Using “10” Dollars Wisely

In a vote as close as a whisker, Californians last November approved a 50-cent-a-pack cigarette tax to benefit early childhood development. This week, the state’s Proposition 10 commission begins sending counties the money that it started collecting in January. It is only an $8-million trickle now, but after Sacramento opens the floodgates later this year, about half a billion dollars will go to counties each year to finance locally developed programs. Unless the money is spent well, the measure’s narrow margin of public support will evaporate.

The lion’s share of the money--$166 million--will go to Los Angeles County, whose nine-member commission, appointed by the Board of Supervisors, holds its first meeting next week. The commission is not off to a great start. The supervisors last month passed an ordinance requiring that all commission staff members be currently employed by the county and be hired within antiquated county Civil Service rules. This is a virtual guarantee of bureaucratic thinking. The staff must be the commission’s own, hired freely from inside or outside government. The supervisors should repeal their ill-considered ordinance immediately.

To make Proposition 10 work, the commission also needs to:

* Identify social needs that don’t get other government revenues. Some county leaders want to bolster health care for low-income children, but the state’s Healthy Families and Medi-Cal programs already have ample access to funding. Their failures are a matter of poor outreach and bad rules.

Most in need of funds are early childhood education programs. Despite abundant new evidence demonstrating the importance of the first three years of life, when 90% of brain growth occurs, only 4% of public spending is earmarked for those years. Many children spend too many unstimulating hours in day care centers that merely baby-sit. A handful of child care programs in the state, like UCLA’s Fernald Child Study Center, actually have curricula that carefully foster children’s natural desire to learn. At least some Proposition 10 dollars should be used to expand these all-too-rare programs.

* Focus funding on proven programs, not on earnest but impractical attempts to fix problems like poverty and fractured families. In a meeting last month with actor and activist Rob Reiner, the chairman of the state’s Proposition 10 commission, Gov. Gray Davis wisely asked Reiner to use some of the money to “encourage reading at an early age.” Reiner, however, countered “that holding a child and loving a child and giving a child a nurturing, loving beginning in life is literacy.” Of course children need love, but it can hardly be legislated.

Counties should listen to Davis and seek modest, practical programs like Massachusetts’ educational home visits to pregnant teenagers. The program helps them find child care centers and other services that support them in juggling work or school and parenting. The program has proved itself, helping create stable home environments and reducing welfare dependency.

* Don’t restrict Proposition 10 dollars to the most “high-risk” children, as some of the initiative’s supporters urge. The measure should be what its backers told California voters it was: a way to help all children thrive in early childhood.

Proposition 10 will fail if it becomes just another welfare entitlement. But if state and county leaders implement it smartly, it can be a shining example of a social experiment that works. (BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Tobacco Tax

Allocations of Proposition 10 money for fiscal year 1999-2000, based on estimated births.

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In millions of dollars

Ventura: $11.7

Riverside: 23.9

San Bernardino: 29

Orange: 49.7

Los Angeles: 166

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Total to all California counties: $537 million

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Source: California Budget Project