Posts Tagged: policy
News
In simplistic terms, lobbying the state Senate and Assembly floors is similar to lobbying legislative committees, except that the scale is much larger. For example, some committees have as few five members (elected officials), while others have over 20 members. As you would assume, most committees in the 40-member Senate have fewer members sitting on them than do their counterparts in the 80-member Assembly.
News
Gov. Gavin Newsom has been riding a high tide of approval from Californians for his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, but he could be heading for stormy weather. California’s tax revenues are projected to decline more than 22 percent and the state estimates that unemployment for the year will hit 18 percent.
Opinion
OPINION: The California Senate had just voted to defeat the state’s highest profile housing bill, Senate Bill (SB) 50, on January 30 when Senate President Pro Tem Toni Atkins quickly rose to address her members. “The status quo cannot stand,” she told the chamber. We at the California Association of Realtors® agree as well.
Opinion
OPINION: California has a drinking water crisis. More than 1 million people in California lack access to safe, clean, and affordable drinking water. 400 schools in our state have lead contamination in their drinking water. About 300 public water systems in our state are not in compliance with drinking water standards. This is a public health and environmental crisis.
News
While wildfires have gotten much of the attention in California as consequences of climate change, it’s really rising sea levels that will likely wreak the most damage. With more than 25 million people living near the coast, some $150 billion worth of property is at risk.
News
A Wall Street public finance expert who says analyzing California’s fiscal condition was the “defining passion” of his career is the state’s new legislative analyst. He is Gabriel Petek, 47, who until recently was Standard and Poor’s chief credit analyst covering California from an office in San Francisco.
Opinion
OPINION: “Our role begins when babies are still in the womb and it doesn’t end until we’ve done all we can to prepare them for a quality job and successful career.” Those were the words Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom used to describe his “cradle-to-career” education platform during the 2018 campaign.
News
Welcome to the 10th running of Capitol Weekly’s Top 100 list, our annual look at people who aren’t elected to office but who wield decisive influence on California politics or policy — or both. Much has changed in the nine years since we started this exercise. We shifted from a Republican to a Democratic governor, emerged from the Great Recession to become the world’s fifth-largest economy and watched GOP voter registration dip to third-party status behind decline-to-state. Hardball politics got even harder.
Opinion
If it becomes law, SB 1156 will harm some of California’s most at-risk residents—low-income, disproportionately minority dialysis and transplant patients who depend on charitable assistance to afford their health care. More than 67,000 Californians depend on dialysis to stay alive, and many face serious financial hardship as a result of their medical condition.
News
Capitol observers often complain about certain procedural aspects of California lawmaking. So I took an informal poll: I asked some of my lobbying colleagues, as well as staff in the Legislature from both houses and both political parties, for suggestions on how to make things more efficient.
The chamber of the state Senate in Sacramento. (Photo: Felix Lipov, via Shutterstock)
