Podcast
Last week, Governors Gavin Newsom of California and Kate Brown of Oregon, leaders of the Yurok and Karuk Tribes and billionaire investor Warren Buffett issued a joint announcement that four dams on the Klamath River will be removed.
The agreement follows decades of often-tense negotiations between the tribes, state and local governments and the dams’ owner, PacifiCorps, a massive power utility that serves roughly 600,000 customers in California and Oregon.
Karuk natural resources spokesperson Craig Tucker joined John Howard to talk about the historic agreement, its impact on the region’s Salmon fisheries, and the potential for replication in other places where dams are contested.
Podcast
Last week Capitol Weekly and the McGeorge Capital Center for Law & Policy presented a Post-Mortem of the 2020 Election, a half-day online conference in which a score of experts and insiders discussed the results of the election and provided a look-ahead at what they mean for 2021 – and beyond. This event was held on Thursday, November 5. We broadcast audio from each of the presentations as individual episodes of the Capitol Weekly Podcast.
Podcast
David Cruz is the head of the Economic and Business Council for the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC). LULAC has declined to take a position on California’s hotly-contested Proposition 22, but Cruz has been actively engaged in making the case to pass the measure, including an appearance in an October debate against Latina activist Dolores Huerta, who is in opposition. David joined us by phone to discuss his support for Prop. 22, including a novel take on how to view the nearly quarter-billion dollars spent on the campaign.
Podcast
Veteran political data expert Paul Mitchell sat down (remotely) with Capitol Weekly’s John Howard and Tim Foster on Friday to chat about early vote turnout, the partisan breakdown of those votes and how California compares to the national picture.
Podcast
As the November election approaches, longtime labor activist Caitlin Vega is focused on what she sees as an existential battle: the effort to defeat Proposition 22 – the initiative that would classify App-based drivers as independent contractors and remove labor protections for thousands of workers.
Podcast
Five years ago this week, Shawnda Westly found herself in a hospital emergency room with “the worst headache of [her] life.” The doctor who examined her concluded that she was experiencing a migraine, prescribed some painkillers and sent her home.
Within 48 hours, she suffered a stroke that threatened to derail her life. Westly faced a harrowing and uncertain recovery, with the very real prospect that she that might never be able to live on her own again. She was just 45 years old.
Podcast
Longtime Sacramento journalist Joe Barr is Capital Public Radio’s Director of Content. While most news organizations have seen a stark decline in staffing over the past decade, Barr has led a major expansion in the station’s news department. Joe joined us by phone to chat about CapRadio’s approach to their news and music stations, the struggles of producing a torrent of election year news programming during a pandemic, and what’s next for CapRadio.
Podcast
Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an Executive Order today to outlaw the sales of new gasoline- and diesel-powered cars and light trucks in California by 2035. California is the nation’s largest market for zero-emission vehicles: Half of all electric vehicles sold in the U.S. are sold in the state. We asked Dave Weiskopf, a senior policy adviser at NextGen, to chat about it.
Podcast
This week we posted four special editions of the Capitol Weekly Podcast, broadcasting the content from our September 17 conference on health care in the Golden State. We focused this year on the unprecedented public health emergency: COVID-19. Exactly six months and one day after the first Shelter-in-Place order, we examined the response to the crisis and looked at what comes next.
Podcast
Lobbyist Jennifer Fearing operates Fearless Advocacy, a small “white hat” lobbying outfit that represents nonprofits, animal rights groups, environmentalists and other clients with feel-good causes. With clients like these, Fearing isn’t the highest-billing advocate on the block, but her record at the capitol is the envy of many of her peers.
