Buoyed by a soaring stock market and rising home prices, personal income tax receipts are flowing into the state treasury at a rate exceeding all expectations. But one big question looms as lawmakers and the governor consider how to spend the government’s new found riches: what will happen when the music stops?
State Capitol, Sacramento. Photo: WikimediaThe new poltical landscape reflects such things as redistricting, the top-two primary and the majority-vote budget. Partisanship even seems to be waning –gasp! — in Sacramento, as some Republicans crossed party lines to support driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants and liberals behaved pragmatically in order to pass a fracking bill. Does a new day loom in the Capitol? The Millennials hope so. (Photo: Eddie Villanueva)
In the upper levels of California government, Mac Taylor is indeed a rarity – he’s nonpartisan.
As the Legislative Analyst – he’s only the fifth one since the office was created 72 years ago – Taylor is the taxpayers’ watchdog over budget and ballot measures and their potential costs. He is the Legislature’s nonpartisan
California school districts are illegally dipping into student meal funds, misappropriating millions of dollars intended to feed the state’s poorest children, according to a new report by the Senate Office of Oversight and Outcomes.
The California Department of Education recently ordered eight districts to repay nearly $170 million to their student meal programs. But
Saying California was “back” and “on the move,” a chipper Gov. Jerry Brown urged lawmakers in his annual State of the State speech to streamline funding for schools, focus on implementing federal health care reform and keep a tight rein on spending so the budget stays balanced.
The Democratic governor said Thursday that he