Joint committe hearing in the Capitol on California's mental health care system. (Photo: Scott Duncan, Capitol Weekly)In a lengthy, often emotional legislative hearing last week on California’s badly broken mental health system, lawmakers and dozens of witnesses agreed that very little has changed, despite decades of new laws and huge infusions of public funds.
A steel worker walks across a beam at a Redwood City construction site. (Photo: Michael Barajas, via Shutterstock)California payrolls added 47,500 nonfarm workers in November compared with October’s 96,800 new hires, according to the state Employment Development Department. The November new hires accounted for 22% of the U.S.’s 210,000 jobs for the month. In California, November’s unemployment rate of 6.9% improved from October’s 7.3%.
A research scientist examines a capsule with a DNA double helix. (Photo: Dan Race, via Shutterstock)One year ago this month, a $5.5 billion wave washed over California’s ambitious stem cell agency and left it refreshed and renewed for another decade or so of searching for “miraculous” treatments for a host of deadly, incurable afflictions. It is now on a pace to hand out $38,000 an hour, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. That would amount to $519 million in awards between this time last year and the end of the agency’s current fiscal year in June.
Students and an instructor at the California College of the Arts. (Photo: CommonApp)Is labor strife the new normal in California higher education as 2021 ends? After UC sidestepped two worker strikes recently, 97 percent of staff at the California College of Arts (CCA) campuses in Oakland and San Francisco voted earlier this month to authorize their contract negotiating team to call a strike.
Commercial marijuana being dried at a California facility. (Photo: Shutterstock)With cannabis taxes to rise on Jan. 1 and a legitimate business landscape plagued by a thriving black market, California’s marijuana industry faces uncertainty. The tax hike — like others before it — stems from a state law requiring the California Department of Tax and Fee Administration to recalculate the cultivation tax rates once a year because of inflation.
Prison inmates at a California institution, many of whom were "realigned" to counties' custody.(Photo: Pubic Policy Institute of California)In 2019, California outlawed private prisons. By the time the ban went live in January 2020, the world’s biggest private prison contractor, the Florida-based GEO Group, lost $223 million in contracts with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR).
A facility run by CoreCivic, a private-prison company. The photo was taken in November 2019, shortly before private prisons were outlawed in California. (Photo: Shuttertstock)In January 2020, Californians thought they were getting out of the private prison business. They are, but under a new law, AB 32, which went into effect at the first of the year, the state remains heavily invested in backing for-profit correctional services — including facilities that resemble detention centers run by the same companies who operate private prisons.
Rep. Karen Bass at a Culver City political rally in September. (Photo: Max Elram, via Shutterstock)Former California Assembly Speaker and current U.S. Rep. Karen Bass wasn’t the first person to get into the L.A. mayoral race, nor the last. But with approximately seven months still to go before the June 7 primary, her candidacy has put a charge into the crowded competition to lead the nation’s second largest city.
Traffic on Harbor Freeway in downtown Los Angeles.(Photo: Jose Luis Stephens)Several factors are shaping demand, prices, sales and supply of new and used cars in the Golden State, but consumers know one thing — their pocketbooks are taking a hit.
An illustration of the brain and potential links to instability -- including mental illness. Some elements provided by NASA.(Image: GrAI, via Shutterstock)Important legislation to improve California’s broken mental health system was passed this year, plus billions in new funding in the state budget — all aimed at stemming the tide of a growing crisis on California streets, in hospital ER’s, jails and prisons. But will it mean real change?