Ronn Owens interviews Joe about hands-free cell phone use while driving and new statistics revealing the percentage of accidents caused by mobile phone use.
State Sen. Joe Simitian’s voting record received high marks from a state environmental group and a state group advocating for seniors, the local senator’s office announced Tuesday. The California League of Conservation Voters and the Congress of California Seniors both gave Simitian 100 percent scores this year on the score cards they use to grade legislators.
KLIV's Jason Bennert profiles Joe's significant impact in Santa Clara County during the past decade.
California lawmakers on Wednesday passed an $11 billion overhaul of the state’s antiquated water system in a bid to supply a soaring population while preserving a fragile environment. [...]
One of the authors in that package of bills, state Sen. Joe Simitian, D-Palo Alto, said Wednesday that one of the first questions the state must address is how much water the Delta needs.
Simitian said he recognizes the fear of some Northern Californians that their water might go to other places.
“I wouldn’t have been an author, let alone voted for the bills, if I hadn’t been pretty comfortable with the fact that we’re going to take care of Northern California and do that as part of a larger state,” Simitian said. “I think that people want to put aside our regional differences and get the job done for the state of California.”
by J.M. Brown
State Sen. Joe Simitian met with three top federal education officials in Washington on Tuesday to assure them that a bill awaiting the governor’s signature would qualify California for a piece of the $4.3 billion Race to the Top fund. [...]
The Race to the Top funds, part of the federal stimulus package passed in February, reward states that establish a clear plan for implementing consistent standards and establishing a data system that tracks students from the earliest years through college. The federal government also wants to see charter school expansion and plans to fix low-performing schools where nagging achievement gaps persist.
But to compete for the money, which is largest amount of discretionary funding ever allocated for education reform, a state has to meet a number of requirements that federal officials thought California lacked.
In his meeting with Russlynn H. Ali, assistant secretary of education for civil rights, and two other officials Simitian said he received assurances that his bill addressed concerns that state law prevented schools from using scores to weigh teacher performance.
The governor is asking for a $10 billion bond act to build more dams. But the real problem, one that dams cannot solve, is the way water moves through the delta from the dams on the Sacramento River to water-users in the South Bay. The delta, the confluence of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, is degrading our water supply, and it is dangerously unreliable. The Legislature is properly focused on this issue, not marginally usable new dams. The Peripheral Canal would divert water from the Sacramento River near Sacramento and move it to state and federal water pumps in the Southern delta near Tracy. These pumps supply the Santa Clara Valley with about half our water. Today, water from the Sacramento River flows through the delta to the pumps. This greatly degrades the quality of the water. Irrigation wastewater is pumped into the delta channels from the irrigated islands. Seawater intrudes into the delta. This doubles the pollution load of the water and adds chemicals which cause cancer (trimhalomethane precursors). [...] Senator Joe Simitian of Santa Clara County is taking a leadership position on this important issue and deserves the thanks of his constituents for his hard and effective work on water issues.
Farmers in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta are trying to convince other Northern Californians that the Peripheral Canal would be bad. But the narrow interests of the farmers do not coincide with the interests of people who live in the South Bay.
The legislature returned this week from their August break by taking up what is undoubtedly the most contentious topic this side of the budget, and perhaps even including the budget, water and what to do about the Delta.
Facing the legislature are five bills, packaged together to address critical issues of facing California Water and the Delta. Tuesday was largely an informational that saw the issues laid forth.
Senator Joe Simitian, a Democrat, argued that the status quo ought to be unacceptable to all elected officials and that the five bill package needs to be seen as a package. The key issue for him was finding a way to move water reliably and cleanly.
Said the Senator:
"When I looked into the situation 3 1/2 years ago I had the same concerns that I think all of you have which is that scientists tell us that there’s a 2/3 chance that the whole system is going to collapse in the next 50 years and that 24-million Californians will be left without water and that’s a 40-billion-dollar economic consequence. I stepped into the fray because the delta, which is the most significant estuary in the western coast, was going to hell in a hand basket and that benign neglect wasn’t serving the delta well over the previous quarter century."
For the Senator, the issue is not one of conveyance, but a matter of figuring out how to fix the delta and our water system. Many, including spokespeople for the Governor argued that the status quo was not acceptable. Lester Snow, Director of Water Resources, argued, "Anyone who thinks the status quo is working doesn't understand what's going on."
He went on to argue that the current bills appear to establish additional obstacles. They delay but do not expedite solutions. Many of them give little attention to water supply as opposed to habitat restoration.
Senator Simitian forcefully argued against the status quo, and argued that conveyance, which in his argument has not been proposed, is not necessarily the end of the world.
"I think that if we reject the package of bills before us today is a vote for the status quo. And the status quo means mass extinction of native species. The status quo means eventual levee collapse and disruption of water supplies to 24 million Californians. The status quo will result in destruction of much of California’s agricultural sector, and a $40 billion dollar plus hit to the state’s economy when those levees fail."
The Senator continued:
"For those who argue that conveyance yet to be proposed, yet to be described, is the end to the world as we know it, I ask you to follow the science."
Battle Lines Drawn on Water: Issues of Conveyance, Governance and Financing.
The California Progress Report, August 2009. By David M. Greenwald, Editor
To continue reading the full text of the article, click here.
August 07, 2009 -- Governor Schwarzenegger signed Senate Bill 159, by State Senator Joe Simitian (D-Palo Alto), making legislation that requires drivers to move over or slow down when approaching roadside emergency scenes along the highway, permanent.
The original legislation, SB 1610, was one of the winning entries in Simitian´s 2005 ´There Oughta Be A Law´ contest, which invites Californians to submit ideas for new state legislation. Tow truck driver and Hayward resident Daniel Frederick Leon entered the contest after noticing that drivers who do not move over or slow down when approaching tow trucks or emergency crews endanger the lives of workers on the road and other motorists. The bill was initially vetoed and reintroduced in 2006 before becoming law.
"This is about promoting highway safety, plain and simple," said Simitian. "I hope that it will put a stop to the senseless deaths of police officers, tow truck drivers, paramedics, and other emergency personnel who are simply helping stranded motorists. And of course," said Simitian, "the general public will be safer as well."
Click here to read the full article
"Neither the delta ecosystem nor the state's water needs have been well served by decades of benign neglect," said Silicon Valley Sen. Joe Simitian, author of one of five bills in the package and chair of the Senate Environmental Quality Committee. "The system of governance is broken and the system of conveyance is broken."
Some states have overcome opposition to pass restrictions. Joe Simitian, a state senator in California, managed to get his hands-free legislation, an effort he began in 2001, passed in 2006. He argued, based on data collected by the California Highway Patrol, that drivers using cellphones caused more fatalities than all the drivers distracted by eating, children, pets or personal hygiene.
In each previous year, the bill was killed — after lobbying by cellphone carriers, including Sprint, AT&T and T-Mobile. Mr. Simitian said that in the first two years, he would visit the offices of his colleagues on the Transportation Committee on the day of the vote and “find three cellphone industry lobbyists sitting in the legislator’s office,” Mr. Simitian said. “They’d just smile.”
He said they fought him even though their brochures said that distracted driving was dangerous. The exception was Verizon Wireless, which supported his efforts from the start.
Opposition gradually eased, and his bill requiring use of headsets while driving took effect in July 2008. In the first six months the California law was in effect, a preliminary California Highway Patrol estimate showed that fatalities dropped 12.5 percent — saving 200 lives. Mr. Simitian said it was too soon to determine whether the law or other factors caused the drop.
Mr. Simitian said one reason political opposition eased was that fellow legislators saw the dangers firsthand. “They’d come to me and say: ‘You may be bringing me around. I almost got creamed at the corner,’ ” he recalled.
Mr. Simitian believes that a ban on talking on cellphones while driving would save even more lives. But he hasn’t proposed one, and has no plans to. “It’s a political nonstarter,” he said. “It’ll be a cold day in hell before people give up their phones altogether in cars.”