California’s vaunted bullet train has yet to carry a single passenger but it has managed to make the news. As it turns out, the state’s High-Speed Rail Authority offered a contract extension of $3 million on a noncompetitive basis. In other words, it was a no-bid sweetheart deal. That emerged in a new report…
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Joel Kotkin, a Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University, charts “California’s Descent to Socialism,” a new statist strain that “more resembles feudalism than social democracy” and being advanced by, “among others, hedge-fund-billionaire-turned-green-patriarch Tom Steyer.” He wants to double down on environmental and land-use regulation but as Kotkin observes, the state’s already severe land-use…
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As we noted, California’s Board of Equalization has managed to misallocate nearly $50 million in tax revenue. BOE members have been spending public funds to promote themselves, staging useless events, and dishing out raises to high-salaried staff without performance reviews. The shabbily constructed BOE headquarters in Sacramento remains a safety threat and bottomless money…
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California governor Jerry Brown has signed off on a $5.2 billion deal that will raise the tax on gasoline, raise the tax on diesel and raise user fees on motorists. Before the Memorial Day weekend, Brown ranted that those who complain about this tax hike are “freeloaders.” This doesn’t deserve a response, but taxpayers…
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Last December, California governor Jerry Brown signed AB 1570, authored by former Republican assemblywoman Ling Ling Chang. Chang’s measure alters the state’s “autograph law,” formerly limited to sports memorabilia, to include any signed item worth more than $5, including books. As Anastasia Bolden of the Pacific Legal Foundation notes, this makes it “extremely risky,…
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As anybody looking for a house or apartment can easily verify, California is in the throes of a housing crisis. In Oroville, for example, many low-income residents live in 1960s-vintage housing built for dam construction workers. Across the state, home ownership rates are the lowest since the 1940s and according to California’s Housing Future:…
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Randal Mills is stepping down as president of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, but that’s not the news. The $3 billion state stem-cell agency is running out of money and according to David Jensen of the California Stem Cell Report, founder Robert Klein “is talking about asking California voters for another $5 billion.”…
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When we last checked in with the University of California they were spending $504 million, more than half a billion dollars, on a computer system that was supposed to cost $156 million. The UCPath project costs taxpayers three times as much as announced, and remains four years behind schedule. UC president Janet Napolitano also…
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In recent years the University of California has been hiking tuition, and when students at UC Davis held a peaceful protest, campus police pepper sprayed them. The ensuing $1 million settlement was mostly waste, with attorneys and consultants cashing in on every hand. In response to funding cuts, the bloated UC bureaucracy began to…
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During winter storms back in February, the emergency spillway of the Oroville dam failed, forcing the evacuation of nearly 200,000 people. Engineers had known for decades that the rock-and-soil spillway was unreliable but did nothing. California Rep. John Garamendi said the spillway “worked fine until it had to be used.” Governor Jerry Brown said,…
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