Master Plan Hearings Monday December 7

For Immediate Release: December 1, 2009
Contact: Karen Zamel (650) 691-2121

JOINT COMMITTEE CONVENES TO REVIEW MASTER PLAN FOR HIGHER EDUCATION,
AS EDUCATION SYSTEM FACES PERIL

Legislators and Top College System Administrators Meet to Assess How Master Plan
Must Change to Address Educational Needs and Keep California Competitive

Sacramento, CA - The Joint Committee for Review of the Master Plan on Higher Education, co-chaired by Assemblymember Ira Ruskin (D-Redwood City) and Senator Gloria Negrete McLeod (D-Chino), will conduct the first of five public hearings on Monday, December 7, from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. at the State Capitol, in room 437.  

The hearings commence as the Master Plan for Higher Education reaches its 50-year anniversary, at a time many agree the state system of higher education is in peril.  The Committee's goal will be to evaluate the Master Plan for Higher Education and determine if it meets California's current and future educational needs, in light of changing forces in global competition, demographics, technology and public financing.

Monday's agenda will include a review of the plan's history, its status today and a beginning look at how the plan should evolve to meet the current and future needs of the state, its students and educators.

"Our higher education system has been the cornerstone for the state's preeminence the past 50 years, and the system is now in danger," Ruskin said.  "If we don't recommit ourselves to higher education, we risk our ability to compete in the global economy and we threaten the continued development of the state.  Studies show that by 2020, we will not have enough qualified graduates to fill jobs across all key sectors of the economy if we do not head off the impending collapse of our higher education system in California."

Morning sessions will include testimony from individuals who were involved in drafting the original 1960 Master Plan, former legislators involved in previous Master Plan reviews and top administrators from the UC, CSU and Community College systems.  University of California President Mark Yudof, California State University Chancellor Charles Reed, and California Community Colleges Chancellor Jack Scott are scheduled to testify at 10:00 a.m.  In the afternoon, administrators, educators, students, business and labor leaders will testify about what is needed for the higher education system to serve its stakeholders and the state.

"The time has come to revisit the California Higher Education Master Plan.  It has been nearly 50 years since the plan was formulated and much has changed in California.  California has become a more diverse population while our economic base has shifted from manufacturing to a service sector economy," said Senator Gloria Negrete McLeod, Co-Chair to the Joint Committee.

"It is time for a realignment of higher education in both mission and goals to address the changing economy and demographics of California," she added.  "With all the financial chaos challenging California and our educational system, we must revisit our mission and goals and refocus our efforts for our children and their future."

The hearing Monday will be available via live webcast and broadcast.  For the webcast link and specific channel listings, go to http://calchannel.com/.

The committee's four additional public hearings will be conducted during the first quarter of 2010, and will focus on eligibility and access, affordability and financing, accountability and quality, and coordination and efficiency.


Websites of Committee Co-Chairs:
www.assembly.ca.gov/ruskin
http://dist32.casen.govoffice.com/

Lawsuits are the latest roadblock for California budget

Litigators go to court to undo cuts made by legislators and the governor. The state is spending billions of dollars fighting the lawsuits and dealing with increasingly unfavorable rulings.

By Evan Halper
From the Los Angeles Times

August 10, 2009

Reporting from Sacramento — Well-connected lobbyists, political pressure and a good turnout at committee hearings used to be the special interest recipe for protecting turf in the state budget. Now, a potent new ingredient is being increasingly thrown into the mix: top-shelf litigators.

Lawyers are being drafted in droves to unravel spending plans passed by the Legislature and signed by the governor. The goal of these litigators is to get back money their clients lost in the budget process. They are havingconsiderable success, winning one lawsuit after another, costing the state billions of dollars and throwing California's budget process into further tumult.

In the last few months alone, the courts added more than a billion dollars to the state's deficit by declaring illegal reductions in healthcare services, redevelopment agency funds and transportation spending. Another ruling threatens to deprive California of all its federal stimulus money if the state does not rescind a cut to the salaries of home healthcare workers.

Lawyers are scrambling to prepare additional suits related to the budget plan the governor signed last month. On Friday, Senate Leader Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) -- who negotiated the budget -- announced that even he plans to sue. Steinberg said the governor illegally made more than $500 million worth of cuts in the budget plan passed by lawmakers.

"We are seeing more lawsuits and more victories by the groups filing them," said Bob Hertzberg, a former Assembly speaker who now is chairman of California Forward, a think tank focused on reforming the budget process. "They don't want to compromise. . . . It's easier to hire lawyers than lobbyists, and you probably get better outcomes."

The attorneys are seizing on state laws that were drafted in sunnier economic times, some of which were put in place by citizen initiative. They created new programs or expanded existing ones and contained language intended to solidify the place of those programs in state government. Now, the state is broke, and lawmakers and the governor are finding their attempts to take money from the programs rebuffed by the courts. Just the lawsuits themselves cost the state millions of dollars in attorney salaries and other legal fees.

"It's the nature of trying to navigate a budget that has become more and more complicated and more and more difficult to make changes in," said Michael Cohen, a budget expert at the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst's Office, to which lawmakers look for advice on fiscal matters.

He said ironclad assurances that programs will be funded have been etched into the law by lawmakers and voters who "can't always see the future in terms of changing priorities or different circumstances that might come along later."

Lawsuits are one reason most in Sacramento expect a quick collapse of the spending plan the governor signed last month to wipe out a deficit of about $24 billion. There is talk of the governor needing to call an emergency session in the fall so lawmakers can get back to work keeping the state solvent.

Even before last month's signing, multiple groups announced their intention to sue. No sooner was the ink on the budget dry than the California Redevelopment Assn. posted an alert on its website calling for members to sign on as plaintiffs in a lawsuit that was being drafted by the law firm of McDonough, Holland & Allen.

The suit would challenge, among other things, a shuffling of state funds away from redevelopment and into school districts. If the association's litigation succeeded, it would throw the budget out of balance by as much as $2 billion.

That suit would join more than a dozen other big ones pending against the state.

Among them is one in which a court ruled in June that several past raids of public transit money were illegal. The decision did not force the state to return funds, but it blocked taking any more.

Josh Shaw, executive director of the nonprofit California Transit Assn. and a lead plaintiff, said the suit "strikes at the heart of the gimmicks that have been employed year after year in putting together the state budget."

The ruling left lawmakers and the governor scrambling to find a replacement for up to $1 billion of the money they had hoped to use to wipe out the deficit.

The alternative they came up with was to take other transportation funds. But the new pot of money lawmakers wanted to raid was sacred to local governments. They use the funds for road maintenance, street sweeping and other services. The proposal died under the weight of city and county opposition during the all-night legislative session last month when lawmakers passed the budget, leaving a billion-dollar hole in their spending plan.

Medi-Cal doctors, meanwhile, this year have managed to roll back a $1.1-billion cut in their reimbursements. A federal appeals court declared illegal a 10% cut in what physicians are paid by Medi-Cal, the government healthcare program for the poor, that was implemented in July 2008. The court ruled the cut would drive doctors out of the program, endangering the ability of patients to get care and thereby violating minimum federal standards for the program.

Some analysts say that although interest groups have become savvier in their use of litigation, state officials have also invited the suits through their desperate and often sloppy budgeting.

The lawsuits are "a product of the desperation of the people trying to forge budget agreements," said Jean Ross, executive director of the California Budget Project, a think tank that analyzes the effects of spending policies on low-income Californians. "All of the easy solutions are gone. The choices are hard, the gap is wide. People look to riskier and riskier options to come up with savings."

It is hardly a secret in the Capitol that lawmakers sometimes approve budget measures despite their dubious legality because it buys them time. The hope is that by the time the appeals process is finally exhausted -- which can take years -- the economy will have rebounded, filling the gap with new revenue. It's a kind of borrowing.

Such was the case with a plan a few years ago to put off some payments into the pension fund for government workers.

The plan was passed in 2004, on the tail end of the last budget crisis. It stayed on the books for several years. By the time it wound its way through the litigation process, state revenues were on the rebound and there was enough cash to take the plan off the books.

"These cases can go on for a while," said Daniel J.B. Mitchell, a professor of public policy at UCLA. "It's a way of pushing liabilities into the future."

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-lawsuits10-2009aug10,0,6482327.story
evan.halper@latimes.com

State Senator Loni Handcock on Budget Impasse (July 10)

Subject: Senator Hancock's Budget Update
Date: Fri, 10 Jul 2009 17:00:34 -0700
From: Senator.Hancock@senate.ca.gov

Dear Friend,

Last week, as California's budget collapsed, the state Controller began issuing IOUs. This week, California's largest banks say they will soon stop accepting them. We have been brought to this place by the reckless and unnecessary choices made by Governor Schwarzenegger.

In June, Democrats passed a $23 billion budget reduction package - the Governor vetoed it. The package had more than $11 billion in heartbreaking cuts which no Democrat wanted to make. However, we refused to shred the safety net for millions of human beings, as the Governor demanded. We recognized the crisis and made more than a good-faith attempt to address hard economic times and meet the Governor halfway.

After the veto, Democrats attempted a second compromise. We proposed a $23 billion package, this time without taxes - just as he demanded. It included cuts to almost every health and welfare program but still protected the safety net for millions of Californians, although at a very
minimal level. We were able to do this without new revenue by re-allocating $1 billion of redevelopment funds and using $1 billion of reserve funds. A rainy day fund of $3 billion remained. Once again, the Governor refused to meet us half-way.

Then, as June came to a close, the Governor rejected the Legislature's attempt at a short-term solution that would have taken us through the summer and avoided the need to resort to IOUs. With that irresponsible act the Governor dug the state into an even deeper hole, adding at least $3 billion to the deficit. That means that more money will need to be cut from schools, cities, parks and health care.

Now the Governor is demanding long-term policy changes that have been repeatedly turned down by voters through the initiative process and that he cannot get approved through legislation. The Governor is insisting on his way or the highway, and refusing to compromise.

As a result millions of Californians will suffer - and I'm learning that it takes a lot of human suffering to reach even $1 billion in cuts. It didn't have to come to this. California has reasonable and legitimate options to raise revenues: An oil extraction tax (California is the only oil producing state without one) and a tobacco tax, for example, are two such options.

Additionally, we have the largest cash reserve the state has had in 20 years. If reserves are meant to be used on a "rainy day", now is certainly the time to use them. But, the Governor says no.

Rather than move toward compromise, the Governor's position seems to have hardened in recent days, veering away from working together to find a reasonable solution. As a result, we will pay millions more in interest payments and families and small business people throughout the state will face hardship and an uncertain future.

If you would like to see more detailed information about the inaccuracy of the Governor's statements regarding the state's safety net programs, I recommend an analysis prepared by the California State Association of Counties. [loads in Safari but not in Firefox]

Additionally, Assemblywoman Noreen Evans, Chair of the Assembly Budget Committee, has provided a comprehensive analysis of what's wrong with the Governor's so-called "reform" proposals.

I hope that you will continue to make your views known to the Governor on this crucial matter. As always, I look forward to hearing your comments and suggestions.

Sincerely,

Senator Hancock
9th District, California State Senate