With a hearing scheduled in the 9th Circuit Federal Appeals Court today the long-scheduled closure of the Drakes Bay Oyster Company has become a cause celebre of well-funded conservative groups, as they seek to overturn the Interior Department’s decision so they can open more of our protected public lands to oil and gas exploration. Right-wing national organizations have launched new efforts in the wake of moves by Washington politicians, including oil-state Senator David Vitter (R-Louisiana), who inserted language in his Keystone pipeline project and coastal drilling bill to give this one company a new, exclusive permit worth millions of dollars in an ecologically sensitive marine wilderness area, and House Republican Natural Resources Committee Chairman “Doc” Hastings (R-Washington), who has launched a review after assailing the Obama Administration’s decision to protect the Point Reyes National Seashore on its 50th Anniversary.

A sample of recent national right-wing involvement:

• Several weeks ago, Cause of Action, a Beltway-based legal foundation that refuses to reveal its funders but has strong links to the right-wing Koch Brothers, stepped into the fray, driving the company’s legal fight. The respected PBS “Newshour” http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2013/05/conflict-of-lease-and-legacy-provokes-controversy-on-the-half-shell.html exposed their involvement. Since that time, we have learned Cause of Action has been involved in 11 lawsuits, all advocating conservative causes, including a suit against the EPA and against Delaware’s governor trying to kill the development of renewable energy in that state.

• Yesterday, national Fox News http://video.foxnews.com/v/2376406357001/family-owned-business-says-govt-trying-to-shut-them-down/ joined their crusade with a biased report. In the interview, the Fox news host repeatedly misstated facts, and the Oyster company’s owner fails to mention that he bought the property in 2005 fully knowing that his permit to operate would expire 7 years later.

• We also have learned that the Pacific Legal Foundation, linked to the Koch Brothers by Sourcewatch http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Koch_Family_Foundations , is involved in the legal fight http://www.pacificlegal.org/pcg/PLF-to-back-Drakes-Bay-Oyster-Company-in-court, as it notes that it will be in the Court on Tuesday, live tweeting.

It’s clear that this is no longer about an oyster company with a significant record of violations with the California Coastal Commission.

It’s about out-of-state special interests working with the oyster company to set a dangerous new precedent to deregulate commercial activity on protected public lands and open them to oil and gas exploration.

The strong revenue California collected in April is one more encouraging sign that after years of weathering the Great Recession we appear to have reached a point of budget stability. To help build on that stability, Assembly Democrats have crafted a Blueprint for a Responsible Budget that will keep California on sound financial footing not just this budget year, but in the future as well.

Over the past several years, Legislative Democrats have made tough but necessary budget cuts. Voters approved the majority-vote budget, which removed the game playing and gridlock that had jeopardized California’s financial picture. And voters stood with Democrats in supporting temporary tax revenues to help fund our schools and avoid even deeper cuts. The Blueprint for a Responsible Budget is based on the following three interrelated principles:

1. Continuing Fiscal Responsibility – the state must pay down debt, provide a prudent reserve, and craft a workable Rainy Day Fund that protects against future economic downturns. We must provide a balanced budget, not just for this year, but for every fiscal year in the forecast period, and we must accelerate the repayment of our budget debts. By accelerating repayment of budget debts we increase our budget stability and our ability to invest in our future. The time has come to craft a real and workable Rainy Day Fund that captures one-time spiking revenues to be set aside for economic downturns.

2. Strengthening the Middle Class – schools and higher education must give everyone a fair shot at the middle class, small businesses must be strengthened, and there must be a functional safety net that gets people back on their feet, contributing to our economy. Middle Class students must be able to afford a college education without being strapped with debt that strangles them well into the future and hurts future economic growth. Funding the Middle Class Scholarship with General Fund revenues from Proposition 39 can slash student fees at UC and CSU by 40 percent.

3. Delivering Effective, Efficient Services for Californians– wasteful red tape and bureaucratic delays must be eliminated for businesses, veterans, and others working with government. Business filings must be processed by the Secretary of State in five days or less, the Department of Public Health “exporting licenses” for perishable goods must also be approved within five days, so California exports can get to their destination and the state’s exporters can prosper. Updating Local Coastal Plans, helping Veterans access the services and benefits they’ve earned and funding courts – with accountability—to preserve access to necessary court services are other key aspects of Assembly Democrats Blueprint for a Responsible budget.

With the Governor’s May budget revision being announced this week and the Legislature working to pass a final budget by June 15, these are some of the issues Assembly Democrats will be focusing on to make sure our state takes the critical steps we need. for our schools, small businesses, safety net, higher education, courts and other key areas that have been harmed during the Great Recession.

(This post originally appeared on www.FoxandHoundsDaily.com)

This week the Assembly Appropriations Committee is scheduled to consider legislation by Assemblyman Bob Wieckowski, AB 1000, that would allow patients direct access to physical therapy treatment for 45 calendar days or 12 visits, without a doctor’s referral. After that window, a signature approving the physical therapist’s plan of care is required from a physician (or osteopathic physician) and surgeon, or a podiatrist.

While there are a number of worthy provisions in AB 1000, the bill doesn’t do enough in its current form to allow for continuity of care – and deserves to be amended.

Frequently, the patient being seen by the physical therapist has a doctor of chiropractic as their primary treating provider. Since 1922 doctors of chiropractic (DCs) in California have been educated and licensed by the State of California to serve as portal of entry/primary care providers. DCs are educated to differentially diagnose all conditions of the human body. After undergraduate study, chiropractic students earn a four-year doctorate degree with classroom and laboratory work in basic clinical sciences, physical examination, diagnosis and differential diagnosis, x-ray and interpretation of laboratory blood work and other treatment procedures. Clinical education includes a year -long internship overseen by a licensed DC on patients with various clinical presentations using manipulation as their primary clinical procedure.

Only health care providers who are trained in the complete diagnosis of all conditions that affect the human body can provide adequate patient safety. We have long been concerned that a seemingly “simple problem” for which a patient may seek treatment directly from a physical therapist might actually be masking a much more serious condition such as heart failure, diabetes, cancer or other disorder.

That is why the California Chiropractic Association (CCA) appreciates the provision in AB 1000 providing that if the physical therapist has reason to believe the patient has signs or symptoms of a condition that requires treatment beyond the scope of practice of a physical therapist, or if the patient is not progressing toward documented goals, the physical therapist shall refer the patient to an appropriately licensed health care provider.

However, we have concerns with how this requirement will be enforced. Additionally, CCA believes it would be appropriate to include language that outlines the minimum penalty for a physical therapist who violates these limitations on direct access.

AB 1000 should be amended. Specifically, doctors of chiropractic should be added to the providers who can approve a patient’s plan of care, thereby ensuring patient safety while allowing for continuity of care for the patient with the primary provider of their choice.

Kassie Donoghue, DC, is government affairs director for the California Chiropractic Association.

The New Leaders Council (NLC), Sacramento Chapter, which calls itself "the premier political entrepreneurship training program for young progressives," announced yesterday that Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson will be honored as their Political Leader of the Year at a fundraiser hosted by the 2013 fellows’ class.

The NLC Sacramento Progressive Leadership Reception and Silent Auction will be held on Tuesday, May 21st from 5:30p.m.-7:30 p.m. at Parlaré Lounge, located at1009 10th Street, Sacramento, CA. Mayor Johnson will be there to accept his award in person.

“We are witnessing gridlock and titanic struggles over the future direction of our country. The need for positive, forward-thinking progressive leadership has never been clearer," said NLC Executive Director Mark Riddle. "These young people are working to ‘pay it forward’ by hosting this event to help support NLC’s future leaders in 2014 and beyond -- I couldn’t be prouder of how our 2013 fellows are rising to the challenge."

New Leaders Council (NLC) works to train and promote the progressive political entrepreneurs of tomorrow — trendsetters, elected officials and civically-engaged leaders in business and industry who will shape the future landscape. NLC recruits young men and women from outside traditional power structures and equips them with the skills necessary to be civic leaders in their communities and workplaces. NLC established its Sacramento Chapter in 2009 to engage young progressive leaders from the public, private and non-profit sectors. There are currently 19 fellows, participating in the program.

This year’s NLC Sacramento Institute was made possible by the fundraising efforts of past fellowship classes. Notable NLC Sacramento Alumni include Planning Commissioner of the City of Sacramento, Kiyomi Burchill; Lobbyist for the ACLU CA, Tiffany Mok; and Harvard Kennedy School, MPP Candidate and Rangel Fellow, Robert Blanco. The 2013 fellows’ class will also honor a local business leader, to be announced.

For more information on NLC Sacramento and this year’s fellows class visit www.nlcsac.org.

Tickets for the event can be purchased here.

Find us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/NLCSac and on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SacNLC

If there’s one thing the debate over public employees’ pensions has taught us, it’s that California needs to invest more in mathematics instruction in its schools.

When Stanford professors who receive special interest funding for their work and self-proclaimed ”taxpayer” organizations bankrolled by anti-union groups wag their finger at an an investment system that yields 8 percent annual returns, it’s clear there’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the numbers.

No wonder the state budget is never balanced.

But let’s back up for a moment. When governments hire teachers, first responders, parks maintenance workers, garbage truck drivers, et cetera, they make certain promises regarding those employees’ retirements. Then, they often have decades to pay for those promises. It’s the same as when a family buys a house — they finance the large amount, and pay it off over 30 years.

In California, the California Public Employees Retirement System (CalPERS) pays for most of those government workers’ retirements, and it does that by making investments, earning interest, and growing the bank account from which it cuts retirement checks.

Critics of CalPERS contend the system doesn’t have enough money in the bank to cover all of the promises it has made. However, it’s already sitting on 70 percent of the money it will need over the coming 30 years. Should it have 100 percent? Of course not. Many of the workers whose retirements CalPERS is funding are still young and working, so the system won’t need to cut checks to them for years or even decades.

The better question is not how much CalPERS has sitting in the bank, but whether it — like that family buying a home — has a realistic plan for paying off its commitments to public employees. The numbers indicate that the answer to that question is a clear “yes.”

CalPERS is currently projecting a 7.5 percent annual return on its investments. Critics call that “unrealistic.” Some suggest 3 percent is a safer figure. However, the system yielded a 13.3 percent return in 2012, and over the past two decades it has earned an average of 8 percent every year.

Any investor would be ecstatic to realize sustained returns on investments like the ones CalPERS achieves. In fact, over a 20-year period prior to the recession, from 1988-2007, the average Wall Street mutual fund investor saw annual returns of just 4.48 percent, according to Dalbar, a financial market analyst.

So why is it that CalPERS is getting scapegoated by cities throughout the state filing for bankruptcy and struggling to balance their budgets?

San Bernardino? When that city began claiming financial distress and stopped making its pension payments, its entire pension obligation for the year was $1.9 million. However, it had a budget hole of well over $40 million. That means even if the city had zero pension costs, it would still have had a massive shortfall. Pensions clearly were not the driving factor.

The same goes for Stockton. Pensions costs make up a small fraction of its budget. Debt service on loans to pay for the construction of a lavish waterfront ballpark and entertainment complex likely has much more to do with that city’s financial woes.

Stockton is a cautionary tale, though. When the city began having problems making its payments and began discussing doing away with defined-benefit pensions, police officers began trading jobs, moving into over cities and counties where their retirements were guaranteed. As a result, crime rose in Stockton and its police force lost a tremendous amount of experience.

Of course, those who advocate clawing back the retirement promises made to first responders, teachers, garbage truck drivers, and other public employees — for them, the more likely scenario is that they’re not looking to have a dialogue based on real numbers at all, but instead one rooted in politics.

(This post originally appeared on www.foxandhounds.net)

Jamie Court, the Executive Director of the Astroturf group ConsumerWatchdog.org, said in a recent interview that "stunts and props are part of our work." Today, he's at it again, with a press event outside the capitol in Sacramento that he's conducting for the special interest that helps bankroll his pay-to-play operations, the state's trial lawyers.

Court claims the event is to kick off a drive for a 2014 ballot measure. Never mind that ConsumerWatchdog.org already has one initiative on the ballot. It's the health care rate regulation measure that the group failed to qualify for 2012 after its bumbled signature-gathering effort. Never mind that the "non profit" organization told a Sacramento Superior Court just a few months ago it was nearly broke. (Under penalty of perjury, Harvey Rosenfield filed papers in the Court saying his organization has "extremely scarce resources" and "would not be able to afford" to hire attorneys that specialize in election law for its campaign efforts.)

Yet with today's press conference is trying to hoodwink the media into believing it will run TWO initiatives for the 2014 ballot. No one should take this seriously, but it's easy to see why Court is seeking headlines today: as a thank you for its largest donors.

According to the Secretary of State's office, trial lawyers dominate the list of donors to the organization's campaign fund, including $100,000 from the Consumer Attorney Issues PAC. More than $500,000 of the funds to ConsumerWatchdog's campaign fund came from its nonprofit arm. Yet the group refuses to disclose those donors. What's it hiding? Even more trial lawyer money?

ConsumerWatchdog's attorneys have more than $650 per hour for their "public service" work. Its lawyers received in excess of $850,000 from the California Department of Insurance's intervenor fee program last year.

So there's no surprise why ConsumerWatchdog.org is fighting for higher rates for lawyers. Like nearly all its actions, this isn't about consumers -- it is about how ConsumerWatchdog.org can pocket more money for its self and its special interest contributors.

(For more info on this group, visit www.ConsumerWatchdogWatch.com)

The Assembly Agriculture Committee unanimously passed Assembly Bill 38 by Speaker John A. Pérez (D-Los Angeles) yesterday. The legislation is an effort to ensure every California child has access to healthy and nutritious food by creating the Office of Farm to Fork in the Department of Food & Agriculture.

The new office will be tasked with promoting access to healthy, California grown foods in underserved communities by bringing public health officials, agriculture industry leaders and educators together to make sure California’s children receive nutritious meals.

“Fruits and vegetables with the ‘California Grown’ label are known for their quality throughout the world, and Californians—especially kids—should have the proverbial first bite at the apple when it comes to the nutritious and healthy food grown in our state,” said Speaker Pérez. “Rural and urban communities throughout California do not have reliable access to quality, nutritious food that helps improve their health and quality of life, and this legislation will help to address this critical, if often overlooked, issue.”

AB 38 expands on the Speaker’s previous legislation, AB 581, which established the California Healthy Foods Financing Initiative, a program intended to eradicate food deserts — large geographic areas with little to no access to affordable, quality, healthy foods — and increase access to healthy and nutritious foods.

Residents of “food deserts” have disproportionally higher incidences of diabetes, cancer, obesity, heart disease and premature death than people living in areas with access to health foods. Speaker Pérez’s efforts have received strong bipartisan support in the past, including today’s unanimous approval of AB 38.

The bill will next be heard by the Assembly Appropriations Committee.

Last week, to perform an end-run around sequester cuts that would have caused massive airport delays, Congress passed legislation to keep funding those agencies in record time. Supporters -- Democrats and Republicans -- crowed about the speed and efficiency to fix a problem.

Yet that wouldn't be possible if a handful of legislators have their way. They're proposing to rewrite the state constitution so that bills have to be put on ice for three days.

Adding a speed bump to the legislative process -- a proposal included in Prop 31, another "good government" proposal that was defeated in each of the state's 58 counties -- may sound good. As the advocates tell it, the measure would give legislators more time to read bills, prevent hastily drawn measures to be exposed to more scrutiny, and give the public more time to weigh in on them.

But what Common Cause and other backers don't tell you is that special interests would be delighted if their proposal passes muster. Why? Because it would likely unravel carefully crafted compromises and allow armies of lobbyists to apply pressure to undo delicately negotiated legislation.

Sausage-making and arm twisting is all part of the legislative process. It's not pretty. But it is why the Legislature often has passed difficult budgets and other key legislation under the pressure of time.

(Note: I wrote about this a few months ago in the Sacramento Bee http://www.sacbee.com/2013/02/02/5159541/viewpoints-vote-delay-sounds-good.html)

A proposed ballot initiative that would enact a tax on oil and gas extracted from California will be granted summary and title by the Office of the Attorney General today. Californians for Responsible Economic Development, the group behind the measure, now has 150 days to collect 505,000 signatures if they wish to qualify it for the 2014 ballot.

In order to collect the signatures the campaign is taking a two-pronged approach, using both grassroots organizing and meeting with donors to raise money for paid signature gathering. In the three months leading up to official summary and title, 109 volunteers from across California have signed up to help gather signatures in addition to the organizations supporting the bill. “As people learn about the benefits of CMED - decreased tuition, renewed cities and parks and job creation fueled by green energy - they are eager to sign on and help,” explains Jack Tibbetts, author and lead-proponent of the campaign.

The California Modernization and Economic Development Act (CMED) places a 9.5% tax on the oil and gas that's extracted from California, and would bring in over $2 billion of new revenue to the state. $1.2 billion would be allocated in four equal parts towards K-12, California Community Colleges, California State University and the University of California. Another $400 million would be used to provide businesses with subsidies for switching to cleaner, cheaper forms of energy. The remaining $300 million will be allocated to county governments for infrastructure repair, public works projects, and funding public services.

The bill has already attracted the attention and support from a wide variety of interest groups and individuals, and touts a growing list of endorsements on their website (www.cmedact.org/endorsements). In February, former US Secretary of Labor Robert Reich endorsed CMED stating. Using a tax on oil extracted from under California to help finance the education of Californians should be a no-brainer. It will only improve our schools. The real question is why California hasn’t done this long before now.”

Dr. Daniel Kammen, Nobel Prize recipient and co-author of Prop 87 (a similar measure on the 2006 ballot), wholeheartedly endorsed the proposal: “Placing a small surcharge on petroleum and gas that is extracted from California can only benefit our state. It would spur innovation on the producer side to reduce costs and bring in funds that are critically needed to green the economy, re-invest in education, and renew cities and parks. The California Modernization and Economic Development Act is the best way moving forward to ensure that all of these priorities are met.”

Last week, the California Modernization and Economic Act gained the support of State Senator Noreen Evans, who is currently sponsoring her own version of an extraction tax in the Senate, SB 241, to fund education and parks in California. She had this to say about the proposed ballot initiative: "The California Modernization and Economic Development Act closes a glaring corporate tax loophole in California that has benefited big oil for far too long. I absolutely support efforts that will allow California to collect on these vast and irreplaceable natural resource revenues that should fund one of the most important core services of government-education. It's past time California ends the oil industry's free ride and finally sets a solid revenue stream towards funding government's education obligations."

“Going forward, the CMED campaign will be working closely with the Senator’s office to ensure that an oil severance tax is enacted” said Tibbetts. “The campaign to qualify the California Modernization and Economic Development Act wholeheartedly supports Senate Bill 241 and we are encouraged by the efforts being made by Senator Evans. California is in critical need of netting additional revenue for education and other important services that will promote job growth and advance our people and our economy. However, just as oil companies have the right to extract and profit from our resources, California has the right to some compensation for the mineral wealth removed. Should the Senate fail to vote and pass SB 241, our campaign will work with public officials, donors, interest groups and students to produce an extraction tax for the 2014 ballot.”