1) Fifteen NEA State Affiliates Are “Financially Distressed”

2) Last Week’s Intercepts

3) Quote of the Week

The SUNY union has long had a series of complaints about AAUP, one of the most prominent being a failure to provide any “return” on the $190,000 sent to the national affiliate each year.

California Common Cause recently released its 2011 Campaign Finance & Lobbying Industry Report and the numbers are truly ghastly. Special interest groups have spent almost $2.7 billion in lobbying alone since 2000. Here’s the graph for the 2011 calendar year:

“You’re seeing more people with lobbying as part of their business plan because it is a better return on their investment,” said Phillip Ung, a policy advocate for California Common Cause.  (Emphasis added.)

The Star-Ledger editorial board has this to say about the concept:

The hoped-for result — doing the same job with less administrative overhead — will save money and lower taxes.

But it never happens. And it’s not just because people have a romantic attachment to home rule. The real reason is there are practical roadblocks. And it doesn’t help that advocates tend to wildly overstate expected savings.

…For one, teachers make up the bulk of every district’s budget, and a merged district will require just as many teachers, unless the schools stuff more kids into each classroom.

What’s more, when school districts merge, state rules require that they all match the most generous teacher contracts. Merge 30 districts, and that means teachers in 29 of them will get raises — enough to wipe out any savings from cutting administrators or sharing services.

Even if Hunterdon County could overcome the teacher contract hurdle, it runs into this structural problem: The districts with relatively low taxes wouldn’t want to merge with the districts that have high taxes. Supporters concede the countywide district would have to cut at least $90 million to guarantee every town a property tax decrease. That’s unlikely.

The op-ed then reaches the triumphant conclusion – “None of this means we should abandon this effort.”

Whaaaa-?

Yep, the headline for the editorial is ”N.J. should support school district mergers.”

You would think editors would be able to go back over their own text and re-read the part where the hoped-for result “never happens.”

The latest cash problem comes after the state has received $2.6 billion less than what Gov. Jerry Brown and Democratic lawmakers assumed in their optimistic budget last year. Meanwhile, Chiang said the state is spending $2.6 billion more than state leaders planned.

To its credit, NEA joined forces with the National Tax Sheltered Accounts Association and the American Society of Pension Professionals & Actuaries to create a disclosure form to allow school employees investing in 403(b) plans to make “an apples-to-apples comparison of their investment options and the fees that brokers and providers receive.”

The form has sections describing “who is receiving compensation from service providers with respect to their plan” and “payments promised to an employer and/or its employees, unions, investment providers, service providers, and/or employees of unions. Include all endorsements, marketing fees, retention payments, bonuses, etc.”

So it was interesting when CTA president Dean Vogel rejected the notion this time. “The last time in this position we did a special assessment to get more money,” he told the Sacramento Bee, “but we’re not in a position to get more money right now.”

I assume he means to say that members are in such financial straits that they can’t part with additional dues for CTA’s war chest. That’s a bold admission to make while spending millions to fund a campaign to raise the nation’s highest state sales tax rate even further.

The poor have had a free ride for too long. Thank heavens good liberals are seeing to it they cough up the necessary funds so that CTA members will earn enough in the future to contribute dues surcharges for political campaigns.