Capitol Weekly Podcast

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...

Former state senator Holly J. Mitchell was elected last year to a seat on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, representing District 2 - the same district in which she was born and raised. Term limits have turned the traditional local-government-to-legislature pipeline on its head, as has the stratospheric growth of LA: as a Supervisor, Mitchell represents twice as many constituents as she...

We welcomed the longtime but soon-to-be-retired Metropolitan Water District of Southern California head honcho Jeff Kightlinger for a wide-ranging discussion that covered the status of the Delta Tunnel Project, climate change and the snow survey, the drought, working from home, jukeboxes, his punk rock roots and Dan Walters' connection to the Zasu Pitts Memorial Orchestra. WHEW. Closing tune is &q...

Veteran political strategist Bill Wong has been a longtime leader in California's Asian Pacific Islander political community, and is a recognized expert on AAPI voters. While Wong should have been celebrating last week's appointment of Rob Bonta as California Attorney General - the first Filipino American to hold the office - he was instead dealing with the fallout of a nationwide spree of raciall...

Democratic political strategist Garry South joins us to talk about the potential recall of Governor Gavin Newsom. South is uniquely positioned to weigh in on the subject: he headed Governor Gray Davis' 1998 and 2002 gubernatorial campaigns, and ran Gavin Newsom's first campaign for Governor back in 2009. South notes that the current recall effort will qualify for the ballot only because of the uni...

While many are noting the success of SB87, which led to the inclusion of more women on corporate boards, there is a lot of room for improvement in diversifying California's boards. A scorecard released last month by Latino Voices for Boardroom Equity reveals that many California boards still lack ethnic diversity. For Latinos, the statistics are particularly shocking: while they make up close to 4...

This special episode of the Capitol Weekly Podcast was recorded live on March 11th at a presentation hosted by Capitol Weekly: The Future of Work, Keynote: Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez is at the forefront of much of the Progressive legislation that emerges from Sacramento. A longtime labor leader and organizer prior to holding office, Gonzalez is the author of AB5, t...

This special episode of the Capitol Weekly Podcast was recorded live on March 4th at a panel discussion hosted by Capitol Weekly: The Future of Work, The Big Picture. For the third year in a row, California has seen a decline in population. Will this alter the state’s employment outlook? And, some high-profile companies have announced that they are leaving the state this year: is this a minor tric...

Political Data Inc., has for 30 years been the state’s largest provider of voter information to political campaigns, consultants, and pollsters, serving a long list of both Democrat and Republican clients. The firm announced last week that they would no longer work with Republican clients, saying, "The company will divest any business that does not align with the organization’s Democratic val...

Today's episode features Delaine Eastin, former Chair of the Assembly Education Committee, two term Superintendent of Public Instruction and now, candidate for California Democratic Party Chair. Eastin joins us to make the case for her campaign, acknowledging that unseating current party chair Rusty Hicks will be a heavy lift, but expressing the optimism that is a hallmark of all of her efforts. E...

This special episode of the Capitol Weekly Podcast was recorded live on February 25 at a panel discussion hosted by Capitol Weekly: The Future of Work, Impact of Proposition 22. After a hard-fought battle at the ballot box, Proposition 22 is law. But, questions remain, the first of which is: does it stand up to the current court challenge? How will 22 impact unions? What other industries may turn...

The past few weeks have seen a spectacular implosion of The Lincoln Project, the high profile collective of never-Trumper ex-Republican political operatives that spent the 2020 election cycle battering the president and his allies with scorching ads, videos and commentary. Whether the Lincoln Project's efforts were effective in the race, or simply played to their base - the Trump-hating Democrats...

This special episode of the Capitol Weekly Podcast was recorded live on February 18 at a panel discussion hosted by Capitol Weekly: The Future of Work, After the Pandemic. What will the workplace look like when the pandemic is over? What will happen to the industries that have been particularly hard-hit, like restaurants and live events/entertainment? Women suffered the worst of the job losses – w...