News

“(The housing crisis) is not just displacing tens of thousands of low-wage workers but also nonprofits who work with them,” O’Hara said.

An effort to cap the salaries of hospital executives may be blocked from California’s Nov. 8 ballot, after a Sacramento judge wrote Thursday that its labor union backers broke a political peace treaty with hospitals.

The healthcare workers union that successfully placed a minimum wage increase on the November statewide ballot formally withdrew the proposal Thursday, two months after Gov. Jerry Brown signed a similar plan into law .

California is one of only three states that requires employers to pay daily overtime after eight hours of work and weekly overtime after 40 hours of work. Even the other two states that impose daily overtime requirements allow the employer and employee to essentially waive the daily eight-hour overtime requirement through a written agreement.

California’s drought-stricken Central Valley harbors three times more groundwater than previously estimated, Stanford scientists have found. Accessing this water in an economically feasible way and safeguarding it from possible contamination from oil and gas activities, however, will be challenging.

Along with up-skilling workers, we should lower the regulatory barriers to entrepreneurship. It’s a sad fact that America tends to regulate the entrepreneurship of the poor much more stringently than it does that of the rich. You can begin an Internet company in Silicon Valley with little regulatory oversight; you need more than ten permits to open a grocery store in the Bronx.

L.A. County needs 500,000 affordable homes and the State of California needs 1,500,000. L.A.’s vacancy rate is the lowest in the nation and 45,000 County residents experience homelessness nightly. The Governor’s plan would allow housing units that match a community’s zoning to be built if they include a certain percentage of affordable housing and ask for no changes that a city department would otherwise need to approve. This proposal mirrors standard land use and development procedure in most cities and states in America. From New York City to urban areas throughout the nation, the Governor’s proposal is the norm. We are an outlier and the Governor’s proposal would fix that.

The refusal of lawmakers to obey their own laws, which they foist upon the rest of the public, is a chief sign of corruption. The repeated exemptions from CEQA for politically connected interests – particularly when it comes to the building that houses most legislators or a new stadium for their hometown basketball team – are evidence of both the inequity of the law and the decadence and hypocrisy of the Legislature. If CEQA cannot be abolished altogether, it should at least be substantially reformed to prevent lawsuit abuses and focus narrowly on legitimate environmental concerns while leaving people free to develop their property without undue hassle and expense.

In a decision that could delay or complicate Gov. Jerry Brown’s plan to build two huge tunnels in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, a Superior Court judge ruled Friday that a comprehensive management plan for the estuary is no longer valid.

According to the Air Resources Board, less than 20 percent went to projects within our six-county region, even though we account for 48 percent of the state’s population.

It’s simple arithmetic, writes Mark Warshawsky of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, author of the study. Paying for expensive health insurance squeezes what’s left for wage and salary raises. Economic inequality increases, because health insurance typically represents a larger share of total compensation for lower-paid than higher-paid workers. Their wages are squeezed the most.

We are already No. 1 in congestion, but the prevailing ethos in Sacramento, as laid out in a new Brown administration transportation plan, is to avoid adding capacity, in hopes of compelling Californians to shift from cars to mass transit – even though transit systems are, overall, losing patronage, not gaining it.

If global warming is an existential threat to humankind, this hostility to a huge, promising source of clean energy is inexplicable. As the Union of Concerned Scientists says, “Effectively addressing global warming requires a rapid transformation of the ways in which we produce and consume energy.” That transformation will be far more difficult without nuclear power.

This past year, public nuisance lawsuits have spiraled out of control in California. Cities like San Diego, Berkeley and Los Angeles have been convinced to sue U.S. companies for enormous sums. Trial lawyers, looking to win big, scour the state and the nation for potential plaintiffs and then recruit municipalities to partner with them to file suits against businesses

The USA Today editors hit the nail on the head in their assessment that, “The best way to deal with inversions and other tax-avoidance games is to cut the high corporate tax rates that are prompting corporate leaders to seek relief in gimmicks. Like so much else in Washington, however, efforts to fix corporate taxes are going nowhere fast. Congress is loath to take on a tough issue. And the Obama administration continues to push Band-Aid efforts.”