Gov. Brown summarily rejected the notion of a per-barrel tax on California oil as it comes from the ground, a move that sharply limits the political options of the tax’s backers who hoped to get a bill through the Legislature to raise perhaps $2 billion annually.
Property theft in California increased in the first year of correctional realignment, according to a new report by the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California highlighting the policy’s possible effect on future crime rates.
California’s 11 ports, from Humboldt Bay in the north to San Diego in the south, generate more than $40 billion in annual economic activity. They create hundreds of thousands of jobs dockside as well as inland where cargo is loaded onto trucks or trains for delivery across North America, mainly to Mid-West hubs like Chicago and St. Louis.
In the movie Thelma and Louise, the two hapless heroines clasp hands and hurl their turquois Thunderbird over a cliff and into an abyss of certain death. It’s become an iconic moment in American film, a noble if extreme solution when all hope is lost.
California’s landmark Environmental Quality Act — the brainchild of Republican lawmakers trying to woo a then-new voting bloc of “environmentalists” — turns 43 this year.
Phil Isenberg is a former state lawmaker, mayor of Sacramento and big-time lobbyist — someone who’s been in a lot of political street fights but whose latest battle may be his biggest.
California’s core environmental protection law, a 43-year-old statute frequently denounced by developers and business interests as a tangle of red tape, is on a Capitol hit list once again.