Dan Walters

One of California’s most complex and unusual financial, political and legal conflicts was settled last week, but mysteries remain.

Ever since California voters passed Proposition 13 40 years ago, the Capitol’s annual budget wrangle has been dominated by how much money would go to K-12 schools – for good reason. Not only are the schools educating six million kids, but they are number one on the voting public’s priority list, and are by a […]

Gov. Jerry Brown reappointed Elaine Howle as the state auditor last week. It was a wise move. Howle has served in that vital, if little known, position longer than anyone with fierce independence and dogged determination to bore deeply into state and local government operations. That was demonstrated last year when Howle uncovered a secret, […]

Los Angeles and San Francisco may be economic and cultural rivals, but politics in the state’s two most important cities are similarly harsh. Both are dense mélanges of economic, cultural and ethnic “communities” that joust constantly and to those who aspire to high office, they are minefields laid atop pits of quicksand. As fate would […]

Walters: For Gov. Brown, striking out on water tunnels and the bullet train would be bitter pills to swallow.

Waters: Some of the big things Brown has championed may or may not pan out.

Dreamers' fate could be a tricky issue for Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who faces a potentially stiff re-election challenge.

Attorney General Xavier Becerra is imploring the U.S. Supreme Court to validate laws in California and other states requiring public employees who are not union members to nevertheless pay “agency fees” to unions. Such fees, Becerra said in a brief filed last week, fairly distribute costs of negotiating contracts with the state, school districts and […]

Four-plus decades ago, the Legislature and Jerry Brown, then in the first stages of his two-part governorship, decreed that public employees had the right to join unions and bargain for salaries and other working conditions. The argument for extending collective bargaining rights to state and local government workers, including teachers, was that they should have […]

California’s education dilemma can be stated rather simply, to wit: The state has 6 million kids in its K-12 public school system, 60 percent of them are classified as either poor or English-learners and as a group they trail badly in educational accomplishment. The state’s political leaders and education officials acknowledge what they call the […]