Asemblymember Nancy Skinner making
hand gestures while speaking to
CCC college faculty.
Assembly member Nancy Skinner and her staffers, Saturday morning, February 5, 2011, led the Contra Costa College faculty and others through an electronic game in which they voted for budget choices with electronic clickers, and then viewed the group results immediately. The concerned citizens met in LA 100 on the college campus on a warm sunny California winter day. The budget game produced by Next10.org, was supposedly for the 2015-2016 budget year. The "
California Budget Challenge" game now competes with the highly respected
Legislative Analyst's Office (LAO) which has been giving financial advice to California legislators and public for decades.
Pie Chart of CA state revenue and spending.
Sorry this is so faint. That's the best my camera
could do. I am not a professional photographer
and I do not compete with professional
photographers who have much better
equipment than I have.
Skinner started out by saying, "Let's put it down in clear terms. The state is spending more money than it is taking in." If you spend more than you get for a few months it is not serious but if you do that for four years, it is a big problem, she told the group.
Legislative aide Jael Myrick, who usually represents
Assemblymember Nancy Skinner in Richmond
"At least half of our states in the U.S. need to balance their budget. Our new governor is being very straight forward about it. He has recommended a budget. He is asking for more revenues. He can't do it with slashing and burning the budget alone."
Asemblymember Nancy Skinner teaching college
faculty about how to make choices
about the California budget.
"The point of today is to help us understand the choices all of us are making and that I am making (in Sacramento.) We can't print money and we can't operate in the red. We have to balance the budget."
(ed note: The federal government can do that but the state governments can't do that.)
Sarah Henry presenting the Next10.org
interactive budget game
She said that the first thing most people think when they think about what the State does, is the DMV—The Department of Motor Vehicles. That's a small part of the budget.
In distance, college president McKinley Williams
greets California 14th District Assemblymember
Nancy Skinner (D, Berkeley)
She showed pie charts on the overhead screen. Half the budget is spent on education; preK through 12 and colleges. We currently have a $25.4 billion deficit. $8.2 billion is from last year's budget. $17.2 billion is from the 2011-2012 budget.
She said Governor Brown's plan is three pronged: raising revenue in the June election, realignment of responsibility from the state to the counties for many services, then funding by the state to the counties; and expenditure reductions.
Mental health, substance abuse, foster care, child welfare, adult protective services, and a smaller public safety program would become the responsibility of the counties. They will be voting to continue the sales tax and the vehicle license tax at a higher rate. The state would also shift to the county, low level offenders and parole violators, adult parole supervision and all juvenile offenders.
Then the first choice flashed on the screen and the audience had a chance to use their clickers to vote for or against realignment from state to county. They voted for local control by 76 percent.
The next question was on sales tax. Choice #3 won by 59 percent on the first vote, as people figured out how to use their voting clickers. Then she took the vote again and garnered 68 percent for #3 on the second vote. Rather than describe all the choices that were presented, you are welcome to go to the Next10.org and see for yourself. Below is how the college faculty voted.
Car tax: #3 won by 73%
Tax credits garnered a lot of discussion and the response from Skinner that she thought the questions had too many choices and too much complexity, and would be revised.
Redevelopment: #2 won by 58%
K-12 education: #3 won by 55%
Income Tax: #2 won by 93%
Health Care: #1 won by 75%
Property Tax: #2 won by 80%
Other taxes: #5 won by 69%
Assemblymember Nancy Skinner surrounded by
her constituents.
Skinner was at her best, interfacing with her younger Next10 leader in presenting the program. They finished each other's sentences, showing that they had made this presentation several times before. Skinner is one of the most skillful public speakers one would have the good fortune to observe, using her long arms, hands and fingers for emphasis, pointing with both forefingers up over her head at the screen in back of her while smiling at her audience all the while. An air traffic controller could not have done it any better. For a college student who usually watches the teacher's back as he writes math problems on the board, this was quite a treat--wonderful theatre in an otherwise delightfully warm winter day.
LA 100, the community college lecture hall,
getting older along with the faculty, many of whom
were there when it was built, which shows how
hypocritical it is of them to pretend to be worried
about their job security.
The audience enjoyed hashing out the first three questions in depth, but then the Skinner crew turned up the speed and we went blazing through the other choices. We were being guided to make the choices that the Skinner crew wanted us to choose, of course. Usually the first choice was "no change." In real life, the first choice would be the one most people would choose, but on this particular morning, we were guided down the list to "most of the above" and found the choice that contained the most money "saving" and the most services for the buck. The result of course was that the faculty balanced the budget and had a healthy surplus at the end of the process. Like buying a new car, one is taken from dealer to dealer, seeing cars that have some little thing wrong with them, like the headrest is uncomfortable or the gas pedal is too sensitive or the color isn't quite what we wanted; until all worn out, one gets to choose the car they wanted to sell us in the first place.
Assemblymember Nancy Skinner surrounded by
her constituents.
We did not get to discuss any of the Legislative Analyst's position papers on prioritizing course enrollment at the community colleges, or the LAO Findings and Recommendations on the 2011-12 budget. The Voice asked CCC President McKinley Williams about elimination of state funding for repetition of physical education and other recreational classes, a 100 unit cap on number of taxpayer supported credits a CCC student may accumulate, and statewide registration priorities. Most people think of colleges as a community of scholars, rather than remedial education. A 100 unit cap and registration priorities would effectively elminate the community of scholars and also eliminate the presence of anyone who might even remotely be considered to be competing for the job of anyone teaching at a community college. Taxpayer supported physical education courses would no longer be available to college personnel for their own physical conditioning.
(ed note: I am taking Intermediate Algebra because I want to teach math, and because an HR man at the Oakland Unified School District said some of my units were too old and that was why he did not want to hire me at OUSD. I have not taken algebra since high school in 1957 and 1958, when I made an A minus, a B, and a B plus in algebra; a B plus and a C plus in plane geometry; and B plus in solid and trig. I think the HR man was wrong and that my units are not too old. To him, I am too old and too fat. Of course he would prefer beautiful young art teachers. The airline stewardesses went through this too after a few of them got fired for getting some gray hairs. They formed a union. I learned to read in the first grade and I still know how to read, so that wasn't too old, either. However, so far I have learned a notation that I didn't learn back in the 50's, which is a set notation like this {}. So maybe that makes a review of algebra worthwhile especially if I want to teach it. Also it's a nice way to rest up after taking Statistics. Now I have time to vacuum my house and pull the weeds in my front yard.)
Assemblymember Nancy Skinner
using interesting hand gestures to
keep her audience's attention.
If you are so old and worn out
that you can't raise your hand higher than
your waist, you ought to go
sign up for a P.E. class
President McKinley Williams told The Point Richmond Voice, "When you're talking to me (about saving the jewelry class) you're preaching to the choir. I am in total agreement with everything you said. If I had my way we would continue offering just what we are offering now—what the community wants. You should be writing letters to the state assembly and the governor."
"We are considering having students with more than 100 units be the last to register and to have courses like jewelry that don't fit into the state category, be fee based courses for $50 a unit, as it is in adult ed…In today's economy we know that everyone is struggling. We have classes that are full to the brim. We have over 10,000 students."
Then Skinner's loyal aide Jael Myrick, who usually represents her in Richmond, came around wanting to know if we had given our clickers back to them. We got to see many elected officials, including John Marquez who is now a CCC district trustee, Madeliene Kronenberg from WCCUSD, El Cerrito council person Janet Abelson, Dr. Akers of the CCC Academic Summit and others. Somehow I feel as though they are my old friends because I have seen them in public meetings so many times, even though I might not ever have spoken to them. Shows you how hard up I am for friends these days. Nobody likes a complainer.
The California budget first reached my consciousness when I went to a spaghetti feed fundraiser for Tom Torlakson and Mark DeSaulnier back about four years ago and they weren't there. They were still in Sacramento at a budget hearing. I think the budget passed a day or two later. The budget was important enough to keep them away from their own fundraiser. And I believed it too, when Martha Parsons told me that.
Assemblymember Nancy Skinner surrounded by
her constituents.
If you want to know how the college faculty voted, you can pull up the Next10.org budget game on your computer screen and compare your vote to theirs. #
