Years of lobbying for what the Brown administration dubbed the WaterFix project had produced more indifference and outright opposition than support. The $16.7 billion plan would build two 35-mile-long, 40-foot-high tunnels to take water south from the Sacramento River to the State Water Project pumps in the town of Tracy. The governor argued that this would sharply reduce the intermittent heavy pumping that played havoc with endangered species in the fragile Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta and would firm up supplies both for Central Valley farmers and the 20 million-plus residents of Southern California.

But in September, the board of the Westlands Water District – which serves 600,000 acres of farmland in King and Fresno counties and is the largest U.S. agricultural district – voted 7-1 against providing about $3 billion for the project. Westlands officials trashed claims made for WaterFix, questioning whether it would actually stabilize the Delta ecosystem and predicting cost overruns.

In November, the Trump administration announced that the federal government would not provide any financial assistance to get the project built. While the Interior Department statement was not unexpected, it contributed to the sense the WaterFix proposal was foundering. By February, Brown administration officials had put the word out they would accept building only one tunnel under the delta and adding a second later.

MWD backed scaled-back project, then changed mind

The death of the original plan appeared confirmed on April 2 when officials with the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California – the giant, politically powerful water wholesaler serving 19 million people – issued a memo expressing support for the one-tunnel option. The rationale: a lack of a consensus for the two-tunnel plan among the water districts south of Sacramento that would need to pay for the project.

But after intense lobbying by the Brown administration, on April 10, the MWD board voted by a 3-to-2 margin to endorse the two-tunnels project and to agree to pay for about two-thirds of the tab – about $10.8 billion. The weighted vote, based on the size of individual agencies, came over the objections of the MWD board’s single largest member, the San Diego County Water Authority.

Momentum continued to build last Wednesday when the board of the Santa Clara Valley Water District – the biggest water agency in Silicon Valley – voted 4-3 to commit its 2 million ratepayers to pay up to $650 million for the project, or nearly 4 percent of the total tab. Santa Clara officials had previously narrowly opposed providing funding.

On Thursday, Brown hailed the decision in a speech to a conference of the Association of California Water Agencies in Sacramento. But the governor also warned that the project still had big obstacles that went beyond getting more water districts to agree to share construction costs. He noted that state and federal regulators still had yet to issue required permits.

On this front, WaterFix may face more skepticism in Brown’s backyard than in Washington. As CalWatchdog reported last year, the Trump administration gave a key senior Interior Department post to Colorado lawyer David Bernhardt, a veteran of California water wars and a critic of the federal government’s traditionally high-profile role in land-use decisions in Western states.

Meanwhile, the California Water Resources Control Board has sided with environmentalists in a long list of previous decisions. In filings with the state board, Restore the Delta and several other environmental groups have challenged the governor’s project on its central claim: that it improves the health of the Delta ecosystem.

Even if the state and federal permits are granted, the tunnels plan still faces hurdles. The Bay Area News Group reported last week that more than two dozen state and federal lawsuits had been filed against the project.

U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ Jan. 4

While none of the four U.S. attorneys’ offices in California have taken high-profile enforcement steps to date, at least two may be inclined to take on legal marijuana in some way – especially given that Sessions has already complained that pot being grown in the state is being trafficked in other states where it remains illegal.

In the California Eastern District based in Sacramento, President Donald Trump nominated McGregor “Greg” Scott to serve as U.S. attorney, returning to a job he held under President George W. Bush. He was sworn in Dec. 29. His large district is mostly inland California, from the Oregon border to the Inland Empire, including Humboldt County, ground zero for the Golden State’s pot culture.

Cannabis advocates worry about Sacramento U.S. attorney

While the Sacramento Bee editorial page hailed Scott’s selection, the Bee’s newsroom reported earlier this month that marijuana advocates are on edge because of Scott’s history of aggressively targeting medical marijuana in his first stint on the job. Scott’s office received national attention in 2008 when it secured 20-year and 21-year sentences for two Modesto men whom Scott said were running a criminal empire – not a clinic.

The Cal NORML marijuana advocacy group blasted Scott for urging local prosecutors to refer medical marijuana cases to his office, calling it “particularly notorious for harsh sentences against medical marijuana defendants.”

“He used to be a hardcore, anti-cannabis drug warrior,” Sebastopol criminal defense attorney Omar Figueroa told the Bee. “I hope he has evolved.”

Scott offered no overview of his intentions beyond issuing a statement saying he would review marijuana cases “in accordance with our district’s federal law enforcement priorities and resources.”

Cartel prosecutor takes reins in San Diego with tough statement

The other California U.S. attorney who might be inclined to take a hard line on pot is Adam Braverman in the San Diego-based Southern district. Braverman was sworn in Nov. 16 after years as a hard-charging prosecutor in the San Diego office targeting drug cartels which operate on both sides of the U.S-Mexico border. His statement echoed Sessions’ remarks that individual states should have no expectations that federal drug laws would go unenforced just because their voters or legislators had approved legal use of pot.

“The Department of Justice is committed to reducing violent crime and enforcing the laws as enacted by Congress. The cultivation, distribution and possession of marijuana has long been and remains a violation of federal law,” Braverman’s statement said. “We will continue to utilize long-established prosecutorial priorities to carry out our mission to combat violent crime, disrupt and dismantle transnational criminal organizations, and stem the rising tide of the drug crisis.”

Earlier this month, former prosecutor and criminal defense lawyer Nicola Hanna was named interim U.S. attorney for the Central District, based in Los Angeles. Hanna, who is expected to get the job on a permanent basis, has kept quiet on Sessions’ announcement. His office refers questions to Justice Department headquarters in Washington.

Any crackdown on cannabis might be difficult just from a resources perspective for Hanna. His office serves an area with 18 million residents in Los Angeles and Orange counties and five adjacent counties – by far the most heavily populated of any office. It is often responsible for complex cases involving not just drugs and white-collar crime but also national security.

Views of acting U.S. attorney in San Francisco unclear

In the Northern District based in San Francisco, U.S. Attorney Brian Stretch resigned within days after Sessions’ policy change, though he said the decision was unrelated.

Alex G. Tse is serving as the acting U.S. attorney after being Stretch’s second-in-command. Tse has kept a low profile to date on Sessions’ policy reversal.

However, his office was known for its aggressive targeting of Oakland’s Harborside Health Center, which the Feedly marijuana news website says is “perhaps the state’s best-known dispensary.”

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, based in San Francisco, threw out prosecutors’ case against Harborside in 2016, saying they had ignored Congress’ direction that medical-marijuana dispensaries operating within state laws should be left alone.

Reporting from across California indicates that more college students are homeless than at any point in state history. While hard statistics are in short supply, surveys suggest the problem is so severe that the Golden State has far more than the overall total of 135,000

The stories hammer home how the housing affordability crisis isn’t just squeezing low-income families in California. It’s limiting how much help middle-income families can give children attending college. After paying for college costs and food, many students don’t have enough money for shelter.

In April, the New York Times reported that California State University estimated that 8 percent to 12 percent of its 470,000 students experienced homelessness in 2016 – at least 37,000 students.

”This is not just happening in urban poor communities,” Eloy Ortiz Oakley, chancellor of the California Community Colleges, told the Times. ”Homelessness now affects working-class and formerly middle-class families.”

In August, the Southern California News Group reported that a recent survey by the Los Angeles Community College District showed 18 percent of the 250,000 students at its nine colleges had experienced homelessness in the previous year. That’s about 45,000 students.

The report noted that Rio Hondo College in Whittier was taking unprecedented steps to address student homelessness, including encouraging students to shower on campus and planning to open a campus pantry to feed destitute students.

In August, a report in San Diego CityBeat detailed how officials at UC San Diego and San Diego State University and local aid agencies had ramped up efforts to help impoverished students with food and shelter. It noted that helping homeless college students was not a priority at local shelters.

Problem is worst in high-cost Silicon Valley

But the epicenter of California’s homeless college student problem appears to be in Silicon Valley, where housing costs are for the most part even higher than in Southern California. Last week, a nonprofit group that helps struggling young people in Santa Clara County – the Bill Wilson Center – released a study that estimated that 44 percent of community college students in the county were either homeless or lacked consistent access to stable housing.

Mike Pritchard, a homeless counselor in Santa Clara County, told the San Francisco Chronicle the high numbers were what he expected: “This is what I see all over the Bay Area and in many parts of this country. People are being forced out of their situations, rents are being jacked up. It’s getting worse, everywhere.”

The problems are not limited to areas close to the coast. In July, the Riverside Press-Enterprise reported on a private Riverside County program that helped 600 poor college students at UC Riverside and Norco College to stabilize their lives, including help finding housing.

In an effort to determine the severity of the college housing crisis, state Sen. Janet Nguyen, R-Garden Grove, introduced Senate Bill 307 in February. It sought to establish a task force with representatives from the University of California, the California State University and the California Community Colleges to conduct “a study to determine the extent, causes and effects of housing insecurity and homelessness of current and future students.”

In May, SB307 passed three Senate committees and the Senate as a whole without a negative vote. But after it passed the Assembly Higher Education Committee in July on another unanimous vote, the measure stalled in the Assembly – without ever facing formal opposition from a lawmaker.

Continuing a longstanding bipartisan tradition, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra came

Assemblyman Travis Allen, R-Huntington Beach, is sponsoring a measure to repeal the fuel tax and vehicle fee hikes approved this spring. The description given to Allen’s proposal by Becerra’s office didn’t mention taxes or fees. Instead, it said the measure “eliminates recently enacted road repair and transportation funding by repealing revenues dedicated for those purposes.”

Allen’s lawyers said the description was fundamentally deceptive. Last week, Sacramento Superior Court Judge Timothy M. Frawley agreed: “The Attorney General’s title and summary … must be changed to avoid misleading the voters and creating prejudice against the measure,” he wrote.

The revision Frawley ordered: “Repeals recently enacted gas and diesel taxes and vehicle registration fees. Eliminates road repair and transportation programs funded by these taxes and fees.”

The perception of attorneys general using ballot language to manipulate voters has been common for decades.

When Becerra’s predecessor, fellow Democrat Kamala Harris, was attorney general before her election in November to the U.S. Senate, Republicans alleged she was particularly ready to put her thumb on the scale. The ballot description for 2016’s successful Proposition 58 made it seem as if it reinforced English-learning standards in state public schools when its primary intent was to repeal mandatory English-only immersion programs required by 1998’s Proposition 227. In 2015, Harris was trashed by the San Francisco Chronicle’s editorial board for effectively killing pension reform measures with what the board called ballot descriptions that sounded like “union talking points.”

When Gov. Jerry Brown was attorney general before Harris, his office also courted controversy. Two of his ballot descriptions were castigated by state judges in the same week in August 2010.

One was for Proposition 23, an unsuccessful measure which would have suspended implementation of state climate-change pollution rules. The initial ballot language was condemned as prejudicial and misleading by Frawley, the same judge who recently ruled against Becerra.

Two days after Frawley’s ruling, Sacramento Superior Court Judge Patrick Marlette rejected ballot language for Proposition 25. The successful ballot measure’s key change was to allow the state Legislature to approve a state budget on a simple majority vote. The ballot language Brown approved made it appear as if the measure’s main intent was to reinforce the requirement that the Legislature could only approve tax increases on a two-thirds vote of both the Assembly and the Senate.

Republican attorneys general also accused of voter manipulation

But in the 20th century, when it wasn’t unusual to have Republicans holding statewide office in California, GOP attorneys general drew fire as well for their perceived ballot language machinations.

The most famous example was in 1978, when California voters approved Proposition 13 to put sharp limits on how much property taxes could increase annually. Neither the ballot title or summary approved by GOP Attorney General Evelle Younger mentioned that it also would raise the threshold for raising taxes in the Legislature to a two-thirds vote.

In 1996, Republican Attorney General Dan Lungren also drew fire over the ballot language he approved for Proposition 209, a successful measure limiting the use of racial preferences by state government. In 2012, Chronicle editorial page editor John Diaz revisited criticism first made in 1996, arguing that Lungren used “loaded words” to sell opposition to affirmative action.

With a seeming vote of confidence from the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California – the giant agency that supplies water to about half the state’s 38 million residents – Gov. Jerry Brown appears set to soldier ahead with his $17 billion plan to build two 35-mile-long tunnels under the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

Brown’s view that the tunnels are crucial both to stabilize the Delta ecosystem and to shore up the state’s water distribution system was rejected last week by the board of the Westlands Water District, which voted 7-1 against joining in the “California WaterFix” project. Westlands – the nation’s largest agricultural water district with 600,000 acres of farmland in Fresno and Kings counties – had been counted on to cover about $3 billion of the project’s total cost.

But Westlands officials voted “no” after expressing concern both about the high price-tag they’d have to pay and about whether WaterFix truly would make water supplies more consistent and reliable. The water district was the first in the state to decide on whether to sign up for the project, and its decisive early opposition appeared to stun some supporters.

This led to reports that Brown’s legacy project could be all but dead by Oct. 10, when the MWD is scheduled to vote on whether to participate. The agency is expected to cover $4 billion of the project’s cost.

But on Tuesday, MWD leaders indicated that at least for now, they were still supportive. Board member Larry McKenney said it was in MWD’s interest to try to promote confidence in the project going forward, according to a Sacramento Bee report. MWD shares Brown’s view that the project is crucial for long-term water distribution reliability.

Brown’s would-be successors cool to his plan

Yet the MWD reprieve might not save the day for WaterFix. For months, Sacramento insiders have noted that Brown appears far more enthusiastic about the project than other significant players in state politics – including those running to succeed him as governor next year.

Los Angeles Times columnist George Skelton reported Tuesday that Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, state Treasurer John Chiang and former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa had each expressed doubts about the project. Newsom and Chiang worried about its environmental impact on the Delta and beyond, while Villaraigosa suggested bold new conservation programs should be tried to see if they could save enough water to make the tunnels unnecessary.

But even if the Westlands district, Newsom, Chiang and Villaraigosa were all on the WaterFix bandwagon, its future would hardly be assured. Environmentalists have a long history of suing and winning over California water policies. In June, they filed the first two of what could be several federal lawsuits targeting Brown’s project in response to a preliminary go-ahead given by the Trump administration.

The Natural Resources Defense Council, the Defenders of Wildlife, the Bay Institute and the Golden Gate Salmon Association alleged that the project would wipe out salmon, smelt and other fish and would worsen water quality not just in the Delta but the San Francisco Bay.

While the Trump administration gave initial approval to WaterFix, it too could prove a wildcard. House Republican Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield and other GOP lawmakers from California have urged the White House to challenge water allocation policies they have long argued favor Delta fish over human beings.

While it didn’t register as significant news in California, Trump’s nomination of David Bernhardt to the No. 2 job in the Interior Department this spring suggested changes in how the federal government deals with water in the Golden State could be in the offing.

As CalWatchdog reported in June, Bernhardt is a Colorado-based partner in Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, a law firm which has represented the Westlands Water District in federal lawsuits targeting Interior Department policies. This background and other concerns led 43 Senate Democrats to vote against his confirmation in July.

The 2017 session of the California Legislature may be remembered as when the criminal justice reform movement in America’s largest state lost its momentum.

The movement entered the session with a head of steam after winning majority support from the Legislature and then the public for Proposition 47 in 2014 and for Proposition 57 in 2016. The former measure reclassified dozens of “nonviolent” and “nonserious” offenses from felonies to misdemeanors. The latter made it easier for nonviolent felons to win parole.

This year, the same rationale that civil liberties groups, progressive think tanks and minority organizations offered for Propositions 47 and 57 was invoked in seeking sweeping statewide bail reform and a pilot program allowing drug addicts to inject themselves in safe settings in several cities and counties. That rationale: California’s criminal justice system is not only far too punitive, it focuses too much on punishment and not enough on rehabilitation.

State Sen. Bob Hertzberg, D-Van Nuys, and Assemblyman Rob Bonta, D-Oakland, led the push for putting sharp limits on the state’s money bail system in favor of a system that largely trusted suspects without serious criminal histories to not go on the lam. They argued that California’s highest-in-the-nation bail requirements were unnecessary to get the accused to show up for trial and had the effect of destroying lives of suspects by forcing them to spend months in jail, unable to post 10 percent of their bail and secure a guarantee from a bail bondsman.

The fact that more than half the people in state jails are there not because they had been convicted of crimes but because they can’t post bail resonated not just with those who saw bail laws as unfair but with those who saw the system as wildly expensive.

This prompted optimism from Hertzberg in an interview with the Los Angeles Times before the 2017 session began: “Now you have a whole host of groups on both sides of the aisle looking at the cost and fairness of the system,” he said.

But the high point for the reform push came on May 31, when Hertzberg’s SB10 passed the Senate 26-11. A day later, the Assembly rejected AB42, Bonta’s identical bill, on a 35-37 vote.

Supporters of the measures expressed frustration that the governor waited until late August to offer support – and then only with the proviso that the bills be taken up in 2018, not in the closing days of the 2017 session. But it’s an open question whether Brown could have muscled the measures to passage. While other local and state governments have reported success with bail reform, Maryland’s adoption of no-cash bail reform last year has won wide attention for its troubled start. The Washington Post reported in July that the number of trial no-shows had more than doubled under the new system.

No to ‘government-sanctioned drug dens’

The other proposed reform made similar halting progress before being put aside for possible reconsideration in 2018. AB186 by Susan Talamantes Eggman, D-Stockton, would have established safe areas in a handful of cities and counties for drug users to inject themselves without fear of being charged with crimes, among several provisions. Drug law reformers argued that this would reduce the carnage from the opioid crisis by making it easier to treat overdoses and by getting addicts in touch with health care professionals. The program would lapse in 2022.

But law enforcement groups voiced sweeping objections to the law, saying it would create “government-sanctioned drug dens with no requirement that participants enter treatment,” in the words of a state Senate analysis, among many criticisms.

The bill passed the Assembly on June 1 with 21 votes – the bare minimum for approval – before being rejected by the Senate on Sept. 12 after gaining only 17 of the needed 21 votes.

A

Under Senate Bill 149, introduced by state Sens. Mike McGuire, D-Healdsburg, and Scott Weiner, D-San Francisco, presidential candidates would be ineligible for the California primary and general election ballots unless they had released their tax returns for the previous five years.

If Brown signs the bill, this would mean Trump couldn’t appear on the 2020 California ballot if he ran for re-election and secured the Republican nomination – at least if he stuck to his opposition to disclosing his taxes. McGuire and Weiner insist the bill is a serious attempt to respond to Trump’s refusal to release his returns during the 2016 campaign. Republicans and some Capitol insiders see it as one more attempt to convey Trump-loathing after a legislative session which saw similar frequent displays.

Enactment of the law seems certain to trigger a legal challenge. State-imposed term limits on members of Congress were thrown out in 1995 by the U.S. Supreme Court on the grounds that states couldn’t tell the federal government who was eligible for federal office.

But so far at least, a cross-section of legal authorities believe SB149 could be upheld if it becomes law, allowing California to impose requirements beyond the present basics that a presidential candidate must be a natural-born citizen who is at least 35 and who has lived in the U.S. for 14 or more years.

Given that the requirement is not onerous and is related to qualification for office, “our research and reflection lead us to conclude that tax return disclosure laws … comport fully with the U.S. Constitution,” wrote Laurence Tribe, Norman Eisen and Richard Painter. Tribe and Eisen have histories of Democratic allegiances, while Painter was an ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush.

UC Irvine law professor Richard Hasen, considered one of the nation’s top election-law experts, said it is difficult to anticipate what federal courts might hold, given that SB 149 appears to bring elements of the U.S. Constitution into conflict. In interviews earlier this year, when the McGuire-Weiner bill first won notice, Hasen stressed the measure’s novelty: “Nobody’s tried it before.”

Tactic could be used against Sanders, Clinton

One reason for that might be political operatives’ awareness the tactic could be used against their preferred candidates in future elections.

In swing states controlled by Republican legislatures and governors like Wisconsin and Ohio, for example, attempts could be made in 2020 to deny ballot placement to candidates who had not belonged to a major party over most of the preceding year (Sen. Bernie Sanders); who had not fully complied with document requests from federal investigators (former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton) or who didn’t offer full details on business deals undertaken with donors (many candidates). As Los Angeles Times columnist George Skelton wrote, the potential for mischief is immense:

What would be next? A requirement that every candidate release a thorough health fitness report disclosing all past illnesses? Make the candidates pledge to campaign in California for at least 10 days? And how would red states retaliate? Force every candidate to disclose whether they’ve ever voted for a tax increase?

But the San Jose Mercury-News recently pointed out a detail that suggests this debate could be academic. Brown refused to release his tax returns when running for governor in 2010 and 2014. Signing SB149 and going after Trump for his refusal to do so would seem problematic at best for the governor.

From pioneering air-pollution control programs in Los Angeles County in

So when Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de León introduced Senate Bill 100 in January, the expectations were high. The measure committed California to generating 50 percent of electricity from renewable sources by 2026 – four years earlier than the present goal – and to 60 percent by 2030 and to 100 percent by 2045. No government remotely as large as California’s had made such a commitment.

In spring interviews with reporters at an energy conference in Orange County, the Los Angeles Democrat depicted his bill as a common-sense measure to goad investor-owned utilities into making long-term shifts in their infrastructure to prepare for an all-renewable future. He said progress had been so quick that he expected the state to meet the 50 percent renewable standard “in the early 2020s without breaking a sweat.” But he also depicted SB100 as setting up “the most ambitious program in the world.”

When it passed the California Senate on a mostly party-line vote in May, the world took notice. The New York Times set the tone: In a 2,100-word analysis headlined “Fighting Trump on Climate, California Becomes a Global Force,” it depicted the bill as a key part of California’s determination to take over the global lead in environmentalism from Washington.

But earlier this month, SB100 failed to even get a floor vote in the Assembly as lawmakers wrapped up business for the year. A Desert Sun report depicted the decision as “unexpected.”

That’s not how it looked to some insiders. Business groups spent months hammering home the argument that it was risky to commit to 100 percent renewable energy use when it was not clear that was either feasible or safe for a modern economy. In a June interview with the San Diego Union-Tribune, Gary Ackerman, executive director of the Western Power Trading Forum, depicted SB100 as “reckless” and with a huge downside. The arguments echoed those made by Pacific Gas & Electric, Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric, the state’s three giant investor-owner utilities, which quietly have established strong ties with Democratic lawmakers in poor districts buffeted by high energy costs.

IBEW adopted, modified utilities’ argument

Meanwhile, de León didn’t enjoy unified support on the Democratic front. An argument the utilities had been making – that SB100 was potentially a hugely disruptive force – was adopted and modified by some labor leaders. They worried what a 100 percent commitment to renewable energy might mean for thousands of union members. According to an NBC News report, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, Local 1245, began opposing the bill in late summer because the local union alleged de León had gone back on his promise to protect union jobs.

But a third factor may also have been at play. De León has never enjoyed the broad goodwill accorded his predecessor, Darrell Steinberg, now the mayor of Sacramento. Soon after taking over as Senate leader in late 2014, de León was the target of a scathing column by then-Sacramento Bee pundit Dan Walters for mistakes, power plays and a lack of humility. He faced similar criticism from the Sacramento Bee’s editorial board.

De León has since emerged as a legislative powerhouse, at least according to the conventional wisdom that holds that the 2017 session was one of the most productive in recent history. But his clout couldn’t overcome the late-emerging opposition to SB100.

The lobbying will begin all over again for the measure in January, the Greentech website reported.

“We’re going to be back next year,” said Peter Miller, Western energy project director at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told the website. “I don’t want to underestimate the challenges to moving to a fully zero-carbon grid, but we can get there, and we will.”

When Gov. Jerry Brown persuaded the Legislature

The first point has been the subject of contention for years because some school reform and civil rights groups allege LCFF dollars have been diverted to district general funds, in particular to raise pay for teachers. But until this month, the second point – about the gains that would result from local control – hadn’t been the source of significant controversy.

That may change with the release of a report by a high-profile Canadian education expert – Michael Fullan – and colleague Santiago Rincon-Gallardo. Fullan helped the province of Ontario overhaul its curriculum and, like Gov. Brown, is a well-established skeptic about top-down education reform who has been a sounding board for Golden State education officials in recent years, according to the EdSource website.

But the report he co-authored – entitled “California’s Golden Opportunity” – raises profound questions about California’s venture into local control. Its most striking findings focus on the lack of both enthusiasm for and expertise in crafting education reforms at the local level. The reports also notes how powerful a factor inertia is in the school districts that were surveyed. These same problems have been cited by advocates of “top down” education reform for decades.

The researchers were generous with their praise for LCFF’s basic framework and its inclusionary, open approach to figuring out how to improve schools. They also cite superintendents who prefer elements of the landmark 2013 law to previous policies.

“Even though its implementation has been somewhat bumpy and cumbersome, LCFF is viewed positively across California’s education system – from central offices to school districts,” their report noted. “There is a widely shared perception that the new funding strategy is much better than the older one and that the system is moving in the right direction.”

Districts see local reform plans as busywork

But Fullan and Rincon-Gallardo wrote that their interviews showed the most basic LCFF obligation – having each district prepare Local Control Accountability Plans – was often treated more as mandatory paperwork to be filled out in pro forma fashion than the starting point for pursuing reform.

Fullan and Rincon-Gallardo said the state should provide far more help to local districts in crafting local reforms. One reason: County offices of education in the great majority of the state’s 58 counties weren’t up to the task. The California Collaborative for Education Excellence – the state agency set up to help districts with LCAPs – needs far more resources, they wrote.

While the report notes problems with motivating local officials to pursue reform, it also includes a tough view of LCFF implementation from those at the local level. It noted that district officials interviewed “across the board” complained of a disconnect between what county- and state-level educators were doing and actions that would actually yield “improved teaching and learning in the classroom.”

Nonetheless, State Board of Education President Michael Kirst treated the report as more positive than negative in an email sent to EdSource. Kirst wrote that the report amounted to “confirmation that California is on the right track … . We have a lot of work ahead as we complete implementation of the Local Control Funding Formula and appreciate [Fullan’s] thoughtful and pragmatic recommendations.”

The California Legislature enters the final week of its 2017 session with ambitious measures on immigration, renewable energy and housing still up in the air.

Two of the measures have been championed by state Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de Leon, D-Los Angeles.

One – SB54 – would put relatively strong limits on how much local and state law enforcement agencies could cooperate with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement branch of Homeland Security and other federal immigration authorities.

Labelled the “sanctuary state” bill by critics and de Leon alike, it passed the state Senate in March. But law enforcement officials’ concerns have won a friendlier reception in the Assembly, where the bill appears stalled despite approvals from three committees. Some sheriffs have warned the bill would put California on a collision course with Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the U.S. Justice Department, which has already acted to withhold funds from “sanctuary cities” on the grounds that the federal government alone sets immigration policy.

Sessions’ recent announcement that the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program would end in six months could give fresh fuel to the “sanctuary state” bill. Under the program, an estimated 200,000 California youths who were brought here as children have some legal rights. Protecting this group from deportation or other negative consequences has been a priority of state Democrats since Trump’s election last November.

Another high-profile de Leon bill also passed the Senate in May before facing a cooler reception in the Assembly. SB100 would set a goal for state utilities of having 60 percent of their electricity generated by renewable sources by 2030 – up from the present goal of 50 percent – and require utilities to plan to be 100 percent renewable by 2045.

While the measure has passed three Assembly committees, most recently the appropriations panel on Sept. 1, its future may depend on whether Gov. Jerry Brown provides a last-minute boost. Utility lobbyists say the state is already making perhaps the biggest gains of any large state in shifting to renewable energy and that they don’t need a further push by Sacramento.

Housing bond, real-estate fee may be packaged

Two measures to address the state’s housing crisis – including one measure long seen as a slam dunk – also await final approval.

The first – SB3 by Sen. Jim Beall, D-San Jose – won some Republican support when it passed the Senate. It would ask California voters to approve $4 billion in general obligation bonds next year to pay for construction of affordable rental housing and “smart growth” projects near transit hubs and to revitalize the state’s veteran home loan program, which is expected to use up all of its present funding at some point in 2018.

SB3 was initially expected to be approved late last month. Reports over the weekend suggested that delays may be because of the desire to package SB3 as part of a comprehensive deal that could rescue the second high-profile housing bill – SB2 by Sen. Toni Atkins, D-San Diego. To generate an estimated $250 million a year in reliable, permanent funding for affordable housing projects, it would increase fees by $75 on some real-estate transactions.

Because it is a fee hike, it needs two-thirds support from both houses to advance to Brown’s desk. In July, it passed the Senate with the bare minimum of 27 votes. But insiders have been skeptical for weeks that the measure can get the 54 votes necessary to pass the Assembly. No Republican Assembly members back the bill, meaning all 54 Assembly Democrats would have to be yes voters for it to advance.

A Los Angeles Times report last month suggested that was unlikely because some Assembly Democrats in swing districts didn’t want to vote for a measure that could be depicted as a tax hike after having already voted to raise fuel taxes earlier this year.