In light of this uncertainty, Petek says that, “regardless of the ultimate revenue estimates, the Legislature almost certainly will have to reassess its policy priorities for the upcoming year.” Newsom was asked in his March 15 press conference about how California’s budget could be affected by the coronavirus.

Read more. . .

Tim Anaya, PRI's Communications Director, joined the Commonwealth Club of California's "Week to Week" political roundtable, discussing the political impact of the coronavirus on local, state, and national communities. The panel also tackled other big political news of the moment, including the latest in the heated presidential primaries.

Watch here. . .

The California Legislative Analyst’s Office reckons “a single-payer program similar to that envisioned in” Senate Bill 562, the Healthy California Act, introduced in 2017 but never becoming law, “could cost around $400 billion annually and require new state tax revenues in the low hundreds of billions of dollars.”

Read more. . .

Yet there have been numerous accountability and transparency questions about the law, enough that a bipartisan bill emerged a few weeks ago demanding increased public “access to SB 1 data so that the expenditure of these valuable taxpayer dollars is easily visible and verifiable.”

Read more. . .

California needs to employ policies and approaches that expressly address the needs of children to ensure they don’t become tomorrow’s street homeless. Instead, however, California employs “housing first” as a one-size-fits-all approach to homelessness, whereby men, women and their children are all treated identically.

Read more. . .