There are many areas that the Republican party in California has left for others. The Election Integrity Project CA has spent yeats creating data showing the flaws in the voting systems and now has filed paperwork to begin the process of suing County Registrars for keeping dead people on the voting rolls, refusing to audit the DMV there admitted admitted tens of thousands of wrongfully registered voters or their registering of illegal aliens as voters.
Then you need to have a working relationship between local elected Republican office holders. On a State level, no Republican organization has put together this operation—now the California Policy Center, on an ideological basis has done so.
“Part of the answer is in our school districts, cities and counties. In these places, California Policy Center is working to support elected officials who stand for financial sustainability, government transparency and personal liberty. And through these officials, we reach the constituents they represent.
We call this effort CLEO – California Local Elected Officials. CLEO is imperative because local officials have tremendous authority to halt the advance of authoritarian state government. But local officials often operate in isolation. They can’t count on independent policy assessments from their fellow officials, and certainly not from the city staffers whose self-interest and training guide them toward more government. Powerful government union officials apply constant pressure to raise compensation – and, therefore, taxes, debt and reduced services.”
Congratulations to Jim Righeimer and his associates for starting this much needed project.
Will Swaim, California Policy Center, 12/21/18
If your family is like ours, you’ll spend the holidays catching up with family. We’ll talk about babies (we love them) and sports (ever hopeful that the USC Trojans will regain their proper place at the top of NCAA football). And we’ll attempt to answer a broader, potentially contentious question: What’s the matter with California?
This Christmas, on this question, I’ll be able to offer real hope – hope that springs from the work my colleagues are doing at the California Policy Center.
A buddy likes to say “facts are friendly.” So before I get to the hopeful scenario, it’s best to start with the present grim reality. California is the most expensive state in the union. We have the highest tax rate – and we just lost the generous state and local tax deduction. We have the highest cost of living, the most costly homebuilding regulations. With all that in mind, it’s no surprise we have the nation’s largest homeless population. Our prisons are overcrowded, and our costs of incarceration are the highest in the nation. Our public schools continue to fail Californians. We have no money to pay down the costs of government employee retirement benefits – unless, of course, we simply eliminate actual government services. Beyond that debt, CPC analysts calculate state and local bond debt at a staggering (or awe-inspiring) $1.5 trillion. Not for nothing are we called Taxifornia.
If we rely on Sacramento, these problems will remain unchanged. Gavin Newsom, just elected governor, is likely to do for our state what he did for San Francisco. We’ll see rising taxes, rising homelessness, filthy streets, declining public services and rising government costs. In producing that catastrophe, the next governor will be ably assisted by a Democrat super-majority in the state legislature – a majority produced by the $2 billion government unions receive from compulsory dues and spend every election cycle.
Nothing will change in Sacramento next year. The fourteenth-century Italian poet Dante Alighieri said the inscription over the entrance to hell reads “Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here.” We ought to post that on the I-5 at the Q Street exit in Sacramento.
I would ordinarily advise a politics-avoidance strategy around the holiday table. But in our house, these California problems unite left and right in very practical ways. This Christmas gathering will be smaller than those in the past because our youngest family members have fled the state. Well-educated and ambitious, they have been stalled by the high cost of living in California. And so they’re starting families and careers in North Carolina, Texas, and Kansas. I can tell you from personal experience that among life’s saddest moments is packing up the rented trailer that will take your children from you. That final hug – and the unnecessary reminder to drive carefully – is a heartbreaker.
That’s why we fight – because bad policies destroy families, and families are the foundation of community.
So where is the hope we can hang onto?
Part of the answer is in our school districts, cities and counties. In these places, California Policy Center is working to support elected officials who stand for financial sustainability, government transparency and personal liberty. And through these officials, we reach the constituents they represent.
We call this effort CLEO – California Local Elected Officials. CLEO is imperative because local officials have tremendous authority to halt the advance of authoritarian state government. But local officials often operate in isolation. They can’t count on independent policy assessments from their fellow officials, and certainly not from the city staffers whose self-interest and training guide them toward more government. Powerful government union officials apply constant pressure to raise compensation – and, therefore, taxes, debt and reduced services.
CLEO can support this courageous minority. Through frequent regional trainings and “hotline” emergency services, CLEO can offer policy guidance, detailed financial analyses, legal advice and communications support.
CLEO aims to create community where there’s isolation. In our regional trainings we gather to learn from one another how we can carry out practical proposals to change the trajectory of our state – not in a generation or in 10 years but immediately. We offer model ordinances – like one that bans the government’s uses of taxpayer dollars in political campaigns to raise taxes. We feature expert speakers in public finance, labor negotiations, and communications.
But the most common response from public officials who attended a CLEO training was summed up by the Bay Area official who told us, “Standing for personal freedom and sustainable finances where I serve is a lonely business. Looking around this room, I realize I’m not alone. We’re in a real struggle and I’ve got allies all over California.”
CLEO is, in other words, a community, a band of brothers and sisters. To paraphrase the great William F. Buckley, a CLEO member is someone who stands athwart California’s dire historical trajectory, yelling stop.
CLEO’s president is Jim Righeimer, the former mayor of Costa Mesa who has faced down union negotiators and dirty tricksters – including the union thug who recently went to jail for trying to frame Righeimer in the middle of tense labor neogitiations. Former San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed is an advisor, coaching CLEO members about his pioneering work on pension reform that has saved his city millions. Longtime California columnist Steve Greenhut (author of Plunder, perhaps the best book on government unions) is a frequent CLEO speaker, as is former San Diego councilman Carl DeMaio – a pension-reformer and author of the 2018 Gas-Tax Repeal.
California’s free-market advocates talk about building public support for restraining government power and increasing personal freedom. But that talk is generally expressed in the last 90 days of expensive political campaigns.
By contrast, CLEO emulates the left’s success with community organizing. Recall the wisdom attributed to former House speaker Tip O’Neill – “all politics is local.” The left has understood for decades that power flows from the bottom up, that the way to build a movement is to build local leaders every day.
CLEO does for advocates of personal freedom and limited government what the left has done for generations. CLEO is building the deep bench of experienced local leaders – men and women training for the day when they will emerge as the best hope for our state and nation.
This holiday season, supporting your local officials may be among the greatest gifts you can give your community and your family.
Will Swaim is president of the California Policy Center. You can contact him at Will@ CalPolicyCenter.org.
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