Tuesday, August 17, 2010 – 12:30 pm

Meg Whitman, republican nominee for California Governor announced a valuable endorsement today.

The California Peace Officers Association (CPOA) representing approximately 3,000 peace officers throughout the state has thrown its support behind the former chief executive of EBay.

CPOA is composed primarily of supervisory and management level peace officers from police and sheriff’s departments within California.

Hudson

10:00 PM PDT on Monday, August 16, 2010

By ALICIA ROBINSON
The Press-Enterprise

A coalition of Riverside community groups on Monday asked the City Council to “return integrity to the city of Riverside” by firing the city manager and called for investigations of possible malfeasance and civil rights violations by city officials.

Members of the Community Coalition, which includes the grassroots Eastside Think Tank and Riverside Coalition for Police Accountability, had discussions with the mayor and council members in July. The meetings resulted in three recommendations that they made public on Monday.

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06:33 AM PDT on Tuesday, August 17, 2010

By ALICIA ROBINSON
The Press-Enterprise

Riverside’s elected leaders can take home a city-owned car and use it to attend city meetings and visit constituents, visit the grocery store or take in a movie, all with a gas card that allows them to fill up at taxpayers’ expense.

The only caveat is that they have to report the perk as income to the Internal Revenue Service.

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James Rufus Koren, Staff Writer
Posted: 08/16/2010 05:56:10 PM PDT

More San Bernardino County students met or exceeded state math and English standards last school year than the year before, but the county’s students are still behind the state average, the most recently released state test results show.

Countywide, 48 percent of students are proficient or better in English and 43 percent are proficient or better in math. That falls short of the statewide figures of 52 percent and 48 percent, respectively.

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10:00 PM PDT on Monday, August 16, 2010

Cassie MacDuff

The loss of one of the two annual NASCAR races at Fontana’s Auto Club Speedway is not just a blow to the motorsports venue.

It’s an economic hit for the region, particularly the hotels and restaurants that served thousands of visitors on NASCAR weekends.

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New home starts far below ’09 pace
Ryan Carter and Rebecca U. Cho, Staff Writers
Posted: 08/16/2010 09:26:11 PM PDT

If last year was bad for homebuilders in the Inland Empire, this year is shaping up to be worse, costing the region jobs as well as revenue, according to industry reports and experts.

Builders have pulled 830 permits from local cities to build single- and multi-family structures in the region, said Carlos Rodriguez, CEO of the Building Association of Southern California’s Baldy View chapter.

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Michael J. Sorba, Staff Writer
Posted: 08/16/2010 05:38:49 PM PDT

COLTON – The City Council will decide tonight on a staff recommendation to post the compensation of every city employee on its website and forward the information to state Controller John Chiang.

City officials say the move will comply with Chiang’s order that all cities disclose the salaries of elected officials and public employees or face a $5,000 fine.

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Cooley

Corruption team has many cases
Bethania Palma Markus, Staff Writer
Created: 08/16/2010 04:02:35 PM PDT

The tiny city of Bell made national headlines after it was discovered officials had helped themselves to grossly inflated salaries, shining the spotlight on corruption in Los Angeles County.

More than a year before the Bell headlines broke, attorneys and investigators from the Public Integrity Division of the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office had been probing complaints of wrongdoing in the small municipality.

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By PE Politics
on August 16, 2010 11:55 AM

Internet poker remains illegal in California, but an Inland tribe this week will enroll members of a “California Intertribal Intrastate Poker Consortium.”

A signing ceremony is scheduled for Wednesday at the office of the Morongo Band of Mission Indians’ Sacramento lobbyist. The tribe, which operates a large casino near Banning, has pushed an Internet poker proposal since last summer.

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Issa

By PE Politics
on August 16, 2010 3:08 PM

Inland Rep. Darrell Issa is asking Congress’s investigative branch to look into whether the Obama administration has improperly used taxpayer money to further its political agenda.

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Meg Whitman

Carla Marinucci, Chronicle Political Writer
San Francisco Chronicle
Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Republican backers of GOP gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman, who remains in a dead heat with Democrat Jerry Brown after putting $104 million of her own money into her campaign, aim to break the political logjam this week with a new statewide ad that takes on Brown as a failed politician.

The Sacramento-based Small Business Action Committee, which is paying for the 30-second anti-Brown spot, received a $10,000 check from Whitman this year, while one of its directors has backed “birther” campaigns and the impeachment of President Obama.

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Tuesday, August 17, 2010

To his credit, Jerry Brown finally followed the advice of Calbuzz and pushed out a batch of info Monday that cleared up most of the confusion and questions about his taxpayer-funded pension.

To his detriment, Gandolf should not have let the matter become a campaign issue in the first place; it did so only because he’s too cheap to hire enough staff to deal with the unstinting demands of running for governor of California in what most of the rest of us recognize as the 21st Century.

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Brown

August 16th, 2010, 3:01 pm · posted by BRIAN JOSEPH, Sacramento Correspondent

Updated with additional calculations by the Watchdog

The Watchdog’s recent story about the mystery surrounding Jerry Brown’s pension has shaken out some answers — and whole lot more questions.

Brown campaign spokesman Sterling Clifford said in a email this afternoon that the gubernatorial candidate spoke with officials at the California Public Employees’ Retirement System today and they told him that at the conclusion of his term as attorney general he will have accrued 16 years in the Legislators’ Retirement System. He also has 9.2 years in PERS, the system available to most state employees: eight from his years as Mayor of Oakland, 1.2 years from time he served as a California Supreme Court law clerk. Sterling writes, “If he were to retire in both systems next year, his pension would be $78K. If he were elected governor, it would go up slightly based on a high salary of whatever the Governor’s salary is. ”

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By Ruben Vives and Jeff Gottlieb, Los Angeles Times
August 17, 2010

Confronting a hostile crowd, the Bell City Council met Monday night on whether to roll back property taxes, turn over administration of city elections to Los Angeles County and cut the cost of obtaining public records — the latest potential concessions by leaders of the small, working-class town in the wake of a salary scandal.

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The city has been hailed as a bastion of citizen-activism in a civically disengaged region. But now, the FBI and other agencies are looking into possible conflicts of interest and other misconduct.

By Hector Becerra, Los Angeles Times
August 17, 2010

Maywood Councilman Felipe Aguirre sees his small working-class city as “the Santa Monica of the Southeast” — a place built on activism, a healthy distrust of the establishment and compassion for the less fortunate.

But these days, Maywood is gaining a decidedly less romantic image.

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California Watch
A Project of the Center for Investigative Reporting
Money and Politics

August 17, 2010 | Timothy Sandoval

After winning the Republican primary for attorney general, Steve Cooley ripped into his Democratic opponent, San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris, after her office was accused of hiding information during the trial of a drug lab technician caught using cocaine.

But Harris isn’t the only candidate for attorney general with employee problems: Cooley is being sued by his own staff.

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By Kevin Yamamura
kyamamura@sacbee.com
Published: Tuesday, Aug. 17, 2010 – 12:00 am | Page 3A

In an era of term limits, Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg is now the veteran budget negotiator among the four legislative leaders. Besides the concerns of the Senate Democratic caucus he leads, Steinberg must also consider impacts on state workers who live in his district.

The Sacramento Democrat spoke with three reporters on a variety of issues last week after touring a middle school and job-training facility in North Sacramento.

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Study says new housing construction contributed $13.8 billion to the California economy in 2009, down from $67.7 billion in 2005. Employment fell to 77,000 last year from 487,000 jobs in 2005 — a drop of 84%.

By Alana Semuels, Los Angeles Times
August 17, 2010

The housing bust has cost California plenty.

The industry’s economic output has plunged by about 80% since 2005, representing a loss of tens of billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of jobs, according to a report released Monday by the California Homebuilding Foundation and the Center for Strategic Economic Research.

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By Ed Mendel

After winning a years-long lobbying battle with business groups, big shareowners led by CalPERS and CalSTRS may get more clout in corporate boardrooms by nominating directors not picked by management.

A provision in a sweeping financial reform signed by President Obama last month is expected to allow institutional investors to put their candidates for board of directors on the voting material sent to shareowners.

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