Cities have been hit the hardest by increases in mandatory payments to the California Public Employees Retirement System (CalPERS) as it tries to shrink its large “unfunded liability.” City officials have repeatedly complained about the specter of insolvency if pension payments continue to grow and the League of California Cities has labeled the situation “unsustainable.” […]
Generally, California’s six million K-12 students are not doing very well academically, as comparisons with pupils in other states on standardized federal tests have shown, and that’s particularly true of poor and English-learner students. The study’s findings were underscored last week by the release of the state’s latest “Smarter Balanced” test results. Once again, they […]
Californians in November will weigh billions of dollars’ worth of ballot measures for low-income housing, children’s hospitals and more. But one of the biggest asks will be mostly invisible to most voters—100 or more local proposals to sell bonds for school construction projects that, if passed, could total more than $12 billion in local borrowing […]
For the second year in a row, California students’ test scores have inched up so slowly that, by some estimates, it could take a generation for disadvantaged students to close the achievement gap with their peers. That was the sobering assessment on Tuesday as the California Department of Education released the 2018 results of the […]
Driving 100 miles in a ZEV consumes 30 kilowatt-hours of electric power, according to the federal government. Therefore, assuming they were still traveling 330 billion miles each year, recharging 30 million ZEVs would expand annual electric power consumption from 300 terawatt-hours to at least 400, and that extra juice also would have to come from […]
The Sacramento Unified School District offers us another example of how expediency can backfire. Late last year, the district’s teachers were threatening to strike for higher pay, and Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg intervened, mediating a new contract that averted the strike and gave teachers an 11 percent raise. Later, it emerged that the money for […]
The researchers conclude that “while public schools in California spent about $69.7 billion on school operations in 2016-17, an additional $22.1 billion—32 percent above actual spending—would have been necessary for all students to have had the opportunity to meet the goals set by the state Board of Education. On a per-pupil basis, the adequate district-level […]
The technology to achieve 100 percent carbon-free electric power doesn’t yet exist because the main sources, solar panels and windmills, require the sun to shine and the wind to blow. Making them dependable would require enormous banks of batteries or some other form of reliable storage. The legislation slyly backtracks on previous policy by, in […]
The California Chamber of Commerce did even better than usual in sidetracking the liberal measures that it placed on its notorious “job killer” list. Over the last two decades, ever since the annual list was first published, the chamber and allied business groups have rung up about a 90 percent kill ratio. But in 2018, […]
Unfortunately, nationwide academic tests tell us that California’s 6 million K-12 school students rank near the bottom in achievement vis-à-vis those in other states. In the National Assessment of Academic Progress (NAEP) testing, for example, California’s fourth-graders rank lower than those in 45 other states and in reading, lower than kids in 39 other states. […]
The 2016-18 legislative session, which ended last week, provided more proof of the symbiotic relationship between California’s labor unions and the Legislature’s Democratic majority. While they didn’t get everything they wanted from the Legislature, unions – particularly those representing state and local government workers – won far more skirmishes than they lost. The record was […]
California’s booming economy is pouring many billions of additional tax dollars into state and local government treasuries. Nevertheless, the locals – cities and school districts, especially – find themselves in an ever-tightening fiscal vise because mandatory payments into public employee pension funds are growing much faster than revenues. That’s why dozens of them are asking […]
California looks a lot different than it did a generation ago. Its residents are far more diverse, and they live in a far more expensive state. There’s way more renters and proportionately way fewer Republicans. Yet today’s Californians have at least one thing in common with their late 1970s forebears: They still really like Proposition […]
Cannella read a list of the projects, most of them professional sports venues, that have received such favored treatment recently, to wit: “A Rams stadium in LA that never materialized; Farmer’s Field in downtown LA that never materialized; the Golden1 Center for the Kings basketball team in Sacramento; a Chargers / Raiders football stadium in […]
California, the world’s fifth-largest economy, spends billions of dollars every year to support its dozens of climate-change programs but has trouble demonstrating whether the promise of the law that spawned them has been kept. Though a separate state law requires economic analysis of major regulations, there is no requirement for a retrospective review. Environmental authorities […]