Author: SacBee — Opinion

California’s Fish and Game wardens are responsible for enforcing fishing and hunting laws, and have jurisdiction over illegal water diversions and water pollution. Wardens are the front-line defense for all natural resources that belong to all 38 million Californians.

We are California’s “environmental police.” Shamefully, California has the “lowest ratio of wardens to population of any state or province in North America,” as stated in The Bee article “Wildlife panel seeks furlough exception” (Capitol & California, Jan. 23).

It is impossible for the warden force to effectively enforce existing regulations, much less new regulations that the Fish and Game Commission approves over our objections. Many of the regulations approved by the commission will not protect the natural resources of California. They will serve only one purpose; they will stretch the warden force ever thinner, which will eventually result in another warden’s on-duty injury or death.

We take no policy position on the Marine Life Protection Act. Yet the act is a hollow regulation and unenforceable. The Department of Fish and Game has reported to the commission that enforcement cost for the Marine Life Protection Act for the first year of implementation will be $27 million and annually thereafter, the cost for enforcement will be a minimum of $17 million. While it seeks to design Marine Protected Areas, my warden colleagues have a different meaning for “MPA” – we call them Marine Poaching Areas. Since the protection act closes productive fishing areas, poachers will know where to rape our resources, and they will know that there is unlikely to be any law enforcement presence or legal anglers present to turn in poachers.

The governor does not support wardens; his actions speak louder than words. He says he supports wardens but his Department of Personnel Administration opposes the warden request for severance from their current bargaining unit. He keeps wardens on furlough yet eliminates furloughs from non-sworn peace officers in our own bargaining unit.

Commissioner Richard Rogers of Fish and Game has approved new regulations knowing they cannot be enforced. Rogers said in the article that “I’m very disappointed the governor chose to restrict the amount of time that the wardens can put in.” Hopefully, Rogers will change his position and oppose regulations placing additional duties upon wardens.

We truly appreciate the commission’s letter to the governor. But, it is our hope the commission will back up its words with action, otherwise they are just words and meaningless echoes of the governor.

If he had said it of Jews, he would still be apologizing.

If he’d said it of blacks, he’d be on BET, begging absolution.

If he had said it of women, the National Organization for Women would have his carcass turning slowly on a spit over an open flame.

But he said it of the poor, so he got away with it.

“He” is South Carolina Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer, running for governor on the Republican ticket.

Speaking of those who receive public assistance, Bauer recently told an audience: “My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed. You’re facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don’t think too much further than that. And so what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to curtail that type of behavior. They don’t know any better.”

You read that right. The would-be governor of one of our poorest states likens the poor to stray animals.

And though it drew some newspaper notice, a riposte from “The Daily Show” and rebukes from Bauer’s opponents, it never quite rose to the level of national controversy as it would had Bauer compared, say, women or Jews to the dogs one feeds at one’s back door. The relative silence stands as eloquent testimony to the powerlessness and invisibility of the poor in America.

One is reminded how earnestly shocked news media were at the poverty they saw five years ago when New Orleans drowned.

“Why didn’t they get out?” observers kept asking – as if everyone has a car in the driveway and a wallet full of plastic.

The poor fare little better on television. The Evanses of “Good Times” and the Connerses from “Roseanne” aside, television has been heavily weighted toward fresh-scrubbed middle- and upper-class families for 60 years.

Politicians? They’ll elbow one another aside to pledge allegiance to the middle class; they are conspicuously less eager to align with those still trying to reach that level.

Who, then, speaks for the poor? Who raises a voice when they are scapegoated and marginalized? Who cries out when they are abused by police and failed by schools? Who takes a stand when they are exploited by employers and turned away by hospitals?

As near as I can tell, no one does.

Unfortunately, poor people have never learned to think of and conduct themselves as a voting bloc; historically, they have proved too readily divisible, usually by race. As Martin Luther King Jr. once observed: “If it may be said of the slavery era that the white man took the world and gave the Negro Jesus, then it may be said of the Reconstruction era that the Southern aristocracy took the world and gave the ‘poor’ white man Jim Crow. And when his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide, he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than the black man.”

It takes some psychology to get two men stuck in the same leaking boat to fight one another. You’d think their priority would be to come together, if only long enough to bail. But the moneyed interests in this country have somehow been able to con the poor into doing just that, fighting tooth and nail when they ought to be standing shoulder to shoulder.

One hopes Andre Bauer’s words will provide a wake-up call – in South Carolina and elsewhere – for people who have been down too long and fooled too often; that it will encourage them to organize their votes, raise their voices, push their issues into the public discourse. In America, one is invisible and powerless only as one chooses to be.

And the Bauers of this world need to know: Sometimes stray animals bite.

PEDRO MOLINA NewsArt.com

The sober, sprawling State of the Union address President Barack Obama delivered last week was marked by one extraordinary moment. It came when the president looked down at six robed members of the Supreme Court, seated directly in front of him, and criticized their recent 5-4 decision that he said “will open the floodgates for special interests, including foreign corporations, to spend without limit in our elections.”

While Democrats stood applauding his call on Congress to pass legislation narrowing the impact of the ruling, the TV cameras caught Justice Samuel Alito, one of the two George W. Bush appointees who made the reversal of precedent possible, apparently mouthing the words, “Not true.”

Such direct confrontations between the branches of the federal government are almost unprecedented, and they set the stage for what ought to be a serious debate.

The day after, much of the discussion was focused narrowly on the question of whether Obama was correct in saying that foreign corporations would be unleashed on American elections by the justices’ decision.

The dissenting opinion of Justice John Paul Stevens had put the proposition more carefully. It said that the reasoning behind the majority opinion, barring restrictions on corporate-financed political ads, “would appear to afford the same protection to multinational corporations controlled by foreigners as to individual Americans.”

But the majority opinion specifically said it was not deciding that question because no foreign-controlled entity was involved in this case. Lawyers differ in their speculation on how the court would rule if that question is presented.

But Obama does not want Congress to wait for possible further damage to campaign finance regulation by the conservative wing of the court. Democrats are ready to attempt legislative steps to reduce the impact of the ruling that the First Amendment invalidates all past efforts to limit domestic corporations using their own funds to support or oppose candidates.

Indeed, as soon as the court signaled last year its interest in reviewing that fundamental constitutional question, Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, Rep. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland and members of Obama’s White House counsel’s office began meeting quietly to prepare a strategy in case the ruling went against them – as it did.

Several senators and representatives already have introduced bills that would – if found constitutional – keep intact the existing ban on ads financed by foreign or foreign-controlled corporations.

On Tuesday, the Senate Judiciary Committee will convene to canvass ideas for going further in order to limit the newly proclaimed rights of domestic corporations and unions to finance campaign ads from their own treasuries.

One option, a Schumer aide told me, might be an attempt to preserve the ban for corporations that employ Washington lobbyists, or enjoy government contracts or receive government bailouts or other substantial subsidies. Another idea is to require the CEO of a company to appear at the end of its political ad, just as candidates already have to do.

Another notion is to require the main funders to be identified by name or by corporate logo in their ads. Or, some suggest, a law might require stockholder approval for any corporate political message.

With the 2010 campaign season about to begin in Illinois, which has a primary Tuesday, congressional Democrats are understandably anxious to shut down the corporate spigot as much as they still can and as fast as they can.

Van Hollen told me that his goal is to have a bill ready to introduce within the next two weeks and to secure hearings soon thereafter.

It is no coincidence that Schumer and Van Hollen, the two prime movers designated by the Democratic leadership of the Senate and House, are also the men who played key roles in the Democratic takeover of both sides of the Capitol.

Some political observers speculate that companies will be slow to take advantage of the new political freedom the court has given them, holding back rather than risking a high profile that might cost them customers.

But the Democrats do not want to take that chance.

Some, like Van Hollen, even think that if Republicans try to block a measure to relock the door against foreign corporations playing in American politics, “it could become a public issue” in the fall campaign.

Small town democracy at its best and at its worst was on display in Winters and in Davis last week, as recounted by The Bee’s Hudson Sangree. Davis offers a glimpse of the bad and Winters, the good.

Winters, a city of 7,000, sits at the southwestern edge of Yolo and has transformed itself from a sleepy little farming town to a semi-hip destination, home to unique restaurants, antique shops, art galleries and the Palms, a popular live music venue.

A passionate crowd showed up for a city planning commission meeting called to air a developer’s plan to build the first fast-food restaurant in Winters. Some residents complained the proposed fast food/gas station off Interstate 505 would steer business from the city’s beautifully restored historic downtown.

Others argued that too many motorists skip Winters because it doesn’t offer the usual mix of fast food joints that beckon tourists to stop elsewhere along I-505, and that the city needs the tax revenue the proposed freeway development would bring.

Whatever the right answer to the issue is, everyone at the Winters meeting got a chance to make their point. Speakers stayed within the allotted time period. They did not repeat each other. No one was rude. There were no personal attacks. How refreshing.

By disappointing contrast, two days later, bickering at a City Council meeting down the road in Davis sent that city’s mayor to the emergency room.

It began when Davis council member Sue Greenwald said she’d made a motion during a closed door session on labor negotiations. Mayor Ruth Asmundson said she hadn’t.

Greenwald accused the mayor of lying. Then the mayor said “Sue, stop calling me a liar.” The bickering continued. Asmundson tried to cut off discussion. Greenwald said she couldn’t, at which point the mayor announced to all assembled that Greenwald’s behavior had sent her to the emergency room four times in the past and that she was having an anxiety attack.

Greenwald shot back: “Ruth, not everyone is cut out for public office.” In the end Mayor Asmundson left the dais and went to the hospital. She then took off on vacation a week earlier than planned.

Local politics are often contentious. But Davis has had a long history of particularly toxic relationships on its City Council. Frankly, it’s getting tiresome. Council members, and Greenwald in particular, need to take a hard look at themselves and ask what kind of example they are setting – particularly for young people in their community who might be considering public service.

Leaders and many activists in the university town of Davis could learn about civility from Winters, and about how to disagree without being disagreeable.

In California’s Westlands Water District in the San Joaquin Valley, a sign in a dried almond crop blames Congress for a “Dust Bowl.”

On Sept. 17, the famously hypertensive Fox News commentator Sean Hannity rolled into the west side of the San Joaquin Valley, satellite truck in tow. Months earlier, the federal government had announced that it was slashing water deliveries to local farmers, after it became clear that a 2-year-old drought would grind on for another year.

Central Valley farms are muscular emblems of American-style production agriculture, growing everything from tomatoes for Heinz ketchup to organic spinach for Amy’s-brand pizzas and vegetable pot pies. The farmers on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley are confederated as the Westlands Water District, the largest irrigation district in the United States, which has a reputation for bare-knuckle combativeness. But Westlands has fared badly in the face of both the drought and water-pumping restrictions to protect a threatened fish called the Delta smelt. Last year, farmers in the Westlands district received only 10 percent of the water they hold federal contracts for, forcing them to leave roughly 156,000 acres – about a quarter of the district – unplanted.

Hannity and many others quickly blamed the crisis on the Endangered Species Act. His retinue set up camp on a fallowed field, clipped microphones to the area’s congressional delegation and began beaming the farmers’ plight to the world. As a boom cam floated over the sign-toting, flag-waving throng, Hannity said, “The government has put the interests of a 2-inch minnow before all of the great people that you see out here tonight.” He brandished a blown-up photo of a smelt and said: “This is what this comes down to: No water for farmers, because of this fish.”

The crowd gave a hearty boo, and the cameras turned to the darling of the hour: Rep. Devin Nunes, the hot-headed 37-year-old Republican who represents the neighboring congressional district. “The liberals and the radical environmental groups have been working on this for decades: They’ve been trying to turn this into a desert,” Nunes fumed, warning viewers: “This could happen to you.”

Nunes had, in fact, been hard at work in Washington, D.C., introducing a series of amendments that would force the federal government to ignore the Endangered Species Act when it determines how much water to deliver to farmers. When his efforts failed, Westlands turned to Sen. Jim DeMint, a conservative Republican from South Carolina. Five days after Hannity’s broadcast, DeMint introduced a similar amendment in the Senate. And that’s when the needle skipped off the record.

California’s warhorse Democrat, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, has been a longtime champion of Westlands, but she has also tried to negotiate common ground in the state’s complicated water politics. Back home, the California Legislature – after years of ignoring the problem – was working feverishly to hammer out a sweeping package of bills to relieve the crisis in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. The DeMint amendment would fail, but when Feinstein learned of it, she denounced it as “a kind of Pearl Harbor on everything that we’re trying to do.”

At a press conference not long after, Feinstein approached Tom Birmingham, who runs Westlands, and pulled him aside. Feinstein managed a tight smile, and then shook her fist at Birmingham, who has contributed to her campaigns. “Tom, I’m angry,” she said. “I’m so angry that I want to punch you.”

Chastened, Birmingham later made a rare admission that Westlands had gone too far. “We just made a terrible, terrible mistake,” he said in early November. “We made a mistake, and we need to acknowledge that.”

Farms drank up groundwater

For decades, Westlands farmers relied on groundwater to irrigate the 615,000 acres where tomatoes and almonds are the two most widely grown crops. Farmers raise everything from alfalfa to garbanzos to pomegranates – more than a billion dollars worth of crops in a normal year. But in the 1950s, with water levels plummeting, Westlands lobbied to be included in the federal government’s massive Central Valley Project.

The effort succeeded, and with that, the district’s star was hitched to the fate of the Delta. Two enormous batteries of pumps on the edge of the Delta feed the Central Valley Project and its sister, the State Water Project. Together the projects supply water to more than 1.2 million acres of farmland in Westlands and other water districts, and to more than 25 million people, primarily in Los Angeles and San Diego.

It’s a complex water system, but the Delta’s ecosystem is even more complicated – and fragile. It is a critical link to the annual spawning runs of California salmon and is home to more than 120 species of fish, including the Delta smelt. And, by the late 1980s, it was already becoming clear that the Delta was being pushed too hard.

The first signs of trouble appeared in 1989, when the winter run of Sacramento River chinook salmon fell so low that the federal government added the fish to the endangered species list. Then, in 1993, the Delta smelt was classified as threatened.

For a time, the state and federal governments attempted to confront the problem. The Central Valley Project Improvement Act, passed in 1992, and the Bay Delta Accords, signed in 1994, both aimed to balance the water demands of farms and cities with protection for the Delta’s fisheries. Yet the Delta fisheries only got worse: By 2004, smelt populations had fallen to record lows. And pumping had actually intensified over the same period.

By 2005, water exports from the Delta had reached a record high. “We have been steadily ramping up diversions from that system, year after year, for a long time,” says Barry Nelson, a water policy analyst with the Natural Resources Defense Council. “We haven’t yet seen extinctions, but we’re on the razor’s edge.”

Farms helped, fisheries hurt

Today, the main check against extinction for the smelt is the pumping restrictions required by a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biological opinion. Because the pumps dramatically reshape the hydrology of the Delta, the biological opinion limits pumping during certain periods of the year to protect smelt and other species during key stages in their life cycles. An earlier version of the opinion was far less restrictive; in 2007, federal District Judge Oliver Wanger ruled that more protective measures be put in place.

Those pumping limitations effectively restrict the amount of water that can go south to Westlands and other water users. With the onset of the current drought in 2007, and Wanger’s ruling, water exports plummeted. But the fish – and the communities that depend on them – haven’t fared any better. Last year, salmon runs collapsed so badly that federal regulators shut down the state’s commercial salmon fishery for the second year in a row, throwing fishermen from San Francisco to the North Coast out of work.

What has been lost in much of the coverage of the water crisis is the fact that the drought, not fish-protection restrictions, is the main factor behind the water cutbacks. Lester Snow, California’s top water regulator, and David Hayes, the deputy secretary of the U.S. Interior Department, have pointedly noted that fish-related pumping restrictions accounted for only a quarter of the reduced exports from the Delta last year. An independent report by the Public Policy Institute of California puts the number as low as 15 percent.

A $40 billion balancing act

The gigantic water package that state legislators hammered out in November may breathe new life into the ideal of balancing water extraction and environmental protection. The package requires the state to establish flows through the Delta to the ocean, a critical element for protecting fish populations. It also requires the creation of an oversight council and legal backstops intended to prevent an outright run on the Delta for more water.

More controversially, however, the package lays the groundwork for some version of a peripheral canal, which would allow water users to directly tap the Sacramento River. A canal might help untangle the snarl of competing demands: It would essentially separate the water in the Delta, shunting the water allocated to farmers and cities straight to the pumps and allowing environmental flows to be used to mimic the Delta’s more natural, variable self.

But the proposal has divided environmental groups. “(The) notion that the best way to restore the Bay-Delta is to separate the fish from the water (is) as biologically unsound as it sounds,” says Jonas Minton, the water policy adviser for the Planning and Conservation League. “This is an attempt by large agribusinesses and Southern California developers to take even more water.”

Other environmental groups have endorsed the package. Doug Obegi, a Natural Resources Defense Council attorney, says that the realities of the collapsing Delta have led his group to support the plan. But, he adds, “how it’s operated – whether it’s good for the environment – really does make or break the project.”

The price tag might break it first. All told, the projects in the water package could ring in at more than $40 billion. This November, with a $21 billion budget deficit already hanging over their heads, voters will be asked to approve the publicly financed portion of the plan, an $11 billion bond. Even if voters approve the package, relief could still be far off for Westlands: The canal wouldn’t carry any water until 2018 at the earliest.

“How are we going to survive between now and the time that these long-term solutions can be implemented?” says Birmingham, Westlands’ boss. “If we have to live with the existing biological opinions until 2018, there are a lot of farmers in Westlands Water District that simply will not survive.”

Under siege, Westlands fights

Westlands has a defiant air of invincibility; its leaders have never blinked in the face of trouble. And Birmingham is the man charged with defending the district’s interests. Birmingham tends not to mince words, and few people are as critical as he is of the effort to save the Delta. “The pumping restrictions have done absolutely no good for the fish,” he says. “We’ve dedicated millions of acre-feet of water per year to protect those species, and they’re still declining.”

Westlands is in a genuinely vulnerable position. Before 1993, the Delta pumps could run throughout the year. Then the smelt was listed, and the window during which the projects could pump water grew smaller and smaller. Overall Delta pumping increased between 1990 and 2005, mainly because the pumps worked overtime when the window did open.

But Westlands, owing to the peculiarities of a complicated system of water priorities, has watched its share of the water become much less reliable. Westlands’ water contracts are “junior” to cities and older irrigation districts in the Valley, which get first dibs on water allotments in a drought. And, because the pumping window is now open mainly in the second half of each year, the district no longer can take advantage of any extra water available in the Delta at wetter times of the year, like winter.

The quest to reopen the pumping window lies at the heart of Westlands’ survival strategy. “What we want to do,” says Birmingham, “is restore the ability of those pumps to operate at capacity year-round.”

In search of relief, the district turned to Rep. Nunes and Sen. DeMint for Endangered Species Act waivers last year. Last March, Westlands – through a broader group of local irrigation districts – also sued the federal government to overturn the biological opinion on the Delta smelt.

Yet, even as Westlands aggressively challenges the biological opinions, it has been participating in a quiet series of negotiations to create a Bay-Delta Conservation Plan. That plan will likely form the heart of the Delta-management framework mandated by the new legislative water package.

Ann Hayden, a senior water resource analyst with the Environmental Defense Fund, says, “We’ve made some progress with the Bay-Delta Conservation Plan, but we have a lot of work left to address the needs of these species that are on the tipping point of extinction.”

Westlands and other water users still have not committed to any specific environmental goals in the plan. “We have to tackle the tough issues, and soon,” Hayden says, adding that Westlands’ support for the DeMint amendment has “led us to question how we stay at the table in good faith, when they’re doing this end run around the Endangered Species Act.”

The state’s environmental groups are also watching to see what happens as Congress returns this month. Feinstein has been working on several fronts to help Westlands and other water users. And Birmingham says that Westlands has not ruled out asking Congress for help in getting a waiver from the Endangered Species Act.

“We will pursue every potential remedy,” he says. “Not,” he is careful to add, “without the express consent of Sen. Dianne Feinstein.”

Fallow the land, sell the water?

In recent years, Westlands has become one of the most water-efficient irrigation districts in the state. But in any year with a less-than-full supply of water from the Central Valley Project, the district runs a deficit that it must cover by buying water in the open market or by pumping groundwater.

As the entire state grapples with drier times, agencies like the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which supplies water to 19 million people in Los Angeles and San Diego, are looking to irrigation districts like Westlands as potential sources for water transfers. Birmingham and many Westlands landowners are adamant that the district won’t sell its water to outsiders. “It hasn’t happened,” he says, “and it isn’t going to happen.”

Still, the prospect of selling water does quietly figure into the farmers’ calculus. “It’s gotten a lot of talk,” says Dan Errotabere, a Westlands farmer and board member. “We’ve been squeezed so hard that now people are giving up water supply to survive. If you’re a financial steward of whatever operation you’ve got, you have to consider whether it’s better to park the ground and sell the water next year.”

John Diener is the nephew of one of Westland’s founding fathers. Although he seems happiest dispensing folk wisdom from behind the wheel of his GMC pickup, he is known as one of the most progressive farmers in Westlands.

In November, Diener wheeled his GMC through his fields, checking on a crop of spinach. He had fallowed about 750 acres, and when I asked what happens next, Diener laughed: “We pray a lot!”

He thought some more. “We would like to see some biological opinions reviewed. And, God willing, it rains.”

Rep. Devin Nunes, above, introduced a series of amendments that would force the federal government to ignore the Endangered Species Act when it determines how much water to deliver to farmers.

“We’ve been squeezed so hard that now people are giving up water supply to survive,” says Westlands farmer and board member Dan Errotabere, above.

Tom Birmingham, above, who runs Westlands, admitted the irrigation district went too far in supporting the failed DeMint amendment.

The court battle involving Mayor Kevin Johnson’s strong-mayor initiative has thrust some potent questions before Sacramento and all of California:

Can voters go directly to the ballot to overhaul or modernize their City Hall? Or does the state constitution force them to go through a lengthy charter revision process that, to some extent, can be checked by forces resistant to change?

Such questions are now before the courts. They were put there because of a lawsuit filed by Bill Camp, a Sacramento labor leader. Camp argues that Johnson’s strong mayor initiative – which would give the mayor broad new powers, including some now granted to the city manager and the City Council – goes beyond a simple amendment to the city charter.

Camp calls it a complete overhaul that must be handled through a charter revision instead of a direct initiative.

And in his final ruling Jan. 21, Sacramento Superior Court Judge Loren McMaster agreed with Camp, blocking the initiative from the June ballot.

Citing provisions in the California Constitution, McMaster said such a major change to city governance can happen only in one of two ways: 1) if the City Council agrees to put such a change before voters; 2) if voters agree to elect a charter reform commission, which then proposes a revision that would be subject to a second ballot vote.

We make no pretense of being legal scholars, so we will not second-guess McMaster’s interpretation of the law. The soundness of that ruling will soon be given a second test, since Johnson’s supporters have appealed the decision to the 3rd District Court of Appeal.

Yet even if McMaster ruled correctly, the legal hoops that spring from his decision are potentially daunting. Across the country, cities are trying to reinvent themselves, improve governance and compete against other growing municipalities and suburbs.

McMaster’s ruling suggests that, at least here in California, civic activists can pursue change only if they get approval from the city council (which may have no interest in ceding power), or if they go through a process that is costly, lengthy and convoluted. While such deliberation makes sense for something as consequential as changing the California Constitution, cities are smaller and more closely tied to their voters. They should face fewer roadblocks going forward.

Just to be clear: The Bee has not taken a position yet on Johnson’s strong-mayor plan. While we think Sacramento’s mayor needs enhanced authority, we fear that Johnson’s proposal goes too far – by proposing to give him and future mayors power over the city attorney.

That said, The Bee has long embraced the ability of voters to use initiatives for limited purposes – most expressly, for political reform. This is one of those moments.

It is easy to look back now and wish the reform process had unfolded differently. Johnson went straight to the ballot with his proposal, sidestepping the City Council and emboldening his critics. Had he played it differently, it’s possible – although not likely – that he and the City Council could have crafted a charter revision that would have achieved some of his goals, and now be on the ballot.

It’s too late for Monday morning quarterbacking. The matter is before the judiciary, and if the courts affirm McMaster’s ruling, it will be a setback for municipal reform – not just here, but across California.

If this ruling stands, lawmakers will need to step in and make a constitutional fix. Voters deserve the right to go to the ballot and fix City Hall when it is not serving their interests.

Blair Bobier

Here in California, crisis is giving way to opportunity. The state’s apocalyptic budget situation has yielded an equally dramatic solution: retooling state government through a citizen-initiated constitutional convention.

The rest of the country would be wise not only to pay attention, but to follow suit. California, the ungovernable, holds lessons for the United States, the ungovernable. And if history is any guide, what happens in California – from political movements to cultural revolutions to technological innovations – winds up being replicated throughout the nation.

The California constitution is a veritable Tower of Babel – an unwieldy, self-contradictory document badly in need of reform. The U.S. Constitution, a model of innovation at the time of its adoption, is similarly ill-suited to govern the lives of its increasingly diverse citizenry. Created by and for an exclusionary elitist society, the original Constitution established a government for a fledgling nation that was then a thin strip along the Eastern seaboard with a population of 2.5 million people. Not only did the original document enshrine slavery as an accepted practice, it created a number of blatantly anti-democratic institutions.

The past few decades have seen a number of campaigns focused on romanticized notions of “taking our country back,” as though the country actually belonged to “We, the People” in the first place.

In truth, it never did: the Declaration’s pursuit of happiness was not meant to include people of color, women and working-class citizens; all have been enfranchised, but only after years of struggle. Now the most dangerous threat to American democracy is the stubborn and misguided belief that we actually have one. The Supreme Court’s recent Citizens United decision, expanding corporate influence over the electoral process, should challenge this unfounded assumption.

Despite our imperfect national origins, this much should be self-evident in the 21st century: Each and every American should have an equal voice in our country’s political process. Yet the Supreme Court’s decision, equating money with speech, defies this logic as well as the basic tenets of democracy. Is there any doubt that corporate cash buys access and influence far beyond that of the ordinary citizen? Equating cash with speech subverts the fundamental principle of one person, one vote because the more cash one possesses, the more votes one can buy.

Congressional action to address the court’s decision would be, at best, an imperfect solution since the court is the ultimate arbiter of the Constitution. That leaves one option: amending the Constitution. Our modern, multi-ethnic, transcontinental nation must embrace systemic change if we have any hope to match our ideals of democracy with the realities of our political practices.

In addition to restoring free speech, the Senate and the presidency must be transformed as democratic institutions. The Senate is remarkably unrepresentative: California’s 38 million people have equal representation with the 500,000 residents of Wyoming. The composition of the Senate, the vestige of an ancient compromise related to the perpetuation of slavery, threatens any legitimate claims this country has to democracy. One has to wonder: would a genuinely representative Senate, uninfluenced by corporate lobbyists, still be debating whether to provide all U.S. citizens with the same access to health care that the senators themselves enjoy?

Like the Senate, the Electoral College is a historical anachronism born of horse-trading and expediency. Since its electoral formula is based, in part, on the composition of the Senate, it, too, is unquestionably anti-democratic. Whether one person, the president, should have ultimate responsibility for the governance of 300 million people is best left for another debate. For now, suffice it to say that, at a minimum, that individual should be elected by a majority vote of the people.

Although George Bush’s 2000 election is perhaps the starkest example of the shortcomings of the Electoral College, it must be noted that Bill Clinton was twice elected without a majority vote. This irrational electoral process is not only undemocratic, it results in a political beauty pageant devoid of serious scrutiny or debate. Using instant-runoff voting to elect our president, as the Republic of Ireland does, would encourage consideration of a diversity of candidates, allow for substantive debate and ensure that our national leader has the broadest support possible.

Free speech for all, a representative government and a democratically elected president: “The world’s greatest democracy” should settle for nothing less.

“The Catcher in the Rye” is of course J.D. Salinger’s best-known work. But with his death last week at age 91 after decades of seclusion, what may be unleashed from his jealously guarded vault – if any?

At the end, with J.D. Salinger dead at 91, we have no memories of him. That is to say, we have no cranky anecdotes about thrown drinks, no second cousins who once stood next to him at a roulette table, no paparazzi pictures of him with his long face and solemn eyes staring with predatory kindness at some starlet in Malibu (careful not to look at her breasts, of course).

He was a sort of saint to his upscale readers, a foe of the cruel and the vulgar, a practitioner of Zen Buddhism, it was said, a man who in his writing found his masculinity in sensitivity and self-deprecation. Not like Hemingway on safari or Fitzgerald in the fountain in front of the Plaza Hotel or Kerouac hurling himself back and forth across America.

They were famous public figures. Salinger was merely famous, idolized, envied; an acutely private figure who was a recluse for more than 50 years in Cornish, N.H. He was still famous when he died.

But we have no memories of him, to speak of, aside from gritty memoirs by his daughter, Margaret, and the writer Joyce Maynard, who, as a freshman at Yale, found herself in a claustrophobic grind of a relationship with him. And lawsuits protecting his privacy and copyrights, and the endless rumors of insanity or Buddhist monkhood.

Back when he was publishing – his last short story appeared in the New Yorker in 1965 – he was a demigod in a cult that seemed like a conspiracy between his books and his readers. He had mystique and a secondhand charisma that came from his prose, not his persona.

His glamour dwindled with the decades. Once, believe it or not, boys wanted to be J.D. Salinger, cool and knowing. They thought they were, in fact, Holden Caulfield, the hero of “The Catcher in the Rye,” Salinger’s first book and only novel, now appearing on better high school reading lists.

Making reading required takes its toll on culture heroes. And writers were once culture heroes in America, people you wanted to touch, like weeping statues or movie stars.

Salinger was once considered subversive, in his wry, quiet, tweedy way, the sort of guy who stands in a corner for the whole party and then goes home with the most beautiful girl there. But how can you be subversive when your books are assigned by the sort of educational pooh-bahs Holden might have spotted as phonies – a concept he taught us in an age when authenticity was the great virtue to sensitive outsiders?

In their better moments, Holden and members of Salinger’s vast, epically self-conscious Glass family would have seen the phonies for what they were, but – saints that they were – they would have forgiven them with the ironic condescension that rang clear and cool as a tuning fork in their creator’s prose.

Gone, all gone: the authenticity, the spirituality, the writer as hero, the belief that literature could save us, as a critic and prophet named Lionel Trilling said somewhere back then.

Still, for those of us growing older until we find ourselves growing old, hope lives on, and Salinger’s death is a happy occasion.

The manuscripts: There are said to be novels, stories, maybe even haiku – Salinger brought haiku to our attention, never dreaming that they would become banal, refrigerator poetry brought home from school. These manuscripts are in bank vaults or salt mines or someplace safe from the clamoring crowd, it is said.

Does he become America’s Proust, with endless chronicles of the Glass family, some of whose children, notably Waker and Walt, had yet to come onstage when Salinger stopped publishing?

One hears of a war novel and thinks of his finest short story, “For Esme – With Love and Squalor,” about a sensitive, ironic, condescending but forgiving soldier whose nervous system is shattered by combat, as Salinger’s seems to have been, in World War II Europe.

Could a whole novel be that good? If so, if so …

On the other hand, his last published story, called “Hapworth 16, 1924,” was a pretentious, self-reflexive slog of the sort you might expect when a writer creates a 7-year-old genius-saint character, Seymour Glass, who writes a 25,000-word letter from camp.

The story is not about the letter; it is the letter.

Even in 1961, when Time magazine was putting Salinger on its cover, the Glass family saga was getting a little tiresome, and it would get more so, to the point where we, his faithful readers, found ourselves forgiving Salinger, rather than Salinger forgiving us.

Salinger had gone out of his way to meet Hemingway during the war, and Hemingway was said to have called him a “helluva” talent.

Hemingway was a writer who made unhappiness beautiful. Salinger took it a step further – with the same uncanny ability to evoke the world his characters move through, he made it a virtue.

Oh, how I needed this reassurance when I was 12 or 13. (I’m 68 now.) One day, I was looking at my parents’ bookshelves and asked about that odd title.

“It’s too old for you,” my mother said.

That night I turned on my light and started reading.

“Catcher” got me with the first line, and I became a devotee, newly coined from the dross of adolescence into the gold of irony and self-consciousness. I wasn’t just agonized with my despairs. I was a member of some order of righteous adolescence, a kid standing in the corner and watching the phonies at the party.

I could go on, but I’ll take caution from that first line: “If you really want to hear about it …” You don’t, of course, because you may well have your own Salinger story to tell.

We can hope, in the name of redemption, both his and ours, that Salinger has his own stories waiting for us, at long last.

Will it be the next iPod or the new Newton? If there were an app for foreseeing truly revolutionary technology, Apple could have made a bundle in the weeks preceding last week’s unveiling of its new, tablet-size portable computer dubbed the iPad.

Though no one knew exactly what it would be called or do, techno-pundits gushed that it could “change everything,” starting with newspapers, books and television.

One writer called it, only partly tongue-in-cheek, “the most eagerly awaited tablet since Moses.”

Wednesday, Apple chief executive officer Steve Jobs came down from the mountain with a device that surprised on some counts – such as its price, starting at $499 – but that fell shy of the hype on others.

“I don’t know if it’s going to save publishing,” said Lance Ulanoff, editor in chief of PC Magazine, after attending the iPad’s San Francisco debut. “I think it’s too soon to tell whether or not this thing is going to be successful. But I don’t think people were disappointed.”

Ulanoff and others said the iPad’s greatest strength may lie in its versatility. Rather than simply appeal to consumers who want a new way to read, he said, the iPad “could have a significant impact on how we enjoy content of all types: newspapers, TV, music, books.”

– Philadelphia Inquirer

Images: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images; Charlton Heston from the movie “The Ten Commandments”/Paramount; Steve Jobs’ face AP/Paul Sakuma

As the state struggles to launch a modest parole reform that would reduce California’s dangerously overcrowded prisons, self-styled “victim rights” groups have raised politically potent objections.

Legislators must not allow these groups, financed in large part by the economically self-interested prison guards union, to derail a sensible release plan designed to save money and improve public safety.

Those targeted for release under the new non-revocable parole plan are the least-dangerous inmates with the greatest chance for success on the outside. Under the plan, hammered out by the Legislature and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger – hardly a soft-on-crime politician – approximately 6,500 low-risk inmates a year would be allowed to earn early release credits beginning this week by completing rehabilitation and education programs. Those eligible cannot have been convicted of a serious or violent felony or a sexually violent crime. They cannot have committed a serious disciplinary offense while in prison or be a validated prison gang member or associate.

While they would be subject to random police stops and searches, inmates released on non-revocable parole would not have to be supervised or report regularly to parole officers like all other ex-cons in California. Nor could they be returned to prison for parole violations. Those features of the plan would reduce the crushing parolee caseloads that have strained the state’s parole system to a breaking point.

Today, parole agents routinely supervise 70 parolees on average. Non-revocable parole cuts the average caseload to 48, leaving agents more time to concentrate on those ex-cons who pose the greatest risk to the public. That will improve public safety.

If they commit a crime, the 6,500 non-revocable parolees face arrest, prosecution and imprisonment just like anyone else. But they cannot be returned to prison for three and four months for minor parole violations.

Prior to instituting this new release program, California was one of only two states in the nation that placed every released inmate on parole. High numbers of parolees churned out high numbers of parole violations. Currently in California, almost 16,000 inmates, 11.5 percent of the entire prison population, are parole violators usually serving between three and six months in prison. The constant churning of minor parole violators in and out of state prison costs California taxpayers a bundle, while doing nothing to make communities safer.

By reducing the number of inmates returned to prison for parole violations, non-revocable parole will free expensive prison and county jail space for more serious offenders. It will save the state an estimated $100 million.

The state’s plan comes as federal courts have ordered California to reduce its dangerously overcrowded prison population by 40,000. Non-revocable parole will not lower populations by that much, but it is a good first step.

To get a real handle on prison population and cost, California needs to implement sentencing reforms that reserve expensive prison beds for those criminals who represent a serious threat to public safety and find alternative sanctions for offenders who do not. Non-revocable parole begins that necessary transformation.

J.D. Salinger

Today, the idea of adolescence as a separate, often troubled, period between childhood and adulthood is entrenched in American culture. But the notion of that middle period came into vogue, as an American creation, only in the 1890s.

And the word “teenager” appears for the first time only in 1941 (though the term “teen age” had appeared in 1921).

So when J.D. Salinger began to explore the world of adolescence in short stories in the mid-1940s, culminating in the novel “The Catcher in the Rye” (1951), he gave unique voice to the self-absorption and angst of this separate age-group culture. Critic Jonathan Yardley, in fact, believes the novel “created adolescence as we now know it, a condition that barely existed until Salinger defined it.”

The main character, Holden Caulfield, a 16-year-old from a well-off family in the post-World War II boom, spoke directly to teenagers (and still does today).

You didn’t have to be Depression-era poor to be alienated and anxious, struggling between the innocence of childhood and the perceived corruption (“phoniness”) of the adult world.

In the mid-1950s, Salinger turned to stories about the Glass family, including what became a novella about the youngest of the Glass siblings, “Franny and Zooey” (1961) – an expansion on his theme of misfits in a culture of phonies.

On the cover, Salinger wrote, “Both stories are early, critical entries in a narrative series I’m doing about a family of settlers in twentieth-century New York, the Glasses.

“It is a long-term project, patently an ambitious one. I love working on these Glass stories, I’ve been waiting for them most of my life, and I think I have fairly decent, monomaniacal plans to finish them with due care and all-available skill.”

Salinger died Wednesday at the age of 91. He lived as a recluse in New Hampshire from the mid-1950s and published his last story in 1965.

He never stopped writing, however. That means we may soon hear more from Salinger, if and when his writings from recent decades are published posthumously.

Sunne Wright McPeak

Our ability to connect through high-speed Internet access – referred to generically as broadband – is improving our lives in many ways. It is helping us share information and images, research and apply for jobs, stay in touch with loved ones, and access entertainment and news.

Broadband saves consumers time and money, increases productivity in the economy, and reduces impacts on the environment. And, now, broadband will even help save lives and improve health care in California.

Clinics and hospitals in rural communities and underserved urban neighborhoods will be connected through the California Telehealth Network, or CTN, to major medical centers, trauma facilities and specialty care and, thus, able to access health and medical expertise remotely. This will both expand access to critical services and improve quality of health care. And, it has the potential to help control costs.

CTN facilities will be able to better serve patients by providing access to specialists and other health care professionals in different locations, sharing X-rays and other diagnostic tests instantaneously, and even viewing treatments and procedures from afar in distant emergency rooms or surgical centers as they happen. They will have access in real time to the best and most up-to-date information and practitioners in university teaching hospitals and other medical centers across California and the nation.

Also, all the data about patient health and outcomes can be collected and shared simultaneously to assure appropriate and effective treatment regimes for the individual patient.

Finally, with ubiquitous broadband use by all Californians, in the not-too-distant future patients will be able to be monitored at home or work for both acute episodes of illness and longer-term chronic diseases – which will save time and money for both consumers and providers by reducing unnecessary visits to medical facilities, keeping people out of hospitals, promoting efficiency in health care, and linking fragmented segments of the health care system.

For example, pediatricians in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at the UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento will be able to consult via the California Telehealth Network with several rural hospitals to save lives of high-risk newborns. UCD neurosurgeons will be able to assist emergency room physicians in rural hospitals treat accident trauma victims without delay.

And, Sutter Hospital specialists in internal medicine will be able to support rural clinics in caring for patients with advanced cardiovascular disease.

The California Telehealth Network is being made possible by a $22.1 million grant from the Federal Communications Commission with $3.6 million match funding from the California Emerging Technology Fund, capitalized by both AT&T and Verizon through an agreement with the California Public Utilities Commission.

The University of California is currently managing the first phase of development of CTN on behalf of a consortium of state agencies, provider and stakeholder organizations, and foundations.

Initially, more than 860 facilities will be connected, including some of the most remote rural areas and tribal lands in the state.

An application is pending before the federal government for funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to expand CTN to approximately 2,000 sites – about a third of the sites in medically underserved communities, spotlighting the enormous need statewide. That is why the state of California and other funders, such as the California HealthCare Foundation, United Health Group/PacifiCare and the National Coalition for Health Integration, also have stepped forward to support CTN to harness technology to work for both patients and taxpayers.

The California Telehealth Network is a bold idea that will transform the delivery of health care – extending resources and saving lives. It will be a signature component of health care reform in California – to improve access and quality of medical care while helping control costs.

Roger
Dickinson

A great opportunity is before us all. It is an opportunity shared by every city, neighborhood, household and individual in Sacramento County.

Beginning in March, each of us can play an important role in improving our county by participating in the 2010 census. We are in a partnership with the U.S. Census Bureau and the California Complete Count Committee. The goal is to have a complete count of who lives in Sacramento County.

As chair of Sacramento County’s 2010 Census Complete Count Committee, I am asking you to look for, complete and return your 2010 census form as soon as it arrives. I ask for your participation because the census provides benefits to our community, state and nation.

At stake is a share of the $400 billion distributed annually throughout the nation. This funding helps to develop education programs, public safety, housing, roads and bridges, job training centers, human and community services. Our community-based organizations use census data to develop social service programs for seniors and children. Businesses use the data to identify where to locate new manufacturing, offices, shopping centers, movie theatres, and banks. All of these activities lead to economic recovery, growth and new jobs.

A complete count ensures that our voice is heard in the state and federal legislatures because census data determines our representation.

From the 2000 census, California gained one seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. In the 2010 census, however, California is in danger of losing representation according to the latest population projections.

Each of us matters. A complete count is critical. The loss in funding for government services for just one uncounted person in Sacramento County was estimated at almost $1,000 by the 2000 Census Monitoring Board. The undercount in Sacramento County in 2000 was 13,343 people. That’s a loss of funding for Sacramento County of $13 million per year and more than $130 million in 10 years. We have so much to gain with a complete count.

You should also know that census participation is safe. The information you provide on your census form is confidential. By law, the Census Bureau cannot share respondents’ answers with anyone, including other federal agencies and law enforcement entities. All Census Bureau employees take an oath of nondisclosure and are sworn for life to protect the confidentiality of the data. Stiff penalties exist for violations of the oath.

The word is getting out. 2010 Census Complete Count Committees have and are being formed to make sure that no one is missed and that all are counted. Television and radio announcements are being broadcast. Our community newspapers, neighborhood fliers, and church bulletins carry this important message. It’s being delivered in several different languages, too. All residents must be counted, including people of all ages, races, ethnic groups, citizens and noncitizens.

The easiest and most efficient method of participating is filling out your form upon its arrival and sending it back in the postage-paid return envelope. Questionnaire Assistance Centers will be available to assist those unable to read or understand the census form, and a Language Assistance Guide will also be available in 59 languages at all QAC locations.

For those with visual impairments, the Language Assistance Guide will be available in large print and Braille. Deaf and hard-of-hearing persons who do not have access to Video Relay Service can call the TDD number, (866) 783-2010, starting Feb. 25.

The 2010 census is one of our most important civic events. Now, it is up to us to make sure everyone is counted in Sacramento County. Ten questions in 10 minutes are all that is being asked of you. By completing and returning your census form, you are performing an important civic duty and helping to paint a new portrait of America.

Last week, the Center for American Progress, a think tank with close ties to the Obama administration, published an acerbic essay about the difference between true deficit hawks and showy “deficit peacocks.” You can identify deficit peacocks, readers were told, by the way they pretend that our budget problems can be solved with gimmicks like a temporary freeze in nondefense discretionary spending.

One week later, in the State of the Union address, President Barack Obama proposed a temporary freeze in nondefense discretionary spending.

Wait, it gets worse.

To justify the freeze, Obama used language that was almost identical to widely ridiculed remarks early last year by John Boehner, the House minority leader. Boehner then: “American families are tightening their belt, but they don’t see government tightening its belt.” Obama now: “Families across the country are tightening their belts and making tough decisions. The federal government should do the same.”

What’s going on here? The answer, presumably, is that Obama’s advisers believed he could score some political points by doing the deficit-peacock strut. I think they were wrong, that he did himself more harm than good. Either way, however, the fact that anyone thought such a dumb policy idea was politically smart is bad news because it’s an indication of the extent to which we’re failing to come to grips with our economic and fiscal problems.

The nature of America’s troubles is easy to state. We’re in the aftermath of a severe financial crisis, which has led to mass job destruction. The only thing that’s keeping us from sliding into a second Great Depression is deficit spending. And right now we need more of that deficit spending because millions of American lives are being blighted by high unemployment, and the government should be doing everything it can to bring unemployment down.

In the long run, however, even the U.S. government has to pay its way. And the long-run budget outlook was dire even before the recent surge in the deficit, mainly because of inexorably rising health care costs. Looking ahead, we’re going to have to find a way to run smaller, not larger, deficits.

How can this apparent conflict between short-run needs and long-run responsibilities be resolved?

Intellectually, it’s not hard at all. We should combine actions that create jobs now with other actions that will reduce deficits later. And economic officials in the Obama administration understand that logic: For the past year they have been very clear that their vision involves combining fiscal stimulus to help the economy now with health care reform to help the budget later.

The sad truth, however, is that our political system doesn’t seem capable of doing what’s necessary.

On jobs, it’s now clear that the Obama stimulus wasn’t nearly big enough. No need now to resolve the question of whether the administration should or could have sought a bigger package early last year. Either way, the point is that the boost from the stimulus will start to fade out in around six months, yet we’re still facing years of mass unemployment. The latest projections from the Congressional Budget Office say that the average unemployment rate next year will be only slightly lower than the current, disastrous, 10 percent.

Yet there is little sentiment in Congress for any major new job-creation efforts.

Meanwhile, health care reform faces a troubled outlook.

Congressional Democrats may yet manage to pass a bill; they’ll be committing political suicide if they don’t. But there’s no question that Republicans were very successful at demonizing the plan. And, crucially, what they demonized most effectively were the cost-control efforts: modest, totally reasonable measures to ensure that Medicare dollars are spent wisely became evil “death panels.”

So if health reform fails, you can forget about any serious effort to rein in rising Medicare costs. And even if it succeeds, many politicians will have learned a hard lesson: You don’t get any credit for doing the fiscally responsible thing. It’s better, for the sake of your career, to just pretend that you’re fiscally responsible – that is, to be a deficit peacock.

So we’re paralyzed in the face of mass unemployment and out-of-control health care costs.

Don’t blame Obama. There’s only so much one man can do, even if he sits in the White House. Blame our political culture instead, a culture that rewards hypocrisy and irresponsibility rather than serious efforts to solve America’s problems. And blame the filibuster, under which 41 senators can make the country ungovernable, if they choose – and they have so chosen.

I’m sorry to say this, but the state of the union – not the speech, but the thing itself – isn’t looking very good.

Sacramento City Manager Ray Kerridge came to town with a mission: “Get the Customer to Success.” While he deserves credit for streamlining a Byzantine development process, Sacramentans now are wondering about the flip side: The “customer” has become synonymous with the “developer” – not the public.

That downside became obvious in Natomas.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency found that Natomas levees don’t meet minimum 100-year federal flood protection standards. That means that new home construction has been banned since Dec. 8, 2008 (unless homes are elevated 33 feet above sea level, about 21 feet in Natomas). That’s a de facto building moratorium until levee upgrades are completed.

That didn’t stop Dan Waters, a city customer service supervisor (and son of City Council member Robbie Waters). An outside investigation, presented to the council Tuesday, revealed actions that can only be described as outrageous:

• City code does not allow building permits to be transferred from one site to another. Yet when the developer wanted to switch 35 permits (15 of which had expired) to 35 new lots in the high-risk flood zone, Waters prepared permits “so that construction could commence.”

• The city’s computer system flashes a FEMA alert for lots in this high-risk flood zone, so city staff know to apply the proper restrictions. Waters overrode the computer system to issue permits without the FEMA requirements.

• A city inspector “expressed concerns that this violated FEMA regulations.” Waters told a supervisor that FEMA had approved the permits – which was not true. That supervisor, according to Assistant City Manager John Dangberg, relied on the false information (without doing any further checking). He told the city inspector to proceed.

Dangberg said Wednesday that Waters believed he was “bringing the customer to success.” And Assistant City Attorney Sandra Talbott said Thursday that Waters believed he had authority from higher management – though the investigation concluded that management appeared not to have “actual knowledge about this permit activity.”

Something is terribly wrong when staff believe they can ignore laws and regulations to “get the customer to success.”

As of December the developer had completed and sold 10 homes. Did the lender tell these families that they were buying homes in a high-risk flood zone without FEMA- required elevations?

Of the unfinished homes, 23 are just slabs; two are partially done. City officials have asked FEMA to allow these 25 remaining homes to “be completed, sold and occupied.”

If FEMA agrees, city officials want the council to modify the city building code to backdate these 35 permits before the Dec. 8, 2008, FEMA elevation requirements took effect – a bad precedent.

Waters has been moved to code enforcement, after serving a one-week suspension without pay, a slap on the wrist. No heads have rolled in the development department. Business as usual.

We attempted to talk directly to Kerridge, but he referred inquiries to Dangberg. Someone needs to be held accountable for the Natomas permitting violations. If it’s not Waters or his immediate bosses, then it must be the city manager.

In investigating the death of 4 1/2-year-old Amariana Crenshaw, The Bee uncovered strong evidence the foster child may have died before her body was burned, a possibility police must reexamine in their ongoing investigation.

Yet beyond that singular question, the series documented serious deficiencies in the state’s foster care system and Sacramento County’s Child Protective Services.

Reporter Margie Lundstrom examined hundreds of pages of state reports and the county’s CPS case file. It paints a nightmarish picture of Amariana’s life in foster care.

When Sacramento child welfare workers placed Amariana and her siblings with Tracy Dossman, the foster parent already had half a dozen other foster children, four of them teenagers, many listed as “special needs,” in her home. A state licensing official who visited described “chaos,” with older teenagers placed in charge of younger kids.

The house was extremely cold, and a social worker reported that Dossman had refused to heat it all winter. She was twice cited for having a padlocked refrigerator. In 2004, the year before Amariana arrived, a teacher reported a 5-year-old foster child under Dossman’s care came to school wearing “extremely dirty” clothes, no socks, and was “always hungry.” The girl said she was sleeping on the floor without blankets.

Amariana’s biological parents and others repeatedly complained about unexplained bruises and split lips the child suffered, complaints CPS discounted. The county also ignored the close personal and financial ties Dossman had with two agency officials. One social worker complained that the relationships undermined efforts to force Dossman to comply with state foster care standards.

Amariana is dead, but Dossman remains a licensed foster care provider. That is an affront to exemplary foster care parents who do courageous work on behalf of such children. It should also light a fire under state and county officials whose single and sole mission should be to protect these vulnerable kids.

The El Dorado Irrigation District, a utility that serves 100,000 customers, finds itself facing a storm of protest over a proposed 35 percent rate hike. Yet the financial fiasco that district now confronts was not only foreseeable, it was predicted.

In October 2003, the present board placed EID on this collision course when it proceeded to take out $166 million in mostly variable-rate debt to finance an extravagant five-year capital improvement program.

Just before the vote, former director Richard Akin spoke these prophetic words: “A dark cloud of debt will burden EID ratepayers for generations to come.” He then resigned from the board in protest.

Flush with cash and under the pretext of building a world-class utility, EID proceeded to spend like there was no tomorrow, according to documents obtained through an open records request. The full details of the frivolous spending are too great to list here, but they include:

• Expenses to water conferences for friends of board members.

• Four-figure restaurant bills.

• Contracts to friends of board members, such as $10,000 to research how other water districts get their legal advice.

• Two infomercials (costing approximately $50,000) that aired late in the night to let insomniacs know what a world-class utility EID is.

Beyond the borrowing and the extravagant spending, the major contributor to this fiasco was the dramatic increase in labor costs. First, there was wholesale upgrade in salaries based on a faulty salary survey and as payback for support of the employee association in the election of the present board.

If that was not enough of a thank-you, the board then raised the CalPERS retirement benefit formula from 2.0 to 2.7 at 55, retroactive for all years of EID service.

The consequences of this action were the topic of a Jan. 15 editorial in The Bee (“A pension perk that doesn’t wash”) which reported a nearly fivefold increase in pension costs to EID, to $3.03 million.

If that wasn’t enough, the board and a previous general manager proceeded to greatly expand the staff by 70 percent – from 180 to 305 employees – in less than five years, according to the district’s 2008 financial report. Collectively, these actions tripled labor costs, from $11 million to $34 million in just six years. Labor costs now account for nearly three-fourths of the operating budget.

The cracks in the dam began showing in late 2007 when Auction Rate Securities, one of the debt instruments issued by EID, began commanding high interest rates. In time, EID was able to convert this debt to another type of debt instrument, but the damage had been done.

As the recession and collapse of the housing market hit home in 2009, EID, for reasons that defy logic, issued another $133 million in new debt at an average interest rate of 5.94 percent to finance a five-year capital improvement program. Many of the high-ticket items in this list were to support residential growth and have since been put on hold. This new debt issuance raised the district’s outstanding debt to the staggering level of nearly $400 million.

Why would Wall Street lend such large sums to a small utility? Simple. The district pledged the repayment of debt with rate hikes, if necessary, and promised to keep revenues at 125 percent of the debt service, even if it required raising rates.

The premise behind all this borrowing and spending was that revenues would continue to grow from EID’s high water and wastewater rates, tax revenues and the sale of water and sewer connections. But property tax revenues declined and real-estate developers stopped buying water connections. EID’s board gambled, and we the ratepayers lost.

Up until this point, the house of cards had been maintained in large part by rate increases. In October 2003, the board voted to make an automatic increase in rates every year on Jan. 1, for six years through 2009. In comparison, in the 10 years preceding the present board, water rates were increased only once for 25 percent.

In addition, there have been additional surcharges to offset loss of property tax revenues taken by the state and for the reservoir cover project. As a result, an average summer water bill in El Dorado Hills has increased by 47 percent under this board.

The increases have not been limited to rates. The cost of a residential water connection has increased from $6,766 in 2001 to $16,640. Other fees have also been dramatically increased. EID’s options are to cut costs or raise rates. It has chosen to raise rates. The ratepayers did not create this problem, so the board should start by eliminating the extravagances, such as health club memberships and health benefits. They should then look at those who have benefited by their mismanagement. Any further rate increases are unjustifiable. The ratepayers should submit their Proposition 218 protest letter.

As former directors of EID, we are asking the Legislature’s Joint Audit Committee to undertake a review of EID finances. Ratepayers can help support this request by writing or calling their lawmakers.

The real scandal surrounding the failed Christmas Day airline bombing was not the fact that a terrorist got on a plane – that can happen to any administration, as it surely did to the Bush administration – but what happened afterward when Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was captured and came under the full control of the U.S. government.

After 50 minutes of questioning him, the Obama administration chose, reflexively and mindlessly, to give the chatty terrorist the right to remain silent. Which he immediately did, undoubtedly denying us crucial information about al-Qaida in Yemen, which had trained, armed and dispatched him.

We have since learned that the decision to Mirandize Abdulmutallab had been made without the knowledge of or consultation with (1) the secretary of defense, (2) the secretary of homeland security, (3) the director of the FBI, (4) the director of the National Counterterrorism Center or (5) the director of national intelligence.

The Justice Department acted not just unilaterally but unaccountably. Obama’s own director of national intelligence said that Abdulmutallab should have been interrogated by the HIG, the administration’s new High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group.

Perhaps you hadn’t heard the term. Well, in the very first week of his presidency, Obama abolished by executive order the Bush-Cheney interrogation procedures and pledged to study a substitute mechanism.

In August, the administration announced the establishment of the HIG, housed in the FBI but overseen by the National Security Council.

Where was it during the Abdulmutallab case? Not available, admitted National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair, because it had been conceived only for use abroad. Had not one person in this vast administration of highly nuanced sophisticates considered the possibility of a terror attack on American soil? It gets worse. Blair later had to explain that the HIG was not deployed because it does not yet exist. After a year! I suppose this administration was so busy deploying scores of the country’s best lawyerly minds on finding the most rapid way to release Gitmo miscreants that it could not be bothered to establish a single operational HIG team to interrogate at-large miscreants with actionable intelligence that might save American lives.

Travesties of this magnitude are not lost on the American people.

One of the reasons Scott Brown won in Massachusetts was his focus on the Mirandizing of Abdulmutallab.

Of course, this case is just a reflection of a larger problem: an administration that insists on treating Islamist terrorism as a law-enforcement issue. Which is why the Justice Department’s other egregious terror decision, granting Khalid Sheik Mohammed a civilian trial in New York, is now the subject of a letter from six senators – three Republicans, two Democrats and Joe Lieberman – asking Attorney General Eric Holder to reverse the decision.

Lieberman and Sen. Susan Collins had written an earlier letter asking for Abdulmutallab to be turned over to the military for renewed interrogation. The problem is, it’s hard to see how that decision gets reversed. Once you’ve read a man Miranda rights, what do you say? We are idiots? On second thought …

Hence the agitation over the KSM trial. This one can be reversed, and it’s a good surrogate for this administration’s insistence upon criminalizing – and therefore trivializing – a war on terror that has now struck three times in one year within the United States, twice with effect (the Arkansas killer and the Fort Hood shooter) and once with a shockingly near miss (Abdulmutallab).

On the KSM civilian trial, sentiment is widespread that it is quite insane to spend $200 million a year to give the killer of 3,000 innocents the largest propaganda platform on earth, while at the same time granting civilian rights of cross-examination and discovery that risk betraying U.S. intelligence sources and methods.

Accordingly, Sen. Lindsey Graham and Rep. Frank Wolf have gone beyond appeals to the administration and are planning to introduce a bill to block funding for the trial. It’s an important measure. It makes flesh an otherwise abstract issue – should terrorists be treated as enemy combatants or criminal defendants? The vote will force members of Congress to declare themselves. There will be no hiding from the question.

Congress may not be able to roll back the Abdulmutallab travesty.

But there will be future Abdulmutallabs. By cutting off funding for the KSM trial, Congress can send Obama a clear message: The Constitution is neither a safety net for illegal enemy combatants nor a suicide pact for us.

President Barack Obama’s first State of the Union address didn’t signal a political shift to the left or the right. It sounded more like a shrewd attempt to move from the inside to the outside – to position himself alongside disaffected voters, peering through the windows of the den of iniquity called Washington and reacting with dismay at the depravity within.

In the course of a 70-minute speech, Obama slammed almost everybody in town. He even included a little self-deprecation and self-doubt – “I know there are many Americans who aren’t sure if they still believe we can change – or that I can deliver it.” But that followed a lengthy indictment of how Washington works, or doesn’t work. It is a tribute to Obama’s rhetorical gifts that the man at the center of our political system could position himself as an exasperated but hopeful outsider.

Unsurprisingly, the president called out the Republicans for being consistently obstructionist: “If the Republican leadership is going to insist that 60 votes in the Senate are required to do any business at all in this town … then the responsibility to govern is now yours as well. Just saying ‘no’ to everything may be good short-term politics, but it’s not leadership.” But he also called out the Democrats: “I would remind you that we still have the largest majority in decades, and the people expect us to solve some problems, not run for the hills.”

He called out both parties at once, in a passage that was about reducing the deficit but could have applied to health care or just about any other issue: “Rather than fight the same tired battles that have dominated Washington for decades, it’s time to try something new. Let’s invest in our people without leaving them a mountain of debt. Let’s meet our responsibility to the citizens who sent us here. Let’s try common sense. A novel concept.”

He called out the media: “The more that TV pundits reduce serious debates to silly arguments, and big issues into sound bites, our citizens turn away.” Hmmm, who on earth would do such a thing?

He even called out the Supreme Court, with six black-robed justices in attendance, for its recent ruling on campaign finance: “With all due deference to separation of powers, last week the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests – including foreign corporations – to spend without limit in our elections.”

With all due respect: Some deference. Justice Samuel Alito should have been able to restrain himself from mouthing what appeared to be “Not true, not true,” but he probably hadn’t expected to find himself in a free-fire zone.

All of this excoriation, it looks to me, serves a political purpose. One obvious lesson from last summer’s town-hall shoutfests, the rise of the Tea Party movement and the victory of pickup-truck-driving Scott Brown in the Massachusetts special election is that many voters are deeply alienated from Washington. Another lesson, especially from Brown’s Senate win, is that the legions who were so enthralled by Obama’s candidacy that they elected Democrats across the country are now unmotivated and perhaps disenchanted.

But polls show that Obama remains personally popular – and that voters hold him less responsible for government dysfunction than either Republicans or Democrats in Congress. In Wednesday’s speech, Obama used his campaign theme of “change” not just to reignite the fervor of disappointed supporters but also to speak to angry critics for whom “Washington” is an epithet not uttered in polite company.

No, he won’t be able to appease the hard-core Tea Party crowd. But independent voters who are fed up with partisan gridlock heard the president invite Republicans to offer their ideas on health care, energy, education and other issues. I believe he may have succeeded at making it more difficult for Republicans to keep giving “no” as their all-purpose answer to anything the administration proposes. The president sounded reasonable and open; the opposition risks sounding truculent and Machiavellian.

Obama was at his most popular when he was seen as a different kind of politician, one who would speak harsh truths to friends as well as adversaries, one who offered not cynical calculation but unapologetic hope. In his State of the Union speech, he sought once again to sound the themes – and inhabit the persona – of his remarkable campaign. He’s been president for a year, but he sounded like an outsider again.

President Barack Obama gestures while delivering his State of the Union address on Captitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2010.

President Barack Obama spent too much of his first year playing rope-a-dope with Republicans and delegating crucial legislation to Democrats.

To succeed in his second year, the president must aggressively stand up to friends and enemies. In Wednesday night’s State of the Union address, there were some signs – although not enough – that he is ready to do so.

A newly aggressive Obama means confronting Senate Democrats when they gum up legislation, such as the sweet deal granted to U.S. Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska on health care reform. It means countering Republicans when they block every piece of legislation and engage in fear mongering – saying that health care reform will threaten people’s “liberty.”

Obama started on a note of conciliation with Congress in his speech, which was politically astute. The American public is more frustrated and angry with politicians than it’s been in decades. If Democrats and Republicans don’t make an attempt to work together on health care, clean energy, immigration policy and other neglected priorities, voters this year will vent their rage on all incumbents, regardless of party.

The president said that jobs are his No. 1 priority, but there were few specifics, suggesting he may again delegate this task to Congress. He can’t. He needs to take his agenda directly to disgruntled Americans, and make them partners in advancing it.

Some may ask: What has Obama done to serve the interests of average citizens? It is a legitimate question. In his speech, Obama noted how the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has saved jobs – by his count, 2 million of them. Tax cuts and unemployment benefits have helped millions, and the much-maligned bank bailout, he noted, helped prevented a more devastating financial collapse.

Still, Obama missed a chance Wednesday to more fully articulate how health reform legislation – now on life support – could help Americans, and not just those who lack medical insurance. Without reform, he noted, premiums will continue to rise, small businesses will drop coverage and the federal deficit will balloon. But he devoted just a few minutes to health care reform, and it came midway through his speech. That left the impression that, once again, prospects for real health care reform have slipped away.

On the plus side, Obama elicited real empathy for the plight of average Americans, many of whom have lost jobs and homes in the last two years, or are on the verge of doing so. Others live in regions that have lost their manufacturing base. They see America as losing its standing and competitiveness.

Obama spoke to them when he said, “I do not accept second place for the United States of America,” and called for systemic long-term investments in education, clean energy and tax policies to help home-grown businesses.

In his second year, the president’s challenge is to help the public separate fact from fiction. Fears of “socialism” and “government-run health care” are the creations of Obama’s enemies, and they are holding back this country from Change We Can Believe In. If the president doesn’t get serious about countering that campaign, his agenda may go nowhere, adding to frustration and anger building in the electorate.