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California's budget coffers are emptier than a politician's promise, but there may be a silver lining to the state's dark financial clouds: Fewer new laws. Legislators approved only 872 bills in their 2009 regular session, and just 632 have become or will become law by Jan. 1. While that may seem like a lot more new laws than we need, it's actually the fewest bills passed, and the fewest signed into law, in more than 40 years. In fact, according to legislative consultants, it's 131 fewer to become laws than last year; 393 fewer than 10 years ago, and a...

RICHMOND -- In a blow to financially strapped Richmond and a $20 million victory for Chevron Corp., a Contra Costa County judge has struck down a tax approved by local voters last year that assessed the company for the value of the crude oil it refines in the city. Measure T is unconstitutional because the tax is out of proportion to the business Chevron does in Richmond and the services it receives there, said Superior Court Judge David Flinn. He said the tax also violates state law because it is based on the value of materials that Chevron uses in...

So now it's out: Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to whack $1.6 billion from the state's payroll to help close a $14.4 billion budget gap in fiscal 2010-11. Although he's said the furloughs would expire on June 30, the end of the 2009-10 fiscal year, The Bee has reported that the governor will push back the expiration date. What might change that? The state's economy roars back. Forget it. The nonpartisan Legislative Analyst's Office said last month that the state is already down $6.3 billion this year, plus the $14.4 billion next year. California will be strapped for several more years,...

WASHINGTON – As the U.S. Senate prepares to pass a historic health care bill early today, California's two Democratic senators find themselves facing something of a dilemma. The problem: Even though Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein have consistently backed abortion rights, both are ready to cast votes that are guaranteed to anger abortion-rights groups. The reason: The $871 billion bill includes language that critics say will restrict the right to abortions. Much of the criticism is aimed at Boxer, who took a leadership role in negotiations over the final bill. She decided to accept the new language only when it...

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger plans to save $1.6 billion in state employee costs by maintaining monthly furloughs past next June, instituting layoffs or shifting general fund workers into positions financed by other revenues, according to sources familiar with the governor's forthcoming budget proposal. California faces a $20.7 billion general fund budget deficit through June 2011, according to an estimate by the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst's Office.

The Bay Area Air Quality Management District is asking residents to check before burning any wood fires on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day since predicted light winds and cool air may create unhealthy air conditions across the region. . . . The district has already issued two winter Spare the Air alerts, its first one falling on Thanksgiving Day. On these days, Bay Area residents are prohibited from burning wood or manufactured fire logs in fireplaces, wood stoves, fire pits or in any other place. The ban extends to both indoor and outdoor fires.

A host of medical services that insurers must pay for in California — from cancer screenings to diabetes treatment to two-day hospital stays for delivering mothers — could be weakened or lost if the health care measures pending in Congress become law. Currently, any health insurer selling policies in California must comply with the state's extensive consumer protections. The reform measures would allow insurance firms to sell policies across state lines if certain conditions were met, bypassing California's rules in favor of the requirements in the state where the policy is issued. The result, critics warn, would be a "race...

HE ASKS CONGRESS FOR BILLIONS OF DOLLARS, LAW RELAXATION - As the U.S. Senate finalized its health care proposal, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger asked Congress on Tuesday to add billions of dollars for California and relax existing laws, warning that the state otherwise may have to slash Medi-Cal benefits or eliminate its in-home care program.The Republican governor connected the long-term health care plan to California's current budget deficit, estimated to be $20.7 billion by the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst's Office. He suggested in a letter to Congress that the health care plan would lock in current federal reimbursement and eligibility policies that...

State officials and advocates for the rights of the disabled are hailing a $1.1 billion settlement of a suit regarding access to sidewalks and facilities owned or maintained by the state's Department of Transportation. "This settlement is a win-win," said Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, in a statement released by Caltrans today. . . .

Sonoma County's top official on Monday ordered the removal of stars, angels and other religious symbols from Christmas trees in county buildings after a complaint that the decorations violate constitutional protections. “I understand the concern about government endorsing religion or a doctrine, and I respect that is not our role,” Acting County Administrator Chris Thomas said. The complaint was lodged by Irv Sutley of Santa Rosa, a 65-year-old disabled veteran who has a long history of protesting the use of religious symbols in government settings. One of the offending trees was in the lobby of Thomas' office. He said he...

Under fire for mismanaging its vehicle fleet, Caltrans was rapped anew on Monday for grossly overstating the number of jobs it created or preserved with federal stimulus money. The criticism came from state Auditor Elaine Howle, who revealed the department's inflated numbers in a report. In October, Caltrans told the federal government that it created or preserved 1,590 jobs with $26.7 million the department received earlier this year under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The stimulus bill requires all recipients of federal money to file quarterly job updates, reporting numbers of jobs created or saved by projects. Howle's auditors...

For years, global warming alarmists have pointed to every drought and heat wave as proof that global warming was a real environmental threat. They had few qualms about blurring the line between weather and climate to make a PR point. Perhaps, then, it was karma that brought a blizzard and freezing temperatures to the U.N. climate change Conference of Parties confab in Copenhagen (or COP-15 for short) last week. You may have read about the 1,200 limos and 140 private planes commissioned to transport COP-15 dignitaries in style. Critics love to point to the hypocrisy of world leaders - such...

For state lawmakers, ringing in the New Year also means getting ready for what's shaping up to be another painful budget season. They'll return to the Capitol Jan. 4 to tackle a deficit that is expected to swell to $6.3 billion by the end of the fiscal year. Filling that hole -- and the $21 billion deficit projected for the next 18 months --tops Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg's list of priorities for the new year. Steinberg said in an interview with The Bee that while further cuts and new revenues will be needed to close that gap, the...

I got a call from Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry the other day. From the sound of things, the Senate clearly intends to take its holiday break Wednesday, no matter what. If so, President Obama is going have a tough time making his Christmas deadline for a health care reform bill to win Senate approval. At this point, it looks like the biggest winners when a bill finally does pass are going to be the insurance companies. They'll be getting millions of new customers - at government expense.

Shedding jobs that once reliably attracted new residents, California grew at a slower pace this year than all but two other years since 1900, according to state Department of Finance figures released Thursday. The number of new births dropped. The number of new immigrants dropped. And more residents left California for other states than came here. The end result: Statewide growth from July 2008 to July 2009 was 350,000 people, or less than 1 percent. During the rest of the decade, California averaged 525,000 new residents each year. The four-county Sacramento region posted even more striking numbers, adding just 21,000...

You have to string together a series of seemingly unrelated events to see it, but this week painted a powerful picture of California's chronic inability to govern itself. As the week began, a legislative committee heard state Treasurer Bill Lockyer describe, in blunt terms, why the state finds it increasingly difficult to market its bonds. Briefly, its budget is chronically unbalanced, it has floated too much debt, and it's now forced to pay higher interest rates on its debts than many Third World nations. Counterintuitively, state schools chief Jack O'Connell a day later urged the Legislature to approve a big...

An attack on UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau’s house and conflicting reports as to why students were arrested at Wheeler Hall Friday, Dec. 11, have added a new twist to ongoing protests against university budget cuts. Student organizers of Live Week—a week-long “open occupation” of Wheeler Hall where students tried to create an open university by holding talks, forums and music shows all day—condemned the 4:30 a.m. arrests during which UC police locked in 66 protesters, cited them for trespassing and later took them to Santa Rita jail. Almost all were reportedly released later. Although campus spokesperson Dan Mogulof said...

Last Friday, the state's biggest public employee union came up short. Again. This time Service Employees International Union Local 1000 backed the loser in a runoff board election for CalPERS, the mammoth government worker pension provider. The board signs off on annual payments that the state and local governments must make to their employee retirement funds. It also sets how the $200 billion system spreads its investments on behalf of CalPERS' 1.6 million members. Local 1000's handpicked candidate, Cathy Hackett, lost to J.J. Jelincic, who was backed by several other unions, 49 percent to 51 percent. It's the latest in...

California faces at least another year of recession, and the state budget is so far upside down that it's now "more likely to default than not," on some of its debt, a new economic forecast from California Lutheran University's economists declares. The director of Cal Lutheran's new Center for Economic Research and Forecasting, Bill Watkins, cites the state's budget problems, its high regulatory and operating costs and its deficit infrastructure as impediments to rapid recovery.

California just missed being labeled a "judicial hellhole" by the American Tort Reform Foundation, a business-backed group that lobbies for changes in the laws and procedures governing lawsuits that allege injuries. Instead, the state was placed on the organization's "watch list" for what the Washington-based organization termed "poorly reasoned California court decisions (that) have placed the state's citizens and business owners in jeopardy." It did not specify what those decisions were, but added, "California businesses are concerned that they will be unfairly hit with consumer and disabled-access lawsuits by those who have chosen litigation as a lifestyle. . . .

Capitol politicians bemoaning the size and cost of the state's bonded debt is something like drunkards arguing over hangover remedies. Members of the Assembly Budget Committee, most of whom voted for tens of billions of dollars in new bonds, including $11-plus billion in new water bonds, convened Monday to worry publicly about how the debts will be repaid from a state budget awash in red ink. "We need to figure out how much borrowing we can realistically and sustainably afford," committee chair Noreen Evans said, terming bond costs "the Pac-Man eating up the general fund." Evans was one of the...

-- After passing a $447 billion spending bill Sunday, Congress faces a Jan. 1 deadline to raise the ceiling on the national debt even as a bipartisan expert panel warned Monday that the United States faces a potential funding crisis. The Peterson-Pew Commission, composed of former members of Congress and budget experts, warned that the federal budget has reached a danger zone much faster than anticipated even a year ago. Like a homeowner swimming in mortgage debt, the government's bills are growing faster than its income, to the point where overseas investors holding U.S. debt could be spooked at any...

Standard & Poor's, the venerable credit-rating agency, chose an opportune moment to unveil its annual fiscal scorecard for American cities, including those in California. Its release came as local governments were assessing the impact of recession on their current budgets and beginning to look ahead with trepidation to the next fiscal year. Twenty-five California cities received S&P's Triple-A rating for their fiscal situations, the most of any state. Only one of those cities – San Jose – is very large. The others are uniformly smaller, affluent and mostly white enclaves such as Beverly Hills and Mill Valley. Even as S&P's...

There is one consolation for Mayor Gavin Newsom now that he's dropped out of the governor's race - he won't have to take a $72,477-a-year pay cut. Newsom, who earns $246,464 as mayor of San Francisco, would have seen his pay drop to $173,987 if he had won the governor's race, as a result of the salary cuts imposed on state elected officers last week.Under the new pay levels, the governor gets about $25,000 a year less than San Francisco's park and recreation director, Phil Ginsburg.And if District Attorney Kamala Harris wins the race to become the next attorney general,...

WASHINGTON – California and other financially strapped states will lose tens of millions of federal dollars that they spend to jail illegal immigrants charged with crimes, under Congress' latest spending bill. The $1.1 trillion plan, finalized by House and Senate negotiators Tuesday night, combines six of the large yearly appropriations bills passed by Congress to keep the government running. State officials and members of the California congressional delegation had lobbied hard once again to increase aid to the states for the program, hoping to cash in on California's increased clout in Washington this year. But their efforts fell flat, with...

The California Air Resources Board gave truckers a break Wednesday on the state's tough diesel emissions rules, acknowledging that the bad economy has both improved the state's air quality and made anti-pollution upgrades unaffordable. After a nearly seven-hour public hearing in Sacramento that featured more than 80 speakers including truckers, health and environmental advocates and even high school students from Oakland, the air board ordered modifications to the rules drawn up for consideration in April. Those changes could include significant delays in enforcement of the rules, depending on how quickly the economy recovers. The board also could add new exemptions...

Barack Obama's faux populism is beginning to grate, and when yet another one of those "we the people" e-mails from the president landed on my screen as I was fishing around for a column subject, I came unglued. It is one thing to rob us blind by rewarding the power elite that created our problems but quite another to sugarcoat it in the rhetoric of a David taking on those Goliaths.In each of the three most important areas of policy with which he has dealt, Obama speaks in the voice of the little people's champion, but his actions cater fully...

BERKELEY -- The city of Berkeley mailed coat hangers to 20 members of Congress today in protest of the anti-abortion amendment in version of the federal health care bill.

The California Air Resources Board must decide today whether the bad economy justifies giving truckers and construction firms more breathing room on the state's toughest-in-the-nation diesel pollution regulations. By cutting diesel consumption, the recession has likely improved the state's air quality, air board staff say. Fleet owners hope to use that evidence to convince the agency that it should delay mandated retrofits and upgrades they say the recession has made them unable to afford. "They could not have put enough regulations in place to do what this slowdown has done," said Felipe Martin, chief financial officer at Sacramento's Martin Bros....

Los Angeles, CA (AP) -- California officials plan to suspend new enrollments for a program that tests low-income women for breast cancer and to tighten eligibility standards when the program reopens. The Every Woman Counts program won't enroll new clients from Jan. 1 until July 2, 2010, and will restrict enrollment to women over the age of 50 thereafter. Previously, women had to be 40 years old to be eligible for the program. California Department of Public Health director Dr. Mark Horton said in a statement that declining state tobacco tax revenues and increased demand were to blame for cutbacks.

WASHINGTON, (AP) -- House and Senate leaders proposed a compromise plan Tuesday to give shuttered General Motors and Chrysler dealers an appeals process to keep their showrooms open. Congressional aides said a broad $1.1 trillion spending bill would include language providing 789 Chrysler dealers closed in June and more than 1,350 GM dealers expected to be shut down next year an improved binding arbitration process to challenge the automakers' decisions. General Motors Co. and Chrysler Group LLC said last week they would reconsider decisions to close the dealers as part of a compromise meant to set aside action by Congress...

OAKLAND -- KTVU News has learned a key section of that bridge has been delayed again and Caltrans now is bracing for a new cost over-run in the tens of millions of dollars. The history of the new Bay Bridge has been a troubled one from the time the state decided to replace the old eastern span after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. The original price tag of a little more than $1 billion has exploded into more than $6 billion along with numerous delays. Now Channel 2 News has learned that next Wednesday, state and local transportation officials are...

The Free Speech Movement lives on at UC Berkeley - 45 years to the day after a barefoot, 21-year-old student named Mario Savio energized thousands from atop a police car by exhorting them to do all they could to stop the administration's restrictive policies. Today the issue is less about freedom of speech than about freedom of access to a quality education, as thousands of students have protested rising tuition, employee layoffs and course cutbacks in recent weeks. "We're the ones fighting for this to be a public university that everyone can afford!" Ronald Cruz, a Berkeley activist, told a...

A year ago, high officials of the California Air Resources Board learned that the author of a statistical study on diesel soot effects had falsified his academic credentials. The CARB researcher, Hien Tran, acknowledged the deception and agreed to be demoted, but after his data were given another peer review, they remained the basis of highly controversial regulations that will cost owners of trucks, buses and other diesel-powered machinery millions of dollars to upgrade their engines. The Tran study concluded that diesel "particulate matter" was responsible for about 1,000 additional deaths each year. Only recently, with the rules on the...

One of the many contentious issues in the national health care debate is something that began 34 years ago in California when Jerry Brown, in the first year of his first governorship, signed legislation imposing a $250,000 limit on pain and suffering damages in medical malpractice cases. The version of a national health care bill that Speaker Nancy Pelosi pushed through the House contains a provision that would push – but not quite compel – California and other states with malpractice damage caps to repeal them.

Just days before Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and legislators finalized a water package, including an $11.1 billion bond issue, state Treasurer Bill Lockyer warned them not to do it. California is already deeply in debt, Lockyer warned, has huge budget deficits and can't afford another big bond issue. "The days of blithely heaping more and more debt burden on the general fund are over – at least they should be," Lockyer said. The earmark-laden bond issue, the package's single most controversial element, raises an interesting question: Just how deeply in debt are our state and local governments? The answer: No one...

SAN FRANCISCO -- Let's hope you weren't planning to cook that turkey over an open fire. Air quality officials have called a Spare the Air alert for Thanksgiving, meaning the burning of wood and manufactured fire logs is banned both indoors and outdoors from midnight tonight until midnight Thursday. The use of any wood-burning device, including fireplaces, wood stoves, pellet stoves and outdoor fire pits, is illegal during that period, the Bay Area Air Quality Management District said. The wood-burning ban covers Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, southern Sonoma and southwestern Solano counties.

A student group at UC Berkeley’s school of law Tuesday called on the U.S. Justice Department, the Pennsylvania Bar and the University of California to “conduct full and thorough investigations” of former government lawyers who crafted the Bush torture memos, including John Yoo, a tenured faculty member at their school. Comprised of a coalition of student groups and individuals, the Boalt Alliance to Abolish Torture (B.A.A.T.) has gathered over 275 signatures which call for investigations into “potential violations of professional and ethical duties, as well as possible criminal conduct.” Both the Pennsylvania Bar Association where John Yoo is registered and...

Before the economy went bust, California voters authorized multibillion-dollar charges on the state's infrastructure credit card. They approved generational investments in roads, schools and levees, as well as hospitals and stem-cell research. At the time, fiscal experts projected that California at most would have to spend roughly 6 percent of its annual budget on payments. But after an economic collapse, estimates now show that debt service could consume as much as 10 percent of the annual general fund budget by 2014-15 – an "unprecedented" ratio, according to the Legislative Analyst's Office. The latest debt warning comes weeks after lawmakers and...

Sacramento -- The number of public safety jobs created or saved with federal stimulus dollars has been vastly overstated in California, according to the state auditor. In a letter sent to leaders at the Capitol on Monday, State Auditor Elaine Howle said that the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has overstated by as many as 13,000 the number of jobs saved by federal stimulus dollars. That represents more than 10 percent of the jobs California reported saving with the federal funds. Howle said the department appears to have counted employees who were not at risk of losing their jobs. The...

Unionized city employees protesting layoffs and wage reductions marched from San Francisco City Hall to Market Street this afternoon, blocking off a busy intersection during rush hour.

For years California has courted a reputation as an eco-friendly, green-minded leader, but the state now finds its most basic program of recycling beverage bottles and cans mired in debt and litigation. Dozens of supermarket recycling sites have shut down recently as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and state legislators spar over how to close a massive gap in the program's budget. California's 23-year-old recycling program, managed by the Department of Conservation through fees charged to beverage buyers, has been hurt this year by recession, rising redemption rates and raids of its coffers to help ease the state's budget woes. Schwarzenegger and...

Nine months after President Obama promised that his $789 billion stimulus package would be the most transparent spending bill in history, much of the information available to the public for the Bay Area and the rest of the nation is incomplete or inaccurate. The White House's Recovery Act Web site - www.recovery.gov - shows that $660 million has been awarded to Bay Area transportation projects to create 997 jobs, which amounts to a staggering $661,986 per job. Last week, the site showed that California Congressional Districts 00 and 99 received millions of dollars in stimulus funding even though neither district...

When Mac Taylor, the Legislature's chief budget adviser, declared this week that the state budget enacted just four months ago is already billions of dollars upside down, no one in the Capitol should have been surprised. Anyone with half a brain and a hand calculator could figure out that many assumptions on which the budget was based, both spending and revenues, were unrealistic, some of them conjured out of thin air to "balance" an inherently unbalanced budget for political reasons. Taylor told legislators that the current budget is $6.3 billion out of balance and the 2010-11 budget has another $14.4...

Somewhere in the bureaucratic haze of Oakland city government, in a spacious office with views of Frank Ogawa Plaza, there is a holiday grinch who has actually succeeded in swiping a slice of Christmas spirit from city residents. Now I already know what you're thinking, so let's get it out of the way. It is not Mayor Ron Dellums. He has been out of town since Saturday attending to a death in the family, said Paul Rose, the mayor's overused, underinformed press secretary. On Monday, Oakland city officials informed Marco Li Mandri, executive director of two business community benefit districts...

State Budgets: California's slide into fiscal oblivion continues, with no end in sight. Despite lots of budget cuts this year, a $21 billion deficit looms. The politicians' solution? Stop selling high-definition TVs in the state. It's starting to become routine. Last February, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a new spending plan with "real, lasting reforms" that would help close its $36 billion-plus deficit and ensure the state never got so out of fiscal whack again. And just four months ago the Governator and California's worst-in-the-country legislature agreed to a plan to close a $24 billion budget gap by cutting spending amid...

More grim news Wednesday for state workers: California's general fund faces a $21 billion deficit through the middle of 2011. The red ink could flow for years to come, according to a forecast by the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst's Office.The state's 200,000 or so workers, already taking a 15 percent pay hit from three furlough days per month, knew this was coming. What does the state's rotten financial picture mean to them?• Real job cuts. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger already has ordered 7,000 jobs eliminated from the deficit-ridden general fund. And as this column reported a few months ago, the administration has...

California again is facing a mammoth budget deficit and the prospect of more severe cuts to state services, the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst's Office warned in a report released Wednesday.Legislative Analyst Mac Taylor said the state will face a $20.7 billion deficit next year and that the Legislature and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger need to start work to fill that gap "as soon as possible." He also noted that many one-time fixes state leaders have relied on in the past to close deficits are not available. The state will face $20 billion annual deficits through 2015 if permanent fixes are not made,...

New Orleans (AP) -- A federal judge has ruled that the Army Corps of Engineers' failure to properly maintain a navigation channel led to massive flooding in Hurricane Katrina.

San Francisco, CA (AP) -- A federal lawyer who was prevented from enrolling his same-sex spouse in his government-sponsored health plan must be reimbursed the cost of outside insurance and other medical expenses, a California judge ruled Tuesday. Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Stephen Reinhardt said Brad Levenson, a public defender in Los Angeles, is entitled to the money because the Office of Personnel Management refused to authorize health coverage for Levenson's husband of 16 months. That violates both his constitutional rights and the court's anti-discrimination rules, the judge ruled. "The denial of federal benefits to same-sex spouses...