Elias: Why did CARE courts take so long?
Gov. Gavin Newsom's CARE Act aims not to commit anyone or set up conservatorships, but to see courts compel those who need it to get...
Thomas D. Elias
Elias: Excess school lands for teacher housing?
Schools propose to help ease their teacher shortage by providing subsidized affordable housing on surplus school property....
Elias: When ultra-dense isn’t dense enough
San Francisco is the second most dense city in the US, but that matters little to the ultra-density fanatics running California....
Elias: Secession fever hits state’s biggest county
Some in San Bernardino think they can do better on their own than as part of California, and voters there are getting a chance to...
Elias: Keep ranked choice voting where it’s working
Ranked choice voting, in use in parts of the state, saves money and lets every voter express their preferences very clearly....
Elias: Bet on passage for big-time sports gambling
If you’re a gambling man or woman, don’t bet the house against either November’s Proposition 26 or Proposition 27....
Elias: State Democrats see reality — voters not uniformly progressive
Polls, tea leaf readings, constituent complaints and recall petitions at last have liberal Democrats realizing they must listen to voters....
Elias: Next economic dip nothing like last one
As the state heads into what might be a new downturn, California seems well situated to make this a fairly brief decline....
Elias: Oil, gas costing us more than we thought
A new report indicates the money motorists lose to the cartel-like oil industry is just a fraction of what consumption really costs us....
Elias: More bait-and-switch on freeway toll lanes
The movement to make things unequal on California’s urban highways, to favor the rich over the poor, grows steadily....
Elias: Facts don’t matter to California’s densifying Democrats
There appears to be no end to the new laws that legislators want to pass to make California at least as dense as New York...
Elias: Dangers lurking in fully electronic health records
State lawmakers almost as an afterthought ordered creation of a unified electronic system for virtually all types of patient information....
Elias: Will the abortion decision revive Calexit?
If anything is ever going to spur this state and perhaps some of its neighbors to go it alone, recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings might....
Elias: Affordability solution — tax housing speculators
California's housing crisis may be as much a matter of hoarding and waiting for profit as it is of supply....
Elias: Groundwater law has not stopped subsidence
In the San Joaquin Valley, irrigation pipes standing up several feet tall in the middle of fields and orchards once were underground....
