California Gov. Gavin Newsom recently signed a “landmark package of bills” to overhaul the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). He took the unusual step of holding up the budget until the Legislature passed them. For the blissfully uninitiated, CEQA, signed in 1970 by Gov. Ronald Reagan, is California’s gift to litigators, bureaucrats and every special interest that...
California’s “disaster recovery” plan isn’t about rebuilding homes—it’s about replacing homeowners with tenants and handing their land to corporate-government cartels. Remember Gavin Newsom’s first visit to the sites of devastating fires last January in Los Angeles, when he vowed to streamline California’s paralytic regulations so people could quickly rebuild their homes? In that interview, while...
It’s time to review our collective fascination with perpetuating mandatory government school attendance. Since the beginning of statehood, Californians have pursued education at a steep cost to produce a free society in the frontier along the Pacific Ocean. During the height of the Mexican–American War, women like Olive Mann Isbell established the first school in...
Silicon Valley veterans view Sacramento’s obsession with renewables mandates with pragmatic detachment. Blessed with disposable income sufficient to make them indifferent to the price of gasoline or electricity, they view life on the bleeding edge as an opportunity for California to lead the world into the electric age. They’re not wrong. Heartless, perhaps. But not...
Unrestrained public employee union power drives up costs, erodes accountability, and holds taxpayer’s hostage, especially in California. The Power Imbalance at the Heart of Governance Public employee unions consistently put their interests ahead of what serves the broader public, creating a dynamic fundamentally different from private-sector unions that must run within market constraints. These public...
Conservative criticism of California focuses, with good reason, on the perils of progressive ideology. The dysfunction caused by progressives in power is evident in the state’s dismal system of public education, its ongoing challenges maintaining law and order, and chronic, escalating state and local government budget deficits that threaten to entirely collapse services that are...
Although Governor Newsom and Rail Authority management are in denial, President Trump’s decision to claw back $4 billion in California high-speed rail funding is likely the coup de grace for the state project. But the state’s other high-speed rail project, Brightline West’s effort to connect Rancho Cucamonga with Las Vegas, also faces headwinds and may...
It’s well known by now that California’s refinery capacity is stretched to the limit. The state’s total crude oil consumption last year was 1.40 million barrels per day, with daily refinery capacity at 1.62 million barrels per day. When accounting for downtime for maintenance and accidents such as the fire in the PBF refinery in Martinez, that’s a thin...
We are told that water scarcity in the arid American West is inevitable and that the great water projects of the past century were the product of misguided hubris. Environmentalists call for Westerners to shrink their agricultural sector and ration their urban water use and, increasingly, demolish the dams and reservoirs that enabled a civilization...
SACRAMENTO – Today, California Policy Center joined a broad coalition of education freedom advocates in submitting a letter of opposition to Assembly Bill AB 84 to the Senate Education Committee. The bill will have a hearing before the committee at 9:00am on July 16th at the Capitol. “California families need more educational choices, not fewer...
It’s July. The California State Legislature has successfully met the budget submission deadline of June 15, and it was signed by the governor. There was one small fly in the ointment: how to cut $12 billion in spending? All while trying to provide $750 million in tax credits annually to one specific industry: Hollywood. Go...
If there is anything that might constitute an overwhelming institutional consensus in California, it’s that we are experiencing climate change, and that one of the consequences will be more rain, less snow, and more so-called whiplash between very wet years and very dry years. In an average year these days, 30 million acre feet of water...
The fiscal year of July 1, 2019, to June 30, 2020, was one of the more memorable for California’s school districts. The COVID-19 pandemic would dramatically impact students in March of 2020. The Golden State had not seen anything like it since the Spanish Flu epidemic in 1918, more than a century prior. This unique...
California’s bullet-train may be the state’s most high-profile transportation money-sink, consuming a projected $135 billion with no clear path to the finish line. However, taxpayers shouldn’t overlook the other transit boondoggles torching public funds. Chief among them is Orange County’s 4.15-mile OC Streetcar: proof that you can pour high-speed-rail-style money into a monument to tunnel...