By State Senator Steve Glazer : calmatters – excerpt (includese audio track)
All posts by discowk7
How the game is played in Sacramento
Opinion by Susan Shelley : dailynews – excerpt
The California Legislature is a waste of money and space.
Every year, the Legislature goes through the motions of passing laws through its regular process, appearing to be a deliberative body. Actually, it’s a dead body. The real decisions are made in back rooms and regulatory agencies, where the public is excluded or ignored.
One aspect of this decayed process is on display in Sacramento right now. Gov. Gavin Newsom recently announced a package of legislation to streamline infrastructure projects. “Streamline” is a word used in Sacramento when government officials want
to override their own strangling mess of regulations and requirements, but only for certain people or projects, not for everything and everybody.
It’s best understood as a fundraising technique. It’s quite streamlined in that regard…(more)
Write Susan and follow her on Twitter @Susan_Shelley… opinion … (more)
Susan Shelley describes what we are all finding out about this year as we watch the Sacramento politicians play their games in the dark. More writers are giving us more details. Perhaps you would like to follow Susan Shelley on Twitter @Susan_Shelley or http://www.susanshelley.com/
I like this article:
California’s absurd war on cars : To paraphrase the late British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, the problem with California government is that you eventually run out of other people’s money…(more)
California Will Newsom CEQA Reform Package Be Among CA’s Next New Laws?
By Lynn La : calmatters – excerpt
Just in time to go home for Memorial Day weekend, legislators bulldozed their way through a bunch of bills at the end of this week to beat the even bigger deluge next week, when there’s a Friday deadline to pass remaining bills through the house where they were introduced.
Some of the bills that passed include:…
Fentanyl crisis: After a marathon 5-hour committee meeting on Wednesday about the fentanyl crisis, the Assembly on Thursday passed several fentanyl-related bills, including legislation that would create a fentanyl task force, prioritize cooperation between state and local law enforcement to crack down on trafficking, increase fines for dealers and expand Narcan accessibility…
Decriminalize psychedelics: Despite the California District Attorneys Association arguing that psychedelics have “no federally accepted medical use and have a high probability of misuse,” the Senate approved a bill to decriminalize certain hallucinogenic substances, which are known to be used by some veterans to treat PTSD, anxiety and depression…
Healthcare minimum wage: Healthcare workers who are advocating for a pay hike are supporting Sen. María Elena Durazo, a Democrat from Los Angeles, and her bill to boost their minimum hourly wage to $25, starting in January (the current minimum wage is $15.50). But the bill has been tweaked to increase pay to $21 an hour by June 2024 and to $25 by June 2025…
Dems Clap Back at Newsom on CEQA
Despite Gov. Newsom’s urging to pass his series of reforms on the California Environmental Quality Act in Richmond on Thursday, just hours later a key Senate budget committee said “no,” report CalMatters’ Marisa Kendall and Julie Cart.
Related Story: Is CA’s New Way of Taking Out the Trash a Failure?…
Newsom’s bills could return as budget trailer bills, however, or he could re-introduce them through policy committees, though that process takes much longer…(more)
Is the housing shortage overblown? This California analyst thinks so
By Jonathan Lansner : eastbaytimes – excerpt
Most of those calculations have very little analysis behind them, says John Burns.
John Burns’ real estate research shop has become one of the housing industry’s top analytical firms by taking a more holistic view of what drives homebuying.
For two-plus decades, his eponymous Orange County-based company has become a critical cog in homebuilding thinking because its research looks far beyond real estate basics to encompass broader economic and demographic changes – not to mention the fleeting desire of house hunters.
So the company has now shed “real estate” from its corporate monicker, morphing into John Burns Research and Consulting from John Burns Real Estate Consulting.
Let me give you a noteworthy example from the novel Burns thinking: The company’s analysis suggests the nation is only 1.7 million homes short of what’s needed – a fraction of other housing shortage estimates…(more)
Mayor Declares San Francisco the ‘AI Capital of the World.’ Can Leaders Keep It That Way?
by Kevin Truong : sfstandard – excerpt
In a Palace Hotel ballroom packed with hundreds of investors, engineers and business leaders, San Francisco Mayor London Breed made a confident proclamation: The city is the “the AI capital of the world,” she said.
Breed closed out the one-day AI Forward conference, touting the city’s roster of deep-pocketed investors and local universities that make it fertile ground for artificial intelligence. Organized by Goldman Sachs and SV Angel, the conference featured Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and OpenAI President Greg Brockman, among others.
In her remarks, Breed pitched the city as the epicenter of cutting-edge tech along with some big ideas, such as a partial redevelopment of the Westfield San Francisco Centre, the Downtown mall Nordstrom recently announced its departure from, or putting a soccer field and open space right in the middle of the Moscone Center.
“Our goal is to make it as easy as possible for you to focus on creating this incredible, innovative thing that’s going on that everybody is talking about,” Breed told the crowd…(more)
Is anyone else tired of being the capital of the world yet? Does anyone believe that San Franciscos is the AI capital of the world? Do we want to be the AI victim of every experiment that business can dream up? Nobody trusts this new technology but our mayor has decided to make us test subjects for a systme that no one knows anything about.
Problems are most obvious with the autocabs, but, for all we know nextbus and school payroll problems stem from experimental AI systems that are beyond human capacity to fix because the codes are not written by humans.
I can’t wait to see what the AI consultant is going to spit out as a remedy for the downtown “doom loop”. I’m sure the Mayor will gush all over it regardless of what it is. Anybody who describes our city’s future as “an incredible, innovative thing” does not have my vote of confidence. That elevator pitch is too vague for me.
Newsom signs executive order, proposes reforms to environmental law known as CEQA
By Fox 40 News : youtube – excerpt (includes video)
The executive order will create a team that will identify environmental, infrastructure and transit projects held up by the strict law known as CEQA. The governor also proposed making adjustments to this law through the legislative process…(more)
RELATED:
Governor Newsom Unveils New Proposals to Build California’s Clean Future, Faster
The Untold Story: When Redevelopment Built A SOMA Community Instead Of Tearing It Down
spotlight : sfexaminer – excerpt (includes audio track)
Several months after the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake damaged a half dozen red-tagged South of Market warehouses and SRO’s beyond repair, The TODCO Group’s President John Elberling and Deputy Mayor Brad Paul went to Mayor Art Agnos with a shocking proposal: “Let’s make Sixth Street an Earthquake Recovery redevelopment area to replace all the lost housing and build new neighborhood facilities for its 2,500 SRO tenants and the longtime SOMA Filipino-American community.” “Are you sure you want redevelopment on skid row?” asked the surprised mayor. “We have to,” Elberling replied. “If we don’t start to build our future Sixth Street community now there will never be one.” “Ok,” Agnos responded, “but responsibility for the consequences will be on you.”
TODCO was the community nonprofit housing company founded by “TOOR,” the strident opponents of the Yerba Buena Redevelopment Project and its bulldozer demolition of thousands of SRO units for the Moscone Convention Center 20 years before. Since then, TODCO had built three senior replacement housing residences in Yerba Buena nearby, two named after those founders, Woolf House and Mendelsohn House. That’s why Mayor Agnos was so surprised to hear TODCO’s bold proposal to use the intimidating powers of redevelopment for SOMA community building instead of downtown expansion and commercial development as usual. 33 years later the results of the two decade “South of Market Redevelopment Area” project, which ended suddenly when Governor Jerry Brown halted all redevelopment statewide, are the foundation for SOMA’s lower-income communities today…
To begin with, over the next 25 years 1,018 units of permanently affordable housing for the lower-income SRO tenants and families of South of Market were built in 17 nonprofit projects in the Project Area with Redevelopment Agency financial support. Two residential hotels that were damaged beyond repair by the earthquake were replaced with newly-built SRO’s with 246 total low-rent units, including first, TODCO’s own Knox SRO built on the cleared Sixth Street former location of the red-tagged and demolished Anglo Hotel, and later the new Plaza Apartments…(more)
The state housing secrecy just keeps getting worse and worse
By Zelda Bronstein : 48hills – excerpt
Crucial planning decisions are made behind closed-doors, with Yimby stakeholders—and the public can’t even get the basic records.
Ben Metcalf directed the California Department of Housing and Community Development from November 2015 to September 2019. In February 2021, Metcalf, now managing director of the Terner Center of Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley, said that the state’s new housing laws had given his former employer “the potential to be moving like the CIA. Most of the time, HCD’s work is done below the waterline.”
He meant that as a tribute to HCD’s effectiveness.
Covert operations are usually hidden from the public. But three months later, HCD advertised its penchant for secrecy. As it prepared to update the statewide housing plan in May 2021, the agency invited members of the public to share their views of California’s housing policies via a series of online “listening sessions.” Then it refused to divulge what it had heard, claiming that to do so would violate privacy.
It appears that the privacy that was allegedly at risk was HCD’s. In response to my Public Records Act request to see the messages entered in Chat and staff notes from the meetings, HCD stated that those records “contain confidential information and it has been determined that the public interest in not disclosing this confidential information clearly outweighs the public interest in its disclosure. This confidential information is exempt from disclosure under deliberative process exemption set forth in Government Code section 6255 and these records have been withheld. Megan Kirkeby, Deputy Director of the Housing Policy Development Division is responsible for withholding these records.”… (more)
Read the rest of this online and comment if you can. The more we see of these Sacramento Politicians’ efforts to remove public participation in government matters, the more we need to pry. Many books and articles have been writing detailing what and how they are doing it, but so far no one has come up with a reason why. They do our elected representatives spend so much time and energy removing public oversight and review of their work? Who determined the government should decide how we live and what is the end game? Let’s keep on watching and searching for the motive behind the lies and the coverups. Are they just keeping us busy watching their housing manipulations what something much more nefarious is going on?
A longtime Sacramento critic, Lydia Kou announces run for state Assembly
by Gennady Sheyner : PaloAltoOnline – excerpt
Palo Alto mayor has consistently opposed housing laws
Palo Alto Mayor Lydia Kou, a staunch critic of California’s approach to encourage more housing, announced on Monday, May 15, that she plans to run for the state Assembly.
Kou, a Realtor who has been serving on the City Council since 2016 and is now in her second term, hopes to win a seat in a district currently being represented by Assembly member Marc Berman, another former Palo Alto City Council member, in the 2024 election. The 23rd Assembly District includes Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Mountain View, Atherton, Woodside, Pacifica, Ladera, Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, Portola Valley, Saratoga and Campbell.
Unlike Berman, a reliable vote of support for recent housing bills that have created streamlined and by-right processes for housing developments, Kou has strongly opposed recent laws that aim to encourage more housing by limiting cities’ powers to reject residential developments. In March, she used her “State of the City” speech as a platform to attack recent Sacramento bills such as Senate Bill 9, which allows split lots in single-family zones; SB 10, which creates a process for cities to build at higher densities in transit-rich areas than underlying zoning would normally allow; and SB 35, which created a streamlined approval process for housing projects in jurisdictions that fail to meet their housing quotas…(more)
Commuters Ditched Public Transit for Work From Home. Now There’s a Crisis
By Mark Ein, CityLab Transportation : Bloomberg – excerpt (includes video)
- Without help, agencies warn of higher fares, service cuts
- Top transit systems see total $6.6 billion shortfall by 2026…
The post-pandemic reality for America’s public transportation is bleak. Work from home has solidly set in, leaving transit agencies that rely on fare-box revenue facing a fiscal cliff.
As pandemic aid dwindles, the nation’s biggest transit systems face a roughly $6.6 billion shortfall through fiscal year 2026, according to a Bloomberg tally of the top eight US transportation agencies based on passenger trips. Rising labor costs and inflation are hitting as farebox revenue stagnates after ridership collapsed. Those eight agencies serve regions that combined contribute about $6 trillion annually to the national economy…
Local officials are pressing for help. Last month, the California Transit Association asked the state for $5.15 billion over the next five fiscal years. Without more money, transit officials across the country warn that the public can expect steep ticket price increases and drastic cuts to train and bus schedules, while long-planned expansion projects are on the chopping block. That pleading worked for New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority when state lawmakers recently approved a massive bailout.
“If it doesn’t get the kind of funding it needs not just to survive but thrive, service will decrease, people will be unable to rely on it, they will be forced to buy cars if they can, take on massive debt to afford those cars.” said Stephanie Lotshaw, acting executive director at TransitCenter, a public transit advocacy group. “All of these outcomes that we are trying to rectify will get worse if we don’t, if we let these systems fail.”…(more)
Proof that we were always working for them (the public transit industry). They were never working for us. Government claimed their goal is to cut traffic, especially comuter traffic jams. COVID did that for them by creating work-from-home options. At the same time large corporations realized they did not need to spend huge amounts of money on rent if their workers worked from home, and given the large number who can and do, they cut back on traffic and commuters. Many of the essential services jobs require a personal vehicle so that is what you have left. Now it is up to the governments to figure out how to re-purpose all those empty office spaces they built, against the wishes of some communities. Not too many people will weep when the building investors go bankrupt. They did their share of bankrupting a lot of people on their way to the top.
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