Law Enforcement

Driver advocates suspect fiscal motive in California's soaring traffic tickets
The reasons are in dispute, but the trend is clear: The California Highway Patrol is handing out more traffic citations than it did a few years ago, and that has generated tens of millions of dollars in new revenue for state and local government. As the state and cities wrestled with shrinking revenue and growing budget gaps, the California Highway Patrol issued about 200,000 more traffic citations in 2009 than it did two years before.
Sacramento Bee

Public Employees

New report says public employees aren't overpaid
A new report concludes that public-sector employees' compensation lags that of private-sector workers when education and experience are factored in. The trade-off: Public-sector jobs remain more secure, and health and pension benefits are generally better than in the private sector. "Getting It Right: Empirical Evidence and Policy Implications From Research on Public-Sector Unionism and Collective Bargaining," by David Lewin, of UCLA's Anderson School of Management, and Thomas Kochan, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management, also includes research from a half-dozen professors from around the country who are part of the Employment Policy Research Network.
Sacramento Bee

State Budget Crisis

Jerry Brown plans to take his case for taxes to voters
Gov. Jerry Brown plans to hit the road next week, taking his case for more taxes directly to voters following the collapse of budget negotiations in Sacramento this week. He is also moving forward with his own plan to overhaul public pensions, apparently in an effort to blunt GOP assertions that he refused to make budget concessions that would rankle public employee unions. The labor groups, big donors to Brown and other Democrats, have resisted fundamental changes to the state retirement system.
Los Angeles Times

LAO: Union contracts ramp up pressure for layoffs, hiring freeze
Contracts recently negotiated by Gov. Jerry Brown's administration don't come close to saving the state enough money, placing "greater pressure on the administration to achieve employee compensation savings through other administrative actions, such as hiring freezes, furlough programs, and layoffs," an internal state memo says. The memo sent Wednesday from the Legislative Analyst's Office to the Senate Republican Budget Committee, embedded below, estimates that the contracts will produce only about one-third of the $308 million in general fund savings that Brown proposes in his budget.
Sacramento Bee

Pensions