In the Capitol, a new push to unionize staff members
WILL SHUCK, Capitol Weekly: "The first time, she had just one co-author; the second time, a dozen. Now, on her third attempt, Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez has convinced nearly half of the California Assembly to co-author her bill to grant collective bargaining rights to rank-and-file Capitol staffers.
Assembly Bill 314 has 38 co-authors. With her, that’s 39, just two short of the number needed for full Assembly approval. If the bill makes it to the floor, it’ll pass, she says. “I have the votes for the floor.”
But first the bill must pass through the Public Employment and Retirement Committee, where her prior two bills died. And the chair of that committee is not among the co-authors."
California AG office withholding data on gun sales, restraining orders from researchers
Sac Bee's HANNAH WILEY: "Attorney General Xavier Becerra’s office is withholding gun violence data from a state-funded research institution tasked by lawmakers with evaluating California’s firearm regulations and also is directing universities to destroy records the agency previously released.
Researchers at the UC Davis California Firearm Violence Research Center say that over the last several years, the Department of Justice has made it increasingly difficult to access data only it maintains, despite a legal mandate to provide the records.
The Legislature in 2016 passed a law to establish and fund the center, which works alongside an existing gun violence research program at UC Davis. The idea was to support independent research to identify policies that best prevent deaths and injuries caused by gun violence."
California's My Turn COVID-19 vaccination appointment system riddled with flaws, officials say
LA Times's RONG-GONG LIN II/LUKE MONEY/COLLEEN SHALBY: "California’s My Turn COVID-19 vaccination appointment system is riddled with flaws that are making it difficult for counties to reserve vaccine appointments for targeted populations, according to local officials.
These flaws have been exploited by wealthy, privileged people to use redistributed access codes to secure appointments for vaccines that had been intended for people living in underserved communities, as The Times has previously reported.
Though California is insisting that counties prioritize vaccinating people living in the hardest-hit areas or those who work in specific front-line essential jobs, the My Turn system does not offer the flexibility to account for a county’s vaccination strategy or eligibility requirements, Los Angeles County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer said Wednesday. It is also web-based, making it inaccessible for many who are unable to use an online interface, Ferrer added."
California to allocate 40% of vaccine supply to lowest-income ZIP codes
The Chronicle's CATHERINE HO: "California plans to adopt a coronavirus vaccine system that will allocate 40% of vaccine supply to its lowest-income residents, state officials said Wednesday.
It will not affect who is currently eligible to get vaccinated, which is health care workers, people who are 65 and older, education and child care workers, food and agriculture workers, and emergency services workers.
Rather, once the new system begins, eligible people in the state’s roughly 400 lowest-income ZIP codes will get 40% of vaccine supply reserved for them. About 8 million residents who are eligible for the vaccine live in those 400 ZIP codes. The list of ZIP codes was not released but it is based on the Healthy Places Index, created by the state, that shows that many of the locations are in the Los Angeles region and the Central Valley. In the Bay Area, they include parts of Southeast San Francisco, Richmond and East Oakland."
SF offered permanent housing to homeless people staying in hotels, but 70% said no. Here's why
The Chronicle's MALLORY MOENCH: "As San Francisco expands a shelter-in-place hotel program that leases rooms for vulnerable homeless people during the pandemic, the city has run into a roadblock: Some residents find where they’re staying more appealing than another permanent option.
Shelter-in-place hotels, opened during the pandemic for vulnerable homeless individuals, offer private rooms with bathrooms and three meals a day, but the program is temporary. In contrast, a newly available permanent supportive housing option in a recently renovated hotel has communal bathrooms and charges 30% of a resident’s income as rent.
So far, around 70% of shelter-in-place hotel residents offered spots at the refurbished 232-unit Granada Hotel, purchased with $45 million from the state last year, turned down spots, Abigail Stewart-Kahn, interim director of the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, told supervisors last week."
New stimulus plan would leave out 2.4M Californians
Sac Bee's DAVID LIGHTMAN: "Millions of higher-income Californians would get lower federal economic stimulus payments, or none at all, under a new Senate plan unveiled Wednesday, an economic research firm’s analysis found.
President Joe Biden has reportedly agreed to the plan, which has been sought by moderate Democrats. The payments are lower than those in legislation passed by the House.
An estimated 31.5 million Californians could get some stimulus money under the Senate proposal, according to data from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. The House plan would benefit 33.9 million state residents."
East Bay freelance reporter sues Richmond after being shot with rubber bullet
The Chronicle's BOB EGELKO: "An East Bay freelance journalist who was shot by police with a rubber bullet while covering a protest over the George Floyd killing has sued the city of Richmond, saying she was wearing her press badge and posed no threat when an unidentified officer opened fire.
Police “used excessive force to prevent (Sarah Belle Lin) from exercising her right to document public protests as a member of the press and in retaliation for her presence,” said the lawsuit, filed last month in federal court in San Francisco. It seeks damages against Richmond and the officer or officers involved in the shooting.
Lin, an independent reporter and photographer for local publications in the East Bay for several years, covered a nighttime protest May 30 in downtown Oakland over the death of Floyd in Minneapolis five days earlier, when a policeman knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes."
The Chronicle's J.D. MORRIS: "When the Texas power grid buckled and cut off power to millions of households during a severe winter freeze last month, Bernadette Del Chiaro saw some troubling similarities to what had played out in California six months before.
Del Chiaro, who leads a solar energy advocacy group in Sacramento, felt Texas was going through “the cold version of Aug. 15,” one of two days California implemented rolling blackouts because energy supplies ran short during a widespread heat wave.
She noticed that in both grid emergencies, some politicians and other observers had blamed a familiar foe: renewable energy. In California, they said, solar panels couldn’t meet demand after the sun set; in the Lone Star State, wind turbines froze."
Pandemic 'Zoom fatigue' is real, Stanford research shows. Here's how to deal
The Chronicle's KELLIE HWANG: "The feeling of exhaustion after a day of video calls has become so commonplace during the pandemic that it spawned the popular term “Zoom fatigue.”
And according to a Stanford University researcher, the effect is quite real.
Jeremy Bailenson, founding director of the Stanford Virtual Human Interaction Lab, examined the psychological effects of spending a prolonged amount of time on the videoconferencing platform."
Sac County still doesn't know the 'root cause' of COVID-19 outbreak in jails
Sac Bee's MICHAEL FINCH II: "More than two months after the start of a major coronavirus outbreak in local jails, Sacramento County officials still do not know the root cause of the event that led to hundreds of inmates being infected over the course of a few weeks.
The outbreak and the state of the jails was the sole topic of discussion during a public health advisory board meeting Wednesday that drew top officials from the county’s Department of Health Services and the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office — the two agencies that oversee conditions in the jails.
An unidentified board member asked county officials if there has been a “root cause analysis of the cause of the outbreak and the difficulty in containing it?” Conflicting narratives have been offered to date."
Human smuggling suspected in crash that killed 13 in Imperial County
LA Times's BRITTNY MEJIA/ANDREW J CAMPA/RUBEN VIVES: "When word spread that more than a dozen people had been killed in a crash at an intersection about two miles northwest of the small town of Holtville, some thought it might have been farmworkers headed to start their long day in the nearby agricultural fields.
But things didn’t add up. The vehicle was all wrong. Not a van or a bus. The number of people crammed into the SUV was far too high for a vehicle that normally would hold seven or eight passengers.
And then there was the debris field. Missing from it was a tell-tale sign, for some advocates, of farmworkers. There were no lunchboxes."
Analysis: Cuomo and Newsom, once pillars of the Democratic Party, now look for paths to survival
LA Times's EVAN HALPER/SEEMA MEHTA: "It wasn’t supposed to be like this for Democrats, who expected to honeymoon into spring as Republicans sifted through the political wreckage Donald Trump left behind.
But the bad behavior and grave unforced errors of two of the party’s biggest outside-the-Beltway stars is spoiling that reprieve, distracting from the Democrats’ work in Washington and forcing them to divert their attention to triage in parts of the country where they usually draw strength.
The missteps, unforced errors and aloofness that now have California Gov. Gavin Newsom facing the threat of recall from office have been overshadowed by the sexual harassment scandal that has rapidly engulfed his counterpart in New York, Andrew Cuomo. The two men took very different paths in their descent from darlings of liberal voters to the targets of scathing parody on SNL, but they both share problems so big they are stealing oxygen from a party that doesn’t have much to spare."
This LA start-up is building tiny injectable robots to attack tumors
LA Times's SAM DEAN: "Doctors take a microscopic craft loaded with cancer-killing chemicals, inject it into the human body, and drive it to a malignant tumor to deliver its payload before making a quick exit.
For most of the 55 years since “Fantastic Voyage” shrank Raquel Welch and company down to the size of a cell to zap a blood clot out of a scientist’s brain, that scenario has been pure science fiction.
But Bionaut Labs, a remote-control medical microrobot start-up, intends to be the first company to make it a clinical reality."
House passes sweeping voting rights bill over GOP opposition
AP's BRIAN SLODYSKO: "House Democrats passed sweeping voting and ethics legislation Wednesday over unanimous Republican opposition, advancing to the Senate what would be the largest overhaul of the U.S. election law in at least a generation.
House Resolution 1, which touches on virtually every aspect of the electoral process, was approved on a party-line 220-210 vote. It would restrict partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts, strike down hurdles to voting and bring transparency to a murky campaign finance system that allows wealthy donors to anonymously bankroll political causes.
The bill is a powerful counterweight to voting rights restrictions advancing in Republican-controlled statehouses across the country in the wake of Donald Trump’s repeated false claims of a stolen 2020 election. Yet it faces an uncertain fate in the Democratic-controlled Senate, where it has little chance of passing without changes to procedural rules that currently allow Republicans to block it."