San Bernardinom, a small Californian city, is the third city in the state forced to opt for bankruptcy in the last few weeks. This highlights the fact that the economic crisis is not over yet.

The elected officials of the 210,000 people in the city have authorized their city’s attorney to seek federal bankruptcy protection. The city is unable to pay the vendors, although a lot of measures have been taken like selling assets or cutting spending, and opting for bankruptcy has been the only possible solution.

The city is facing a budget shortfall of $45 million. City officials said the problem is weak property and sales tax revenue combined with escalating pensions and a loss of state redevelopment funds.

Stockton, a California city with almost 300,000 people was the first that filed bankruptcy on June 29. The second one was the small city of Mammoth Lakes this July 3.

The California Governor Jerry Brown didn’t want to speculate concerning other possible bankruptcy cases, instead declaring that the real problem is that the country, the states and the cities have lived beyond their means, and he specified that these finances were “means created by a mortgage bubble, by greed, by mistakes, by people not knowing what the hell they were doing, and millions of people have been hurt.”

Jim Spiotto, a Chicago attorney who tracks municipal bankruptcies, said that since Congress added chapter 9 to the bankruptcy code in 1937 to allow municipalities to seek protection, about 640 entities have filed. For Spiotto, bankruptcy is considered a measure of last resort because it carries the danger of increasing the city’s borrowing costs.

Bloomberg explained that in California “five of its 39 Chapter 9 petitions were made by cities or counties: Orange County in 1994, and the cities of Desert Hot Springs in 2001, Vallejo in 2008, and Stockton and Mammoth Lakes in the past month.”

San Bernardino, Stockton and Mammoth Lakes are not the only cases of city bankruptcy around the nation. Cities like   Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Jefferson County, Alabama, and Central Falls, Rhode Island are on the same situation. For these cities bankruptcy is a great problem. The jobs in the public sector are threatened so a lot of people could loose their jobs, and also some vital services like the police could loose economic support and employees and would  not be able to fulfill their jobs as they did in the past.

The difference between a company and a city bankruptcy is that companies in this situation have the option to break up, cities do not have this option because this would be unconstitutional, so they must find another solution.

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Sacramento, U.S.A. — A new poll conducted by Pulse Opinion Research on behalf of Californians for Population Stabilization (CAPS) finds that 61% of Californians say they will be less likely to vote for Governor Jerry Brown if he signs into law a bill giving illegal aliens authorization to legally obtain California driver’s licenses. The poll also found that half of all Californians believe Governor Brown is doing a poor job of getting the California economy moving again and putting unemployed Californians back to work.

“Giving illegal aliens the right to legally obtain California driver’s licenses is like giving them a license to take unemployed Californians’ jobs,” commented Marilyn DeYoung, Chairman of the Board of Californians for Population Stabilization. “It’s time Governor Brown focused on opening jobs for unemployed Californians instead of making it easier for illegal aliens to take our jobs.”

The Driver’s license bill will be introduced later this year for the eighth time by Los Angeles Assemblyman Gil Cedillo. The bill is expected to be approved and presented to Governor Brown for his signature before the end of the year. Similar bills were passed by the California legislature in previous years but were vetoed by Governor Schwarzenegger. Only two other states in America, New Mexico and Washington State, allow illegal aliens to obtain drivers licenses.

63% of poll participants oppose driver’s licenses for illegal aliens. Top reasons include:

• Illegal aliens have broken the law and should not be rewarded.
• The license will become an official ID card illegal aliens can use to obtain other taxpayer benefits.
• It will encourage more illegal immigration.

Mrs. DeYoung also voiced security concerns. “The 911 hijackers used driver’s licenses to gain access to our airplanes and kill 3,000 Americans. I don’t have a lot confidence that the California DMV has the ability to run background checks that could identify potential terrorists.”

The poll was recently conducted among one thousand likely voters in California. Other findings include:

• 70% favor mandating that all California employers electronically verify their workers are in the country legally and have a work visa.
• 76% think new California jobs should go to unemployed Californians instead of bringing in new legal immigrant workers

The article Most Californians Reject Licenses for Immigrants appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.

The California Association of Sanitation Agencies (CASA) is spearheading a statewide initiative to better educate the public, regulators, and local, state and federal leaders on the role they need to play in achieving new state and national clean energy goals.

In Governor Jerry Brown’s 2012 State of the State address, he called for “…a goal of 20,000 megawatts of renewable energy by 2020.” In President Barack Obama’s 2012 State of the Union address, he set a goal of having 80 percent of all Americans’ electricity provided through clean energy by 2035. California’s clean water agencies are listening and responding to the demand for clean energy.

Many of California’s publicly owned clean water agencies and wastewater treatment plants are successfully generating clean energy to offset their individual agency needs. Wastewater plants are identified as resource recovery agencies producing energy in the form of biogas, biosolids, and methane.  They are also able to produce energy when processing foods, fats, oil and grease provided by restaurants and residents.

“California’s clean water agencies are ready to be active partners at the state and national level to achieve these clean energy goals,” CASA President Gary Darling said. He added, “Local wastewater treatment and recycled water facilities are the ideal places to look at when investing resources into clean energy generation.  Increased clean energy production at local wastewater facilities is just one of the ways we are protecting the environmental and local waterways.”

CASA’s initiative is not only aimed at educating about the value of clean energy, but it will identify opportunities in public forums to advocate for investing in its members’ clean energy production, as well as removing any obstacles for funding and production.

“Clean energy production is a relatively new industry, both the public and the decision-makers need to understand dollars invested today will reap benefits in the future by helping to significantly reduce our reliance on traditional, and rapidly dwindling, energy supplies such as oil,” Darling said.

In April 2009, a Water Environment Research Foundation report stated, “The energy potential contained in wastewater and biosolids exceeds by at least five times the energy used to treat it.”  Currently, someCalifornia wastewater facilities are striving for a net zero energy consumption, literally becoming energy neutral by generating their own heat and power and even having excess energy available for outside use.

“This is an exciting time for California’s clean water agencies,” said Darling. “We have the opportunity to be part of our nation’s transformation from energy users to energy producers by expanding our everyday resource recovery work practices. Waste to watts, that’s our vision.”

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