Tag Archives: arizona

Supreme Court Upholds Arizona’s Right to Ensure Minority Representation

by FelicaSlavin924 Posted on April 20, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

The Supreme Court upheld an Arizona redistricting commission’s right to draw legislative districts in a way that ensures minority representation, delivering a crushing rebuke on Wednesday to a group of Arizona tea party activists who’d sought to strike down the state’s redistricting maps in order to increase the voting power of rural white voters.

In Harris v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission, the plaintiffs were taking on Arizona’s Independent Election Commission, a body created through a 2000 ballot initiative intended to make redistricting less partisan. The commission produced its first legislative maps after the 2010 census. Its work came under fire almost immediately, primarily by Republicans. At one point, then-Gov. Jan Brewer (R) attempted to impeach the commission’s chair in what was seen as a power grab. When that failed, in 2012, the Republican-led state legislature filed a lawsuit arguing that the ballot measure that created the commission was unconstitutional because it deprived the legislature of its redistricting power. The lawsuit went all the way to the US Supreme Court, which last June ruled 5-4 in the commission’s favor.

In the current lawsuit, filed in 2014, the plaintiffs, all Republicans, argued that the commission diluted their voting power by packing more people into Republican districts while underpopulating Democratic ones. They wanted the court to mandate that all district have almost exactly equal populations; the current ones vary by 4 to 8 percent. The commission, in turn, responded that it drew the districts in such a way as to win approval from the Justice Department, in compliance with the Voting Rights Act. Due to Arizona’s long history of suppressing minority voting, it was one of the jurisdictions required under the Voting Rights Act to clear any changes to legislative districts with the Justice Department before implementing them. The Supreme Court gutted this requirement in Shelby County v. Holder in 2013, but it was in place when Arizona redrew its legislative maps.

If the Harris plaintiffs had been successful, the case could have opened the floodgates to lawsuits challenging how states around the country draw their legislative districts. But in an opinion written by Justice Stephen Breyer, the court ruled unanimously that Arizona’s maps were indeed designed to comply with federal law in ensuring minority representation, and that the minor population deviations were acceptable.

It’s the second time this term the court has rejected challenges to state redistricting plans from tea party conservatives upset about the growing clout of Latino voters. In Evenwel v. Abbott, decided earlier this month, a pair of Texas plaintiffs argued that states should create state legislative districts based on the number of eligible voters in them, as opposed to total population. The move would have granted more power to rural, white areas that lean Republican over more populated urban areas that are home to large minority (and Democratic-leaning) populations. Earlier this month, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled against the Evenwel plaintiffs.

Continue Reading »

See original article: 

Supreme Court Upholds Arizona’s Right to Ensure Minority Representation

Posted in Anchor, cannabis, Citizen, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Supreme Court Upholds Arizona’s Right to Ensure Minority Representation

Kansas Voters Have 21 Days to Register if They Speak English, or 15 if They Speak Spanish

by TheoRolleston Posted on April 12, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Prospective voters in Kansas were given different instructions for how and when to register to vote depending on whether they received the English- or Spanish-language voter guide issued by the Kansas secretary of state’s office.

The English-language version correctly informed voters that they could register up to 21 days before an election. But the Spanish-language version told voters that they had only 15 days to register, according to the Kansas City Star. Passports were listed as a valid proof of citizenship in the English version; in the Spanish version, they were not.

Craig McCullah, who oversees publications in the secretary of state’s office, apologized in the Star for the “administrative error” and said he was “diligently working to fix” the issue. He said the online versions were corrected within a day and the physical versions were sent to a translating service to eliminate discrepancies.

It’s unclear exactly when the errors were introduced or whether the erroneous voter guides had an effect on registration for the state’s presidential caucuses on March 5.

The botched voter guides, first flagged by a Democratic consultant in Daily Kos, have sparked the latest in a series of controversies over strict voter registration policies in Kansas under Secretary of State Kris Kobach.

A former Justice Department counsel in the George W. Bush administration and law professor at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, Kobach was known for helping craft anti-immigration laws in Arizona, Alabama, and Georgia and for pushing the idea of self-deportation. Since becoming secretary of state in 2010, he has restricted access to the polls in Kansas and pursued criminal prosecutions for alleged instances of voter fraud, despite its rare occurrence. In 2013, even as the Supreme Court struck down a law requiring proof of citizenship for federal elections in Arizona, the state established a two-tier voter system that required Kansas residents to provide proof of citizenship to vote in state and local elections.

Kansas is one of several Republican-controlled states that imposed tighter voter restrictions after the 2010 midterm election. Those policies have prompted legal challenges from civil rights advocates, who argue that such restrictions affect young, minority, Democratic-leaning voters. In January, a Kansas district court judge, Franklin Theis, struck down the state’s two-tier system, noting that Kobach, as secretary of state, “is not empowered to determine or declare the method of registration or create a method of ‘partial registration’ only.” Kobach plans to appeal the ruling.

In February, the American Civil Liberties Union again challenged the state’s voting policies, claiming the proof of citizenship requirement would keep at least 30,000 people, or 14 percent of Kansans who tried to register, off the voter rolls. The lawsuit is also seeking to prevent the state from tossing out more than 350,000 registration applications that are considered incomplete because prospective voters did not provide proof of citizenship.

Originally posted here: 

Kansas Voters Have 21 Days to Register if They Speak English, or 15 if They Speak Spanish

Posted in Anchor, Citizen, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Kansas Voters Have 21 Days to Register if They Speak English, or 15 if They Speak Spanish

Angered by Arizona’s Botched Election, One Man Decides to Run for Office

by GerardBoatright Posted on April 11, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

A week after the botched election in Maricopa County, Arizona—when thousands of people waited hours to cast their ballots—the state’s House Elections Committee got an earful from angry voters.

One of them, local criminal defense attorney Adrian Fontes, stepped to the lectern and ripped into the state’s legislature and Helen Purcell, the county’s chief elections official.

“A political culture that worships at the altar of slashing budgets will eventually lead to the complete collapse of our most sacred democratic institutions: the right for Americans to vote,” he said at the hearing on March 28. “You are as responsible for this as anyone else.”

He concluded, to cheers (and an attempt by the committee chair to cut him off), “I do not want Helen Purcell to resign. I want to beat her at the ballot box.”

That’s exactly what he’s trying to do. Outraged by the long lines at the March 22 election, Fontes filed his paperwork the next morning to run for County Recorder. Purcell, a Republican, has been the recorder since 1988 and is currently in her seventh term. Maricopa County has been a Republican stronghold for decades; Mitt Romney carried the county by 10 points in 2012.

Aaron Flannery, a Republican from the Phoenix suburb of Glendale, also plans to run against Purcell.

The election in Maricopa County, where voters made their choices for the Democratic and Republican presidential nominations, made national headlines for its lines that stretched as long as five hours. There were also questions as to why county election officials decided to cut the number of voting places from 200 to 60, and accusations that the distribution of those locations adversely affected minority neighborhoods. The state’s House Elections Committee held a contentious hearing the Monday following the election about the bungled election, and five days later, the US Department of Justice, citing concerns about the wait times and the impact to minority communities, opened an inquiry into the election. Arizona Secretary of State Michelle Reagan will hold several public meetings this week to talk about the matter.

Fontes, 46, tells Mother Jones that he’s been thinking about the state of elections in Marciopa County since he nearly ran for a state House seat in 2014. (He’d filed paperwork to run, but ended up not running after all). Since then, he’s been active in local Democratic Party politics.

“We’ve been watching our right to vote deteriorate for several election cycles,” he said, “and this was the straw that broke the camel’s back.” Fontes, a former US Marine and lawyer with experience in Arizona, Colorado, and in federal courts in California, says he’s not sure the County Recorder should be a partisan position, because it requires a person who will go to bat for all voters.

During his testimony before the House Elections Committee, he said that Arizona’s primary (technically called a “presidential preference” vote) should be modified to let all registered voters participate—not just those registered with one of the major parties—and called for a re-vote to occur on June 7th.

Adrian Fontes Champion PR

“There’s a lot of people out there, from all sides of the political spectrum, who got cheated,” Fontes says. “I’m not saying I think they got cheated. There’s no question that they were cheated. And the fraud that was committed against these voters wasn’t by a political party. The fraud that was committed against these voters was by their very own government.”

Fontes sees the problems as part of a years-long pattern of systemic voter suppression. Until 2013, Arizona was one of 16 states that were covered under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, requiring them to get federal approval for changes to election procedure or law. In 2013, the Supreme Court struck down the underlying formula behind Section 5, so Arizona and the other “pre-clearance” jurisdictions could make any changes they wanted. If Arizona had still been under pre-clearance, the decision to cut polling locations by 70 percent would likely have required federal approval and may not have been carried out.

Fontes says the long lines were a form of “poll tax” and were no accident. “If you’re a working person, you’ve got two or three jobs, you can’t afford five hours out of a working day,” he says. “You just can’t. Not only for those folks, but for the veterans who are disabled, for the non-veterans who are disabled. For the elderly. For single parents with kids. This wasn’t just an inconvenience. This was a deterrent, an intentional deterrent to keep people from voting.”

Original article:  

Angered by Arizona’s Botched Election, One Man Decides to Run for Office

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Angered by Arizona’s Botched Election, One Man Decides to Run for Office

Climate change is sucking the Colorado River dry

by WileyReal78 Posted on April 2, 2016

Climate change is sucking the Colorado River dry

By on 2 Apr 2016comments

Cross-posted from

ClimateCentralShare

Even as the number of Americans relying on the Colorado River for household water swells to about 40 million, global warming appears to be taking a chunk out of the flows that feed their reservoirs.

Winter storms over the Rocky Mountains provide much of the water that courses down the heavily tapped waterway, which spills through deep gorges of the Southwest and into Mexico.

Low water levels in late 2014 at Lake Powell, which is a Colorado River water reservoir built along the border of Utah and Arizona.

Jessica Mercer

But flows in recent decades have been lighter than would have been expected given annual rain and snowfall rates — and a new study has pinpointed rising temperatures as the likely culprit.

“For a given precipitation over the cool season, from October through April, we’re seeing less flow than we’ve seen in the past,” said James Prairie, a researcher with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s Upper Colorado Regional Office. He was not involved with the new study.

As greenhouse gas pollution piles up in the atmosphere, it’s trapping heat and raising global temperatures, which is beginning to parch the Colorado River watershed. Heavier impacts on drinking water supplies in the West and elsewhere are projected for the future as warming accelerates.

The new research, published in Geophysical Research Letters by academics and a federal scientist, focused on the upper stretches of the river. It attempted to parse out the different roles of temperature, precipitation, and soil moisture on the variability of yearly water flows since reliable record-keeping began in 1906.

Annual Colorado River flows have naturally swung up and down over time, but the natural trends have been bucked in recent years and decades.

“What we’re seeing now is that, consistent with more of the global observations in terms of warming, that it’s not just a fluctuation that’s within that historical back and forth,” Prairie said. “That oscillation is starting to break from that range.”

Temperatures appear to have been playing a larger role in reducing the flows of water down the Colorado River since the late 1980s, the findings from the new study suggested.

“If you look at the trend in temperature over this period, we see a warming trend,” said Connie Woodhouse, a University of Arizona professor who led the new research. “We’re finding in those years temperatures explaining a lot more of the variability.”

Warmer temperatures cause more snow to fall instead as rain, and they cause snowpacks to melt earlier. Both of those effects lengthen growing seasons of riverside vegetation, which allows it to suck up more water as it grows. Higher temperatures also increase evaporation.

The likely effects of climate change on rainfall, snow, and streamflow in the West remain difficult to assess, though they’re expected to lead to more rain and less snow, reducing the water volume of the snowpack that melts slowly to fill up the rivers. Storms may also shift southward.

Recent assessments suggest that even without changes to precipitation, the flow through “most of the Colorado River” would “shift to moderately lower” levels as the planet continues to warm, said Andy Wood, a National Center for Atmospheric Research scientist who was not involved with the study.

Although more research is needed, the new study indicates that climate change has been worsening the effects of the recent Western drought on some of the country’s biggest reservoirs.

“The paper is intriguing, but it also leaves open a number of questions that I would think probably need to be addressed by a more detailed analysis,” Wood said.

Worldwide surface temperatures have warmed by about 1 degree C (1.8 degrees F) since the 1800s, worsening heatwaves and droughts. Last year easily broke a global temperature record that had been set one year prior.

Based on computer modeling, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation in 2012 warned that each 1 degree C of global warming could increase the amount of water that gets evaporated and sucked up by plants from the Colorado River by 2 to 3 percent. One of the models used suggested the effects would be twice as severe as that.

With 4.5 million acres of farmland irrigated using Colorado River water, and with nearly 40 million residents of seven U.S. states from cities as far afield as San Diego depending on it for municipal supplies, those incremental losses can have a heavy impact — particularly during times of drought.

Until the 1990s, yearly supplies of available Colorado River water outpaced demand. Now, the opposite is true.

Demand for Colorado River water has begun outstripping supply.U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.

Much of the West has endured drought in recent years, with Lake Powell and Lake Mead — both large reservoirs storing freshwater and producing hydropower in the Colorados River’s downstream stretches — falling to ominously low levels.

Colorado River water shortfalls during the past decade have fueled a rapid and unsustainable frenzy of drilling for groundwater from beneath the watershed.

The Reclamation Bureau officials said the heaviest impacts of higher temperatures are being felt at smaller reservoirs that are relied on by farmers further upstream. Agriculture accounts for about 70 percent of Colorado River water use.

Because those upstream reservoirs are smaller, they’re less capable of storing enough water following wet years to buffer the effects of dry ones.

“Less water in the reservoirs means less water for people who actually want and need the water,” said Peter Soeth, a spokesperson for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. The effects aren’t just being felt by farmers and other water customers, Soeth said. They’re also impacting electrical grids, with less water flow meaning less hydropower.

Share

Please

enable JavaScript

to view the comments.

Find this article interesting?

Donate now to support our work.

Get Grist in your inbox

Link:  

Climate change is sucking the Colorado River dry

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, solar, Uncategorized, Wiley | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Climate change is sucking the Colorado River dry

This Ad by Republicans Against Barry Goldwater Basically Predicted Donald Trump

by LesterMcGrowdie Posted on March 25, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

“When the head of the Ku Klux Klan, when all these weird groups come out in favor for the candidate of my party, either they’re not Republicans or I’m not,” says the thoughtful-looking man as he stares into the camera.

You wouldn’t be at fault for assuming such a line was used to describe the existential crisis within the Republican party today, as it wrestles with the very real prospect of Donald Trump becoming its presidential nominee. But it’s actually a direct quote from “Confessions of a Republican,” a 1964 television advertisement attacking then–nominee Barry Goldwater. It features an actor playing a lifelong Republican who struggles to come to terms with the Arizona senator’s rise.

The classic campaign ad has resurfaced today because of its eerie parallels to the 2016 election and the increasingly likely chance that Trump will secure the GOP nomination.

“This man scares me,” the man in the ad says. “Now maybe I’m wrong. A friend of mine said to me ‘Listen, just because a man sounds a little irresponsible during a campaign doesn’t mean he’s going to act irresponsibly. You know, that theory that the White House makes the man—I don’t buy that.”

For nearly five minutes the actor ponders the implications of his party’s nominee, regretting that he did not go to the San Francisco convention and oppose him. He concluded by urging Republican support of the Democratic candidate, Lyndon Johnson.

“I think my party made a bad mistake in San Francisco, and I’m going to have to vote against that mistake on the third of November.”

That’s probably where the parallels to today end.

See the original article here – 

This Ad by Republicans Against Barry Goldwater Basically Predicted Donald Trump

Posted in alternative energy, Anchor, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, solar, solar power, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on This Ad by Republicans Against Barry Goldwater Basically Predicted Donald Trump

Native Americans Are Taking the Fight for Voting Rights to Court

by CarynX74xvmpk Posted on March 25, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

On Tuesday night, the long lines of Arizona primary voters highlighted the potentially disastrous fallout from a 2013 Supreme Court ruling that gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The specter of a new disenfranchisement controversy was all too familiar for a group of people who have been fighting for their right to vote in Arizona and much of the West for years: Native Americans. “What’s happening in Indian Country is reflective of what’s happening nationwide,” says Daniel McCool, political science professor at the University of Utah and coauthor of the book Native Vote.

Earlier this month, Indian Country Media Network reported that Native American and Alaska Natives have flagged voting-related problems in 17 states, via litigation or tribal diplomacy with local officials. For example, in Alaska—which will hold its Democratic caucuses Saturday—Alaska Natives scored a victory in September 2014, when a federal judge concluded that state election officials violated the Voting Rights Act when they failed to translate voting materials for Alaska Natives in rural sections of the state. After nine months of talks, they reached a settlement to get election pamphlets translated into six dialects of Yup’ik and Gwich’in through 2020, granting them language assistance ahead of the caucuses this weekend.

9 Facts that Blow Up the Voter-Fraud Myth

Meanwhile, congressional efforts to protect voting rights for Native Americans and Alaska Natives have come to a halt. Last July, Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) announced a bill that would prevent states from moving polling places to inconvenient locations, banishing in-person voting on reservations, and altering early voting locations. The bill, inspired by a voting access case in Montana that compelled three counties to open satellite offices on reservations, has stalled in the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Here are a few other cases to keep in mind:

Poor Bear v. Jackson County: In September 2014, members of the Oglala Sioux Tribe from the Pine Ridge Reservation filed a lawsuit against Jackson County, South Dakota, alleging that county officials refused to create a satellite office where Sioux residents could register and file in-person absentee ballots. For tribal citizens, the closest place to submit their absentee ballots is the county auditor’s office in Kadoka, a town that’s 95 percent white and roughly 27 miles away. (Native Americans must travel twice as far as white residents in the county to submit ballots in person, according to the lawsuit.) Voters can also submit absentee ballots by mail, but they have to submit an affidavit to prove their identity if they lack a tribal photo ID card, a potential hardship for Native American voters.

The county commission declined to approve the office because “it believed funding was not available,” despite a Help America Vote Act plan that allowed the county to use state funds to create the office. After residents filed for a preliminary injunction, the commission agreed to open a temporary satellite voting office in the runup to Election Day 2014. Last November, in an agreement with South Dakota’s secretary of state, the Jackson County Commission approved a satellite site through 2023.

Brakebill v. Jaeger: In January, seven members of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians filed a lawsuit against North Dakota state secretary Alvin Jaeger, alleging that the strict requirements under the state’s voter ID law imposed a discriminatory burden on Native Americans. When the state enacted House Bill 1332 in April 2015, it limited the forms of permissible identification at voting booths, required forms of identification to display the voter’s home address and date of birth, and eliminated a provision that allowed voters to use a voucher or affidavit if they failed to bring an ID. The lawsuit alleges that the bill “disenfranchised and imposed significant barriers for qualified Native American voters by establishing strict voter ID and residence requirements.”

According to the lawsuit, Native Americans in North Dakota have to travel an average of nearly 30 miles to obtain a driver’s license. The lawsuit also claims that many Native Americans lack tribal government IDs with residential addresses, which is an alternative form of ID under state law. In February, Jaeger tried to get the case tossed out, arguing that the voter ID law was constitutional. The judge has yet to decide.

Navajo Nation Human Rights Commission v. San Juan County: Less than two years ago, prospective Navajo Nation voters in San Juan County, Utah—where Native Americans are nearly 47 percent of the population—had to travel an average of two hours to submit a ballot in the predominantly white city of Monticello, without access to reliable public transportation. That’s because in 2014, according to a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and others in late February, the county closed polling places and switched over to mail-in ballots, placing a “disproportionately severe burden” on Navajo residents. The county has yet to respond in court to the case.

It wasn’t the first time San Juan County has been sued for violating the Voting Rights Act. In fact, the Navajo Nation claimed in a previous lawsuit that the county commission “relied on race” when it decided not to change the boundary lines for a largely Native American district in 2011, three decades after they were initially drawn. In February, US District Judge Robert Shelby ordered the county to redraw its election district lines after he ruled that its current boundaries, which were set after a settlement with the Justice Department in the 1980s, were unconstitutional.

Taken from:

Native Americans Are Taking the Fight for Voting Rights to Court

Posted in alternative energy, Anchor, Citizen, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, solar, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Native Americans Are Taking the Fight for Voting Rights to Court

Rubio Slams Trump for Hiring Foreigners, but His Own Record Could Bring Trouble

by RickBarrier Posted on March 3, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Last week’s Republican presidential debate had just begun when Marco Rubio launched into his first of many broadsides against front-runner Donald Trump for the hiring practices in his real estate empire. “Even today,” the senator from Florida said, “we saw a report in one of the newspapers that Donald, you’ve hired a significant number of people from other countries to take jobs that Americans could have filled.” He repeated the attack again on the eve of Super Tuesday this week, saying at a rally in Atlanta that Trump had recently hired foreign workers in Florida. “I know Americans are qualified to do those jobs, because those are the jobs my parents did, working in a hotel,” Rubio said.

The critique didn’t appear to have much of an effect: Trump dominated the primaries and caucuses on Tuesday, winning seven states while Rubio came away with just one. And Rubio might want to think twice before employing that line of attack again, since he’s as vulnerable to it as anyone.

It’s not that Rubio has staffed his Senate office with cheap foreign labor. (As Trump retorted during the debate last week, “I’ve hired tens of thousands of people over at my job. You’ve hired nobody.”) But Rubio has been unwavering in his support for guest worker visas that some companies exploit to replace American workers with foreign ones. As Rubio continues to hammer Trump for hiring foreign workers to do jobs that Americans can do, he is actually highlighting one of his own weaknesses as he faces the populist, nationalist frenzy that Trump has whipped up.

Rubio’s work on the Senate’s “Gang of Eight” immigration bill in 2013 has been a stumbling block throughout his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination because of his support for the bill’s path to citizenship or, as the right wing calls it, “amnesty.” Less discussed is the fact that Rubio led the charge to expand a business-friendly guest worker visa program known as H-1B. He even brought in an old friend who was a partner at a corporate immigration firm—and whose clients stood to benefit from the guest worker program—to lead his office’s work on the bill.

Continue Reading »

See original article:

Rubio Slams Trump for Hiring Foreigners, but His Own Record Could Bring Trouble

Posted in Anchor, Citizen, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Rubio Slams Trump for Hiring Foreigners, but His Own Record Could Bring Trouble

How Nevada’s Solar Showdown Could Play Into the Caucuses

by HenryMarasco Posted on February 19, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Last month, solar power suffered a major blow in Nevada. Under pressure from the state’s largest electric utility, NV Energy, state regulators agreed to drastically roll back a key financial incentive for rooftop solar installations. The move, which applied both to new solar users and to homes already equipped with panels, could leave existing customers on the hook for thousands of dollars in higher electricity costs. It also obliterated the economic case for prospective solar buyers. And it prompted a mass exodus of solar contractors in the state with the most solar jobs per capita. SolarCity, the country’s largest solar installer, fired 550 workers; two of its main competitors, Vivant and Sunrun, plan to shut down their Nevada operations.

Now, the fight over solar could become an important issue in the presidential election.

The controversial public utility commission decision relates to net metering, the policy that allows homeowners to sell the excess electricity from their solar panels back to the utility at set prices. Most states have adopted some form of net metering. It enables solar customers to defray their upfront costs and has been widely credited as a major driver of America’s solar boom. But the policy is generally loathed by utilities, who not only lose a customer but have to pay that lost customer for their power. In response, utilities and their allies in conservative think tanks such as the American Legislative Exchange Council have waged a nationwide battle against net metering, particularly in sunny states like Arizona and Florida. The Nevada decision is one of the utilities’ biggest victories yet: It allows them to raise the flat monthly fee on solar customers threefold by 2020, from $12.75 to $38.51. It also reduces the net metering credit by 18 percent. This is especially harmful to customers who made big investments in solar under the expectation that it would generate big savings into the foreseeable future.

Since the decision, solar has been one of the top headlines in Nevada. The change has been decried by local solar contractors, their customers, and environmentalists. Two homeowners have filed a class-action lawsuit against NV Energy (owned by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway), and a coalition of solar companies known as the No Solar Tax PAC is pushing a ballot measure that would reverse the regulators’ decision.

The Nevada caucuses are just around the corner, Saturday for Democrats and this coming Tuesday for Republicans. Solar enjoys widespread support from Nevada voters in both parties: A poll last month from Colorado College found that 75 percent of voters in the state support tax incentives for solar, while a solar-industry-commissioned poll last year found that 69 percent of Nevada Republicans and 80 percent of Nevada Democrats wouldn’t vote for a candidate who doesn’t support pro-solar policies.

“The fallout from the solar decision has been so severe on both sides of the aisle,” said Barbara Boyle, a Sierra Club staffer in Nevada. “I think there’s going to be a lot of activity in the caucuses related to the issue.”

On Tuesday, the Alliance for Solar Choice, a lobbying group backed by SolarCity and Sunrun, emailed a memo to thousands of solar supporters in Nevada urging them to “make sure the presidential candidates can’t avoid this issue.” Democrats Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have already charged into the fight. Last week, Clinton issued a statement expressing her support for federal legislation that would limit states’ ability to raise fees for existing solar users, as was done in Nevada:

On Monday, Sanders met face to face with a group of solar workers in Reno, where he called the regulators’ decision “incomprehensible” and encouraged solar supporters to petition Buffett to back down.

Eli Smith, who operates a small solar installer in Reno called Black Rock Solar, attended the meeting with Sanders. He said that although no presidential candidate can offer much of an immediate remedy to the state’s solar woes, he plans to support Sanders in the caucus because he has “the kind of commitment I personally look for” on clean energy issues.

Smith added that he was surprised that thus far, the Republican candidates “aren’t even acknowledging the issue,” given solar’s bipartisan appeal in Nevada.

Indeed, none of the GOP contenders have weighed in on the controversy yet, and they didn’t respond to requests for comment for this story. A few have come close: In New Hampshire, John Kasich said it’s “not acceptable” to slow the development of solar, and Marco Rubio said the United States should be “number one” in solar (although his proposed energy plan focuses on promoting fossil fuel extraction and ignores renewables). In South Carolina on Tuesday, Donald Trump suggested that because his campaign is self-funded, he wouldn’t be held captive to the interests of utilities, as some environmentalists have suggested Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval (R) is:

Avoiding this issue would be a big missed opportunity for Republicans in Nevada, said Debbie Dooley, whose Green Tea Party group organizes conservative support for solar because it represents “energy choice” and freedom from monopolistic utilities. Dooley is in Nevada this week working to promote the No Solar Tax PAC’s ballot measure. She said she expects Republicans to take up the issue once they make it past the South Carolina primary on Saturday.

“If I were a presidential candidate, I would certainly come out and start talking about energy freedom and energy choice,” she said. “I think the person that does grab hold of it will gain votes.”

Credit:  

How Nevada’s Solar Showdown Could Play Into the Caucuses

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, green energy, LG, ONA, Radius, solar, solar panels, solar power, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on How Nevada’s Solar Showdown Could Play Into the Caucuses

Arizona Is Paying a High Price for Cracking Down on Illegal Immigration

by Matthia76J Posted on February 9, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting look today at the costs and benefits of immigration across the Southern border. After Arizona cracked down on illegal immigration in 2007, their population of undocumented workers dropped by a whopping 40 percent—and it’s stayed down since then:

Arizona is a test case of what happens to an economy when such migrants leave, and it illustrates the economic tensions fueling the immigration debate.

Economists of opposing political views agree the state’s economy took a hit when large numbers of illegal immigrants left for Mexico and other border states, following a broad crackdown. But they also say the reduced competition for low-skilled jobs was a boon for some native-born construction and agricultural workers who got jobs or raises, and that the departures also saved the state money on education and health care. Whether those gains are worth the economic pain is the crux of the debate.

You should read the whole thing if you want all the details, including the fact that wages increased about 15 percent for a small number of construction workers and farmworkers—though Arizona’s unemployment rate more generally has been no better than its neighbors’. Beyond that, though, the Journal provides only a graphic summary that doesn’t really summarize much. So I’ve helpfully annotated it for you. It sure looks to me like Arizona has a very long way to go before the benefits of reducing illegal immigration will come anywhere close to the costs.

See original article here:

Arizona Is Paying a High Price for Cracking Down on Illegal Immigration

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Arizona Is Paying a High Price for Cracking Down on Illegal Immigration

Your City Will Never Get Rich Hosting the Super Bowl

by Lashawnda45U Posted on February 4, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Along San Francisco’s Embarcadero, right in front of the restored Ferry Building, a fan village known as Super Bowl City is expected to draw at least a million visitors this week. Super Bowl Host Committee officials project that not only will San Francisco finish in the black after the nine-day event, but that it also could generate anywhere between “a couple hundred million to $800 million” in economic output for the city. What’s more, a PricewaterhouseCoopers study projected that the Bay Area could see at least $220 million in direct revenue from business during the Super Bowl, the most ever.

But where do those numbers come from, and how accurate are they, really? We reached out to two economists who study the impact of mega sporting events, and their assessment was less than rosy. Here are some takeaways:

Every year, the same studies come out. Every year, they’re wrong. When the NFL and its host committee estimate the event’s economic impact, they tend to forget how the city operates before the event, says Andrew Zimbalist, an economics professor at Smith College. For example, San Francisco’s hotel occupancy rate typically has hovered around 90 percent in February. So when Super Bowl fans flood area hotels, they’re likely just filling spots that would have already been filled. Additionally, residents can be reluctant to visit the Super Bowl City area over fear of traffic, congestion, and increased security, displacing typical economic activity and leaking money out of the city. Notably, on Super Bowl City’s opening day, only 7,000 people showed up.

“I’m expecting next year they’re going to come out and say the host city is going to turn into New York City. Not really. It’s silly,” Zimbalist says. “Every year they come out with the same stuff. The studies that they do are based on a false methodology and unrealistic assumptions.”

The host city’s Super Bowl committee usually keeps quiet about the projected economic benefits to the host city or the region. Previous analyses by university researchers, in partnership with the NFL and host committees, have measured the gross economic benefits anywhere between $400 million and $700 million. For instance, researchers at Arizona State University found that last year’s Super Bowl XLIX in Glendale, Arizona, brought $719 million of total economic impact to the state.

ASU would not release the entire study to Mother Jones under an agreement with the NFL and the host committee. But Victor Matheson, an economics professor at the College of Holy Cross who examined the study’s summary findings, told Mother Jones that researchers failed to take into account the region’s typical activity. Matheson argues that the true impact for the host city usually falls between $30 million and $120 million.

San Francisco gave up a lot to get Super Bowl City, and still needs to figure out how to pay for it. This year, Super Bowl City is 45 miles away from the actual big game, which will take place at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara. But San Francisco’s taxpayers are on the hook for at least $4.8 million in city services during Super Bowl week. Why? An independent budget analysis found that San Francisco did not make a formal agreement with the NFL and the Super Bowl Host Committee to receive a reimbursement for those services. Or, as SF Weekly recently put it, “The Super Bowl is here on little more than a handshake deal.”

As Zimbalist notes, $4.8 million is a small number when you consider San Francisco’s $8.96 billion budget. Still, he says, “it’s $5 million not being spent on road repairs and schools.” Or on the city’s roughly 3,500 homeless, some of whom recently relocated from the Super Bowl City area to a growing tent encampment under a highway overpass in the Mission District. San Francisco magazine counted 100 tents in the area, though homeless advocates and officials say the encampment has grown over the course of a few months, even years. A host committee official told Bloomberg News in January that the group would invest $13 million of the $50 million it had already raised in charities addressing homelessness and poverty.

Meanwhile, as part of the Super Bowl bid, San Francisco’s police, fire, and emergency management departments “signed letters of assurance to not seek reimbursement from the NFL” for providing more services during the Super Bowl—an arrangement that Matheson said isn’t unusual. (Last year’s Super Bowl likely cost the city of Glendale at least $579,000 and as much as $1.25 million in security and transportation cost overruns.) Only two departments will earn money back from the host committee—the fire department (a 6.7 percent reimbursement) and parks and recreation (100 percent). Jane Kim, who sits on San Francisco’s board of supervisors and has called the city’s non-agreement “the worst deal ever,” pushed for a last-minute bill to make the city renegotiate with the NFL, less than a week before the events at Super Bowl City were set to start.

The city’s municipal transportation agency and police department will spend a combined $3.8 million for services to Super Bowl 50 events; the transportation department will spend more than $700,000 on additional parking enforcement alone. The city will try to cover this by redirecting funds in different department budgets along with staff time from future projects “to support this extraordinary special event.” For now, some city workers will volunteer their time during Super Bowl week.

All told, it could’ve been worse. Take Super Bowl XLVIII, which left New Jersey residents with a $17.7 million tab. Or last year’s big game, which cost Glendale—a city of 230,000 where more than 40 percent of its debt is set aside to pay off sports facilities—more than $2.1 million to pay for security alone. And while Santa Clara’s taxpayers still have to deal with the public subsidies that helped fund Levi’s Stadium, the city did manage to make a deal to earn back roughly $3.6 million in service costs for the Super Bowl.

“In the big picture,” Matheson says, “this is one of the cheapest for the taxpayers that we’ve seen.”

Follow this link:

Your City Will Never Get Rich Hosting the Super Bowl

Posted in alo, Anchor, Citizen, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Your City Will Never Get Rich Hosting the Super Bowl