CAPITOL WEEKLY PODCAST: Longtime politics oppo research specialist Joe Rodota has lately turned his skills toward historical events and storytelling, first with a book on the Watergate complex, The Watergate: Inside America’s Most Infamous Address, and now with a new podcast, Hillside: The Investigation and Trial of the Hillside Strangler.
Clean-energy advocates demonstrate on the steps of the state Public Utilities Commission, which is covered by the anti-secrecy law known as the Bagley-Keene Act. A California law intended to block secret decisions in the state bureaucracy actually prevents officials from talking to each other on crucial matters, according to their testimony before a state investigative panel. The issue, which intensified in the wake of recent activities at the California Public Utilities Commission, arises from changes in the 1967 Bagley-Keene Act, which is intended to assure the public’s access to the actions of state boards and commissions.
World headquarters of Tesla Motors in Palo Alto. (Photo: Katherine Welles)Tesla’s decision to choose Nevada for its planned $5 billion battery factory is all but certain to play out Thursday evening in the one-and-only televised gubernatorial campaign debate between Jerry Brown and Neel Kashkari. California’s economic recovery has been a core issue in the gubernatorial campaign between Gov. Brown, a Democrat who is seeking an unprecedented fourth term and already is the state’s longest serving governor, and Kashkari, a Republican and former treasury official. Brown is heavily favored.
An $8 million pension bond was approved last week by voters in Piedmont, a small well-to-do city completely surrounded by deep-in-debt Oakland, originator of the pension bond that has figured in the Stockton, San Bernardino and Detroit bankruptcies. (Photo: City of Fremont