Podcast
Nothing ever really dies in the Capitol, as the saying goes, but sometimes you come across a knockout blow. And that’s what happened with SB 827, a sweeping bill aimed at addressing California’s housing crisis. To the surprise of just about everybody and after months of media attention, the measure was rejected decisively in its first committee hearing. Joining us today to take a look at all this is Louis Mirante of California YIMBY, who sat down with Capitol Weekly’s John Howard and Tim Foster to chat about the issue.
Analysis
Clearly, Washington, D.C., and Sacramento share many things in common — including such negatives as a hyper-heated political culture, insularity and a pervasive sense of entitlement. And California’s Legislature is obviously based upon the federal legislative model. Nonetheless, their legislative rules are different, so let’s take a look at some of the major distinctions.
News
The recent police killing of an unarmed black Sacramento man has left protesters and local politicians demanding revisions to California’s Peace Officer’s Bill of Rights — the decades-old protocol for officers facing disciplinary investigation. But state lawmakers, despite the national attention directed at the shooting of 22-year-old Stephon Clark, have not introduced legislation or even made reference to the 1976 law, known as the POBR.
News
It goes by various names: Universal Healthcare Access; National Healthcare; Medicare for All; government-run health care; Socialized Medicine. Most news reports call it Single Payer. It threatens to tear asunder California’s Democratic Party.
News
Thousands of California women who said they were raped gave details of their assaults to investigators and provided critical data in “rape kits” — DNA, wounds, semen, hair, fibers — to identify their attackers. But many of the rape kits were not examined in a timely way, caught in a backlog that has angered some lawmakers and women’s groups.
News
One of the ongoing themes in analyzing California’s 2018 elections is the impact of the reforms that were enacted in 2012 – the state’s open primary, the extension of term limits and the new district lines drawn by the state’s independent redistricting commission. Beyond these three, we also saw the creation of statewide online voter registration and a ballot measure to allow passage of an on-time state budget by a simple majority vote. This wave of reforms has made it incredibly difficult to discern the impact of each.
News
Camrosa Water District, a public services provider in Ventura County, gets its water from a combination of groundwater, recycled wastewater, and the State Water Project, which transports water south through the state. Twenty miles away, another mid-size public water agency also founded around 1960 has a very different portfolio: Las Virgenes Municipal Water District gets virtually all its water from the State Water Project, which is managed by California’s Department of Water Resources.
News
California’s drive to produce a stem cell therapy is ratcheting up a notch with announcement of two new, global industry partners along with a plan to engage more companies and give them “direct access” to hundreds of millions of dollars in state-funded research.
News
A bill by state Sen. Steven Glazer, D-Orinda, giving new state workers the option new University of California workers received two years ago, a 401(k)-style plan rather than a pension, is opposed by unions and soon may be opposed by CalPERS. More than a third of eligible new UC employees have chosen a 401(k)-style plan. Instead of a guaranteed lifetime monthly pension check, the 401(k) plan that replaced pensions in most of the private sector uses individual tax-deferred investments to build a retirement fund.
News
The number of Latinos in California with two- and four-year degrees has doubled in little more than a decade, a dramatic increase. But compared with the overall, growing Latino population, the proportion of college-trained Latino adults over the same period has remained flat — roughly one in 10 from 2005 to 2015. The figures are from a new study commissioned by Univision’s Political, Advocacy and Government Group — which is separate from the network’s news division — on Latinos’ access to higher education in California and reflect the obstacles facing Latinos seeking a college education.
Louis Mirante of California YIMBY. (Photo: Tim Foster)
