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Remaining CA LGBTQ bills survive 1st chamber votes

Another six bills related to LGBTQ issues or health concerns are moving on this legislative session in the California Legislature. Lawmakers in the bills' houses of origin adopted them by their June 3 deadline to do so this year.

All 20 pieces of legislation the Bay Area Reporter is tracking this year are moving forward. Many build on LGBTQ laws previously enacted by state lawmakers that focused on issues impacting public schools and foster youth, with several others related to ending the HIV pandemic.

Governor Newsom Releases Balanced Revised Budget Plan

SACRAMENTO – Governor Gavin Newsom today released his May Revision proposal, a balanced budget plan that maintains critical investments to address our biggest challenges while preparing for continued economic uncertainty due to global economic issues.

The Governor’s budget closes a projected $32 billion budget shortfall while protecting key investments in the issues that matter most to Californians, including education, health care, housing and homelessness, public safety, and climate action.

As emergency aid flows to flooded-out Californians, will thousands be left out?

It was late Friday morning when muddy, brown water started rushing onto Michelle Hackett’s Salinas Valley farms.

On one side of her family’s Riverview Farms cannabis business, a county-mandated retention pond overflowed. Next door, a farm abandoned by another grower — one of dozens of cannabis businesses to shut down in Monterey County in recent years — spawned another small river headed straight for Hackett and her skeleton crew.

Helping the ‘unbanked’: California mulls entering banking business to serve disadvantaged consumers

Anneisha Williams figures she has paid several hundred dollars in overdraft fees over the years, so when her last bank recently refused to refund about $500 a hacker stole from her checking account, Williams decided she was done with banks. 

Williams, 38, works full-time at a Jack-in-the-box in the Los Angeles area and is an in-home care provider. She also is raising six children; she doesn’t have time to hassle with a bank she no longer trusts, she said. 

Renewed push to extend child tax credits in California

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — There’s a renewed push in the Capitol to send California families a child tax credit.

California provides families with a child tax credit if they have kids under the age of six, but Assemblymember Miguel Santiago said poverty doesn’t end once your child reaches the age of six.

Despair in Emerald Triangle as CA legal cannabis collapses

In 2016, when California voters faced the choice of whether to legalize marijuana for recreational use, they heard promises that it would help end a racist “war on drugs,” bring a violent illegal market out of the shadows and, by the way, bring in tax revenue. Gavin Newsom, then lieutenant governor and now governor, said so. 

More than six years later, while Proposition 64 has cut arrests for marijuana-related offenses, it hasn’t lived up to its billing for the small cannabis growers in Northern California’s famed Emerald Triangle. 

Floods, fires, droughts show California needs bigger safety net for farmworkers, advocates say

Torrential rains and floods submerged whole towns and killed more than 20 people in parts of California in January. They also caused thousands of farmworkers to lose weeks of pay because the flooded fields and orchards were surrounded by treacherous, watery and muddy roads. 

The steep storm-related losses — along with recent revelations that some farmworkers are living in substandard conditions — are bolstering advocates’ argument that California should expand its safety net to help its agricultural workforce survive such setbacks.

Some lawmakers are listening to them.