A hearty congratulations to these talented student athletes, and Coach Rob Willson!
Photo Credit: Placer Herald
UPDATE (5/29 10:40PM): Jene’ Hallam from the President’s Office forwards the YouTube video of the “dogpile”…we had some Sierra fans down there in Fresno! Thanks, Jene’.
The press release from the college…
Sierra College Nevada County Campus begins site work construction on the Public Safety Training Center
GRASS VALLEY – The Sierra College Nevada County Campus will begin the site work construction for the new Public Safety Training Center on Monday June 2, 2008. Immediate impact will be to users of the portion of Litton Trail on the NCC campus – the trail is on the very edge of the construction site. Although the trail will not be closed, over the next couple of months, users may be periodically halted for several minutes while the logging and earth moving operation progresses. This construction project is projected to take five months to complete. Signs will be posted at all entrances of the trail.
Construction operations will not impede access to the Grass Valley Fire Station #2 immediately to the west of the construction site. All construction access will occur from the upper campus to the east side near the Robotic Observatory.
A new career technical education partnership at Colfax and North Tahoe High Schools…here’s the story from the Bee.
Sierra’s career education project gets $600,000 boost
By Lakiesha McGhee
The California Community College Chancellor’s Office has awarded $600,000 to Sierra College to help boost career technical education in the region.
The money will be used to strengthen connections between the Placer County-based college and area high schools through programs focused on science, technology and related subjects, a news release says.
The college’s Workforce Development and Continuing Education Division will lead a collaborative effort to create new career technical education models, strengthen existing programs and interest more middle and high school students in science, engineering, technology and math.
The latest project will target Colfax High School, where new courses will be developed in response to industry needs and North Tahoe High School, where an engineering and architectural component will be added to a construction program.
A remarkably good article about the state budget crisis from Daniel Weintraub at the Bee. If this doesn’t convince you that raising taxes won’t solve anything in Sacramento…
California Budget 101: What went wrong, when
By Daniel Weintraub
When Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed the state budget last summer, he all but declared "mission accomplished" in his administration’s biggest battle. The spending plan not only eliminated the state’s perpetual deficit, he said, it also boasted a record $4 billion reserve. The state was fully funding education and public safety and repaying debt earlier than required, all without raising taxes.
"I applaud the Republicans for pushing us to take the operating deficit down to zero this year," Schwarzenegger said as he signed the document after a seven-week stalemate. "And I applaud the Democrats for being willing to compromise while sticking to their principles to get the budget done. It was a difficult process, but in the end, this is a good budget for California."
Even as Schwarzenegger spoke, however, trouble was looming. The tax projections on which the spending plan was based already were proving to be overly optimistic. And spending, especially in the state prison system, was heading higher than expected, thanks mainly to court-ordered payments for inmate medical care.
Now, nine months later, the governor is back in the fiscal swamp. His reserve has been wiped out, and projections for the end of the current year and the next fiscal year combined showed a potential shortfall of $17 billion if Schwarzenegger and the Legislature were to do nothing more to avert it.
This month, as the governor released a revised spending proposal, readers reported to me that they did not understand how the state got itself into this predicament. As citizens, they said, they can’t be expected to assess the relative wisdom of budget cuts, tax hikes, gimmicks or borrowing without a fuller explanation of the dimensions of the problem those remedies are meant to solve. This column begins to answer that question in a very abbreviated and simplified form.
So, what went wrong?
The latest trouble is partly the result of the sluggish economy. Employment growth flattened. Corporate profits sagged. The crash in the housing market slowed consumer spending. Tax revenues that last summer had been expected to total more than $102 billion now figure to come in under $98 billion for the year.
Spending is up, too, though. The forecast for the current year was about $102 billion. The latest figures now put the cost of the state’s commitments at more than $104 billion.
But the economic issues only worsened a basic, structural problem in the state budget: Spending is programmed by law to grow each year at a rate that is generally faster than tax revenues can match. Current state law would push general fund spending to $113 billion next year if nothing is done to slow it, according to the Schwarzenegger administration. Revenues, meanwhile, are projected to decline further, to about $95 billion. The budget Schwarzenegger celebrated last summer would have bridged the gap for one year at best.
Since Schwarzenegger has been governor, the state’s revenues have grown by 25 percent. But spending has grown even faster – far faster than population growth and inflation combined. The spending increase totals about $26 billion, starting from a base of $77 billion.
Where did all that money go? Most of it went to education, health and welfare programs, and prisons, with a good-sized chunk for transportation.
The state today reports spending $13 billion more on kindergarten through 12th grade education than it did the year before Schwarzenegger took office, an increase of nearly 50 percent. That number overstates the growth in education spending because of accounting changes and the changing relationship between state and local finances. A better way to measure it is to look at state and local tax dollars combined for schools. But even by that yardstick, spending per pupil has still increased by 29 percent, from $6,624 per student to $8,564.
Health and welfare programs have grown at the same rate, 29 percent, or $6.6 billion since 2002-03. The biggest cost driver there has been health care for the poor, which took about half the gain. The other half of the growth was split mainly among services for people with mental illness, help for the developmentally disabled and assistance to the elderly and the disabled in their homes.
Prison costs also have escalated rapidly, gobbling up about $4 billion of the overall increase. Their rate of growth – 74 percent – has been by far the fastest among the state’s major programs. Thanks to tough sentencing measures and a parole system that sees 70 percent of ex-cons going back to prison within three years of their release, the number of inmates behind bars has grown from about 160,000 to 169,000 on Schwarzenegger’s watch. Correctional officers also got a 37 percent pay raise spread over five years that began just before Schwarzenegger took office. And the courts have ordered hundreds of millions of dollars in new costs for inmate health care.
The state is also spending a lot more on transportation, mainly building roads, bridges and public transit systems. Most of that increase – about $1.3 billion – is money from sales tax collections that the voters redirected to transportation programs when they passed Proposition 42 in 2002. Spending on higher education has grown in step with population and inflation, about 25 percent, or $2.3 billion.
So if you want to roll back spending, those are the places that have to be cut. If you want to slow the growth in government, then education, health and welfare, and prisons are the places to look for the big bucks. And if you are asked to consider raising taxes, those are the programs that are going to benefit most from the increased revenues.
That’s a bare-bones explanation. But I hope it helps.
One of my favorite election traditions is to go to the polls with my wife on election morning. We always go to Starbucks for a coffee, then head down to Colfax City Hall, greet the friendly volunteers, and walk out with our "I Voted" stickers.
Somebody just shared with me the projection that 67% of Placer County voters will cast absentee ballots in the election on June 3. Wow! I’m hoping that my preferred method of voting is not going the way of the dinosaur. Frankly, I like that it takes some effort to vote — it makes for better citizenship.
But in any case, I’m actually at a conference in San Jose that week, so I officially contributed to that statistic by dropping off my ballot at the Elections Department today. Oh, well. 
Don’t forget to vote!
He’s been home for six months now. I was flipping through some of those pictures, and he looks so much older now.
Here he is enjoying his new sandbox from Nana and Papa. All of these grandparents just don’t know when to stop!
And here he is, kicking back and enjoying life in his little swimming pool. C’mon, have you ever seen a cuter kid than mine, really?
Breaking ground at the Nevada County Campus…and not a moment too soon! The Union covers the blessed event in today’s paper…
Construction work on three new buildings is going on full-swing at the Sierra College Nevada County campus, Dean Neal Allbee said Friday.
The buildings should start coming up in the next month, Allbee said.
“They are just finishing up the ground work and the electricity and water lines are coming in,” Allbee said. “We are set to occupy the buildings in February and March 2009.”
Finally!
