Any restrictions, other than the common sense ones of liability and safety, placed on volunteers wanting to help their community, are really corrosive to the common good, and one hopes this kerfuffle soon bites the dust.
Daniel Weintraub: Legislature toying with civic-minded volunteers
By Daniel Weintraub - dweintraub@sacbee.com
Published 12:00 am PDT Tuesday, April 1, 2008
Every fall, the American River Parkway Foundation leads a massive, citizen-powered clean-up of the regional park that brackets the American River from the outskirts of Sacramento to the edge of downtown near the state Capitol. Last year, more than 1,000 volunteers turned out on the third Saturday in September, and working together for just three hours, they removed more than 20,000 pounds of trash.
But if a state law that is set to expire at the end of this year is allowed to go away, the parkway foundation and its good works might also fade into history. The group would no longer be able to rely on the volunteers who are its lifeblood.
Instead, the nonprofit foundation would have to pay anyone who worked on projects financed even in part by taxpayer dollars, including the kind of government grants that help the foundation pay its overhead costs.
It sounds absurd that the state would force a foundation to spend more taxpayer money when it wants to spend less, to pay wages and salaries to people who are eager to work for free. But this is no bureaucratic mix-up.
It is a deliberate policy advocated by the labor unions that are so influential with the Democratic majority in the Legislature. Those unions do a very good job representing their members, and in their eyes, any job done by a citizen volunteer for free is one less job for a worker who might be a member of a union.
Volunteer groups, especially those that use a lot of free labor for environmental projects, thought they had put this issue to rest a few years ago. In 2004, under pressure from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Legislature adopted a fix that exempted volunteers from the wage requirement otherwise associated with government-financed projects. But that exemption was temporary, and it is about to expire. So here we go again.
