The charade continues...

Well the information is in. The Bureau of Labor statistics just released its most dangerous occupations list for 2006. And guess what (big surprise) firefighters and law enforcement are not even in the top 20 (have not been for years). So the next time a cop or fireman tells you their job is dangerous and that the big pay scale for only a High School diploma is justified and they need to retire at 50 (at 100% of their highest years pay) just give them this study published by their government pals over at the Bureau of Labor statistics.

Just look at a summary of the report above in the two charts below from the report (click on the charts to enlarge them):





Lakewood Accountability Action Group™ LAAG | www.LAAG.us | Lakewood, CA
A California Non Profit Association | Demanding action and accountability from local government™

Big mystery solved

We'll say it again: Cars parked on the street during weekly (hopefully) street sweeping prevents the sweeper from clearing out the nasty stuff in the gutter that contributes to bacteria in the summer time runoff. Long Beach is just now starting to figure this out. When will they figure out that Lakewood (and other cities) are polluting the water in the San Gabriel River due to lousy street sweeping practices? LAAG could have figured this out for free.

Making waves
Long Beach is getting to the bottom of polluted beaches.
Article Launched: 08/08/2007 09:34:37 PM PDT

Long Beach Assistant City Manager Christine Shippey and health and water experts met with the editorial board earlier this week and delivered cautiously optimistic news: The city and county may have pinpointed some of the major sources of bacteria polluting Alamitos Bay.

This is potentially promising information about some of the city's most-polluted waters. Alamitos Bay bacteria levels have routinely exceeded state standards, leading the National Resources Defense Council and Heal the Bay to label some city beaches among the worst in the region.

One of the key sources of bacteria is now believed to be the Alamitos Bay Pump Station, which has been sending untreated storm water into the bay near the Leeway Sailing Center. Another pump station near the Bay Shore Avenue bridge at Second Street was also believed to be feeding runoff into the bay.

Storm pumps are not designed to treat water, only divert it to prevent flooding, which is not usually an issue in summer. But urban runoff and other sources that were supposed to be diverted were building up in the pipes and causing the county-owned pumps to kick in and do their jobs.

The water, which largely came from Long Beach-area sources, was circulating
throughout the Bay and over to Mother's and Bay Shore beaches. City health officials said in a follow-up interview that the pipes normally contain high levels of bacteria, which could be an additional source along with runoff.

Working with the county sanitation district, Supervisor Don Knabe and 3rd District Councilman Gary DeLong, the city and county diverted the waters into the storm drain system. A test this week showed Alamitos Bay water within state standards, but health officials are not ready to proclaim victory because they want to see a pattern of improvement. Water, as per state standards and funding levels, is tested weekly, not daily.

Other potential sources of pollution have also been investigated. The city has sent divers to examine boats for leaky lines and also looked at beach restrooms, illegal dumping and other likely sources. Shippey likens the effort to detective work and said the sleuthing will continue.

When asked about the breakwater's role in pollution, Shippey said the city doesn't yet know its impact on water quality, but the City Council has funded what is believed to be the first in a series of tests that may lead to answers. Another city official said the breakwater would not likely impact bacteria levels - only one type of pollution - in Alamitos Bay, but could play a role on other city beaches.

One could assume that wave action would cleanse the entire area, but that is not always the case. Water quality in sections of Huntington Beach, Santa Monica and Malibu - all places with sizeable waves - has been abysmal at times. That said, we believe that studies of the breakwater should go forward.

Other big sources of Long Beach pollution are better known, particularly runoff from the Los Angeles River, which snakes through 50 miles of concrete before emptying pollutants into the Long Beach harbor. There are also drought-like conditions that allow pollutants to build up on streets and sidewalks, animal waste and people hosing - instead of sweeping - their driveways.

One thing is clear: There are multiple sources of pollution, and the city isn't ruling out anything. The council recently created a task force to study water quality and ways to solve the problems.

For now, it looks like one major leak has been plugged.

Lakewood Accountability Action Group™ LAAG | www.LAAG.us | Lakewood, CA
A California Non Profit Association | Demanding action and accountability from local government™

Way to go Costa Mesa....Deny the voters!

Apparently the Bush administration is rubbing off on the Costa Mesa city council who felt that it was their prerogative to deny the taxpayers their day at the polls. Kind of ironic when what were talking about is Independence Day and the Declaration of Independence

Wednesday, August 8, 2007
Costa Mesa fireworks ban smothered
City Council votes to keep a fireworks ban off of the November 2008 ballot.
By NIYAZ PIRANI
The Orange County Register

COSTA MESA A proposal to have Costa Mesa residents decide on the November 2008 ballot whether the sale of "safe and sane" fireworks should be allowed in the city was extinguished Tuesday in a 3-2 vote.

Councilwoman Linda Dixon put the item on the agenda after hearing residents complain about fireworks at numerous council meetings. She recommended that it was time to give the public a choice in the matter.

"Fireworks are not sane and are not safe," Eastside resident Judy Lindsay said. "I wonder what catastrophic event we're waiting for to realize that we need changes."

Dixon drafted a two-pronged approach that would have the public vote on the sale of fireworks and also place a 2 percent increase on the Costa Mesa transient occupancy tax – a fee charged to people who stay in the city's hotels – as a way of backfilling the income generated by firework sales.

Bill Pfeifer, a Northside resident and pit director for the Newport Harbor High School marching band, said fireworks help fund items including uniforms and instruments.

"Without that money, you can't go to tournaments, you can't compete," he said. "You don't have a band."

Councilwoman Wendy Leece said she wasn't ready to take funding away from youth sports, another beneficiary of the sales, without first finding an alternative means of generating revenue.

Councilman Eric Bever said he was also concerned that a higher tax could send visitors "down the street." He said he didn't want to make decisions regarding the occupancy tax if local businesses had not weighed in.

Leece, Bever and Mayor Allan Mansoor voted the proposal down.

Contact the writer: 714-445-6689 or npirani@ocregister.com

Lakewood Accountability Action Group™ LAAG | www.LAAG.us | Lakewood, CA
A California Non Profit Association | Demanding action and accountability from local government™

Who in the private sector retires on 70 to $100,000 per year?

Really it does not matter if the liabilities are funded or not. (Long Beach claims they are) Quite frankly I dont trust the accounting shenanigans of most government entities, especially when we are looking at 40-50 years out from now on these pension liabilities. Lets keep this wave going and put taxpayers back in charge. Once they start seeing what public employees are getting and they aren't the sentiment will change, no matter if public employees are heroes or not.


Deflating big pensions
LB Press Telegram
http://www.presstelegram.com/opinions/ci_6545873
Article Launched: 08/04/2007 05:56:29 PM PDT

Orange County's challenge could help shrink deficits throughout California.

There has been a lot of angst but little action about costly government pensions, but that changed abruptly last week in Orange County. A local confrontation there could affect public employees throughout the state, and save taxpayers billions of dollars at the expense of public employees.

Orange County supervisors, at the instigation of one of them, John Moorlach, voted to test the constitutionality of big pension increases given in 2001 to county employees. If they prevail, the county would be off the hook for up to $550 million over the next 30 years in unfunded pension liabilities.

It also would mean that other cities, counties and the state would be in a similar position, of having passed out big pension benefits that amounted to illegal gifts of public funds.

The theory advanced by Moorlach, and supported by constitutional scholar John Eastman of Chapman University Law School, is that Orange County acted illegally when it granted a big pension increase effective retroactively, not in the sense that already-retired employees would get the increase (they didn't), but that employees would be getting an increase they hadn't
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earned for past service, as well as an increase for future service.

Moorlach also argued that the increase violated debt limits, since it was unfunded, and amounted to a gift of public funds, since it was unearned by past service. Although the pension increases had been made permissible by state legislation, the way they were implemented was wrong.

A wave of pension increases throughout California followed that legislation, and created pension liabilities of billions of dollars. In Orange County, as in Long Beach and most other cities and counties as well as state government, public-safety employees got pensions of "3 at 50," meaning that an employee could retire at age 50 with a pension of 3 percent of the highest salary for every year of service.

Many cities and counties, Long Beach among them, followed up with fat pension increases for non-public safety employees as well, some so overly generous an employee could actually retire with a pension bigger than his or her salary.

Most of these aren't backed with a plan to pay for them, although Long Beach's pension liabilities are well funded. Orange County's are not.

If the names of Moorlach and Eastman seem familiar, it's for good reason. In the 1990s, Moorlach was derided as a Chicken Little until the skies did fall in with the bankruptcy of Orange County because of risky investments. He went on to be appointed and elected county treasurer, then county supervisor (his license plate reads SKYFELL). Eastman has involved himself in land-condemnation issues in Long Beach.

Now Moorlach is warning that pensions in Orange County are so far out of line they again could bankrupt the county. Eastman, who is dean of the Chapman University law school, says he thoroughly agrees with Moorlach's points about the pensions' questionable legality.

Rescinding the public-safety pension increases in Orange County would mean a 30 percent cut for employees of the Sheriff's Department, where a retiree now gets an average of $70,000. Another way out of the problem would be for employees to pay for the pension enhancements.

If it turns out the pension increases are constitutional, Moorlach and others seem determined to do something about pension costs Orange County can't afford to pay.

Either way, Moorlach and his colleagues will have done a great service for taxpayers of his county, and, we hope, throughout the state.

Lakewood Accountability Action Group™ LAAG | www.LAAG.us | Lakewood, CA
A California Non Profit Association | Demanding action and accountability from local government™

Arnie the "democrat" vs the spendaholics

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/sunday/commentary/la-op-whalen5aug05,0,6174605.story?coll=la-sunday-commentary
From the Los Angeles Times

GOP vs. the governor
Schwarzenegger has let down Republicans, so we're back to the familiar show of legislators feuding with a governor from their own party.
By By Bill Whalen

August 5, 2007

Acalifornia governor at odds with legislators from his own party isn't breaking news. Rather, it's the same old soap opera -- not that anyone would dare mistake the politicos in Sacramento for "The Bold and the Beautiful."

Before Arnold Schwarzenegger's arrival in the Capitol, Gray Davis and legislative Democrats feuded about whose job it was to implement whose vision. Before him, Pete Wilson denounced uncooperative Republicans as "irrelevant" for saying "no" to a budget fix.

So the summertime rift between Schwarzenegger (who backs the Assembly-passed budget) and 14 GOP senators (who are holding out for $1 billion less in state spending) that has kept California without a spending plan past the July 1 deadline is history repeated. To pass the budget with the required two-thirds majority, at least one more Senate Republican must approve it.

Only there's a wrinkle. The spat is about more than whether or not another billion dollars gets spent; it highlights the Republican Party's struggle to find a direction and be a driving force in state politics. And it speaks volumes about Schwarzenegger's failure to control spending -- which has increased by nearly one-third in the last four years and shows no sign of slowing -- and to change Sacramento's way of doing business.

Give Schwarzenegger credit for trying to slow global warming, pushing stem cell research and favoring domestic partnerships for gays and lesbians -- all stands that many Republicans run from yet a majority of Californians support. Part of his legacy will be that of a governor who on some issues was years, if not a generation, ahead of his party.

But it has come at a price. As the fourth anniversary of the recall election approaches, the 14 holdout senators -- call them the "Benedict Arnolds" in the budget revolt -- have cast their lot with the Republican runner-up in that 2003 contest, state Sen. Tom McClintock (R-Thousand Oaks). He is a grim, by-the-book social and fiscal conservative -- an all-purpose scold to Schwarzenegger's upbeat glad-handing. He's also the anti-Arnold in another sense: McClintock has never won statewide office. In short, he represents the same set-in-stone conservatism that led to Republican defeats in the 1998 and 2002 gubernatorial races.

For die-hard conservatives, the GOP's Gang of 14 is the movie "300" come to life -- if you believe that defending the pass at Thermopylae and causing the budget impasse in Sacramento are one and the same. Yet the defense of fiscal conservatism doesn't come across as all that heroic.

That's because the messaging needs work.

Consider what happened after the GOP caucus, in late July, proposed $300 million in welfare cuts to help balance the state's books. On paper, the idea was to limit grants for noncompliant recipients, fleeing felons and noncitizens. But on the nightly news, the face was that of a welfare recipient who didn't look felonious, just plain scared. You decide who wins that PR exercise.

To gain the upper hand in next year's budget deliberations, Republicans need to do a better -- and earlier -- job of educating the public on the sillier aspects of Sacramento budgeting. For example, the Assembly-approved budget funds thousands of state jobs that the Legislature has already eliminated. By spotlighting such foolishness, the GOP would be in a stronger position to drive the budget conversation.

But state Republicans need to do more than improve their tactics. They must devise a winning strategy for the much larger war of ideas.

In the national GOP contest to succeed President Bush, "compassionate conservative" isn't part of the dialogue. Instead, the Republican hopefuls are trying their best to channel Ronald Reagan. The problem is that none of the leading candidates represents an ideological movement, as did Reagan.

State Republicans will face a similar situation when they choose their next gubernatorial nominee. In the conservative-dominated primary in 2010, no GOP candidate will embrace Schwarzenegger's idea of "post-partisanship." But there is no winning alternative philosophy in a Democratic-leaning state, other than being the party of "no" on the budget and most matters that look even vaguely progressive.

This is not to suggest that divorce proceedings are underway between the governor and his conservative Republican "friends" in the Legislature. A reconciliation of sorts will occur once Schwarzenegger starts issuing vetoes that anger Democrats, such as his refusal to go along with same-sex marriage. And perhaps the healing will extend into next year, especially if Schwarzenegger revisits public employee pension reform and takes on the teachers union over merit pay as part of education reform.

But there would probably be no spat between the governor and his party -- nor a budget impasse, for that matter -- if Schwarzenegger had delivered on his promise not to spend more than the state takes in. That, and his other promises to change Sacramento's ways: legislation written without any hearing, state budgets chock full of fuzzy math and phony economic assumptions and a Capitol still hostage to gridlock and partisan preening.

It's an irony hard to overlook: The star of "Hercules in New York" most likely will leave office in January 2011 having failed to clean out Sacramento's Augean stables of underperformance, waste and shady political practices.

No wonder Republicans complain about having seen this movie.

Bill Whalen, a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, was chief speechwriter for former California Gov. Pete Wilson.

Lakewood Accountability Action Group™ LAAG | www.LAAG.us | Lakewood, CA
A California Non Profit Association | Demanding action and accountability from local government™

We like what we read...

A little slow on the uptake but at least the battle lines are getting drawn. The danger to our society was/is not Al Qaeda all along. Its public employee unions. (and of course the politicians who feel the must pander to them over the small but more numerous voices of taxpayers) Hmmm who would have thought....

http://www.ocregister.com/column/cops-board-believe-1793174-deal-percent
Wednesday, August 1, 2007
Cops' pay has been ripe for backlash

FRANK MICKADEIT
Register columnist
fmickadeit@ocregister.com

The Board of Supervisors says its decision yesterday to begin considering whether to roll back some sheriff's deputies' and D.A. investigators' retirement benefits is necessary because the supervisors must uphold the state Constitution.

And, yes, if the benefits are ultimately cut, it will be because a court rules the 2001 benefits deal violates the Constitution.

But don't make the mistake of believing that at its core this is about fealty to the Constitution. That's a means to an end. That end? Well, the noblest would be fiscal responsibility – not driving the county deeper into unfunded liability. That's undoubtedly amotive, and Supervisor John Moorlach says it is his.

But what I believe this really is about in the global sense – the reason there's support for this beyond one number-crunching supervisor – is because of growing backlash against what are perceived as overly generous contracts for law enforcement. And against police unions' ability to extract those contracts from politicians.

Three- or four-day work weeks. Liberal overtime and vacation policies. Retirement after 25 years at age 50 at 75 percent of their highest salary. (The so-called "3-percent-at-50" that is the subject of this debate.) Stress-related retirements that allow cops to retire with 100 percent of their salary at almost any age.

I'm not just talking about O.C. cops. I'm talking about cops statewide, perhaps best exemplified by a prison-guard union so powerful we're about to be put under total federal control. Politicians who try to rein in compensation find themselves facing election opponents funded by police unions.

The citizenry gives cops tremendous police powers to begin with. When it comes to believe cops are also so powerful they can write their own tickets financially? That breeds a sense the checks and balances are out of whack.

This perception – true or not – has been building now, for at least two decades, with a significant break after 9/11, when we realized just how much these brave men and women mean to us. It's no coincidence that the 3-at-50 deal was cut in December 2001. I'm not here to argue for either side; I'm just analyzing what I believe to be the real driving force, where the overall political will to do this comes from. Grocery clerks' bennies cut. Other hourly jobs go overseas. Cops get fat increases? Backlash city.

See, this has huge statewide implications. Other cities and counties are watching. They were just waiting for someone like Moorlach to come along and make the first move. Moorlach's chief of staff, Mario Mainero, estimates public agencies statewide have $13 billion in unfunded liability because of retroactive pensions.

Here's a very telling indication of how big a deal this is: Mike Capaldi, Dale Dykema, Buck Johns, Tracy Price, Rich Wagner. You know who these guys are? They are leaders in the Lincoln Club, the high-rolling conservative

Republican group founded here in 1962. Some are also members of the even more high-falutin' New Majority.

These guys don't play politics at this level. They're kingmakers. They sit back, give audiences to would-be politicians and write checks. They help put supervisors in office; they don't deign to attend their meetings, for God's sake. But there they were yesterday, sitting in a pack in the Board Chambers. I asked each when he last attended a Board meeting. This is, after all, the most powerful elected local body in Orange County. Capaldi: Can't remember the last time. Dykema: Never. Johns: 15 years ago. Price: Never. Wagner: Years ago.

Wagner, the president, got up and told the Board that hisboard had already voted on whether the county should challenge the 3-at-50. The vote: Yes, 24: No, 0.

It was interesting to see the two men the Lincoln Club helped breathe life into at their political infancies – Mike Carona and Tony Rackauckas– get up yesterday and more or less side with their employees. Both men were somewhat cautious – although Carona called cutting 3-at-50 now "go(ing) to guns" – and urged the supes to take time to study the matter.

T-Rack came off as about the most even-keeled speaker of the day, drawing on his staff lawyers' analysis (do I sense the hand of B. Gurwitz?) and his own experience as a judge to caution the five-member non-lawyer Board that if they go to court, it won't be the slam-dunk victory they might have been led to believe. Can't wait.

Contact the writer: Mickadeit writes Mon.-Fri. Contact him at 714-796-4994 or fmickadeit@ocregister.com.

Lakewood Accountability Action Group™ LAAG | www.LAAG.us | Lakewood, CA
A California Non Profit Association | Demanding action and accountability from local government™