News

Thursday, October 12, 2017

As excerpted from The Orange County Register. 

A landmark new law designed to narrow the gender pay gap in the nation’s most populous state bars California employers from inquiring about applicants’ previous salaries and benefits.
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Thursday, October 5, 2017

As excerpted from The Record. 

Assemblywoman Susan Eggman, D-Stockton, who requested the state audit last year along with Sen. Lois Wolk of Davis, said Thursday that the findings are “one more stick in the spokes of a bicycle that is going off the track.”
 
“I think the takeaway is they’ve been planning for 11 years and there’s no plan,” Eggman said. “It’s time to cut our losses and start working on a real solution.”
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Thursday, October 5, 2017

As excerpted from the Mercury News.

Gov. Jerry Brown’s $17 billion proposal to build two massive tunnels through the Delta to make it easier to move water from north to south was hit with another setback Thursday as a state audit found it was suffering from “significant cost increases and delays.”
 
The 91-page report from California’s state auditor, Elaine Howle, said the state Department of Water Resources “has not completed either an economic or financial analysis to demonstrate the financial viability” of the project, which the Brown administration calls the California WaterFix.
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Thursday, October 5, 2017

As excerpted from the Sacramento Bee. 

California’s state auditor criticized planners of the Delta tunnels Thursday for paying millions of dollars to an unqualified consultant and not completing a cost-benefit analysis of the $17.1 billion project.
 
In a 97-page report, State Auditor Elaine Howle said the California Department of Water Resources broke state law in 2009, during the early stages of the tunnels planning, by hiring a Sacramento company called Hallmark Group to oversee a portion of the planning process. The report said Hallmark “does not appear to possess the technical credentials or experience on relevant projects.”

 

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Wednesday, October 4, 2017

As excerpted from The Mercury News.

California employers would be barred from asking job applicants about their prior salaries if Gov. Jerry Brown signs into law a new bill seeking to close the state’s gender pay gap.

“Nobody denies it’s a real issue,” said Assembly member Susan Talamantes Eggman (D-Stockton), who introduced the bill. “I think the remedies are what people debate about. And since it’s remained stubborn and hasn’t really moved, then why not try something that has been tried around the country?”

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Tuesday, October 3, 2017

As excerpted from Capital & Main.

Many harm-reduction programs are already legal in California. You can buy testing kits, for example, and needle-exchange programs qualify for federal funding. But one of the most effective strategies, practiced in Europe and Canada, remains implicitly against state and federal law, despite evidence from other countries that it works: dedicated facilities where people can come to use their drugs in a safe, hygienic environment in the company of trained medical staff. “They increase the amount of people who get into treatment, they increase the amount of people who stay clean, decrease the amount of people who are contracting HIV, Hepatitis, and those kinds of things,” Assemblymember Susan Eggman (D-Stockton) told a press conference on International Overdose Awareness Day, August 31.
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Thursday, September 28, 2017

As excerpted from the Sacramento Bee. 

The state fined a Santa Monica nursing home for claiming a resident received physical therapy five days a week. At least 28 of those sessions were documented by nurse assistants who were not at work on those days. In Los Angeles, lawyers for a woman who was severely re-injured at a convalescent home discovered that nonexistent nurses made entries in her chart.
 
All that was detailed by The Sacramento Bee’s Marjie Lundstrom in 2011. Now, after failed legislative attempts in past years, Gov. Jerry Brown can correct this inequity by signing Assembly Bill 859 by Assemblywoman Susan Eggman, D-Stockton. The bill would help expose and thus discourage what was, until Lundstrom came along, a largely untold story of falsification of patient records in nursing homes.
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