Sacramento —  After reading through the recently completed state audit of “improper activities by state agencies and employees,” one might wrongly conclude that California’s massive bureaucracy of 131,000-plus employees is a well-oiled machine. After all, if this is all they could find, then the problems in state government must not go very deep. The California...

Sacramento More than a decade ago, the Orange County Sheriff’s Department offered a good value to cities that wanted to provide police services without having to operate their own departments. However, years of excessive salary and pension increases have driven up the costs of the contracts and could drive cities toward the brink of bankruptcy....

Sacramento — Observers have wondered in recent months why the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, the nation’s largest state pension fund and one of Wall Street’s most muscular financial players, has taken such a hamfisted approach toward one of California’s tiniest and least-powerful cities. There’s a rational, albeit troubling, reason for its approach. After the...

WORKERS OF THE WORLD: San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee, bottom center, walks with protesters during a march in San Francisco, May 1, 2017. Despite San Francisco’s pension disaster, Lee was one of several local officials who recently received a massive salary bump. By Steven Greenhut and David Schwartzman Sacramento — Pension reformers had for years...