Archive for category Public Policy
The Death of Redevelopment
Posted by admin in Public Policy, Resoration Economy on May 2, 2012
Thanks to Thirty Miles of Corruption for sharing the documentation related to the State’s reply to the City’s redevelopment loans.
Press Enterprise Is A “NO” Surprise On Measure F: Sustainability Commission
Posted by admin in Public Policy on May 2, 2012
Regarding Press Enterprise Editorial 4-29-2012, Charter Measure F_A Sustainability Commission Added to City Charter:
Wasn’t it Gandhi who said, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win”. Fear of the unknown is no reason to avoid it. The past, no matter how successful it may have been, is no guarantee of the future. The overwhelming majority of my neighbors see Sustainability and Economic Development in the same context. If either is out of balance, quality of life and health are impacted.
A Sustainability Commission is an obvious and appropriate first step to take if we are to have either and live long and well enough to enjoy them.
Painting the issue as “trendy buzzwords” and “feel good symbolism” demonstrates a serious misrepresentation of the issues at hand and is a disservice to the the over 100 participants at the Green Action Summit, many of whom have been at work on this for 30 years or more. Sort of like the little old ladies who wanted to save the Santa Ana River. They laughed at them too.
Some Back Story About Riverside’s Electric Rates
Posted by admin in Public Policy, Resoration Economy on May 2, 2012
New post on TMC: Thirty Miles of Corruption |
CITY OF RIVERSIDE: HIDDEN TAXES ON YOUR ELECTRIC UTILITY RATES!by thirtymiles |
If you think the City of Bell had serious taxation problems and mis-appropriation of funds, grab your socks!
Riverside levies hidden taxes on your utility bill. They are simply and stealthily included in the utility rates the city charges residential customers. Your minimum tax rate on electric utility services to your property is 11.5%. It expands upward from there depending on how much utility service you use each month that is subject to punitive tiered pricing.
Let us look at your bill for electricity and the city’s residential winter electric rate schedule. The first tier or the base metered rate for electric service is $0.1035 per kwh (this is the metered unit of measure for electric service). The base rate is charged to the consumption of each of the first 350 kwh of electric service each month. On a per kwh basis $0.0119 of the first tier rate per kwh is tax revenue paid to the general fund. That is a tax rate of 11.5%.
Should you exceed first tier usage as most homeowners do, then you are charged at the second tier price of $0.1646 per kwh from the 351th thru the 750th kwh of service. The difference — of $0.0611 per kwh in the second tier electric rate — is an additional tax for using more electric service than the city thinks you should use. It is a punitive tax to economically force you the consumer to conserve electricity. You are being taxed even though you are using electricity for beneficial purposes and not wasting it. Looking at just the $0.0611 price difference per kwh of first tier and second tier prices/kwh the effective tax rate is 37%!
Should you use more than 750 kwh of electric service per month you are billed at the 3rd tier rate of $0.1867 per kwh for those units consumed over 750 kwh. The third tier tax is $0.0951 per kwh. This is an effective tax rate of 51%!
Now, that’s a punitive tax!
To help put this into perspective with how our electricity is delivered to your property, please review the following facts:
- A municipal electric utility provides property owners with the “service” of transporting the power to your property via government-owned infrastructure. The electricity is virtually worthless at the point of generation or acquisition. It is the city’s infrastructure of power transmission lines that imparts value to electricity. If they could not deliver it to your property you would not buy it and they could not give it away!
- On average it costs the city $0.0500 to generate or acquire power and transport electricity to its residential customers.
- Some power is purchased on long-term contracts and may cost as little as $o.o4 per kwh delivered to you. To be fair, other sources of electricity cost more. So in the end it all averages out to a range of $0.04-$0.06.
- What the city has done to you is this: it has stopped putting ballot measures forward for a vote to approve electric bonds. Basically, it has improperly hidden the tremendous cost of borrowing money (and the burden to pay it back for thirty years) in your electric rates, fees and charges.
- By law the cost of borrowed money used to build infrastructure must be approved in an election as a property assessment tax or a special tax. In this way you would be able to see the level of debt, the cost to you, the years left on each contract to continue paying and have the voter knowledge to understand what this means to you.
- Since 2007 the City Council has approved instruments of borrowing that were created specifically to evade state constitutional restrictions that restrict the amount of borrowing or require voter approval. The city discloses that it knows how and why the contracts were created (specifically to avoid complying with the state constitution) but, since no one in Riverside has filed a lawsuit to stop the practice, it will continue to offer these contractual forms of debt at will. This results in electric rate schemes that have ever increasing hidden taxes in them; however the cost of debt to build infrastructure is not an annual variable operating cost to be included in the rate calculation. It is a fixed cost that should be collected via other means on your bill or property tax. It should not be included in the rate structure. The rate should always be determined from the variable costs of operating the infrastructure.
- A vote to approve a constitutional form of municipal bond requires the city to account for the cost of debt service separately from the annual cost of operating the utility. In this way they cannot hide the cost of debt service in the rate calculation and charge you $0.1035 and up for each kwh.
- A municipal utility is not allowed to make money. It is a government-owned monopoly and may not charge more than the actual cost of providing the service to you at your property. Municipal utilities are budgeted to break even. They have reserve funds in case of a bad year and the city can always make a loan or spend tax revenue to cover an annual loss.
- In recent times the city has taken no steps to reduce costs of operating the utilities. They have taken every opportunity to expand the cost to residential consumers and buried it in the utility rate structure.
- The electric utility has a huge fixed annual cost (mostly debt payments) averaged over the calculated electric rates and total annual production. It must sell all of its planned annual production to recoup the funds needed to pay the debt service. If you are forced to conserve electricity via tiered pricing, the city has to automatically raise the price. It is “Catch-22″ Math! The more you conserve the more it will cost you. Also,the city makes more money by transferring more utility (hidden tax) revenues to the general fund with every rate increase. This meets the definition of a special tax in the constitution! You have a constitutional right to vote yes or no on a special tax measure (remember the library special tax).
- The city wants you to think it is running a business. A municipal utility provides services to the ownership of property. It is a government-owned and operated monopoly. You have to contract with the city for electric service to your property and pay the hidden tax rate of up to 57%!
Now that is some profit margin! Where is your money going? Can you live on 350 kwh of electric service per month!!
The city by approving 50% increases in electric rates over the last six years and instituting punitive tiered pricing, is forcing you to conserve electricity (remember in October 2006, city council approved electricity rate hikes to fund the “$1.5 billion Renaissance”) but, you don’t need more electricity. Most if not all of the $650 million dollars spent for electric infrastructure improvements has been for future growth of the city population, housing, downtown office space and re-development. It was never planned to help you but, you will pay and pay and pay. This burden of hidden taxation falls most harshly on fixed income (retirees) and low income families in the city. The city would prefer you to move to Mo-Val.
TMC, RATED RIVERSIDE’S MOST “SLANDEROUS” AND MEZZSPELLED, “MISSPELLED” AND “OPINIONATED” BLOG SITE! TEMPORARILY BLOCKED BY THE CITY OF RIVERSIDE AT PUBLIC ACCESS SITES WITHIN THE CITY, THEN UNBLOCKED. I GUESS YOU CANNOT DO THAT ACCORDING TO THE ACLU. RATED ONE TWO STAR OUT OF FIVE IN TERMS OF COMMUNITY APPROVAL RATINGS.. TMC IS NOW EXCLUSIVELY ON FILE WITH THE COUNTY OF RIVERSIDE’S DISTRICT ATTORNEY’S OFFICE, AND PROSSIBLY POSSIBLY ON FILE WITH THE CITY OF RIVERSIDE’S POTENTIAL SLAPP SUIT LIST… WE WILL HAVE TO ASK GREGORY ABOUT THAT ONE ( OUR PEOPLE WILL HAVE TO CONTACT HIS PEOPLE)… AGAIN, THANK-YOU COMMUNITY OF RIVERSIDE AND THE CITY OF RIVERSIDE EMPLOYEE’S FOR YOUR SUPPORT! WE REALIZE IT’S TOUGH, SO HANG IN THERE.. COMMENTS ALWAYS WELCOMED, ESPECIALLY SPELL CHECKERS! EMAIL ANONYMOUSLY WITH YOUR DIRT OR FOR CONTACT! THIRTYMILESCORRUPTION@HOTMAIL.COM
City Of Riverside: Demise Of Redevelopment – What A Mess!!
Posted by admin in Public Policy on April 17, 2012
From TMC: Thirty Miles of Corruption
With the end of California Redevelopment December 29, 2011, cities are scrambling to grab assets and minimize their losses. As one reads in the news, Governor Brown stole our money and we are left with a mess. I don’t know about other cities, but I can tell you that Riverside created their own mess.
Riverside has a long history of borrowing monies from our own local utility funds, they are the cash cows for cities. When the Hudson regime was crowned by Mayor Loveridge, Ed Adkinson, Frank Schivaone, Dom Betro, etc. this borrowing became exponential.
The sewer, electric and water fund operate as an enterprise fund, essentially they are set up to make a profit. This profit is supposed to be used for maintenance, repairs, and operations, in the case of the sewer fund no new construction is allowed. The profit is saved for a rainy day and used to maintain our infrastructure. Well here comes FRED (Frank and Ed), Mayor Loveridge and a city manager willing to take our city into the deep dark hallows of debt. The borrowing frenzy began, funding pet projects, redevelopment activities, and favored developers was on.
The parking fund was born and we immediately borrowed 5 million from the sewer fund. This was the birth of the parking meters. One million dollars of the sewer fund went to the parking meters and the other four million went to fund the Taj Mahal, Orange Street parking garage. Well, this was easy, no one noticed, so let’s see what else we can spend sewer monies on.
We have a developer who would like to build some luxury townhouse/condos (Raincross Promenade). Sewer fund monies again, the victim of greed and mismanagement. The city spent approximately 15 million dollars to assemble properties, demolitions, relocation, etc. Sewer fund 0, developer 15 million. There is a catch here.
The city charter states that we can make inter-fund (between electric, water and sewer) loans, no mention of inter-agency (redevelopment is a separate legal agency) loans. Fast forward 2010. Over 21 million dollars was loaned out of the sewer fund to the City of Riverside Redevelopment Agency. One loan did not even have a contract in place so that the sewer fund would be able to be paid back. Who would have known that the first thing Governor Brown would do when taking office would be to end redevelopment. Oops.
AB 126 passed,the court upheld this ruling and now we must comply. What does that mean for the sewer monies and the monies from all of the enterprise funds, sewer included. Bye Bye. The ruling states that these loans are unenforceable, sewer fund 0, redevelopment agency and the State of California 21 million. When you hear city leaders complain that the State of California is taking our money, our city leaders should have had the ethical and intellectual understanding to have not made illegal loans in the first place. Taxpayers 0, Sewer fund 0, Renaissance 21 million.
Please view the article link.
TMC, RATED RIVERSIDE’S MOST “SLANDEROUS” AND MEZZSPELLED, “MISSPELLED” AND “OPINIONATED” BLOG SITE! TMC IS NOW EXCLUSIVELY ON FILE WITH THE COUNTY OF RIVERSIDE’S DISTRICT ATTORNEY’S OFFICE, AND PROSSIBLY POSSIBLY ON FILE WITH THE CITY OF RIVERSIDE’S POTENTIAL SLAPP SUIT LIST… WE WILL HAVE TO ASK GREGORY ABOUT THAT ONE… AGAIN, THANK-YOU COMMUNITY OF RIVERSIDE AND THE CITY OF RIVERSIDE EMPLOYEE’S FOR YOUR SUPPORT! COMMENTS ALWAYS WELCOMED, ESPECIALLY SPELL CHECKERS! EMAIL ANONYMOUSLY WITH YOUR DIRT OR FOR CONTACT! THIRTYMILESCORRUPTION@HOTMAIL.COM
Guerrilla Grafters Bring Forbidden Fruit Back To City Trees
Posted by admin in Gardening, Public Policy on April 12, 2012
Here is a problem begging for a solution. Let’s hope the fruit grafters and the city can come up with the perfect way to keep everyone fed, healthy and safe on the sidewalks!
Thanks to NPR’s food blog, The Salt.
Spring means cherry, pear and apple blossoms. But in many metropolitan areas, urban foresters ensure those flowering fruit trees don’t bear fruit to keep fallen fruit from being trampled into slippery sidewalk jelly.
But a group of fruit fans in the San Francisco Bay Area is secretly grafting fruit-bearing tree limbs onto those fruitless trees.
I visited the “crime scene” one recent day, but I can’t tell you where it is because I was with the “criminals.”
“If we say where it is, they could come after me,” says Tara Hui, a fruit tree grafter. She’s talking about city officials, who manage the trees and say it’s illegal to have fruit trees on sidewalks.
So let’s just say we’re in some Bay Area city in a working-class neighborhood, at a line of pear trees that bear no pears.
Hui and two assistants pull out a knife, reach into a plastic bag filled with twigs no bigger than your pinkie, and cut from a fruit bearing pear tree. She says it’s an Asian pear, and that she’s grafting it onto a flowering pear tree.
They whittle a wedge into one end of their twig, then cut a groove into a similar-sized twig on the city tree. They join the two, like tongue and groove carpenters. And when their grafted twig eventually grows into a branch.
“There will be a much better looking tree that actually will provide fruit for people that come by,” Hui says.
Hui’s motives to break the law are straightforward.
“We don’t have a supermarket and we have very few produce stores [here],” she says. “What better to alleviate scarcity of healthy produce in an impoverished area than to grow them yourself and to have it available for free.”
Carla Short, an urban forester for the San Francisco Department of Public Works who’s in charge of 103,000 public trees, has a different view of fruit trees.
“It gets very dangerous very quickly,” Short says. “I mean the minute that fruit gets crushed on the sidewalk, it is slippery. We certainly don’t want people to get injured.”
She says fruit isn’t forbidden everywhere, and the local government does encourage them in community gardens.
But that does put the city forester in an awkward position — advocating for publicly available fruit trees, but policing guerrilla grafters. Short says her team is looking for the guerrilla grafters but hasn’t found them yet.
And what will they do if they find them? First, try to reason with the grafters, she says.
Meanwhile, Hui imagines these same streets in the coming years.
“Just taking an evening stroll, and then you see a fruit and you reach over and now you’re nourished,” says Hui.
So far, officials have yet to discover which of the city’s decorative trees will become delicious trees because the grafts aren’t yet old enough to bear fruit.
Wall Street’s Not Cutting It – Can We Do Better?
Posted by admin in Democarcy, Public Policy, Resoration Economy on November 9, 2011
By Ellen Brown. Wall Street’s not cutting it: California’s legislature voted to do a feasibility study on establishing a state-owned bank.
AB 750, California’s bill to study the feasibility of establishing a
state-owned bank that would receive deposits of state funds, has passed both houses of the legislature and is now on the desk of Governor Jerry Brown awaiting his signature.
It could be the governor’s chance to restore the state to its former glory.
As noted in TIME Magazine:
[I]n the 1950s and ’60s, California was a liberal showcase. Governors Earl Warren and Pat Brown responded to the population growth of the postwar boom with a massive program of public infrastructure-the nation’s finest public college system, the freeway system and the state aqueduct that carries water from the well-watered north to the parched south.
But that was before Proposition 13, a California constitutional amendment
enacted by voter initiative in 1978. Prop 13 limited real property taxes to
one percent of the full cash value of the property and required a two-thirds majority in both legislative houses for future increases of any state tax rates.
Prop 13 radically reduced the tax base, and as economist Michael Hudson
observes, it is too late to raise property taxes now. The tax savings simply drove property prices up, getting capitalized into additional debt service to the banks.
Today, he says, “so much urban property is sinking into negative
equity territory that a rise in property taxes will lead to even more
foreclosures and abandonments, and hence even lower fiscal returns.”
Meanwhile, the state is struggling to meet its budget with a vastly shrunken tax base. What it needs is a new source of revenue, something that won’t squeeze consumers, homeowners, or local business.
A state-owned bank can provide that opportunity. North Dakota, the only state that currently has its own bank, is the only state to be in continuous budget surplus since the banking crisis began.
North Dakota’s balance sheet is so strong that it recently reduced individual income taxes and property taxes by a combined $400 million and is debating further cuts.
It also has the lowest unemployment rate, lowest foreclosure rate and lowest credit card default rate in the country, and it hasn’t had a bank failure in at least the last decade.
Revenues from the Bank of North Dakota (BND) have been a major boost to the state budget. The bank has contributed over $300 million in revenues over the last decade to state coffers, a substantial sum for a state with a population less than one-tenth the size of Los Angeles County.
North Dakota is an oil state, but according to a study by the Center for State Innovation, from 2007 to 2009 the BND added nearly as much money to the state’s general fund as oil and gas tax revenues did.
Over a 15-year period, according to other data, the BND has contributed more to the state budget than oil taxes have. North Dakota is a conservative red state, not the sort you would expect to be engaging in government enterprise. But the conservative justification for a state-owned bank is that it preserves state sovereignty, allowing the
state to be independent of Wall Street and the Feds.
The BND is not a business competitor of the local banks but partners
with them, helping with capital and liquidity requirements. It participates
in loans, provides guarantees, and acts as a sort of mini-Fed for the state.
According to the annual BND report for 2010:
Financially, 2010 was our strongest year ever. Profits increased by nearly
$4 million to $61.9 million during our seventh consecutive year of record
profits. . . . We ended the year with the highest capital level in our
history at just over $325 million. The Bank returned a healthy 19 percent
ROE, which represents the state’s return on its investment.
A 19 percent return on equity beats the 170 billion dollars LOST
by CalPERS and CalSTRS, California’s two public pension funds, by the time the stock market hit bottom in March 2009. The BND was making record profits all through that period.
The BND augments state revenues in other ways besides just returning its profits to the general fund. It helps build the tax base by providing the
funding needed by local businesses, and by financing the infrastructure that attracts them. Among other resources, it has a loan program called Flex PACE that allows a local community to provide assistance to borrowers in areas of jobs retention, technology creation, retail, small business, and essential community services. Doesn’t that sound a lot like what redevelopment agencies were supposed to be doing?
The BND also furnishes a credit line to the state itself, one that is
effectively interest-free, since the state owns the bank. Credit lines are
extended in times of emergency or whenever state departments or
municipalities face unforeseen circumstances, such as the recent flooding in the state. Having a credit line to the state’s own bank allows state and local governments to avoid extortionate interest rates from Wall Street and pressure to privatize and reduce services in order to avoid downgrades from rating agencies.
Timothy Canova is Professor of International Economic Law at Chapman
University School of Law in Orange, California. In a June 2011 paper “The Public Option:The Case for Parallel Public Banking Institutions ,” he compared North Dakota’s comfortable financial situation to California’s:
. . . California is the largest state economy in the nation, yet without a
state-owned bank, is unable to steer hundreds of billions of dollars in
state revenues into productive investment within the state. Instead,
California deposits its many billions in tax revenues in large private banks
which often lend the funds out-of-state, invest them in speculative trading strategies (including derivative bets against the state’s own bonds), and do not remit any of their earnings back to the state treasury.
Meanwhile, California suffers from constrained private credit conditions, high unemployment levels well above the national average, and the stagnation of state and local tax receipts.
California was once the nation’s leader in technology, industry,
entertainment and public education. Under Governor Pat Brown, tuition at UC campuses was free, making higher education available to all. Today tuition is about $13,000 a year, and the state has an unemployment rate hovering at 12%.
California, like North Dakota, is resource-rich. A state-owned bank will
allow it to capitalize on its resources to full advantage by providing the
credit needed to realize its potential. As the bank was described by
Assembly Member Ben Hueso of San Diego, who authored AB 750, “It’s not the fad of the moment, a pair of tight fitting jeans; it’s a pair of
construction boots.”
For more stories on banking possibilities, check out 1 Comment
Deomocracy Is For People
Posted by admin in Democarcy, Public Policy on November 9, 2011
One thing most of the 99% agree on is that democracy is for people and money is not free speech.
If you agree and would like to do something about it, add your name to the people’s petition to amend the constitution, overturn Citizens United and return democracy to we the people. Add Your Name Here.
Who Enforces City Charter Violations?
Posted by admin in Democarcy, Public Policy on November 9, 2011
Several public comments made at the charter review committee meetings have highlighted breakdowns in oversight and effectiveness of our public grand jury system.
It turns out that the DA is the public agency of next resort for citizens. Hello grand jury. Here’s more background from TMC.
Occupy Riverside Eviction
Posted by admin in City Of Our Dreams, Ethics, Public Policy, Social Capital on November 9, 2011
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