The Legislature continues marching toward financial devastation of California counties.
Looking out for their own political interests, Democratic lawmakers keep advancing legislation making it costlier and in many cases nearly impossible for counties to contract out for vital services.
This ill-conceived bill, AB 1250, perhaps the worst legislation this year, should have died months ago. Instead, it cleared another Senate committee on Friday as legislators race to finish business by Sept. 15.
Those lawmakers, doing the bidding of labor lobbyists, aim to force counties to stop contracting and instead hire more county workers, complete with their unaffordable pension costs.
The bill purports to be a cost-saving measure that forces counties to compare the price of contracting for services with hiring more county workers. But the bill’s rules for comparison place a giant thumb on the scale, inflating the cost of contracting while hiding the full price of hiring workers in-house.
Although the bill has been repeatedly amended, it remains fundamentally flawed. It epitomizes politics at its worst.
Democratic lawmakers want more campaign money from labor unions. Labor unions want more union members in county jobs. Taxpayers will get less for their money, and fewer people who need help will get services.
As if to prove the bill’s damaging potential, San Francisco was completely exempted. Santa Clara County Executive Jeff Smith, working for an extremely pro-labor Board of Supervisors, cut a shameless deal to exempt his health department from the contracting rules. Santa Clara sold out other counties, including Contra Costa, where Smith used to be county hospital director.
Similarly, state Sen. Jim Beall, D-San Jose, backed the bill in committee only after assurances that Santa Clara would get its carve-out. “That’s an effort of good faith and I appreciate it,” he said.
Good faith? Hogwash. It gave him political cover at home.
But it could backfire.
Patricia Gardner, chief executive officer of the Silicon Valley Council of Nonprofits, says Santa Clara County’s contracts with many of her member agencies would still be endangered — just like most contracts with non-profits in California’s other 56 counties.
According to a scathing analysis of AB 1250 by Gov. Jerry Brown’s Department of Finance, the bill “makes it extremely difficult for counties to contract for a host of public services including health care services, mental health services, substance (abuse) services, social services, transportation projects, and security and maintenance services.”
It would also hinder counties’ ability to hire, for example, financial, planning and environmental consultants, outside legal advisers and private ambulance providers.
Oh, the irony. For years, the state has jettisoned rehabilitation programs, turning them over to counties to run more efficiently and cost-effectively. Counties did this by partnering with non-profits. Now legislators want to force the costs up and efficiency down.
The goal isn’t saving taxpayers money. It’s giving more of it to public sector labor unions so they can bankroll lawmakers political campaigns down the road. Needy Californians will be the victims.
