Sacramento Capital. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Proposition 31 might win the battle for the longest and most complex ballot measure. At more than 8,000 words Prop. 31 is an opus to California Forward‘s attempt to restructure and rebuild California’s government from the core. To do that it outlines nine main changes:

1. Establishes a two-year budget cycle
2. Permits the governor to make unilateral budget cuts during fiscal emergencies
3. Requires all bills to be published three days prior to a vote
4. Forces lawmakers to identify a funding source for new programs or tax deductions
5. Requires performance reviews
6. Defines specific goals for the state budget and all local government budgets
7. Allows local governments to establish “Community Strategic Action Plans”
8. Allocates $200 million a year in sales tax to those plans
9. Allows local governments to transfer local property taxes among themselves.

Whew, that’s a lot.

But one component of the initiative is particularly opaque: What are these “Community Strategic Action Plans”? What are they supposed to do? KQED called California Forward’s Executive Director Kristin Connelly to ask her specifically about the plans. California Forward wrote and sponsored Prop. 31.

We also spoke to one of the plan’s detractors, Wendy Mitchell, a member of the California Coastal Commission and who serves on the board of the California League of Conservation Voters.

Below are transcripts of those conversations, edited for clarity and length:

Lisa Pickoff-White, KQED: We’ve had readers and listeners contact us with questions about Proposition 31′s Community Strategic Action Plans. What are they and what are they meant to do?

Kristin Connelly: What we wanted to do is put forth a plan for what works. The Community Strategic Action Plan really comes from local folk involved in delivering services, at the local level, who said that they could do a better job if they had some flexibility and were allowed to integrate services, which evidence shows leads to better outcomes.

The plan is a voluntary component in Proposition 31; nobody has to do a Community Strategic Action Plan. It’s not a regional government — there’s a lot of misinformation there about Prop. 31 — but there are appropriate levels of oversight. Everything has to happen through a majority vote of the local jurisdictions of the community governments that are opting to participate.

The idea is this:  if a majority of the cities in a county and the school districts representing a majority of the students [in that county] want to work together to solve problems then they can. If there is some sort of state regulation or a statute that interferes with their ability to deliver those state funded services they can propose a community rule in order to administer those services.

So these governments come up with a plan, and each jurisdiction has to approve it by a majority vote of their boards. Then once a county and all the local governments have taken all the steps to put together their plan, the legislature still has an opportunity, or relevant state agency if there’s a particular regulation that a community is seeking a community rule on. They have 60 days to review the plans and veto them to say you know what you didn’t meet the mark or there’s something that’s not working and you need to do a better job. Then it goes back to community, and doesn’t go into effect.

The clock for the legislature doesn’t start to toll if the legislature isn’t in session. We tried to make this as flexible for the local governments as possible, impactful, and a process that makes sense.

Pickoff-White: You’ve said that you based this on other projects. What are those projects?

Connelly: Since the 1990′s 11 counties have taken advantage of a series of small-scale pilot projects. Fresno used this authority to develop a strategic plan to coordinate its efforts to improve youth outcomes. They created seven neighborhood resource centers that provided integrated public safety and health services. They received waivers so that they could pool several state and federal funding streams to support them. Since then more students are scoring above the 50th percentile on the SAT, crime is down, school attendance is up.

Another example, Marin County they created a youth pilot program devoted to reducing placements in the county’s very costly foster care programs. The pilot program received permission to pool resources from two state funding streams and to alter Medi-Cal requirements. The state allowed Marin to keep the savings it generated so that created an incentive for them. Their program has been successful for 90 percent of the children it served. In 2004 the county was able to hold onto the estimated $900,000 in savings it generated by improving results.

Pickoff-White: If there are already counties and districts that are changing these programs and able to change the funding streams then why do we need these Community Strategic Action Plans?

Connelly: We wanted to be able to bring it to scale. So it’s an opportunity and not just done on a piecemeal basis. The measure provides important incentive funding [$200 million]. This money is meant to be planning money and collaboration money to incentivize counties, cities and communities to facilitate this collaboration. We have no way of knowing how many counties will avail themselves of this and our hope is that we’re going to create an echo chamber here and that our success will foster others. Counties can encourage one another to participate in this manner.

Pickoff-White: Some of your detractors including the California League of Conservation Voters and the League of Women Voters and the Federation of Teachers have argued that Prop. 31 would hurt education, environment, health and other priorities.

Connelly: We respectfully disagree. The Community Strategic Action Plans don’t apply to very important environmental provisions. It’s about state funded programs and the manner in which the programs are funded. There’s a disagreement there. Personally I tried to get styrofoam banned from Contra Costa County as a young person. I care a lot about the environment. I’m a true environmentalist, so I wouldn’t be supporting Prop. 31 if I didn’t think that it had lots of benefits.

The cycle that we’re in is not acceptable and it needs to improve. We really believe that Prop. 31 is a great way to get there.

Pickoff-White: What kinds of checks and balances do you have?

Connelly: I think one of the important things about Proposition 31 that many people don’t talk about is performance based budgeting and what it requires in actually focusing on results and reporting those. What we’re trying to do is focus the budgets of the state on stuff that works and is getting things done for Californians. We’re not imposing some new structure of government or some regional collaboration. The Community Strategic Action Plans that I was speaking about are a voluntary component of the measure. We think it’s a great opportunity, but it’s not going to be imposed on people. We did not want to have a one-size-fits-all approach there.

Some of the questions that we get — and concerns from detractors — come from misunderstanding how the measure actually works. The reason I mention performance-based budgeting and all the transparency components of Prop. 31 is that I think we have the opportunity to turn the page to a new era of governance where we really have changed the culture, where we focus on results and see what we’re getting rather than what did we spend last year. Let’s see what works and what are we getting with the investment of our tax dollars. How government chooses to spend its tax dollars is among the most important decisions that leaders make. We think this is an important step forward.

***

Wendy Mitchell is a member of the California Coastal Commission and serves on the board of the California League of Conservation Voters.

Pickoff-White: You’ve come out against Proposition 31 and one of the reasons you cited was the Community Strategic Action Plans. Why?

Mitchell: This initiative was couched as reform. Everyone wants reform, and the state of California certainly needs reform. However, one of the fundamental stumbling blocks to this initiative, and why the environmental community and the League of Women Voters — and others — are opposing this, is because of these Community Strategic Plans.

They’re great buzz words, but what would happen is it would allow a county board of supervisors to adopt a Community Strategic Plan. Then, if they determine that a state law or regulation was impeding this Action Plan and their ability to achieve it, they could then determine their own community rule. That would be a functional equivalent of what the state law was.

What is going to happen with that is multiple things. One, you’ll have communities that will not be consistent with state law. Our environmental laws, our worker safety laws, our health and human services laws can be in jeopardy. You have everyone — 58 different counties — passing different rules to apply state laws.

And then most importantly you’re going to have litigation on every single Community Strategic Plan and community rule because it’s not clearly defined in the legislation. The local governments and everybody is going to litigate. So the courts are going to decide. It’s going to throw all development in local communities into a tailspin.

Pickoff-White: California Forward argues that these plans are optional. No one is forcing communities into these.

Mitchell: That is true. But it also sets aside $200 million — takes it out of the state budget which is already seriously in jeopardy — to allow local governments to do these Community Strategic Plans. Some may, some may not. But we can’t run the risk of local communities making plans about how they adhere to state laws.

That wouldn’t be good for the business community. I know the conservative right wing is opposed to this, as well as liberal Democrats. It really doesn’t work for anyone in the state of California and it isn’t good for business because you’re going to have different counties in the state. And the litigation alone is going to take decades to get sorted out.

So yes, it is optional. But the environmental community, the League of Women Voters and newspapers up and down the state have come out in opposition to this initiative.

Pickoff-White: I spoke to Kristin Connelly, California Forward’s executive director, about this and she said that what this does is allow communities to do what they need to do, and decide what’s important to them. She pointed out several examples in education, specifically in Fresno, where this has worked out. Do you think communities need a way to change these restrictions to work together?

Mitchell: I think certainly local communities have very big input. As you know they do all the zoning, they create plans around housing, etc. They have a large role, the local government. The people have their elected representatives at the state level as well.

But creating a patchwork in which schools in one county are administered one way and schools in another county have a totally different threshold for passage of classes is a recipe for disaster. If everyone is going into vocational college, community college, UC or CSU they need to have the same foundation of education. And while local governments and local school boards have a role in that, there is consistency throughout the state because of state regulations and state statutes.

Pickoff-White: The measure does allow state agencies and the legislature to say, “No, we’re not going to allow you to make these changes.” Do you think that prevents some of the problems you’re talking about?

Mitchell: I think that’s not realistic for the timeline of how government actually works. First of all the state legislature is out four months of the year. So it’s a 60-day timeline to vote up or down. Organizations like the Coastal Commission, if they created the functional equivalent to the coastal act, we only meet every 30 days, so being able to review and act upon that in a timely manner just isn’t feasible. I think that pays lip service to the issues that I’m raising, but it doesn’t solve the problem.

Learn more about Prop. 31 in KQED’s Proposition Guide.

“From the City to the Valley.” This transit map reflects the modern reality that “Silicon Valley” has grown to include the entire San Francisco Bay Area.Credit: Stamen Design

In downtown San Jose, the cavernous, cool ZERO1 Garage is the conceptual epicenter for a wide-ranging art exhibition. Seeking Silicon Valley is an artistic exploration that includes 100 exhibits at 45 museums, galleries, and studios across the Bay Area.

Jaime Austin is one of the curators. Forty years ago, “Silicon Valley” referred to a small clutch of high tech companies in the Santa Clara Valley. Today? “It’s a network of freeways, a network of people, a network of technology, a network of companies and a network is something fairly abstract,” Austin says. “Silicon Valley, at least to me, is really more of an idea, than it is a place.”

Austin stands in front of what looks like a Bay Area public transit map — except the transit is anything but public. It’s a map of corporate bus routes that more than 44-thousand people use to commute to Google, Apple, Facebook and the like. The map (by Stamen Design of San Francisco) is jaw-dropping for its size and complexity — and for what it says about the way Silicon Valley has grown over the last 40 years.

“You know, the idea of San Francisco and Silicon Valley being two different types of cities with two different types of industry is no longer true. The greater San Francisco Bay Area is now interconnected. Because we really are one giant ecosystem.” Austin says.

That ecosystem is also one of the nation’s biggest economic drivers. Like it or not, Silicon Valley has a relationship to cultivate with government. Internet industry analyst and author Larry Downes says some of the most intractable political issues trickle down as big business problems across the world of High Tech. Take for instance, patent law.

“The patent system is utterly and completely broken,” Downes states flatly, “and I don’t know a single person in Silicon Valley, whether they’re a beneficiary or a victim — often both — who doesn’t think otherwise.”

Immigration law is another pain point. Downes points to one example: the best and brightest come here to California to study at our universities, up to the point they’re ready to start working here.

“That’s the moment at which we say ‘You have to leave the United States and go do it in another country.’ I mean, it’s insane!” he says.

More broadly, there’s a vast cultural gulf between Silicon Valley and Washington, DC. Even now, a dozen years into the 21^st century, there are members of Congress who boast about how clueless they are.

Last year, Downes covered the debate over SOPA or the Stop Online Piracy Act, a Congressional measure stopped by an upswell of protest from people and companies concerned about its impacts on the digital realm. Many of those impacts were either unintended or not fully thought through. The bill was largely a creature of lobbyists for the entertainment industry, and many Congressmen were simply taken aback at the public response to the bill.

Downes was in the audience for the hearings. He was shocked at some of what he heard come out of the mouths of some representatives. “‘Well, I don’t really understand the Internet,’ or ‘Well, my daughter uses this device and it sounds very interesting.’” Downes pauses for effect.

“I mean, not only do they not understand these products that we build,” he says, “They don’t even feel compelled to pretend they understand the products!”

The way Downes sees it, government should just stay out of the way. “We built a government that couldn’t do things quickly, because we wanted to make sure that when government acted, it acted carefully and with due deliberation. Of course, that’s a terrible fit for businesses or for technologies that change every 12-18 months. The pace is such that everything you want government to do — even if they did it, it would be too late by the time it arrived.”

Downes recently articulated these views in a commentary for Forbes. But even he admits that what high tech companies want from government depends on what kind of high tech they do. A software developer working on a smart phone app may view government’s “help” more like interference. For companies in other tech industries — med tech, biotech, green tech, clean tech — the view may be quite different.

Priv Bradoo is co-founder of Blue Oak, a venture-capital funded start up that aims to tackle toxic e-waste by grabbing phones and laptops on their way to the landfills of Asia, then extracting the precious metals inside for sale. Sipping on a can of Red Bull in the dappled sunshine outside the company’s offices on Sandhill Road, Bradoo says “I don’t think the government’s in the business of picking winners, but it should be in the business of facilitating and improving and increasing the access to resources that aren’t easy to be funded using small private investment.”

Bradoo says her company would like to build one of their refineries in Southern California to do that extraction. The trouble is, labor, utilities and taxes are more expensive here than in other states. If state and local governments were to sweeten the deal, that might change the math.

“Absolutely. I think it all comes into what are the incentives for us to be here, versus somewhere else,” she says.

Because at some point, Bradoo’s going to have to make the case to her venture capitalists.

“From the investors perspective, that’s usually a big question,” she explains. “Is it going to take two years to put up? We’ve done as much as we can do without actually setting up a facility. Hopefully we can find places where it’s not going to be a problem, but it’s actually even the perception of a regulatory risk which can be a hinderance.”

Beyond that, Blue Oak is going to burn through its VC cash, and the firm will find itself competing for real – inside a system that essentially off-shores the human and environmental cost of e-waste to people in China and India.

Blue Oak Co-founder Bryce Goodman says it matters that the U.S. is not a signatory to the Basel Convention, an international anti-toxic waste dumping deal, and that we don’t mandate companies to take back used electronics on a nationwide basis. Without those kinds of policies, the volume isn’t there to make recycling much of a business proposition in the U.S.

“That’s one place where government can be a driver — is in providing some sort of guarantee for markets that we think are crucial and that won’t exist otherwise,” Goodman says.

Whether their business model relies on a tight relationship with government – or relies on government staying out of the way – one thing is for sure: Silicon Valley denizens don’t leave their relationships with government up to chance anymore. Big companies hire their own lobbyists. Little ones band together in collective lobbying associations, like EngineAdvocacy in San Francisco. This is, after all a democracy, and if you don’t participate, you don’t get a say in what happens.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the industry spent more than $120 million on lobbying in 2011 — twice as much as a decade ago.

Hear the radio version of this story on the California Report.

Read Rachael Myrow’s other stories about the intersection of government and Silicon Valley:

Silicon Valley Republicans: Wandering in a Political Wilderness

Not So Simple Math: Support for Silicon Valley K-8 Teachers in an Era of Budget Cuts

Photo by Gabriela Quiros, KQED Science

On KQED Public Radio’s The California Report Magazine on Friday, Scott Shafer talked with Marian Mulkey, the director of the Health Reform and Public Programs Initiative at the California HealthCare Foundation, a health-policy think tank (and a funder of the show).

Edited transcript:

SCOTT SHAFER: First of all, the Affordable Care Act has gradually been getting phased in nationwide. Give us a sense of what’s been happening up to now, right here in California.

MARIAN MULKEY, CALIFORNIA HEALTHCARE FOUNDATION: California has implemented many of the early provisions of the Affordable Care Act, making some new extensions of coverage available, for example, to young adults, assuring that pre-existing conditions are covered for children, and implementing many of the early programs — one for people with pre-existing conditions is in place and covering people already.

California has taken steps in terms of planning and establishing a state-based exchange, which is the marketplace by which people will be able to view their choices, identify what’s available for them and access federal subsidy support for buying coverage.

SHAFER: And it’s fair to say California has been further out in front on that than pretty much any other state?

MULKEY: Yes, California was early in determining it wanted to have a state-based exchange and moved quickly, immediately after the passage of the law in 2010 to start one up and to make some initial decisions.

SHAFER: Some people thought that after the Supreme Court weighed in and basically affirmed the Affordable Care Act, that would kind of be the end of the story. But we do have this big election coming up — the President, Congress. What could change depending on the outcome of that election?

MULKEY: Well, everybody’s eyes are on the presidency right now, and certainly there is a difference. If Obama is re-elected, then we remain on the path that we understand pretty well now, in terms of implementing the Affordable Care Act. If Romney is elected, then I think it’s fair to say, at a minimum, there’s a little bit of a pause, that people are looking toward Washington, and it will likely take months before it’s really clear what the new administration intends to do and what Congress will allow or encourage them to do.

SHAFER: And last month, Governor Brown vetoed a couple of bills that basically would have required insurers to cover all Californians, regardless of pre-existing conditions, even if the Affordable Care Act is gutted by the new president or the Congress. Why do you think he did that?

MULKEY: There was certainly pushback from the insurance industry about separating that individual mandate that’s in the federal law from the guaranteed issue, or the requirement to sell to everyone regardless of their health, which was in the state law. But I think it’s fair to say that there were many details in those bills — they compromised across all the stakeholders on some of them, and apparently didn’t get all the way to a compromise that the governor could uphold when it came to his desk. I think it’s likely that those issues will be revisited very soon in 2013.

SHAFER: Looking ahead to January, we understand that the governor intends to call a special session of the Legislature, focusing on health. How might this election determine what they might focus on?

MULKEY: If President Obama is re-elected, and we appear to continue down this path toward implementing the Affordable Care Act, then California has many pieces of unfinished business around the specific way we do that.

The individual market rules that you described earlier, certainly the way that we expand and pay for a MediCal expansion — those would be high on the to-do list for the Legislature. On the other hand, if Mitt Romney is in the White House or if Governor Brown’s tax proposition doesn’t pass, then I think attention will go in many different directions. It won’t be so focused narrowly on the implementation of the Affordable Care Ac; there may be higher priorities with respect to balancing the state budget.

Aerial view of downtown San Jose. (Helene Labriet-Gross/AFP/Getty Images)

What started as a San Jose State University class project has morphed into a real politics. In November, San Jose voters will vote on Measure D [PDF] – which would raise the minimum wage from $8 an hour to $10 an hour.

Both sides claim their arguments are simple. If you think $8 an hour is not a livable wage in San Jose, then you should vote yes. If you think hiking the minimum wage by 25 percent would cost jobs, then vote no.

But like most things in life and politics, nothing is really that simple, as evidenced by the Measure D debate on KQED’s Forum Wednesday morning. One of the main arguments against Measure D is that it would make San Jose an island of higher minimum wage and would put San Jose businesses at a competitive disadvantage.

Larry Stone, Santa Clara County’s assessor and a local businessman, disagreed, pointing out that nearby cities Fremont and Campbell have different sales tax rates.

“So I don’t see any reason why San Jose cannot have its own minimum wage,” he said. “The other thing is it’s more expensive to live in San Jose than in other parts of the state. You cannot live on the same amount of money in San Jose as you can in Fresno or Redding or any other place in the state. So it makes sense to me to have a variance between the minimum wage as well as other costs, city by city depending on the cost of living.”

Matthew Mahood, president and CEO of the San Jose Silicon Valley Chamber of Commerce, acknowledged the differences in sales tax rates but said Stone’s argument was “incomplete.” Mahood talked about the geography of the San Jose area and how main streets ignore city borders.

“You have main corridors — Bascom Avenue, Stevens Creek Boulevard — where if this minimum wage increase is passed, on one side of the street you’ll have employers paying one minimum wage under one set of government-mandated regulations, and on the other side of the street you’ll have businesses at a competitive advantage paying a lower wage,” he said. “Valley Fair Mall has Santa Clara on one side and San Jose on the other. The city border runs right down the middle of that mall. So within one mall you can have two different wage rates.”

The two men sparred over whether researchers had found that minimum wage increases had no impact on jobs (Stone) or were split (Mahood). In any case, the San Jose Silicon Valley Chamber is Commerce is releasing a report later this week which, Mahood says, shows that Measure D will cost jobs.

Mahood also said a poll of the Chambers membership who employee minimum wage workers showed that 67 percent said they would cut hours and 43 percent they would have to lay off workers. He said a hike from $8 an hour to $10 — a 25 percent increases plus payroll taxes on top of the wage increase — is too much at once.

Stone returned to the moral argument — that $8 an hour is simply not a livable wage. “The main point on this is it’s the right thing to do. People who work hard, who play by rules should make a fair wage,” he stated. “Workers should be able to live modestly where they work. You cannot live on $16,400 a year or $1,300 a month when that’s $500 less than the average rent right now of $1,800 in San Jose. The current wage is simply not livable and I think it’s deplorable that anyone would not favor this.”

Learn More about Measure D:

Listen to the Complete Forum Discussion on Measure D:

San Jose’s Measure D Would Raise City’s Minimum Wage 25 Percent

In San Jose, Once a Class Project, Now a Major Political Battle 

Both Garamendi and his challenger, Republican Kim Vann were guests Friday on KQED’s Forum.

Vann, a former Colusa County supervisor, focused her comments almost exclusively on supporting businesses through the entire discussion. When asked how she would create jobs, she pointed to her record.

“I’ll do it the very same way I’ve done it as a county supervisor,” she told Forum host Dave Iverson, “get government out of the way, make sure that the businesses understand what the rules are, not constantly changing the game and changing rules through over-reaching regulations. Making sure we have a good, solid tax code that people can understand.”

Garamendi blamed Republican obstructionism which, he says, has blocked passage of President Obama’s American Jobs Act. He then promoted his own plan to build the economy. ”It is this,” he said, “spend our tax money on American-made products. This is really something that can make a difference — in Sacramento. Siemens, the big German manufacturing company, has built a manufacturing plant to build 70 locomotives for Amtrak. This is part of the stimulus money, revamping the Amtrak system with new locomotives, 100% American made. … That’s taxpayer dollars being spent in America, on American made equipment.”

But Vann called the idea of more regulation a “band-aid” that would not address the core economic problems. “We adamantly refuse to address why businesses are not function at a high level in this country,” she said. “We are over regulating them. We are over taxing them. We are not giving them the confidence they need to grow their business. And adding another regulation is not going to fix that.”

Another big topic on the campaign trail is health care. Vann said she would join Republican colleagues in voting to repeal the Affordable Care Act. “This comes down to another situation where there are really good parts to it with some unintended outcomes,” Vann said. “This bill was put together with politics in mind first. Not the relationship between the patient and the doctor.”

Garamendi has a long record in California politics and he pointed to his tenure as Insurance Commissioner when discussing his support for the health care law.  ”I was the Insurance Commissioner in California for eight years,” he said. “And I understand what the private health insurance companies can do to people. It is the Affordable Care Act that pushes the insurance companies to provide insurance.”

You can listen to the 30-minute discussion here:

Click below to listen to the radio story.

Community College of San Francisco student Janice Suess has taken the organizing skills she learned during Occupy and put them to work advocating for student rights. (Katrina Schwartz/KQED)

A year ago the Occupy movement grabbed a national spotlight, shifting the political debate to focus on economic inequality. Those expecting the movement to translate into national electoral politics — as the Tea Party movement has done — have been disappointed. Many Bay Area Occupiers say their political awakening has driven them to fight for change in their own communities, instead.

Janice Suess, 19, moved to San Francisco a little over a year ago. Shortly after moving into her apartment, she heard the Blue Angels would be flying, and decided to head out to take some pictures. On her way back, she saw a crowd gathering in front of the San Francisco Federal Reserve. She was curious.

“I thought it was kind of peculiar so I went up and just asked someone what was going on. And they said it was the Occupy Movement and I was like, ‘Whoa, what is this?,’” explained Suess.

It was a chance encounter, but it turned out to be a significant one. “I started talking to more and more people and realized that what they were there for was a lot of what I had been feeling frustrated with since the 2008 financial collapse. But they were actually out there voicing what a lot of people didn’t know how to express, like myself,” she said.

Suess was hooked by the spirit of open dialogue and civility of political conversations in the camp. She also began to see how the financial collapse affected her. “Because it was personal, I felt like I could have a say in making change. Like, here are the specific issues facing you and your community. And that kind of hit home more.”

She joined working groups, started camping out in front of the Federal Reserve and helped organize big marches. Even Suess found this somewhat odd because she identifies as an introvert.

Police assemble to break up the Occupy San Francisco camp in Justin Herman Plaza last winter. (Katrina Schwartz/KQED)

But when the Occupy camps were dismantled, Suess says it was harder to stay involved. A lot of occupiers say that without a central place to meet they’ve found it harder to engage. Janice did what a lot of people in Occupy did. She took that energy and focused it on something that mattered to her, something she felt she could tackle — student rights.

“Being a student, that’s where I spend most of my time — at school — and those are the issues that impact me most and my community the most,” Suess explained.

That is pretty typical of what Occupiers are up to these days. They aren’t active in electoral politics, they’re kind of segmented, often working on local community issues.

For some, like Buck Bagot, that’s the whole point.

“I think that the only way to have Occupy have more power, be able make more of a difference, is to take that political discourse and find concrete expressions of that in our neighborhoods and where we work,” said Bagot.

Bagot is one of the principal organizers of Occupy Bernal, a group trying to stop foreclosures in San Francisco’s Bernal Heights neighborhood. Bagot also got involved because it was personal.

“I was standing on the street with a friend of mine and she says, ‘You know the house I’m renting is in foreclosure.’ And I said, ‘In Bernal Heights?’ She said ‘Yeah.’ And I looked it up and there are two other houses on this block in foreclosure,’” Buck explained.

So far Occupy Bernal has helped postpone 200 home auctions and worked with 45 people to get affordable loan modifications. Bagot says the group is now considering whether to support specific ballot initiatives and candidates.

But over in Oakland, ground zero for Occupy in the East Bay a year ago, Mike King finds electoral politics a waste of time. He says he can’t get behind any politician because most won’t have a real effect on his life. “I’m more interested in working with people to directly change the way that things look like, on the ground in an immediate sense,” he said.

King has been involved with Occupy Oakland since the beginning. He’s putting his energy into opening a library in Oakland’s Fruitvale neighborhood. He wants to change how people think about political engagement.

“I feel like that was what Occupy Oakland was doing — and still is doing — is kind of redefining what is political through action, through process,” King explained.

Critics have dinged the Occupy Movement for not participating in electoral politics.

U.C. Berkeley political science professor Paul Pierson sees Occupy’s disdain for electoral politics as a weakness.

“I think if you look at successful social movements, whether it be the Tea Party, which I think has had a lot of success, or going back further and thinking about the civil rights movement, these were movements that had particular goals in mind, that had particular targets in mind either that they wanted to provide support for or express opposition to,” Pierson said.

He says that if Occupy doesn’t create political alliances, it can’t move its goals about economic inequality into the mainstream. “I think there has been a kind of diffuseness to Occupy Wall Street that has made it hard for it to go beyond those initial effective steps that it took,” he explained.

Those in the Occupy movement are still defining what it means to be politically engaged. A year ago Janice Suess was a self-proclaimed ‘slack-tivist’. Now she calls herself an activist.

“Taking what you know and going into your community and like empowering people is, I think, is what matters. And I don’t think you have to call it Occupy, you just have to actually make a difference,” said Suess.

Occupy will celebrate its one year anniversary on Monday. People who have been quietly working in their communities will take to the streets. Janice Suess says she’ll be out there, hoping to recapture some of the power and joy of that very public, national moment.

Edited transcript:

RACHAEL MYROW: You recently blogged that the governor’s campaign reminds you of the infamous January 1973 cover of National Lampoon: “If you don’t buy this magazine, we’ll kill this dog.”

JOHN MYERS: Yeah, and I also wrote that it may be a little over the top to make the comparison. But the point is that when you look at the way the governor has rolled out this campaign in the early stages — and he’s now had an event in Sacramento, San Diego, San Francisco — it’s very much a campaign geared towards what happens if Proposition 30 fails. He hasn’t talked a lot about all the great things that will happen if it passes. And that’s typically what you have in a ballot measure campaign. People say “Vote for us, because great things will happen.” This has been a campaign of saying, “If you don’t vote for us, doomsday comes.” And doomsday in this case, is the $5 billion to $6 billion in automatic spending cuts to schools that were written into the state budget if Prop 30 fails. That’s a very different kind of political campaign.

MYROW: This week USC released a poll that offers a couple of interesting insights. First, and this is probably the part Gov. Brown likes, a majority of those polled would vote for Proposition 30.

MYERS: They would. If you look at this poll, and if you look at all of the polls that we’ve seen in the last few weeks, the governor’s measure, which, again, would temporarily raise income taxes on the wealthiest and sales taxes on everyone, it has always polled in the low 50s, which of course is a majority of those being polled. But historically in California, if you’ve got a measure that polls below the 60 percent threshold in the early going, they don’t fare too well on election day, and so this is actually a low number.

MYROW: I was quite taken by another interesting tidbit from this poll: people ranked school funding fifth as a spending priority. This is after the economy, after jobs, after the state budget deficit and wasteful government spending.

MYERS: Yeah, it’s interesting, one of the folks from USC who were talking to reporters about this poll made the comment that they really feel as though voters are in a triage mode. The economy has been tough, unemployment has remained high, and voters’ historic priorities about spending and government may be shifting somewhat, or at least temporarily shifting. And clearly there’s an issue of wasteful government spending — they asked these folks in this poll about things like high-speed rail, the ongoing controversy about the hidden money in the state parks bank accounts, and the governor has tried to insist that these things have nothing to do with Proposition 30. But this poll does raise some questions about whether voters feel as though government is mismanaging the money it has, and maybe they don’t want to give any more money to government.

MYROW: This week the governor argued a state as big as California should be able to pursue more than one funding priority at the same time. “We have to be able to jump rope, chew gum and do five other things. Otherwise, we’re not going to make it,” Brown said.

Now it appears that he sees himself in a fight to the political death with Pasadena attorney Molly Munger, who has spent millions pushing Proposition 38, which would raise taxes to fund K-12 and makes a point of saying, “This money doesn’t go to Sacramento. It goes to your local schools.” But I wonder, is this really an either-or situation, the way the governor seems to be presenting it. Why not presume voters could approve both propositions?

MYERS: People who I’ve talked to, election law experts, say, “Yes, the voters can approve both of these measures.” But, whichever one would get the most “yes” votes would probably be the only one that would go into effect. And, if in fact, Ms. Munger — the wealthy civil rights attorney — her measure went into effect, with tax revenues only for schools, then those schools could still suffer a $5 billion to $6 billion automatic trigger cut, because that’s what was drawn out in the budget if Prop. 30 fails. So, there’s a legal problem there.

But but there’s a political argument, too, that’s difficult. Which [is] if you’re the governor, are you telling people to vote for both? They don’t like taxes, but hey, here’s double taxes, in a way. And we should point out the polling is that Prop. 38, this Munger K-12 tax measure, does not have majority support in any poll I’ve seen. It is below the 50 percent threshold, and at this point it could just be a political argument. The voters really may not say ‘yes’ to that.

What was once just a class project has taken on a life of its own, with business and labor lining up against each other in campaigns run by seasoned professionals.

As we reported Tuesday, San Jose voters will decide in November on a minimum wage measure that  started as a student class project at San Jose State University. Measure D would raise wages from $8.00 an hour to $10.00 and is gaining support from a growing coalition that includes labor unions and non-profit organizations like Catholic Charities and United Way.  Business groups, on the other hand, have said they plan to spend more than a million dollars in opposition.

Albert Perez, Diana Crumedy and Saul Gomez, students who started San Jose minimum wage measure. (Peter Jon Shuler/KQED)

Last January, San Jose State students taking a class on social action kicked off the petition drive for the measure, after being the first to sign. They had just spent nearly a year fundraising, conducting public opinion polls and going out into the community to gather support. And within just five weeks, they collected more than enough valid signatures to qualify the measure for San Jose’s November ballot.

Sociology professor Scott-Myers Lipton designed the class to help students make the leap from merely thinking and talking about issues to engaging in the political process.

“Our culture doesn’t do a great job in asking our students much more than this idea of voting,” he says. “And so how do we impact social policy? That’s not a question they’re familiar with or I think that the students feel they can actually have a say in.”

Myers-Lipton says instead of feeling helpless or railing against social problems, his students identify the issues that concern them then learn concrete ways to take action. This class developed the minimum wage measure based on their own struggles to get by on $8.00 an hour. Now Measure D has taken on a life of its own, with business and labor lining up against each other in campaigns run by seasoned professionals. Supporters say the state minimum is too low for San Jose’s high cost of living; opponents say a wage hike would be a job killer in a precarious economy.

A number of students from last year’s social action class have already graduated, but they’re still hard at work on the campaign. At a campus coffee shop, three former classmates reflect on their transformation into political organizers. Twenty-three-year old Albert Perez says even students who are motivated to get involved in politics can find it difficult to navigate the system. He says working on a campaign in the context of a class gives young people the tools and support they would otherwise lack.

“From the first moment we started this campaign, we knew that we wanted to [participate] in the democratic process,” he says. “We wanted to make sure it was done the right way, that it was done in the American way and that the people in San Jose had a voice.”

And it wasn’t easy, says student Diana Crumedy.

“It doesn’t happen overnight. And I think a lot of people think that ‘well, I signed a petition.’ Or I’m mad! Like being mad meant something. It means something if you’re willing to put action…behind it and commit to staying…through the long haul and reaching out to other members of the community and forming allies. Being mad alone doesn’t solve much.”

Crumedy and her classmates are now in full campaign mode, walking precincts, working phone banks and making speeches  — all the while holding down jobs and managing their personal lives. Crumedy is a single mom with an 11-year-old son. She says she understands how many of her peers feel alienated from politics.

“The process is more complicated than it needs to be,” she says. “And it gives people the feeling that they’re not supposed to be involved. That they don’t, honestly, want you to be involved.”

Saul Gonzales came to the class with a fervor for social change. But he found sitting through hours of city council meetings agonizingly slow and bureaucratic. Working on the minimum wage campaign made him see the value of working within the system.

“Once you become a community activist, you realize politics is the way to make changes,” he says. “Because that’s the only avenue that society has chosen to have a democratic process. And so, whether you like politics or not, (if) you want to make a change, you have to be involved.”

Perez say after this campaign, he can see himself taking on other community issues.

“It’s a big first step, but it’s a first step. There is so much more that I feel as an organization and for myself that I want to accomplish within the next couple of  years that are along the same lines. Things like reducing poverty, helping the youth and helping the communities in San Jose.”

Professor Myers-Lipton says he hopes all of his students learn that democracy is not a spectator sport and that they really can make a difference.

“It’s good for our democracy to have this type of engagement, whether we win or lose. Of course we want to win, but I think, you know, it’s been a great learning experience, and as a professor I care deeply about that, too.”

So as San Jose voters debate the merits of the measure, the students know they’ve unleashed something bigger than themselves. And they hope their efforts will inspire others to engage.

In November, San Jose residents will vote on whether or not to become one of the few cities in the nation to raise its minimum wage above the state level. If approved, Measure D would raise the city’s minimum wage from the state floor of $8.00 an hour to $10.00. San Francisco has a similar ordinance on the books, currently mandating hourly pay of at least $10.24.

The roots of the initiative go back to San Jose State University students, who were struggling to make ends meet. Elisha St. Laurent is a behavioral science major and the single mom of a 5-year-old boy. She expects to graduate next June.

Alisha St. Laurent(left) signs a petition from Leila McCab (right) to raise San Jose's minimum wage at San Jose State. Photo by Peter Jon Shuler/KQED News

“I work at an electronics store and we make minimum wage there. So it’s definitely not an easy thing being a part-time employee and then a full-time student,” she says.

But many businesses have lined up against the measure, and opponents say they’re ready to spend more than a million dollars to defeat it.

That campaign has brought together some surprising allies. John Hogan is CEO of TeenForce, a non-profit group that helps foster-youth and other minors acquire work experience. So you might think he’d be in favor of raising their pay.

“Yeah, it’s probably ironic that I’m running a youth jobs program and I might be against this — which I am,” he says.

Hogan calls Measure D the wrong solution to a real problem. Although he thinks the minimum wage should be higher, he doesn’t believe it should be a a city-by-city decision. And he says it will create more obstacles for the kids his organization helps. “These more disadvantaged youth are the ones that are tending to start at the minimum wage and we’re going to have a harder time finding jobs for them,” he says.

At the Good Karma Vegan Cafe, owner Ryan Summers says hearing about the measure inspired him to raise wages ahead of the November vote. But he understands why it has some employers worried.

“If you’d asked me two years ago if I would have been able to afford a pay raise for my employees, I would have said no way. And [the hard part is] small businesses just barely scrape by sometimes.” Summers says he increased salaries because he felt it was the right thing to do. “If you’re in a position to do something more for your employees and the community, I feel like you should.”

A poll of likely voters taken before the petition drive, conducted by the students, showed overwhelming support for raising the minimum wage. But retired San Jose State political science professor Terry Christensen says that was before the opposition had organized.

“All things being equal, people would be inclined to vote in favor of this, but all things will not be equal,” Christensen says. “There will be a strong opposition campaign that will be communicating, and I think they’ll have a credible message. So it’s going to be a real test of the campaign skills and abilities — and really reaching out to voters and persuading them.”

One of the contrasts, says Christensen, is that the Yes side will be largely a grass-roots, volunteer campaign, while the No campaign will be conducted primarily through the media.

The Ten Commandments of Arithmetic: no place here for fuzzy math like you see in politics. (Credit: KQED/Rachael Myrow)

This November, California voters will be asked to weigh in on two ballot measures that affect education funding. Proposition 38 promises to raise money for K-12 schools with a broad-based income tax hike. Proposition 30, backed by Gov. Brown, would also raise taxes, but to a slightly different end: bolstering the state budget and avoiding massive education cuts.

Of course, lots and lots of funding has already been slashed. The distance between where we are and where we want to be in education is profoundly troubling to many voters in California – not just parents hoping to get their kids into a top university.

During Olympics season, the group StudentsFirst has generated a lot of buzz with a series of ads pointing up our nation’s less-than- competitive academic profile.

Whatever you think of the group and its leader Michelle Rhee (who garnered her national profile in Washington DC but is now living in Sacramento), it’s hard to ignore the feeling that there’s a great gulf between the amazing, explosive growth of Silicon Valley and the way we’re preparing our children to work in it — or not. To be fair, there have been impressive improvements in California in recent years, but there’s a lot more work to do by just about all accounts.

These are the kinds of questions the Silicon Valley Leadership Group spends a lot of time thinking about. The nonprofit hasn’t yet taken a position on either measure — those opinions are due out sometime in October. But Dennis Cima, VP of Education and Public Policy for the group, says funding is just one piece of the education conversation he’d like to see the state engaged in.

“We need to think more broadly about who we are and want to be in the next 20 years,” he says. “With the measures on the ballot, it comes down to this binary decision. Do we support the ballot measure or not? As opposed to really seeing the larger sustainability issues in education. Are we really putting in the inputs that we need to get the outputs that we want? My sense is no. We’re not.”

“The state of California could be and should be providing teacher professional development funding,” he says ruefully. “But it doesn’t.”

Math teacher Susan Tappero brims with genuine love for math. She helps elementary school teachers drop their fear of the subject and develop a sense of adventure instead. (Credit: KQED/Rachael Myrow)

The Silicon Valley Leadership Group, however, does. Last month in San Jose, I visited a teachers’ math clinic that the organization provides. The instructor, Susan Tappero, teaches math at Cabrillo College in Aptos during the school year. In the summer, she helps elementary school teachers brush up — and expand — their skills in the subject.

“It’s beyond most of what these teachers will ever teach their own students,” she said with a mischievous grin, referring to the mathematical concept of inverse functions — which she was challenging her teacher-students to tackle. “But it builds lots of math structure – and encourages discovery and exploration.”

Tappero hopes these teachers will bring a new flush of enthusiasm to their classrooms when they return in the fall. What she doesn’t say is that a fair number at the clinic were English and poli-sci majors in college. They can teach elementary level math, just not particularly well.

She says her classroom is a safe place to play catch-up. “They grow their math power and they just feel differently about tackling a math problem that’s hard. They look at it as more of an adventure rather than something to avoid.”

The clinic is in its fifth year, and while most seats are reserved for teachers from low-performing schools in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, classes are also open to people who really do excel at numbers.

Take Heidi Shimamoto, who’s been teaching sixth graders for 11 years, mostly in math. Shimamoto struggles to understand why some students don’t get basic concepts. And she comes across kids who’ve simply memorized the right answers, which is an approach she says works until it doesn’t. “They get so confused, but when they understand the underpinnings, which is what we’re doing, the foundations of math, then it’s so much easier. It makes so much more sense.”

California public schools – like schools all across the country – will soon be implementing new academic standards, called Common Core Standards. The stated hope is that all students will be encouraged to develop “adaptive reasoning,” “strategic competence” and “conceptual understanding” in math and science. But it’s one thing to tell teachers that’s what the state wants, and another entirely to help them deliver on the promise.

The program costs $3,000-3,500 per teacher, including 80 hours of instruction plus optional follow-up to help teachers analyze their students’ work. Cima says this was not a hard sell to corporate funder Intel, or for education officials at the county level.

It’s part of Cima’s job description to lobby for math and science education in Sacramento. He says every politician, Republican and Democrat alike, nods sagely when reminded that Silicon Valley’s future is tied to math and science education. But in an era of budget cuts, funding for schools is getting slashed. Rich communities can compensate somewhat at the state level. Poor communities? Not so much.

But Cima, a poli-sci major himself, acknowledges that in politics, things don’t always progress in a linear fashion – the way they do in math.

“We could sit back and wait for that money to come,” he says. “Or we could be innovative, work with partners like Intel, work with educators, work with schools, and create something here that can be replicated anywhere.”