Some of the candidates want even higher levels of construction. Newsom and Villaraigosa have talked about building 500,000 new units a year to attack the backlog of unmet needs. But that would mean coming up with $200 billion a year in construction funding. As last year’s housing finance legislation demonstrated, state and local governments can […]
The CalPERS board voted to change the period for recouping future investment losses from 30 years to 20 years. The bottom line is that it will require the state government and thousands of local government agencies and school districts to ramp up their mandatory contributions to the huge trust fund. . . . Officials fear […]
Proponents would pound on providing more money for schools, which, polling tells us, are the most popular thing that government does. That was the theme of two successful ballot measures that raised income taxes on the wealthiest Californians in 2012 and 2016, and in fact per pupil spending has increased by 66 percent in the […]
However, school reform and civil rights groups have questioned whether the extra money is really being effectively spent on the targeted children, and have criticized Brown’s hands-off attitude toward monitoring spending and its results. Most independent examinations of LCFF, including an exhaustive dive by CALmatters.org, have found little or no discernible closure of the achievement […]
Across California, the cost of retirement benefits for public employees remains untamed. The total cost to state and local governments as well as schools and colleges has more than tripled since 2003—and projections indicate the burden in coming years will continue to grow. Payments for public employee pensions and retiree health care benefits are putting […]
Suing oil companies for causing climate change has become a popular exercise in California’s coastal communities. Officials in five cities and three counties have filed suits, alleging that the companies knowingly emitted greenhouse gases that will damage those communities as oceans rise, and should pay for it. . . .It’s easy to file a lawsuit […]
Renewal of Sacramento’s expiring half-cent tax would cover perhaps half of the projected increase in annual pension costs, but crowd out other services the tax now finances. Were voters to double it to a full cent, virtually every new dollar it generated would be needed to pay increased CalPERS demands. Asking voters to raise taxes […]
Celebrity endorsements aside, there’s an increasingly pervasive feeling among those of us who actually live here that the California dream is just harder than it used to be. A recent USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll found that only 17 percent of Californians believe the state’s current generation is doing better than previous ones. More than […]
With tens of thousands of Californians turning to private and out-of-state schools for distance learning, Brown and Community Colleges Chancellor Eloy Ortiz Oakley say they want to provide an affordable, high-quality option for busy adults to gain skills that will help them in the labor market. They’re asking the Legislature to approve $100 million in […]
Retirement System (CalPERS) is rapidly increasing mandatory contributions into its pension trust fund to make up for those losses, cope with a host of rising expenses and, it would appear, stave off the prospect of its own insolvency. City managers, facing annual increases in contributions of 15-plus percent, are feeling the squeeze, which a new […]
When the Legislature reconvenes and the campaigns for governor heat up next year, Californians will be hearing a lot – and a lot of hot air – about universal health care. Making California the first state to guarantee health care for every resident has become a touchstone issue – and a divisive one – for the state’s dominant Democrats. . . .It’s not necessary for the state to seize control of California’s entire medical care system if the real bottom line goal is covering those undocumented immigrants. It could be done for about $10 billion a year, which is a lot less than $100 billion. However, advocates would have to publicly acknowledge that covering them is what this conflict is all about and take whatever political heat it generates.
In the waning hours of the legislative session, Democrats pushed through new labor requirements widely viewed as retaliation against Tesla, the electric car maker embroiled in a union-organizing campaign at its Fremont plant. Labor unions got lawmakers to insert two sentences into a cap-and-trade funding bill requiring automakers to be certified “as fair and responsible in the the treatment of their workers” before their customers can obtain up to $2,500 from California’s clean vehicle rebate program. At the time, Democrats openly wrestled with the concern that the United Automobile Workers, which is trying to maintain its role as the auto industry makes big bets on electric vehicles—was expanding its unionization campaign from the factory floor to the Senate floor. Sen. Steve Glazer of Orinda said the state should not “hold our environmental projects hostage to a fight with one progressive employer.” Sen. Connie Leyva of Chino countered that California shouldn’t want companies to succeed at the expense of workers.
It’s clearly aimed at Tesla at a critical moment in its brief history. It’s counting on sales of a new, lower-priced model to move into the mass market and become profitable, it needs rebates to entice customers, and it faces a potential loss of federal rebates.
Implicitly, politicians are telling Tesla to either cooperate with the UAW or be frozen out of rebates, which would still flow to customers of Tesla rivals.
Four years after Gov. Jerry Brown launched his signature program to boost California jobs by awarding tax credits to the businesses that create them, businesses have left two thirds of those available credits unclaimed—a sign that most expected jobs have yet to materialize.
Nor can the state say for sure how many of the administration’s 83,414 projected jobs over five years have actually been created. State offices responsible for awarding and monitoring the California Competes tax credits say they aren’t keeping count.
Three recent and seemingly discrete events neatly frame California’s political and legal war over whether the state’s six million K-12 students are being adequately educated.
The conflict pits the state’s education establishment against a coalition of civil rights groups, education reformers and charter school advocates over the “achievement gap” that separates poor children, particularly Latinos and African-Americans, from more privileged white and Asian students.
The battle has been waged in the Legislature, before the state school board and local boards and quite often in the legal arena.