But California is already home to one of the highest state corporate income tax rates and one of the least competitive business climates in the country, according to the Tax Foundation. Not only would imposing additional burdens make the state even more unfriendly to business than it already is, more revenues will not solve the crisis.

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But maybe we’re not talking about a public institution at all. Trinity Tran, co-founder of the California Public Banking Alliance, denies that BankCal would be a government-owned bank. BankCalNow claims that AB1177 “does not create a new bank.” “Instead it creates a statewide retail banking option through which every California worker can access zero-cost financial services.”

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While the ruling does not kill the project, it certainly has a much more uncertain future now.  The Bakersfield Californian reports that Tejon Ranch president and CEO Gregory Bielli said after the ruling, “environmental impact reports are extremely lengthy, complex documents, and it’s difficult to get everything perfect the first time out.”

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Bloomberg News is reporting that by August, there will be 1,700 megawatts of new battery capacity across the state— “enough to power 1.3 million homes”—connected to the grid. “In theory,” it should be enough to prevent another emergency, such as the 2020 outage, in which more than 800,000 homes and businesses lost power.

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Some of the problem rests with a huge backlog of road and highway repair costs, the result of decades of lawmakers siphoning off funding for critical projects as it dealt with massive deficits and funded other, lesser priorities.  At the time of SB 1’s passage in 2017, the Assembly’s Floor Analysis noted a $59 billion backlog in deferred road maintenance and repair, while local roads faced a $7.3 billion annual maintenance shortfall. 

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