Thomas Calderon

Environmentalists are declaring victory in their battle against an Assembly bill they say would drastically weaken laws protecting wetlands and other critical coastal habitats. But the bill's author says her proposal--sparked by a pivotal Orange County case--has merely been put on hold to allow comment from state officials and environmental organizations.

Hundreds of corporate lobbyists prowl the marble halls of the state Capitol in Sacramento in these last days of the legislative session, doing their work behind the screen of last-minute chaos. The Senate and Assembly toil into the night to hastily dispose of hundreds of bills before midnight Saturday, when everything that's not passed expires. All but the budget bill, still deadlocked two full months into the new fiscal year.

Aerojet General Corp. and local water producers have failed to reach agreement on a cleanup plan for the contaminated San Gabriel Valley aquifer, raising the prospect of costly litigation. Discussions involving the defense giant, the Main San Gabriel Basin Watermaster and the Environmental Protection Agency broke down Friday, blowing a federal deadline and dashing hopes that relief for the 16-year-old Superfund site was finally in sight.

Amid an unfolding national debate over the safety of reprocessed, single-use medical devices, a Sacramento lawmaker announced that he will introduce a bill to temporarily ban the use of such devices in California. Assemblyman Thomas Calderon (D-Montebello) says the bill--proposed in response to a Times story published Monday--would ban reprocessed, single-use devices until further studies can demonstrate whether they pose a risk to public health.

A Montebello assemblyman and the state schools superintendent were scrambling Friday to find ways to relieve many schools of skyrocketing energy costs resulting from suddenly onerous contracts. In myriad California schools, thousands of children wore jackets in chilly, dim classrooms, libraries and gymnasiums. Colleges, meanwhile, were forced to rent huge diesel-powered generators and go to other extremes.

In a reform linked to the California insurance commissioner scandal, confidential state studies of how insurance companies handle policyholder cxlaims would become public under a last-minute bill that passed the Legislature Thursday and went to the governor for his signature. Under the measure by Sen.

A consultant has made sweeping recommendations, including mandatory sensitivity training for city workers and translation of council meetings to Spanish, to help city leaders communicate better with residents. Thomas Calderon, the president of a Fullerton-based firm that was hired by the council earlier this year, told the council Monday that numerous programs should be started and others expanded.

SACRAMENTO -- A partisan standoff in the Assembly on Sunday over $4 billion in new taxes caused Gov. Gray Davis to miss a midnight deadline for signing a new state budget by the start of the fiscal year. Assembly Republicans halted passage of the budget, saying that it spends too much money and does too little to avoid the billions of dollars in tax hikes necessary to close a $23.6-billion deficit. The plan failed 49 to 26, five votes short of passage.

In response to growing concerns over the safety of disposable medical devices that are reprocessed for reuse, the U.S. government Monday proposed highly anticipated measures to more strictly regulate the practice. The Times last summer reported that millions of medical devices that come in contact with blood or other body fluids and are supposed to be discarded after one use are, instead, reprocessed and reused in other patients without their knowledge.

Housing advocates and a bipartisan group of state lawmakers are sponsoring a package of legislation designed to increase the availability and affordability of housing in California, where a growing shortage threatens the health of the hottest job markets. Although cities and counties have struggled with the issue on their own, the package of eight bills, including one by state Sen. Joe Dunn (D-Santa Ana), aims to stitch together a state framework to tackle the problem.