California budget woes sideline more bills

On their first day back from summer recess, California lawmakers made clear that the budget crunch isn’t over. 

The Senate appropriations committee sent dozens upon dozens of bills — that have a price tag of at least $50,000 to $150,000 and that may also be politically dicey — to the dreaded suspense file, where many could die quickly on Aug. 15.

CalMatters’ Mikhail Zinshteyn reports that many of the bills were also opposed by the governor’s Department of Finance, including ones that cost relatively little in California terms. Among them:

• Assembly Bill 3172 (price tag of $400,000 a year) to apply civil penalties to social media companies if courts find that they violated rules meant to protect minors.
• AB 3027 (cost estimate of $660,000 a year) to halt the attempts of foreign governments to target dissidents living in the U.S.
• AB 2925 (tens of thousands per campus) to require anti-bias training at California colleges and universities, a proposal supported by numerous Jewish groups and the California State University. 

The Assembly appropriations committee meets Wednesday. The two committees culled hundreds of bills in May’s suspense file hearings, also due to the deficit. To balance the 2024-25 budget, lawmakers and Gov. Gavin Newsom had to make widespread cuts and dip into reserves.

One reason for state spending increases: crucial contracts with employee unions. 

On Saturday, the union representing state scientists said that it has reached a tentative labor agreement with the Newsom administration, after a four-year fight for better pay and benefits. Assemblymember Liz Ortega, a Hayward Democrat and chairperson of the labor committee, said a contract was “long overdue.”

If the deal is ratified later this month by the nearly 5,000 members of the California Association of Professional Scientists, they will get a retroactive salary bump of at least 9.2% and as much as 23% over the next three years. The union at one point sought raises of up to 43%. It walked out last November (considered the state’s first civil servant strike), then rejected an offer in December to increase pay by as much as 10%. One major reason for the holdout: The pay inequities between the 5,600 scientists, about half of them women, and state engineers, who are mostly men. In 2022, the engineers union won a contract with a 7.5% raise over three years.

Amid the state budget crunch, state lawmakers are still collecting freebies. As they were considering a bill this year to loosen Ticketmaster’s stranglehold on the ticketing and live concert industries, some lawmakers were receiving free tickets themselves, reports Politico.

The bill, which followed Ticketmaster’s mishandling of ticket sales for pop singer Taylor Swift’s tour, ended up getting so watered down that its initial backers withdrew their support. According to Politico, the committee chairperson on privacy and consumer protection, Democratic Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan of San Ramon, received concert tickets at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara the day Taylor Swift was scheduled to perform.

As part of its analysis into legislators’ 2023 financial disclosures, Politico found that Assemblymember Mike Fong of Monterey Park and Sen. Bill Dodd of Napa, both Democrats, received the most in free tickets. 

You can check out CalMatters’ own deep dives into these records as they relate to free trips lawmakers take and what properties they own.

CalMatters covers the Capitol: We have guides and stories to keep track of bills and your lawmakers, find out how well legislators are representing you, explore the Legislature’s record diversity and make your voice heard.

For the latest episode of his new podcast, Gov. Gavin Newsom returned to San Quentin State Prison and highlighted two of his key criminal justice decisions.

In a video posted Monday on social media, he shows the death chamber, pointing to the phone labeled “governor” that the warden picks up in case of last-minute clemency. In March 2019, Newsom imposed a moratorium on executions, overriding what voters decided in 2016.

And in March 2023, during his “State of the State” policy tour, the governor unveiled a plan to transform San Quentin into a groundbreaking center for rehabilitation. (A new report by the Public Policy Institute of California takes a look at the mixed record of state rehabilitation programs.) 

The video shows him and co-host Marshawn Lynch, the former NFL star running back, talking to inmates, including one who says: “I needed to do some healing up in here. … If you don’t heal yourself, you can’t help nobody.”

• Newsom: “People are selling you fear and anxiety, and that’s what this is about. And It’s fueled by anger, and it’s understandable because people want to be safe. But this has become a racket, and breaking up this racket is hard, and the opposition is real and it’s not about politics.”

The episode is part one of “Inside San Quentin” from “Politickin,’” promising “raw, unfiltered content” from “one of the most notorious prisons in the country.” 

But at least one reviewer was not all that impressed with the two prior episodes. Writing for Slate, Alex Shultz points out that for a podcast that was not supposed to be about politics, it actually is. It did launch last month during a historic period in American politics when President Joe Biden dropped out of the race and Vice President Kamala Harris, Newsom’s political frenemy, emerged as the Democratic nominee.

• Shultz: “If the Politickin’ podcast co-hosts insist on dancing around politics, save for when world-historic events occur, then they’ll keep getting caught flat-footed far more than they’ll be putting themselves ‘out there.’”

Abortion politics: Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis, who’s running for Newsom’s job in 2026, has a new political action committee centered on abortion rights. It launched a new ad Monday going after GOP vice presidential nominee JD Vance on that issue that is crucial to Democrats.

Conservative backlash: CalMatters Capitol reporter Alexei Koseff has been chronicling local conservatives fighting back against California’s progressive politics. Now, his stories are all in one place to keep up with the growing trend.

As California schools race to adopt artificial intelligence tools inside the classroom, two recent blunders underscore their challenges, writes CalMatters tech reporter Khari Johnson.

In March, Los Angeles Unified School District launched the $3 million AI platform Ed to help create personalized “action plans uniquely tailored to each student.” Its superintendent described Ed as a “game changer.” But three months later, the company that created Ed laid off more than half its staff. The district shelved the AI assistant and provided scant details about how the bot performed. 

In that same month, a Point Loma High School teacher told CalMatters she used an AI tool that the San Diego Unified School District bought to help grade writing assignments. But a week later, the Voice of San Diego reported that none of the district’s school board members appeared to know about the tool or the contract. 

These cautionary tales come during a time when edtech companies, school leaders and teachers feel pressure to offer or include AI tools in their services or curriculum, said Alix Gallagher, the head of strategic partnerships at the Policy Analysis for California Education center at Stanford University.

Though the California Department of Education encourages the adoption of AI in its guidelines, experts say the technology warrants more scrutiny. The Legislature is currently considering a bill that directs the state’s education superintendent to convene a working group to make recommendations on “safe and effective” use of AI in education.

Read more about the schools’ botched AI rollouts in Khari’s story.