April 2 Update: City, county, state ballots set for November

As extra pandemic benefits ended, California poverty rose in 2023. Pay increases in 2024 and labor activism could change the equation.

Ballot measure campaigns are already building their war chests for the costly fight to come, raising more than $60 million since January.

The most sweeping bills to change California elections got shelved in the Legislature. Instead, lawmakers are focusing on ballot measure language, local redistricting, voting integrity and campaign finance tweaks before the 2024 election.

The oil industry qualified a 2024 ballot measure to kill a law that bans new oil wells near schools and neighborhoods, and the fast-food industry qualified another to wipe out a law creating a council to regulate fast food wages. 

The San Jose vote will determine whether the new mayor elected this fall serves two or four years.

California got the OK from state officials to start collecting signatures to put a question around secession on a future ballot.  

I remember making minimum wage, $3.35 per hour, when I worked at Burger King during high school. Most of my coworkers were high school students, college students and very few were adults. Prior to my job at Burger King, I had a paper route that, according to my memory, netted out to less than minimum wage. Many of these jobs no longer employ young people in the same numbers, but that does’t mean the city should raise the minimum wage.

It has been a tough week for Mayor Chuck Reed. An enterprising investigative reporter, Jenna Susko, from KNTV News challenged the mayor’s veracity of the “fiscal crisis” and exposed his administration’s exaggeration of the unfunded liability facing San Jose. The mayor’s opponents were quick to jump on the news and quickly filed an ethics complaint. A complaint which, ironically, is justified under Reed’s own ethic reforms, which state that public officials shouldn’t lie. But the regulation—like many Reed Reforms—is unenforceable. A lawyer for the ethics commission advised the body not to investigate as they have no jurisdiction over the matter. That is lawyer-speak for you can’t do anything even if he did lie.

On Wednesday, the city sent a draft of proposed ballot measures addressing pension reform to each public employee union. Only two of those letters went to union groups that have agreed to set times to continue negotiations: the police and firefighters, which recently joined together in negotiations, and the unions representing architects and engineers (AEA), mid-level managers (CAMP) and maintenance supervisors (AMSP).

Despite calling the city’s unfunded liability a cancer, brought on by escalating and unfunded employee retirement costs, Mayor Chuck Reed has decided to delay treatment options. The City Council will defer any decision on declaring a fiscal and public safety emergency to Aug. 2.