The timing could not have been more perfect — or more ironic.
As the Legislature mulls Gov. Jerry Brown’s proposal to abolish local redevelopment activities, a San Diego judge has issued a denunciation of one redevelopment agency for running roughshod over private property owners in its zeal to underwrite a big condominium.
National City, a suburb of San Diego, wanted to seize the property under eminent domain to facilitate construction of a 24-story condominium building.
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If the California budget’s whopping deficit were not the Capitol’s preoccupation this year, the Legislature’s most important piece of work might have been Assembly Bill 18.Assemblywoman Julia Brownley, D-Santa Monica, who chairs the Assembly Education Committee, said she introduced the bill to create a more rational and equitable financing mechanism for public schools.
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The timing of Gov. Jerry Brown’s “12-point pension-reform plan” last week was no accident.The plan was released a couple days after his negotiations with Republicans on a state budget deal collapsed. The latter contended that Brown had balked at their demands for public pension reforms because of opposition from unions that helped him win the governorship last year.
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About 90 percent of the men and women who hold seats in the California Legislature are either true-blue liberals or red-meat conservatives, even though polls have consistently indicated that only about half the state’s voters fall into those categories.That’s another way of saying the state’s moderate Democrats, centrist Republicans and independent voters — half of the electorate — have only scant representation in Sacramento.
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As California’s economy roared in the middle years of the last decade — an unsustainable bubble fueled by mortgage funny-money — income and sales taxes flooded into the state treasury.
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California Gov. Jerry Brown said March 10 — scarcely two weeks hence — is “very close” to a drop-dead date for legislators to approve his major budget provisions, especially one placing more than $11 billion a year in tax extensions before voters in June.March 10 also happens to be 60 days since he unveiled his budget for the remainder of the 2010-11 fiscal year and all of the 2011-12 cycle, thus neatly meshing with his self-imposed 60-day window for getting a budget deal done.
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Hundreds of developmentally disabled Californians and their parents and care providers packed the Capitol on Thursday to angrily or tearfully denounce Gov. Jerry Brown’s 2011-12 budget.
It was the latest outpouring of opposition to cuts in health and welfare services he says are needed to close a chronic deficit. Testifying en masse at almost daily legislative hearings, advocates for the poor, the aged and the disabled have hammered on two themes:
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Last year when California prison guards discovered that mass murderer Charles Manson had obtained a cell phone and made calls and sent messages all over the world, it was graphic evidence of a smuggling epidemic.
Prison personnel confiscate thousands of cell phones from inmates each year, and worry aloud they are being used to plot crimes. But oddly, it is not a crime to smuggle them into prisons or possess them.
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Three weeks after proposing big spending cuts and more taxes to close California’s chronic budget deficit, Gov. Jerry Brown beseeched legislators Monday to quickly place his plan before voters, raising the specter of even deeper whacks at education, social services and other public programs if it fails.
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