Oct. 9
San Jose Mercury News on drones interfering with firefighting efforts:
California needs to pour cold water on the idiots flying drones so close to California wildfires that they threaten lives and drive away aircraft trying to put out the blazes.
Sen. Barbara Boxer and Rep. John Garamendi, D-Walnut Grove, get it, but apparently Gov. Jerry Brown does not.
Boxer on Wednesday proposed the Safe Drone Act, making it a misdemeanor subject to a fine and a year in prison to operate a drone within 2 miles of an airport or of firefighters battling a fire on federal land. Garamendi had introduced a companion bill in the House of Representatives in August.
Brown, on the other hand, just vetoed three bills that would have increased penalties for flying drones over California wildfires, prisons and elementary schools. The bills called for up to six months in jail and a fine of up to $5,000 for interfering with firefighters in the line of duty.
Brown’s reasoning mystifies us.
“Over the last several decades California’s criminal code has grown to more than 5,000 provisions covering every conceivable form of human misbehavior,” the governor wrote. “During the same period, our jail and prison populations have exploded. Before we keep going down this road, I think we should pause and reflect how our system of criminal justice could be made more human, more just and cost-effective.”
All that is true, but it’s irrelevant. Drone misuse is a new problem that our laws do not adequately address, and it threatens not only property but lives.
This is particularly true of firefighting. Pilots already risk their lives dealing with the weight of fire retardants and the unpredictable air currents created by out-of-control fires. A collision with even a small hobby drone could be deadly, and having to avoid them risks lives on the ground.
California firefighters have been forced to ground their aircraft at least four times this year because of drones. In the San Bernardino Mountains fire in July, five drones were spotted hovering over the flames. They shut down airborne firefighting.
Hobbyists flying drones near airports is also on the rise. According to a federal report released last week by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, nearly 1,000 incidents have been reported nationwide - one in five in California, more than any other state. (We do like our gadgets.) San Jose’s airport had the second most incidents in the state (18), trailing only Los Angeles (42).
One-third of the California incidents involved a drone flying within 500 feet of an aircraft. Airline pilots have reported drones as high as 4,000 feet, interfering with landing approaches.
But wait - the governor is not unmindful of the dangers of drones. He did sign a bill outlawing paparazzi from flying them over private properties. Rich celebrities are now better protected.
What a relief. Let those firefighters and school kids fend for themselves.
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Oct. 9
The Riverside Press-Enterprise on the future of solar energy:
Bernadette Del Chiaro, executive director of the California Solar Energy Industries Association, was circumspect when asked how the rooftop solar companies CALSEIA represents felt about the new renewable energy bill signed into law this week by Gov. Jerry Brown.
“We applaud the governor for signing SB350,” she told us. “It provides certainty for the large-scale renewable industry.” However, she continued, “We ask the governor to turn his attention to rooftop solar.”
What Ms. Chiaro is referring to is the differential treatment of renewable energy generated by utility-scale solar and rooftop solar under SB350, the so-called Clean Energy and Pollution Reduction Act of 2015.
By 2030, Southern California Edison and other state regulated utilities are required to derive half of their electricity from solar, wind or hydro.
While that state mandate requires the utilities to buy electrons (or renewable energy tax credits) from utility-scale solar - like Ivanpah solar energy plant in San Bernardino County and Desert Sunlight solar farm and Genesis solar energy plant in Riverside County - it does not require the utilities to buy electrons produced by rooftop solar.
That confounds, considering that the small-scale solar systems installed on rooftops of some 300,000 California residences and businesses generated more than 2,500 megawatts in 2014. That’s the equivalent of a year’s worth of electricity for more than half a million homes.
That rooftop solar was afforded no love by SB350, Ms. Del Chiaro suggested, might be attributable to union influence in Sacramento.
Indeed, it is no secret that organized labor has a dim view of rooftop solar. That’s because the nascent industry is made up primarily of small- and medium-sized businesses with non-unionized employees.
By contrast, most utility-scale solar power projects have unionized workers. Not because the developers of Ivanpah, Desert Sunlight, Genesis or other multibillion-dollar solar projects are big union backers, but because it’s the price of receiving government tax credits and other considerations.
We believe solar energy has a promising future in California - be it utility-scale or small-scale rooftop.
But because the state has so distorted the market for solar and other renewable energy sources by mandates imposed by SB350 (and other such laws before it), and because the Obama administration has similarly skewed the market by throwing extremely generous tax credits at developers that build solar plants, we don’t know how promising that future really is.
Only when government removes its far too visible hand in the solar business will we know if the industry is built to last.
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Oct. 7
Victorville Daily Press on the state’s welfare program:
Sunday’s story by Staff Writer Shea Johnson provided shocking evidence that California has become ground zero in the entitlement revolution.
Welfare state indeed. Statistics cited by San Bernardino County First District Supervisor Robert Lovingood show that California housed 21 percent of the nation’s welfare recipients in 1996, but less than 20 years later that number has grown to 32 percent. And remember, California’s population of 38.8 million makes up just 11.9 percent of the nation’s population.
Is it any wonder that Democrats keep trying to find new ways to tax us? In order to satisfy their growing voting base, they need the money to hand over for those massive programs that just keep getting bigger - welfare, Medi-Cal, food stamps, housing subsidies.
It’s one thing to fund programs like CalWorks that help laid-off workers receive training so they can return to the workforce. It’s another to enable those who don’t want to work to stay on the government dole.
San Bernardino County and the High Desert both find themselves locked in this battle, as well, and it appears for now to be a losing battle.
The expansion of Medi-Cal because of the Affordable Care Act has led to an increase in residents on other types of aid. County officials told Johnson some ask about other aid they may be eligible for when they sign up for the Affordable Care Act, and county workers also tell them about other types of aid they can receive.
Is it any wonder the nation’s debt is approaching $19 trillion?
Here in the High Desert, more than 50 percent of residents are receiving some type of aid, up from less than 20 percent just 15 years ago. In Barstow and Adelanto, more than 61 percent are receiving some type of aid. Even 39 percent do in Apple Valley. The total cost is right around $1 billion per year, more than one-fifth of the county’s $4.7 billion annual tab.
America was built on hard work and America’s productivity remains among the highest in the world. But government handouts of this magnitude take away the incentive for people to work and support their families.
It’s one thing to make health care available to the masses, it’s quite another to ask taxpayers to support the masses.
The Democrats may want to do that to ensure they stay in power, but that simply provides a quicker path to ruin.
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Oct. 13
Inland Valley Daily Bulletin on a wave of bills signed by Gov. Brown:
Once the governor has signed or vetoed a bill, that’s the end of the issue. Advocates celebrate, opponents dust themselves off. Everybody moves on to other topics. Right?
Wrong in the case of a lot of bills whose fates were settled by Gov. Jerry Brown in the past few days - but whose core questions may still be wrestled with for some time to come.
Here are five examples from California’s just-ended legislative season.
’Right to Try’
Assembly Bill 159, to allow terminally ill patients to try treatments not yet approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, was vetoed by Brown - even as he signed into law the so-called “right to die” bill, letting the terminally ill end their lives with doctors’ help.
Brown said he’d prefer to see how FDA efforts to speed availability of experimental drugs work before setting up a separate state policy.
But proponents of the bill, co-authored by Assemblyman Ian Calderon, D-Industry, note that many patients can’t wait.
It’s contradictory to give dying people the right to schedule their deaths while denying them the right to determine their treatments. This argument isn’t over.
Motor Voters
Brown’s signature on AB 1461 will make California the second state to automatically register citizens to vote when they get new driver’s licenses.
No, the law backed by Secretary of State Alex Padilla, who made expanded access to voting part of his campaign platform, will not allow undocumented immigrants to vote.
The issue now is the same as it is for all moves to increase election participation through procedural tweaks: How to persuade more people to vote?
Few people who really want to vote are stopped by the slight inconvenience of having to register.
’Redskins’
AB 30, barring the state’s public schools from using “Redskins” as a team name (as four high schools north of here do), will embolden American Indian groups pressuring the NFL’s Washington franchise to change its name.
Brown signed AB 30 but vetoed Senate Bill 539, which would have prevented the naming of public property for Confederate heroes. He probably got both calls right - banning “Redskins” erases a slur, while banning “Robert E. Lee” whitewashes history without necessary public conversation about whom we honor and why. The cultural argument, meanwhile, continues.
Racial profiling
Brown signed AB 953, requiring law enforcement agencies to report data about traffic stops - the characteristics of people stopped, and why they were pulled over.
This could be an important step toward understanding if, or how much, police engage in racial profiling. But that depends on how the data is collected and analyzed.
Family Leave
Brown vetoed SB 406, which would have required companies to give employees paid leave to care for not only children, spouses and parents but other family members too.
That’s a win for the business community and a defeat for women’s groups. Expect, and encourage, women to keep fighting on this and other workplace issues.
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Oct. 13
The Merced Sun-Star on a wave of bills signed by Gov. Brown:
Last week was quite busy in the United States of California.
On Monday, Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill making assisted death legal for the terminally ill in this massive - and massively influential - state.
On Tuesday, he signed the nation’s toughest gender-pay equity protections, instantly raising the bar for the rest of the country.
On Wednesday, he signed a landmark bill radically upping the ante on the use of renewable energy.
Thursday’s signatures removed coal from the investment portfolios of the nation’s largest public pension systems - California’s - and put this state’s behemoth clout behind the national movement to stop plastic microbead pollution.
On Friday, Saturday and Sunday’s to-do list? Nationally watched legislation to automatically register voters when they obtain driver’s licenses and to finally regulate medical marijuana.
That’s not counting the vaccination bill Brown signed earlier this year, which already has substantially deflated the national anti-vax movement. Or the racial profiling bill he signed last weekend, requiring California police to do what some departments have resisted: gather the hard data to back their claim that they don’t stop people based on race and ethnicity.
California’s size and population long have made it a trendsetter, and Brown and the Democrats who control the Legislature have the luxury this year of operating in a virtual one-party state.
But the appalling gridlock in Congress, along with what has passed for debate so far among Republican presidential contenders, has created a stark backdrop for the machine-like efficiency with which California has churned out nationally influential legislation.
Immigration? Congress may be incapable of policy consensus, but California has come up with humane and smart ways to ensure that, as long as undocumented people are here, they won’t be increasing the ranks of the state’s sick or uneducated, or driving without a license.
The climate change debate in Washington, D.C.? Brown is inking subnational agreements all over the globe to reduce greenhouse gases.
Mass transit? Federal action is an oxymoron, but nearly three dozen private-sector companies have expressed interest in partnering with California to build the nation’s first high-speed rail line.
Centrist though Brown’s politics may seem from California’s blue-state standpoint, they no doubt strike much of the rest of the country as alarmingly progressive. All the more reason for the rest of the country to take note of the momentum here.
Power abhors a vacuum, and that’s what the federal government’s paralysis has created. Left to its own devices, California is filling that vacuum, one big national issue at a time.
With every stroke of the pen, Brown and the Legislature have telegraphed a message to Congress: If you can’t work together, the rest of us will act without you. Lawmakers here aren’t without problems. Too many are far too swayed by campaign money. But as the legislative year closes, it’s worth noting that not everyone in this country has stopped believing that thoughtful governance can take place.
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