Realignment, now two years old, has been an amalgam of success, headaches, money and challenges. The big unknown, thus far, is corrections.
From Capitol Weekly's John Howard: "It was done too quickly, without enough notice and not enough jail beds for local detainees,” said John Benoit, chairman of the Riverside County board of supervisors, referring to the transfer of state inmates to local custody."
"The shift of some state prisoners to the county sheriffs is the most visible – and controversial — piece of realignment, Gov. Brown’s plan to transfer authority over numerous state programs to the local jurisdictions and supply them with the money to handle them. He sought the shift after federal judges ordered the state to reduce the number of inmates in its overcrowded prisons; the governor has appealed the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court."
"But the huge shift, some $6 billion a year worth of services, includes much more than inmate transfers. “I think things are moving along okay on that front – we’re getting people into mental health treatment and we’re getting people into substance abuse treatment. On the whole, providing the services is still a work in progress for us,” Benoit said..."
Negotiations to avert a BART strike are going on, but on another transportation front, the governor has weighed in -- at AC Transit.
From the Chronicle's Jill Tucker: "AC Transit workers were pulled from the brink of a strike Wednesday after Gov. Jerry Brown called for an investigation into the contract dispute, the first step toward calling for a 60-day cooling-off period."
"The agency's union workers had issued a 72-hour strike notice Monday, which could have halted bus service for 180,000 daily riders at 12:01 a.m. Thursday."
"The AC Transit Board of Directors on Tuesday asked Brown to issue a 60-day cooling-off period, saying a strike would "significantly endanger the public's health, safety and welfare."
Speaking of weighing in, the governor is getting into one of the thorniest disputes of the modern age -- the internet vs. privacy.
From Capitol Weekly's Alex Matthews: "Jerry Brown became California’s longest-serving governor earlier this month. But the state he governs now is drastically different than the one he first faced in 1975. That dynamic landscape is illustrated nowhere more clearly than in the blending and shifting of the borders between technology and individuals’ privacy rights."
"For example, just three years before he began his first term Californians amended the state constitution to enshrine privacy as one of their fundamental rights."
"Nicole Ozer of the ACLU noted that California lawmakers “have a long history of proactively addressing privacy issues.”
Officials in Los Angeles, where voter turnout is so miserable that it makes low turnout in other areas look great, want to boost voters' engagement.
From the LAT's David Zahniser: "Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and City Council President Herb Wesson called Wednesday for the creation of a citizen panel to look for ways of boosting the city's anemic voter turnout, months after fewer than one-fourth of the electorate took part in the mayoral election."
"The proposed Municipal Elections Reform Commission would explore such ideas as changing the date of city elections, offering same-day voter registration, making absentee ballots more readily accessible and conducting special elections that are vote by mail only."
"The proposal comes a week after the Greenlining Institute, a Berkeley-based nonprofit group, issued a report saying elections in odd-numbered years inhibit voter turnout and skew the makeup of the electorate. Los Angeles' elections are held in odd years, while state and federal elections occur on even-numbered ones."
The carrot-and-stick approach works in the world of public education administration, according to a Stanford study that examined Michelle Rhee's tactics.
From EdSource's John Fensterwald: "Score one for Michelle Rhee and performance pay."
"A study released Wednesday of the controversial teacher evaluation system that Rhee initiated when she was chancellor of the District of Columbia Public Schools has found that both its threats of dismissal and big pay incentives worked as intended. Within its first three years, the system led to increases in the retention and the performance of effective teachers while encouraging ineffective teachers either to quit or improve."
"The research, co-authored by Professors Thomas Dee of the Stanford Graduate School of Education and James Wyckoff of the University of Virginia, is one of the first studies to show a positive impact of offering more money to teachers who perform better. As they acknowledge, most of the research “raises considerable doubt about the promise of teachers’ compensation-based incentives as a lever for driving improvements in teacher performance.” Especially when the pay incentives were linked to increasing test scores alone, “it may be that teachers generally lack the willingness (or, possibly, the capacity) to respond to incentives that are linked narrowly and exclusively to test scores,” Dee and Wyckoff wrote."
