$600 payments for low-incoming Californians approved by Legislature
The Chronicle's ALEXEI KOSEFF: "Millions of low-income Californians will receive direct $600 payments and small businesses will be eligible for billions of dollars’ worth of grants and tax deductions under a plan approved Monday by the Legislature.
The package of bills passed the Assembly and Senate by overwhelming margins with bipartisan support, as lawmakers acknowledged they needed to do far more to ease the economic pain of the coronavirus pandemic.
“Our small businesses are dying, and we simply cannot let that happen,” said Assembly Member Cottie Petrie-Norris, D-Laguna Beach (Orange County)."
Speculation swirls over Becerra's replacement
CHUCK MCFADDEN in Capitol Weekly: "It’s a time-honored habit around the Capitol: Fevered speculation about who may be appointed to fill an empty and important statewide office.
Sometimes, the speculation even extends to who is going to be appointed to fill the vacancy left by the first appointment.
This time around, it’s all about whom Gov. Gavin Newsom will name as California’s attorney general to fill the vacancy to be left by presumably departing Xavier Becerra, who still retains his California position pending his confirmation in the Senate."
READ MORE related to Becerra Nomination: Becerra to face Republican gauntlet at confirmation hearings -- The Chronicle's TAL KOPAN
California's rocky COVID-19 vaccine rollout dogged by poor communication, forecasting
LA Times's LAURA J NELSON/MAYA LAU: "California is failing to provide crucial information about COVID-19 vaccine supply levels to local officials, complicating efforts to schedule appointments and contributing to temporary closures of vaccination sites.
Officials running local vaccination programs in multiple counties say they are not being told how many doses they will receive over the next three weeks, which is key data they need to keep vaccine sites open and running smoothly.
President Biden promised last month that his administration would provide a “reliable three-week supply look-ahead” in an effort to improve the transparency and efficiency of the country’s rocky vaccine rollout."
California's electricity prices are so high that researchers worry people won't ditch fossil fuel
The Chronicle's J.D. MORRIS: "California’s electricity prices are growing so high that they threaten the state’s ability to convince enough people to ditch fossil fuel-powered cars and appliances, new research says.
The state’s electric rates are now two to three times what it costs to provide power, a paper released by the energy institute at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and the nonprofit think tank Next 10 reported.
As much as 77% of what investor-owned electric companies recover through rates are related to fixed costs that don’t change based on consumption, the paper says. That includes generation, transmission and distribution costs but also subsidies for low-income households and public programs such as increasing energy efficiency, the authors concluded."
Newsom pushes private seawater desalting plant over local and environmental opposition
LA Times's BETTINA BOXALL: "When Gov. Gavin Newsom was photographed dining at an opulent Napa Valley restaurant during a surge in coronavirus cases, many Californians saw it as hypocrisy. For opponents of a planned $1-billion desalination plant along the Orange County coast, however, the optics were menacing.
The unmasked Newsom was celebrating the birthday of a lobbyist for Poseidon Water, which is close to obtaining final government approval for one of the country’s biggest seawater desalination plants.
Poseidon boasts that the facility will provide a local, inexhaustible source of water for Southern California. Critics complain that Newsom and his political appointees are exerting heavy influence to benefit a private company that would produce some of the state’s most expensive supplies."
Lawsuit seeks to stop ICE use of private guards for California arrests
Sac Bee's YESENIA AMARO: "Two civil rights organizations have filed a federal class action lawsuit against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in an attempt to get the federal agency to halt what the organizations describe as an “illegal practice” of using private companies to detain people.
The Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Asian Law Caucus and the ACLU Foundation of Northern California filed the lawsuit on Friday in U.S. District Court for Central California. The complaint says the federal immigration agency uses private companies, such as G4S Secure Solutions, Inc., to detain people upon their release from jails and prisons in California. The private guards, the suit says, then transfer the individuals to ICE.
“Federal law prohibits ICE from using private security to make immigration arrests, a fact that immigration officials have willfully ignored,” the organizations said in a Monday statement."
California passes bill allocating $1.4M towards tracking anti-Asian bias/hate crimes
Sac Bee's ASHLEY WONG: "California legislators approved $1.4 million in state funding to help combat anti-Asian violence and racism through the Stop AAPI Hate reporting center on Monday.
Assemblymember Phil Ting, D-San Francisco and chair of the Assembly Budget Committee, secured funding through the passage of AB 85, which provides additional state resources for the ongoing pandemic response. The money will be used to support Stop AAPI Hate’s research and help the organization track anti-Asian incidents, which have increased during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The rise in hate incidents against Asian Americans during the pandemic is alarming,” Ting said in a statement. “But, we can’t solve a problem without knowing how big it is. New state funding allows the data gathering to continue, and the research will ultimately lead us to solutions that will make all communities safer.”"
New hires to corporate boards in California still mostly white, despite state law
The Chronicle's CHASE DIFELICIANTONIO: "A new report on statewide corporate board diversity shows recent hires were still mostly white, despite a new California law requiring board positions to be increasingly filled with people from different backgrounds.
The report from the Latino Corporate Directors Association, which tracks board leadership, found that of the 607 board members hired in the last six months of 2020, slightly over a quarter were from nonwhite backgrounds.
While it did not take effect until Jan 1., Gov. Gavin Newsom signed AB979 in September mandating that public companies headquartered in California have at least one director from an underrepresented community by the end of this year. The law was joint authored by state assemblymembers Chris Holden D-Pasadena, Cristina Garcia D-Bell Gardens, and David Chiu D-San Francisco."
Witness the largest pollination event on Earth: California's almond blossom
Sac Bee's DAVID CARACCIO: "There’s something in the California air.
The state’s spectacular almond bloom—the largest single pollination event in the world—has begun. Orchards are blooming and honey bees are buzzing.
The video above shows flowering almond trees at Kimmelshue Orchards in Durham, California, south of Chico."
As nation marks half a million deaths, concerns rise over new California coronavirus variant
The Chronicle's ERIN ALLDAY: "Half a million Americans have died of COVID-19 since the pandemic began, a once-unfathomable toll of a virus that is still far from contained, with new variants threatening to upend fragile progress toward vaccinating the country and preventing another surge in cases.
The United States on Monday crossed 500,000 deaths, a figure that exceeds the entire population of the city of Sacramento or the whole county of Sonoma. But it came with signs that the worst days might be over in the Bay Area: The winter surge is abating and inoculations already are helping.
Yet the path to 500,000 deaths has been a jagged line, and the virus that has killed roughly one in every 660 people in the country remains opportunistic and unpredictable. Monday also brought troubling findings from two teams of San Francisco scientists, who reported that a California-bred variant is now dominant in many parts of the state, and that it is more infectious than earlier versions of the virus. One study also found signs that the variant causes more serious illness and may be resistant to the body’s immune response."
California's coronavirus strain looks increasingly dangerous: 'The devil is now here'
LA Times's MELISSA HEALY: "A coronavirus variant that emerged in mid-2020 and surged to become the dominant strain in California not only spreads more readily than its predecessors, it also evades antibodies generated by COVID-19 vaccines or prior infection and it’s associated with severe illness and death, researchers said.
In a study that helps explain the state’s dramatic surge in COVID-19 cases and deaths — and portends further trouble ahead — scientists at UC San Francisco said that the cluster of mutations that characterizes the homegrown strain should mark it as a “variant of concern” on par with those from the United Kingdom, South Africa and Brazil.
“The devil is already here,” said Dr. Charles Chiu, who led the UCSF team of geneticists, epidemiologists, statisticians and other scientists in a wide-ranging analysis of the new variant, which they call B.1.427/B.1.429. “I wish it were different. But the science is the science.”"
Vaccine access codes for Black, Latino communities improperly used in affluent LA areas
LA Times's JULIA WICK: "A California program intended to improve COVID-19 vaccine availability to people in hard-hit communities of color is being misused by outsiders who are grabbing appointments reserved for residents of underserved Black and Latino areas.
The program to address inequities in vaccine distribution relies on special access codes that enable people to make appointments on the My Turn vaccine scheduling website. The codes are provided to community organizations to distribute to people in largely Black and Latino communities.
But those codes have also been circulating, in group texts and messages, among the wealthier, work-from-home set in Los Angeles, The Times has learned. Many of those people are not yet eligible for the vaccine under state rules."
Sacramento got no COVID vaccines last week due to storms. What it means for appointments
Sac Bee's MICHAEL MCGOUGH/TONY BIZJAK: "Sacramento County health officials on Monday revealed the county did not get any of its expected vaccine doses last week due to storms that interrupted the nation’s vaccine supply chain, forcing clinics to cancel thousands of appointments over the weekend.
Placer County officials also report they are running out of doses and have not yet scheduled clinics this week past Tuesday.
And several local health care systems that get direct shipments separate from counties’ allocations said they also had to cut back on vaccinations as their supplies ran thin. That includes Sutter Health, which reports it is not currently accepting appointments for first-dose shots and is postponing some second-dose appointments. UC Davis Health, operator of the UC Medical Center in Sacramento, which reports it may have to temporarily stop giving shots as well this week."
Major expansion of Cal Grant financial aid proposed for state's college students
LA Times's TERESA WATANABE: "Nearly 200,000 more California college students could receive state assistance for tuition and living expenses under one of the largest expansions of the Cal Grant financial aid program ever proposed, according to details released Tuesday.
The plan, unveiled by the California Student Aid Commission and two legislators, would eliminate some current requirements for the main Cal Grant award that favor younger students within a year out of high school who have a minimum GPA of 3.0. Instead, it would broaden access to older students and others not currently eligible.
It would also simplify the program and tie eligibility to the federal Pell Grant, which better accounts for a student’s total cost of attendance, which includes housing, transportation and other expenses. Although the Cal Grant focuses on tuition and fees, it is one of the nation’s most generous college financial aid programs, providing annual support to more than 500,000 California students."
California teachers move to the front of the vaccine line in most counties
EdSource's DIANA LAMBERT: "Thousands of California teachers from urban and suburban school districts who had been waiting for Covid-19 vaccinations finally began receiving their first doses last week, with those numbers expected to climb as the state takes additional steps to prioritize teachers.
Gov. Gavin Newsom tried to give teacher vaccinations a boost last week when he announced that the state would designate 10%, or 75,000, of its vaccine doses each week for school employees. The new plan starts March 1. The vaccines will be prioritized for school workers who are returning to classrooms.
Formerly, most of the teachers who were vaccinated worked in rural districts in counties that had quickly vaccinated people higher on the state’s priority list and moved on to school staff. But now counties with some of the largest school districts are putting shots in teachers’ arms."
SCUSD announces campus reopening target dates
Sac Bee's SAWSAN MORRAR: "The Sacramento City Unified School District announced students could be back on campus in early April.
The district announced it was working on a phased in-person return plan:
- Students in pre-kindergarten through third grade, and K-6 special day classes could return April 8.
- Students in grades four through six could return on April 15.
- Middle and high school students could return to campus May 6 if Sacramento County is in the state’s red tier for coronavirus spread risk."
The Chronicle's NANETTE ASIMOV: "Changing California’s college placement rules has dramatically helped Black students — whose four-year college graduation rate has doubled in the past decade to 20% — and advocates have more ideas about how to push racial equity in higher education.
The “State of Higher Education for Black Californians,” released Tuesday, laid out which policies have helped Black students in recent years and which ones lawmakers and education leaders should now pursue.
The report — from Campaign for College Opportunity — reveals that the share of Black community college students taking classes eligible for transfer to the University of California soared in 2019 after state lawmakers eliminated no-credit remedial classes at community colleges in 2017 and replaced them with college-level instruction."
Berkeley to consider sweeping police reforms
The Chronicle's SARAH RAVANI: "As anti-police brutality protests swept the Bay Area last summer, Berkeley and other cities vowed to address racial disparities in police departments.
On Tuesday, the Berkeley City Council could take the first step in adopting sweeping reforms to the city’s Police Department by approving recommendations that include eliminating police stops for low-level offenses, requiring written consent for police searches and firing officers who have engaged in racist behavior.
“It’s important to acknowledge that last year there was a lot of conversations about reimagining public safety,” said Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguín. “Millions of people took to the streets to demand change. We have not seen the kind of big transformative change that people called for. It’s significant that we are still moving this forward.”"
Biden admin is dumping Trump admin's controversial citizenship exam
The Chronicle's BOB EGELKO: "The Trump administration’s new civics exam for prospective U.S. citizens — longer and more challenging than the old exam, and with a conservative tilt — will have a short shelf life. Four months, to be exact.
The test, given to hundreds of thousands of legal residents each year, was revised Dec. 1 to double the number of questions asked and correct answers required, and to add topics that were more complex and, in some cases, controversial.
One new question asked why the U.S. went to war in Vietnam, with the only accepted answer being, “To stop the spread of communism.” Test-takers can also be asked to identify the authors of the Federalist Papers, a favorite of conservatives (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and their pseudonym Publius) and to name five of the original 13 states instead of three."
