Posts Tagged: estimates

Opinion

Small businesses offer key fiscal support for government

Downtown Placerville, Calif. (Photo: Laurens Hoddenbagh, via Shutterstock)

OPINION: The recent flurry of stories about small business woes often miss an important part of the picture: Small businesses’ role in helping fund government’s important responsibilities. Consider the City of Placerville. Located in El Dorado County with the original colorful Gold Rush era monikers, the sometimes controversial Hangtown and the more staid Dry Diggings, the city is a tourist draw housing a number of buildings on the National Register of Historic Places.

News

Internet poker stymied in Capitol

Internet gambling, an illustration. (Photo: Pedro Sala)

Legalizing internet poker in California – a fruitless effort that has spanned seven years, a dozen major bills and hundreds of hours of tense talks – was headed for defeat in the Capitol, following opposition from a key Senate committee leader. Casino-owning tribes, card clubs and the horse racing industry were unable to agree on a formula that would allow them to share in the online gaming market, potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

News

Criminal justice, sentencing reforms gain traction

An inmate gestures through the bars of his prison cell. (Photo: Sakhorn, Shutterstock)

For decades, Californians and their representatives in the state Capitol had a “lock-‘em-up-and-throw-away-the-key” approach to lawbreakers. But that view is changing. Following years of a steadily increasing prison population and some communities repeatedly being devastated by crime, public discussion has shifted in part toward reforming law enforcement’s approach to crime prevention.

News

Brown targets education, cap-and-trade money

Gov. Brown and aides head to a Capitol briefing on his latest state budget. (Photo: AP/Rich Pedroncelli)

Jerry Brown kept the purse strings tight on the University of California, but proposed an $8 billion boost for public education and wants to spend $1 billion of cap-and-trade auction money on high-speed rail. transit and related projects. In the first budget of his last term in office, the Democratic governor offered a $164 billion spending plan — $113 billion of it in the General Fund, the state’s coffer of sales, income and business taxes — for the 2015-16 fiscal year that begins July 1.

News

California players gathering, again, for internet poker

An online gambler concentrates on his game in Nevada, which recently authorized internet gaming and may license fantasy sports companies.(Photo: Associated Press)

Rival interests are rolling the dice to legalize California’s internet gaming market, the most lucrative in the nation. At stake in the Capitol negotiations is a prize worth hundreds of millions of dollars — and maybe more. It’s not the first time. Efforts to legalize internet poker in California – where the revenue may top $1 billion annually over a decade — have failed repeatedly in the past.

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