News

The move to find a permanent home for the Silicon Valley branch of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has been put on indefinite hold.

Reform of the state of California’s landmark and controversial environmental law, CEQA, is starting to get more complicated.

A new report that compares state finances finds California’s budget revenues are soaring higher than all but one other state in the nation. Its economy is growing at an above-average pace as well.

An effort is under way in the Capitol to require local governments to perform comprehensive economic impact studies of so-called “superstores” before approving the projects.

At least one business group is happy with Gov. Jerry Brown’s new economic plan. California’s manufacturers are delighted with the governor’s new reforms, especially the new statewide sales tax waiver for buying new industrial equipment.

It wasn’t even close. Bechtel Corp. claimed the top spot on the San Francisco Business Times’ annual ranking of the largest private companies in the Bay Area. With $37.9 billion in 2012 revenue, the San Francisco engineering and construction firm raked in five times more money than the No. 2 company on the list, Delta Dental of California.

After previously proposing widespread and hefty tuition increases for graduate and professional degree programs, UC’s top administrators have retreated and will seek fee hikes affecting only a small group of graduate students, mainly in nursing, and at much reduced levels.

In this Friday’s print edition, I take a closer look at whether Gov. Jerry Brown’s decision to kill the state of California’s enterprise zone program will actually work. The controversial decision to phase out the program and replace it with a range of other incentives was a hot topic last week when the California Legislature approved the governor’s reforms.

Workers in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties are again among the highest-paid employees in the nation. A new report out from the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates the average worker in San Mateo County earned $3,240 per week—more than three times the national average, and $1,100 more per week than the average worker in Manhattan.

The average weekly wage in San Mateo County California, the home of Silicon Valley behemoths like Facebook, increased 107.3 percent in the last quarter of 2012, making it the richest place in America — even ahead of Manhattan — all because of a little IPO that happened in May 2012. Here’s how the thinking goes: Facebook went public in May 2012. In November — 181 days after the offering — those with vested stock options could cash in. Sure, CEO Mark Zuckerberg promised not do that. But if Peter Thiel, one of the earliest and biggest investors in the social network took out something like $1 billion, you can bet some less famous names did as well. In that quarter alone, the roughly 6,200 tech workers in the area collected total wages of $6.8 billion, notes the Wall Street Journal’s Scott Thurm. “That kind of a jump can only be explained by what’s happening with stock” Doug Henton, chief executive of Collaborative Economics told Thurm. Some of that likely also came from other tech IPOs that year, but Facebook’s was by far the largest.

The nation’s largest health insurer, UnitedHealth Group Inc., is leaving California’s individual health insurance market, the second major company to exit in advance of major changes under the Affordable Care Act.

Programs that prepare students for college and careers are about to get a jolt of one-time state money that supporters are counting on to lead to a permanent and sustainable expansion of programs.

California’s highways continue to rank among the worst in the nation — a sorry distinction the state has held for more than a decade.

. . .the newly released data provide an interesting glimpse at how salaries for both public and private sector workers are recovering from the recession. State employee salaries are growing at dramatically different speeds, in comparison to both their peers in other states and private sector workers in their own states.

The purpose of this report is to measure the economic importance of the U.S. shipbuilding and repairing industry.