November 2020

Plans to remove four privately owned, obsolete power dams on the Klamath River advance with California taxpayers putting up more than half the cost.

The state auditor’s report points out that California has no comprehensive approach to building affordable housing and it wasted $2.7 billion.

California has an unexpected and welcome revenue windfall, but it creates a dilemma on what to do with it.

The pandemic has touched all of us, in ways that might have seemed unimaginable just a year ago.  We have lost beloved parents and grandparents, siblings and children and friends. Our own health and mental health have been challenged, sometimes acutely. We have lost income, lost housing, lost the stability those provide. Our children have […]

Elizabeth and Nicole go deep to talk with small business owners about the most recent coronavirus spike and to explain the "Latino vote."

Alice Huffman was paid millions by corporate ballot measure campaigns that her historic civil rights organization endorsed, while many Black leaders took opposing positions.

A model calculates a 12% chance that a guest at a small dinner party in Napa Valley is infected with the virus. Whether indoors or outdoors, dining in a restaurant is “amongst the riskiest things we do for COVID,” a UC San Francisco health expert said.

Good morning, California. It’s Friday, November 20. Limited lockdown Starting Saturday night, nearly all Californians will be subject to a curfew aimed at curbing a statewide surge in coronavirus infections. Under the terms of the “limited stay-at-home order” Gov. Gavin Newsom unveiled Thursday, nonessential work and gatherings will be prohibited between 10 p.m. and 5 […]

You can’t always get what you want, but for special interests in California politics, spending $34 million sure does help. That’s the amount of unrestricted political spending that industries and unions with regular business in the capitol pumped into Legislative races across the state this year. As CalMatters reported before Election Day, the oil industry, […]

After the Great Recession, California signed an exclusive contract with Bank of America to distribute unemployment benefits through prepaid debit cards. A CalMatters investigation reveals that to this day, no one knows how much the bank has made off the deal. Lawmakers are examining the bank’s role in mass account freezes and untold amounts of missing money for thousands of struggling jobless Californians — as well as where the bank may have failed to keep unemployment money safe from fraud.