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There are many other unworthy contenders, but Senate Bill 858 may be the most pointlessly cynical legislative act of this still-young century.

In their latest estimate of the four-year drought’s economic effects, professors at the university’s Center for Watershed Sciences said Tuesday the drought has reduced seasonal farm employment by 10,100 jobs this year. When indirect job losses are thrown in, including truck drivers, food processing workers and others partially dependent on farming, the impact on payrolls comes to 21,000.

Legislators weighed in early and often this year with bills dictating where the growing fund could be spent. According to an analysis by the California Taxpayers Association, legislators have floated 23 bills that would allocate a whopping total of $4.8 billion.

Without writing its formal obituary, Brown and other politicians, plus the state’s education establishment, have strangled the test-based accountability system that California adopted in the late 1990s.

Another Washington-like tendency is passing sweeping legislation but leaving the sticky, all-important, details to unelected bureaucrats, such as the Air Resources Board’s multibillion-dollar “cap-and-trade” fees to curb greenhouse gases.

Not only does Fresno, vis-à-vis other large California cities, have one of the higher rates of poverty, but its poor residents are among the most isolated of any American city, regardless of race.

These are questions worth keeping in mind as our energy policy sorts itself out in this climate-change era. As it strives to end reliance on fossil fuel, will California help turn the rest of the West green? Or will the Golden State end up being dusted with coal ash?

All that international trade creates tens of thousands of jobs in California along supply chains that reach out through the Inland Empire counties of San Bernardino and Riverside and into the Central Valley. The gateways also serve the state’s manufacturers and farmers, who last year shipped more than $170 billion in merchandise abroad. And crucially in a state with ever-widening income disparities and that ranks 48th in the percentage of adults with no more than a high school education, the freight industry almost uniquely continues to offer large numbers of unskilled blue-collar workers a chance to earn middle-class wages.

Although California’s official unemployment rate climbed out of the cellar during the year that ended June 30, it still had the nation’s second highest rate of total “labor underutilization,” according to a new federal government report.

During the 2010-14 period, for example, Los Angeles County’s population grew by nearly a quarter-million, but it added fewer than 40,000 housing units. During the same period, San Francisco, despite its geographic limitations, grew by nearly 50,000, but built fewer than 10,000 housing units.

Although its overall population growth continues to slow, California’s senior population – those 65 and older – will nearly double in the next 15 years, a new report from the Public Policy Institute of California concludes.

California, the nation’s most populous state, also has more government workers than any other. Nearly 1 in 10 Californians belongs to one of 85 government pension systems, according to a new report by Kevin Cook of the Public Policy Institute of California. About two in three pension members belong to either the California Public Employees’ Retirement System or the California State Teachers’ Retirement System.

The proposal asserts California voters have the right via initiative and referendum to determine state and local government employees’ pay and benefits. Employees hired Jan. 1, 2019, or later would not be allowed to join existing pension plans unless voters approved continuing those plans.

The WCIRB report says that despite steps to curtail costs, total premiums paid to workers’ compensation insurers hit $16.5 billion in 2014, up from $14.8 billion the year before and 27 percent of all such premiums in the nation. It pointed out, however, that the premium jump reflected not only higher rates being charged by insurers to compensate for rising costs, but increases in the number of Californians on payrolls as the state recovered from recession.

As part of their effort to pay for the major transportation overhaul Gov. Jerry Brown has called for without levying new taxes, Assembly Republicans have proposed cutting 3,500 full-time positions from the California Department of Transportation, at a savings to the state of half a billion dollars.