Get ready to hear a lot about tax reform in California, but be warned: What most taxpayers would think of as reform may not be what we see from the California Legislature and the many interest groups that want to increase state spending. They will use the word “reform” all day long, which in a ...
By Dave Puglia In recent years, business and industry groups have been cautiously hopeful that as Democrats ran up their numbers in the California Legislature, a moderate faction would emerge within their ranks that could help deflect at least some of the annual barrage of legislation promoted by environmental groups, trial lawyers and labor unions. ...
By Dave Puglia The four-year drought that has hammered California may be easing this year, thanks to El Niño storms, but it will leave lasting scars—beyond any from prior droughts—on the state’s political, legal and even social landscape. For example, we have seen unprecedented media and political criticism of the water needed to produce food, ...
Where are the new dams? That question has been asked, often quite loudly, by many Californians in the months since voters overwhelmingly approved Proposition 1, the 2014 water bond that authorized $7.545 billion in funding for various projects and needs, and specifically allocated $2.7 billion for storage projects. Some have questioned whether the Brown Administration ...
An election year has concluded and while voters in most states signaled their desire to move (or stay) on the right side of the ideological spectrum, California held firmly to its position as the nation’s largest and strongest bastion of liberal policies and politics. Voters continued to pour cement on an already formidable foundation of ...
We take a break from our regularly scheduled program, “California Needs More Moderate Democrats in Sacramento,” to bring you this news flash: California—and especially its private sector economy—needs more Republicans in Sacramento. As everyone now knows, the Democrats won two-thirds supermajorities in both houses of the Legislature last November. They briefly held a slim…
Observers of California politics often preface their analyses by reminding us that “demographics are destiny.” The original source of this quote is disputed, but few doubt its logic. In the last few years, Latinos moved past non-Hispanic whites to capture the largest share of the state’s population, and the trend appears to be increasing such ...
Into yet another election year we lurch. In California, battle lines are being drawn in key races and around key ballot measures. Perhaps well over $1 billion will be spent on political campaigns large and small across the state, with obscene sums thrown at the marquee contests for governor and U.S. Senator. Having been in ...
In June, California voters made the first cuts among a multitude of candidates seeking statewide and legislative offices in both Congress and the state legislature. Under the state’s relatively new top-two election reform, the term “primary election” is no longer quite accurate, as that term refers to a closed process whereby partisans of each party ...
Every issue of this magazine includes a column on government affairs, known less formally as lobbying. There is good reason for this; while members of Western Growers look to the association for a variety of business services, at its core Western Growers is here to advocate for its members on public policy issues. Many, if ...
Across California, landowners, water managers and local government officials are struggling to develop sweeping plans to bring more than 100 groundwater basins and sub-basins into compliance with the most dramatic change to the state’s water laws in over a century. In the few short years since the passage of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), ...
As I complete my 15th year with Western Growers, I am filled with gratitude and anticipation. On February 1, I take over as President and CEO. In just about every way possible, 2020 will be an unusually interesting year, and I am eager to jump in. The last year was also unusually interesting, as I ...
Once again, the State of California has launched a legal assault against the federal government, this time over the latter’s modernization of the failed regulatory policies that have, since 2008, hobbled the state’s water storage and conveyance systems by basing diversion decisions in the Delta on static and scientifically-flawed rules. Those rules have failed the ...
In his sequel to Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll depicts a fantastical world in which his heroine finds that, like a reflection in a mirror, everything is reversed, including logic. Since Through the Looking-Glass was published in 1871, the idiom has come to describe situations where you find the opposite of what is normal or ...
“Change is inevitable.” Like many clichés, this one suggests a certainty of outcome, but is it? Is change—in the aftermath of a historic global pandemic that took many thousands of lives and crashed a vibrant economy—really inevitable in all sectors of our society? We know with certainty that the COVID-19 pandemic will change our industry ...
What is the Biden Administration’s agenda and how will our industry fare? Here’s a short and unsatisfying answer: We’ll all find out together. Often, an incoming President’s priorities are discerned from the campaign. Presidential candidates can create a governing mandate by defining their candidacy around a clear and unambiguous policy agenda. While the Biden campaign ...
“Words matter,” begins Michael Mandelbaum, professor emeritus of American foreign policy at Johns Hopkins University, and former faculty member at Harvard University, Columbia University and the U.S. Naval Academy. He continues on, “especially words defining complicated political arrangements, because they shape perceptions of the events of the past, attitudes toward policies being carried…
In American politics, the term “aisle” refers to the ideological and partisan differences that separate the two major parties. Interestingly, the term is rooted in the actual physical division of Republicans and Democrats in the U.S. Senate, where the desks are arranged in a semicircle with a wide central aisle. As viewed from the presiding ...
Two things struck me recently as I thought about the water headaches that afflict many California farmers, especially those in the San Joaquin Valley. First up, the matter of “drought.” We all noted with concern the dry fall season, which understandably raised concerns about another drought, and predictably journalists and environmentalists who focus on water ...
Remember Big Green? Probably less than 1 percent of all Californians do. But I bet many of you remember the 1990 ballot initiative sponsored by environmental activists. The Big Green Initiative (Proposition 128) proposed an aggressive suite of far-reaching regulations and restrictions on several sectors of California’s economy—especially agriculture. Whether you remember Big Green or ...