Posts From Wayne Lusvardi
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Do Californians want to raise oil taxes?
Are Californians ready for another tax increase? That’s what California hedge-fund manager Tom Steyer sought to find out in his “People’s Poll” on whether voters would support an added oil extraction tax in California. The tax would be 9.9 percent on
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Brown submits May Revise budget
Yesterday, Gov. Jerry Brown submitted the May Revision of his 2014-15 budget proposal with a mixture of line-item revisions. Most were budges that only moved the budget slightly. The fiscal year begins July 1. Over his January budget proposal, Brown increased the
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Prop. 26 wins San Diego water war
Remember Proposition 26, the Stop Hidden Taxes Initiative, passed by 52.5 percent of California’s voters in 2010? Probably no one who voted at that time had any idea Prop. 26 would help resolve — at least for now — the 68-year
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Will Beverly Hills ban fracking black gold?
Come and listen to a story about a city named Beverly Hills and its bubblin’ crude. “The Beverly Hillbillies” still plays on TV in reruns, providing laughs about the Clampetts from Tennessee who strike it rich in oil on
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Supreme Court allows L.A. County storm tax
On May 5, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear another appeal in a case mandating tax increases to pay for stopping and cleaning up polluted storm water. The L.A. County Supervisors have been playing hot potato with the highly unpopular
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SF splits over CleanPowerSF co-op
San Francisco is suffering from a split personality when it comes to establishing CleanPowerSF, an electricity buyers’ club approved by the city’s Public Utilities Commission in 2010 to replace the monopoly Pacific Gas & Electric utility. Such buyers’ cooperatives are authorized
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Skepticism rises over need to reduce CO2 levels
It’s not even Halloween, but this sounds scary. The San Francisco Chronicle headline warned, “High Carbon Dioxide Levels Set a Record.” CO2 is a greenhouse gas of the type that AB32, the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, is designed
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Support for boosting school taxes drops
Proposition 13 still garners broad support across California 36 years after the tax-limitation measure was passed. According to the latest opinion poll conducted by the Public Policy Institute of California, support for loosening Prop. 13’s two-thirds vote requirement for approving local
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Ivanpah morphs into gas-solar hybrid
This is Part 2 of a two-part series on the Ivanpah solar plant. Part 1 is here. As its name implies, the Ivanpah Concentrated Solar Thermal Power Plant in the Mojave Desert is supposed to provide renewable energy from the rays of the
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Ivanpah solar power shifts pollution to the desert
This is Part 1 of a two-part series on Ivanpah solar power. It’s supposed to be the latest thing in solar power. Gov. Jerry Brown and other state politicians tout the new Ivanpah Concentrated Solar Thermal Power Plant in the Mojave
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