Late last month, the Legislature enacted a 9,900-word bill purporting to protect Californians’ personal and financial information from being revealed without their permission. This legislation was hastily drafted to persuade San Francisco developer and privacy advocate Alastair Mactaggart to drop an initiative ballot measure on the same issue that he had qualified for the November […]
Californians dutifully load up their recycling bins and feel good about themselves. They’re helping the environment and being good citizens. But their glow might turn to gloom if they realized that much of the stuff is headed to a landfill. That’s because there’s no longer a recycling market for a lot of the paper, cardboard, […]
Last year, China bought up more than half of the scrap materials exported by the United States. . . . Globally, since 1992, 72 percent of plastic waste has ended up in China and Hong Kong, according to a study in the journal Science Advances. But since January, China has closed its borders to most […]
So why are so many local entities feeling strapped? Local officials will tell you, if you don’t quote them by name, that it’s mostly because their mandatory payments into the state’s two big pension funds are soaring. The California Public Employees Retirement System (CalPERS) and the California State Teachers Retirement System (CalSTRS) lost tens of […]
In June, California lawmakers approved a new state budget with a healthy $16 billion reserve, reflecting California’s strength as the fifth largest economy in the world. Now that the state has recovered from the depths of the Great Recession, it seems odd that lawmakers are still proposing higher taxes and fees. Since the start of […]
We score all 50 states on more than 60 measures of competitiveness, developed with input from a broad and diverse array of business and policy experts, official government sources, the CNBC Global CFO Council, YPO and the states themselves. States receive points based on their rankings in each metric. Then we separate those metrics into […]
U.S. consumer prices rose for a third straight month in June, eating away at modest wage gains and sending inflation to its highest rate in more than six years. The consumer-price index, which gauges what Americans pay for everything from veterinarian services to baby clothes, rose a seasonally adjusted 0.1% in June from the prior […]
For critics of the California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA, this case is a poster child for the need for reform. Signed by Gov. Ronald Reagan in 1970 and often referred to as “see-kwuh,” the law calls for “preventing environmental damage, while providing a decent home and satisfying living environment for every Californian.” Environmentalists say […]
In fact, despite Brown’s reserves, the state may be less prepared for a future economic downturn than it was when he became governor for the second time in 2011. While higher spending is largely locked in place, the revenue stream is now even more unreliable because it is even more dependent on the rich. Their […]
California lawmakers on Tuesday revived a long-stalled proposal to set a goal of generating 100 percent of the state’s energy from carbon-free sources. With other controversial and high-stakes energy legislation also moving forward, California lawmakers face an array of decisions with vast implications for the Western energy grid, the future of renewable power and consumers’ […]
California lawmakers introduced 39 bills and constitutional amendments in the current legislative session that, if enacted, would increase taxes and fees by more than $272 billion annually — more than doubling the amount of state taxes and fees already paid. 2018 is the second year of a two-year legislative session, and the Legislature is on […]
The digital revolution relentlessly enables consumer products to become better, faster and cheaper. But environmental regulation has for decades been making household tasks more difficult, time-consuming and expensive. A new effort to rewrite some old rules suggests a consumer backlash may be brewing. “Make dishwashers great again. It should not take 2-3 hours to clean […]
In their quest for cash, municipalities across the nation are trampling individual rights and human dignity by imposing arbitrary and abusive fines on residents. In some cities, if you walk on the left side of the sidewalk rather than the right, you could be fined. BBQ in the front lawn? Face a fine. Have mismatched […]
The general manager of a small public agency under fire for delivering brown, smelly water to parts of Compton and Willowbrook has been placed on administrative leave effective immediately, the water district board’s attorney announced Thursday night. Maria Rachelle Garza’s suspension comes days after The Times reported allegations that the embattled Sativa Los Angeles County […]
Much of the discussion around the proposed deal to remove an initiative requiring a two-thirds vote on all local taxes centers on the motives of the soda industry to avoid taxes on soda but there is another side to that coin that has received little attention. Local governments and unions opposed to the initiative want […]