The state’s merchandise exports had a total value of $12.13 billion in February, down nearly 3.5 percent from $12.55 billion a year earlier, according to a report from Beacon Economics, a consulting firm with offices in the Bay Area and Los Angeles.
Shortly before Brown signed the California law on Monday, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed a similar measure for his state. During the ensuing public celebration, New York state’s AFL-CIO President Mario Cilento said, “When we raise the floor in wages, we raise the ceiling. … Those of you making 16 or 17 or 18 dollars an hour, the next time your union goes in to negotiate, they’re going to ask for 19 and 20 and 21 dollars and up!”
Brown, traveling to the state’s largest media market to sign the landmark bill, remained hesitant about the economic effect of raising the minimum wage, saying, “Economically, minimum wages may not make sense.”
In a letter to Brown last week, the California Business Roundtable warned that any pause in minimum wage increases would lift just as the state began its recovery.
In another sign that California’s drought has eased but the state’s water system is far from fully recovered, federal regulators announced Friday that Sacramento Valley farmers would get full water deliveries for the upcoming growing season, but many San Joaquin Valley growers would face another year of severe shortages.
Elk Grove officials have signed a tentative deal with a Bay Area tech company to bring 2,500 manufacturing jobs to the city.
We are fortunate that so much of this year’s precipitation fell in the form of snow, because the snowpack is, in effect, a natural reservoir that releases water slowly. But if global warming is as real as Gov. Jerry Brown and others contend it is, future precipitation from an El Niño would be more likely rain, rather than snow, and we could see both severe flooding and severe water shortages if we are not prepared to capture it as it falls.
Yet the large majority of California’s public high schools don’t offer dedicated computer science or computer programming courses, according to a Sacramento Bee review of teacher assignment data from the California Department of Education.
The Employment Development Department said the statewide unemployment rate fell by two-tenths of a point, to 5.5 percent. Employers added 39,900 jobs during February, compared with a loss of 4,000 jobs in January.
Although its 2014-15 budget was balanced, California’s state government ended the fiscal year $175.1 billion in the red, thanks largely to state retirement obligations that had to be included in its balance sheet for the first time. . . debts for “postemployment benefits” will jump again in the report for the 2017-18 fiscal year, when state retiree health care must be included under GASB’s rules.
The Brown administration this week formally asked the U.S. government to sign off on a revamped tax on health plans that has the primary goal of continuing to pull in more than $1 billion in federal money.
California’s farm industry kept growing in 2015 despite a fourth year of drought, adding 30,000 jobs even as farmers idled huge swaths of land because of water shortages.
The California state auditor has criticized the Department of Transportation’s approach to highway maintenance, saying Caltrans has “weak cost controls” that “create opportunities for fraud, waste and abuse.”
Thanks to new accounting standards, California’s state and local governments are being forced to acknowledge tens of billions of dollars in previously obscure debt for unfunded pension liabilities.
The Employment Development Department said Friday the statewide unemployment rate dropped two-tenths of a percentage point. However, non-farm payroll jobs, considered one of the key barometers of economic health, declined by 1,500 compared with December.