The end-game for this year's legislative session gets under way today in the Assembly, and there's a little something for everybody. The Senate, meanwhile, is nowhere to be found. This could work
From Capitol Weekly's Greg Lucas: "That was then. This is the Now of 14-hour workdays crammed with a flurry of rushed hearings, slapdash amendments and secretly hatched skullduggery."
"Rumors swirl among the lobbying corps of possible last minute deals and power plays – from legalizing Internet poker to bumping up the tax on a pack of cigarettes from 87 cents to rewriting a multibillion-dollar water bond for the 2014 ballot to changing the limits on awards in medical malpractice cases. Lurking in the background is a major push from Gov. Brown to change Proposition 65, the 1986 voter-approved law intended to protect the public from harmful chemicals."
"This time of the legislative year has always been crazed and it always will be – right up until lawmakers go home by midnight on Sept. 13."
The crux of the debate over overhauling public pensions comes down to this: Can the pensions of current workers, who have been assured contractually of their benefits, be cut?
From Calpensions' Ed Mendel: "After a five-day trial last month, a judge is looking at 13 issues in suits filed by unions and retirees against a San Jose pension reform. The big one is whether pensions earned by current workers can be cut."
"Measure B, approved by 70 percent of San Jose voters last year, challenges the widely held view that a series of court rulings mean pensions promised state and local government workers on the date of hire become a “vested right” that cannot be cut."
"Most attempts to reduce pension costs, including a statewide reform pushed through the Legislature by Gov. Brown last year, spare current workers but give new hires a lower pension, delaying savings for years or decades."
Tom Steyer, the politically restless California billionaire and environmentalist who bankrolled a successful ballot initiative last year to close a corporate tax loophole, is going national: Now,he's financing an advertising blitz in opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline and intends to back Democrat Terry McAuliffe in the Virginia governor's race.
From Politico's Alexander Burns: "Steyer, a California-based financier, instructed advisers on Friday to launch television ads starting this week. The paid-media blitz from his group, NextGen Climate Action, will be the opening salvo in what’s expected to be a much larger effort aimed at mobilizing and turning out climate-oriented voters in a key off-year gubernatorial race."
"The enterprise will be a test both of Steyer’s individual influence in electoral politics, and of the impact of heavily-funded advocacy politics within the Democratic Party. The bet, for Steyer, is that making climate issues a prominent part of the Virginia election will nudge the center of national politics in a greener direction, shaping the political landscape for 2014 and 2016 and giving environmental interests a stronger hand to play in Washington policy debates."
"It will be Steyer’s second major foray this year into electoral politics, after he funded a turnout operation in Massachusetts on behalf of now-Sen. Ed Markey in the special election to replace Secretary of State John Kerry. In 2012, he put about $30 million into a successful home-state ballot initiative, Proposition 39, which will require multistate energy companies to pay higher taxes in California."
The governor intervened at the last minute to get people to talk in hopes of avoiding a BART strike. No strike today, and perhaps for a week as negotiations ramp back up.
From the Chronicle's John Cote and John Wildemuth: "BART trains will be rolling for at least another week after Gov. Jerry Brown stepped in late Sunday night to block an impending strike, just hours before the scheduled 12:01 Monday walkout by the transit system's union workers."
"At the request of BART management, the governor appointed a three-member board of inquiry to investigate the stalled negotiations. In a letter to BART's general manager and three top union leaders, said he is stepping in because a strike "will significantly disrupt public transportation services and will endanger the public's health, safety and welfare."
"The board must provide the governor with a written, public report on the contract talks within seven days, during which time the unions are not allowed to walk off the job nor can they be locked out by BART. Brown then will decide whether to impose a 60-day cooling-off period on BART and its unions, which would delay any possible strike until mid-October at the earliest."
A subsidiary may be bankrupt and the San Onofre nuclear power plant may have been closed, but Edison International, is changing its operations and powering right on through.
From the LAT's Catherine Green: "Edison International, the parent company of Southern California Edison, has had its hands full with the bankruptcy of a subsidiary and the shutdown of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station. Now, it is overhauling its operations."
"The Rosemead company, which oversees the utility that provides power through much of Southern California, began as Los Angeles Edison Electric Co. in 1894 when Visalia street-light provider Holt & Knupps merged with Electric Light Works."
"The company has long since branched out beyond its primary utility, establishing power producer Edison Mission Energy, investment arm Edison Capital and coal subsidiary Midwest Generation."
And for those of you who like lobster -- and that's just about everybody -- we turn to our "Rock-bound Coast of Maine" file to see how global warming is heating the kettle.
"While experts agree that the summer of 2012 was something of an anomaly with freakishly warm water, two to three degrees above average, it may also be a foretaste of what warming waters in the Gulf of Maine will bring in future years. Record-breaking lobster catches may sound like one of those few happy side effects of a warming planet, but as with most such cases, the story of the lobster is not that simple."
"In 1999, lobstering in Long Island Sound collapsed without warning. It was a record-breaking hot year, and the unusually warm water temperatures seemed to unleash a hitherto rare infection. Shell disease, a bacterial infection that up to that point had only been observed commonly in the infrequently-molting older lobsters, claimed 80 percent of the lobster stock off the coast of Rhode Island and Connecticut. More than a decade later, the lobster fisheries still haven’t recovered and the water temperature has passed the threshold that these otherwise-hardy crustaceans can endure. Average water temperatures are now routinely at that record-breaking 1999 level."
“Anything above 20º C is extremely stressful for lobsters,” explained Bob Steneck, Professor of Marine Sciences at the University of Maine. “While warmer waters off the coast of Maine in recent years have probably aided the boom in lobster numbers, putting us right in the temperature sweet spot for this species, we’re getting closer and closer to that point where the temperature is just too stressful for them, their immune system is compromised and it’s all over.”
Say it ain't so ...
