Blog

Ballot initiative filing fees set to increase

One strategy for pursuing policy changes through ballot initiatives may become victim of the new law to charge a larger fee to file an initiative for title and summary with the Attorney General’s office. The $200 filing fee, in place

Can ‘Big Data’ figure out how to reduce CA gridlock?

Chris Reed October 24, 2015

The use of “Big Data” has transformed strategizing in baseball, given rise to microtargeting of individual voters in presidential campaigns and turned browsing the Internet into an unsettling experience in which users see advertisers guess what they might want to

Moody’s: Energy edict will hammer SoCal municipal utilities

Chris Reed October 23, 2015

Assembly Bill 32, the landmark 2006 law requiring California to begin shifting to cleaner-but-costlier forms of renewable energy, hasn’t hit consumers as hard as some economists feared for an ironic reason: Dirtier “brown energy” got cheaper. The U.S. fracking/shale revolution

Legislators propose differing plans to fund state-wide highway repair

Joel Fox October 20, 2015

There is consensus that California’s roads and highways must be fixed. There is no consensus how the fix should be paid for. A Special Session legislative meeting Friday was called a first step in finding agreement to the funding problem.

Whale-sex ban spurs mockery of Coastal Commission

Chris Reed October 18, 2015

The release of a 2013 documentary, “Blackfish,” that accused SeaWorld theme parks of treating their captive killer whales cruelly put a big dent in the company’s revenue in 2014. Thanks to CNN’s repeated airings of the documentary, anti-SeaWorld sentiment gets

Did 2006 cellphone law cut CA traffic deaths or not?

Chris Reed October 16, 2015

When California approved a law in 2006 requiring that drivers could only use their cellphones hands-free beginning on July 1, 2008, state leaders patted themselves on the back for pioneering legislation that would inspire the rest of the nation and

Voters will confront more bonds on 2016 ballot

Joel Fox October 15, 2015

State Treasurer John Chiang issued a report recently that praises California’s fiscal strides in dealing with debt but also raises warnings that the state is still in the deep end of the debt pool. The issue of debt will be on

NFL ‘Plan C’ for L.A.: Oakland looks like odd team out

Chris Reed October 13, 2015

As the National Football League enters the stretch of the 2015-16 season, the saga of which team or teams will move to Los Angeles seems less and less mysterious, starting with this near-certitude: The Oakland Raiders aren’t likely to be

Lawmakers upset with vetoes of PUC reforms

Chris Reed October 12, 2015

Many state lawmakers appeared surprised and upset with Gov. Jerry Brown’s weekend decision to veto six measures adopted in response to a series of scandals at the California Public Utilities Commission that have prompted criminal and civil investigations as well

Oregon claim of assisted suicide safeguards has critics

Chris Reed October 9, 2015

A key argument spurring Gov. Jerry Brown’s recent decision to sign a bill allowing physician-assisted suicide in California, and the Legislature’s desire to enact such a law, was that a similar law had worked well in Oregon after its 1997