This coming year for California will be a continual economic struggle to stay afloat. With many other issues pushed back, Gov. Schwarzenegger has a multitude of tasks ahead of him. The new group of lawmakers in Sacramento that took their oath of office Dec. 1 have inherited the $28 billion deficit thanks to the last groups bickering over petty nonsense.
With democrats wishing to raise taxes and republicans refusing to endorse the strategy, no relief is in sight. For any tax raises to be approved by the legislature, there needs to be a super majority of two-thirds approving the action. This could all be solved with a simple, yet continually overlooked remedy. Cut spending. California should sell its surplus and vacant properties that it will not need. The state currently owns more than 2,200 separate parcels of land, which is slightly larger than Los Angeles County. In downtown San Diego, the state owns a warehouse that could rake in millions if sold on the market. An example of this process would be Caltrans, which, since 2006, has sold 657 properties throughout California while receiving $87.7 million in return.
Caltrans has set the example that could be enacted throughout many other agencies. Another unnecessary waste of money is our prison health care system. California spends $1.48 billion a year on medical treatment for incarcerated convicts’ according to the State Controller’s audit. Annual health care spending on inmates has increased from $2,714 per inmate in 1995 to $13,778 this year, according to the state Department of Finance. Gov. Schwarzenegger should grant an early release to the roughly 25,000 non-violent, non-sex offender inmates that pose little threat returning to society.
They can still be mandated to attend certain rehabilitation classes on the outside depending on the crime that was committed. Putting prisoners in gyms on three-tier bunk beds is a recipe for disaster. Inmates seek out those who they feel most comfortable with, which tend to be of similar race.
This grouping only escalates the racial tensions that reinforce the vitriolic hatred we see on the streets. With that cut, the prison population would drop from 158,000 inmates to about 133,000. That incarceration rate, which is the highest in the world, would still would be above the capacity of California’s 33 state prisons, which were designed to hold fewer than 100,000 inmates. California isn’t like other states. We like our cars and that’s not going to change. The Governor should next focus on fixing California’s ailing and decrepit freeway system.
We should redirect funds to implement a Manhattan Project-like program to rebuild most highways and relieve our big cities of their embarrassing rush hour gridlock. Patches and band-aids aren’t going to fix our problems. They continually come up and need to be solved with the type of innovative ideas that got us this great state that is California.
