Posts Tagged: historic
News
As a native of the Coachella Valley near Palm Springs where it hardly ever rains, Joaquin Esquivel has always known that water is precious. His uncle often took him to the Salton Sea, and he had family served by a well. He carries that respect for the resource as chair of California’s State Water Resources Control Board. “Growing up in the desert, you are very aware of water,” he said.
News
Gov. Gavin Newsom is proposing a multi-billion-dollar package of monetary goodies for Californians, but how much of it will become reality is now up to legislators. The clock ticks: Lawmakers have less than a month to approve the 2022-23 budget, an unprecedented, nearly $300 billion document, and send it to Gov. Gavin Newsom.
News
California’s attention was focused recently on the failed attempt to recall Gov. Newsom as a rare event of historical magnitude. In fact, recall elections happen all the time, and all but a relative handful of these obscure contests disappear into the limbo of history.
Opinion
OPINION: Sacramento must use the windfall to even up the sides during this economic recovery, while also setting the stage for more equitable and sustainable prosperity in the decades to come. The surplus represents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to go big on a just transition to an equitable clean energy economy. Right now is the time for a California Green New Deal.
Opinion
OPINION: As gun sales and gun deaths have continued to surge since the onset of the pandemic, California’s underinvestment in violence intervention programs has become a glaring policy failure. Even after January 2021 proved to be California’s single deadliest month for gun homicides since 2007, the governor and state legislators have still not agreed to make funding the California Violence Intervention and Prevention (CalVIP) grant program a priority.
Opinion
OPINION: California is dealing with cascading crises the likes of which have never been experienced before. Between February 2020 and today, California’s unemployment rate rose from a record low of 3.9% to 13.3%. Nearly two million Californians who were working then aren’t working now. And California’s clean energy economy — which employed 3% of the state’s workforce before COVID-19 — has also taken a hit.
News
Landmark legislation to improve California’s notoriously fractured mental-health system has been passed and sent to the governor in the waning days of a chaotic legislative session disrupted by the COVID pandemic. “This package of legislation is a game-changer,” said Maggie Merritt, executive director of the Steinberg Institute.
News
Qualifying a proposition for the ballot – much less convincing millions of voters to support it – is always a Herculean task. In the best of times, it requires a near limitless supply of money, talent and luck. Nobody right now thinks we are in the best of times. Many months now into the COVID-19 pandemic, a lot of people instead feel trapped inside a George Orwell novel.
News
California public schools will be getting a big infusion of cash — a very, very big infusion — if voters approve an unprecedented trifecta of multibillion-dollar measures aimed at next year’s statewide ballots. First, there’s a $15 billion plan, financed by bond borrowing, for construction projects for K-12 and higher education. Gov. Newsom signed the bill and placed it on the March ballot.
News
As the race to fill the nation’s remaining Major League Soccer spots heats up, Sacramento is going all in to get the ball rolling on a multi-million dollar stadium. Sacramento’s soccer team, the Sacramento Republic FC – known locally as Sac Republic — just broke ground on a $250 million stadium located between 8th and 10th Streets in the historical plot of ground known as the Railyards just north of downtown.
Joaquin Esquivel at a water board meeting. (Photo: Water Education Foundation.)
