The Foothill-Eastern Transportation Corridor Agency, which operates 39 miles (63 kilometers) of toll highways in Orange County, risks default on $2.4 billion in debt, a consultant to California Treasurer Bill Lockyer’s Debt and Investment Advisory Commission said in July. The county itself filed for protection in 1994, the biggest U.S. municipal bankruptcy at the time, after losing about $1.7 billion on derivatives.
Over time, however, complying with CEQA became not only a torturous slog through very expensive red tape – one that elevated complex process over final product – but a tool for interest groups to engage in what can only be described as extortion. Do something for us, they could and sometimes would implicitly threaten, or we’ll tie up your project in court for years or even decades and it will die an expensive, lingering death. Many payoff demands have absolutely nothing to do with environmental protection.
Boeing is shifting more engineering jobs from Washington state to Southern California, the latest in a series of such changes that could see hundreds of jobs moving away.
Close to three-fourths of construction companies are having a difficult time finding qualified workers and experiencing labor shortages, according to a recent survey from the Associated General Contractors of America, a trade group.
Employers added a softer-than-expected 169,000 jobs in August and the unemployment rate dipped slightly to 7.3 percent, the government said Friday in a status-quo jobs report that showed the workforce participation rate at its lowest level in 35 years.
The disappointing jobs report released Friday leaves Federal Reserve officials without a clear-cut signal of an economy on the mend, creating a dilemma for the central bank as it contemplates pulling back on a landmark bond-buying program designed to stoke growth.
. . . But beneath such positive numbers lay evidence of a job market stuck in second gear. The government revised down its estimate for June and July hiring by a combined 74,000 jobs, and a disproportionate share of the jobs that are being added are in low-paying sectors such as restaurants and retail. At the recent pace of hiring, the economy won’t get back to prerecession levels of employment, adjusting for population growth, for more than eight years.
According to Labour Department figures released on Friday, the number of people with jobs fell by 112,000 in August. The data do not go into detail about why specific industries suffered, but it is thought that a temporary hiatus in the pornography industry had a significant impact on the figures. The adult film business was brought to a standstill for 12 days in August, after one of its actors was found to have HIV. The jobs data do not drill down into such specific industries, but the wider movie business lost 22,000 paid jobs – around 6pc of its total workforce.
The visualization below, created by Caren Weiner Campbell of Synoptical Charts, shows where nonacademic STEM Ph.D.’s reside in the United States, in the major categories of life sciences, physical sciences, technology, and mathematics. The states shown in darker hues have a higher raw number of people in the category. There’s a lot of information, and I encourage you to mouse over your states of interest and click around.
Manufacturers consume a lot of energy, particularly natural gas. Increased domestic production of natural gas has lowered its price, and a new study by IHS estimates industrial production will increase by 3.5 percent by the end of this decade as a result of the shale energy revolution.
The California Trade Report, released by research firm Beacon Economics, found that Golden State exports ticked up 6.8 percent over the same time last year. Shipments of manufactured goods, especially civilian aircraft and plane components, helped account for much of the increase. Non-manufactured goods such agricultural products were also up and shipments to China increased by 19.9 percent
Kinkisharyo International Inc., the No. 1 supplier of low-floor light rail vehicles in North America, is moving its U.S. headquarters from Massachusetts to El Segundo, bringing about 25 jobs to the South Bay city and another 250 positions to the Palmdale area, where it will manufacture rail cars for the county Metropolitan Transportation Authority.
Company: Edison CoCA Net Job Gain/Loss: -730Reason: LayoffCity/Region Losing Jobs: San Clemente, CA
The world’s biggest and most dynamic economy derives its strength and resilience from its geographic diversity. Economically, at least, America is not a single country. It is a collection of seven nations and three quasi-independent city-states, each with its own tastes, proclivities, resources and problems. These nations compete with one another–the Great Lakes loses factories to the Southeast, and talent flees the brutal winters and high taxes of the city-state New York for gentler climes–but, more important, they develop synergies, albeit unintentionally. Wealth generated in the humid South or icy northern plains benefits the rest of the country; energy flows from the Dakotas and the Third Coast of Texas and Louisiana; and even as people leave the Northeast, the brightest American children continue to migrate to this great education mecca, as well as those of other nations.
The state’s merchandise export trade totaled $13.98 billion, up a nominal 6.8% over the $13.09 billion in exports recorded in July 2012. By comparison, overall U.S. merchandise exports rose by a nominal 5.1% during the same period.