A California lawmaker has announced the city of Sacramento will receive $5 million for safety improvements on Folsom Boulevard, including a stretch of the roadway in East Sacramento where a mother was struck and killed while picking her daughter up from Phoebe Hearst Elementary School earlier this year. State Assemblyman Kevin McCarty, D-Sacramento, unveiled the new state funding on Tuesday. The funds will go toward reducing lanes of Folsom Boulevard between 58th and 65th streets “to calm traffic and reduce conflict points,” McCarty’s office said in a news release.

On Sept. 29, 2022, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed two significant criminal justice bills into law which were modeled after programs at the Yolo County District Attorney’s Office.

Kids taking a tumble at the ASI Children’s Center playground will have a softer landing thanks to a $1 million earmark in the state budget.

Assemblymember Kevin McCarty announced the funding at a Sept. 29 press conference at Sacramento State, outside the center.

“I had the opportunity to put together a list of $25 million to reinvest in a dozen or so projects around Sacramento, and this was certainly one that rose to the top of my list,” McCarty said.

Sacramento County is now equipped with a plan intended to help organizations function when smoke from nearby fires drifts into the region. 

Officers in California have killed nearly 1,000 people in six years, according to a Chronicle review of state Department of Justice data that reveals a picture of where violent police encounters occur in the state, and to whom.

But the statistics do not yet offer conclusive results for recent legislative attempts to curtail police violence by toughening the rules of engagement for officers, requiring de-escalation training and bringing in outside investigators when unarmed civilians are killed.

Assemblymember Kevin McCarty spoke with KCRA 3 on how the funding would be used.

“So these monies will go to the county of Sacramento to basically pay for other locations to get homeless off of the parkway into a more appropriate space,” McCarty said.

The bill has support from the Senate president Pro Tem. Assembly speaker and the governor’s office.

The University of California, facing record surges in applications, could increase seats for California students by as many as 33,000 by 2030 — the equivalent of building a new campus.

At least half the growth would come at the UC system’s most popular campuses — UCLA, UC Berkeley and UC San Diego — in part by reducing the number of out-of-state and international students and giving those seats to Californians.

Assemblymember Kevin McCarty (D-Sacramento) hosted a rally at Sacramento City College on June 6 urging Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Legislature to adopt a debt-free college plan for students.

Assembly Bill (AB) 1746, the “Cal Grant Reform Act,” would expand free tuition to more low-income students in the state, eliminate grade-point-average requirements for community college students, and guarantee financial awards for students eligible for a federal Pell Grant.

The campaign to expand free tuition to more low-income California students has been riding a wave of unanimous goodwill, despite its large costs. But the state’s — and nation’s — largest public university system has made public its concern that key trade-offs required for that expansion will be a financial burden for some middle-class students. 

Backers of the effort say those concerns are misplaced. How and whether lawmakers choose to respond will affect the fate of tens of thousands of prospective college students in California for years to come. 

A bill aimed at reducing the potential for unconscious bias in the criminal justice system passed the California State Assembly yesterday by a vote of 72-0.

AB 2778 or the “Race-Blind Charging” bill would require the Department of Justice to develop and publish “Race-Blind Charging” guidelines beginning in January 2024, whereby all prosecuting agencies, as specified, implement a process to review a case for charging based on information, from which all means of identifying the race of the suspect, victim, or witness have been removed or redacted.