California Editorial Roundup

Feb. 27

The Fresno Bee on enthusiasm for California infrastructure after floods:

There is a cycle to the conversation about infrastructure and how to pay for it. And it goes like this in California:

A few politicians say that infrastructure - roads, bridges, tunnels, railways, dams and more - are the lifeblood of economic prosperity.

Editorial boards point out that Gov. Pat Brown and the Legislature of his era helped make California an economic power by investing in the massive California State Water Project and highways, and by making the University of California system the best in the world.

People mostly nod “yes” and move on to the hot-button issues of the day. They do so because infrastructure isn’t sexy and it is expensive. It requires political and financial discipline to build and maintain all these things that help make an economy hum.

Then disaster strikes. A bridge collapses and people die. A train barreling along poorly maintained tracks derails. Or deep erosion opens on the Oroville Dam emergency spillway, and 188,000 downstream residents along the Feather River must be evacuated.

Suddenly infrastructure is sexy.

Last week Gov. Jerry Brown urged that lawmakers spend $437 million for flood control. It is a modest request, though not nearly enough, as he readily acknowledged by displaying charts showing that upgrading California’s water infrastructure, including 1,500 dams and thousands of miles of levees, would cost $50 billion.

If we are to live and prosper, we will need to pay for it. How to pay for it is less clear. But Californians can readily see what’s in store if we fail to find solutions.

Brown has appealed to President Donald Trump for infrastructure funding. Money from Washington would be nice. But Californians will need to take steps on their own.

A Legislative Analyst Office report last month shows that $1.7 billion remains unspent from a $4 billion flood control bond approved in 2006. The LAO attributed the delay to the lengthy permitting process and complications of allocating funding among state, local and federal sources.

In other words, red tape is getting in the way of the public good. That needs to end, and it starts with smart reform of the California Environmental Quality Act.

Brown and the Legislature should also revisit Proposition 218, the 1996 initiative that restricts local government’s ability to raise taxes to pay for public works. Brown is fully aware of the constraints imposed by Proposition 218, saying in 2015 that it is an “obstacle to thoughtful, sustainable water conservation pricing and necessary flood and stormwater system improvements.”

Without a doubt, many existing levees and dams need to be shored up, and the state should greatly increase storage by expanding and building reservoirs and recharging aquifers.

But if, as the experts say, we are in for continued extreme weather as our climate changes, California must look beyond simply reinforcing levees and dams to battle nature. One environmentally sound solution is right in front of us.

Motorists driving over the Yolo Causeway now see what looks like a huge lake. The Yolo Bypass is one of the most elegant flood-control measures in California. It’s prime farmland during the summer and fall, and lush feeding grounds year-round for birds that migrate over the Pacific Flyway.

It’s also a vital flood-control basin for water that otherwise would top Sacramento River levees. It ought to be replicated in other flood zones, though that might mean buying some low-lying land from property owners.

The crisis isn’t over. Even if we get no more major storms this year, rivers will remain swollen with runoff for months and levees can fail on warm spring days.

The storms of 2017 offer Brown and legislators a grand opportunity to return to what helped build California in the first place: infrastructure.

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Feb. 28

Mercury News on requiring California doctors to reveal their probationary status to patients:

There is no state requirement that former Piedmont family practice doctor Lindsay Agolia advise her Yuba City patients that she’s on probation after having a sexual relationship with one patient and inappropriately prescribing narcotics for another.

Felix Vergara’s bio on the Kaiser Permanente website makes no mention that the Antioch-based internist is on probation because of inadequate record keeping and negligent care of a patient who subsequently died.

The California Medical Board has also placed Los Gatos internist Mary Hutchins on probation after she excessively prescribed narcotics and psychotropic drugs to multiple patients.

If you are a patient of one of those doctors, wouldn’t you want to know their status? And what happened?

You deserve to know. It’s long past time for state lawmakers to require that doctors reveal their probationary status to patients.

These are not physicians who have committed minor transgressions; they’re generally one step away from losing their California licenses to practice medicine after egregious behavior.

There are only 497 doctors, or less than half of 1 percent of the physicians living in and licensed to practice in California, who are on probation.

We’re talking about cases of gross negligence or incompetence, substance abuse, inappropriate prescribing of medications, sexual misconduct or felony convictions.

Nevertheless, the medical board has dragged its heels for years on rules requiring notification when patients come in the door. The doctor-majority board puts pocketbooks of physicians ahead of interests of patients.

Board President Dr. Dev GnanaDev insisted during a legislative hearing Monday that money has nothing to do with it. His warped-logic rationale is that he does not want to “destroy the doctor-patient relationship.”

Imagine that. If patients knew their doctors’ troubled histories, they might feel less comfortable. What he really means is that they might go elsewhere - you know, find a doctor who doesn’t abuse drugs or inappropriately fondle patients.

GnanaDev, appointed to the board by Gov. Jerry Brown, is also a past president of the California Medical Association. That’s the physician’s lobbying group that throws its political influence and money around Sacramento.

Thus far, it has been successful. Bills to require notification have died as legislators put political interest ahead of their constituents. The only way for patients to learn something is amiss is by searching the medical board’s clunky web site for each of their doctors’ records. That’s not adequate.

Legislation last year by state Sen. Jerry Hill, D-San Mateo, would have required notification of patients when they come into the doctor’s office. Senate Bill 1033 died when 25 of 40 senators voted no or didn’t vote.

Many are now gone. The list of holdover obstructionists includes Bay Area Sens. Steve Glazer, D-Orinda; Bob Wieckowski, D-Fremont; and Bill Monning, D-Monterey.

It’s time for them to put patients’ interests first.

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Feb. 23

East Bay Times on BART funds:

Three East Bay representatives deserve great credit for trying to restore some fiscal sanity and honesty to BART.

The Bay Area’s critical transit district is being run under a cloud of deceit. District officials last year convinced voters to pass a $3.5 billion bond measure for capital projects. They promised that the district would continue to kick in its fair share, but less than three months after the election they are moving to renege on that.

They could withdraw as much as $1.2 billion and redirect it to the district’s excessive labor costs. In effect, that means that a large chunk of the money from the bond sales, for which property owners will pay higher taxes for decades to come, will not go for the capital projects that were promised.

Instead it will go to cover the district’s mounting projected operating shortfall, now forecast at more than $300 million over the next 10 years.

Credit Assemblywoman Catharine Baker, R-Dublin, and Sen. Steve Glazer, D-Orinda, with trying to rein in this financial train wreck. Credit newly elected Assemblyman Tim Grayson, D-Concord, for backing some of their efforts.

While the rest of their Bay Area legislative colleagues give tacit consent to this mismanagement of public funds, Baker and Glazer are proposing simple, meaningful changes.

For starters, Baker’s AB 1509 would require that BART keep its promise to the voters by making its full $1.2 billion contribution to capital projects. If it failed to do so, the state would withhold a like amount of sales taxes.

Glazer’s two bills attempt to address the underlying cause of BART’s behavior: sweetheart labor contracts that the district cannot afford but agrees to under the threat of strikes that can gridlock Bay Area roadways.

SB 603 would prohibit BART officials from signing labor agreements that limit its ability to prepare for a strike. Under the current contract, only a “qualified train operator” can drive trains, and they’re all union members. Glazer’s bill would enable BART to train management workers so they’re prepared in case of a strike.

SB 604 would simply prohibit BART workers from striking after a contract runs out if the district continues to maintain provisions of the old contract and that old contract has a no-strike clause.

As reasonable as these measures are, Baker and Glazer will have a tough time garnering support in the labor-dominated Legislature.

But they might have leverage: The Legislature will soon be considering a transportation infrastructure package and placing a bridge toll increase on the ballot from which BART wants even more money.

BART shouldn’t get more until its leaders start managing what they have responsibly.

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Feb. 27

Pasadena Star-News on free speech on California campuses:

Our nation’s institutions of higher learning are supposed to be repositories of knowledge, enriched by the free flow of information and competition of ideas, but they are increasingly failing in this mission.

Sadly, college campuses, which tend to embrace liberal ideologies, including tolerance, oftentimes are among the most intolerant of opposing views, as evidenced by the imposition of speech codes and enforcement of “free speech zones,” which limit what can be said and where it can be expressed. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education notes that it “has received an increasing number of reports that colleges and universities are inviting students to anonymously report offensive, yet constitutionally protected, speech to administrators and law enforcement through so-called ’Bias Response Teams.’” More than 230 schools have formed such teams, which oftentimes operate under broad definitions of “bias,” and create “a chilling effect on campus expression,” FIRE reports.

Tensions have reached a boiling point on many campuses, as illustrated by several recent examples here in California. Orange Coast College suspended a student for recording a professor’s anti-Trump rant, before backing down after a national outcry.

At UCLA, conservative communications instructor Keith Fink is accusing his department of political discrimination after suffering reductions in his class size and the rejection of his permission-to-enroll forms, which allow students to enroll in a class with the instructor’s permission, under a new department head with reportedly very left-leaning ideals. Only 200 of the 241 students who attempted to enroll in Fink’s course were admitted, even though the classroom has a capacity of 293. Ironically, the subject of the argument is Fink’s popular “Sex, Politics and Race: Free Speech on Campus” course.

Sometimes, attempts to stifle speech even get violent. A Cal State Fullerton instructor was suspended for allegedly striking a student from the College Republicans, who were staging a counterprotest of students rallying against President Donald Trump’s policies. And then there was the violent protest that forced the cancellation of controversial conservative speaker Milo Yiannopoulos’ planned event at UC Berkeley a few weeks ago.

But there is a bit of a silver lining as well. Just about a week prior to the UC Berkeley riot, a rowdy crowd forced the cancellation of another Yiannopoulos talk at UC Davis. In response, interim Chancellor Ralph Hextor announced that he is forming a work group of students, faculty and staff to recommend policies to ensure that even the most polemical speakers can have their voices heard on campus.

“When we prevent words from being delivered or heard, we are trampling on the First Amendment,” Hextor stated recently. “Even when a speaker’s message is deeply offensive to certain groups, the right to convey the message and the right to hear it are protected.”

Quite so. Moreover, there is no place for speech codes and free speech zones on college campuses - or anywhere else. After all, as FIRE senior program officer Adam Steinbaugh wrote in a recent Washington Examiner column, “How will students be able to defend their rights in the legislature or the courts if debating them in the classroom is to be discouraged?”

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Feb. 22

Orange County Register on race disparities in education:

On Feb. 1, the first day of Black History Month, hundreds of African American students and parents rallied outside the Capitol in Sacramento to encourage lawmakers to support charter schools in order to help improve student achievement.

“We all know the system is failing black kids,” said Margaret Fortune, president and CEO of Fortune School, which operates several Sacramento-area charters and Hardy Brown College Prep in San Bernardino.

As the popularity of charter schools has soared, including among more traditionally Democratic-dominated constituencies, a fracture has appeared in the historic Democratic-labor union alliance, with a growing segment of the Democratic Party joining with Republicans in calling for greater school choice.

There is a reason for that increased support for charters: results. Of 13 predominantly African American and low-income California schools deemed “high achieving” on state assessments, 12 are charters, Fortune noted.

When the NAACP considered an ill-conceived resolution calling for a nationwide moratorium on new charter schools last fall, the California Legislative Black Caucus sent a letter opposing the idea. “African American students in charter schools gained the equivalent of 14 extra days of learning in reading and 14 extra days of learning in math per year, compared with their African American peers in traditional public schools,” the letter noted. Those benefits rise to 29 and 36 extra learning days, respectively, for low-income African American charter students.

“Additionally, African American and Latino students in California charter schools are accepted into the University of California at much higher rates than students in traditional public high schools” (19 percent versus 11 percent, respectively).

“An outright moratorium,” the Black Caucus added, “would put minority students and students in low-income neighborhoods and underperforming districts at a significant disadvantage by eliminating a critical educational option.”

These benefits are not limited to African American students, of course.

Greater choice, greater flexibility and greater competition in education should be embraced because they will lead to more innovation and better educational outcomes for students of all racial and economic backgrounds.