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Tapping into public resentment of government pay perks, state Sen. Joe Simitian, D-Palo Alto, has introduced legislation that would put limits on the retirement benefits of government workers.

The bill, among other things, would curb a practice known as “pension spiking” in which public employees count pay hikes in their final year of work, such as cashed-out vacation time and career-end bonuses, toward their pension payouts. How much employees get is generally based on their last year’s salary.

While not illegal, many try to boost their final pay for the sake of retirement, adding a burden to the state’s public retirement fund and forcing other employees and local governments to make greater contributions to keep the retirement system viable.

by Joe Simitian

“Jobs, jobs, jobs” was the call from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in his State of the State message. No one heckled. Jobs are a bipartisan aspiration.

Turning it into a bipartisan accomplishment has been more elusive. So it is all the more frustrating when the state fumbles an easy opportunity for more employment - when projects have been designed, money is available, contractors are eager to bid, workers are desperate, and yet all sit and wait for a sluggish bureaucracy.

School district officials up and down the state tell me that they have construction work ready to go. But the plans are stalled at the Division of the State Architect which must approve them. Like many state agencies, the architect’s office has required its employees to take three unpaid furlough days a month - even though when plan-checkers stay home, construction workers remain idle.

The measure of the wait is called “bin time.” Bin time is not how long it takes to review the plans; it’s how long a plan sits before someone even picks it up. At the end of January, bin time was 12 weeks. That’s right, three months.

School districts have the money for new buildings and modernization. Voters in 2006 approved $7.3 billion for K-12 schools statewide, and local bonds add millions more. California’s construction industry certainly needs the work. It shrank by more than 100,000 jobs in 2009. That means that school districts are missing a prime opportunity to capture low-cost bids, giving the taxpayers more for their money.

Delays on school projects are particularly disruptive. For work that must be done when students are gone, a three-month delay can turn into a year if the project isn’t approved in time for the coming summer.

Instead of furloughs, state architect’s office employees ought to be working full time, and even overtime. If applications temporarily flood in, the agency should contract out for additional reviewers if it believes adding permanent staff is not cost-effective.

Getting these projects underway is not just a benefit for school districts. When people go to work and contractors buy supplies, the state receives sales and income taxes.

Unfortunately, a backlog at the state architect’s office is nothing new. Last April, the agency told school districts it was reordering priorities. In June, acknowledging bin times of 12 weeks, the agency announced it would hire 25 additional staff and take other measures to catch up.

It sounded good. Progress was made. It didn’t last.

Long term, the state and the nation need to reinvigorate the private sector to strengthen our economy. But in the short term, we need government to prime the pump. Right now, no mission of the state is more critical than job creation.

Few projects can match school construction as a quick way to put carpenters, masons, electricians and plumbers back to work and to boost orders for lumber, concrete, lights and pipes.

Schools are waiting to provide better classrooms, libraries and playgrounds for their students. Workers are anxious for a regular paycheck. The money is waiting in the bank.

Everyone is waiting on a state that says it wants nothing more than jobs, jobs, jobs, yet the bureaucracy seems in no hurry to reach in and grab the ones sitting in the bin.

State Sen. Joe Simitian, D-Palo Alto, is a member of the Senate Education Committee.

Drivers who love to text or chat on a cell phone, you might want to reconsider your illegal ways.

The cost of a ticket for these offenses could go way up — to $455 for texting and $255 and up, from about $145 — for not using a hands-free device if a bill introduced Monday by state Sen. Joe Simitian, D-Palo Alto, becomes law. [...]

“I’ve heard repeatedly that the current fines are too modest,” said Simitian, who has led the charge for tougher laws on these forms of distracted driving for nearly a decade. “They wouldn’t be anymore.”

Op-Ed by Rosamond L. Naylor and George H. Leonard

If aquaculture is to play a responsible role in the future of seafood here at home, we must ensure that the “blue revolution” in ocean fish farming does not cause harm to the oceans and the marine life they support.

In December, Rep. Lois Capps (D-Santa Barbara) introduced in the House the National Sustainable Offshore Aquaculture Act, a bill that addresses the potential threats of poorly regulated fish farming in U.S. ocean waters. Her bill shares many of the features of a California state law, the Sustainable Oceans Act, which was written by state Sen. Joe Simitian (D-Palo Alto) and signed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2006. That legislation regulates fish farming in state waters, which extend three miles off the California coast. At present, all aquaculture operations in California and the U.S. are located just a few miles offshore. [...]

The Obama administration is currently developing a national policy to guide the development of U.S. aquaculture. The administration would do well to embrace the vision articulated by Capps and Simitian for a science-based and precautionary approach to help ensure a responsible future for U.S. ocean fish farming.

How veteran California legislator Joe Simitian ’77 waded in to play a leadership role in California’s water reform battle.

A few miles downstream from the confluence of California’s Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, their combined waters—the bounteous runoff from the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada—funnel through the Strait of Carquinez, gap in the low hills of the Coast Range. This geological chokepoint creates a rare hydrological marvel: a vast, inverted river delta—one of only a few inverted deltas in the world. It’s an immense, wildlife-rich estuary once known as the “inland sea.”

Over the past 150 years, though, the Delta’s abundant and flood-prone waters have been corralled by levees and tapped by giant aqueducts. Now the linchpin of California’s water supply, the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta provides water to 25 million California residents and irrigates 5 million acres of cropland. But even as demand for the Delta’s water has grown, the supply has shrunk: The Delta has been plagued by four consecutive years of drought.

The combined effects of drought and diversion have devastated the estuary’s wildlife, especially fish populations. The Pacific smelt is on the verge of extinction, and wild salmon runs have dropped by 98 percent: from 3 million per year to just 50,000 per year. “There is, indeed, a salmon crisis in California,” Professor Holly Doremus, a Boalt Hall expert on state environmental laws, told California legislators in March 2009. “This is very obvious to anyone paying attention.” Doremus added, “This is not new. It’s as if we’ve waited until we’ve had a heart attack to seek medical attention rather than take preventive action.”

But it isn’t just wildlife that is at risk: Experts warn that the Delta’s 1,600-mile maze of flood-control levees, some dating back 150 years—is extremely vulnerable to collapse, and some estimates of flood damage from a Katrina-like catastrophe put the potential cost at $25 billion or more.

In April 2009, water shortages, ecological damage, and vulnerable levees prompted the environmental group American Rivers to declare the Delta America’s most endangered waterway. Environmentalists have long sought a solution to the situation. But just as the Delta is a geologic and hydrologic chokepoint, it’s proven to be a political chokepoint, too, defying a quartercentury of legislative attempts at water reform. Finally, in November 2009, the California legislature passed an omnibus package of water-reform bills. Designed to protect the Delta’s fragile ecosystem and improve water-supply reliability, the package included four bills to address the issues of water supply, environmental protections, groundwater monitoring, and oversight and enforcement, as well as a bond issue to fund future
water projects.

Fiscally, the most contentious piece of the water-reform bill signed into law by Governor Schwarzenegger on Nov. 9 is likely to be the $11-billion bond issue that would fund future water projects. But philosophically, the linchpin of the package is SBX7 1, authored by State Senator Joe Simitian, ’77. Simitian’s bill creates two “co-equal goals,” water-supply reliability and an improved ecosystem in the crucial and fragile Sacramento- San Joaquin Delta. SB-1 also abolishes the troubled Cal-Fed program and the Bay Delta Authority, creating a new seven-member governing council to oversee future water projects and the Delta’s environmental protection. Simitian—chairman of the Senate’s Environmental Quality Committee—spoke at length with Transcript about his labyrinthine four-year journey through California’s water world.

Click the following link to access a PDF of the interview: