While our own Supreme Court judges call California “dysfunctional,” it just got a little easier to keep tabs on what’s going on in Sacramento.
The state’s new “Reporting Transparency in Government” website promises to track how your tax dollars are being spent, and CALPIRG has released a study assessing how it measures up.
Now that Sacramento has a way to track budgetary specifics, it may also want to look into tracking blatant ironies.
This week The National Park Trust announced that it would honor Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger with its 2009 Bruce F. Vento Public Service Award, despite the fact that earlier this year he cut over $14 million in funding to the state park system and threatened to close over one third of California’s parks.
But don’t think this award means Schwarzenegger’s been wooed by a bunch of tree-huggers.
Earlier this week he signed a bill authored by Senator Mark Leno and supported by Mayor Gavin Newsom to sell 23 acres of Candlestick Point, San Francisco’s only state park, to a private developer. This after a group of Bayview activists stormed Leno’s office demanding that the park be saved.
The land is slated to be turned into a new housing development by notorious polluter Lennar Corporation—let’s hear it for conservation!
At least one person on Capitol Hill isn’t afraid to call’em like he sees’em. When the Governator made the mistake of crashing the San Francisco Democratic Party annual gala on the Oct. 7, he met head on with irate Assemblyman Tom Ammiano.
“You lie,” Ammiano yelled when Schwarzenegger tried to claim he was post-partisan, “Kiss my gay ass.” And with that Ammiano took his leave.
Ammiano’s not the only one sticking it to the Governor this week.
On Monday a federal judge issued an injunction blocking Schwarzenegger’s plan to cut home care to over 130,000 elderly and disabled Californians. Sacramento has yet comment on how it will make up for the more than $250 million it had planned on slashing from that program. In the Mission District some 1,300 are affected.