno in the San Joaquin Valley.

          Brown, in fact, has used his appointive powers to ease the path of high speed rail, which he last rode on his weeklong April jaunt to China. Example: the key question asked of all applicants for an open seat as a Madera County supervisor was about support for the project. And just about the first thing his appointee did on assuming office was cast the deciding vote to take that county out of a lawsuit opposing the planned bullet train route. The suit ended with a settlement shortly afterward.

          Then the winning bid to build that 28-mile opening segment and its combination of high viaducts and deep, wide trenches, came in at just under $1 billion, as much as half a billion dollars less than expected. So maybe the cost estimates of $68 billion-plus for the entire Los Angeles to San Francisco route are a tad high. (That’s before cost overruns, of course, and the Center for Investigative Reporting found the lead partner in the low-bidding consortium, Tutor Perini of Los Angeles, had overruns totaling $765 million – 40 percent – above its initial bids on several other recent projects.)

          At nearly the same time, the nonpartisan federal Government Accountability Office reported that the High Speed Rail Authority’s estimates of revenue and ridership are probably spot on.

          Many have called those numbers overly optimistic, with a study from the libertarian Reason Foundation, out a few days after the GAO effort, predicting the bullet train will lose between $124 million and $373 million per year if and when it’s finished, with ridership as much as 77 percent less than expected. That report was co-authored by Joseph Vranich, who runs an Irvine-based business that formerly called itself “the Business Relocation Coach” and is now known as Spectrum Location Solutions.

          Vranich regularly denigrates most things California as he helps businesses depart, so the Reason report’s pessimistic claims can be taken with a grain of salt.

          Meanwhile, the toll roads and toll freeway lanes operating in portions of Southern California give a far more solid warning to backers of high speed rail.

          The Transportation Corridor Authority roads in Orange County (Highways 73 and 241), for example, have cost taxpayers who must pay to use them more than $1.7 billion in subsidies and state-funded maintenance since construction on them began in the 1980s. Lower than expected use of the roads also pushed back the expected date of paying off all construction bonds – at which time these routes are to become normal freeways – from 2035 to 2042.

          Toll lanes that started operating late last year along the Highway 110 Harbor Freeway in Los Angeles County also began with lower use than expected. That’s leading to one good thing: Traffic in the northbound high occupancy lanes (where tolls run as high as $15.40 for a single-occupant vehicle to drive the entire 11-mile stretch) has averaged 10 mph faster than before during high-traffic periods. But traffic in the remaining free lanes slowed by about 8 mph in the most congested segment of that road.

          The warning for HSR is that traffic volume declined by about half on some segments when that lane started charging tolls.

          So both toll efforts that have existed more than a couple of months see usage well below expectations, although officials say the Harbor Freeway toll traffic has begun to rise.

          Why is that a warning for the bullet train? Because fares are now projected at or slightly above the level of airline prices for the same Los Angeles-San Francisco run. A car carrying more than one person between the same points will have a far lower per capita expense. And the experience of toll roads and lanes indicates that when prices to use a transportation option rise too far above parallel – if slower and less pleasurable – options, the cost factor can drive usage down.

          So even though the initial bid looks good on its surface and even though the GAO says everything is hunky-dory, there’s still plentiful cause for skepticism about the economics of high speed rail.

     -30-
     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

LNG EXPORTS COULD HURT CALIFORNIA RECOVERY

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, MAY 17, 2013, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
          “LNG EXPORTS COULD HURT CALIFORNIA RECOVERY”

          California’s recovery has led the nation for months in producing new jobs, even though it hasn’t yet come close to replacing all those lost in the Great Recession of 2009-2011.

          Low natural gas prices have been one key element helping California along. They affect everything from factory production to oil refineries, power plants, dairy farms and citrus groves where fans blew heat onto trees to keep fruit from freezing during January’s unusual cold snap.

          This makes it mandatory for Californians in Congress and the Legislature to track the strong campaign by natural gas producers to export much of the gas bonanza now being extracted everywhere from Northern and Central California to Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota and Colorado.

          This effort has strong implications here because natural gas prices have been very low compared with just a few years ago. For example, the late-January price of natural gas at Henry Hub in Louisiana, considered the benchmark for the industry, was about one-third of its 2008 level and well below the going prices in every year since 2003.

          Prices began dropping in 2009, just about the time hydraulic fracturing (best known as “fracking”) became widespread. No, gas prices paid by customers of big California gas-providing utilities have not plunged two-thirds, but that’s because the wholesale cost of gas accounts for slightly less than half what we pay. The rest of the price to customers comes from transportation and the cost of building and maintaining pumps, storage facilities and pipelines, plus a profit percentage.

          Californians have paid little attention because no liquefied natural gas (LNG) receiving plants were built here during the early and mid-2000s, when potential gas importers made a big push for them, claiming a major shortage of domestic natural gas was about to hit.

          Of course, fracking ended any such threat, and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) is currently entertaining nine proposals for either building new facilities to do the opposite – superfreeze natural gas into a liquid state and ship it around the world to countries with gas shortages as LNG – or convert onetime receiving plants into export facilities.

          The commission appeared gung-ho to approve at least some of these quickly before the late-April explosion of two LNG-bearing barges in Alabama. No one knows how that will impact decisions. Meanwhile, three export applications are pending in the Pacific Northwest, all on sites once earmarked as importing plants.

          These would unquestionably make gas exploration companies wealthy, while also causing the wholesale price of natural gas to rise again, perhaps even to levels of the late ‘90s – about three times today’s level.

          The federal Department of Energy concluded in a report issued last December that “for every one of the market scenarios examined, net economic benefits increased as the level of LNG exports increased.”

          The report skimmed over danger of explosions, even though liquefying plants are widely considered more dangerous than import facilities, where LNG is warmed back into its gaseous state.

          Democratic U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, site of two current exporting proposals, protested quickly that flaws in the Energy Department study “are numerous and render (it) insufficient for the Department of Energy to use in any export determination.” The study was conducted by a private consulting firm.

          The Sierra Club also objected, as did the American Public Gas Assn., which represents many municipal utilities which buy natural gas. Sierra Club objections are that the Energy Department report does not consider potential environmental harm from increased fracking that would follow the start of export operations, while also ignoring the effects of the domestic natural gas price increases that could result from approving more LNG exports than are already permitted.

          But the U.S. Chamber of Commerce maintains gas prices must rise or the boom will soon peter out. Said Chamber President Thomas J. Donahue, “If they don’t do something to stimulate the price of gas a little, nothing will be taken out of the ground. You can’t go around the world demanding free, open and transparent markets and then not allow LNG exports. Our significant energy resources give us a chance to move on federal spending and taxes because they can generate much more government revenue.”

          This, then, is no simple matter. Today’s historically low natural gas prices are good for almost everyone in California. But the chamber believes they may soon eliminate incentives for new production. Meanwhile, residents near proposed export facilities in Oregon, as one example, are fighting furiously to nix them because of what they see as dangers of explosions and environmental damage when pipelines bringing gas to the new plants are built.

          This quarrel has major potential effects on California’s economy, which means the state’s Congressional delegation – so far largely uninvolved – has to get seriously engaged, and soon.

    -30-

        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

DON’T LET PRECONCEPTIONS DECIDE SCHOOL FUNDING

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, MAY 14, 2013 OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“DON’T LET PRECONCEPTIONS DECIDE SCHOOL FUNDING”

          When it comes to setting education funding policies for California, preconceived notions have long held at least as much sway as actual reality.

          Thus it was that when the state Supreme Court in 1971 issued its landmark Serrano v. Priest decision demanding that per-student school funding be equalized throughout the state, the presumption was that districts like Los Angeles, Oakland, San Bernardino and others serving large numbers of the urban poor would benefit most.

          They did not. Rural districts benefit most from Serrano’s demand that state funding (before “categorical” money) allow differences between districts of no more than $350 per year per student.

          Now another assumption guides the proposal of Gov. Jerry Brown to change funding again, giving extra money to school districts that have the most students who get government-subsidized lunches or are English learners or foster children,

          That belief: school districts with the highest numbers of poor, “disadvantaged” students get less money per student than districts in wealthy areas. The presumption is so strong that Brown the other day called the entire issue a matter of “equity and civil rights.”

          But like the idea behind the Serrano decision, this one also is off by quite a bit.

          No district in California, for example, serves more English learner students than Los Angeles Unified, the nation’s second-largest public school system. But spending per student in Los Angeles topped $10,700 per year in 2011-2012, the latest year for which figures are available, even though it got only $5,421 in state money based on average daily attendance. (for more such figures, see www.ed-data.k12.ca.us.) The latest Los Angeles spending was about $500 per student below the previous year’s.

          More than $5,000 per student per year in additional money for Los Angeles schools, then, came from other sources, based largely on the same kinds of considerations Brown wants to add to the state funding formula. Los Angeles, for example, got $1,889 per student in federal money in 2010-11, among the top figures nationally, most of it from Title I of the 1965 Education Act, funds aimed at “improving the academic achievement of the disadvantaged,” also Brown’s aim.

     Almost $3,600 more that year per student came from the state for things like advanced placement classes, American Indian education, bilingual teacher training and school safety. That’s called “categorical funding,” and Brown wants to eliminate it, while still passing the funds out to districts. He would let local school boards spend those dollars as they like, while sending them additional money according to his new criteria. There is considerable doubt most categorical classes will be eliminated, though, as each type has powerful, dedicated advocates.

          This all leaves districts in many middle-class and wealthy areas feeling underrepresented and underfunded.

          “It’s obvious that students in my district are not getting equal protection,” says Malcolm Sharp, school board member and clerk of the Palos Verdes Peninsula Unified district. His district gets about $2,500 per student per year less than nearby Los Angeles, and Sharp – who signs the layoff notices – complains it has had to cut 75 teachers from a prior staff of 550 since 2008.

          Palos Verdes, like districts in similarly wealthy areas, has some students fitting into disadvantaged categories, but not enough to get significant added funding under the Brown formula, which would see some districts eventually get as much as $5,000 more per student than they do now.

“Some of our kids are living with their grandmas because their parents have been unemployed for a long time,” Sharp said. “Why should each of them get less than kids in Compton with the same problems? It just would not be fair.”

Or, as Democratic state Senate President Darrell Steinberg told reporters, “The governor’s way of doing it leaves poor kids in a non-poor district invisible.”

          Then there’s the presumption that more money means better education. It’s no doubt true that too little money means poor education, but this doesn’t mean that the more money, the better the education. If it did, why wouldn’t Los Angeles students perform better on average than those in Palos Verdes, El Segundo, Coronado, Carpinteria, Clovis, Novato and other areas that get and spend less money?

          On average, they don’t, on most standardized tests.

          There is, therefore, no proof that new money will improve the performance of disadvantaged students.

          What’s more, there’s a bit of bait-and-switch here. Brown last fall convinced school board members and boosters to campaign hard for his Proposition 30, believing their districts would get a fair share of the tax money it produced.

          Instead, says Sharp, “Our demographic is mostly who is paying for Proposition 30, but (a lot of) the money is going elsewhere. That’s not a healthy thing.”

          Put it all together and it’s clear that rather than operating on presumptions that often turn out to be wrong, legislators should be looking long and hard at what Brown’s proposed new formula actually can accomplish before making the radical change he’s pushing so aggressively.

    -30-
     Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net