Capitol Alert

The final weeks of this year's legislative session are almost upon us, and for influence peddlers in California's Capitol, that means a calendar full of fundraising events.

During the week of Aug. 6 alone, legislative candidates have scheduled four fundraisers on Monday, 10 on Tuesday and five on Wednesday.

Enter ContributionTrack.com. a website aimed at lobbyists.

Wavelength Automation Inc., the West Sacramento company behind the site, is marketing a new version that allows customers to see fundraising event fliers, add events to their personal calendars, suggest where their clients direct campaign contributions and manage how close those donations are getting to FPPC limits.

"ContributionTrack was designed for California's Third House," an ad says. A subscription costs $159 a month.

A sales team is pitching the product during two sessions Aug. 2, just before the Legislature returns from its summer recess. Click here for more information.

The firm also runs the website CapitolTrack.com.

In his first public remarks about the California state parks scandal, Gov. Jerry Brown downplayed its significance this morning, suggesting it was better to find nearly $54 million in apparently hidden money than to discover money missing.

"This is the first problem I've ever seen where actually people in government saved money, and that's good, because we have the money and we can use it," Brown told reporters in Sacramento. "How the heck it happened, we're trying to figure it out. And we will figure it out. We're looking at all the special funds."

The Brown administration revealed Friday that the Department of Parks and Recreation had been sitting on a surplus even as the state moved to close parks. Brown that day called for an investigation.

This morning, the Democratic governor said California's larger problem is reducing state debt.

"When somebody comes and says, 'Hey, guess what, we have some money over here,' well, that's better than saying, 'Whoops, we don't have the money,' " he said.

The state usually concerns itself with controlling misspending and overspending, not departments failing to spend money they have, he added.

"That's a new one," Brown said, "and we'll work on it."

But, he added, "More money is better than less money."

Gov. Jerry Brown, announcing a controversial, $14 billion plan this morning to build a pair of tunnels to move water through the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta to the south, said he will not be hindered by "analysis paralysis."

"Analysis paralysis is not why I came back 30 years later to handle some of the same issues," the 74-year-old former governor said. "At this stage, as I see many of my friends dying -- I went to the funeral of my best friend a couple of weeks ago -- I want to get s--- done."

The Democratic governor has been seeking a way to move water through or around the Delta since he was governor before. He persuaded the Legislature three decades ago to approve a peripheral canal, but the measure was defeated in a referendum in 1982.

Brown's remark had newspaper reporters chuckling and television reporters wondering whether they could air it on the evening news.

U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar made note of it, too. He said officials are "moving forward" with the project, a point he said Brown made "without any degree of ambiguity."

The "realignment" of California's criminal justice system, implemented in response to a Supreme Court decree to reduce overcrowding in state prisons, has shifted 38,000 felons from the state to local authorities so far, according to an initial study.

The study, conducted by the Chief Probation Officers of California with a foundation grant, says that 23,000 prison inmates have been released into supervision by local probation officers, rather than by state parole agents, and an additional 15,000 felons have been diverted into local jails and probation rather than being sent to state prison.

The underlying concept of the program is to reduce the number of felons deemed to have little propensity for violent crime in the state prison system. So far, the study says, the prison population, once over 160,000, has dropped to under 140,000.

Dan Walters says that "you can't make this stuff up" -- being the history behind a Alameda County Board of Supervisors seat. Think Nadia Lockyer and Mary Hayashi.

Have a question you'd like Dan to answer? Post it on our Facebook page.

See other Dan Walters Daily clips here.

VIDEO: Dan Walters says, in today's report, "It's time for Jerry Springer" to weigh in on the Nadia Lockyer-Mary Hayashi saga unfolding in California's Alameda County.

It's the moment that California water wonks have been anticipating: This morning, Gov. Jerry Brown and federal officials are officially announcing a controversial federal-state deal on the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, known as the Bay Delta Conservation Plan.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar will join Brown in Sacramento, as will Eric Schwaab, who's the assistant administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Marine Fisheries Service. The presser starts at 10:30 a.m. at the Natural Resources Agency, 1416 Ninth St.

The Bee's editorial board took a look earlier this week at the plan, which would include a pair of 35-mile-long tunnels moving water from the Sacramento River to pumps south of Tracy. The editorial, which you can read here, notes that the deal has shaky support.

That shakiness will be in evidence at another presser at 12:30 p.m. on the Capitol's west steps, where Democratic Rep. John Garamendi, Democratic Sen. Lois Wolk of Davis and Republican Assemblyman Bill Berryhill of Ceres join farm bureau representatives and fishermen as well as consumer and environmental advocates worried that the deal could put Northern California water rights and the Delta itself at risk.

Meanwhile, nearly half of California registered voters delayed getting medical care in the past year because of costs, according to the latest Field Poll, with dental care was most frequently postponed. Cynthia Craft has more details in today's Bee. For more numbers, click here to read the publicly released poll. You'll find the statistical tabulations compiled exclusively for Capitol Alert at this link.

YOUTH: The Chicano Latino Youth Leadership Project is holding its 30th Capitol Day, with 120 student leaders meeting with Capitol denizens and conducting mock legislative hearings. Anna Caballero, the secretary of the State and Consumer Services Agency, is listed to speak at a 10:30 a.m. news conference on the Capitol's north steps.

CITY EMPLOYEES: California's largest cities have shed about 10,000 jobs in the past few years. The Bee's Phillip Reese runs the numbers at this link.

PHOTO CREDIT: Aerial view of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and the islands separated by the Franks Tract in the foreground; San Joaquin river in the middle and the Sacramento River in the background. Bradford Island, center, is flanked by Jersey Island on the left and Sherman Island in the background. Nov. 11, 2008. Manny Crisostomo / Sacramento Bee

As it slowly recovers from its worst recession since the Great Depression, where does California's economy fit into the global marketplace?

A massive new economic forecast from the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp. confirms that were California a nation, it would place No. 9 among the globe's economies, just behind No. 8 Italy and just ahead of Russia.

The data-filled report, to be unveiled today in Los Angeles, pegs California's economy at just under $2 trillion a year (2011 numbers) and implies that it could move up or down in the rankings, depending on what happens to the volatile European economy. The state once ranked as high as sixth.

California's economy saw an inflation-adjusted 2 percent growth from 2010 to 2011, while Italy's grew at just one-fifth of that rate. Among the economies larger than California's, only China, Germany and Brazil, which leaped into sixth place, had higher rates of growth than the state. But Russia's economy grew twice as fast as California's from 2010 to 2011, so it could push California down to 10th place.

The report says that Los Angeles and four surrounding Southern California counties would rank 16th among the world's economies at over $900 billion a year, just behind South Korea. Los Angeles County by itself, at $557.5 billion, would be 21st, lodged between No. 20 Saudi Arabia and Sweden.

Overall, the forecast is for California to recover from recession "slowly but steadily," albeit with double-digit unemployment rates for at least another year.