FOUR-YEAR DEGREES AT COMMUNITY COLLEGES? WHY NOT?

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

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

    “FOUR-YEAR DEGREES AT COMMUNITY COLLEGES? WHY NOT?”

          Maybe it’s been just an ego thing or a matter of turf, but administrators and some alumni groups at the University of California and the California State University systems for years have adamantly opposed the notion of community colleges granting anything more than two-year associate of arts degrees.

          But this idea is making more sense than ever, especially amid continuing cutbacks at many existing four-year schools. It’s also an idea that’s allowed in more than 20 other states.

          The possibility gained more practicality the other day, when Gov. Jerry Brown, attending a Cal State trustees meeting in Long Beach, criticized a preliminary CSU budget plan seeking hundreds of millions of new state dollars next year. CSU could use that money to ease the current enrollment crunch, which sees tens of thousands of qualified students turned away from the state’s public universities each year.

          But Brown told his fellow trustees that CSU might need to fix leaky roofs and make other structural repairs before increasing enrollment.

          So where can qualified students go once they’ve earned A.A. degrees and want to transfer to a four-year school?

          Why not let them stay put and earn bachelor’s degrees right where they’ve been?

          It’s an idea under quiet consideration by the huge California community college system, home to one-fourth of all junior college students in America. A task force of officials from all three of the state’s higher education systems quietly held meetings recently about whether to seek four-year authority for the 112 community colleges.

          This move, of course, would challenge traditional fiefdoms established by the state’s 1960s-era Master Plan for Higher Education, which sets up a definite hierarchy, community colleges tasked primarily to provide job training for local students.

          The colleges already go well beyond that. And many would like to join counterparts in places like Michigan and Florida that give bachelor’s degrees, mostly in technical fields. One candidate for such degrees in California might be nursing, where many community colleges now excel.

          There are already some breaches of the Master Plan tradition, most notably the fact that Cal State offers several doctoral degrees, an area once reserved for UC schools.

          Letting community colleges do more makes pure economic sense, too. The system charges far lower tuition and fees than the four-year schools, already offers basic classes so good that both UC and CSU allow transfer students full credit for them. Many faculty members are at least as qualified as the majority at the more prestigious four-year campuses.

          But the four-year schools have never liked this idea. For one thing, it would let community colleges compete for precious tuition dollars.

          Yes, there have been some tuition increases at the community colleges, but they remain well below either UC or CSU. The two-year schools also are often far closer to students’ homes than their big brothers. The twin factors of cost and location make community colleges accessible to far more students than either of the higher systems.

          The notion of community colleges doing more was first voiced prominently in 2008 by Democratic state Sen. Jerry Hill of San Mateo (then an assemblyman), who sought the change just for the San Mateo college district. His bill went nowhere.

    In 2009, he was joined by Democratic state Sen. Marty Block of San Diego, also an assemblyman at the time. Block, a former dean at San Diego State University and an ex-president of the San Diego Community College District board, said he sees no sound reason for not making the change.

    

          “We have a lot of well-respected community colleges…,” he told a hearing. “They could do a fine job offering those next two years to students, at least in certain disciplines.”

          But pushing a major change like this won’t be easy, perhaps one reason the current discussions have been so quiet. Turf battles are inevitable, as professors at four-year schools won’t want their prestige spread around. There’s also the question of whether most junior colleges could offer small seminars and advanced laboratory facilities to upperclassmen.

          But there seems little doubt this change is doable, and probably in pretty short order. It’s also something that needs to happen soon or California risks depriving many thousands of its brightest young people of opportunities long promised to them.

    -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

ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT MYTHS EXTEND TO ORGAN TRANSPLANTS

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, OCTOBER 29, 2013 OR THEREAFTER

    “ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT MYTHS EXTEND TO ORGAN TRANSPLANTS”

          The unproven, unprovable but persistent myth that undocumented immigrants are a vast financial burden on the American taxpayer is now extending to the unlikely field of organ transplants.

          The latest furor began when about 40 persons, many undocumented, picketed a Chicago hospital in late summer demanding the government finance organ transplants for illegal immigrants, as it often does for others. Some were on a hunger strike, promising to persist on water and Gatorade until they are placed on the waiting list for organs like kidneys and livers.

          So far, this demonstration has not been duplicated in California. But the issue of transplants for the undocumented arrived here early last year with the case of Jesus Navarro, who did not receive a kidney transplant set to go to him because at the last moment, doctors at the University of California’s San Francisco Medical Center learned his immigration status.

          Navarro eventually got a transplant, but it was not paid for with government funds. That didn’t remove all the controversy, though.

          “Why should an American citizen lose out on a transplant to someone in the country illegally?” asked the conservative blog Natural News, speaking for many.

          One response might be that contrary to urban legend, undocumented immigrants donate a lot more organs for transplant than they will ever use as long as they can’t legally enter programs like Medicare (which covers all eligible patients in kidney failure starting shortly after they begin dialysis treatments) and Medi-Cal, the California form of Medicaid.

          Asked the other day what the effect on organ donation might be if it became widely known that unauthorized immigrants can be wait-listed for organs and eventually receive them if financially qualified, the head of California’s largest organ procurement organization took a different tack.

          “I worry far more about any group saying ‘If we can’t get transplants, why should we ever donate,’” said Thomas Mone, chief executive of Los Angeles-based OneLegacy, which arranges distribution of organs donated by the families of accident victims and others who die, but have reusable hearts, kidneys, livers, lungs, corneas and other tissues.

          “We certainly don’t ask any prospective donors their immigration status when we’re asking them to donate,” he said. “It’s not pertinent medically and it could scare them off quickly. But we know about 10 percent of the population here is undocumented. And we know about 51 percent of our donors are Latino. So we estimate that about 50 of our approximately 450 donated organs each year come from the undocumented. We know for sure that 65 percent of Latino families who are asked to donate the organs of a deceased relative actually do it.”

          So the undocumented almost certainly account for well over 10 percent of donations. Meanwhile, an American Medical Assn. report found that over the 20 years from 1988 to 2007, non-resident aliens (including illegal immigrants) received far less than 1 percent of all transplants nationally (http://virtualmentor.ama-assn.org/2008/04/msoc1-0804.html).

          Mone estimates that less than one percent of transplants here go to non-resident aliens.” So illegal immigrants give far more than they’ve ever received. Who’s a burden on whom?

    Financial questions have long affected prospective organ recipients, along with health tests and a psychiatric exam aiming to establish they would likely observe the drug regimen needed to keep a transplant going. “The financial test is the most significant hurdle for undocumented immigrants to be listed for transplant,” Mone reported.

    Yes, Medi-Cal allows coverage for some U.S.-born children of unauthorized residents, but how would most of their families pay the large monthly cost of drugs needed to keep transplants going?

          Jesus Navarro got his transplant last year only after a cash donor stepped forward. It could be argued that as someone who lived in this country 16 years prior to his kidneys failing, 14 working for a Berkeley steel foundry, he had contributed enough to society to merit government insurance coverage. But it didn’t work that way for him.

          The bottom line: As in other areas, the contributions of the undocumented in the transplant realm generally go unnoticed. Which doesn’t make them any less real, especially if you happen to need one of their organs in this era of long waits and big shortfalls.

    -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. He has had a kidney transplant since 1997.

ARNOLD’S SHORT-SIGHTED BUILDING SALE PLAN WON’T DIE

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2013, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
    “ARNOLD’S SHORT-SIGHTED BUILDING SALE PLAN WON’T DIE”

    It was one of the most smartest and also one of the most obvious decisions Gov. Jerry Brown made after his latest term began in early 2011 – canceling the planned sale of 11 choice state office buildings to private investors.

           

          The only problem was that contracts had been signed and commitments made while muscleman actor Arnold Schwarzenegger was still governor, so this classic example of penny-wise, pound-foolish fiscal policy just won’t go away, even though it’s always been an awful deal for the state.

          Not surprisingly, lawyers for the private investors who would profit by billions of dollars over 30 years if the deal goes through insist that  a contract is a contract, even if it was signed by a governor who has now left office. Schwarzenegger made sure he signed as many papers on the deal as possible before Brown took over, since Brown had expressed great skepticism over the deal while campaigning in 2010.

          Now a judge in San Francisco has overruled state attempts to have the investor claims dismissed, so there will likely be years of litigation before the ultimate ownership of the red granite Ronald Reagan State Building in Los Angeles and several choice buildings in San Diego, Sacramento and the San Francisco Civic Center is determined.

          This lousy deal originated in late 2009, with Schwarzenegger desperately casting about for stopgap ways to raise some bucks to relieve the state’s chronic budget woes. When the package of buildings went out for bidding in early 2010, at the very bottom of the Great Recession’s real estate crash, even Schwarzenegger’s pet economists predicted a net loss for the state of $2.8 billion over 30 years.

          Yes, the sale would have produced about $600 million in immediate money – and if it eventually goes through, it would now generate almost $1 billion because some bonds that would have been paid off by proceeds from the sale have been paid down considerably in the meantime. But long-term losses would be far higher as the state pays rent on the buildings for decades.

          The deal also would bring about $16 million in commissions to the firm of Coldwell Banker Richard Ellis, whose executives contributed more than $79,000 over the years to various Schwarzenegger campaign committees.

          The sale drew little attention until this column in February 2010 exposed its short-sighted nature. Protests built after that, with a group of former state building officials eventually filing suit to stop the sale.

          Their action because moot when Brown nixed the deal shortly after moving back into the governor’s office, unwilling to tolerate the long-term losses. His contention was that Schwarzenegger’s purchase agreement merely began an escrow process, which could be stopped before it was finalized.

          The California First partnership that had won the 2010 bidding (its main partners include Irvine-based ACRE LLC and Hines Inc. of Houston, Texas) has never taken possession of any building.

          But the partnership won’t give up. “The state negotiated and signed a contract with California First and has no right to back out of the deal,” said one partnership lawyer. “Brown wanted to distance himself from the sale,” said another. “It was a politically motivated decision that left our client with a broken contract.”

          Brown explained his canceling the deal differently, saying he sought long-term solutions and not short-term Band-Aids that merely “kick problems down the road.”

          The bottom line is that this was one of the worst real estate deals ever negotiated by California officials, who could instead have sold off vacant state properties like a former CalTrans building near San Diego’s Maritime Museum. But that wouldn’t have a provided large enough short-term fix to satisfy Schwarzenegger.

           And so, almost 10 years to the day after he won office in the recall election that ousted Gray Davis from the governor's office, the ghost of his deal lives on, and no one knows if or when it will ever go away.

   -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. For more Elias columns, go to www.californiafocus.net

NEW LAW COULD THREATEN VOTE-COUNTING RELIABILITY

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2013, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

    “NEW LAW COULD THREATEN VOTE-COUNTING RELIABILITY”

          Suddenly this fall, a potential threat has emerged to the vote-counting reliability Californians have enjoyed for the last six years.

          This comes from a new law just signed without hoopla by Gov. Jerry Brown, who listed it among 30 signings and five vetoes in a routine press release.

          Here’s the possible threat: This measure will allow the California secretary of state to approve new electronic voting systems that have received no certification at all for use in actual elections. It also ends a long-standing requirement that all electronic voting systems be certified at the federal level before they’re used here and allows counties to develop their own voting systems.

          This bill cried out for a veto from Brown, considering the problems encountered by electronic voting systems during much of the last decade. Comprehensive testing demonstrated that many could be hacked, with the possibility that programming might be inserted so that – for one example – when a voter touched a screen favoring one candidate, the vote actually went into someone else’s column.

          No one ever proved that such hacking occurred in a real election, but the machines’ hardware and software could make this kind of cheating virtually undetectable. Some Democrats have long believed cheating of that kind occurred in Ohio in 2004. They note that the head of a firm called Diebold Election Systems co-chaired the Ohio campaign of Republican President George W. Bush and promised he would never allow 2004 Democratic challenger John Kerry to take that state.  Had Ohio gone for Kerry, he might have been president until early this year.

          This background led current California Secretary of State Debra Bowen to center her 2006 election campaign around the issue of voting machine reliability. Immediately after her election, she conducted a “top-to-bottom” review of electronic voting here, with one result being that every electronic voting system used in this state has had to get both federal and state testing -- until now.

          The voting machine troubles eventually led Diebold – still a prominent maker of ATM machines, safes, vaults and other security systems – to change the name of its voting machine subsidiary to Premier Election Systems and later sell it off to another voting machine company. Election Systems & Software Inc. bought Premier for just $5 million, tens of millions less than the firm’s apparent value before the 2004 election.

          Why tinker with voting machines now? Here’s what the new law’s legislative sponsor, Democratic state Sen. Alex Padilla of the San Fernando Valley portion of Los Angeles, an MIT graduate and once the youngest president of the Los Angeles City Council, said in press releases as his measure easily wended its way through the Legislature:

          “Most California counties purchase their voting systems from…private vendors. (This) has resulted in a patchwork of technologies throughout our state. The private vendors consider their technology proprietary…; Currently, state election officials and the public are completely dependent upon these vendors… Allowing counties to develop, own and operate voting systems will increase voter confidence in the integrity of our elections.”

          Padilla, who will be termed out of the Senate late next year, is a candidate for the Democratic nomination for secretary of state. If he wins the office, he would enjoy the new authority granted in his own bill.

          His press releases never mentioned the fact that experimental systems will now be usable in pilot programs in real elections. Nor the fact that counties already can develop their own voting systems.

          In other words, machines that might be as hackable as Diebold’s or even more corruptible may soon count the votes in some California elections.

          This has the potential of opening a Pandora’s Box filled with expensive recounts, legal challenges to election outcomes and deflated public confidence in the electoral process. That’s the very opposite of what Padilla’s press releases promised.

          Which is why this measure is a prominent entry in the unofficial sweepstakes to determine this year’s worst new state law, one that should be viewed skeptically by Californians of every ideological stripe.

    -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