The single most important issue that drove the Los Angeles mayoral election was union spending on behalf of Wendy Greuel, especially money from the public union within the Department of Water and Power. In a heavily Democratic, labor-oriented city, labor’s candidate lost. What does that portend for the long-term reforms on pension costs, tax reform, re-thinking how government services are delivered and other labor related issues?

It’s true that Greuel had solid support from the business community as well. In fact, she seemed to have many advantages going into the race. She claimed she was the candidate that could bring business and labor together for the betterment of the city. She was more closely identified with the voter rich San Fernando Valley. Some polls indicated that her plea to become the first female mayor of the city struck a chord with voters.

I’ve been on the road around the state quite a bit recently, and I keep bumping into former state legislators. With few exceptions, the former legislators talk about how much more they know now than when they were in – and say they could do better if they could go back.

So why not let them?

I’m not suggesting something so logical or reasonable – and politically unrealistic by the unreal standards of California politics – as eliminating term limits. But that doesn’t mean that former lawmakers couldn’t return and help the state legislature. Heck, many former legislators still do quasi-legislative work as lobbyists and consultants.

Mad Men is one of the few television programs, outside of the work-based reality programs, that takes employment and business seriously. Many of the storylines center on the business activities of Sterling Cooper Draper Price (SCDP), the advertising agency in New York at which Don Draper, Roger Sterling and the other main characters are employed.

The 1960s in which Mad Men is set was a different job market than the present in California and the United States. The California unemployment rate was below 5% throughout 1968, going down to 4.1% in December 1968. Our aerospace, banking, shipping and retail trade giants dominated their industries in the 1960s, and were able to offer the stable employment more widespread in the 1950s and 1960s California.

The appetizers have been cleared and it looks like the table is being set for possible reform of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). While there are a large number of issues that one can discuss when it comes to CEQA reform, I will limit my comments to how to stop abusive CEQA lawsuits.

The CEQA debate came to a head recently in the Senate Environmental Quality Committee. The debate featured a lot of legislators, a lot of bills and a lot of passion, but in the end it became clear that Senate Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg was going to control this debate with his bill, SB 731. CALA had been supporting legislation by State Senator Tom Berryhill as one possible vehicle for reform, but it was pretty clear that SB 787 was going to be grounded due to the makeup of the committee.

It has been 35 years since California voters overwhelmingly approved Proposition 13, a measure that, as Governor Jerry Brown put it in 2011, “started the centralization of power” in the state. He should know because he was also governor in 1978 and helped oversee that shift.

At the time, Californians were enraged that their inflation-fueled home values were accompanied by rising local property taxes. The referendum limited those taxes to 1 percent of their property’s value.

At the time, advocates of Proposition 13 claimed it would limit government spending. They were wrong.

David Crane’s argument above advocating doing away with the property tax protections in Proposition 13 is flawed. Crane says the state would function more efficiently if it relied more heavily on a stable property tax instead of more volatile income and sales taxes, but what makes the property tax so stable in California is Proposition 13.

Under the Proposition 13 formula, during economic downturns property tax revenue does not fall as much as the sales and income tax because many properties are not tied to current market values. If properties taxes were based on market values, as they were before Prop 13 passed, California schools and local governments would have taken an additional major hit during the recent recession because the taxable value would drop dramatically and the tax take would fall with it.

Let’s face it; while the intent of California’s global warming regulations was good, how it actually works is not.

We can continue to attempt to roadblock the implementation of California’s landmark greenhouse gas legislation, or we can figure out how to implement this policy with as little impact on Californians’ checkbooks as possible.  It’s past time that all of us roll up our sleeves and figure out what fixes are needed to make it work right.

Governor Jerry Brown has shown a growing interest in reforming laws that are leading to abusive litigation in California. Last year he signed a bill to cut down on Americans with Disabilities Act lawsuits. This year he made reforming the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) a top priority because CEQA lawsuits have been blocking important development projects. And last week, Brown announced that he is taking on a new effort – reforming the well-intentioned but widely misused Proposition 65, an initiative approved in 1986.

We Californians have all seen the warnings…the store where you are shopping or the product you are about to use “contains chemicals known by the State of California to cause cancer or reproductive harm.”

Predictions from the Legislative Analyst that the state will have more revenue than the governor projects in his May budget revision — with most of the money going to the schools under the provisions of Prop 98 — could set up a spending tug-of-war with Prop 98 in the middle.

Passed in 1988, Prop 98 set a guaranteed percentage of the state’s general fund budget for K-12 and community college education. The measure also established a complicated formula to not only send money to the schools each year, but to make up for what the schools did not receive during particularly dismal budget years.

There’s consensus that California needs a big new deal to govern water. There’s no consensus on what should be in it. Habitat restoration? Rebuilt levees to withstand earthquakes? Or new tunnels to divert water from the Sacramento River to farmers and cities in Southern California?

These are all possibilities for the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, a water source for 25 million of California’s 38 million people. But if there’s to be a smart deal on the most contentious and complicated issue in California, the most important ingredient isn’t water. It’s sunscreen—the sunscreen that participants in any negotiations should apply to themselves as they head out to look at the affected places firsthand.