California Voices

Will legislators consider that two seemingly different policy choices debated currently share a similar principle and therefore require a like solution? I’m looking at Senate Bill 206 by Sens. Nancy Skinner of Berkeley and Steven Bradford of Gardena to allow college athletes to be paid for the money-making use of their name, image, and likenesses, and the […]

The Legislature and Gov. Gavin Newsom are grappling with the most significant utility-related public-policy issue our state has faced in some time–California’s wildfire vulnerability and the bankruptcy of Pacific Gas & Electric Co. Crafting a legislative solution is challenging. Add an active bankruptcy court proceeding and billions of dollars at stake, and the stage is […]

The state budget package that Democratic legislators and Gov. Gavin Newsom just enacted is sprinkled with billions of dollars in extra goodies for their most important political constituency, labor unions. Take, for example, Senate Bill 90, the budget’s omnibus education measure. It would allocate $3.1 billion to reduce mandatory payments that local school districts would otherwise […]

California’s political leaders have made the long-overdue decision to clean up the Central Valley’s contaminated drinking water, and help cash-strapped rural water districts. The catch: rather than assess a fee on water users or tapping into the state’s budget surplus, Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Legislature relied on cap-and-trade money to pay for a portion […]

Every Californian should be aware by now that the state’s housing shortage not only causes personal angst for millions of the state’s residents, but is a key factor in its economic future. The latter was underscored last month in an analysis of the state’s employment picture by Christopher Thornberg, founder of Beacon Economics and director […]

The Supreme Court’s ruling that upheld partisan gerrymandering as a political practice for which there is no federal judicial remedy will be taken as a green light by some state legislatures to draw political maps to favor the party in power. Even if that is not a risk to us in California, the case should […]

We know their stories because they have told them to us: The hardship of sleeping in the fields with no shelter except a blue tarp and the grape vines that they picked; the awkwardness felt by elderly parents who slept on the couches of their adult children’s apartments and trailers already crammed beyond capacity; the […]

In January, California ended a decades-old legal doctrine that put numerous people behind bars for murders they did not commit.  Yet six months after the new state law—Senate Bill 1437—took effect, some prosecutors are trying to overturn it, resorting to scare tactics and false distortions. We are the legislators who wrote and supported this critical […]

Since 1984, Californians have been pulling their older cars and pickups into smog-check stations and pulling out their wallets to pay for a test to certify that their vehicles meet state emission standards. The average cost for a vehicle-inspection in 2018 was $48.60. It has been money well spent. Every day the program prevents 400 tons of tailpipe […]

For years – many years – journalists and government watchdogs have cataloged an almost unbroken, extremely expensive string of failed attempts to bring information technology into state government operations. Dozens of IT projects have either failed completely or functioned undependably, costing taxpayers countless millions of dollars. The current poster child for faulty IT is “The […]