Opinion
The Save the Plastic Bag Coalition wasted no time filing a lawsuit challenging the countywide ban on plastic grocery bags. The suit claims the county waste management board violated the law because it did not prepare an environmental impact report before adopting the ban.
Redevelopment is dead after more than six decades as a multibillion-dollar government economic development tool.
San Luis Obispo County is proposing to put some teeth in regulations aimed at protecting the public from aggressive animals. A new ordinance introduced Tuesday would give animal control officers the ability to issue citations to the owners of menacing dogs and other animals that aren’t adequately contained.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has a hard-won reputation for issuing sweeping, precedent-setting and liberal rulings that are often overturned by the more conservative U.S. Supreme Court.
Gov. Jerry Brown's campaign to balance the state budget with new income and sales taxes took a double hit Monday.
The state of California has put plans for a Paso Robles prison complex on ice. That’s an economic blow not only for Paso, but also for the entire county.
California's 112 community colleges, the nation's largest higher education system, may change a lot if Gov. Jerry Brown has his way.
Gov. Jerry Brown and his fellow Democrats in the Legislature settled on a hastily revised state budget last June – after Brown had vetoed legislators' first version – and pronounced it to be balanced and timely.
So much for transparency. Assembly Bill 1148 — more commonly known as the California DISCLOSE Act — died in the Assembly this week, just two votes shy of the necessary two-thirds majority.
Many years of partisan wrangling over the state budget reached a climax in 2010 when public employee unions and Democratic politicians persuaded voters to pass Proposition 25, eliminating the two-thirds vote for budgets.
Gov. Jerry Brown’s plan to close 70 state parks — including the campground at Morro Strand State Beach — doesn’t add up. The $22 million in savings that would be realized is too puny to worry about; it accounts for just two-tenths of 1 percent of California’s $9.2 billion deficit.
Gov. Jerry Brown is scaling back the state's highly controversial bullet train project to keep it alive.
Would it be churlish to say that the much-ballyhooed Think Long Committee for California fell short on fortitude?
It’s easy to see why Cal Poly officials are proposing a new “student success fee” that would eventually generate $14 million per year for the university. Just look at the numbers: In the late 1980s, state support accounted for 90 percent of the university’s revenue. That’s since dwindled to 41 percent.
When a political party achieves dominance of any government, one expects that it would use its hegemony to enact its public policy agenda.
The big news in Stanislaus County these days is that a big Internet retailer – almost certainly Amazon – will establish a huge distribution center in Patterson that would employ at least 1,500 workers.
Like picky suitors who recognize too late that they let the Right One slip away, the Paso Robles City Council acknowledged this week that a used-car lot at 201 Spring St. may have been a good match for the city after all.
Last Tuesday, the Public Policy Institute of California issued a new poll that found, among other things, just 17 percent of the state's voters like the Legislature's performance.
It’s been 15 years since California voters legalized medical marijuana. That would seem to be ample time to develop sane policies that would allow those legitimately ill and disabled to have reasonable access to the drug, while putting safeguards in place to prevent the proliferation of pot shops that are nothing more than fronts for recreational sales.
Known for its concerts on the green, its flock of chickens strolling through the downtown parking lot, its trove of historic buildings, the Village of Arroyo Grande now has another, less bucolic, feature: surveillance cameras.
