Catching up on news

JOSEPH N. BELL

Here are some of the things I discovered in the piles of unread

newspapers awaiting me when I returned from a holiday trip:

First, on the high side, just a few weeks after my daughter, Patt,

and I bought a 20-game package to Angel games in the upcoming

baseball season, the Angels’ new owner, Arte Moreno, thanked us by

acquiring outfielder Vladimir Guerrero, certainly one of the best

hitters in the game today. With their earlier free agent signings,

the Angels are loaded.

I know we’ve been down this road before -- notably when Gene Autry

tried to buy a pennant by signing a passel of high-powered free

agents and, years later, with the disastrous signing of former

Newport Beach resident Mo Vaughn -- but this feels different.

And for frosting on this new cake, Edison Field became Angel

Stadium when Southern California Edison withdrew its name sponsorship

-- a misnomer that has been hanging around the Angels’ neck ever

since baseball teams took to grubbing for money by selling the names

of their stadiums to corporations that think a double steal means

hiring a new tax lawyer. I always choked when I had to write Edison

Field, especially when I remembered the $400 electric bill I got when

Enron and its pals were gouging us through Edison. But now it is

Angel Stadium, spring is coming, and I’m thinking World Series

tickets.

Then, our governor released a budget that was bound irrevocably to

his campaign promise to repeal the car tax and not to raise other

taxes. He got around the latter promise partly by calling taxes by

more acceptable names. And he compensated for losing the $4-billion

car tax revenue principally by sticking it to what a Los Angeles

Times headline called the “poor [and the] ill.”

We learn in Economics 101 that there are three ways to attack a

deficit: reduce expenditures, increase taxes and both. But Arnold

added a fourth: borrow -- $15 billion. This would put off a day of

reckoning by inducing slow bleeding, thus avoiding immediate

increased taxes -- except those disguised, for example, as fees at UC

Irvine.

Arnold may have serious trouble schmoozing this program through

the state Legislature, although he has proven himself masterful at

this by somehow convincing the California Teacher’s Assn. to support

a temporary $2 billion hit in state school funding, which our local

union president, Jim Rogers, told a Pilot reporter seems like a

marriage of “oil and water.”

Don’t tell me, please, that this deficit is all ousted-Gov. Gray

Davis’ doing. It isn’t. It’s a combination of a good many complex

problems to which Davis certainly contributed. But if Arnold is

looking for a quick fix instead of slow bleeding, he might want to

remember the words of his first economic advisor, Warren E. Buffett,

who said that reform should start by restructuring Proposition 13.

Buffett hasn’t been heard from on Arnold’s behalf since.

Then, in one of those compulsory journalistic

look-back-at-the-past-year reflections, Newport Beach Councilman Dick

Nichols -- who, like former Dodger pitcher Kevin Brown, isn’t

speaking to the press -- offered some e-mail answers to questions

from Pilot editors. He predictably blamed his problems with the City

Council on the Pilot for taking his comments about Mexicans “out of

context” and making “my remarks racist” by not including his

description of the differing uses of the multiple grassy areas around

Corona del Mar beach.

If I read him properly -- and that isn’t easy -- Nichols is saying

that it is OK for him to blame a specific racial group by name for

what he sees as a generic public problem as long as the writer

reporting the charges identifies the right patch of grass being

contested.

I also read that Costa Mesa has apparently settled -- again --

with former City Atty. Jerry Scheer for the ham-handed treatment he

got from city officials after allegations made against him in a

closed meeting led to his suspension. By the time an independent

investigation cleared him, the suspension had been made public, along

with the city’s violation of the Brown Act that apparently topped a

list of other bumbling decisions that didn’t require rocket science

thinking to avoid.

The final gaffe was almost blowing a $750,000 settlement because

one of the six city officials being sued wouldn’t sign off on it.

When Scheer, angry at the delay, re-filed his claim, the city got it

done, reportedly at the same rate. But a lot of misgivings remain.

Most important of all, the people who elected the council members

involved in Scheer’s treatment -- and who ultimately pay the bill --

are apparently going to remain outside the loop, denied the details

that would allow them to properly judge the performance of city

officials who ran up a $750,000 taxpayer tab.

Then there’s the upcoming Robert Dornan-Dana Rohrabacher primary,

which brings to mind columnist Art Buchwald’s comment when Richard

Nixon resigned the presidency. Buchwald said that even though he was

on Nixon’s enemy list, he hated to see him go because Buchwald could

mine an endless supply of humor by just reporting Nixon absolutely

straight.

That’s the way I feel about Dornan. On slow days when I was

writing a column for The Times, I could always look to Congressman

Dornan for instant material, sobered only slightly by the recognition

that we had actually elected him to public office. In return, he sent

several letters to the editors suggesting that they help me into some

other line of work.

So it’s rather like Old Home Week for me to know that he’ll be

operating so close by during the primary campaign -- and turning his

invective on another Republican who thinks global warming is a

liberal conspiracy. That’ll be almost as much fun as baseball spring

training.

Finally, there is the Park Newport lady who sees coyotes as a

“danger to our communities” because one of the critters almost did in

her cat, and she’s worried about attacks on other pets “and infants,

children or even adults.”

She wants local authorities to take action, although it isn’t

clear what action she suggests. Perhaps open season on coyotes? While

the authorities figure this out, we will continue to see an

occasional coyote when we walk in the Back Bay, because that’s where

they live. So I’ll keep in touch with this problem for you.

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights. His column

appears Thursdays.