SES Foundation

TechTest2008 Recognition Breakfast

George Rebane May 2008

The second annual TechTest Recognition Breakfast was held last Friday morning at Tofanelli’s in Grass Valley. Recognized for their achievement in being the top scorers on TechTest2008 were thirteen juniors and seniors from the county’s high schools. The four-hour merit scholarship test was given on 5 April 2008 under the supervision of TechTest Academic Committee chairman John McDaniel who teaches physics at NUHS. A copy of the test is available here.

The breakfast was attended by a large group of students and parents. SESF Executive Director Michael McDaniel welcomed everyone and thanked the Academic Committee for their work in administering and grading the test. He also recognized and thanked Tony and Paula Medler as one of the generous contributors to this year’s TechTest scholarship fund.

This year’s scholarship winners will divide $15,000 awarded to the thirteen highest scoring seniors. First prize $6,000, 2^nd prize $4,000, 3^rd prize $2,000, and ten $300 special recognition prizes. Juniors are permitted to take the test for practice. The top three scoring seniors Philip Jackson (NU), Andrew Pado (Truckee), and Collin Rutherford (NU) (alphabetical order) are pictured above. Their placement rank will be announced during the upcoming NU Scholarship Night on 4 June 2008.

My job as SESF’s Director of Research was to again be the test author. The four-hour test is written to have the expected top scores fall in the 50% range. This year the top three senior scores were 57, 46, and 45 out of a possible 100 points. The average score on the test was 34.54. Chris Convis, a junior at NU, took the test for practice and turned in the second highest score at 50.25. We may expect a strong performance from Chris when he goes for the money in next year’s TechTest2009.

All of the TechTest2008 scholars are to be congratulated as high achievers in a most difficult area of study. We can be proud that Nevada County is able to produce such students who will join the next generation of leaders in technology innovation, education, and entrepreneurs.

Unfunded Liabilities- The System Is Broke, Let's Focus On Solutions

The following piece was submitted to The Union as an Other Voices on Jan 16th 2008.

"Michael McDaniel

The system is broke, let’s focus on solutions. 

    Nevada County, Grass Valley, and Nevada City taxpayers and employees should be alarmed by the current unfunded debt associated with our local government agency pension plans. Elected officials of the past have handed current community leaders pension debt in the tens of millions of dollars. In the City of Grass Valley's case, they recently acted to make the problem worse (amending the pension plan from a 2% at age 55 TO 2.5% at age 55).  Pension payments promised to current public employees are not being funded by today's leaders.  A recently published report by Sierra Environmental Studies Foundation identifies and explains the dire condition of our community’s public employee pension plans. Our areas pension plans are in the red as follows (approx):

Nevada County $48,000,000, the City of Grass Valley $4,000,000, the City of Nevada City $677,000. 

     The report (found at www.sesfoundation.org) has instigated considerable discussion.  The report insinuates several solutions being enacted across the United States by communities in the same predicament.  I would like to take this opportunity to highlight 3 actions that would help our community to meet their public employee pension plan obligations.

First, I suggest that each local government agency provide a detailed compensation calculation to each of it's employees on a quarterly or annual basis.  Employees in the public sector are generally unaware of their true compensation when health benefits, pension contributions, sick leave, vacation pay, overtime, etc are considered. The SESF report cites a compensation analysis completed by the City of Nevada City whereby an employee with a base salary of $36,367 actually costs the city $69,039.59 (see report for details).  It is my contention that the average public employee does not understand their true compensation; given the exceptional benefits they are provided. It would be beneficial to all interested parties to have such compensation meticulously outlined and provided to each public employee at least annually.

    Second, each public entity should strive to retain private companies and independent contractors for cheaper labor. Nevada County management and the Board of Supervisors should be commended for their work in decreasing the number of staff at the county.  The current Board of Supervisors has decreased the number of county staff by approximately 64 employees, including 4 department heads. It would appear that the current BOS acknowledged a possible economic slowdown (especially in real estate which equates to less property tax revenues) and acted prudently to curb some expenses.
    Lastly, and perhaps most importantly each entity should move immediately to stop offering defined benefit pension plans in favor of a 401(k) style retirement plan to all NEW hires. 

     Such positive changes would help insure that current public employees' pensions ARE funded and that taxpayers are NOT asked to bail out years of mal-management. 

	For public employees and taxpayers (those directly affected by this unfortunate issue) I strongly encourage 
you to comment on The Union website below this piece, comment to the SESF blog (http://sesf.typepad.com/ ) 
and contact your elected officials. It is imperative to put this issue at the top of the coming year’s election topics list."

Unfunded Liabilities - Our Community’s Fiscal Time Bombs

Russ Steele

This is an open thread for your comments on the SESF TR0712-1: Unfunded Liabilities – Our Community’s Fiscal Time Bombs report. You can down load a copy of the report from the SESF Web page here.

We encourage all readers to comment on this ground breaking report. Your feedback is important to developing a much need public dialog on this vital issue of government responsibility.

Town Hall Meeting on Ozone in Nevada County

George Rebane

Last Wednesday night's (20 June) town meeting on Nevada County air quality was sponsored by APPLE and featured speakers from Nevada County Breathers (Dr. Jeff Kane, but no website), Save the Air in Nevada County (Alan Stahler), SYRCL (Shawn Garvey), Megan Anderson (pro bono lawyer), and Northern Sierra Air Quality Management District (Joe Fish).  About seventy people were in the audience to hear of the dangers of ozone and what we should do about it.

The factual parts of the meeting included the following information points -

• Ozone pollution is invisible and causes/aggravates a number of bad health effects in humans (presented by Dr. Kane);
• The ozone measured in Nevada County arrives here from the large upwind population centers of
• Sacramento and Bay Area cities (soon China will also add ozone to the airborne particulates it already exports to us);
• NC produces a negligible amount of ozone compared to what is exported to us from the west;
• Western NC has one ozone monitoring station located on the roof of the Litton building which indicates that the unhealthy ozone levels occur during the afternoon and night hours.  This, according to Mr.Fish, is due to a complex set of factors that include sunshine, temperature, air currents, and our mountainous topology.
• The detailed county wide levels (presented on http://sparetheair.com) are generated  by a model that both interpolates and extrapolates ozone readings from about five stations located in the foothills primarily in Placer and El Dorado counties.
• No one knows what the actual ozone levels are over the county.  To collect more data, STAinNC is making arrangements to purchase a new portable ozone measurement instrument.
• Based on this knowledge the EPA has rated NC as a county having one of the highest levels of ozone in the country.
• The current EPA air quality regulations now recognize that bad air can indeed move from a community where it is generated to a distant community where it is measured.

Water Shortage Coming?

George Rebane

Last Wednesday evening (21 March) Russ Steele and I attended a presentation on what was billed as Nevada County’s coming water shortage problem. Well, it wasn’t actually billed that way, but that was its clear implication. The presentation was given by our resident consultant hydrologist Steve Baker of HydroSolutions of California Inc. Russ has posted a fine blog of it here; I will try to cover some of the more arcane takeaways from the evening. The public meeting was typical of the many on community issues that we routinely hold here in western Nevada County and sponsored by APPLE, one of the many VVCOs (variously very concerned organizations).

Full disclosure – I suppose that when you put a fine point on it, SESF is also a VVCO so this is not really a denigrating appellation because, if anything, around here so many of us are variously very concerned, it’s the leading pastime in Nevada County. But back to the meeting.

Are land-use rules to blame for high housing costs?

Russ Steele

The above title is Carol Lloyd’s, and it lured me into reading her column. While reading, I was reminded of Mike McDaniel’s paper on Affordable Housing. 

Carol Lloyd, writing in today's Business Section of the San Francisco Chronicle.

A couple of weeks ago, I moderated a panel for the Commonwealth Club called "Buy, Sell or Wait?" that assessed the current real estate market. At one point, one of the panelists, Joseph Perkins, president of the Home Builders Association of Northern California, responded to a question about the lack of affordable housing in the Bay Area.

He declared that land-use regulations were a prime culprit in the region's exorbitant housing prices. As he spoke, some of the other panelists -- from the bullish Vince Malta, former president of the California Association of Realtors, to the bearish Cynthia Kroll, an economist from UC Berkeley -- nodded in agreement. Nodding along with them was yours truly.

Read the full article here.  Mike’s Affordable Housing paper is here.

KNCO -- OpEd on Affordable Housing

Russ Steele

Mike McDaniel, SESF’s Director of Public Relations is currently featured on KNCO Guest Editorial this week end (03-08-07). He give an quick verbal over review of his Affordable Housing research paper, which can be found here. If you missed Mike’s Op Ed you can listen, or download, from KNCO's web site here.  Scroll down to Guest Editorials.

Are we vulnerable to voter hacking?

Russ Steele

The folks at ARS Technica have published a guide for hacking local voting machines.  I was listening to Supervisor Nate Beason on KNCO and the security procedures he outlined on the air seemed reasonable and prudent to me.  However, How to Steal and Election by Hacking raises some questions.  SESF has sent a copy of the document to Nate Beason, BOS Chairman, for his review and we hope a response.

I noted that much of the information is from 2003. I certainly hope the voting machines used by Nevada County in 2006 have the latest software,  and all do not have the same default administrator password. Strange things have happened at the Elections Office lately, and it makes one wonder if they are on top of the technology, or this it the other way around?  Please review the vote hacking guide and give us your comments. 

How to Steal and Election by Hacking is a copyrighted document and ARS Technica has ask you download your own copy here. 

Voters will support transportation sales tax measures. (edited)

Russ Steele

Over the last 25 years citizens of 20 California counties have voted to raise sales taxes to pay for surface transportation improvements, in some cases more than once. These citizen driven initiatives have demonstrated local contol over transportation funding can work through fiscal-accountability, and delivering projects on time and budget.   Collectively these “local transportation sales taxes” have generated roughly $2.5 billion per year for capital investments in new highways and transit systems and the maintenance and operation of existing roads. These taxes are the fastest growing source of revenue for transportation improvements in California. They are often used to leverage stat and federal transportation funding. Selfhelp counties have an advantage, said a high ranking Caltrans official.

Why should local measures T and S be any different?  The biggest differance is Measure T and S are city measures, rather than a county wide tax measure. The County Board of Supervisors had an opportunity to enact a county wide tax, but chose to let the cites take the initiative. Truckee already had a local option sales tax in place and Dorsey Drive the major funding target was in Grass Valley. Nevada City has it’s own special needs and constituency, so I will focus my question on Grass Valley’s Measure T.

List of Sales Tax Counties, click for a larger image

These successful transportation sales tax programs have the following atributes:
1) The taxes were approved directly by the voters.
2) The funds are raised and spent within the juristriction.
3) Most of the taxes had sunset clauses after which they expire.
4) The  tax initiiatives contained lists of specific transportation projects to be financed by the taxes.
5)  Citizen groups were established to hold goverment agencies accountable.

The Grass Valley Measure T initiative has all five attributes as shown at the Measure T web site in Exhibit A.

In summary, Measure T demonstrates the following attributes:

1) Requires 2/3 voter approval
2) Taxes will be spent on projects in the city sphere of influence
3) Taxes will sunset in 20 years
4) Taxes will be spent on a specific list of projects
5) A citizen oversight committee will be established

Measure T would fund Dorsey Drive, neighborhood street improvements, bike lanes, Wolf Creek Parkway trail, and a parking structure, creating a tax package with something for everyone.  The weakness of something for everyone packages is that people tend to vote against something, rather than for something, especially taxes.  Negatives have more sway with voters. Negative ads work, though we have not seen a negative campaign emerge, except for a few letters published in The Union.

Could the $13.5 million for a 2. 5 mile trail create more negative than positive votes? Will a parking garage, that is going bring more traffic down town, be a negative?  Maybe for a few voters, but I think the positive aspects of the Measure T, safer roads, better down town parking, and less traffic congestion will win the day, especially if we are to beleive the the community survey results.

A community survey was taken by Fairbank, Maslin, Amullin & Associates in March of this year.  This survey was funded by the Nevada County Transportaiton Commissin, and It found Grass Valley citizens are willing to support a local option tax:

1)  Seventy two  percent were inclined to support a tax measure with Citizen Oversight.

2)  Seventy three percent thought buidling Dorsey Drive on/off ramps extreamly or very important.

3)  Sixty eight precent were inclinded to support an tax meeasure for fixing pot hole and improving highways.

4)  Citizens surveyed were less enthusastice about buidling the Wolf Creel trail, with 15 percent listing it as extreamly or very important, however 37 percent thought is was somewhat important, for a total of 52 percent supporting the trail project. 

I predict that Measure T will pass in November by a comfortable margin, unless a concerted negative campaign is launched against Measure T, and then is will pass with a slim margin.  Grass Valley voters  are smart enough to see the merits of Measure T.

Balanced Community? Fat Chance!

George Rebane

After some procedural and administrative delays The Union was kind enough to publish the following (longer than 750 word) article on 7 April 2006 as an Other Voices column in their online Opinion section.
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If I had my druthers, I’d like western Nevada County to grow into what a lot of folks call a ‘balanced community’.  We all have differences in what we consider balanced, my own vision is something close to Simi Valley in Ventura County, a town Jo Ann and I helped to become a model city in the seventies with residential areas, parks, shopping, businesses, and populated by people of all colors living in marbled neighborhoods.  From recent visits there we are happy to report that growth has been kinder to it than many California towns with a favored youth.  But residing in the armpit of the San Fernando Valley ten minutes away, its future now looks uncertain.

Our Jeff Ackerman recently called for such growth in his 21mar06 editorial which, because of an unfortunate choice of a word or two, left many people seeing him as yet another social engineering import to these forests and hills.  My own consternation to his editorial was blogged in ‘Planned Color In My Back Yard?’ on NC Media Watch. Jeff responded to the piece with a kind email and followed up with his clarifying 28mar06 editorial that, to my mind, tilted The Union toward a more level political stance.

In a related exchange with a friend - who also happens to be a county supervisor - I, in my turn, had to clarify my own position.  Talking about this community growth stuff is really hard, no matter how calmly and reasonably we come to the task.  As we listen to each other, we automatically do what psychologists call ‘framing’ – that is, we assign meaning to the words that tend to confirm the beliefs and pre-judgments we bring to the dialogue.  Once so framed, it’s difficult to break out, especially if the conversation is kept short.  (And our culture today applauds people with self-declared short attention spans that demand the most complex ideas to somehow arrive in lucid and quick sound bites.)  Anyway, to the apprehension that I am a proponent of a lily-white, affluent future for Nevada County, I responded –

For the record, I do not envision "a bedroom community of upper-middle and up."  My desire is that our community would evolve according to the broad and openly expressed desires of the residents of Nevada County, and not be forcefully channeled toward some narrow vision held by a dominant (dominating?) right or left interest group.  My concern is that such 'naturally evolving' paths in our country are no longer possible.

And that brings me to the main point – Balanced community?  Fat Chance! – the explication of which, unfortunately, can neither be compressed into a lucid sound bite nor treated fully in this short piece.

Every community can usefully be viewed as a tightly coupled system having characteristics and processes such as a demographic profile, population density, physical connectivity (facile traffic flows), virtual connectivity (telecoms), money flows, etc.  Within any community, no matter how small, there is a natural tendency to segregate forms and functions – for example, no one wants to live near the dump so houses are grouped away from the dump with something else in between.  Retail businesses want to be near other retail businesses and away from manufactories – in short, birds of a feather want to flock together, you get the idea.

A community will then have districts that fill different functions because that serves people’s utilitarian and esthetic requirements.  Historically the size of such districts have been determined by physical access parameters such as the ease of getting from here to there to fulfill everyday needs. The districts’ functions tend to follow real estate costs and the availability of specific support services such as utilities, rail transport, broadband availability (today), etc.  And bit by slow these districts become more homogeneous in their make-up as they grow.  All of us with a few birthdays under our belts can cite examples of this kind of growth from our own experience.

So here’s a ‘rule’ that seems to dictate a community’s growth pattern.  As a community grows so will its functional districts, each becoming more homogeneous to the extent that facile inter-district access arteries are provided and maintained.

This explains neighborhoods on the good and bad sides of the tracks, big shopping and office complexes, industrial areas, etc.  It dictates the existence of homogeneous communities like Beverly Hills, Malibu, Bel-Air, Mill Valley, Compton, Watts, … .  If Bel-Air were located far away from Culver City (for its servants) or Century City (for its offices) it would have to provide for a ‘workforce housing’ district and so on within its own borders.  Since the travel times between these areas are still tolerable, Bel-Air can maintain its high-end residential décor.

Western Nevada County will not be immune to these formative forces.  Today we have more or less homogeneous districts that resulted from the time when it took longer to travel to and from Auburn and Yuba City to meet our needs.  It’s easy to see as we reduce travel times between these communities, that western Nevada County’s beauty and commensurate real estate prices will drive us toward becoming a collection of residential districts each growing more or less homogeneous in their character as many already are.  If that’s difficult to understand, consider the resistance to building large shopping centers or business parks here if some new technology allowed us to get to Roseville in five minutes.  Our hills would then be filled with residential districts full of people coming to enjoy the mountains, forests, and lakes.  No one could afford or would want to build anything else here.
A strategy to subvert this future and increase the likelihood of local balance would be to shorten intra-community trip times and torpedo any initiatives to reduce inter-community travel times on highway 20 and 49.  Instead, the good people of Nevada County will continue to demand fast and safe access to Auburn, Yuba City, and points north and south.  And these same folks will forever be frustrtaed in their attmepts to bring balance to such a well connected county.  Balanced community?  Fat chance.

The article was also published on NC Media Watch.