California schools could eliminate a week of instruction and increase class sizes next year under Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s new plan for solving the state’s budget crisis.
Vowing to give schools maximum flexibility to cut costs, the proposal unveiled Wednesday also would allow districts to eliminate one of two science courses required for high school graduation.
Schwarzenegger’s plan would provide no teacher salary increases, eliminate a program providing subsidies to overhaul low-performing schools, and suspend participation in a program encouraging teachers to obtain national certification.
“It’s got a lot of ugliness to it and something for everyone to hate,” said Kevin Gordon, a veteran education lobbyist who said he sympathizes with Schwarzenegger’s plight.
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By Dan Smith and Kevin Yamamura
smith@sacbee.com
Published: Friday, Dec. 19, 2008
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s administration is telling labor unions that it will order two-day-a-month unpaid furloughs for state employees beginning in February to help the state save cash amid its budget crisis.
Bruce Blanning, executive director of the Professional Engineers in California Government, said he received a call this morning from Department of Personnel Administration officials informing the union of the impending executive order.
DPA officials could not be reached for comment, but Schwarzenegger administration officials have said the governor was considering such an order.
The furloughs would apply to all general fund and special fund employees and amount to about a 10 percent pay cut, Blanning said. The unpaid furloughs would begin in February and continue through June 2010, he said.
In addition, Blanning said, DPA officials told him the governor would order a 10 percent elimination of jobs in the state workforce, which could result in thousands of layoffs.
Blanning, whose union represents 13,000 engineers and land surveyors at Caltrans and other agencies, said the move is imprudent.
“We’re in a time when we’re trying to get federal money to build infrastructure and create jobs,” he said. “Telling people to stay home two days a month does not seem to be a productive way to do that.”
SacBee.com
Reggie Theus became the latest coaching casualty of this young NBA season.
Just 24 games into a disappointing campaign, the Sacramento Kings shook up their coaching staff Monday, firing Theus and tapping assistant Kenny Natt as his replacement on an interim basis.
Theus was fired two days after the Kings dropped a 114-90 decision to the New York Knicks, Sacramento’s 13th loss in 15 games.
The lopsided loss to the mediocre Knicks reportedly angered Kings owners Joe and Gavin Maloof, who have publicly criticized Theus’ coaching style and questioned the team’s direction in recent weeks.
“I’m not inclined, at the first sign of trouble, to start running around saying you have to fire the coach,” said Kings president Geoff Petrie, who informed Theus of his decision Monday morning. “But we have to try to do something to get a higher level of performance.”
Geoff Petrie is absolutely spot on!
“But we have to try to do something to get a higher level of performance.”
Joe and Gavin Maloof, there you have it, a simple solution. take it to a higher level. How do you do that you ask? Replace Petrie…
How can you hold a head coach responsible for the teams performance when you don’t even have a team. Petrie continues to mold and shape this team. At some point, you have to realize that what he is shaping is anything but a team…
Finally! The police catch a break and BAM, we have 3 arrests. I have zero tolerance for this type of behavior.
As for the punishment, I will leave that up to your imagination.
From the SacBee.com:
From Sandy Louey:
Sacramento police have arrested three teens believed to be responsible for three Natomas area armed robberies.
The three, a 17-year-old and two 15-year-olds, were arrested on suspicion of robbery in West Sacramento Tuesday night.
They were arrested after a person called the police with information about the suspects, said Officer Michelle Lazark, a spokeswoman for the Sacramento Police Department.
Police said the teens are responsible for robbing three businesses: the Pizza Hut at 604 W. El Camino Ave. on Nov. 13; the Mountain Mike’s Pizza restaurant at 1589 W. El Camino Ave.; and the Wendy’s at 4180 Northgate Blvd. on Dec. 1.
In all the robberies, the robbers pulled shirts over their heads and used a handgun to take money from the cash registers, police said.
Lazark said police are looking to see if the three are connected with other robberies.
The Bee is not identifying the suspects because they are juveniles.
Below is one of the surveillance photos, released earlier by police, that was taken at one of the robberies.
SacBee.com
Safety is a growing concern in the Sacramento area simply because the number of thugs and scumbags out number police. JoeSacramento has a great post on the thuggery in Natomas. The SacBee has a great article outlining how citizens and neighborhoods are paying for their own security.
Here is the article:
Published: Thursday, Dec. 04, 2008 | Page 1B
“You may start with a nice neighborhood,” Martinez said. “But if nobody does anything when the window is broken, the level of crime will escalate. You must nip it in the bud and let people know these things won’t be tolerated.”
Martinez is a big believer in the broken window theory, a concept that says if a window is left broken, people will perceive that nobody cares and nobody is in charge.
Times are hard all over, and it’s making things easier for crooks.
Lean budgets have prompted Sacramento city officials to cut the Police Department budget by 8 percent, and the county has made cuts in probation and other programs aimed at keeping offenders off the streets.
Some neighborhoods aren’t willing to sit back and hope for the best. Here’s how three of them are augmenting police services:
Sierra Oaks pays off-duty cops
Compared with other neighborhoods, there’s not much crime in Sierra Oaks, where houses range from $400,000 to more than $1 million.
Still, about a month ago, the enclave off Fair Oaks Boulevard hired off-duty Sacramento County sheriff’s deputies.
“We live in one of the most desirable neighborhoods in Sacramento and want to keep it that way,” said Thomas Dodson, homeowners association president.
Crime in Sierra Oaks is mostly limited to property – the bicycle taken from a garage or a laptop stolen from a car. Another problem this time of year involves thieves swiping delivered packages off porches.
One portion of the neighborhood is in Sacramento and the other part in the unincorporated county. City police and county deputies patrol their respective jurisdictions within Sierra Oaks.
The neighborhood once employed a private patrol company for $2,000 a month. The off-duty deputies cost about $4,000 a month, financed through homeowners association dues. About 500 of the 1,200 homeowners belong to the association.
“We have doubled our financial investment, but I think we have more than doubled our crime fighting,” said Dodson. “Our goal is to expand patrols.”
The deputies work through the Sheriff’s Department’s off-duty program. They come with street smarts and computer-equipped squad cars.
“They can make arrests, they can make stops,”said Dodson. “They will just pull up to somebody who doesn’t look quite right and say, ‘How you doin’?’ ”
Residents chose the days and times they wanted the extra patrols. Sierra Oaks committed to five four-hour shifts a week at varying times.
Dodson said squad cars are more noticeable these days:
“I got an e-mail from a deputy last night that said he drove 45 miles during his four-hour shift,” said Dodson. “He probably passed my house four times.”
Natomas Park hires security
To stem crime, the homeowners association for the sprawling, 8-year-old Natomas Park development hired Paladin Security. The community has endured robberies, shootings and home invasions.
“It is working phenomenally,” said Robert Thompson, homeowners association president.
The officers carry pistols and Tasers.
Several years ago, the homeowners association contacted city police but learned the department had no program for off-duty neighborhood patrols.
That could change.
Police Chief Rick Braziel said “he would be very supportive if a neighborhood association approached us to go into a contract to provide these services,” said Officer Konrad Von Schoech, police spokesman.
Thompson said Natomas Park is the largest homeowners association in Northern California: 4,000 homes with 14,000 residents.
Homeowners’ dues pay for the patrol. Dues, which include a management service, well-equipped clubhouse and the 24-hour security, cost homeowners $69 a month.
“Providing safety is at the top of the list for us,” said Thompson. “The basic tenet of the homeowners association is to preserve the property values. Nothing affects property value like crime.”
River Park relies on patrol
In River Park, one of the city’s safest neighborhoods, 40 men and women carry nothing more lethal than a portable spotlight.
Volunteers of the River Park Neighborhood Watch night patrol have shone a light on a potential thief who had shimmied under a vehicle for its catalytic converter.
They have scared off a stranger poking around a remodeled home in the neighborhood of 1,700 households near California State University, Sacramento.
The tree-lined streets are not immune to crime. One recent morning, a gardner’s leaf blower was lifted from his truck while he worked.
And the most shocking crime of recent memory occurred just this summer.
On Aug. 19, a girl in her late teens was walking near the neighborhood’s Glen Hall Park about 1 p.m. when a man forced her into the women’s restroom and sexually assaulted her, police said. The suspect remains at large.
The patrol operates in River Park from Memorial Day through Labor Day, a stretch that parallels the busiest time for Glen Hall Park, next to the levee at the American River’s Paradise Beach area.
“You do get people who arrive in the afternoon and don’t leave until late at night,” said patrol coordinator Billy Martinez, a physical therapist.
“Often they are drunk or stoned.”
The volunteers, traveling in pairs, pay for their own gas during two-hour shifts from 10 p.m. to 4 a.m.
Every time volunteers start to patrol, they call the Police Department and give dispatchers their names and the type of car they are driving. That saves time when they call back to report suspicious incidents.
They make no arrests.
Associated Press
Published: Wednesday, Dec. 03, 2008
SAN DIEGO — Four Sacramento men, including the son of former California Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez, went looking for revenge after being turned away from a fraternity party the night a San Diego college student was stabbed to death, then tried to destroy evidence, according to an arrest warrant released Wednesday.
Esteban Núñez, 19, and the others returned to San Diego on Wednesday to face murder charges, a day after they were arrested in Sacramento.
They are charged with one count of murder, three counts of assault with a deadly weapon and a misdemeanor count of vandalism for the Oct. 4 death and face a maximum sentence of life in prison if convicted of murder.
An arrest warrant filed in San Diego paints a picture of a group of friends who went out looking for trouble and then tried to cover up their actions. Police said they had gone to San Diego to party.
After being turned away from a fraternity party near San Diego State University, Esteban Núñez and the others went to a friend’s apartment, where they drank beer and rum.
The friend, Briana Perez, described people in her apartment becoming increasingly agitated about being rejected from the party. Some said, “Let’s go burn down their house” and “Let’s show them how we do it in Sac-Town,” according to the warrant.
Perez told police that Núñez and Rafael Garcia did most of the talking. Garcia, Ryan Jett and Leshanor Thomas, all 19, face the same charges as Núñez.
The four left the apartment and later encountered a group of men leaving a fraternity party about 2 a.m. Two of the stabbing victims interviewed in the hospital told police they were challenged to a fight. Their assailants called them “punks” and other names.
“They were walking down the street, there was a verbal exchange. It escalated into a physical altercation and eventually into the stabbing,” San Diego Police Capt. Jim Collins said.
A felony complaint filed in San Diego County Superior Court said the defendants used a knife or multiple knives to stab the four men. Luis Santos, a 22-year-old student at San Diego Mesa College, died at the scene. The stab wound “sliced through the bottom of his heart,” according to the arrest warrant.
“We’re not going to go into the details of each one of them, but they all acted in concert,” Collins said.
Police had not recovered any weapons. It was unclear how many knives were used in the attack, but the arrest warrant quotes a witness as saying Núñez and Jett tried to hide the knives and destroy other evidence.
One of the defendants, Thomas, told investigators the group went to a friend’s home in San Diego after the confrontation. He saw one of the men cleaning the knives while Jett and Núñez washed clothes in the kitchen sink. They then put the clothes in a plastic bag, which Thomas thought they brought back to Sacramento, according to the warrant.
A friend on the trip who was not charged says he went with Esteban Núñez and Jett to a spot along the Sacramento River near Núñez’s apartment. The friend, John Murray, told police the two placed knives in a plastic shopping bag and prepared to burn a shirt and a hat. They had filled a plastic cup with gasoline at a 7-Eleven, according to the warrant.
“They had a hat and a shirt they burned and they had their knives in a bag,” Murray told investigators. “I walked back to my car and said ‘You guys do what you have to do.’ ”
Murray said he didn’t actually see any items catch fire.
Police said they traced the suspects to Sacramento almost immediately based on witness accounts in San Diego. Detectives had searched the Northern California homes of all four suspects about a week after the October stabbing.
They are scheduled to be arraigned on Thursday.
Fabian Núñez, 41, flew with his wife and two younger children to San Diego on Wednesday and released a statement saying he had faith in the justice system.
“This is a very difficult and painful experience for every family involved. Maria and I love our children very much,” he said. “We are confident our son Esteban will be cleared of the charges he is facing.”
He referred media inquiries to Carlsbad defense attorney C. Bradley Patton, who did not return a telephone call. San Diego County prosecutors said they did not know whether the other three defendants had hired attorneys.
Santos’ father, Fred Santos, told the San Diego Union-Tribune he was glad arrests had been made.
“Who these people are, who their parents are, doesn’t make the pain less or more,” he said from the family home in Concord, a suburb east of San Francisco. “It changes nothing. Nothing can bring my son back.”
Esteban Núñez and at least one of the other suspects are college students in the Sacramento area, police said. Núñez listed himself as a business student at California State University, Los Angeles on his Facebook and MySpace pages. He posted photos of himself on Facebook with friends, including Ryan Jett, whom he labeled “Jett,” and Rafael Garcia, whom he called “Rafa.”
Most of the images were of Núñez posing at parties with friends. In one photograph, Núñez wore a black bandanna over his mouth with a friend doing the same while a girl held up a bottle of liquor.
On his message wall, one friend wrote “hang in there bro.”
Collins, the San Diego police captain, said there may be a “gang nexus” but declined to elaborate on any possible gang connection or other circumstances of the stabbing. Collins also would not comment on the role each of the suspects is believed to have played in the attack.
In the arrest warrant, investigators said the four defendants belonged to a “close-knit group of friends who call themselves ‘THC’ aka The Hazard Crew.”
Thomas said Esteban Núñez told his friends not to worry, according to the arrest warrant: “Núñez said whatever happens, he would take the rap for it” and that “hopefully his dad would take care of it and could get them off on self defense.”
Fabian Núñez, 41, was the longest-serving speaker in California’s era of term limits. The Los Angeles Democrat cultivated a close relationship with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger that led to their agreement on a landmark law to greatly reduce greenhouse gas emissions in California.
A former amateur boxer, Fabian Núñez worked his way through the political ranks of the Los Angeles labor movement before being elected in 2002 to the Legislature.
In 2004, he was elected Assembly speaker, one of the most powerful political leadership positions in the state. Núñez said he has no immediate plans to run for a future office.
Here is another example of a chain store making a change at the worst possible time. Today Raley’s announced that Frank McMinn was fired “Retiring”. I for one looked forward to hearing McMinns voice on the Raley’s ads.
Good luck to Mr. McMinn, we wish you the best.
Frank McMinn, the iconic radio voice of Raley’s, has exited the airwaves.
The upbeat, folksy McMinn aired his final spot for the grocery chain last week. His unnamed replacement is already voicing new ads on a trial basis.
Why the change?
Raley’s spokeswoman Nicole Townsend says McMinn “retired” as narrator for the company’s radio ads but will continue to work “behind the scenes” writing ad copy.
McMinn, who is in his 70s, says only “no comment.” Others suggest his retirement was not exactly voluntary.
Regardless, his departure from the airwaves will be a surprise for many Sacramentans who’ve heard him rhapsodize - “ummm, ummm” - about Raley’s fresh produce and meats for the past 15 years.
McMinn joined Raley’s in the late 1940s as an ad guy and rose through the ranks to become part of a management team that insiders still remember as “The Trinity.”
After retiring in 1993 from his VP marketing post, McMinn became a consultant - writing, producing and narrating spots for Bel Air Supermarkets and then Raley’s.
As the voice of Raley’s, McMinn acquired a following. “He had a way of romanticizing the retail product,” says local ad exec Paul McClure, whose Sacramento firm represents one of Raley’s competitors, SaveMart.
Another fan, Scott Rose of the Runyon Saltzman & Einhorn agency, says listeners trusted the “maturity” in McMinn’s voice.
“If he was telling me (Raley’s produce) was fresh, by God, I believed it was fresh,” Rose says.
Can the company find another radio spokesman with the same connection to listeners?
Of course. But maybe not one as personally identified with the longtime grocery chain.
Sac Bee
In the midst of a fiscal crisis, a down economy, and a dim outlook on the future, one State Assemblyman, Hector de la Torre showed his true colors by accepting a pay increase. Torre went from $113,098 to $116,208.
Assemblyman Hector de la Torre, an elected state worker and Southgate Democrat, has told the State Controller’s Office he’ll now accept a bump in his annual pay from the $113,098 he was earning to the $116,208 set a year ago by the independent California Citizens Compensation Commission.
We left a message this morning with the Assemblyman’s press secretary, Hilda Delgado, to get comment. When we hear from her or the Assemblyman himself, we’ll pass it along.
In the meantime, you can click here to read de la Torre’s letter to the SCO.
That knocks down the list of state legislators who didn’t take the $3,110 raise from 26 to 25. We blogged about this select group last week. You can read that post by clicking here.
And add Assemblyman John Laird to the list of elected state workers who didn’t take the October increase in per diem.
Laird spokesman Bill Maxfield sent us the e-mail string that shows the termed-out legislator turned down the $3-per-day bump. Maxfield also explains that state workers in the Assembly Clerk’s office have the low-down on who doesn’t take per diem, who does, and how much. We’re grateful for that bit of info.
We thought that elected state workers had to make a formal request by letter to adjust their per diem, Apparently that’s not the case. It’s easier than we believed.
Sac Bee
It looks like even old St. Nick was affected by the economic downturn. For the first time in 25 years, Sacramento’s Santa Parade has been canceled due lack of funds.
Parade organizer Laurie Hensley announced the cancelation today in a press release. She says that although the City of Sacramento was able to continue its support, parade organizers couldn’t secure other sponsorship funds.
“We’re disappointed, and especially sorry to disappoint the people who’ve been looking forward to the parade,” said Hensley in a statement. “But we want to assure people that we’re looking at this as an unfortunate, but necessary, year off – not an ending for the parade, just a one-year break.”
Hensley says planning has already begun for next year with an emphasis on creating a stable financial foundation for the organization.
From the SacBee.com:
“We’re a trickle-down casualty of the financial mess,” Hensley said. She said she is contacting the 60 groups scheduled to participate in the parade, including school bands, youth groups and equestrian organization, with the news.
The parade was always held during the Thanksgiving holiday weekend and drew crowds of up to 25,000. It helped draw people to downtown Sacramento since people could eat and shop afterwards, Hensley said.
Hensley said the cancellation is intended as a one-year break. Planning for the 2009 parade has already started. There has been a lot of outpouring of interest after people learned about this year’s cancellation, she said.
Anyone interested in helping with the 2009 Santa Parade can call (916) 451-6200.
California’s Supreme Court has agreed to review the ban and to hear legal challenges that have been “filed by groups of same-sex couples, a gay rights body and a group of local governments”.
The California Supreme Court accepted three lawsuits seeking to nullify Proposition 8, a voter-approved constitutional amendment that overruled the court’s decision in May that legalized gay marriage.
As soon as Proposition 8 passed two weeks ago—with 52 percent of the vote—three lawsuits were filed challenging the legality of the law. Among the petitioners were the cities of San Francisco and Los Angeles, along with several counties in the Bay Area and 44 members of the state Legislature. Earlier this week, Jerry Brown, the state’s attorney general, who is tasked with defending the new law, agreed with the petitioners that the case merited the court’s attention.
All three cases claim the measure abridges the civil rights of a vulnerable minority group. They argue that voters alone did not have the authority to enact such a significant constitutional change.
As is its custom when it takes up cases, the court did not elaborate on its decision.
Along with the gay rights groups and local governments petitioning to overturn the ban, the measure’s sponsors and Attorney General Jerry Brown had urged the Supreme Court to consider whether Proposition 8 passes legal muster.
The court directed Brown and lawyers for the Yes on 8 campaign to submit their arguments for why the ballot initiative should not be nullified by Dec. 19. It said lawyers for the plaintiffs, who include same-sex couples who did not wed before the election, must respond before Jan. 5. Oral arguments could be scheduled as early as March, according to court spokeswoman Lynn Holton.
