One city’s crime-fighting quandary: Where exactly to invest?
One city’s crime-fighting quandary: Where exactly to invest?
Chicago spends 39 percent of its municipal budget on policing, while New York spends just 8 percent and Los Angeles...
Chicago spends 39 percent of its municipal budget on policing, while New York spends just 8 percent and Los Angeles spends 26 percent, according to a report released last year by the Center for Popular Democracy. This means the city has less funds for things like schools and social services. The proposed $95 million academy comes just five years after the city announced the biggest mass closing of schools in US history, shutting down 50 schools because of a $1 billion budget shortfall.
Read the full article here.
Latino Construction Workers Continue to Die on the Job Because of Unsafe Conditions
Fox News Latino - January 16, 2015 - A new analysis of federal safety data found that while overall jobs in the...
Fox News Latino - January 16, 2015 - A new analysis of federal safety data found that while overall jobs in the construction industry are getting safer, Latino workers are still getting injured at alarming rates.
According to the data, between 2010 and 2013, the number of deaths among Latinos in the construction industry rose from 181 to 231. The number of deaths also rose in the industry overall, from 774 to 796, but that increase is attributed entirely to Latinos. During the same period, deaths for non-Latino construction workers fell from 593 to 565.
Each day across the country, hundreds of day laborers and migrant workers wait in street corners waiting to get hired. They are sometimes picked up by contractors or subcontractors looking to cut corners by hiring cheap labor that won’t expect benefits – most undocumented workers live in the shadows and, in general, don’t qualify for any federal benefits.
"There’s a clear correlation between low-wage jobs and unsafe jobs," said Occupational Safety and Health Administration chief David Michaels, according to the Nation. "Workers in low wage jobs are at much greater risk of conditions that will make it impossible for them to live in a healthy way, to earn money for their family, to build middle class lives."
Another reason for the spike in deaths is a rise in safety violations on job sites run by smaller, non-union contractors and an unwillingness by some undocumented workers to report violations, according to a 2013 study by the New York State Trial Lawyers Association.
"Contractors aren’t taking simple steps to protect their workers," Connie Razza, from the Center for Popular Democracy, told the New York Daily News. "They are not providing the training and the safety equipment that are required by law."
Advocacy groups are working to combat any changes to New York’s scaffolding law, which organizations like the Center for Popular Democracy say gives incentive to keep workplaces safe. The law holds owners and contractors who did not follow safety rules fully liable for workplace injuries and deaths.
Contractors argue that it has driven up insurance costs to record levels.
Lawmakers, however, have historically blocked any of the proposed changes to the law.
"All we’re looking for is the ability to have the same right as anybody else would in the American jurisprudence system," said Louis J. Coletti, president and CEO of the Building Trades Employers' Association.
In an attempt to make their work environments safer, some day laborers have joined together to seek protection through collective action. In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, some day laborers in New York City turned to one another about the dangerous conditions, and decided together how to deal with them.
The Bay Parkway Community Job Center in Brooklyn brought in safety experts for guidance; community groups and foundations rallied around the laborers, helping them buy their new trailer with several grants.
With the help of organizations such as the Worker’s Justice Project, laborers learned about wage and hour laws, the hazards of exposure to certain building materials and what kinds of actions or treatment by the people who hire them constitute abuse and violations.
"When something isn’t right, at that moment, you may not realize it or attach much significance to it," Rafael Tecpanecatl, a laborer who came from Mexico 11 years ago told Fox News Latino. "I’ve worked many jobs that I realized later were hazardous to my health. I’d get on ladders that were not steady, I’ve sanded walls and cut plywood and had debris go into my eyes and lungs."
Source
Sexual Assault Survivors Personally Confront Senator Jeff Flake, Who Said He'll Vote Yes for Kavanuagh
Sexual Assault Survivors Personally Confront Senator Jeff Flake, Who Said He'll Vote Yes for Kavanuagh
Sexual assault survivors personally confronted Senator Jeff Flake after he said he'd vote to confirm Supreme Court...
Sexual assault survivors personally confronted Senator Jeff Flake after he said he'd vote to confirm Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh this morning. Flake, who is a republican from Arizona and considered a key swing vote, made his announcement less than 24 hours after both Dr. Christine Blasey Ford and Kavanaugh testified on her allegations that the Supreme Court nominee sexually assaulted her in high school.
Read the full article and watch the video here.
Signature gathering begins for $12 minimum wage initiative
Signature gathering begins for $12 minimum wage initiative
PHOENIX (AP) - A group advocating for worker’s rights is gathering signatures for a ballot initiative in Arizona that...
PHOENIX (AP) - A group advocating for worker’s rights is gathering signatures for a ballot initiative in Arizona that would increase the minimum wage to $12 an hour by 2020, at the same time Republican lawmakers are proposing their own ballot measure that would give the Legislature sole authority to set the wage in the state.
The fight over Arizona’s minimum wage has grown amid widespread worker frustration over sluggish wage growth that has fueled presidential campaigns and led to legislative battles on both sides of the country - California and New York lawmakers are poised to pass bills lifting the minimum wage to $15 an hour over the next several years.
The Fair Wages and Healthy Families Initiative incrementally increases minimum wage in Arizona to $12 per hour by 2020 and requires employers to provide earned paid sick time.
The initiative campaign has less than four months to collect more than 150,000 valid signatures necessary to get on the November ballot. Arizona’s current minimum wage is set at $8.05 per hour and is increased annually based on inflation.
Campaign manager Tomas Robles said his group has worked with people on both sides of the issues to find a compromise that offers workers a livable wage without putting too much of a burden on employers.
“We feel that this wage increase is that happy medium that protects small business and helps workers who can’t pay their rent at the end of the month even though they work full time,” he said.
The campaign committee has received backing from the Latino rights organization Living United for Change and the Center for Popular Democracy, a social and economic justice advocacy organization, Robles said. The campaign aims to collect more than 250,000 signatures using a combination of paid and volunteer petitioners to ensure they can get on the ballot.
At the same time, Arizona Republicans have proposed to increase the minimum wage to $9.50 an hour by 2020 with annual adjustments based on inflation - in a bid to stymie an increase in wages they say small businesses could not handle.
“This offering is kind of a counter-balance to the insane socialism we hear in other quarters,” said Sen. Don Shooter, R-Yuma, during a committee hearing in March.
It would also prevent cities, towns and counties from setting their own minimum wage, which Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey has said would “drive our economy off a cliff.”
The Senate Appropriations Committee passed the measure on a 5-3 party-line vote. It will now undergo a standard review before going to a Senate vote. If passed, House Concurrent Resolution 2014 could go before voters this November.
If both measures end up on the ballot and both pass, the initiative with greatest number of “yes” votes would win.
By RYAN VAN VELZER
Source
Are Scheduling Bills Like D.C.'s Helpful or Meddlesome?
The District of Columbia Council scheduled a hearing for Jan. 13 on a bill that would require stores and restaurants to...
The District of Columbia Council scheduled a hearing for Jan. 13 on a bill that would require stores and restaurants to tell employees what their work schedules will be several weeks in advance and require employers to compensate employees for last-minute schedule changes.
“This movement is under way across this country,” lead sponsor Vincent Orange Jr. (D-At Large) said when he introduced the measure Dec. 5. “San Francisco recently passed regulations to address this issue and bills have been introduced in seven states.”
The Hours and Scheduling Stability Act of 2015 wouldn't apply to all stores and restaurants, but it would have a big impact, Orange told Bloomberg BNA Dec. 17. If passed, the measure “will assist tremendously with providing [the district's] workforce and their families with certainty,” the councilmember said.
The bill would require employers to tell workers what their schedules will be at least three weeks in advance. A change in schedule less than three weeks out would require the employer to pay an extra hour of wages. Less than 24 hours' notice would require four hours of wages.
Orange's bill would cover any D.C. franchisee of a restaurant chain with at least 20 locations nationwide or a retail store chain with at least five.
Unpredicatability Affects Planning, Benefits Eligibility
It's hard enough for families to balance work and personal life, Orange said when he introduced the bill. “Having a schedule you can count on leads to a better work environment and better harmony in scheduling family obligations.”
Liz Ben-Ishai, senior policy analyst at the Center for Law and Social Policy, which supports legislation requiring employers to provide workers with advance notice of schedules, told California lawmakers in March of 2015 that volatile schedules affect workers’ ability to arrange child care. Such volatility also interferes with their ability to hold second jobs and pursue education or training, she said.
There's another problem with unpredictable schedules, Ben-Ishai told Bloomberg BNA Dec. 22. Many public assistance programs ask participants to estimate their income or number of hours they will work, she said. “Because they have these erratic schedules or insufficient hours they can't predict how much they'll make,” she said.
Utah is “an example of a good approach,” she told Bloomberg BNA. State eligibility assessors use “professional judgment” to draw on multiple sources of information, including paychecks and conversations with employers regarding anticipated hours and overtime, to determine an applicant's’ eligibility, Ben-Ishai wrote in a policy brief. Utah encourages workers to follow up on information applicants provide that may not reflect their current eligibility, such as out-of-date wage information
Ben-Ishai also suggested a different time frame for evaluating applicants’ incomes and work hours. She pointed to the Child Care and Development Block Grant, which “requires a longer authorization period” and “accounts for fluctuation in people's hours.” This federally funded program allows states to determine eligibility “over a period of 12 months to provide a more realistic picture,” she said.
Bills Introduced Around the Country
The Washington, D.C., bill is one of several under consideration in state and local legislatures, as well as on the federal level. Within the past two years, there have been similar proposals in 13 other cities and states, plus one on the federal level.
San Francisco has been the first and, so far, only jurisdiction to pass a predictable scheduling law. It passed Nov. 25, 2014, by a 10-0 vote of the 11-member Board of Supervisors and became law without the signature of Mayor Ed Lee (D). Lee said he was “concerned about large numbers of impacted merchants who said there was little meaningful discussion” in the drafting of the law (243 DLR C-1, 12/18/14).
Lizzy Simmons, the National Retail Federation's senior director, government relations, told Bloomberg BNA Dec. 30 that the San Francisco law has a “carve-out that allows unions and their collective bargaining agreements to waive out” of its requirements. She said she's concerned that allowing employees to contractually waive the law's requirements grants outsize influence to labor organizations “since a lot of the unions have been behind” efforts to pass predictable scheduling laws.
The San Francisco law actually “takes away and impedes on employee flexibility,” Simmons said. Retail managers and employees should work together to come up with schedules that can accommodate individual needs, she said. “A one-size-fits-all government mandate” makes that harder to accomplish, she said.
Part of the problem with scheduling bills is that there's little guidance on how to implement them, said Robin Winchell Roberts, the federation's senior director, media relations. For example, the San Francisco law exempts employee-requested changes from triggering schedule change compensation, which Roberts calls “penalty pay.” The key factor in determining when an employer must pay schedule change compensation is who requests the change, Roberts said. It isn't clear whether it is due when a retailer requires an employee who can't work a scheduled shift to find a co-worker to work the shift in her place, Roberts said.
The compensation might also be triggered if business is better than expected, Simmons said. For example, a store might want to extend a sale that's going well. If the store wants to staff up to respond to the additional customer demand, it might incur unexpected expenses on account of employees who weren't scheduled, she told Bloomberg BNA. “I don't think you can just say after the fact sales made up for that,” she said when asked whether the unexpected increase in revenue would offset the unexpected increase in expenses.
Flexibility Essential, Industry Group Says
“Flexibility is a trademark of the restaurant industry,” Christin Fernandez, director of media relations and public affairs at the National Restaurant Association, told Bloomberg BNA by e-mail Dec. 23. Businesses operate around the clock “with business models unique to each restaurant,” she said.
Starbucks is an example of a business that pursued its own scheduling model. The company announced in August 2014 that it would voluntarily change its scheduling practices. It said it would provide employees with schedules a week in advance. It also said it would prohibit scheduling employees to close a store one night and return a few hours later to open the next morning (157 DLR A-6, 8/14/14).
But 11 months later, a report by the Center for Popular Democracy, an organization that describes itself as advocating for a “pro-worker” agenda, concluded that the company hasn’t kept its promises. The report, “The Grind: Striving for Scheduling Fairness at Starbucks,” drew on comments from a survey of employees who say back-to-back closing and opening shifts continue. Reached for comment Dec. 22, Brent Gow, global director for payroll at Starbucks, told Bloomberg BNA he couldn’t speak on the record because the company is still working on the issue.
Reporting Time Pay Laws Exist in Some States
Predictable scheduling laws don't take into account that “some of the people that go into these jobs to begin with do it for exactly the flexibility that's being challenged here,” said Diane Saunders, a shareholder in the Boston office of Ogletree, Deakins, Nash, Smoak & Stewart P.C. who advises employers as co-chair of the firm's Retail Practice Group.
Saunders advises her clients to ensure that they comply with reporting time laws that are already on the books. In Washington, D.C., and eight states, employees are guaranteed a minimum number of hours of pay if they report to work but are sent home because business is unexpectedly slow, she wrote in a Novemberblog post.
New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman's labor bureau chief, Terri Gerstein, wrote to 13 retailers in April 2015 as part of a review of on-call scheduling. In the letters, Gerstein reminded the companies that New York state law requires that an employee who reports for work must be paid four hours, or the number of hours of a regularly scheduled shift if that is less than four hours.
Gerstein told the retailers the attorney general's office had received reports that an increasing number of employers require their employees to call in “just a few hours in advance, or the night before.” Threatening enforcement action over this practice goes beyond what New York law says, said Jim Evans, a partner in Alston & Bird LLP's labor and employment practice who represents employers.
Whether the proposals become law, employers should focus on “the human aspect” of predictability in scheduling, he said. Employers that voluntarily change their practices and lawmakers who draft predictable scheduling laws should consider the “harsh economic consequences” of last-minute shift cancellations, he said.
New Application for Existing Laws
The New York attorney general's letters were sent to companies with household names such as Gap Inc., J. Crew and Burlington Coat Factory. One recipient was Abercrombie & Fitch Co., which is facing a class action in California over its use of on-call scheduling.
In the absence of laws requiring pay for on-call shifts, one team of lawyers is attempting to use wage and hour laws that are already on the books to help their clients. Hallie Von Rock and Carey James, of Aiman-Smith & Marcy, filed a lawsuit in December against Abercrombie & Fitch on behalf of C’endan Claiborne and a class they estimate includes between 15,000 and 65,000 members in three states.
In the lawsuit, Von Rock and James allege that the company's practice of requiring California employees to call in one hour before their scheduled start time in order to find out whether they're required to work the shift should be considered reporting to work. When an employee calls and is told to stay home, the employee is entitled to a few hours of pay, Von Rock and James told Bloomberg BNA.
Under wage and hour laws already on the books, Abercrombie should pay its employees for the time they spend calling in, Rock and James said. The calls last between two and 20 minutes, which adds up to several hours of unpaid wages per month, they said.
Von Rock and James contend that employees—who aren't paid for the time they spend on these phone calls—are reporting for work when they make these calls. “Even though they're not physically showing up” at the store, the phone call is the beginning of a work shift, Von Rock said. Abercrombie, which is represented by Morgan Lewis & Bockius LLP and Vorys Sater Seymour and Pease LLP, denies the lawsuit’s allegations.
James said the law “is undeveloped in California” as to what qualifies as reporting for work under the reporting time law. “To me, report is a straightforward word and it could just as easily mean call,” he said.
Von Rock expressed concern about a power imbalance between employers and employees. Predictable scheduling laws attempt to level the unequal bargaining power, she said.
Simmons, with the National Retail Federation, views it differently. These laws insert friction into the employer-employee relationship, she told Bloomberg BNA. “These bills punish job creators,” the federation says in its restrictive scheduling toolkit. A better approach would be to continue to allow the market to strike a balance, Simmons said.
Common Ground
One thing on which supporters and opponents of predictable scheduling laws agree is that it's too soon to tell what kind of impact San Francisco's law is having. Ben-Ishai, the policy analyst, and Simmons, of the National Retail Federation, told Bloomberg BNA it is too early to have meaningful research.
Evans, the employer-side attorney, offered advice on balancing employers' need for flexibility with workers' need for predictability. “Focus on the human aspect of it,” he said. “I represent large corporations, many of which are very focused on the human aspect of it. I think that the human aspect of the legislation and the impact of the practices can't be overemphasized.”
“It's just not fair to subject people to that last minute change and kind of harsh economic consequences,” he added. “When you measure who has the ability to absorb the impact of a last minute change in schedule, the answer's kind of obvious.”
Source: Clasp
This is how protesters plan to take on the Federal Reserve
Main Street activists and community groups plan to turn up the pressure on the Federal Reserve at an annual conference...
Main Street activists and community groups plan to turn up the pressure on the Federal Reserve at an annual conference of the economic elite this month, in hopes of convincing the central bank to maintain its support of the American recovery.
The campaign, known as Fed Up, is staging a conference in Jackson Hole, Wyo., that will run at the same time as the invite-only gathering of the world’s top financial and economic policymakers and academics hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. The campaign’s organizers said they expect at least 50 people -- ranging from workers to economists -- to attend the so-called “teach in,” which will be held in the same hotel as the Fed’s gathering. Topics include income inequality, efforts to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour and whether the Fed should invest in municipal bonds.
The conference in Jackson Hole comes as the Fed nears an historic crossroads. The central bank has kept the target for its benchmark interest at zero since 2008, a legacy of the darkest days of the financial crisis and a reflection of the lumbering economic recovery since then. Over the past year and a half, amid faster economic growth and a rapid improvement in the job market, the Fed has taken small steps toward reducing its support.
But the big decision to raise its target interest rate still looms ahead, and Fed officials are seriously considering whether to finally abandon its crisis-era stance at its meeting next month.
“For inexplicable reasons, the Fed seems primed to intentionally slow down the economy in September,” said Ady Barkan, campaign director for Fed Up. “ The real crisis in America is stagnant wages and a lack of good jobs. We are going to Jackson Hole to remind the Fed of this stark reality: slowing the economy down now will leave African-American and Hispanic communities permanently mired in a Great Recession.”
The Fed Up campaign made history last year when about a dozen demonstrators showed up at the conference to draw attention to the country’s uneven economic progress, particularly among minority communities. The protest led to meetings with top Fed officials over the past year, starting off with Kansas City Fed President Esther George, one of the central bank’s most vocal supporters of tightening the reins on the economy, who met with the group for two hours in Jackson Hole. In the fall, Fed Chair Janet Yellenhosted the group, and organizers have reached out to other officials since then with mixed success.
The campaign is returning this year with a more concrete agenda and the backing of a growing number of established left-leaning academics and think tanks, including the Roosevelt Institute, the AFL-CIO and the Economic Policy Institute. The campaign is led by the Center for Popular Democracy.
The group is also slated to release a report touting the economic benefits of an economy at full employment, which it pegged at a jobless rate of 4 percent -- significantly lower than the Fed’s estimate of about 5 to 5.2 percent. The lower rate would amount to 14.3 million more jobs, boost the economy by $1.3 trillion and generate an additional $261 billion in tax revenue, according to the analysis by PolicyLink and the Program for Environmental and Regional Equity at the University of Southern California.
True full employment, the report argues, would translate into a much lower jobless rate among minorities. The study estimated the impact of a 4 percent unemployment rate for every gender and racial group, adjusted for disparities in age. Black households, for example, would see their income jump by 23 percent, from $37,025 to $45,568. While Fed policy is not going to be the only solution to getting to full employment for all, we see it as a critical component of a broad policy agenda,” said Sarah Treuhaft, a director at PolicyLink. “We know that we need more growth and we need more jobs to stimulate hiring of people who have been left behind.”
Treuhaft said that the report does not estimate what inflation would be under this scenario but pointed out that it remained relatively stable in 2000, the last time the labor market hovered around full employment. But many analysts believe that a 4 percent jobless rate would cause the economy to overheat and inflation to spike. And some economists -- including a vocal minority within the Fed -- believe the central bank is already in the danger zone.
Those groups are also taking their message to Jackson Hole in hopes of bending the ear of policymakers ahead of their crucial decision in September. The conservative American Principles Project is staging a conference in the shadows of the Grand Tetons that coincides with the Fed’s gathering. The group has been skeptical of the benefits of the Fed’s easy-money stance and the reach of its powers, Several members have called on the central bank to rely on prescribed rules for conducting monetary policy, a recommendation the Fed has opposed.
Steve Lonegan, director of monetary policy at APP, said the group hopes its conference will reinvigorate the public conversation about monetary policy, which he argues deserves as much attention among conservatives as cutting taxes and reducing regulations.
“This is a recent phenomenon that Americans are disconnected from the value of their money. It’s the third leg of an economic growth plan for America,” Lonegan said. “It’s their savings. It’s their wages. It’s their life’s work.”
The Jackson Hole conferences will take place Aug. 27 to 29. The theme of the official Fed meeting this year is inflation. The central bank has set a 2 percent target for price-level increases, but it has consistently undershot that goal in recent years and wage growth has been stagnant
The Fed Up campaign has called on the Fed to set a target for wage growth as well. It is also calling for reforms of the selection process for presidents and boards of directors at the Fed’s 12 regional banks.
Source: Washington Post
Peralta pushing to pass Carlos’ Law
Peralta pushing to pass Carlos’ Law
“Citing a 2013 report by the Center for Popular Democracy, Peralta said that between 2003 and 2011, three out of four...
“Citing a 2013 report by the Center for Popular Democracy, Peralta said that between 2003 and 2011, three out of four victims in fatal construction accidents in the United State were immigrants or U.S.-born citizens of Latino heritage.“Among the cases investigated by [the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration] in New York state that number is 60 percent,” Peralta said. “In New York City it’s 74 percent. And in Queens it’s 88 percent.
Read the full article here.
Report: Pa. Charter Schools Lost 30M to Fraud, Mismanagement
Daily News - October 1, 2014, by Regina Medina -THE STATE'S charter schools are out $30 million due to chicanery and...
Daily News - October 1, 2014, by Regina Medina -THE STATE'S charter schools are out $30 million due to chicanery and waste since the 1997 charter-school law was enacted, according to a report released yesterday by three grass-roots education groups.
The report, "Fraud and Financial Mismanagement in Pennsylvania's Charter Schools," was authored by the Center for Popular Democracy, Integrity in Education and Action United. It calls for, among many recommendations, a moratorium on new charter schools, changes to the oversight structure and legal protections "to encourage whistle-blowers to report instances of fraud."
The state's oversight of charter schools is "not effectively detecting or preventing fraud," the report says.
The charter-school law mandates general auditing techniques, which the report claims may find inaccuracies but won't detect abuse. The report urges that charter schools follow practices used by federal agencies and conduct targeted audits that look into high-risk areas.
The report adds that whistle-blowers within the charter organizations and the media have exposed the majority of fraud cases and suggested that oversight agencies increase staffing to adequate levels.
In Philadelphia, the district Charter School Office oversees the city's 86 charters. The office has five staffers and no director.
The report cites specific cases of fraud around the state including the following from Philadelphia:
* Two officials with the Philadelphia Academy Charter School, Kevin O'Shea and Rosemary DiLacqua, were convicted in 2009 of defrauding the school of more than $900,000. They submitted fraudulent invoices for personal expenses.
* Ina Walker, former CEO, and Hugh Clark, founder, of the New Media Technology Charter School, were sentenced to prison for stealing $522,000 in taxpayer funds, which were used to fund a restaurant and a private school.
* Dorothy June Brown, who founded a number of charter schools including Laboratory Charter and Planet Abacus, is to be retried this year for allegedly defrauding $6.5 million from the schools and then attempting to cover it up.
Source
SF Finalizes Settlement in Nevada ‘patient dumping’ Case
SF Finalizes Settlement in Nevada ‘patient dumping’ Case
A $400,000 “patient dumping” ...
A $400,000 “patient dumping” settlement with Nevada approved Tuesday by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors also requires that state to regularly report to The City for the next five years regarding any patients sent to California.
The settlement establishes criteria for sending those patients to California in the first place.
City Attorney Dennis Herrera had sued Nevada two years ago over the state’s improperly discharging psychiatric patients and sending them on Greyhound buses to San Francisco with little means and nowhere to stay, a practice first exposed by the Sacramento Bee.
The Nevada Board of Examiners, which reviews claims for payment, approved the settlement Oct. 13 and on Tuesday the Board of Supervisors unanimously approved it, making it official.
As part of the settlement agreement, made public Tuesday, Nevada agreed to only provide travel assistance for released patients based on certain criteria. That would include, for example, cases where the patient was a California resident at the time they were admitted for treatment in Nevada.
Other criteria includes cases where a clinic has agreed to accept the patient in the destination city in California or an acquaintance or family member has agreed to care for the patient.. The agreement also requires the discharged patient to have a travel chaperone, like a family member, who must be present when released in Nevada and accompany the patient on the trip to California.
“I’m pleased we reached an agreement that will assure the well-being of psychiatric patients when they’re transported, and that also offers a model for how jurisdictions can work together to better protect our patients and taxpayers,” Herrera said in a statement released shortly after the Board of Supervisors vote.
When the proposed settlement was reported by the San Francisco Examiner on Oct. 5, Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval said in a statement, “We look forward to working with California to ensure all patient transfers to and from both states are managed using these best practices and adhering to conditions detailed in the agreement.”
The settlement agreement requires Nevada to provide San Francisco with a semi-annual report regarding any patients Nevada’s state mental health system sends to to California between January 1 and December 2019. The report must include patient information like date of discharge and eligibility for travel under the agreement.
Since April 2008, San Francisco identified 24 patients bused from the state-run Rawson-Neal Psychiatric Hospital in Las Vegas to San Francisco, with 20 in need of medical care “some within mere hours of getting off the bus,” said the lawsuit. Over the past five years, Nevada sent a total of 500 patients by Greyhound bus to cities and counties in California,” the lawsuit said. The lawsuit sought $500,000 in expenses for the medical care of the patients.
Also on Tuesday, San Francisco increased gun control regulations, which has prompted the closure of the last remaining gun store.
Supervisor Mark Farrell, who introduced the legislation, offered no apologies for the pending closure of High Bridge Arms at 3185 Mission St., which plans to shutdown on Oct. 31.
“I believe all of us in San Francisco will be better off,” Farrell said of the anticipated gun shop closure. The store was opened by Bob Chow, a Chinese American who competed in the US Olympics, in 1952, operating primarily as a gunsmith. In 1987, it was sold to Andy Takahashi, who before coming to San Francisco via Alaska lived in Japan.
The legislation requires the video recording of all firearms sales, which would be available to the police with a search warrant. The legislation would also require at least weekly reporting the Police Department of store bought ammo. The law was supported by the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence.
“Even though our city and our state have some of the toughest gun control laws on the books there still remains more that we can do to protect public safety,” Farrell said.
The legislation was approved in a 9-0 vote. Supervisors Eric Mar and John Avalos were absent from the meeting. Both were attending the Local Progress convention in Los Angeles.
Source: San Francisco Examiner
This Week In Sports Law: Ezekiel Elliott News, Phil Ivey U.K. Loss, Pop Warner Case Goes On
Dallas Cowboys running back Ezekiel Elliott will suit up and play against the Washington Redskins, as the ongoing drama...
Dallas Cowboys running back Ezekiel Elliott will suit up and play against the Washington Redskins, as the ongoing drama in the courtroom over the NFL's tabled six game suspension continues. On Monday, the U.S. district court judge in New York denied the NFL's attempt to hurry up the scheduling on a hearing that will provide more clarity as to whether Elliott will actually be held out of any games this season while the case goes on.
Read the full article here.
22 hours ago
22 hours ago