It will be no surprise if Californians don’t see many needed highway repairs getting underway in the next year. For the Jerry Brown administration says it will take $59 billion to repair state roads, another $78 billion to fix those maintained by cities and counties. This magnitude of repair money is not available from the state’s general fund or from … Read More

For many years, California’s powerful Public Utilities Commission has conducted Kabuki-style dances with the multi-billion-dollar corporations it regulates. The latest significant commission decision amounts to a descent into comic opera. When the PUC deals with rate increase requests from the likes of Pacific Gas & Electric Co., Southern California Edison and the San Diego Gas & Electric Co., the Kabuki … Read More

Rarely has a political party flailed in as many futile ways as California’s branch of the Republican party. In a state where Latinos are plainly on their way to becoming the largest voting bloc, the GOP until this fall maintained a platform plank stating that “allowing illegal immigrants to remain in California undermines respect for the law.” That now has been … Read More

Ballot initiative campaigns don’t usually center around definitions, but the question of what is a pension and what is not is one battle over definitions that is likely to face voters this fall. After years of frustration caused mainly because of failed efforts to change and reduce the pensions that are or will be paid to past and present public … Read More

After three years of steadfastly denying the increased enrollment of foreign and out-of-state students could endanger the very California identity of the University of California, it is stunning and encouraging to see the 10-campus system do an about face. The switch came late last month when U.C. regents voted overwhelmingly for a plan to increase in-state enrollment at the elite … Read More

Anyone looking for a roadmap showing which of California’s 53 congressional district elections will be tight next year need look no farther than how the state’s House Democrats voted last month: At stake was a bill that would essentially halt a federal plan to take in tens of thousands of refugees from Syria and Iraq. The same map shows just … Read More

There is no doubt Gov. Brown has tolerated corruption in his administration. There are hints that he might be personally involved. For corruption Mr. Brown has known about but not curbed, start with the Public Utilities Commission, proven to have decided multi-billion-dollar rate cases after lengthy private contacts and email exchanges between commissioners, their staff and utility executives. Then there … Read More

There was good news and bad news – and no news at all – in the latest results of standardized tests given each year to California public school students. It was no news that even though this year’s test was more rigorous than ever before and based on new Common Core standards adopted by this state and 41 others, students … Read More

Critics call California’s three-year-old top two primary election system a jungle primary. It tosses candidates of all stripes into the same pot, forcing them to speak to all voters since only the two leading vote-getters make it into November runoff elections. By this time next year, the national Republican Party might be wishing this system were in effect much more … Read More

At 8:05 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 3, anyone in San Mateo County who cared knew that the county’s (almost) all-mail election was a resounding success. That is when the county published the results from 68,988 ballots that arrived by mail before Election Day. The election wasn’t completely over, but those votes amounted to 75 percent of all ballots cast in the … Read More