We are joined this episode by Lande Ajose, chair of the Governor’s Council for Postsecondary Education – a big job as California colleges prepare to reopen campuses to students, post-pandemic. Ajose helped prepare the recently-released “Recovery With Equity” roadmap for California’s postsecondary systems to come back from the pandemic more financially resilient and positioned to more equitably serve California students.
When we invited freshman Assemblymember Alex Lee (D – San Jose) to come on the podcast we planned to discuss his ambitious policy proposals, like Universal Health Care, a Wealth Tax, and a ban on corporate donations to political candidates. What we didn’t expect was that those discussions would all be in the past tense.
Veteran journalist and university professor Sigrid Bathen, who has written extensively about California’s mental health policies, joins Tim Foster and John Howard on the Capitol Weekly Podcast to chat about what is rapidly becoming a hot political issue — having mental health clinicians accompany police officers on some emergency calls, such as family disturbances. The “cops and clinicians” movement is capturing attention.
We’re joined today by Matt Rexroad, redistricting expert and the former mayor of Woodland and member of the Yolo County Board of Supervisors. Rexroad offers his thoughts on the upcoming congressional reapportionment, the abrupt resignation of Daniel Claypool, the executive director of the Redistricting Commission and the likelihood of success for the attempt to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Former state Sen. Holly J. Mitchell was elected last year to a seat on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, representing District 2 – the same district in which she was born and raised. Term limits have turned the traditional local government-to-Legislature pipeline on its head, as has the stratospheric growth of LA: As a supervisor in a county of 10 million people, Mitchell represents twice as many constituents as she once did in the state Senate.
Regional Recycled Water Advanced Purification Center Grand Opening 10, Oct 2019In this episode John Howard and Tim Foster welcomed the longtime but soon-to-be-retired Metropolitan Water District of Southern California head honcho Jeff Kightlinger for a wide-ranging discussion that covered the status of the Delta Tunnel Project, climate change and the snow survey, the drought, working from home, jukeboxes and his punk rock roots.
Veteran political strategist Bill Wong has been a longtime leader in California’s Asian Pacific Islander political community, and is a recognized expert on AAPI voters. While Wong should have been celebrating last week’s appointment of Rob Bonta as California Attorney General – the first Filipino American to hold the office – he was instead dealing with the fallout of a nationwide spree of racially-motivated attacks, culminating in a mass shooting in Georgia that claimed the lives of six Asian women.
Democratic political strategist Garry South joined Capitol Weekly’s John Howard and Tim Foster to talk about the potential recall of Governor Gavin Newsom. South is uniquely positioned to weigh in on the subject: he headed Governor Gray Davis’ 1998 and 2002 gubernatorial campaigns, and ran Gavin Newsom’s first campaign for Governor back in 2009.
California has a diversity problem on its corporate boards. For Latinos, the statistics are particularly shocking: while they make up close to 40% of California’s population, Latinos hold less than 3% of these board seats. Esther Aguilera of the Latino Corporate Directors Association joins Capitol Weekly’s John Howard and Tim Foster to talk about why this matters and what her group is doing to help diversify the state’s business leadership.
Over the last four weeks Capitol Weekly presented a series of live panel discussions and presentations on Zoom, examining the topic “The Future of Work.”
The battles over the Dynamex decision, AB5 and Proposition 22 reveal an uncertain landscape for working people in California. Priced out of the nation’s most expensive housing market, some workers are choosing to leave the state. Manufacturing, once a mainstay of good-paying jobs in California, is in deep decline. Gig work is booming – but is it sustainable? And, a year-long pandemic has devastated many industries – how will they come back? What is the Future of Work – and workers – in the Golden State?