A bill that started out as Gov. Brown’s proposal to restructure the CalPERS board emerged from the Legislature last week as a more modest change: a requirement that CalPERS board members receive 24 hours of education in pension fund operations.
The campus of the University of California, Berkeley. Photo: LAgirl5252A move is afoot in the Capitol to bring back a higher education watchdog and restore a data trove of 1.7 billion records on public colleges and universities that were placed in limbo by Gov. Jerry Brown.
State Capitol, Sacramento. (Photo: David Monniaux)Californians give Governor Jerry Brown a record-high job approval rating and his budget proposal strong bipartisan support, according to a statewide survey released today by the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC), with funding from The James Irvine Foundation. The state legislature’s approval rating is a near-record 42 percent among adults and is at 33 percent among likely voters. Both ratings are similar to December. Asked to rate the job performance of their own state legislators, 48 percent of adults and 45 percent of likely voters approve. (Photo: David Monniaux)
OPINION The importance of health care access to underserved populations is clear. Today, those local health needs are identified and prioritized in collaboration with local governments, nonprofit hospitals and community members. These “community benefit plans” provide the framework for local hospitals to direct available resources to target local health care needs in the community.
Gov. Jerry BrownOn his wish list for the next fiscal year, Gov. Jerry Brown has put higher education right near the top. California’s public colleges and universities, Brown said as he unveiled the state budget, “used to be four years and free. Now in many cases it’s six years and expensive.” (Photo: Samantha Gallegos/Capitol Weekly)
OPINION: Today’s young professionals think about the quality of the home they will make, the social interactions the region can offer, how family fits into that picture, in addition to looking for career satisfaction.
State Capitol, Sacramento. (Photo: David Monniaux)For the followers of California politics, non-election years usually are yawns. Not so 2013: One would be hard pressed to find a year with more hot-button events fraught with statewide political ramifications. Here’s our roundup of the year’s top tales, a subjective compilation to be sure but one which was fun to put together. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)
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