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.
We are joined this episode by Jodi Hicks, President and CEO of Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California. Hicks has been one of many voices sounding the alarm as the Supreme Court’s new conservative supermajority takes up the issue of abortion rights in cases from Texas and Mississippi. Will 2022 be the year that Americans in half the states lose access to legal abortion? And, how will California be affected? Plus: Who had the Worst Week in California Politics?
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.
As the American Political Items Collectors prepare to host their annual show this weekend in Sacramento we asked Adam Gottlieb to talk with us about his passion for collecting buttons and other campaign items.
Police at a Vallejo crime scene, where three people were shot during an armed robbery. (Photo: Francis Arrostuto, via Shutterstck)Preliminary numbers from California’s biggest cities suggest that 2020’s stunning 30-percent increase in the statewide murder rate – the largest since 1960 – has continued to rise this year, and crime experts have as many questions as answers. “We’re seeing a continued trend” in rising murder rates throughout 2021, said Mangus Lofstrom, a policy director and senior fellow at the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California.