It may be one of the thorniest, and most critical, votes the California congressional delegation has faced in decades, a proposal pitting Silicon Valley and Hollywood against big labor over a trade pact the Obama administration calls a linchpin of its economic agenda.
“I hate to say this, but there’s no such thing as ‘green energy,’” says Doug Bell, a wildlife program manager for the East Bay Regional Park District who’s witnessed the deaths of hawks, owls, falcons, meadowlarks, robins and golden eagles. He and other environmentalists blame wind turbines for 10,000 bird deaths per year.
Workers who benefit from Oakland’s minimum wage hike might soon lose a service that enables them to work in the first place. It turns out the well-intentioned law is putting a financial squeeze on Oakland’s child care industry, leading some providers to panic. . . Asked if Lift Up Oakland anticipated problems for the city’s child care sector, spokeswoman Beth Trimarco said the campaign “did not specifically analyze impacts on all industries.”
The official reason behind the closure was a “staffing dispute” between workers and port operators, said Port of Oakland communications director Mike Zampa. He did not offer further details.
Sometime in the next few weeks, the lead contractor for the Bay Bridge’s new eastern span will finally declare that the most complex public works project in California history is done — and state and local authorities will be solely responsible for a landmark beset by problems that trace back more than 16 years, to the day a handful of experts picked a design that bordered on the experimental.
According to an analysis by Standard & Poor’s, as the income gap has widened over the years, growth in state tax revenue has declined, from 11 percent annually from 1950 to 1979 — before the income gap began to noticeably widen — to 7 percent since 2009. Bottom line, according to the report, “increasing income inequality is undermining the rate of state revenue growth” in California and nationwide.
California drivers are going to see a bump at the pump starting Jan. 1 – with a good chunk of the money going to kick-start Gov. Jerry Brown’s struggling high-speed rail project.
A seismic expansion joint on the westbound Carquinez Bridge – similar to a dozen used on the skyway portion of the new Bay Bridge eastern span – has cracked after less than 10 years of pounding by heavy trucks, Caltrans officials said Wednesday.
Workers can recover unpaid wages by placing liens on property owned by their employers, including businesses and homes where they performed work, under a bill that passed the Assembly on Wednesday.
Preempting the mayor, a group of labor activists led by Service Employees International Union Local 1021 filed documents with city’s Department of Elections on Monday to place a proposal on the November ballot to raise the city’s minimum wage to $15 an hour – the highest in the nation.
Starting next year, the law will force fuel distributors into the same cap-and-trade marketplace as utilities and major manufacturers. The oil industry says it will lead to price increases of at least 12 cents a gallon immediately, while state regulators say any price spikes could vary widely, from barely noticeable to double-digits.
On Friday, amid California’s driest year on record, Gov. Jerry Brown declared a drought emergency in the state. As days pass without snow or rain, dairymen, farmers and other livestock producers are finding themselves in the same predicament as Imhof. Without water to irrigate, produce growers fear they will have to leave some fields fallow.
Mickelson still lives in California, but other wealthy people say they have moved out mainly or partly because of skyrocketing tax rates. Whether you sympathize or not, millionaires’ migrating out of California has serious consequences to the state’s bottom line and is something state leaders are watching closely.
California energy regulators have proposed a set of sweeping changes to the way most of the state’s residents pay for power. The current system, in which electricity prices are based on the amount used, would be fundamentally altered by 2018, under the proposal issued this week by the California Public Utilities Commission.
A cost comparison of the staples of American diets shows that San Francisco prices are on par with those in Washington, D.C., a city with a more distant and tenuous connection to farmers.