California Voices

Nearly seven decades ago, historian Carey McWilliams assessed California’s first century of statehood and labeled it “The Great Exception” for its many attributes. The same phrase could be applied to the California Legislature, which habitually carves out great exceptions for particular interests from laws everyone else must obey. State tax codes are riddled with loopholes […]

If we – the California public – are to hold politicians and other government officials accountable, we must first know what they are doing or not doing. Thus, the first point of conflict is always access to records of official action or inaction. The current legislative session is the first one affected by a 2016 ballot […]

Californians are dealing with a late summer outbreak of devastating wildfires. Even the National Guard has been called out to fight them. On Tuesday, the Legislature began the final, furious days of its 2017 session with hundreds of bills still in limbo, including a package of housing measures that everyone considers vitally important to the […]

The cultural firestorm over statues, flags and other symbols of the Confederacy, ignited by a violent clash of white supremacists and their opponents in Charlottesville, Virginia, would seem far removed from California. Not so. California became a state in 1850 largely because of pre-Civil War political maneuvering over slavery and the fear among northern politicians […]

California’s labor unions should be celebrating on this Labor Day because they’ve been on a political roll. Overall union membership in California, 2.6 million, is by far the most of any state, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, and at 15.9 percent of the state’s workers, is one of the nation’s highest. Over […]

One of the less heralded – albeit, one of the more important – of the many clashes between Sacramento and Washington these days has to do with accountability for educating the state’s 6-plus million K-12 students. Gov. Jerry Brown, state schools Supt. Tom Torlakson and the state Board of Education have indicated by word and […]

The state Supreme Court this week issued a much-anticipated ruling that will make it much easier for local tax increases to be enacted. Or maybe not. The 5-2 decision, upholding an appellate court ruling, was that the taxing constraints on local governments in the state constitution don’t apply to voter-generated ballot measures that raise taxes. […]

There’s something of a feeding frenzy underway in the Capitol during the final weeks of the 2017 legislative session. August’s quarterly auction of carbon dioxide emission allowances under the state’s cap-and-trade program was a sellout after more than a year of lackluster results. Not only did it generate more than $600 million for the state, but […]

California’s housing crisis has spawned several other socioeconomic dilemmas, the most important being a transportation crunch. The state’s most plentiful, best-paying jobs are concentrated in coastal urban areas, but they also have the state’s worst housing shortages and therefore its highest housing costs. Ergo, even relatively well-paid workers cannot find affordable housing and are forced […]

The California Public Utilities Commission must, by its nature, straddle the fine line between providing consumers with dependable electric power, natural gas and other utility services at fair prices and protecting the financial health of the huge corporations that supply those services. Over the past few years, however, two natural gas disasters and a scandal […]