Waiting for Orange County’s 28 school districts to post their annual audited financial statements for the year ending June 30, 2024, was an exercise in patience. All but one completed their audits before Dec. 31, which is extremely commendable. But five districts didn’t post their accountability requirements until mid-year 2025. Two were as late as...
When it comes to self-congratulatory, performative environmentalism, San Franciscans probably lead the pack. They declared a “climate emergency,” and then, in defiance of a court ruling, they banned natural gas hookups in new buildings. To further their war on personal automotive transportation, they closed Highway One to traffic, a vital north/south thoroughfare. And they’re creating “urban biodiversity” by planting trees and “restoring natural...
When we talk about EVs, it is reasonable to suggest that at their current level of price and performance, whoever wants to use one has already made the purchase. After a decade of rapid year-over-year growth, EV sales in California in 2024 were actually a bit lower than they were in 2023. There aren’t enough...
SEIU California expands its membership and its coffers by trying to bring open borders. The week’s riots in Los Angeles kicked off with the June 6 arrest of David Huerta, president of the Service Employees International Union’s California chapter. You might expect a union boss to favor immigration enforcement in the name of protecting his members’...
On June 12, the California High-Speed Rail Authority (CHRSA) released a 14-page letter rebutting the Federal Railroad Administration’s (FRA’s) case for rescinding $4 billion in grant funding. The Authority plans to provide a more detailed response in July, but the initial letter contains a lot to chew on. Some of CHSRA’s claims are not unreasonable....
In the heart of Silicon Valley, where innovation is supposed to reign supreme, the Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) has become a textbook example of government waste, mismanagement, and the creep of crony politics that prioritize insiders over the public good. The agency’s latest draft budget for Fiscal Year 2027 (FY27) projects a staggering $14.9 million...
All social movements require a patron saint. Californians who support illegal immigration believe they have theirs: David Huerta, president of the state’s Service Employees International Union, or SEIU. Federal officers in Los Angeles arrested Huerta during a protest outside a business where ICE was executing a search warrant Friday — just one skirmish in what...
One of the most controversial water issues in California is the proposed Delta Conveyance. The 45-mile-long tunnel will have the capacity to move up to 4 million acre feet per year from the Sacramento River safely under the fragile delta ecosystem, delivering water to southbound aqueducts. That’s not bad. But the reservoir storage necessary to allow the...
As a father of five children and a lifelong advocate for educational excellence in California, I take the well-being and future of our students personally and seriously. I have spent my career working on education policy, including running for State Superintendent of Public Instruction in 2022, because I believe every child—regardless of their zip code—deserves...
A false solution to a true problem Bay Area transportation and housing initiatives are often portrayed as solutions to the climate catastrophe we are facing due to excessive greenhouse gas emissions from human activity. The thinking is that if we could get everyone to live in apartments near stations on electrified transit systems, thereby removing...
One of the biggest debates over environmental stewardship is whether a degraded ecosystem is best left completely alone to recover or whether it should instead be restored by increasing human intervention and management. A perfect example of this is the conifer forests of California, extending over nearly 30,000 square miles. For millennia, lightning strikes ignited fires that...
The moral argument for resuming oil drilling in California is simple: the state still relies on petroleum for fifty percent of its annual energy inputs, and until we can overcome that reliance, we should be producing it here, where it’s subject to the most responsible environmental and labor standards in the world. This argument holds up...
A bill to allow more time to track down and file charges for these massive fraud schemes is languishing in the Senate. For all of the five-year remembrances of Covid-19, few have paused to recall the cyber smash-and-grab that hoovered billions of dollars out of state unemployment offices. Inmates in California grabbed thousands of dollars from prison library...
California has declared war on its middle class, and the special interests controlling the state are doing everything they can to impose this punitive economic model on the rest of America. It’s a quasi-feudal system, with the entire population divided into aristocrats and serfs. The means to destroy the middle class is to engineer an...