The Real Collectionator

by juls [courtesy of Calitics: Soapblox California - Front Page]

Hannah-Beth Jackson brought up one of my favorite ways to needle Arnold Schwarzenegger, and that is to talk about his overblown self-appointed title of "Collectionator".  He said he was going to go to Washington and use his relationship with the president and the then Republican Congress to bring back some of the $50 billion in tax dollars that Californians send to DC, but rarely receive back.  Arnold has been an abject failure in that regard.

That title really should go to Barbara Boxer.  Chron:

Sen. Barbara Boxer of California is giving her constituents a textbook example of the power a single senior senator can wield, using her new post chairing the Environment and Public Works Committee to add generously to the amount of money the state stands to get for water and flood control projects.

In all, California accounts for about $1.4 billion of the estimated $13.9 billion in projects authorized under the Water Resources Development Act passed 91-4 Wednesday by the Senate. At about 10 percent of the total, California ranks second only to flood- and hurricane-ravaged Louisiana, which accounts for 25 percent of the total.

Can I just say...wooohooo.  And it is about damn time, especially for those of us living in the Central Valley.

For California -- a state whose leaders complain regularly about sending far more to Washington in federal tax dollars than the state gets back -- the experience in the water legislation represents a positive reversal of fortune.

By the time the bill, the first such water program legislation to get this far in Congress in seven years, was wrapped up in Boxer's committee, hundreds of millions of dollars for specific California projects had been added. What's more, many other projects in the state were added to the bill without specific funding totals, making them eligible for future appropriations. And the bill called for federal studies of several other potential water projects.

"We have a lot of important projects in here because we have so many needs," said Boxer, who has served on the committee in the minority and the majority since coming to the Senate in 1993. She became chairwoman after Democrats took control of Congress in November.

Way to go BB!  Now, I hope you can steer this through the Senate floor, get it through the House and somehow convince the President to sign it.  DiFi should be able to give you an assist with her chairmanship of the Senate appropriations subcommittee on the interior and the environment.

P.S. Why the heck did the Chron feel like they needed to rehash the dumb as bricks non-controversy over the $25 million for the Port of San Francisco.  They really should have included the response from the Port if they were going to talk about it at all.  Just because there are two sides, that does not mean you need to give them equal time.