Although couched in dense education jargon, the letter essentially accuses WestEd of ignoring the uniform achievement standards it says state law requires in favor of squishier measures, and offers an alternative version.
More than 70 percent think state and local officials should dedicate additional resources to existing roadways. By a smaller margin, 48 percent to 35 percent, they believe more money must be set aside for new road construction.
“It’s the biggest. The reason it’s so large is that fuels have come under the cap,” said David Clegern, a spokesman for the ARB. Transportation fuels account for about 40 percent of greenhouse gases.
California water agencies are on track to satisfy a state mandate to reduce water consumption 20 percent by 2020. But according to their own projections, that savings won’t be enough to keep up with population growth just a decade later.
Slowly, quietly – but unmistakably – California’s education establishment is dismantling or softening state and federal testing-based “accountability” systems that were imposed on public schools more than a decade ago.
“Instead of cherry-picking job creation in favored industries benefiting wealthy areas, we should be growing jobs in impoverished communities that continue to suffer from disgracefully high unemployment rates,” Vidak said.
Instead of including the 50 percent target in the state’s existing regulatory framework, the utilities argue, California should require increased carbon reduction through other, more flexible means. They say other approaches could cost less while still achieving environmental goals.
With well over 300 billion vehicle-miles of pavement-pounding travel each year, our highways and local roads and streets are in sad shape. California not only has the nation’s worst traffic congestion but the nation’s second worst pavement conditions.
An extra $2 billion annually over five years would help fill the gap under Atkins’ plan, with about $1.8 billion of it flowing from a new fee on all drivers. Atkins said she has not yet determined how the fee would be assessed but estimated it would amount to roughly a dollar a week.
A months-long stalemate in contract talks between the Pacific Maritime Association and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, both based in San Francisco, has clogged major ports in California and is having a negative economic impact on Central Valley growers and other Northern California businesses such as Devine Intermodal.
California contains 12.2 percent of the nation’s population but its state government accounted for 13.8 percent of all state spending in the 2012-13 fiscal year, according to a new Census Bureau report.
As California enters its fourth year of a historic drought – rung in with record dry spells this January in many regions across the state – water conservation becomes more important than ever.
Some lawmakers represent areas where poverty is a central part of constituents’ daily lives. In some legislative districts, poverty rates are more than double the state average of 16.6 percent, according to the U.S. Census’ most recent American Community Survey. In others, the poverty rates are barely a quarter of the California average.
A panel created by the Legislature to review state parks operations will report Friday that the Department of Parks and Recreation is underfunded and mired in outdated bureaucracy, and that the parks system is out of reach for many poor people in urban areas.
The goal is part of a newly announced initiative targeting an estimated 1 million degree gap in the state economy by 2025. While more than 900,000 CSU students earned degrees in the past decade, the six-year graduation rate for freshmen hovers around 51 percent.