Economist: Job growth in Inland Empire returning to normal

Businesses are hiring, and the Inland Empire is starting to see it — in the numbers anyway.

The region saw the net creation of about 46,800 new jobs in 2013 — a statistic Inland Empire economist John Husing said is a return to normalcy after the economic downturn of the past few years.

“What normally has occurred in the Inland Empire is, if you go back over the last 10 years and you look at growth, 46,000 is a slightly above-average number for us,” Husing said. “We’ve been as high as 60,000 but 46,000 is really strong. So it means that 2013 was an extraordinarily strong year, and it means that the whole economy has reached the point where it shifted gears from being struggling to starting to act more normally.”

The figure, Husing said, is based on a revision by the California Economic Development Department released on Friday. An earlier EDD estimate had net job growth in the Inland Empire for the past year at about 14,000 jobs, though the figure was presented prior to new calculations from data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Husing said.

“The conversations I’m having with people in different sectors of the Inland Empire economy are very positive,” said Paul Granillo, president and CEO of the Inland Empire Economic Partnership. “People have been reticent to invest and to hire and I think what I’m hearing is that now is the time that things have changed and that investment is necessary for them to position themselves for the next few years.”

According to Husing’s data analysis, social assistance was a sector that made the biggest gain in job growth with about 12,000 new jobs.

“That was a rather aggressive expansion of social services last year and that makes sense given the fact that unemployment tends to be rather high,” Husing said.

The revised data also marked a strong return for the construction sector with 6,700 new jobs according to a chart provided by Husing.

“Construction has been negative for the last several years,” Husing said. “That is a definite turnaround for that sector since we’re finally seeing construction taking back its traditional role as a strength for our economy.”

In an economic report keynote earlier this year, Husing said the sectors of logistics and healthcare are major driving forces of the regional economy.

According to the latest march EDD report, looking at the past year, trade, transportation, and utilities were major growth sectors, adding 9,600 more jobs. Transportation and warehousing added 4,300 jobs, retail trade was up 3,800 jobs and wholesale trade increased by 1,700 jobs over the year, according to the EDD.

Other industries that reported job gains for the year include leisure and hospitality employment with 8,600; education and health services with 6,600 jobs; and professional and business services with 6,100 jobs, according to the EDD report.

The Southern California Association of Governments, Granillo said, expect the Inland Empire population to grow from 4.3 million to 6 million by 2035.

“The economy is on an upswing and people are making investments in the employees, and looking to, in some cases, relocate to the Inland Empire, based on the fact that our economy is situated for growth,” Granillo said. “The people I’ve been talking to lately are in the professional services sector – lawyers and accountants looking to grow their footprint in the Inland Empire or to establish companies in Riverside and San Bernardino Counties.”

PHOTO: The State Economic Development Department on Friday released a jobs report for the Inland Empire - showing a surprising 46000 people were hired for new jobs - the figure is higher than an earlier report - surprising IE economist John Husing. Construction has made a strong showing in the new report.

via: http://www.sbsun.com/business/20140312/economist-job-growth-in-inland-empire-returning-to-normal

School Success Part Of Broader Strategy To Target Urban Poverty In Los Angeles Promise Zone

LOS ANGELES – Most days, you can find Melissa Estrada at Monseñor Oscar Romero Charter Middle School in Central Los Angeles where her son Angel Hernandez is in eighth grade. While Angel is in school, Estrada has taken classes to learn how to track his attendance and grades online and talk to him about drugs and safe sex.

Estrada never finished high school, but hopes to show Angel and her three other children how much she values education by taking workshops at the Romero school in the largely poor Mexican and Salvadoran neighborhood of Pico Union.

“I don’t know if I’m a good parent, but I want my children to see that I’m trying,” Estrada says. “I tell my son, ‘I want you to be better than I am.’”

Classes for parents offered at the charter school are all part of the plan there and at other schools in some low-income neighborhoods of Los Angeles to connect students’ families and other community residents with the help they need to find housing, health care, counseling and job training.

The concept is one all schools in Central Los Angeles’s “Promise Zone” – encompassing the neighborhoods of Pico Union, Westlake, Koreatown, Hollywood and East Hollywood – plan to copy.

‘Enormous implications’

With 165,000 residents and a poverty rate of 35 percent – 14 percent higher than for the city as a whole – the Promise Zone is one of five low-income areas named by President Obama in January as test cases for how to transform poor communities through a combination of federal grant support and local investments and partnerships.

The other Promise Zones are in San Antonio, Philadelphia, Southeastern Kentucky and the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. Within three years, the administration plans to bring the total number of Promise Zones to 20 across the nation.

The Promise Zones bring together the central elements of the multiple place-based strategies initiated during President Obama’s first term. These include Promise Neighborhoods, emphasizing schools designed to provide services to students from “cradle to career;” Choice Neighborhoods, centered on improved housing; and the Byrne Criminal Justice Innovation grant program, focused on public safety. In addition, Promise Zones are designed to attract and encourage economic investment and provide job training – and jobs.

“Promise Zones build on a lot of work that has been done already,” says James Quane, an associate director of research at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government who advised the Obama Administration on how to evaluate the Zones. But historically different governmental agencies -- including the departments of Education, Housing and Justice -- carried that work out separately. In the Promise Zones, these federal agencies and others, including the departments of Health, Treasury and Agriculture, will work together toward the goal of ending poverty, and each will be held accountable for its role.

“The push in the Obama Administration has been to put schools at the center of these agency networks,” says Quane. “So for example, there will be a push for interagency collaboration around the Department of Education’s goal to improve the academic performance of kids. If done right, this combined effort can have enormous implications.”

Another distinctive feature of the Promise Zones is that they will get preference when applying for federal grants. An array of city agencies, the Los Angeles Unified School District and 83 additional nonprofit and corporate partners have identified more than $500 million in potential federal grant money these partners can apply for under the Promise Zone initiative over the next 10 years – all aimed at not only giving families like the Estradas a chance to succeed but also to lower unemployment rates and raise income levels.

The city of Los Angeles has pledged nearly $33 million annually toward implementing and sustaining Promise Zone strategies.

In addition, nearly 50 business and nonprofit partners are on track to contribute $387 million to the LA Promise Zone. Combining revenues from all these sources, including support from philanthropic foundations, the LA Promise Zone is projected to benefit from an infusion of about $900 million over the next 10 years.

Schools at the hub

The LA Promise Zone will build on the substantial work of the Youth Policy Institute, which won a $30 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education in 2012 to revitalize the low-income communities of Hollywood and Pacoima, under the Obama administration’s Promise Neighborhood program.

Nineteen schools in the Promise Neighborhoods operate much like the Romero school, offering job training, one-on-one tutoring, after school programs, and health care to serve the whole community.

“When a student steps into a school, it’s our job to meet the needs of that student and her family, whether those needs are education-related or not,” says Dixon Slingerland, director of the Youth Policy Institute, which runs the Romero school and three other schools in Los Angeles, and will play a leading role in the LA Promise Zone.

The schools are based on the community school model, in which campuses become a hub for a range of programs for neighborhood residents. Educating students is just a small part of the services available to students and their families at the school. “If they’ve got housing problems, need counseling or therapy, we have full-time staff at the school site whose only job is to make all this stuff work,” Slingerland said.

Of the 19 schools in the Promise Neighborhoods, 11 have seen test score gains. Three of the schools are too new to have comparative test results. The schools with test results available saw on average a 17-point gain on the Academic Performance Index, according to numbers reported on Ed-Data, a website providing statistics on California schools. The index is the scale California has used to rank schools and is tied primarily to the test scores of their students.

The community school model is based on the idea of providing “cradle-to-college” services along the lines of the Harlem Children’s Zone, a 97-block section of Manhattan that has emerged as one of the most prominent place-based initiatives in the nation.

Despite skepticism among some researchers as to its effectiveness, President Obama has been sufficiently impressed with the Harlem project and its founder Geoffrey Canada that he has made it a model for his Promise Neighborhood program, and now for his Promise Zone initiative.

Long-term transformation

The Los Angeles Promise Zone will arguably be even more ambitious in its plan to transform schools than the Harlem Children’s Zone, which centers on three charter schools. The city hopes it can transform all 45 public and charter schools within the zone into resource centers for the entire community.

A large measure of the Promise Zone’s success will depend not only on whether it can improve children’s academic performance but also whether it will promote business investment in its communities and create jobs for its residents.

Youth Policy Institute’s Slingerland says he is pleased with success stories like the Estrada family. Yet he points out that the long-term goal is to put people to work through job-training programs offered through schools, or in one of three job-training centers that will be funded by the city and are expected to be up and running in the Promise Zone by this summer.

The Los Angeles Unified District, with the help of Youth Policy Institute, will transform all high schools in the Promise Zone into “linked learning” schools – effectively linking the academic curriculum with preparation for college and careers. To that end, schools will partner with high growth industries in the Promise Zone such as health care, construction, tourism and entertainment.

“If you look at data and statistics, a majority of our students tend to stay in this area,” says Esther Soliman, head of Los Angeles Unified’s linked learning initiative. “We’ll look at economic forecasts throughout the country, and specifically in LA, so we can determine the areas where students can actually get an entry-level job. We want them to go to college, but if they don’t, we want them to be prepared to make other decisions and make positive contributions to the community.”

Promise Zone leaders will be expected to collect data to measure their progress. That shouldn’t be a problem in Los Angeles, where the Youth Policy Institute spent three years building a data system in its Promise Neighborhoods in Hollywood and Pacoima to track children’s attendance, grades, test scores and post-graduation plans, including college attendance.

“For the first time ever we’ll be able to track families and say after five years what happened to those families,” says Martha Rivas, who directs research and evaluation for the Youth Policy Institute. “We’ll be able to say what services they received, what was effective, what wasn’t effective, what happened to family education level, family income, and begin to get more of a holistic picture of what’s working, what’s not, and what we need to do to change.”

Melissa Estrada has seen firsthand how the school has helped her son Angel. At many schools, there’s only time to teach reading, writing and math. At the Romero school, the first class begins at 8:30 a.m. and the school day ends at 4 p.m. After school programs continue until 6:50 p.m. That leaves time for hands-on science experiments in class, as well as computer and leadership lessons.

All students at the school get free breakfast, lunch and a snack (some community schools serve dinner). Tutors give students one-on-one help in all math classes. After school, there’s soccer (her son Angel’s favorite), chess, piano lessons, computer graphics and more one-on-one tutoring.

Plus, his mother’s involvement in the school also benefits her son. When she noticed Angel hadn’t turned in two history assignments, she spoke to his teacher right away – thanks to the workshop that taught her how to track his attendance and grades online. Since then, Angel’s history grade has improved from a C-plus to a B-plus.

But it is not test scores that are the most important goal of the initiative, says the Youth Policy Institute’s Slingerland. “What if test scores don’t go up?” he said. “I mean, we’re sure they will, but what if they don’t? If we reduce poverty, that’s what’s important. That’s what this is all about.”

This story was produced by The Hechinger Report and EdSource Today, the largest education reporting team in California

PHOTO: US President Barack Obama greets members of the Harlem Children's Zone Promise Academy after speaking about poverty during an event in the East Room of the White House's private dining room January 9, 2014 in Washington, DC. Obama announced five locations where his administration hopes to combat poverty including San Antonio, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, southeastern Kentucky and the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. AFP PHOTO/Brendan SMIALOWSKI

via: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/13/la-promise-zone-school_n_4957245.html

Democrats Will Try Long-Shot Maneuver To Bring Back Unemployment Benefits

WASHINGTON -- Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives will try to restore long-term unemployment insurance to 2 million workers using a rare parliamentary maneuver on Wednesday.

The procedural move, called a discharge petition, requires a majority of House members to sign on in support of discharging a bill from committee that has otherwise stalled. Democrats were unable to hit the threshold needed -- 218 votes -- for another recent discharge petition on minimum wage legislation, so it's unlikely they'll succeed with unemployment benefits.
But Democrats hope merely raising the issue puts pressure on Republicans.

"If my colleagues want to vote against the extension, I respect their right to disagree; but failing to even allow a vote goes against the very progress that families and our constituents demand," said Rep. Brad Schneider (D-Ill.), who will file the petition. "Partisan politics must not be allowed to get in the way of doing the right thing for our middle class families. That’s why I'll be filing a measure to end the gridlock and force a vote on extending unemployment insurance."

Discharge petitions are one of the few tools at the minority party's disposal to push the majority party to hold votes on items it doesn't want to advance. The majority party in the House, currently the Republicans, generally won't bring up a bill for a vote unless it has support from the majority of the chamber, or often the majority of the party's own members. 

That means that bills like the unemployment insurance measure from Rep. Sander Levin (D-Mich.), which is currently going nowhere in the House Ways and Means Committee, don't make it to the floor to be either voted through or voted down.

Levin's legislation would reauthorize federal unemployment insurance until the end of the year. The benefits, which kick in for workers who use up six months of state compensation, lapsed at the end of December for 1.3 million workers. Since then another 700,000 workers have exhausted their state benefits and been left hanging. Under the legislation they would all receive lump-sum payments for benefits they've missed so far.

Nearly 4 million workers have been jobless six months or longer, according to the Labor Department. The average jobless spell in February had lasted about nine months.

House Republican leaders have said they're not very interested in an unemployment insurance bill if it doesn't come with any GOP-friendly provisions. And they're happy to let the Democratic-controlled Senate make the first move, something the Senate has been unable to do.

"The Speaker has said repeatedly that if Senate Democrats can produce an extension of temporary emergency unemployment benefits that is not only paid-for, but also does something to actually create jobs, he will be happy to discuss it," Brendan Buck, a spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said in an email last week.

The Congressional Budget Office estimated reauthorizing the unemployment insurance would add 200,000 jobs to the economy, but Republicans have ignored or dismissed the CBO's findings on unemployment benefits and jobs.

In addition to the discharge petition Democrats filed last month to raise the minimum wage, they are expected to soon make the same move on comprehensive immigration reform.

Discharge petitions rarely get the 218 votes needed to force a vote on the House floor. Since 1931, when the maneuver took its current form, 563 discharge petitions have been filed but only 47 received 218 signatures, according to the Congressional Research Service. Over the past 30 years, seven petitions have made it to the signature threshold, and all of them received floor votes.

But even if they don't expect to get 218 signatures, proponents argue that circulating discharge petitions can up the pressure. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said as much last week when talking about plans to file a discharge petition for a comprehensive immigration reform bill.

"We'll never get the 218 on the [immigration] discharge petition ... because the Republicans will generally not sign," she said in an interview on SiriusXM. "But the fact that it is there and the outside mobilization is saying, 'All we want is a vote' -- either sign the petition, which enables us to get a vote, or urge the speaker to give us a vote."


PHOTO: On Wednesday March 12, 2014, Nancy Pelosi of California told reporters , she and dozens of her party members prepared to file a discharge petition in the House, aimed at forcing a House vote on an unemployment insurance extension. The Huffington Post/Jennifer Bendery


via: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/11/unemployment-benefits_n_4936840.html?utm_hp_ref=unemployment

Californians' food assistance use doubled during recession

As recession gripped the state a half-decade ago, Californians receiving what used to be called food stamps more than doubled to more than four million, a legislative hearing was told Tuesday, but the state still has, relatively, a very low rate of utilization.

Californians' use of what is now called CalFresh may be the lowest in the nation, a report from the Legislature's budget analyst says.

The state's utilization rate of 57 percent of eligible low-income Californians was calculated by the federal government for 2011 and was tied with Wyoming for the lowest. The national average was 79 percent that year, indicating that were California to reach that level, another 1.4 million Californians would be receiving the electronic benefit cards that replaced food stamps and are used in grocery stores to purchase approved foods.

The report said that the food assistance program increased from two million persons in 2006-07 to more than four million in 2013-13 and showed an especially large jump — nearly 25 percent — in 2009-10, during the depths of the recession. While enrollment is still growing, the rate of increase has dropped to scarcely 5 percent a year as the economy has improved.

However, the report from Legislative Analyst Mac Taylor's office warned legislators that the federal data on utilization may be outdated and otherwise not a true picture of what's happening with the federally financed program in California, although it did not question that the state's use is below average.

The joint hearing by the Assembly and Senate human services committees was called to delve into ways to increase utilization. It heard from a variety of advocates for the poor, as well as state and local officials who administer the program.

PHOTO: Volunteers sort boxes of food at the Elk Grove Food Bank Services in Elk Grove on Feb. 20, 2014. The Sacramento Bee/Randall Benton

Citing truancy 'crisis,' Kamala Harris, lawmakers seek action

Emphasizing that young students who frequently miss school are far more likely to fall behind and commit crimes later in life, California Attorney General Kamala Harris and half a dozen lawmakers introduced an anti-truancy bill package on Monday.

The legislative effort ties to a a report from Harris' office that depicts the repercussions of an estimated one million truant elementary school students a year, good for a 29.6 percent truancy rate among California youngsters.

Missing a substantial amount of school carries cascading consequences, Harris said: children who are already behind reading level by third grade are four times as likely to drop out of high school. In turn, high school dropouts suffer higher unemployment rates and become more likely to turn to crime.

"There's a direct connection between education and public safety," Harris said.

School districts also incur an economic cost, Harris said, given that funding is linked to school attendance rates. The report estimated that absent students cost districts $1.4 billion annually.

Legislators promoted a set of five bills focused on data collection and reporting, from requiring the State Department of Education to track truancy rates to having district attorneys explain the outcomes of school attendance-related prosecution.

A bill by Assemblywoman Joan Buchanan, D-Alamo, would require all counties to create entities called school attendance review boards, which some counties already use to give chronically absent students an alternative to entering the juvenile justice system. A bill by Assemblyman Chris Holden, D-Pasadena, would have existing school attendance boards share more data.

Harris and lawmakers acknowledged that enhanced data collection will not by itself affect the outside issues that keep kids out of school, from poor health to volatile homes to overworked parents. But they said it is a starting point, allowing policymakers to understand why desks stay empty.

"If we don't know what the problem is or where the problem is, we can't solve it," said Buchanan.
Low-income students whose families lack the resources to compensate for missed classwork suffer acutely from skipping school, lawmakers said, as do children of color. Sen. Bill Monning, D-Carmel, called addressing early childhood truancy key to breaking the cycle of poorly performing students churning through the criminal justice system.

"Stemming the tide of truancy is a critical component to disrupt the school to prison pipeline," Monning said.

PHOTO: Attorney General Kamala Harris greets Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson at a press conference at the Capitol on Monday March 10, 2014. The Sacramento Bee/Hector Amezcua 

Analyst says Jerry Brown's prison plan is short-term fix

Gov. Jerry Brown's plan to reduce prison overcrowding may satisfy a looming federal deadline but it does not represent a durable long-term solution, according to the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst's Office.

In a victory for the Brown administration, the federal panel adjudicating the struggle over California's prison overcrowding recently gave the state two more years to reduce its population to constitutional levels.

While the LAO concludes that California is on pace to slip under the federal cap, the nonpartisan analyst faulted Brown's plan for relying too much on the use of county jails and private prisons. Brown's budget would spend $481 million to place just under 17,000 inmates in so-called contract beds .

A strategy combining contract beds with other changes, such as increasing good time credits and expanding parole for the elderly, inmates with serious medical conditions and second-strikers, will likely get California under a federally-mandated cap by the new 2016 deadline, the LAO found.

But the state's prison population is projected to climb again in subsequent years. Relying on contract beds will also place a costly burden on the state, the LAO argues, to the tune of about $500 million annually.

"The plan contains relatively few measures that would help the state maintain long-term compliance other than relying indefinitely on costly contract beds," the report concludes.

Given those risks, the LAO urged the Legislature to craft some longer-term policy solutions. 

Its recommendations include reducing certain sentences and converting some crimes to "wobblers" that can be charged either as misdemeanors or felonies -- an approach Brown vetoed last year - allowing inmates to earn more early release credits for good behavior, and expanding programs that allow adult men to serve part of their sentences outside of state prison.

The two-year extension, granted earlier this month, came after the governor secured legislative approval last year of his package allocating $315 million to house excess inmates.

But because California received the two-year extension, Brown's budget proposes taking some of the money approved last year to house more inmates and depositing it instead into a Recidivism Reduction Fund.

Specifically, Brown's budget also proposes channeling just under $50 million from the recidivism fund into re-entry hubs and around $30 million on substance abuse, rehabilitation and mental illness programs.

That infusion might help for the coming budget year, but it will quickly exhaust the recidivism fund, the LAO said. To sustain the types of programs Brown proposes funding, the Legislature would need to continue dipping into the General Fund on an annual basis.

"The Governor's budget proposals create or expand programs that would require ongoing funding to effectively reduce the prison population," the LAO report estimates.

The LAO also rejected both the governor's plan to fund re-entry hubs, which use education and treatment to prepare inmates nearing the end of their terms to reintegrate into society. 

The report cast doubt on whether re-entry hubs effectively reduce recidivism.
Similarly, the report urged the governor to discard his plan to spend $11.3 million on integrated drug treatment, calling the program unproven and overly costly.

Instead, the LAO recommends diverting the $60 million set aside for those two programs towards an initiative rewarding counties that keep paroled felons from returning to state prisons.


PHOTO: Inmates inside the jail cells in the old Stanislaus County downtown main jail in Modesto on Wednesday June 19, 2013.The Sacramento Bee/Manny Crisostomo.

Attorney General Kamala Harris fights for concealed-weapon standard

Attorney General Kamala Harris announced on Thursday she would appeal a ruling overturning California's concealed-weapons law.

Two weeks ago, a three-judge federal appeals court struck down a California law requiring people to demonstrate "good cause" - beyond self defense - before they can carry a concealed handgun in public.

As a result of that rule, some counties have a more stringent standard for obtaining permits, requiring applicants to justify a need beyond self-defense. A group of San Diego County residents had sued after their permit applications were rejected in 2009.

Harris had until Thursday to declare the state's legal response, and she announced in a press release that she had filed a motion urging the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to reconsider its decision.

"Local law enforcement must be able to use their discretion to determine who can carry a concealed weapon," Harris said in a statement. "I will do everything possible to restore law enforcement's authority to protect public safety, and so today am calling on the court to review and reverse its decision."


San Diego County Sheriff Bill Gore has already decided to not appeal the ruling.