Valley Republicans Seek Options for High Speed Rail Money

by DEVIN NUNES

Today, I joined my colleagues in the House, Kevin McCarthy (CA-22) and Jeff Denham (CA-19), in the introduction of legislation that will allow the State of California to redirect federal high speed rail funding to finance long overdue and urgently needed road repairs along the State Route 99 corridor.

If state and local leaders choose to support this legislation, they will have sufficient funding to establish a six-lane freeway from Sacramento to Bakersfield while vastly improving the heavily congested corridor’s safety and enhancing the region’s air quality.

The economic and environmental benefits of SR 99 improvements are strongly contrasted by the uncertainty of California’s now infamous bullet train, which has been described by the national press as “the train to nowhere.” Providing the state the option to redirect high speed rail funding to SR 99 will give state and local leaders the opportunity to step-back from what is likely to become a bottomless pit of spending.

At this time, state leaders admit that California is poised to spend $58 billion – using ultra conservative state estimates – to build the phantom bullet train. However, the actual price tag is likely to exceed the combined federal highway spending in California for the 50 years from 1957-2007 (if it is ever completed). In addition, a host of independent watchdog groups, including the State Auditor, have raised serious questions about the project and question whether it is even viable. [State Auditor's Report, Legislative Analyst's Report, Transportation Studies at the University of California, Berkeley]

Meanwhile, nearly everyone agrees that the State Route 99 corridor – one of California’s most seriously congested and under-funded highways – is in need of major infrastructure improvements. For this reason, I and other Valley Republicans believe California should have the ability to transfer a portion or the entirety of the federal high-speed rail funds to improve Highway 99. [see bill text here]

Water Wars Update

by DEVIN NUNES

This week, the House will vote on a federal spending bill – the 2011 Continuing Resolution (CR). This CR, which funds the operation of the federal government for the current fiscal year, is necessary because last year Democratic leaders failed to pass a budget.

While much of the public attention is appropriately focused on efforts to reduce spending, there are also important provisions in the CR that relate to our communities in the San Joaquin Valley.

Specifically, thanks to the support of Republican leaders, I was able to get language included in the CR that will restore and protect our water supplies (see bill text).

The language included in the base bill of the 2011 Continuing Resolution will prevent any federal funds from being used to implement the biological decisions responsible for reduced Delta pumping – effectively guaranteeing normal pump operations for 2011.

Furthermore, it will ban federal funding for the restoration of the San Joaquin River during the 2011 fiscal year, the first step in Republican efforts to replace the flawed billion dollar salmon run. It also demonstrates Congressional intent to suspend restoration flows for 2011 thereby keeping the water on the east side of the valley.

In place of the existing restoration plan, which spends $21 million per salmon, I am working with House leaders to establish both an environmentally and economically responsible San Joaquin River restoration. This will include a year-round, live river on the San Joaquin but will also ensure a robust east side agriculture economy.

However, despite the inclusion of this important language in the CR, there are a number of obstacles ahead. There is no question that liberal leaders will offer amendments to strip the San Joaquin valley water language from the CR. That is why it is essential for California Democrats to unite in our defense. Should we succeed, the pressure will be on our Senators. Will they choose two inch bait fish and the junk science now rejected by the federal court or will they choose valley workers and their families?

Public Pension Hygiene Act

The first reform step is exposing the true size of the funding hole.
January 22, 2011

by THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

We're so accustomed to misnamed legislation like the Employee Free Choice Act (card check) that it's hard to believe that a welcome proposal called the Public Employee Pension Transparency Act describes what it actually purports to do. To wit, prohibit public pension bailouts by the federal government and expose the $3.5 trillion of unfunded public pension liabilities that local and state governments have obscured.

Most state and local governments currently use their own estimated rate of return on their investments to discount their liabilities. By projecting unrealistically high rates of return, states minimize their unfunded liabilities, at least on paper. Lower unfunded liabilities in turn allow them to reduce how much they and public employees must contribute to their pension funds. Inflated investment assumptions are one reason that public pension funds are unfunded to the tune of $3.5 trillion.

Public pensions typically assume an 8% annual return on average, but over the past five years state pension funds with more than $5 billion in assets have earned only 4.5%. Taxpayers must make up the difference between what the funds earn and what they need to pay retirees. For Californians that is roughly $5 billion this year.

Local taxpayers are already seeing their services whacked and taxes raised to fill these pension holes. University of California students will have to pony up 8% more next year for tuition to offset an expected $500 million in state budget cuts. Illinois residents will soon pay 67% more in income taxes, but taxpayers won't feel the full brunt for another decade when the funds begin running out of money. When Chicago's pension fund goes dry around 2019, over half of the city's revenue will be dedicated to pensions.

In the 1950s and 1960s, many private employers obscured their liabilities the way governments are doing today, though they didn't have a public backstop. Many funds went broke. In 1974 Congress established minimum funding requirements and penalized companies that underfunded pensions. The law also required companies to report and discount their liabilities using a more conservative rate of return.

These changes exploded liabilities and prompted many companies to switch from defined-benefit plans to defined-contribution plans like 401(k)s. While a majority of private workers now have defined-contribution plans, defined-benefit plans remain the norm in government.

Enter the Public Employee Pension Transparency Act, which is sponsored by House Republicans Devin Nunes and Darrell Issa of California and Wisconsin's Paul Ryan. Their bill would encourage governments to switch to defined-contribution plans by revealing the true magnitude of their unfunded liabilities. States and municipalities would have to report their liabilities to the U.S. Treasury using their own rosy investment forecasts as well as a more realistic Treasury bond rate (to be determined by a formula).

This data would make clear how much taxpayers potentially owe and increase pressure on lawmakers to fix their plans. For instance, Illinois estimated in 2009 that it had a roughly $85 billion unfunded liability. Using a Treasury discount rate, that unfunded liability balloons to $167 billion.

Out of respect for state sovereignty, the federal government shouldn't and can't tell local governments how to run or fund their pensions. But the bill doesn't do so and it also doesn't force states to fund their plans using a lower discount rate. States don't even have to comply with the law, though they would forego their ability to sell federally subsidized, tax-exempt bonds if they don't.

The bill may not persuade states like Illinois and California to revamp their pensions, but it will reveal how broken they are—and that's a start.

Printed in the Wall Street Journal on January 22, 2011.

Crying Over Unspilled Milk

Land Of Milk and Regulation

Preventing the next dairy farm oil slick

by THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

President Obamasays he wants to purge regulations that are "just plain dumb," likehis humorous State of the Union bit about salmon. So perhaps he should review anew rule that is supposed to prevent oil spills akin to the Gulf Coastdisaster—at the nation's dairy farms.

Two weeks ago,the Environmental Protection Agency finalized a rule that subjects dairyproducers to the Spill Prevention, Control and Countermeasure program, whichwas created in 1970 to prevent oil discharges in navigable waters or nearshorelines. Naturally, it usually applies to oil and natural gas outfits. Butthe EPA has discovered that milk contains "a percentage of animal fat,which is a non-petroleum oil," as the agency put it in the FederalRegister.

In other words,the EPA thinks the next blowout may happen in rural Vermont or Wisconsin. Otherdangerous pollution risks that somehow haven't made it onto the EPA docketinclude leaks from maple sugar taps and the vapors at Badger State breweries.

The EPA rulerequires farms—as well as places that make cheese, butter, yogurt, ice creamand the like—to prepare and implement an emergency management plan in the eventof a milk catastrophe. Among dozens of requirements, farmers must train firstresponders in cleanup protocol and build "containment facilities"such as dikes or berms to mitigate offshore dairy slicks.

These plans mustbe in place by November, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture is even runninga $3 million program "to help farmers and ranchers comply with on-farm oilspill regulations." You cannot make this stuff up.

The final ruleis actually more lenient than the one the EPA originally proposed. The agencytried to claim jurisdiction over the design specifications of "milkcontainers and associated piping and appurtenances," until the industrypointed out that such equipment was already overseen by the Food and DrugAdministration, the USDA and state inspectors. The EPA conceded, "Whilethese measures are not specifically intended for oil spill prevention, webelieve they may prevent discharges of oil in quantities that areharmful."

We appreciateMr. Obama's call for more regulatory reason, but it would be more credible ifone of his key agencies wasn't literally crying over unspilled milk.

For the article online: http://on.wsj.com/fhqu0w

Feinstein Embraces “Pearl Harbor Style” Legislating

by DEVIN NUNES

Radical environmentalists have realized that they cannot win a public debate arguing that a two-inch bait fish is more important than families in the San Joaquin Valley and are scrambling for a new message. They are also crafting a sneak attack to take control of our water.

The Left’s need to re-image the Delta water debate is particularly desperate due to a ruling in the U.S. District Court which rebuked the federal government as having used “sloppy science” to justify the man-made drought. Judge Oliver Wanger ordered federal agencies back to the drawing board.

However, the Left is already pressing ahead with its backup plan with the help of Senator Dianne Feinstein. That plan is concealed in massive $1.1 trillion federal spending bill for 2012 and would designate the entire Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta as a National Heritage Area. If it becomes law, the Heritage designation would establish a new federal mandate to protect the natural, scenic, historic, cultural, and recreational resources of the Delta - a thinly veiled effort to cut off valley water supplies.

Feinstein’s controversial proposal is opposed by water users, farmers, and rural communities. They understand that National Heritage Areas create another layer of government between water rights owners and the government who controls delivery. Many others would also raise concerns if they knew Congress was considering the creation of this new National Heritage Area. However Democratic leaders, at the request of Senator Feinstein, are working to bypass public debate. They want to sneak the Heritage designation into law by air-dropping it into the nearly two thousand page Fiscal Year 2012 Omnibus Appropriations bill (see page 880).

The action taking place this week is particularly outrageous coming from Senator Feinstein, who just over a year ago came unhinged when Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) tried to restore Delta pumping through an amendment on the Senate Floor.

Senator DeMint’s amendment came in the light of day and was subject to both a full public debate as well as a separate vote. Yet Senator Feinstein persisted in describing it as a “Pearl Harbor” style of legislating (see the outrageous video here).

What a difference an election makes. With her allies losing power in the House, Feinstein apparently has changed her view on sneak attacks.

Public Pension Bill Making Headlines

Pension Woes Prompt GOP Move
by THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

The new Republican House leadership, whose party benefited in November from public antipathy toward the bailout of banks, is moving to avoid a federal bailout of state and local pension funds.

Congress has little authority over, or responsibility for, state and local public-employee pensions. But with pension liabilities increasingly stressing state and municipal finances, the prospect that the problem will end up in Washington's lap has some academics and politicians urging that the federal government move preemptively.

In New Jersey, concerns about cuts in public pensions have led to a rise in retirements this year.

The latest wrinkle: A bill introduced last week by three prominent House Republicans to deny states and localities the ability to sell tax-exempt bonds—the lifeblood for many governments—unless they report their pension-fund liabilities to the Treasury Department. The federal tax-free status of interest on municipal bonds helps generate demand for the bonds and lowers government borrowing costs.

The goal, the congressmen say, is to get a better handle on funding woes of public pensions, which they say are not always forthcoming about the true extent of their financial exposure.

For decades, the federal government has regulated corporate pension funds and a federal agency, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp., can bail them out.

But there is no such federal backstop for state and local employee pensions. Some argue that Washington would be hard pressed to ignore a pension plan if it threatened a major government insolvency.

"The point of this is to smoke the rats out of their holes," said Rep. Devin Nunes of California, who introduced the bill. "What is the total amount of pension debt? No one really knows."

Read the full article from the Wall Street Journal here.

Pension reality check
The Washington Post
December 8, 2010

State and local government spending stands at 12.6 percent of U.S. gross domestic product - the highest share ever. To be sure, this largely reflects the recession, during which state and local spending has been growing more slowly than it did earlier in the decade while GDP has been falling or stagnant. Still, long-term state and local financial commitments, above all for pensions and health-care benefits of public employees, are driving much of the cost. And since states have to balance their budgets, spiraling employee compensation threatens to crowd out the provision of public services such as education, recreation and road maintenance.

Getting states, counties and cities back on a sustainable budget path is primarily their own responsibility. But federal policies can help - or hurt. At the moment, Congress is considering one of each type. On the helpful side, a trio of Republican members of the House - Paul Ryan (Wis.), Darrell Issa (Calif.) and Devin Nunes (Calif.) - have proposed a bill that would require all state and local governments that issue federally tax-exempt bonds to file accurate annual reports of their pension liabilities with the Treasury Department.

Public-employee pension funds are notorious for understating their liabilities through the use of vague projections and rosy investment-return assumptions. This proposal would force pension funds to show what they would earn if invested only in super-safe Treasury securities - a reasonable point of comparison given that pension benefits are usually guaranteed by law. And the bill would declare that the federal government is not liable for covering state and local pension fund shortfalls, another incentive for such plans to enact reforms.

Read the column in the Washington Post here.

Accounting for Public Pensions
The New York Times
December 10, 2010

As companies moved away from defined-benefit plans, most cities and states did not follow. One reason for that may have been that the Government Accounting Standards Board — the public sector equivalent of FASB — has done much less to force good disclosures, or comparable ones.

Having limited information available can obscure problems, but when concerns arise, a lack of good data can have the opposite effect; people assume the worst.

Estimates of unfunded pension liabilities can be breathtaking. Two economists, Robert Novy-Marx of the University of Rochester and Joshua Rauh of Northwestern, put the figures at $3 trillion for state governments and almost $600 billion for municipalities. Those figures are far greater than official government figures, and are highly dependent on interest rate levels, which can and do fluctuate. They may be too high, but there is no way to be sure of that.

Some people say the 1974 passage of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, known as Erisa, led to the demise of private pension plans because companies for the first time really had to honor pension promises. But the trend did not pick up steam until the accountants forced disclosure of real numbers. Most state constitutions have long barred cutting public pension benefits that have been earned, but that fact alone did not force change.

This week, three Republican members of Congress, led by Representative Devin Nunes of California, a senior member of the Ways and Means Committee, proposed legislation to force states and cities to report pension fund liabilities on the same basis, and to force them to disclose market values of assets. The bill would not even allow smoothing, so the state of pension funding will seem volatile as markets rise and fall. Such volatility could be reduced by putting more pension money into bonds than stocks, but doing so would force governments to admit they were likely to earn less on investments, and thus need to put even more money into pension plans.

Read the complete column in the New York Times here.