National Alliance For Healthy Communities

By Tilde Herrera, GreenBiz.com

Six companies that collectively manage nearly 1 million vehicles have joined President Barack Obama’s new program aimed at making the nation’s largest private fleets more fuel efficient.

In joining the National Clean Fleets Partnership, Coca-Cola, Enterprise Holdings, General Electric, Osram Sylvania, Ryder and Staples will identify, test, adopt and share fuel reduction strategies and technologies. Already the new partners have a deep bench of collective practices to draw from, including extensive deployment of alternative fuel vehicles.

“It will give us the ability to expand beyond our role in advancing natural gas to look at other technologies, specifically electric,” said Scott Perry, Ryder’s group director of vehicle supply management. “We think there’s going to definitely be a focus on that and being able to play a broader role in educating our customers, vehicle technology development and infrastructure, and broader market and industry awareness.”

read the full article here on GreenBiz.com

Recycling of tires in asphalt pavement is an idea that has proven as resilient as rubber itself. Yet in the approximately 50 years since first being tried, the idea has failed to revolutionize the United States paving industry.

That could change.

New technology and old concerns about the environment seem to be re-energizing the rubber asphalt revolution.

The primary obstacles to more widespread reuse of tires in asphalt have been relatively high cost and uniform testing processes that tend to work against rubber asphalt while standards for highway projects are set.

These fundamental barriers to acceptance have been offset to some extent by repeated demonstrations in the United States and abroad that rubber asphalt holds up well under heavy traffic and absorbs the weight of passing vehicles in a way that reduces freeway noise. And the indisputable advantage of rubber asphalt is that it recycles tires that otherwise are piling up in landfills and ditches.

Federal and state environmental agencies are on the side of anyone wanting to reuse tires in new pavement. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency promotes the concept in the Resource Conservation Challenge section of its Web site. Noting that rubber asphalt is the single biggest user of crumb rubber (12 million tires a year), the agency lists the benefits of the rubberized asphalt – “longer lasting road surfaces, reduced road maintenance, cost effectiveness over the long term, lower road noise and shorter braking distances.”

Mobility over the years has changed. The advantages of new technology has contributed to the change. Today “being mobile” can mean simply having wireless access or a cell phone.

The challenge has become cost service access.

First, the need. Cell phones have become a necessary service to voice and data. To a great extent a life line for 911 service emergencies. The challenge has become service reception. In many areas of the country there is no service. This can be due to the restrictions on large communication towers or “cells”, or simply the geographic nature of the terrain (tunnels, mountains, valleys, rural areas, subways, etc). Now there is technology that can bring service that is reliable to challenged regions through loss of small senders or repeaters. This allows for hikers, those in rural communities, mountains and subways to be able to communicate at all times…emergency, personal or professional. As an example, in Washington DC the subway was involved in an accident. Due to the lack of cell services, first responders went to a wrong location at first. With the new technology in place this could have been prevented.

Second, the cost. The costs are mostly in construction and not in service, so the consumer bill does not reflect any significant cost for services.

The key is public safety and the need has become greater since the events of 9-11. If for no other reason then our own security and ability to be in touch at all times, it is vital that we support the technology both as consumers and as government.

The National Alliance for Healthy Communities, with the support of think tank City Solutions, has compiled significant information on the issues and how to address them. The information is available for transit agencies, local, state and federal governments.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) Technology Innovation Progran (TIP) announces that it is seeking white papers from any interested party. White papers will be used to identify and select areas of critical national need and the associated technical challenges to be addressed in future TIP competitions.

The Technology Innovation Program (TIP) was established for the purpose of assisting U.S. businesses and institutions of higher education or other organizations, such as national laboratories and nonprofit research institutions, to support, promote, and accelerate innovation in the United States through high-risk, high-reward research in areas of Critical National Need. TIP holds competitions for funding based on addressing areas of critical national need. TIP identifies and selects topics for areas of critical national need based on input from within the NIST, the TIP Advisory Board, the science and technology communities, and from the public.

TIP is interested in receiving input on the identification and definition of problems that are sufficiently large in magnitude that they have the potential to inhibit the growth and well-being of our nation today.

Health-Care Cuts Could Shift Costs
Private Sector May Face Greater Burden, Economists Say

President Obama’s plan to rein in federal spending on health care could end up shifting costs to the private sector, economists say.

Unless doctors and hospitals are able to respond to the government cuts by becoming more efficient, the result could be higher costs for insurers, employers, and people with private medical coverage, they say.

Historically, health-care spending has been a bit like a balloon: If it is squeezed in one place, it tends to bulge in another.

“I think there’s definitely risk that a portion of the reduction in hospital payments from Medicare will wind up as increased payments by private insurers,” said Paul B. Ginsburg, president of the Center for Studying Health System Change.
Depending on the circumstances, hospitals may have the motive and means to “transfer those charges to somebody else,” and “we’ll see costs increasing on the private side and not necessarily falling everywhere,” said Harold S. Luft, director of the Palo Alto Medical Foundation Research Institute.

The biggest health-care proposal that Obama announced last weekend is especially likely to move costs to the private sector, because it would cut Medicare payments without giving hospitals the tools to deliver care more cost-effectively, Luft said. The administration predicts that measure — adjusting Medicare payments to reflect productivity changes in the overall economy — would save the government $110 billion over 10 years.
Squeezing from the government’s end could make health care more efficient for everybody. “If you push on one side, you’re actually pushing on the whole thing,” said Kenneth Baer, a spokesman for the Office of Management and Budget.

But a report issued Tuesday by the Congressional Budget Office portrayed that outcome as speculative. There is no guarantee that the health-care system’s response to pressure would be greater quality or efficiency, according to the CBO analysis.
Throwing cold water on hopes for effective health-care reform, the CBO described a variety of problems that could make it hard to slow federal spending on care — and to do so without putting quality at risk.
“At this point, experts do not know exactly how to structure such reforms so as to reduce federal spending on health care significantly in the long run without harming people’s health,” the CBO said.
“Examples of efficient care certainly exist today. . . . Yet applying the methods of those efficient providers throughout the health-care system cannot be accomplished through fiat or good intentions,” it added.
The challenge is that the administration and Congress are trying to extend medical coverage to the uninsured without increasing the federal budget deficit over the next decade. As a result, they are bound by the budgetary scoring process — meaning they must come up with solutions that can predictably and measurably reduce federal outlays.
Some steps that might prove cost-effective over the long run do not necessarily mean savings for the federal budget.

Conversely, some steps that save the government money would not necessarily translate into overall reductions in national health-care spending.
If Medicare cuts payments to hospitals but the costs of treating patients stay the same, “then you have the potential for cost-shifting,” said Kenneth E. Thorpe, a professor of health policy at Emory University. But Obama is trying to implement policies “that would lead to hospitals reducing their expenditures,” he said.

One of the president’s signature proposals would reward hospitals for reducing readmission rates and penalize hospitals whose patients must return for another stay because they did not receive adequate treatment the first time. That proposal is unlikely to create a bulge in private medical costs, because it would lead hospitals to change the way they function, Thorpe said. The administration is counting on improved readmission rates to save the government $25 billion over 10 years.

Not all hospitals would have the ability to foist additional costs onto the private sector. Those most likely to make up elsewhere for cuts in government payments are major hospitals that are essential to local health networks and therefore able to wield more market clout, Ginsburg said.

The consolidation of hospitals in many communities limits private insurers’ ability to push back.
Cutting payments by Medicare, the federal program for the elderly, is a relatively blunt instrument of reform.
“Imposing slower growth in [Medicare] payments would create ongoing pressure on providers to identify and adopt efficiencies; it would also, however, create risks for providers and patients if the efficiency gains were not achieved,” the CBO said.
Part of the problem is what the CBO described as the difficulty in measuring the quality of care. If quality cannot be gauged, it is hard to reward doctors and hospitals for delivering it — and it is hard to penalize them for not doing so.

Various popular ideas about how to save money have limitations and downsides, the CBO reported.

Increasing access to preventive care, for example, is widely considered a powerful way to reduce spending, but “one study of health and economic effects of preventive services found that only 20 percent of the services that were assessed yielded net financial savings,” it said. In some instances, the cost of delivering preventive care to a large population would actually exceed the savings on the relatively few people who avoided illness as a result, CBO said.

Similarly, improving public health can reduce Medicare spending on particular problems. However, helping people live longer and healthier lives can increase the burden they put on the federal government, partly because they will spend more time collecting Medicare and Social Security benefits, the CBO reported.

Fifteen years ago, when Democratic Sen. Tom Daschle was running interference for the Clintons’ effort at health-care reform, his goal in life was to enlist Sen. Bob Dole, the hugely influential Republican leader, as a co-sponsor. Daschle never got him, and the enterprise crashed and burned.

When an interview was done with the two of them this week, Dole remarked that “we started out working together, and then it fell apart” — the victim of a massive lobbying campaign, a bunch of tactical errors by the president and first lady, and Dole’s presidential ambitions, which moved him into the camp of the Republican naysayers.

Now Daschle and Dole, along with another former Republican leader, Howard Baker, have come together with a report outlining the provisions of a possible bipartisan health bill and strong recommendations on how to pass it. (The fourth original member of this Bipartisan Policy Center board, former Senate Democratic leader George Mitchell, dropped out to become President Obama’s special envoy to the Middle East.)

In a phone conversation the day before their report was released, Daschle and Dole agreed that prospects for enactment of major reform are far better now than in 1994 — and better than they would have been even two years ago. “The situation is far more dire on costs and quality and access to care,” Daschle said. Added Dole: “You have business, labor and a whole cross section of people saying, ‘We have to have reform.’ ” But it will still be a heavy lift. Like Obama, Daschle and Dole estimate the cost of insuring the 46 million without health coverage to be $1.2 trillion over 10 years, and they say that at least half will have to come from new revenue, if the Obama goal of budget neutrality is to be met.

To raise it, they would assess large companies that do not offer employees health insurance a fee based on their payrolls — a mandate that Dole acknowledges would be hard for many Republicans to swallow. And they would impose taxes for the first time on the so-called Cadillac policies paid for by employers — a change opposed by many Democrats, by unions and by Obama when John McCain advocated it during last year’s election campaign.

But that is only the beginning of the bitter medicine Dole and Daschle are asking their fellow partisans to choke down.

Acknowledging that there is little chance for bipartisanship in the House, Dole urged Senate Republicans to give up any thought of filibustering the health bill. “We need a group of Republicans who will give an early demonstration that bipartisanship is possible,” he said.

Daschle, in turn, said he thinks the Democrats should not attempt to ram a health bill through the Senate by using the budget reconciliation device to pass it with 51 votes, rather than the 60 votes most legislation requires.

Daschle, who would have been Obama’s point man on health reform had his recent tax returns not caused him problems, made the point that a reform of this magnitude should not be forced through on a narrow majority. Australia, he said, “passed and repealed health reform several times before they got a strong enough vote to sustain it.”

It is significant that the Daschle-Dole plan sidesteps the raging controversy over whether there should be a government-sponsored plan to compete with private insurers. Obama and most other Democrats are demanding it; Republicans and conservative Democrats call it a deal-breaker.

Daschle reluctantly agreed that there would be no federal-government plan. Instead, states that want it could include such a plan on the menu for their residents, with technical help from the feds in setting it up. Five years from now, if a demand for such an option still exists, the president could recommend it, and Congress would have to vote on it.

It was damned hard for Dole and Daschle, neither of whom faces the voters or the lobbyists, to agree. It will be much harder to extract a bipartisan bill from Congress.

Where did we get the idea that the only good health-care bill is a bipartisan bill? Is bipartisanship more important than whether a proposal is practical and effective? And if bipartisanship is a legitimate goal, isn’t each party equally responsible for achieving it?

This week, the health-care debate moved from general principles to the agonizing specifics of how much reform will cost, who will pay and which groups get what.
If this were a perfect laboratory experiment, Democrats and Republicans would enter such discussions agreeing on core goals and then argue over how to tweak certain provisions and spread the costs equitably.

That’s what Howard Baker, Tom Daschle and Bob Dole, the bipartisan trio of former Senate leaders, suggested in a report yesterday. Good for them. And Max Baucus, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, still hopes to be health care’s Great Compromiser, this era’s Henry Clay, even if the messy particulars slowed his efforts this week.

But there should be no illusions: On health care, the two parties are far apart on the fundamentals.

Most Democrats believe that fixing the system will require increased government intervention to guarantee universal coverage and to contain costs. Most Republicans oppose an expansion of government’s role and believe an even more market-oriented system would pave the way to health-care nirvana.

Trying to achieve full bipartisanship by squaring those two views is a recipe for incoherence.

As it is, President Obama and the Democrats have already compromised a great deal. They are not proposing a government takeover of health-care financing, as single-payer advocates prefer. Instead, they are working within the confines of current arrangements.

That’s why White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel can argue, as he told me recently, that any proposal Obama endorses will be “bipartisan” because “the policies in the bill will include Republican and Democratic ideas.” That’s another way of saying that any health-care bill that passes will expand government’s role but also build on the existing private health-care market.

This has not stopped Republicans from charging that Obama favors “socialized” health care run by “big government.” And even when the GOP is not using over-the-top rhetoric, the party’s own proposals make clear how far most Republicans are from Obama’s purposes.

Yesterday, House Republicans unveiled their own health-care principles, and Rep. Dave Camp of Michigan said in an interview that their willingness to do so belies the idea that he and his colleagues constitute “the party of ‘no.’ ”

Camp, a key architect of the Republican initiative, is the antithesis of the Rush Limbaugh-style shouters, a cheerful Midwesterner who has engaged in serious legislating, notably on adoption and foster care. And the Republicans’ wish list does include some less-than-sweeping but reasonable ideas (for example, making it easier for children to stay on their parents’ health plans up to the age of 25, and offering new incentives for doctors to go into primary care) that could well make it into a bipartisan bill.

But their core proposals — especially their call to expand health savings accounts and to overturn state regulations in favor of nationwide “association” health-care plans — push in exactly the wrong direction by further fragmenting the insurance market.

Doing so might cut insurance costs for those who are not ill, but at the expense of raising the already-prohibitive costs for the sick. The marketplace is good at providing options for the well-off and the healthy, but they are not the ones with problems. That’s why Obama wants the government to change the health-care market.

What this means is that most Republicans want to take themselves out of the health-care discussion altogether. For reasons of principle as well as politics, they want to rail against the costs of government action and assert — against what I would insist is overwhelming evidence — that somehow we can find a way for the market to solve our health-care problems.

Republicans have every right to do this. But they can’t refuse to play the game and then go on to condemn Obama and the Democrats for being insufficiently bipartisan.

It’s one thing to compromise to pick up votes, which, one hopes, is what Baucus is doing. It’s another to compromise in exchange for nothing at all. The first is bipartisanship with a purpose. The second is the bipartisanship of fools.

With the Introduction of President’s “Pay-As-You-Go” Legislation, Democrats Continue Commitment to Fiscal Discipline, Budget Reform

“The deficits that my Administration inherited reflect not only a severe economic downturn but also years of failing to pay for new policies… Enacting Statutory PAYGO would…represent and important step toward strengthening our budget process, cutting deficits, and reducing national debt.”
- President Barack Obama, 6/9/09

Today, House Democrats introduced President Obama’s “Statutory Pay-As-You-G- Act of 2009.” This legislation is necessary to help reverse years of recklessness by the Bush Administration, which left out Nation in an unprecedented fiscal hole, facing a deficit of $1.3 trillion. A primary focus of the Democratic Congress, restoring PAYGO will help restore fiscal discipline, allowing us to invest in America’s most important priorities while making the tough choices necessary to cut wasteful spending, address the deficit, and reduce the national debt.

PAYGO Proposal Reflects Lessons of the Past, Challenges of Today

Building on the successful efforts of the past that turned deficits into surpluses while understanding the unique challenges of today, this proposal continues to lay a vision fro fiscal reform.

* In the 1990′s, PAYGO helped turn massive deficits from the Reagan era into a record surplus under President Clinton.
* President Obama’s proposal is very similar to the original PAYGO law in the 1990′s. However, instead of requiring that legislation be deficit neutral in each year, the President’s proposal would look at the ten year cost of legislation. If the net effect of all legislation enacted during a session of Congress was paid for over then years, there would not be sequester, even if the costs were not offset in some years.
* This legislation serves as supplement to the existing House PAYGO rule. It provides an enforcement mechanism that will hold both chambers of Congress, as well as the Administration, accountable for paying for legislation.
* This legislation builds on the fiscally responsible budges put forward by the President and agreed to by Congress, in which Democrats paid for the priorities like health care, energy, and education.
* This legislation allows for Congress and the President to respond to an economic crisis by designating and exempting the costs of emergency legislation. During the recession in the early 1990s, Congress and the President enacted legislation extending unemployment benefits without offsets by designating it as emergency spending.

As the process moves forward, Democrats will work with the Administration to resolve the differences between the President’s proposal and existing House rules.

The state of California has been granted $1.1 billion by the Department of Energy (DOE) through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 and many California cities are hoping to capitalize on an opportunity to boost their energy efficiency because of it.

Of that $1.1 billion, $351.6 million will go to local governments for energy efficiency efforts through the new federal Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant Program. Local governments with a population of more that 30,000 are currently in the application process for their piece of the pie.

Those with less than 30,000 are awaiting information on the competitive grant process. Applications are due on June 25 and the DOE is looking for projects that create jobs, meet the objectives of the program and are using the money for eligible activities, said DOE spokeswoman Jen Stutsman.

“If an application doesn’t do one of those things, we will go back and forth with these local governments until we can get a plan that we can approve” Stutsman said. “Our goal, absolutely, is to get these funds to the states and city governments.”

For many city councils, the price of democracy is that moment of peak fatigue, after deliberations have gone on too deliberately. A rule of thumb, when the meeting goes late, the quality of discussion is not great.

For that reason, many city councils have rules that put a fence around how late a meeting can go. Tempers were short and angry words were exchanged when a recent Berkeley meeting went past midnight and more members of the public wanted to be heard on the topic of a draft of a city’s Climate Action Plan. At the end of the meeting, bleary council members were unsure if they were voting on a resolution to extend the voting on amendments to the Climate Action Plan.

Most California cities wrestle at one time or another with the proper way to close discussion and vote on issues before council members become punchy. Often this is expressed by putting a time limit on speakers. Most cities have a three- or five-minute limit on speakers. In Berkeley, this limit is two minutes.

At one time Berkeley council meetings started with a “lottery” in which five people’s names were drawn out of a drum, out of all who wished to speak on non-public hearing matters. After some people objected, the city received a legal opinion that the method was illegal. If less than 10 residents have signed up to speak, they get two minutes each. If it’s more than 10, they get one minute.

The Berkeley council policy guide has this rule:

No council meeting shall continue past 11:00 pm unless a two-thirds majority of the Council votes to extend the meeting to discuss specified any motion to extend the meeting beyond 11:00 pm shall include a list of specific agenda items to be covered and shall specify in which order items shall be handled.

Sometimes it’s enough just to raise awareness.

In California’s latest doom-and-gloom announcement, Governor Schwarzenegger’s Department of Finance on Tuesday proposed closing the state’s main welfare program, releasing nonviolent prisoners one year early and shuttering up to 80 percent of state parks to shrink the state’s $24.3 billion budget deficit.

Schwarzenegger wants $5.6 billion in new cuts to replace a like amount of borrowing he proposed in his budget plan earlier this month. The Republican governor previously asked for more than $15 billion in other savings by slashing schools and Medi-Cal, laying off 5,000 state workers and borrowing money from local governments.

Several of the latest cuts were eye-openers, but the largest was the wholesale elimination of the California Work Opportunity and Responsibility to Kids Program, which provides grants to parents that people commonly refer to as “welfare.”

Nearly 1.3 million Californians received CalWORKs payments in February, almost 1 million of whom were children. The state would save $1.3 billion next year by eliminating CalWORKs but lose three times as much in federal funds.

“It boggles the mind that California would be the only state in the Union without a CalWORKs-type program,” said Frank Mecca, executive director of the County Welfare Directors Association. “In fact, we’d be, to our knowledge, the only state in a country in the entire First World not to have subsistence benefits for children.”

Department of Finance Chief Deputy Director Ana Matosantos laid out the governor’s plan during a conference committee hearing, going through each proposal line by line, prompting questions – and expressions of shock. Democratic committee members took issue with many ideas but pledged to consider them in hearings.

Besides the CalWORKs elimination, more than 900,000 low-income children would lose medical coverage under a proposal to eliminate the state’s Healthy Families program, saving $250 million.

“I would hate to see us eliminate the safety net at a time of rising unemployment, people losing their homes and increasing homelessness,” said Assembly Speaker Karen Bass, D-Los Angeles, in a telephone interview. “Having said that, I do completely recognize the revenue situation is serious.”

Schwarzenegger envisions phasing out Cal Grants for low-income college students. He would save $10 million by giving only $7,000 to the University of California’s Hastings College of Law, the bare minimum so as not to upset the state’s 19th-century contract with the Hastings family. And he wants to defend state parks, forcing them to rely on user fees.

“It could be upwards of 80 percent of parks not having sufficient fee revenues to continue to operate,” Matosantos said.

A Schwarzenegger proposal to close parks last year didn’t go anywhere, but the state’s fiscal condition has worsened considerably since then.

The Governor’s plan would release a year early, about 19,000 nonviolent, non-serious prisoners not convicted of sex offenses, saving $120 million. He also would seek $790 million in savings by reducing inmate services such as substance abuse counseling and vocational education.

The Governor proposes saving $150 million by retaining a two-day furlough for state workers.

Schwarzenegger would cut Medi-Cal services such as dialysis, breast cancer treatment for women over 65 and non-emergency care for undocumented immigrants.

Assemblywoman Noreen Evans, D-Santa Rosa, Chairwoman of the Assembly Budget Committee, said it would be more responsible to seek additional taxes.

“With this proposal, the Governor’s made it very clear he’d rather throw women and children out of the lifeboat before he raises taxes,” she said.

But Assemblyman Roger Niello, R-Fair Oaks,said the state’s economy cannot sustain further tax increases, so there are no other options.

“I think everybody here would agree, Republicans and Democrats alike, that we would not want to make these drastic reductions that we’re going to be making if we didn’t have to,” Niello said. “But the unfortunate fact is, we have to.”

In a speech to California small-business leaders in Sacramento, Schwarzenegger lamented the various cuts he had proposed this month, saying, “Behind every one of those dollars that we cut there are real faces.”

But he warned that “if we don’t make those cuts, I think that we will face catastrophic consequences.”

And Schwarzenegger isn’t done yet. The governor’s aides are expected to outline an additional $3 billion in cuts by Friday, responding to new projections showing that the deficit is larger than he originally anticipated.

During Tuesday’s hearing, nonpartisan Legislative Analyst Mac Taylor suggested there were better ways to eliminate the shortfall that would allow the state to leverage federal dollars.

“You rightly were concerned about the draconian nature of some of those (cuts), because I think it’s a whole difference from the kind of options you saw in the May revision or, frankly, the kind of options that we put on the table,” Taylor told Evans.

Lawmakers and Schwarzenegger agreed in February to close $36 billion of a $42 billion budget deficit with a mix of higher taxes and spending cuts. But they used outdated data and underestimated the extent to which the economy would stall. Voters last week rejected $6 billion in other solutions.

State leaders face pressure to resolve the deficit quickly. California must borrow between $10 billion and $23 billion starting in July to pay its bills. To do so, the state needs to show investors that it has a balanced budget in place. Meanwhile, the state will lose the opportunity to cut money from the 2008-09 budget year that ends June 30 if leaders wait until July.

Schwarzenegger has ruled out tax increases, saying that voters who rejected last week’s special election measures said they wanted no more taxes.

Bring on the autopsy. If the polling is any indication, California voters will defeat the five budget balancing measures, Propositions 1A through 1E, today. Not only do both the Field and PPIC polls show the measures losing, but opinion seems to be hardening against them. According PPIC, those voters following the measures closest are the most vigorously opposed. Fifty two percent of likely voters oppose Proposition 1A, the spending cap/tax measure. But among those following the measure most closely, 65 percent are opposed and only 29 percent are in favor.

If the measures go down, two factors will be at play. The voters do not seem to believe the legislature is capable of reforming itself, thus they are unimpressed with the “rainy day” spending cap Governor Schwarzenegger and proponents have pushed so hard for.

And they are opposed to the additional burden of higher sales taxes, a higher car tax and increased income taxes, all of which fall on the state’s voters. As part of the budget compromise, the legislature declined to impose any industry specific taxes (no doubt to not arouse industry opposition) and instead raised broad based taxes. But the voters have already turned down higher taxes on rich people, oil companies and tobacco companies – so why did the legislature think voters would support higher taxes on themselves.

So who are the winners and losers if the measures fail? That’s easy. Everyone is a loser. Republicans said they were for a spending cap, but they are not supporting Proposition 1A, that has a spending cap. GOP anti-tax activists say it won’t hold down spending, but how do they know if it is not tried.

Legislative Republicans ousted their leadership over the tax increases and are recalling members who voted for the tax package. But in the process, they alienated themselves from business, which wants the ballot measures, and the governor, who is the only one who can raise any money for the state GOP (not that he cares about that anymore.) Will the new GOP legislative leaders be players in what happens next? Probably not.

Democrats are losers in the short run; they must still govern and make the draconian cuts that will be necessary if the measures fail. But they can be winners in the long run. The tax increases will now expire in 2011, but if Democrats under new party boss John Burton put their minds to it they can win two thirds control in both houses, and in 2011 they can make the tax cuts permanent, and do so without worrying about a spending cap. That’s having your cake and eating it too.

Given plummeting GOP registration throughout the state, all the Democrats need to do is spend $5 to $10 million in a half dozen Assembly and Senate seats in 2010 – dollars they can easily raise — and they will take full control of both houses of the legislature. In 1975, when Jerry Brown first became governor, Democrats had effective two thirds margins in both houses; funny if Jerry Brown becomes governor in 2010 and this is all repeated 36 years later.

Finally, Governor Schwarzenegger is certainly a loser too, but he also has a window of opportunity. His numbers have plummeted largely because the public no longer believes him. He said he would not raise taxes and he did so. There is no chance of passing another tax bill, but liberal Democrats will concoct 41-vote fee bills that do the same thing. They passed one in January to impose an oil severance tax and a gas tax fee that Schwarzenegger vetoed.

Once the people have spoken, Schwarzenegger should say no to any new taxes, especially those disguised as fees. If the voters on May 19 vote for draconian budget cuts, the governor should see that they get them.

Two groups targeting California politics for extreme makeovers have made enhancing revenue streams for local government a focal point of the argument for supporting drastic change.

California Forward and the Bay Area Council both think the state has fallen into a rut, dressing the same tired budgeting tricks in tacky clothes and parading it around like a new solution.

They want a transformation starting at the city and county level, but they are selling different paths to slimming down big government-style budgeting.

“We need to move government closer to the people,” said Robert Hertzberg, former Democratic speaker of the state Assembly and now California Forward co-chair, at a Sacramento Press Club lunch while on a multi-media promotional tour.

California Forward (www.caforward.org), a bipartisan group funded largely by foundations, wants to change the way budgeting works in California.

The group started with a legislative study group to improve state spending plans and hopes to convince the legislature to put proposals for tax reform on the 2010 or 2012 ballot.

“We want to restore flexibility for local governments by giving them more control over their budgets,” explained Jim Mayer, California Forward executive director.

How much flexibility?

“They should have authority over raising and lowering taxes and managing programs. The state’s role is to set minimum standards and then let cities and counties – counties in particular – decide how to provide services.”

Allowing councils and boards of supervisors to decide whether to move some law enforcement funds into social services or the other way around based on the city’s individual situation and administrator preferences can be a compelling argument.

The Bay Area Council (www.bayareacouncil.org), another bi-partisan group, funded mainly by business, has called for a Constitutional Convention to overhaul the budget process and wants to put the idea to a statewide vote as early as 2010.

Last year, the group hired Oakland-based Fairbank, Maslin, Maullin & Associates to conduct a poll on public attitudes toward the idea.

Of the 800 people interviewed, 82 percent said the state is headed in the wrong direction.

Almost that many (80 percent) were extremely, very seriously or somewhat seriously concerned with how the state collects and distributes funds to local governments and schools.

Of the specific reforms polled for possible inclusion in the ballot initiative, the one that received the most support was the local control question.

Pollsters asked if the respondents would support “permitting local governments to keep locally collected taxes instead of sending them to Sacramento and having them redistributed back to local governments.” A total of 68 percent responded positively.

“More locally-collected funds should stay local,” concluded John Grubb, Bay Area Council senior vice president of external affairs.

How either of these groups will specifically make that happen will have to wait until the big reveal, probably after the May special election results show just how bad the state is in need of a new ‘do.

Please note, statements and opinions expressed are solely those of their respective authors and may not represent the views of The National Alliance for Healthy Communities or its employees thereof. The National Alliance for Healthy Communities is not responsible for the accuracy of any of the information.

A major concern to employers is, “do you hire before the business comes through the door or after?”  Every state has federal funds to assist businesses in paying for new hires and training from direct payments to tax credits.  California, as an example, has over 600 million dollars a year for these efforts.  The same funds can be used to assist public and private education starting at the 3rd grade level.

Great programs, but unless you ask you cannot receive. 

The National Alliance has been involved in these types of programs for many years and has great insight to the funding.

Do not forget, SHOVEL READY.  This is the most important term that you can use in getting federal funding.  This means the projects are almost ready to go. The rationale is that the project is needed, that the project produces jobs short and long term and that it is good for the environment.  No one will come knocking on your door.   You not only need to ask, you need to submit a proposal that is sensitive to the funding sources thoughts and objectives. Your proposal needs to contain all the proper buzz words and phrases or it becomes just another good proposal.