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According to an editorial on Thursday at www.sacbee.com, Assemblyman Bob Wieckowski is attempting to clean up Assembly Bill 506 with AB 1692 less than one year after AB 506 was approved.

The original AB 506 established a mediation process cities would have to follow before filing for bankruptcy protection. It is the basis for the mediation process the Town of Mammoth Lakes is currently undergoing.

According to sacbee.com, Wieckowski is reneging on the law before there has even been a chance to see if it works.

“Wieckowski gutted an innocuous measure, Assembly Bill 1692, and inserted amendments that allow interested parties – including most significantly, his public employees union buddies, mainly firefighters – to endlessly delay and thus effectively stop municipal bankruptcy filings,” the article stated.

The law was originally negotiated between municipalities and public employee unions. Union contracts could be nullified if a city enters into bankruptcy, according to www.calwatchdog.com.

“The amendments inserted into AB 1692 impose on cities the very provisions which, after lengthy negotiations, Wieckowski agreed to strip from last year’s compromise measure. They were removed from the original bill because cities recognized that they would stymie city efforts to file for bankruptcy,” it continued.

If the Legislature approves AB 1692 (it may be going to a vote as early as Friday, May 24), it would not only break the deal the Legislature cut such a short time ago, it would destroy trust, according to sacbee.com Not to mention the blow it could potentially strike the Town of Mammoth Lakes in its continued dealings with the Mammoth Lakes Land Acquisition settlement.

Coming soon to a jail near you: inmates, courtesy of the state of California and its new Public Safety Realignment Act of 2011, aka AB 109.

On Tuesday, Mono County Interim Chief Probation Officer Tracie Neal briefed Mono County’s Board of Supervisors on the County’s Local Implementation and Post Release Supervision plan to handle perhaps a dozen or so inmates, who are to be transferred here from state prison facilities, either for incarceration, supervision or parole programs.

Neal reported that our area Community Corrections Partnership (CCP) crafted the local implementation plan, which was approved at its most recent meeting on Oct. 5.

The plan stemmed from the requirements under AB 109 the Public Safety Realignment Act. CCP drafted recommendations that allow local agencies to accommodate the new prison population under AB 109.

Signed by Governor Jerry Brown in April, AB 109 went into effect as of October of this year. The law moves persons convicted of crimes deemed “non-serious, nonviolent and nonsexual” to county jails with “some” (the keyword) of the costs paid by the state. In May, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling that gives California just two years to trim its prison population by 33,630, reducing the number of inmates to 109,805 from 143,435.

According to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR), between 1990 and 2005, California’s prison population increased by 73% and peaked in 2006, with slightly more than 172,000 offenders incarcerated. Prisons have been operating at 175% of their designed capacity, and as a consequence, the CDCR is the state’s largest agency, with an annual budget of $10 billion dollars.

The CDCR reports that parolees returning to prison or committed for a new crime accounted for only 10% of the entire inmate population in 1977. By 2009, the number had skyrocketed to 77%. In 2003, the Little Hoover Commission analysis on California state government concluded that California’s prison system was nothing short of a “billion-dollar failure.” Its unacceptable recidivism rates, coupled with prison overcrowding and exorbitant spending, led directly to the new legislation and mandated judicial action.

The court’s decision made what was a “prospect” of releasing offenders a reality. “The Supreme Court recognized that the enactment of AB 109 [in which a prison plan is laid out] is key to meeting this obligation. We must now secure full and constitutionally guaranteed funding to put into effect all the realignment provisions contained in AB 109,” Brown said after the ruling.

One of the key provisions of AB 109 provides for the shifting of minimum-security inmates and low-risk offenders to county jails or other correctional facilities.

According to Neal’s breakdown, AB 109 revenue funds include $220,093 for training and implementation, a planning grant, post-release community supervision/local incarceration, and District Attorney/Public Defender costs, distributed as follows: Probation Department $158,000; Sheriff’s Department $57,500; Department of Social Services $1,000; District Attorney $1,796.50; Public Defender $1,796.50. Inmates cost the County roughly $180 each per day to house.

The CDCR estimates Mono County’s “average daily population” (ADP) of these offenders will be approximately 4 under post-release community supervision, 1 parolee and post-release community supervision violators in jail on revocations, and another 7-8 serving mandatory supervision or full jail terms.

She said four offenders would be on post-release community supervision or probation during the first 9 months. These offenders will require the full range of supervision, sanctions and services resource available through the department, Neal added.

The new, untested recommendations are seen as “works in progress,” according to Mono Sheriff Rick Scholl, who agreed with Neal that there will be refining of policies and procedures to “kick the tires, and find out what works and what doesn’t.”

Scholl also said the exact inmate figures Mono County can expect are subject to fluctuation. Further impact to the County is also expected due to “new sentencings” that have yet to hit the state system. Those figures, he added, are also “unknown quantities.”

County Counsel Marshall Rudolph said that he is in contact with various colleagues’ offices in other counties, as well as the California State Association of Counties, to explore other legal remedies, should those become necessary, including possible ballot measures that could be put before state voters. “Right now, it is the law,” noted Board Chair Hap Hazard. “We’re driving blindfolded, but we are trying to peek out from under blindfold.”

Neal said state funding dollars are only guaranteed for 9 months, though Gov. Brown is said to be working on a proposed Constitutional amendment to make that money a more permanent part of the state budget.

Critics doubt cap-and-trade will be as sweet as ice cream

Federal Cap and Trade legislation may, according to Senate majority leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), be dead on the Hill, but even in advance of the Nov. 2 general election, the previous day the state California Air Resources Board (CARB) had released its proposed greenhouse gas (GHG) cap-and-trade regulation.

Proposition 23 would have put AB 32, the state’s greenhouse gas law, on hold until the unemployment rate held at 5.5% or lower for at least a year. That, state officials acknowledged, has happened only three times in the past 40 years, having the practical effect of killing the law.

No matter, Prop 23 was defeated, clearing the way for cap and trade to take effect in California in 2012.

The cap-and-trade program will apply to about 85 percent of GHG emissions in the state from 360 businesses, reports Bay Citizen. Those industries impacted include large industrial emitters, the electricity sector and fuel distributors.

The cap-and-trade rules would place a limit, or cap, on GHG emissions for the state that would decline over time, reports The Wall Street Journal.

Aimed at helping the state meet its target goal of reducing GHG emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, the?emissions cap will decline approximately 2 percent a year from 2012 to 2014 and about 3 percent a year after 2015, reports Bay Citizen.

Companies could also purchase carbon credits, or offsets, and use those offsets to meet up to 8 percent of their “compliance obligation,” which is up from the 4 percent proposed by CARB earlier this year, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Between 2012, the first year of the proposed cap-and-trade program, and 2020, “a maximum of 232 million offset credits may be used,” with each offset credit representing one metric ton of carbon dioxide, reports the Bloomberg news service.

The offsets will be approved by the Los Angeles-based Climate Action Reserve, and the accounting system is said to meet both local industry?and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency GHG accounting requirements, according to a report in The New York Times.

California is also working with six other western states and four Canadian provinces through the Western Climate Initiative (WCI) to design a regional cap-and-trade program.

Cap-And-Trade critics say the free market is the best way to achieve the reductions in GHG emissions that society wants. There is also considerable push-back mounting to putting CARB in charge of the regulation. Opponents have called CARB an “objective-oriented … activist agency that plays fast and loose with science,” a charge borne out by recent revelations that CARB ignored seriously flawed data in key emissions analyses in the state’s off-road diesel vehicle regulations.

“I believe the battle over cap and trade in America is taking place in California,” Republican Assemblyman Dan Logue told the New York Times. Logue, who represents districts in northern California, authored the ill-fated Prop 23 ballot initiative. “What we’re saying is, this is not the time for political correctness. This is a time for putting America back to work; let the experiments happen later.”

Proposition 23 was largely funded by petroleum interests, including Texas oil giants Valero and Tesoro, who said AB 32 will end up forcing them to invest millions of dollars to comply, and asserted that it would force companies to cut jobs and raise the price of gas at the pumps.

Big oil, however, was clearly not united in its opposition: some major California oil refineries, including Chevron, stayed out of the battle.

“Implementing AB 32 will cause significant job losses and higher energy costs in California,” said Katie Stavinoha, a spokesman for Flint Hills Resources, a Kansas-based petroleum company owned by the Koch brothers. “The company also thinks it sets a bad precedent for other state governments to do the same thing.”

Curiously, the issue hardly breaks cleanly along business lines. Some business analysts think it could be a reflection of California’s diverse business environment, which has always had a strong research and development sector, powered by venture capitalists ready to finance cutting-edge technology.

Numerous business groups opposed the drive to suspend the greenhouse law. And the list of contributors backing Prop 23 was noteable for the absence of many of those same venture capitalists.

CARB will hold its final vote of the cap-and-trade program on Dec. 16.