Opinion
OPINION: The leadership of the California Association of County Treasurers and Tax Collectors (CACTTC) is comprised of five elected women and two men, thus reflecting the success of women in elected office. Representing the concerns of CACTTC, we find it ironic that at a time when gender balance in politics is front-and-center, the office to which historically more women than men are elected is being eroded through consolidation of treasurer-tax collector with auditor-controller without voter approval.
News
Dan Jacobson, Environment California’s state director, sits down with Capitol Weekly’s John Howard and Tim Foster to chat about the “straw law,” which would curb the proliferation of single-use plastic straws. Those ubiquitous little tubes damage the environment by ending up in the ocean and clogging waterways, among other things.
News
For the second time in recent months, the U.S. Department of Labor has extracted penalties from a California farm business blamed for the deadly crash of a vehicle transporting migrant field workers to their jobs. The Labor Department announced this month that Fisher Ranch LLC — a major produce farm near Calexico, close to the Mexican border — has agreed to pay $49,104 for violating the Migrant Seasonal Workers Protection Act. The case stemmed from a March 2017 van crash that killed one laborer and hurt six others.
Analysis
On any given day, thousands of jailed people are awaiting trial, sentencing or hearings in any of California’s 58 counties. Many are in custody because they cannot afford to post bail. Legislation to allow people to be free while their case is in the Legislature and its fate will be decided by midnight Aug. 31 when lawmakers adjourn.
News
After two weeks straight of heavy smoke blanketing Northern California from multiple wildfires, some residents got a bit of a break this week. Blue skies began to reappear from Sacramento to the Sierra and “good” to “moderate” air quality ratings returned, replacing the previous alarming “unhealthy” ratings.
News
Welcome to the 10th running of Capitol Weekly’s Top 100 list, our annual look at people who aren’t elected to office but who wield decisive influence on California politics or policy — or both. Much has changed in the nine years since we started this exercise. We shifted from a Republican to a Democratic governor, emerged from the Great Recession to become the world’s fifth-largest economy and watched GOP voter registration dip to third-party status behind decline-to-state. Hardball politics got even harder.
Opinion
OPINION: The resignation of Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt was met with a collective sigh of relief across the nation. Pruitt, one of President Donald Trump’s most loyal foot soldiers in the Trump Administration’s ongoing war on environmental quality, environmental justice, and environmental health, had overseen some of the most egregious rollbacks of environmental protections in history during his brief and troubled tenure in office.
News
Brianne Tufts is exhausted. This is the third place Tufts has lived in as many years, and she’s worried she’ll have to move again because her apartment complex might increase the rent now that her lease has expired. It’s just after 11 a.m. on a Sunday in April, and the 24-year-old mother of two sits on the balcony of her cramped 2-bedroom south Sacramento apartment watching intently as her daughters play in the living room.
Opinion
OPINION: The clean energy revolution is here, now, and California is a trailblazer of its success. Solar and wind power, electric vehicle use, rooftop photovoltaics, and community choice aggregation are all on the rise in California. The traditional centralized, fossil-fuel power plants are now competing with renewable and distributed energy sources, forcing the industry and regulators to adapt, and upending close to one hundred years of power generation and distribution.
News
Some were bank robbers, car thieves and burglars. Now they are on the front lines in the scary and dangerous job of saving California from raging wildfires. There are about 3,900 of them, all state prison inmate volunteers from 44 fire camps spread across California.
The California state Capitol in Sacramento. (Photo: Adonis Villanueva, via Shutterstock)
