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Guv Talks Jobs, School, Ponies and Pigs |
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STATE OF THE STATE
By Richie Duchon (Posted first at NeonTommy.com)
 (California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger offered up his State of the Sate address on Wednesday. In case you missed it here’s a report and a video.)
California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger gave his final State of the State address Wednesday morning, highlighting major compromises of the past year on the state's budget crisis and new water legislation and signaling his hopes for the new year, including tax and budget reform and a major emphasis on cutting prison spending and preventing more cuts to public education.
The governor opened his speech with a bit of levity, using a bizarre anecdote to compare the teamwork of his pet pony and pot belly pig getting into his dog's food bin to the team work of legislators in Sacramento tackling the tough problems of 2009.
"Last year we had a pig and a pony year," he said. "The message is about working together. We got California through the front end of the worst financial crisis since the great depression."
As expected, Schwarzenegger devoted much of his speech to pulling the state's economy out of the gutter. But the biggest surprise of the speech came when the governor turned his attention to public education, which saw a terrible 2009 with K-12 education losing billions in state funding and public higher education institutions raising tuition and fees by as much as 32 percent.
Schwarzenegger raised the often-cited statistic that California spends more on its prison system than it's public education system -- 11 percent on convicts and 7.5 percent on students. (The rest of Duchon’s report … plus VIDEO … here. )
(Richie Duchon is Senior News Editor at Neon Tommy where this report was first posted.) -cw
CityWatch
Vol 8 Issue 2
Pub: Jan 8, 2010
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