Prison realignment plan makes sense but taxes should not go up to fund it

One of the California Legislature's more reasonable actions has been its so-called prison realignment plan, which shifts responsibility for low-level offenders from the notoriously bureaucratic and wasteful California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to county law enforcement officials.

For starters, California has the highest recidivism rate in the nation; so, this makes reasonable policy sense given that state control has not helped reform this dysfunctional and overcrowded system. Furthermore, local control is a good thing from a democratic perspective as local officials are more
accountable to voters than state officials. Saving money in a tough economic climate is a useful goal also.

Yet many local officials have been frantic about the proposal and some have been claiming that this plan will lead to a dangerous crime wave across California if it goes through without more "funding."
It's against this backdrop that Gov. Jerry Brown last week issued his promise to seek a ballot initiative in November 2012 that provides a state constitutional guarantee of funding for the realignment proposal. He spoke at a Sacramento gathering of local and law enforcement officials who were looking at ways to implement the plan. As is typical with government officials, their main concern was how to get more money from the state's hard-pressed taxpayers.

Brown didn't disappoint. "Don't worry about the money," he told them, according to published reports. "We'll get it to you one way or the other." California taxpayers ought to become concerned about this sort of big-spending talk.

The Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association believes that Brown is almost certainly looking at a measure that would undermine constitutional requirements that require two-thirds local votes to increase local taxes or special taxes. Brown clearly wants to make it easier for local voters to increase taxes on themselves. Indeed, Brown has been upfront since his campaign about his desire for higher taxes in this already highly taxed state – provided that voters approve them. At the local level, public-sector unions are well-funded and can continually support tax increase proposals until they pass.

Undermining the two-thirds vote requirement makes it a matter of when, not if, such tax increases are approved throughout the state. This is particularly galling given that local law enforcement agencies are at the center of the ongoing debate about pension reform. Rich pensions for public safety officials – often topping $100,000 a year, thanks to the "3 percent at 50" formula that allows law enforcement to retire at age 50 with  90 percent or more of their final year's pay – are cutting deeply into local budgets. The reason these agencies don't have enough money to incarcerate low-level criminals is because the departments spend so much on personnel and pension costs. They overspend on bureaucracy building and equipment buying. When they run out of money they complain that they don't have enough to live up to their legal responsibilities.

So they complain to the governor and he tells them not to worry. He will raise taxes on local property owners and find the money "one way or the other." One need only look at the California state government's cost structure, especially in the area of incarceration, to see that we spend far more here than in other states. There's much room for reform. We want to see alternative ideas – i.e., contracting out for services, more competitive bidding, pension reform, prison guard compensation scrutiny and cutting of nonessential services – before being told that there's nothing else to do but make it easier to raise taxes.  We'll wait to see the governor's specific proposal, but this looks like more of the old tax-raising reflex we've come to expect from him.