Democrats in the Legislature threw a fiscal lifeline to public transit last week, bolstering financing for buses and trains at a time when the state is cutting just about everything else. But leaders of the Bay Area’s Metropolitan Transportation Commission saw the moment as a lost opportunity for fundamental change in the way California pays for public transit. They want a local sales tax on fuel.
Aurelio Duran has always known he is lucky to live in San Francisco. At first, it was because he loved the city and its music scene. Today, it is also because San Francisco offers universal health care.
The number of long-term unemployed in California has now reached a level roughly equivalent to a city the size of San Francisco. And more and more of them are workers with backgrounds in financial services, computer operations, commercial and residential real estate and human resources. Each of these jobs usually attracts tens or hundreds of applicants when an opening is announced.
With money raised from outside grants, government funding and other resources, Grant High School in Sacramento’s Del Paso Heights neighborhood has been able to run an edible garden and kitchen on campus. But the program is constantly threatened by scarce resources.
The East Oakland Boxing Association is about more than boxing. The center also has a youth internship program that trains young people in skills that could help them get a job or start a business. Recently, a group of youth interns worked with another nonprofit to overhaul the center’s water use and improve its water conservation.
California’s 23-campus state university system can’t seem to function as it is currently structured. The system’s centralized administration is doing more harm than good. Maybe we should blow it apart and let each campus control its own future.
Anthem Blue Cross has been under scrutiny for its recent rate hikes. But that scrutiny should go beyond the rate hikes to their overall business practices—and the broken health system that rewards bad behavior. The company has perfected a business model based on collecting premiums from the healthy and avoiding as much as possible actually providing coverage to those who are sick.
California is experiencing a worsening shortage of doctors in rural and low-income communities, in part because of decades-old laws that no longer serve our needs. I have worked as a “country doctor” for 22 years. It’s the kind of work I always wanted to do, but it’s a tough sell for younger doctors today – even for those who see it as their professional calling. College and medical school tuition and subsequent debt are exorbitant. More patients in rural communities are uninsured or on Medi-Cal than privately insured. The doctors who treat them are routinely paid less than half of the cost of care.
California’s Air Resources Board is coming under increasing pressure from construction industry contractors seeking to roll back regulations adopted three years ago to sharply reduce the amount of diesel pollution from big off-road tractors, scrapers and earth-movers. The agency has acknowledged that it underestimated the effects of the recession on diesel emissions and is also studying claims that assumptions in a faulty computer model further inflated estimates of pollution caused by the vehicles.
Bob Cohen saw a problem and vowed to correct it. He saw a need and wanted to fill it. Today, thousands of people across the country are getting tax refunds and credits easily and without charge because of his work and the Legal Aid Society of Orange County, which Cohen directs. The problem Cohen saw was desperate low-income people, often people with little knowledge of the government or tax system, losing much of their refunds to tax preparers who offered them instant money while taking a huge cut of their check. The need he wanted to fill was for an easy, online program that would allow people to skip the commercial tax preparers, file their taxes themselves and get their money almost as quickly.