Posts Tagged: budget
Analysis
The California Legislature has a combined 55 standing committees, with 33 in the Assembly and 22 in the Senate. There were 2,661 bills introduced during the 2023 Legislative Session. Those standing committees, and their hardworking consultants (along with their minority party counterparts), reviewed and analyzed thousands of bills during the past two years.
The following
Opinion
OPINION – People need to be convinced that a future in which their cars, houses, stoves, and garden equipment run on electricity – and that they will need to live sustainably – will not mean a decline in their quality of life. That’s why California should mandate climate change education in grades K-12 right now.
Analysis
ANALYSIS – One of the controversial occurrences during the annual California Legislative Session is so-called “gut-and-amend” bills, or replacing the bill’s contents with a subject which is entirely unrelated to the original contents of the bill. Such amendments raise the legislative issue of “germaneness,” which refers to whether a proposed amendment is relevant to the subject matter currently contained in the measure.
Podcast
CAPITOL WEEKLY PODCAST: Facing the first deficit in a decade, legislators finished hammering out a Budget deal with the governor this week. Our guest today is Chris Hoene, Executive Director of the California Budget & Policy Center. Hoene has been a Budget-watcher for decades, and helps us dig into the new Budget Deal.
Opinion
In lean budget times like this year, state leaders must make difficult choices about what programs and projects to fund, and what is on the chopping block.
News
With California’s high levels of recidivism in mind, Oakland-based nonprofit Creating Restorative Opportunities and Programs (CROP) is set to open a reentry campus there for formerly incarcerated people in early April.
News
As a budget analyst in the California Department of Finance in 2005-2008, Joe Stephenshaw never imagined that he would one day come back to lead the division. This month, Stephenshaw, 47, was sworn into the post, becoming the first African-American to hold the position.
News
A crack opened last week for the first time in 17 years in the firewall between state politicians and the $12 billion California stem cell agency. It involves only $600,000 — at least for now — and is buried deep in the 1,069-page state budget bill that was introduced June 8. But its implications are far-reaching. They range from opening the agency to major changes — wanted and unwanted — to creating a basis for the agency’s currently dubious, long-term financial sustainability.
News
Gov. Gavin Newsom is proposing a multi-billion-dollar package of monetary goodies for Californians, but how much of it will become reality is now up to legislators. The clock ticks: Lawmakers have less than a month to approve the 2022-23 budget, an unprecedented, nearly $300 billion document, and send it to Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Recent News
Decades of underinvestment in schools, culture battles over bilingual education, and dizzying levels of income inequality have pushed California to the bottom of the pile, making it the least literate state in the nation. Nearly 1 in 4 people over the age of 15 lack the skills to decipher the words in this sentence. Only 77 percent of adults are considered mid to highly literate, according to the nonpartisan data crunchers at World Population Review.