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Bill would revive California’s redevelopment agencies

SACRAMENTO – California’s redevelopment agencies were a fixture on the local political landscape for six decades, as they guided development policies and grabbed “tax increment financing” that localities used to pay for infrastructure improvements, downtown renovations and affordable-housing projects.

Legislature is back and focused on housing, recall and bail

Steven Greenhut August 24, 2017

SACRAMENTO – California’s Legislature is back from its recess and legislators kicked off the session by focusing on two highly partisan matters. Assembly Republicans first voted to keep Chad Mayes as Republican leader, despite pressure from activists to oust

San Diego mayor offers suggestions for future of state GOP

Steven Greenhut August 16, 2017

SACRAMENTO – Even Republicans admit the state GOP is something of a rudderless ship these days. The party doesn’t control any constitutional offices. Democrats have supermajorities in both houses of the Legislature. Assembly Republican Leader Chad Mayes of Yucca Valley,

CalPERS’ divestment goals in crosshairs as coal stocks soar

Steven Greenhut August 9, 2017

SACRAMENTO – A newly released report from the California Public Employees’ Retirement System confirms that, fulfilling the Legislature’s directive to divest from coal-related investments, the pension fund has now largely exited from coal stocks. But as news reports this week

Democrats and Republicans see different solutions to California housing crisis

Steven Greenhut July 26, 2017

SACRAMENTO – Before the recent legislative recess, California Democratic leaders and Gov. Jerry Brown announced their intention to tackle one of the state’s biggest crises: housing affordability. It’s the rare instance where virtually everyone in the Capitol at least is

GOP legislators unlikely to pay price for cap-and-trade vote

Steven Greenhut July 18, 2017

SACRAMENTO – As the California Legislature approached a late-night Monday vote to extend the state’s climate-change-fighting cap-and-trade system, the Capitol buzz focused on Jacqui Irwin of Thousand Oaks. The Democratic assemblywoman was absent because of a long-standing family commitment, thus

CA Legislature seeks data on race, sexual orientation of lobbyists

Steven Greenhut July 17, 2017

SACRAMENTO – A letter late last month from the state Legislature’s six special-interest caucuses asking California lobbying firms to provide legislators with detailed demographic data has sparked debate and controversy within the Capitol and media. The Sacramento Bee reported last week

Is California budget as ‘balanced and progressive’ as Gov. Brown suggests?

Steven Greenhut June 21, 2017

SACRAMENTO – The California Assembly and Senate have until Thursday to approve the budget deal announced by Gov. Jerry Brown last week, but there’s little uncertainty about the outcome. The general-fund budget is a record-setting $125 billion – something Brown

Is Assembly speaker playing game of chicken over 72-hour rule?

Steven Greenhut June 7, 2017

SACRAMENTO – California voters in November overwhelmingly passed Proposition 54, a constitutional amendment to promote transparency by requiring all bills in their “final form” to be published online for 72 hours before legislators vote on them. It’s designed to stop

Gov. Brown’s pension plan gets mixed reviews from reformers

Steven Greenhut May 30, 2017

SACRAMENTO – Gov. Jerry Brown and the Legislature mostly have avoided tackling the state’s unfunded pension liabilities, even though these taxpayer-backed debts to pay for pension promises to state and local employees have soared by 22 percent in the last