A California rice field at sunset. (Photo: Sirisak Baokaew, via Shutterstock)This September, 300,000 of California’s 550,000 acres of rice fields lay barren—over half the state’s rice crop. Instead of miles of soft green grasses swaying amid shimmering water, the state’s rice fields were cracked bare dirt, some crowded with weeds. “It is now just a wasteland,” a third-generation rice farmer told the San Francisco Chronicle.
Homes destroyed during the Thomas fire in Ventura, 2018. (Photo: Joseph Sohm, via Shutterstock)OPINION: Increasingly, California residents have been left with no choice but to accept the California FAIR Plan, the insurer of last resort, and the typically higher rates that come with it. The FAIR Plan provides basic fire insurance coverage when traditional insurance is not available, often for properties that other insurers decline to cover because they are considered high-risk.
Homes under construction in Riverside. (Photo: Orange Grove, via Shutterstock)OPINION: The California Senate had just voted to defeat the state’s highest profile housing bill, Senate Bill (SB) 50, on January 30 when Senate President Pro Tem Toni Atkins quickly rose to address her members. “The status quo cannot stand,” she told the chamber. We at the California Association of Realtors® agree as well.
Climate change demonstrators rally at the state Capitol in Sacramento on Sept. 20. (Photo: Associated Press/Rich Pedroncelli)Climate change activism in California is gaining a newer, more youthful face. In Sacramento, a crowd of more than 1,000 people, including teenagers and pre-teens, rallied recently at the state Capitol to urge lawmakers to sign onto a National Climate Emergency Declaration, which seeks to halt new fossil fuel infrastructure.
Skyline of downtown Los Angeles on a smoggy day. (Photo0: EvijaF via Shutterstock)OPINION: Growing up in New Orleans, summertime brought mixed feelings. It meant the end of the school year and endless snow cones, but also the beginning of hurricane season. Here in California we experience extreme heat in the summer and floods and fires throughout the year, all made worse by climate change. Unless we take action now to prepare our communities, many will suffer, some more than others.
Mail boxes all in a row in rural California. (Photo: Ant Clausen)More and more of them are flooding your mailbox. They are usually bright, colorful, and nonsensical. Political mailers. What else? It’s the season, after all. Even in the age of texting and twitter, old-fashioned paper still has its charm for campaign strategists, especially in-down ballot races where a shotgun approach is not useful.
O'Shaughnessy Dam at Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, the source of water for San Francisco. (Photo: Gary Saxe. via Shutterstock)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.
An illustration of the electorate. (Image: M-SUR, via Shutterstock) ANALYSIS: Pew Research recently released a report titled Commercial Voter Files and the Study of U.S. Politics, which initially looked like a really interesting piece for someone like me who works in voter files every day. But one paragraph in, I nearly laughed out of my chair. The reason? There is a big difference between voter files and panels.
A condominium complex being undermined by rising ocean levels at a Monterey beach. (Photo: Steve Smith)As officials in Washington try to repair the nation’s flood insurance program, scientists in California are grappling with a looming threat that will complicate flooding hazards in the state: sea-level rise. Creeping ocean waters are already flooding coastal areas more frequently and eroding sea cliffs more rapidly. They’re also worsening damage from extreme weather events like high tides and torrential rains.
An increasingly rare device -- the dial telephone.A decade ago, better than nine out of 10 California households with telephones relied on land lines for their service — a scant 5 percent used cell phones for their home connection. This year, nearly half of all households rely on cell phones. So Capitol Weekly’s John Howard and Tim Foster dialed up our favorite numbers cruncher, Political Data analyst Paul Mitchell, to talk about the seismic shift from to cell phones to land lines and how that will play out in the 2018 election cycle.