Commentary

Four years ago, the state Senate was thrown into turmoil by the simultaneous prosecution of three senators on unrelated felony charges. The Senate compelled all three to step aside from their Senate duties, but could not legally strip them of their salaries and fringe benefits while they awaited disposition of their cases, which eventually resulted […]

Suing oil companies for causing climate change has become a popular exercise in California’s coastal communities. Officials in five cities and three counties have filed suits, alleging that the companies knowingly emitted greenhouse gases that will damage those communities as oceans rise, and should pay for it. As CALmatters environmental writer Julie Cart says in […]

California’s political leaders don’t have to look very far to find a stark example of the pension cost crisis facing the state’s 482 cities. Three blocks from the Capitol, in Sacramento’s city hall, Mayor Darrell Steinberg – a former leader of the state Senate – and other officials are seeing pension costs skyrocket. “Over the […]

The recall – allowing voters to fire elected officials before their terms expire – was one aspect of the populist political reform movement that swept through California more than a century ago. The recall, the initiative (direct legislating by voters) and the referendum (empowering voters to overturn newly enacted laws) gave Californians the right to […]

Getting legislative leaders to release records about sexual harassment by legislators and their staffers was like pulling teeth without anesthesia. It took months of pressure from women who work in and around the Capitol and had demanded an end to the pervasive culture of bad behavior and from news media, but it finally happened last […]

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

"We don't know how we're going to operate," one city official says.

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 […]