Schwarzenegger

Caught between falling budgets and the rising ranks of the unemployed and underemployed on welfare, the state of California has suspended employment assistance services such as child care subsidy for welfare families, according to The New York Times' Erik Eckholm. 

After vigorously pursuing policies to push more welfare recipients into the workforce, the state is also dropping work requirements and penalties for single parents with a child aged 1 to 2, or those with two children under 6.

By 2011, the state's welfare-to-work program CalWorks will enforce stricter rules for participants to reduce costs.  Until then, the state is slashing those programs because they are ineligible for stimulus act funds. 

The reversal of a decade's worth of welfare policies worries many who supported the cultural change effected by California's carrot-and-stick approach to getting welfare recipients back to work.

Mr. Schwarzenegger did wring savings out of the state’s welfare-to-work program, known as CalWorks, and achieved a future tightening of the rules. But those changes do not start until July 1, 2011. In the interim, to save $375 million a year, the state is trimming the employment assistance programs at the heart of the welfare-to-work approach, especially subsidized child care, and suspending work requirements for a large share of recipients.

Those programs were selected, in large part, because they were not eligible for extra federal money under the stimulus act.

--- Kristen Young

California Democrats and environmentalists didn't like the executive order signed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Tuesday, but all the other Western states might.

Surrounded by smiling energy company executives, Schwarzenegger's decree will require California's electric utilities to draw at least a third of their power from wind, solar and other renewable resources by 2020, according to the LATimes' Marc Lifsher.

Sounds good, right? 

But California Democrats and environmentalists had been slogging through crafting their own bills to that effect for nine months, and they had support from some utilities as well as labor unions. 

Schwarzenegger said he slapped those bills down because they would favor alternative power produced in California at the expense of other Western states, increase the cost to consumers and compromise electric utilities' easy access  to renewable power.

As of July 2009, California's unemployment rate was pressing 12 percent, but hey, we're all suffering.  Send the jobs up the coast!

- K. Young

Farmers, urbanites and environmentalists were behind the California Legislature's proposed sweeping water reforms, but lawmakers balked at the $12 billion price tag and deferred the vote until the next session.

The bond would have paid for new water infrastructure, ecosystem restoration and supply projects such as water recycling and desalination, according to Bettina Boxall's article in the Los Angeles Times.

Still, there may be some hope for healing the convergence of two rivers in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta east of San Francisco.  As the West Coast's largest estuary, the rivers are home to delta smelt and provide a route both for salmon and for water shipped to Central Valley farms and Southern California cities.

Democrats said they would ask California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to hold a special session on water this fall. 

The delta is crumpling due to past excessive pumping of water to fill federal and state aqueducts, which has been temporarily curtailed to protect the smelt.  That, in turn, has amplifying the drought's effect on farmers and cities.

Investigative journalism creates change, as evidenced by today’s report in the Los Angeles Times that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger fired half of the members of the state Board of Registered Nursing on Monday.

The Governor was spurred into action by a joint project between the LA Times and investigative journalism non-profit ProPublica that highlighted how nurses with well-documented histories of violence, criminal convictions, theft, drug abuse and incompetence continue to work in the California system for years. 

Reporters Tracy Weber, Charles Ornstein and Maloy Moore revealed that poor board oversight and lengthy disciplinary review times kept these nurses working in California even after they had been disciplined by other licensing boards or barred from practicing in other states. Patient assaults and horrible care followed.