BIG UTILITY'S EVER-SHRINKING FINE FOR FATAL EXPLOSION

CALIFORNIA FOCUS

FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2015, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

    “BIG UTILITY'S EVER-SHRINKING FINE FOR FATAL EXPLOSION”

          Some were mystified when, moments after the California Public Utilities Commission assessed the state’s largest utility company a record $1.6 billion fine for violating state and federal natural gas pipeline standards before the 2010 San Bruno natural gas pipeline explosion, Pacific Gas & Electric Co. announced it would not appeal the decision.

          Even now, about six months later, PG&E still has not said why it simply accepted the largest penalty ever assessed against an American utility company.

          But a relatively unpublicized vote last month in the state Senate gives a new hint about why. So does PG&E’s latest filing with the utilities commission, best known as the PUC, which sets rates for all privately-owned utilities in California.

          The Senate vote effectively ended a legislative effort to prevent PG&E from using most of the fine as a tax deduction, despite the fact that the company has been found negligent by federal agencies in the deadly 2010 San Bruno gas line explosion.

          There is some consumer comfort in the fact that PG&E will pay something, while Southern California Edison Co. and the San Diego Gas & Electric Co. will not be penalized at all for actions leading to the failure of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, for which the PUC has assessed Edison and SDG&E customers more than $3 billion. Then again, nobody died at San Onofre, while San Bruno saw eight fatalities.

          Allowing PG&E to write off $1.3 billion of the fine as a business expense will allow the company to recoup about $115 million, according to some calculations. That’s a bit like a motorist being able to take the bulk of a speeding fine as a tax deduction. Anyone who tried this would trigger red flags at the Internal Revenue Service.

          The writeoff means PG&E will actually pay just over 40 percent of its fine to customers and the state. Yes, $400 million will be refunded to customers. Another $300 million will go to the state’s general fund and $50 million to pay for a variety of PUC safety activities. But the deduction gives the big utility part of those amounts back.

          The Senate’s inaction also lets PG&E deduct the bulk of the $850 million of this “fine” that will be used to repair and improve its gas transmission system. Of course, it makes no sense for any of the fine to go for this, since the utility has collected payments monthly from all customers for pipeline maintenance and safety for more than six decades.

          Because the PUC never tracked how that money was used until after San Bruno, no one knows what PG&E actually spent on maintenance and how much it just kept. The PUC has never explained why it’s allowing the company to use fine money this way.

          The Senate actually voted by a wide margin not to let PG&E get away with at least some of this. The vote was 25-14 to disallow the tax deduction. But a two-thirds majority of 27 votes was needed, and all 14 Republicans voting went in PG&E’s favor, so the big utility won out.

          The no-deduction bill’s sponsor, Democratic Sen. Jerry Hill of San Mateo, called the vote a demonstration “of political influence by a major utility which spends a lot of money…on campaigns and lobbying.”

          Almost simultaneously came PG&E’s latest filing with the utilities commission, an application for a $2.7 billion rate increase over three years. If the decades-old dance pattern of the PUC and the utility ensues, PG&E will end up getting about $2 billion, and the PUC will brag about saving consumers $700 million – when the company hasn’t shown it deserves any new profit at all.

          Worse, any big rate increase would essentially pay PG&E back in less than a year for the approximately $640 million in San Bruno fines it will actually pay. The net result will be that PG&E comes out ahead, just as Edison and SDG&E figure to come out ahead in their questionable San Onofre settlement with the PUC, one the commission so far shows no sign of rescinding despite the questionable legality of how it was reached.

          All of which would demonstrate there’s been no real change at the PUC, despite talk from the commission’s new president, Michael Picker, who has said he means to make his agency more consumer-oriented and transparent. Stay tuned.

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    Elias is author of the current book “The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government's Campaign to Squelch It,” now available in an updated third edition. His email address is tdelias@aol.com 

ARNOLD HELPED PAVE WAY FOR THE DONALD

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 29, 2015, OR THEREAFTER 

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
          “ARNOLD HELPED PAVE WAY FOR THE DONALD”

          Parallels between current presidential candidate Donald Trump and ex-California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger are myriad and obvious to anyone who cares to look.

          Both are celebrities with no need to spend money on getting-to-know-you TV commercials like ordinary candidates for high office. Both went after political offices after pursuing lucrative careers not even slightly related to running a government. Each claimed not to need special interest money, since both are rolling in dough.

          Neither has shown the slightest worry about the rumors or reality of his womanizing past and (maybe) present. Voters male and female have never shown signs of worry about their personal indiscretions.

          Trump’s flashy campaign style, featuring his blue-painted personal jumbo jet and occasional rides for kids in his personal helicopter apes Schwarzenegger’s practice of constantly surrounding himself with klieg lights and aides attired in expensive leather jackets festooned with Arnold-related logos. Because he campaigned only in California, Schwarzenegger never needed a jumbo like Trump’s Boeing 757, but could make do with a mere private jet he kept at the Santa Monica Airport, not far from his home in Brentwood’s Mandeville Canyon.

          The similarities go on and on, the largest of them being that their support levels are never diminished by their errors, ignorance or sins. It’s almost as if both were Kardashians, members of a dynasty founded by a lawyer pal of accused and acquitted wife-killer O.J. Simpson, Robert Kardashian, who was long suspected of destroying or hiding key evidence sought by police.

          That background has never held back any member of his clan.

          Nor has the way Arnold and The Donald ignore the old caution to “be sure brain is engaged before putting mouth into gear.”

          Several months into the campaign for next year’s Republican presidential nomination, Trump continues to lead the GOP field, where the No. 2 spot in the polls fluctuates unpredictably.

          As with Schwarzenegger, and decades earlier with actor Ronald Reagan, Democrats don’t yet see Trump as a serious threat. He puts foot in mouth at least once a week, rarely apologizing and never backing off what would be serious gaffes for any non-celebrity.

          Consistency also doesn’t matter, as Trump has changed positions on everything from abortion to immigration. When he entered politics, the muscleman actor Schwarzenegger didn’t have prior positions he could contradict. But he frequently broke promises, including the first one he made as a recall election candidate in 2003.

          Starting his run on NBC-TV’s Tonight Show, Schwarzenegger vowed never to accept “special interest” money. Then he immediately began accepting campaign contributions from oil companies, car dealers and almost any interest willing to write a check. He also promised to order an independent investigation into allegations he groped and otherwise sexually harassed women. It never happened. There were many others.

          Once he became governor, it quickly became clear Schwarzenegger had little notion of how to run America’s largest state government. He began by threatening public employee unions, who famously whipped him in every ballot initiative contest they fought. He gave orders to the state attorney general, only to be reminded that independently-elected official did not work for him. He appointed a former utility company president to regulate that company as president of the California Public Utilities Commission.

          Would Trump, who has bragged about taking advantage of federal bankruptcy laws because “everyone else in my position does,” display similar desires to be a kind of strongman? There’s little doubt he would bring at least as much bombast to the office.

          Democrats who now belittle Trump’s White House chances because he doesn’t pepper his speeches with many facts or pay much heed to what he could do by himself if elected should remember Reagan, who as a campaigner also did not bother much with facts.

          When faced with tough questions in the early months of his winning 1980 campaign, he often turned toward the wings offstage, saying “I’ll let Ed (Meese) answer that one,” referring to a top aide he later appointed U.S. attorney general. When an opponent rattled off facts and pointed out his contradictions during debates, he grinned wryly into the camera and said, “There he goes again.”

          And he always won easily. So might Trump if Democrats keep taking him lightly. That’s the lesson for them from Reagan and Schwarzenegger, the only other big-time celebrities to seek the highest office they possibly could.

    -30-       
    Elias is author of the current book “The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government's Campaign to Squelch It,” now available in an updated third edition. His email address is tdelias@aol.com 

UNION DUES FOES MAY STILL WIN, DESPITE THREE BALLOT LOSSES

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 2015, OR THEREAFTER


BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

    “UNION DUES FOES MAY STILL WIN, DESPITE THREE BALLOT LOSSES”

          The common assumption in California politics is that labor unions will always be a major force because they have been for the last 30-plus years. But change may be coming, even though organized labor since 1996 has beaten back three ballot initiatives aiming to end its influence.

          The issue here is union dues paid by public employees. Rules are different for unions covering workers in private business.

          In 1996, 2005 and 2012, conservatives seeking to end labor’s donations to political candidates (almost exclusively to Democrats) ran ballot initiatives aiming to end the obligation of schoolteachers and other employees to pay union dues unless they want to.

          All three measures called themselves “paycheck protection,” seeking to force unions to get yearly written permission from members before using their dues money for political purposes. The most recent went a step further, aiming to ban direct contributions from unions to political candidates.

          All three measures lost, but never by large margins. Each became a fairness issue: Labor would have a vastly diminished political voice if any of these propositions had passed, but corporations and wealthy individuals would not have seen their influence cut, and that would tilt the electoral playing field in unprecedented ways.

    After losing three times and wasting more than $20 million on those efforts, conservatives were forced to conclude voters won’t soon opt to deprive unions of their political voice. So they turned to the courts.

          The libertarian-oriented, Washington, D.C.-based Center for  Individual Rights (CIR) found 10 California schoolteachers who don’t like being represented by the 300,000-member California Teachers Assn. One of them, Rebecca Friedrichs of Orange County, became the lead plaintiff in a case that will be heard this fall by the U.S. Supreme Court, with a decision due by the end of June 2016 – just in time for next year’s general election campaign.

          The case, Friedrichs vs. California Teachers Assn. et al, seeks to overturn a 1977 Supreme Court ruling that lets public employee unions collect dues from everyone covered by their bargaining, even if some of those people don’t want to be involved. In the CTA’s case, for almost 40 years, those who don’t want to be covered have not had to pay the roughly 35 percent of dues that normally goes to political donations and campaigning.

          But the Friedrichs lawsuit contends that all public employee union activity is political, not just functions openly labeled that way. “Bargaining with local governments is inherently political,” argues the CIR. “Whether the union is negotiating for specific class sizes or pressing a local government to spend tax dollars on teacher pensions…, the union’s negotiating positions embody political choices that are often controversial.”

          So this case aims well beyond the three failed ballot initiatives. This one seeks to deprive public employee unions of virtually all their funding, unless workers voluntarily pay. No one knows how many would, with annual dues in the CTA, for example, often topping $1,000.

          That makes this a life and death case for the unions, and they can’t be certain of the outcome. One justice, Samuel Alito, wrote in a previous union-related case that “…no person in this country may be compelled to subsidize speech by a third party that he or she does not wish to support.”

          Ironically, the unions’ best hope for picking up the vote they need to expand beyond the high court’s four solidly liberal justices might be that of Antonin Scalia, often the court’s leading conservative. In a 1991 case, he wrote that because public sector unions have a legal duty to represent all employees, it’s reasonable to expect all workers to share the costs.

          But Scalia doesn’t have to be consistent, and sometimes is not. Meanwhile, frequent swing vote Anthony Kennedy has not always been friendly to labor.

          The bottom line is that no one knows how this case may turn out. Which means candidates of all stripes should be getting ready today for an earthquake-scale change in California’s political funding, one that might come at a vital, key moment in next year’s campaign.

          -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

MANSON FOLLOWER AGAIN TESTS BROWN ON PAROLE

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 22, 2015, OR THEREAFTER


BY THOMAS D. ELIAS   
    “MANSON FOLLOWER AGAIN TESTS BROWN ON PAROLE”

          If this seems like déjà vu, that’s because it is. For the 29^th time since he was convicted in two of the nine gruesome killings conducted by the cult-like Charles Manson “Family” in the late 1960s, 72-year-old Bruce Davis is up for parole.

          Gov. Jerry Brown has until the end of December to veto a late August finding by the state Parole Board finding Davis eligible for release from prison. He’s now held in the California Men’s Colony in San Luis Obispo.

          Brown has demonstrated in the past that he knows Davis and other followers of Manson – himself held in Corcoran State Prison – should never go free.

          When parole officials last found Davis suited for release, Brown wrote a six-page ruling reversing the decision. He made this salient point: “In rare circumstances, a murder is so heinous that it provides evidence of current dangerousness by itself. This is such a case.”

          Previously, Brown and other governors declined to release Davis because he refused to accept any responsibility for his role in the slice-and-dice murders of aspiring musician Gary Hinman and movie stuntman Donald “Shorty” Shea.

          Davis insisted for more than 40 years that he had little to do with those deaths, saying about Shea’s murder that he had inflicted only a “token” stab wound on Shea’s shoulder, while Manson himself made the fatal stabs and cuts. Finally, in 2013, Davis admitted he sliced Shea from armpit to collarbone.

          Shea’s carved-up body was later found in small pieces spread around the former Spahn Movie Ranch in the Santa Susana Pass area between Los Angeles and Simi Valley, where cowboy stars like Gene Autry and Roy Rogers once roamed. Many episodes of TV shows like Bonanza and The Lone Ranger were at least partially filmed there. But by 1969, when the Manson group moved onto the ranch, owner George Spahn had become elderly, frail and unable to resist the cult’s takeover of his land.

          In Hinman’s slaying, trial testimony by a former Manson follower revealed, Davis held a gun on Hinman while Manson slashed his face with a sword and tried to extort money from him. Hinman’s dead body was later found in his home, with the word’s “political piggy” scrawled in blood on a wall.

          There is no evidence, however, that Davis was involved in the better-known Manson Family murders at the Beverly Hills-adjacent residence of movie star Sharon Tate and the Los Angeles home of grocer Leno LaBianca and his wife Rosemary. Other race-tinged messages were written in blood within the LaBianca house.

          It can be difficult for those not involved in investigating or covering the Manson Family crimes to appreciate the depth of their depravity and cruelty. The upshot was that not only were the victims killed, but the murders were done in the most painful and vicious manner conceivable, each concocted to serve some purpose linked to Manson’s vain hope of spurring a race war to which he applied the name “Helter Skelter.”

          While it’s true that in more than 40 years as a prisoner, Davis has married, fathered a child and earned a doctoral degree in religion, the question of why he ever should be freed remains unanswered given the lives he helped end abruptly in some of the bloodiest possible ways.

          While the many millions of Californians either not resident here or not even born at the time of those murders may not remember their impact, Brown certainly does. Back then, he lived in Laurel Canyon north of the Sunset Strip and not far from Tate’s rented house in Benedict Canyon. He may even have felt the fears experienced by other canyon dwellers aware that the Manson killers cut power and telephone lines in an era long before cell phones. Their impending victims could not call for help or even see much as their executioners approached in the dark.

          Brown’s statement when Davis last came up for parole demonstrates he knows the depth of these crimes. The hope is that this former Roman Catholic seminarian has not lost the understanding that some crimes are simply too horrible ever to be forgiven, no matter how goody-two-shoes their perpetrators may appear to have become years later.

         

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Elias is author of the current book “The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government's Campaign to Squelch It,” now available in an updated third edition. His email address is tdelias@aol.com 

ANTI-VAXXERS THREATEN FREEDOMS OF OTHERS

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, 2015, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
    “ANTI-VAXXERS THREATEN FREEDOMS OF OTHERS”

          Imagine a California where polio becomes a threat to children’s health as it was before the 1950s, when first the Salk vaccine and later the even more effective Sabin formula threw this dreaded and crippling disease and all its iron lungs into dormancy.

          Or a California where dozens of kids die every year from pertussis, better known as whooping cough for the gasping whoop children often make after their deep coughing. And more, like measles, mumps and rubella, to name a few.

          This was the threat that faced California after Gov. Jerry Brown in 2012 attached a one-sentence signing message to a law that aimed to make it tougher for parents to evade getting their kids vaccinated.

    Now a proposed referendum being circulated by anti-vaccination activists threatens to thrust the state back into those Dark Ages-style dangers.

    Brown’s short message in 2012 called on state health officials to provide a religious exemption on a form allowing parents to opt out of vaccinations and still register them for public or private schools.

          Checking the religious belief box allowed parents to claim their deep theological beliefs precluded vaccinations. Many with little religious belief lied when they took the checkoff. They either believed the widespread shibboleth that vaccinations are harmful or they were just plain lazy.

          Within less than three years, there followed outbreaks of both measles and pertussis. There is no proven link between these bursts of previously inactive diseases to Brown’s personal belief box, found a Johns Hopkins University study of a 2010 pertussis epidemic in California. But the report showed a link between the location of cases and the areas where parents most actively sought previous, harder-to-get, religious exemptions.

          Of course, no organized religion then or now, aside from the Black Muslim Nation of Islam, has opposed vaccination. The great preponderance of vaccination exemptions have come in wealthy coastal counties with virtually no Nation of Islam presence. So parents claiming a religious belief exemption must either have lied or possess a private religion.

          All this caused Brown to reverse himself this year and okay a law allowing vaccination exemptions only for medical reasons. This law, effective with the start of the next school year, still doesn’t demand all children be vaccinated before kindergarten and seventh grade; parents can home school their kids if they don’t want them vaccinated.

          The current referendum effort aims to put a measure on the November 2016 ballot and reverse the new law. Only two modern-era referenda have succeeded: one in 1982 cancelling government approval of a “peripheral canal” project to bring Northern California river water to the San Joaquin Valley and Southern California, and one last year reversing state approval of an off-reservation Indian casino.

          It’s telling that religion has barely been mentioned in public meetings around the state pushing the anti-vaxxers’ referendum. Most speakers describe the vaccination mandate as a “fundamental human rights issue.” As an example, they argued in one San Diego County meeting this summer that “the state wants to get between a parent and a child.”

          The anti-vaxxers want to be free to leave their kids unprotected from potentially deadly diseases whose viral or bacterial causes are still present in the environment. They claim, for instance, that the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine is linked to increased autism rates. This myth, originally published in a medical journal, was debunked long ago and later denounced by the authors of the flawed British study, who admit their research was faulty. But it persists, even getting a full airing on the syndicated talk show of former CBS News anchorwoman Katie Couric, who later apologized for that.

          Essentially, parents who want to be free to keep their children unvaccinated and at risk for dangerous diseases would deny the freedom of other children with medical reasons that preclude vaccination to attend schools or enjoy theme parks and other public areas for fear of picking up disease from unvaccinated peers. It’s clear the belief of some parents in a discredited theory should not take precedence over the freedoms of other kids to live without fear of preventable diseases.

          But this conflict will never be voiced by anti-vaxxers who formerly could take the religious exemption even when they had no religion.

          Which makes it clear responsible Californians should refuse to sign the current referendum petitions when accosted outside supermarkets and big box stores by carriers being paid up to $9 for each signature they gather.

-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

FEDERAL REGULATORS AS BAD AS STATE PUC

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 15, 2015, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

    “FEDERAL REGULATORS AS BAD AS STATE PUC”

          For many years before formal investigations by both state and federal authorities began, it was clear the California Public Utilities Commission consistently favored big utility companies over consumers at every opportunity.

          But until a court order produced tens of thousands of emails between utility commissioners and executives of the companies they regulate, no one could prove either the cronyism that has long existed or the mechanism by which it operated.

          Now it is gradually becoming clear that national agencies like the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) also consistently favor big utilities over the citizens the commissions are sworn to protect.

          Example A involves the now-closed San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, often known as SONGS. When that plant first lost power on Sept. 8, 2011, several months before it formally closed, the outage caused a blackout over an area as big as northern Europe, covering much of Southern California and northern Mexico. FERC’s initial investigation blamed a single bungling utility worker in Arizona, letting Southern California Edison Co., the plant’s operator, off the hook.

          FERC’s investigation did not freeze Edison’s internal emails, allowing the utility to destroy them. Edison in effect admitted this in a Sept. 16, 2011 letter to FERC just unearthed by the San Diego law firm of Aguirre & Severson.

          Said the letter, “It should be noted…that certain electronic documents related to the outages, particularly electronic mail, may have been deleted…prior to the receipt of your Sept. 12 letter (demanding those emails).”

          In short, said ratepayer attorney Maria Severson, “Edison destroyed evidence…within days after the blackout … Evidence shows that FERC did nothing to stop them.”

          Of course, neither FERC nor the NRC has done anything to penalize Edison for destroying evidence, and the NRC also has done nothing to sanction Edison for its big-money purchase of new steam generators for SONGS despite the fact executives knew in advance they were faulty.

          Edison is now trying to get almost $1 billion back from Japan’s Mitsubishi Heavy Industries for that misdeed, but even if it gets all it’s after, customers will still be stuck with the lion’s share of the costs for decommissioning SONGS, unless the PUC does a sudden about-face and cancels a 2014 settlement with Edison. The corruption of that settlement has been well documented through emails proving the outline was agreed upon in private meetings between former PUC President Michael Peevey and Edison executives during a junket to Warsaw, Poland, the year before.

          The bottom line on SONGS is that only luck spared California the same sort of radiation exposure endured by Japan in the Fukushima disaster that hit about a year before SONGS closed.

          But federal negligence in protecting Californians goes beyond San Onofre. There’s also the NRC’s handling of potential danger from major earthquakes at the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant near San Luis Obispo owned by Pacific Gas & Electric Co. In a meeting last spring, the NRC allowed PG&E to continue a $64 million study of earthquake dangers to Diablo Canyon, saying it knows no reason to shut down or limit operations at the plant.

          The PG&E report, for which the company now wants consumers to pay, has been called a “scientific fraud” by area activists and allied engineers, including former Republican state Sen. Sam Blakeslee.

          Said David Jay Weisman, head of the San Luis Obispo-based Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility, “The NRC seems to always accept anything PG&E tells them.” PG&E is far from unique in its favorable treatment from that commission. The NRC has never denied a license request for an atomic power plant from any utility.

          “The NRC is a rubber stamp for the utilities,” Weisman said. In fact, the commission has “accepted” PG&E’s seismic study, but also gave itself 18 months to examine the report and then issue a final ruling on Diablo Canyon’s earthquake safety.

          All of which means that anyone unhappy with the pattern of utility favoritism at the PUC can expect little or no comfort and support from any federal commission.

          The patterns of behavior by FERC and the NRC are similar enough to what the PUC did for decades without any legal challenge that these two agencies also should get careful and constant observation to ensure against continued outright favoritism of the big utilities.

              -30-

    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

PROP. 47 LOOKING LIKE A WELL-INTENTIONED BLUNDER

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2015, OR THEREAFTER


BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

    “PROP. 47 LOOKING LIKE A WELL-INTENTIONED BLUNDER”

          The more time goes by since last fall’s passage of the high-minded Proposition 47, the more it begins to look like a well-intentioned mistake.

          This was the ballot measure that turned some “minor” felonies into misdemeanor crimes, thus easing the crowding in state prisons and many county jails. It has unquestionably helped some ex-felons rebuild their lives.

          But as crime statistics for the first half of this year pour in from around the state, this measure looks worse and worse, on balance. The numbers are bearing out warnings Proposition 47 opponents made in their official ballot argument against the initiative before it passed by a whopping 60-40 percent margin.

          “Proposition 47 is a dangerous…package of ill-conceived policies wrapped in a poorly drafted initiative which will endanger all Californians, said opponents, led by Citrus Heights Police Chief Christopher Boyd, president of the California Police Chiefs Assn.

          Here’s a bit of what’s happened since passage: In San Francisco, car burglaries are up 47 percent this year over 2014, while car thefts have risen 17 percent and robberies rose by 23 percent. In Los Angeles, overall crime is up 12.7 percent this year and violent crime rose almost 21 percent. That’s after 12 straight years of crime decreases in the state’s largest city.

          Some saw Proposition 47 as a mere expansion on Gov. Jerry Brown’s prison “realignment” program, designed to reduce prison populations at the demand of federal judges up to the level of the U.S. Supreme Court. Convicts on a de facto basis were already seeing sentences reduced or being shifted from tougher state prisons to county jails. Many lesser offenders who might previously have gotten at least some jail time were going free on probation. Prior to Proposition 47, this had cut the prison population by almost one-fifth, while not causing crime rate increases in most places.

    But the initiative does much more than mere realignment, switching many crimes from the felony category to misdemeanors. This includes most drug possession arrests, petty thefts, forged checks and receiving stolen property, with property crimes having to exceed $950 to be a felony. One result: Myriad drug addicts have adjusted their practices, trying to hold their take from “minor” crimes under that amount. Because of crowding in local jails, it’s common for misdemeanor offenders to be turned loose soon after their convictions.

          Proposition 47 supporters also touted the fact their measure allows all those crimes to be treated as felonies if the accused has previous convictions for rape, murder or child molestation or is a registered sex offender.

          Not enough, said the opponents, noting that persons with prior convictions for armed robbery, carjacking, child abuse, assault with a deadly weapon and other serious crimes would still be allowed misdemeanor status for new non-violent offenses. They pointed out that thousands of convicts who stood to be released because their crimes would be converted into misdemeanors have prior records of violent crimes not listed among the most dangerous.

          At the same time, many convict firefighters (about 40 percent of crews battling major fires in California are convicts) have been released because of reductions in the category of their crimes.

          Prison-provided fire crews nevertheless retained the same manpower as last year during the early blazes of this wildfire season. No one yet knows if in-prison recruiting of some new firefighters will produce the same quality of work (several fires this summer spread far wider than officials expected) or whether more convicts on wild-land crews will now try to escape.

          Proposition 47 also earmarked much of the prison money it saves for mental health and drug treatment programs, aiming to cushion the effects of making most drug possessions no more than minor offenses.

          But enrollment in drug treatment programs has dropped, probably a sign that many addicts no longer feel pressured to kick their habits. They know they’ll never do significant time either for using or for most crimes that support their addictions.

          So it’s become quite clear the opponents made good points. On balance, Proposition 47 is turning out to be bad policy. Now it’s time for legislators to do what they can to fix the flawed measure. A start would be increasing the list of serious prior offenses than can turn the new “minor” crimes back into felonies.

          -30-

    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net