Brown offered few specifics for financing deferred transportation maintenance on Friday when he unveiled his $113 billion state spending plan, other than to say he’d bring a bipartisan group of lawmakers and stakeholders together.
Employees who while on call are required to stay at a worksite should be compensated for all their hours, including sleep time, the California Supreme Court ruled unanimously Thursday.
About $467 million of the $560 million increase covers raises already scheduled for many union-covered employees, exempt state managers and supervisors, said Nick Schroeder, who tracks state employee costs for the Legislative Analyst’s Office. The balance would go to medical-benefit cost hikes and other anticipated employee-expense increases.
Gov. Jerry Brown unveiled a spending plan Friday that restores few recession-era spending cuts to social services, with schools and a voter-approved rainy day reserve benefiting the most from robust revenue growth in recent months.
California public schools and community colleges will reap the lion’s share of revenues from a booming economy, with their budgets growing by $7.8 billion this year and next, Gov. Jerry Brown proposed Friday.
Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr. today proposed a carefully balanced budget that injects billions of dollars more into schools and health care coverage, holds college tuition flat and delivers on Propositions 1 and 2 by investing in long overdue water projects and saving money, while continuing to chip away at the state’s other long-term liabilities – debt, infrastructure, retiree health care and climate change.
But unemployment hasn’t fallen just because some people are getting jobs, and other people are retiring. It’s also fallen because some other people who we’d expect to be working have given up trying to. So-called “prime-age workers” between 25 and 54 years old—too old to be in school, for the most part, and too young to be retired—aren’t working or even looking for work as much as they were before the Great Recession.
The U.S. concluded its best year of job growth in 15 years as the unemployment rate fell to a postrecession low last month, signs of strength that mask continued challenges of stagnant wages and a stubbornly high number of Americans still on the sidelines.
In its first congestion report card in five years, the Bay Area’s transportation planning agency said that average congestion — defined as traffic moving 35 mph or less — increased 65 percent in the Bay Area from 2009 to 2013.
Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown cautioned against “exuberant overkill” on spending when he released his $164.7-billion budget proposal for 2015-16 on Friday, but pressure already is mounting in the Democratic-controlled Legislature to offer more state assistance to Californians struggling financially..
His spending plan allocates $478 million for maintenance on the state’s universities, parks, prisons and hospitals, a tiny fraction of the $66 billion the state needs to spend to catch up with deferred maintenance, according to the state Department of Finance.
It’s no secret that California is expensive. It’s a little more nuanced than that: coastal California is very expensive, while inland California is just moderately expensive. State leaders in Sacramento, however, don’t appear too concerned with California’s growing price tag even though there’s evidence that it could be slowing the Golden State’s economic growth.
California income and corporation tax collections surged in December, pushing estimated tax revenue since July to about $3.6 billion above what lawmakers projected when they approved the current budget, according to preliminary totals compiled by the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office.
In 2006 California voters approved about $40 billion in bonds to address infrastructure deficiencies. About $5 billion of that hasn’t been spent. Brown’s Department of Finance says about $1 billion will be included in this year’s budget.
The U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, through the Department of Commerce, announced today that the goods and services deficit was $39.0 billion in November, down $3.2 billion from $42.2 billion in October, revised. November exports were $196.4 billion, $2.0 billion less than October exports. November imports were $235.4 billion, $5.2 billion less than October imports.