Capitol Weekly Podcast

We sat down on Friday for a chat about the looming Recall election with Jonathan Brown, president of Sextant Strategies & Research, a Democratic polling firm based in Southern California. Brown published an intriguing analysis of the race back in August, noting that Democrats were outperforming their registration numbers in early voting, and challenging the chorus of pundits who had predicted...

We are joined today by Anne Dunsmore, Campaign Manager for Rescue California, the organization that is heading the effort to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom. Dunsmore is a longtime fundraiser and activist and has plenty of experience with the Recall process: she worked on the campaign to oust Gov. Gray Davis and the earlier effort to remove Supreme Court Justice Rose Bird. Will she make it three-for-thre...

Last week Capitol Weekly published The 2021 Top 100 - naming the most powerful movers and shakers in California politics. We don’t include elected officials. Instead, we look at those who devote their professional lives to fighting for – or against – issues of state politics and policy, including lobbyists, bureaucrats, activists, trade group leaders, Capitol staffers and even journalists. On this...

The decennial census data released last week by the US Census Bureau offered insights into how the country has changed since 2010 and will be instrumental in redrawing California's political maps. We're joined today by Paul Mitchell of Political Data Inc., who offers his thoughts on what the data portend for California's redistricting. And he shares his very favorite redistricting story with us! P...

Longtime lobbyist Chris Micheli stops by the Capitol Weekly Podcast to talk with Tim Foster and John Howard about his TWO new case books: Introduction to California State Government and Cases and Materials on Direct Democracy in California. Micheli, a lawyer and an adjunct professor at the University of the Pacific’s McGeorge School of Law has published numerous books on the subject of lobbying, a...

The latest Berkeley IGS Poll finds that among likely voters, 47% favor recalling Governor Gavin Newsom and only 50% favor his retention. Those numbers are a stark warning for a Governor serving amid the most turbulent era in memory, where extreme circumstances within - and beyond - his control could impact the attitude of the electorate at any moment. We are joined today by veteran pollster Mark D...

Today we welcome Randall Hagar, the Policy Consultant and Legislative Advocate for the Psychiatric Physicians Alliance of California. Hagar has been advocating for sound mental health policies for over 20 years and helped draft the language for the original Laura's Law, a landmark state law that allows for court-ordered assisted outpatient treatment. Hagar Joined us to talk about the growing numbe...

We are joined this episode by Asm. Kevin McCarty of Sacramento, who walks us through some of the groundbreaking investments in education that are enshrined in the 2021-22 state budget, signed last Monday by Gov. Newsom. McCarty, a Democratic member of the Assembly Budget Committee, takes a victory lap, touting the unabashedly progressive education agenda outlined in the Budget - an unprecedented e...

The Bash (AKA The Back to Session Bash) has been a Capitol tradition for close to two decades now. The 2020 edition - the biggest ever - was held as usual in January, before COVID was a concern. Twelve months later, a January 2021 Bash was out of the question. The question then was: cancel or postpone? Bash headmaster David Quintana (AKA Q) consulted with the party's sponsors and decided to schedu...

Note that we're posting early on the holiday weekend - we are joined this episode by California Governor's Office of Emergency Services chief Mark Ghilarducci. Ghilarducci leads the state response to disasters of all kinds. Ghilarducci has extensive experience: he has served California governors since the Deukmejian administration and was the incident commander on the Oklahoma City bombing recover...

As John says in the episode: "When we think of solar energy, we think of Bernadette Del Chiaro." Bernadette is the executive director of the California Solar & Storage Association, whose mission is to promote the widespread deployment of local clean energy technologies. Rooftop solar has been one of the state's biggest clean-energy success stories: California has built the equivalent...

Longtime environmental advocate Annie Notthoff retired from the Natural Resources Defense Council last year but still has plenty to say about California environmental issues. We asked her about CEQA exemptions for housing, what to make of the budget and the drought. Plus: Who had the Worst Week in California Politics? Show Notes: 3:30 Benefits of an ally in the White House 6:07 Housing and CEQA 11...

Ken Jacobs, chair of the UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education, joined us to chat about a number of labor issues, including the ongoing uproar over at SEIU 1000 following the election of outsider candidate Richard Louis Brown; the latest fallout from Proposition 22; and The PRO Act: what is it, and how will it impact California workers if passed? Also: What the heck is going on at th...

We are joined today by the Governor Newsom's Executive Secretary, (aka chief of staff) Jim Deboo. Deboo joined the governor's office in January, just as the pandemic surged in the wake of the holidays. Unemployment was at record highs, predictions for the state's economy were dire, and the Recall effort was gathering steam. Six months later, Deboo surveys a very different landscape: California lea...

Since we posted FOUR new episodes this past week, we're offering up an abbreviated version of our regular podcast... this time we'll just look at who had the #WorstWeekCA. If you have been following the news, the answer should be pretty clear: SEIU 1000, home to 96,000 union state employees, saw a dramatic low-turnout election that unseated the longtime leader and replaced her with an outsider can...

This special episode of the Capitol Weekly Podcast was recorded live on May 26 at a panel discussion hosted by Capitol Weekly as part of A Conference on Housing Policy. Assemblyman David Chiu, Chair of the Assembly Housing and Community Development Committee delivers the Keynote address: "We Still Have a Housing Crisis." Asm. Chiu was first elected in 2014 and re-elected in 2016, 2018, a...

This special episode of the Capitol Weekly Podcast was recorded live on May 26 at a panel discussion hosted by Capitol Weekly as part of A Conference on Housing Policy. After years of debate and fierce opposition from neighborhood associations, the support for single-family zoning is waning. Housing advocates like Sen. Scott Wiener have introduced legislation to encourage multi-family building sta...

This special episode of the Capitol Weekly Podcast was recorded live on May 26 at a panel discussion hosted by Capitol Weekly as part of A Conference on Housing Policy. Even a worldwide pandemic couldn’t slow California’s climbing cost of housing. The Golden State boasts the most expensive real estate market in the country – the median home price in California is nearly double the average for a ho...

This special episode of the Capitol Weekly Podcast was recorded live on May 26 at a panel discussion hosted by Capitol Weekly as part of A Conference on Housing Policy. As people hunkered down, working from their homes, inventory tightened; home prices made an unexpected jump, driving prices even further out of range for many Californians. At the same time, many working people lost wages, creating...

With Memorial Day - one of the biggest camping holidays of the year - coming up next Monday, we thought we'd check in on the status of California's State Parks. We're joined this week by Gloria Sandoval, Deputy Director of Public Affairs for State Parks who tells us how to get into your favorite park - and offers tips on what to do if your first option is booked. As pandemic restrictions lift, Cal...

Assemblyman Mike Gipson (D) represents the 64th Assembly District, which includes communities that are among some of those hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic: Carson, Compton, Gardena, South Los Angeles, Torrance and Watts. Gipson is the chair of the committee on Infectious Diseases, and introduced AB1038, a bill to create a $180 million California Health Equity Fund that would address health an...

We are joined this episode by Lande Ajose, chair of the Governor’s Council for Postsecondary Education - a big job as California colleges prepare to reopen campuses to students post-pandemic. Ajose helped prepare the recently-released "Recovery With Equity" roadmap for California’s postsecondary systems to come back from the pandemic more financially resilient and positioned to more equi...

When we invited freshman Assemblymember Alex Lee (D - San Jose) to come on the podcast we planned to discuss his ambitious policy proposals, like Universal Health Care, a Wealth Tax, and a ban on corporate donations to political candidates. What we didn't expect was that those discussions would all be in the past tense. Lee had a rough week: his proposal for a Wealth Tax didn't make the deadline t...

Veteran journalist and university professor Sigrid Bathen, who has written extensively about California's mental health policies, joins Tim Foster and John Howard on the Podcast to chat about what is rapidly becoming a hot political issue -- having mental health clinicians accompany police officers on some emergency calls, such as family disturbances. The "cops and clinicians" movement i...

We're joined today by Matt Rexroad, redistricting expert and the former mayor of Woodland and member of the Yolo County Board of Supervisors. Since leaving public office Matt has shut down his longtime firm, Meridian Pacific, and moved on to Redistricting Insights, whose motto is "fair lines produce good government." Rexroad knows something about fair lines, having been involved in Calif...