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Don't get too worked up over acelaw.....he is a lost soul. You hit the nail on the head, and it is something I've stated this whole time.
You are describing what I like to call "lipservice". PROVE to me, and you, that something will get done........
Bah. I like the ol' "Well, the wheels are in motion." That one is my favorite because it has been used too much and means nothing.
Sks
Thanks for the recommendation, interesting that you go out of your way to get your SHOT in !!!Did they offer a amnesty ? NO ?, HMMMM just like I said they would not, now or ever, mark that down now!!!! What was TALKED ABOUT (not a law yet E) was a joke of a program , pandering was all that it was about.
We predicted the budget problem way back in Sept. 28th of 2001 , and the reasons for it, guess we were right on the money HUH SKS, lip service you say, and the train wreck is not over yet ,
..
Feature Story
September 28, 2001
CALIFORNIA BUDGET CRISIS LOOMS
THIS TIME IT WILL REALLY BE BAD
 THE COMING CALIFORNIA TRAIN WRECK
"America is importing permanent poverty and California is headed for a train wreck. The top 4% of income earners pay more than 50% of all income taxes collected by the state, while the bottom 49%, mostly Latinos, pay less than two percent of all income taxes. When the next downturn comes, and it will, state revenue will disappear overnight, leading to an unpredictable level of discontent among squabbling minorities." Bonds of Our Union, Part II.
I did not post the whole thing as it is about 5 pages , but you may want to kiss Calif GOOD-BYE
This will be the last train weck for this state
http://www.latimes.com/features/prin...-home-magazine
COVER STORY
Infinite Ingress
A human wave is breaking over California, flooding freeways and schools, bloating housing costs, disrupting power and water supplies. Ignoring it hasn't worked.
By Lee Green
For the Times
January 25, 2004
If projections through 2040 by demographers in the state Department of Finance prove accurate, conditions will only get worse. Much worse. New residents continue to wash over California's borders, but the state is neither attempting to restrain growth nor building adequate infrastructure to accommodate it. And the boat continues to fill.
During the last half of the last century"”an epoch encompassing most of the baby boom and, a generation later, all of the boom's echo"”the state's population grew by more than 24 million. The next 24 million"”more than the population of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa and Nebraska combined"”will arrive more quickly, inflating the total to nearly 60 million within 36 years. Barring the long-overdue mother of all earthquakes, a tightening of federal immigration policy, or the Rapture, California's population, currently at 36 million, likely will double within the lifetime of today's schoolchildren. A close look at the numbers suggests that the 1990s began a pattern in which California receives more new residents each decade than it did the previous one. The 2020s will witness the greatest 10-year increase in state history, and the numbers in the 2030s will be greater still.
John Vasconcellos, Democratic state senator from San Jose, says the Legislature's by-now renowned dysfunction ensures that "the government isn't capable of looking long-term at anything. The state is truly in dire straits. I'm not a pessimist and I'm not a doomsayer, but I've never felt so frightened by the prospects of the state in all my 37 years of serving the Legislature."
Vasconcellos is nicely positioned to address those frightening prospects as co-chair of a joint legislative committee called Preparing California for the 21st Century. The perils of unending population growth would be a fine place to start, but in its first three years the group instead has examined the intricacies of racial diversity and the implications of new technology. Fine subjects both, but it's disconcerting to think that in a Legislature with a select committee dedicated to professional sports and another focused exclusively on the horse-racing industry, no committee exists to examine a mounting population burden that threatens to degrade every quality that makes California so ... California. The topic "would be fitting for our agenda," Vasconcellos says, "but right now our agenda and our staff are at capacity."
So, perhaps, is California. Overshadowed by the state's long-term fiscal quagmire is the less publicized neglect of aging infrastructure that wasn't designed to serve current population levels, let alone a population projected to be nearly two-thirds larger within 36 years. The state relies on a staggering array of dams, canals, pipelines, pumping plants, levees, reservoirs, highways, bridges, parks, forest fire stations, agriculture inspection facilities, prisons, crime labs, mental hospitals, colleges and universities to maintain social and economic order. One would hope that the state would protect this investment of hundreds of billions of dollars, but the Legislative Analyst's Office reported just over a year ago that "appropriate maintenance ... has been a chronic problem," resulting in "deterioration of facilities and an accumulation of 'deferred maintenance.' " Not only does California have insufficient funds to correct the situation, it can't afford to do what's necessary to keep from falling still ****her behind.
And that's just the stuff we already have. To handle the anticipated yearly increase of 600,000 new residents"”equal to three new cities the size of Glendale"”the state must engineer and build billions of dollars of new infrastructure and facilities. Seemingly earnest efforts are underway, including water desalination proposals, road-widening projects, and new classrooms, but just catching up to current population needs would require a Herculean effort"”Sisyphean, actually, given the task's uphill, never-ending nature. Los Angeles's ratio of freeway space to cars ranks worst in the nation, one-third too small to meet existing demand. Since the mid-1970s, the number of miles driven by Californians has more than doubled while lane mileage has increased by less than 10%. One study predicts that by 2020, Southern California drivers will spend at least half their driving time making exactly as much forward progress as they would sitting on the living room sofa.
Water? The state should have no trouble keeping its head above it"”because there isn't much. For the past three decades, California's population has severely outstripped the state's ability to store water. Maurice Roos, chief hydrologist for the California Department of Water Resources, claimed three years ago that the state lacked sufficient storage capacity to get through two consecutive dry years. Even with continuing conservation efforts and occasional wet Sierra Nevada winters, experts agree that California will face chronic water shortages in the near future unless something changes.
"The electricity crisis [of 2001] should be a wake-up call for all of us with respect to water in California," Feinstein says, implying that water rationing is no less plausible than power shortages. "We will not have enough water unless we begin to build the necessary infrastructure, the desalination, the recycling, the conservation that's really necessary for 45 [million to] 50 million people."
The Assn. of California Water Agencies warns that as early as 2010, yearly demand could exceed supply by 4 million acre-feet, an amount equal to what 20 million residents use in a year. You won't be reduced to drinking from your rain gauge, but your water bill may get your attention, and green lawns, clean cars and full swimming pools could become as rare as a Dodgers appearance in the post-season. And that's in a good year. Even now the Colorado River, a prime source for Southern California, is so thoroughly tapped by seven states and Mexico that its waters rarely reach the sea.
Schools? In addition to his role with the Preparing California for the 21st Century joint legislative committee, Vasconcellos chairs the state Senate Education Committee. "We're so far behind now that if we build something like 100 schools a year for the next 10 years, we wouldn't catch up," he says. (Actually, the state only looks five years ahead. The California Department of Education calculates that meeting anticipated enrollment will necessitate the construction of 19 new classrooms every day, seven days a week, for the next five years. That's about 230 new schools per year. An additional 22 aging classrooms per day will need modernizing.) "We know that we've got a million more students coming to higher ed. We've known that for 10 years, and we've done almost nothing about it. The no-tax crew have had their way, so we're turning away 170,000 community college students this year alone."
Human proliferation touches everything. Air traffic is expected to double in the next 25 years. Los Angeles currently can deal with its garbage, but the county can foresee the day when it will have to ship it elsewhere. Developers convert at least 50,000 acres of California's farmland to home sites and other urban amenities every year, a phenomenon with no end in sight. The state already has lost 90% of its coastal wetlands. "To me the issue most fundamentally tied to population growth is loss of habitat and endangered species," says former CAPS President Ric Oberlink, who still consults for the organization. "You can talk about air quality, and there may be technological solutions for at least part of the problem"”and in fact we have improved air quality in most cities over the last several decades. But when it comes to wildlife habitat, there's no turning back."
Ben Zuckerman, a Harvard-educated UCLA professor of physics and astronomy, serves on the board of directors for both CAPS and the Sierra Club. "I have thought quantitatively through my whole career in the sciences, and I just look at the numbers, the extrapolations of the current trends, and they're just horrific both for the United States and for California," he says. Zuckerman advocates immigration reductions, but in doing so he takes pains to make clear that he doesn't speak for the Sierra Club, which officially abandoned that position in 1996. In the past decade, most other U.S. environmental groups have backed away from the issue as well"”the "deafening silence," Zuckerman calls it. It's a paradoxical shift given that human population growth underlies virtually every environmental problem.
"Environmental groups are not talking about it anymore," says Oberlink. "There's been a retreat from even identifying it as an underlying issue. And if they're not talking about it, the legislators are not going to delve into this issue if they're not being pressured. It's what we call an unholy alliance of leftists concerned about human rights considerations and right-wing libertarians who don't think there should be any government interference in anything."
Moreover, any stance against immigration, no matter how well articulated, guarantees cries of racism, elitism, all the old ad hominems.
And then there is the pesky little matter of conventional economics. "To create a sustainable and prosperous set of communities with zero population growth requires a different economic system than we have," says urban planning analyst William Fulton, who has written extensively on California growth and development. "Whether your population is increasing or decreasing, it creates a set of problems. I grew up in a depressed area where people didn't have jobs, where there was hardly any demand for anything, and where the quality of community life eroded day by day because population was stagnant and the economy was in decline. The way I look at it, which set of problems do you want?"
Can this be true, that to prosper we must increase population and consumption indefinitely, a feat quite impossible no matter how clever we think we are? The self-corrective, of course, is that as a place becomes less livable, people leave. That has already happened in California, though not in numbers great enough to matter. As long as other places are worse, people will come to California.
The state has "a spending crisis," Schwarzenegger said in this month's State of the State message. But the state also has an evolving crisis of shifting demographics as immigration expands the underclass, which pays a lesser share of the tax burden. The Southern California Assn. of Governments' 2003 State of the Region Report found that the region's position "is slipping in nearly every performance category related to socio-economic well-being, including income and educational attainment. Among 17 major metropolitan areas nationwide, the region ranks 16th or worse in ... attainment of high school degrees, per capita income, persons in poverty, and children in poverty."
Researchers at the Rand Corp. think tank spotted these troubling trends in 1997 after studying 30 years of economic and immigration data. Rand's review concluded that "the large-scale of immigration flows, bigger families, and the concentration of low-income, low-tax-paying immigrants making heavy use of public services are straining state and local budgets."
The lifeboat keeps sitting lower, water spilling over the gunwales, provisions stretching thin. Yet we keep taking on more passengers, and nobody's doing much bailing. Is this any way to run paradise?
"
You are describing what I like to call "lipservice". PROVE to me, and you, that something will get done........
Bah. I like the ol' "Well, the wheels are in motion." That one is my favorite because it has been used too much and means nothing.
Sks
Thanks for the recommendation, interesting that you go out of your way to get your SHOT in !!!Did they offer a amnesty ? NO ?, HMMMM just like I said they would not, now or ever, mark that down now!!!! What was TALKED ABOUT (not a law yet E) was a joke of a program , pandering was all that it was about.
We predicted the budget problem way back in Sept. 28th of 2001 , and the reasons for it, guess we were right on the money HUH SKS, lip service you say, and the train wreck is not over yet ,
..
Feature Story
September 28, 2001
CALIFORNIA BUDGET CRISIS LOOMS
THIS TIME IT WILL REALLY BE BAD
 THE COMING CALIFORNIA TRAIN WRECK
"America is importing permanent poverty and California is headed for a train wreck. The top 4% of income earners pay more than 50% of all income taxes collected by the state, while the bottom 49%, mostly Latinos, pay less than two percent of all income taxes. When the next downturn comes, and it will, state revenue will disappear overnight, leading to an unpredictable level of discontent among squabbling minorities." Bonds of Our Union, Part II.
I did not post the whole thing as it is about 5 pages , but you may want to kiss Calif GOOD-BYE
This will be the last train weck for this state
http://www.latimes.com/features/prin...-home-magazine
COVER STORY
Infinite Ingress
A human wave is breaking over California, flooding freeways and schools, bloating housing costs, disrupting power and water supplies. Ignoring it hasn't worked.
By Lee Green
For the Times
January 25, 2004
If projections through 2040 by demographers in the state Department of Finance prove accurate, conditions will only get worse. Much worse. New residents continue to wash over California's borders, but the state is neither attempting to restrain growth nor building adequate infrastructure to accommodate it. And the boat continues to fill.
During the last half of the last century"”an epoch encompassing most of the baby boom and, a generation later, all of the boom's echo"”the state's population grew by more than 24 million. The next 24 million"”more than the population of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa and Nebraska combined"”will arrive more quickly, inflating the total to nearly 60 million within 36 years. Barring the long-overdue mother of all earthquakes, a tightening of federal immigration policy, or the Rapture, California's population, currently at 36 million, likely will double within the lifetime of today's schoolchildren. A close look at the numbers suggests that the 1990s began a pattern in which California receives more new residents each decade than it did the previous one. The 2020s will witness the greatest 10-year increase in state history, and the numbers in the 2030s will be greater still.
John Vasconcellos, Democratic state senator from San Jose, says the Legislature's by-now renowned dysfunction ensures that "the government isn't capable of looking long-term at anything. The state is truly in dire straits. I'm not a pessimist and I'm not a doomsayer, but I've never felt so frightened by the prospects of the state in all my 37 years of serving the Legislature."
Vasconcellos is nicely positioned to address those frightening prospects as co-chair of a joint legislative committee called Preparing California for the 21st Century. The perils of unending population growth would be a fine place to start, but in its first three years the group instead has examined the intricacies of racial diversity and the implications of new technology. Fine subjects both, but it's disconcerting to think that in a Legislature with a select committee dedicated to professional sports and another focused exclusively on the horse-racing industry, no committee exists to examine a mounting population burden that threatens to degrade every quality that makes California so ... California. The topic "would be fitting for our agenda," Vasconcellos says, "but right now our agenda and our staff are at capacity."
So, perhaps, is California. Overshadowed by the state's long-term fiscal quagmire is the less publicized neglect of aging infrastructure that wasn't designed to serve current population levels, let alone a population projected to be nearly two-thirds larger within 36 years. The state relies on a staggering array of dams, canals, pipelines, pumping plants, levees, reservoirs, highways, bridges, parks, forest fire stations, agriculture inspection facilities, prisons, crime labs, mental hospitals, colleges and universities to maintain social and economic order. One would hope that the state would protect this investment of hundreds of billions of dollars, but the Legislative Analyst's Office reported just over a year ago that "appropriate maintenance ... has been a chronic problem," resulting in "deterioration of facilities and an accumulation of 'deferred maintenance.' " Not only does California have insufficient funds to correct the situation, it can't afford to do what's necessary to keep from falling still ****her behind.
And that's just the stuff we already have. To handle the anticipated yearly increase of 600,000 new residents"”equal to three new cities the size of Glendale"”the state must engineer and build billions of dollars of new infrastructure and facilities. Seemingly earnest efforts are underway, including water desalination proposals, road-widening projects, and new classrooms, but just catching up to current population needs would require a Herculean effort"”Sisyphean, actually, given the task's uphill, never-ending nature. Los Angeles's ratio of freeway space to cars ranks worst in the nation, one-third too small to meet existing demand. Since the mid-1970s, the number of miles driven by Californians has more than doubled while lane mileage has increased by less than 10%. One study predicts that by 2020, Southern California drivers will spend at least half their driving time making exactly as much forward progress as they would sitting on the living room sofa.
Water? The state should have no trouble keeping its head above it"”because there isn't much. For the past three decades, California's population has severely outstripped the state's ability to store water. Maurice Roos, chief hydrologist for the California Department of Water Resources, claimed three years ago that the state lacked sufficient storage capacity to get through two consecutive dry years. Even with continuing conservation efforts and occasional wet Sierra Nevada winters, experts agree that California will face chronic water shortages in the near future unless something changes.
"The electricity crisis [of 2001] should be a wake-up call for all of us with respect to water in California," Feinstein says, implying that water rationing is no less plausible than power shortages. "We will not have enough water unless we begin to build the necessary infrastructure, the desalination, the recycling, the conservation that's really necessary for 45 [million to] 50 million people."
The Assn. of California Water Agencies warns that as early as 2010, yearly demand could exceed supply by 4 million acre-feet, an amount equal to what 20 million residents use in a year. You won't be reduced to drinking from your rain gauge, but your water bill may get your attention, and green lawns, clean cars and full swimming pools could become as rare as a Dodgers appearance in the post-season. And that's in a good year. Even now the Colorado River, a prime source for Southern California, is so thoroughly tapped by seven states and Mexico that its waters rarely reach the sea.
Schools? In addition to his role with the Preparing California for the 21st Century joint legislative committee, Vasconcellos chairs the state Senate Education Committee. "We're so far behind now that if we build something like 100 schools a year for the next 10 years, we wouldn't catch up," he says. (Actually, the state only looks five years ahead. The California Department of Education calculates that meeting anticipated enrollment will necessitate the construction of 19 new classrooms every day, seven days a week, for the next five years. That's about 230 new schools per year. An additional 22 aging classrooms per day will need modernizing.) "We know that we've got a million more students coming to higher ed. We've known that for 10 years, and we've done almost nothing about it. The no-tax crew have had their way, so we're turning away 170,000 community college students this year alone."
Human proliferation touches everything. Air traffic is expected to double in the next 25 years. Los Angeles currently can deal with its garbage, but the county can foresee the day when it will have to ship it elsewhere. Developers convert at least 50,000 acres of California's farmland to home sites and other urban amenities every year, a phenomenon with no end in sight. The state already has lost 90% of its coastal wetlands. "To me the issue most fundamentally tied to population growth is loss of habitat and endangered species," says former CAPS President Ric Oberlink, who still consults for the organization. "You can talk about air quality, and there may be technological solutions for at least part of the problem"”and in fact we have improved air quality in most cities over the last several decades. But when it comes to wildlife habitat, there's no turning back."
Ben Zuckerman, a Harvard-educated UCLA professor of physics and astronomy, serves on the board of directors for both CAPS and the Sierra Club. "I have thought quantitatively through my whole career in the sciences, and I just look at the numbers, the extrapolations of the current trends, and they're just horrific both for the United States and for California," he says. Zuckerman advocates immigration reductions, but in doing so he takes pains to make clear that he doesn't speak for the Sierra Club, which officially abandoned that position in 1996. In the past decade, most other U.S. environmental groups have backed away from the issue as well"”the "deafening silence," Zuckerman calls it. It's a paradoxical shift given that human population growth underlies virtually every environmental problem.
"Environmental groups are not talking about it anymore," says Oberlink. "There's been a retreat from even identifying it as an underlying issue. And if they're not talking about it, the legislators are not going to delve into this issue if they're not being pressured. It's what we call an unholy alliance of leftists concerned about human rights considerations and right-wing libertarians who don't think there should be any government interference in anything."
Moreover, any stance against immigration, no matter how well articulated, guarantees cries of racism, elitism, all the old ad hominems.
And then there is the pesky little matter of conventional economics. "To create a sustainable and prosperous set of communities with zero population growth requires a different economic system than we have," says urban planning analyst William Fulton, who has written extensively on California growth and development. "Whether your population is increasing or decreasing, it creates a set of problems. I grew up in a depressed area where people didn't have jobs, where there was hardly any demand for anything, and where the quality of community life eroded day by day because population was stagnant and the economy was in decline. The way I look at it, which set of problems do you want?"
Can this be true, that to prosper we must increase population and consumption indefinitely, a feat quite impossible no matter how clever we think we are? The self-corrective, of course, is that as a place becomes less livable, people leave. That has already happened in California, though not in numbers great enough to matter. As long as other places are worse, people will come to California.
The state has "a spending crisis," Schwarzenegger said in this month's State of the State message. But the state also has an evolving crisis of shifting demographics as immigration expands the underclass, which pays a lesser share of the tax burden. The Southern California Assn. of Governments' 2003 State of the Region Report found that the region's position "is slipping in nearly every performance category related to socio-economic well-being, including income and educational attainment. Among 17 major metropolitan areas nationwide, the region ranks 16th or worse in ... attainment of high school degrees, per capita income, persons in poverty, and children in poverty."
Researchers at the Rand Corp. think tank spotted these troubling trends in 1997 after studying 30 years of economic and immigration data. Rand's review concluded that "the large-scale of immigration flows, bigger families, and the concentration of low-income, low-tax-paying immigrants making heavy use of public services are straining state and local budgets."
The lifeboat keeps sitting lower, water spilling over the gunwales, provisions stretching thin. Yet we keep taking on more passengers, and nobody's doing much bailing. Is this any way to run paradise?
"
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