There will be a public memorial for State Senator Dave Cox on August 5th at the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament in Downtown Sacramento located at 1017 11th Street. The ceremony begins promptly at 10:00am.

In lieu of flowers, the Cox family asks that donations be made to the Dave and Maggie Cox Scholarship Fund with the Sacramento Region Community Foundation, 740 University Ave., Suite 110, Sacramento, CA 95825.

I was recently a guest of radio talk show host Eric Hogue, where we shared some memories of my good friend Dave. Here’s a link to the story and the actual audio of my chat with Eric.

There’s been a lot of talk this week about removing the $11 billion water bond from the November 2010 ballot and putting it on the 2012 ballot. Many think it won’t pass if it’s on this year’s ballot. I say, get rid of it all together. California can’t afford it and for the Sacramento region and the North State, it’s a bad deal that won’t provide the additional water storage that we need. Here are my comments on the bond at a press conference held earlier this year.

Below you’ll find the video highlights, or maybe we ought to call them lowlights, of our Roseville Business regulatory hearings held in January. Unfortunately, everywhere we go, we continue to find stories of businesses who are prevented from growing and hiring new employees or are being forced to look elsewhere to grow.

Senator Cox and I are committed to continue to hear from these businesses, however, and we have scheduled another hearing for February 23, in Rancho Cordova. Please join us if you have a story to tell about your business being impacted by the regulatory climate of California. Details are here on my website.

Business Regulation Hearing from CA Assembly GOP on Vimeo.

I appeared today before the California Air Resource Board to offer my testimony in support of a suspension of the truck and bus diesel regulations that CARB enacted last year.

With many thanks to the Pacific Research Institute and executive producers, Lance Izumi and Vicki Murray, and filmmaker Nick Tucker, we had a great Sacramento premiere of the short documentary film, “Not as Good As You Think” on Tuesday evening.

The film is based on the book of the same name and focuses on the California’s education system and the fact that in many middle class neighborhoods where the schools may look nice, the reality is that schools are under-performing and as a whole, our secondary schools are not keeping up with the rest of the world.

The film presents the case that a system of school choice, not unlike what is happening in Sweden, whereby the money the state pays to educate the child follows the child, and gives parents the right to choose where to send their child to school, could work very well here in California and work to improve our public schools by providing them with some earnest competition.

I’m posting the trailer of the film here.  If you are interested in seeing the entire film, please contact me and I will work to get you a copy.

The conversation continues on the California Forward website. My latest post in response Fresno Mayor Swearengin, and Lorena Gonzalez of the San Diego and Imperial Counties Labor Council.

Recently, I was asked to join the discussion on the California Forward “Forward Thinking” website, where you’ll find ongoing correspondence on critical issues affecting politics and policy in California, by contributors representing different political and professional perspectives.

Today, the topic was Local Government and how local governments might be coping with the current budgetary crisis. As a former county Supervisor, I had this perspective to offer the conversation.

Last week, my ACA 20 was once again killed in the Assembly Elections Committee. As you can see from the press release above, this measure would have changed the title and summary process for the placement of initiatives on the statewide ballot. Currently, the Attorney General, a partisan elected official, is charged with developing the Title and Summary of initiatives. ACA 20 would give this responsibility to the non-partisan Legislative Analyst.

Ballot titles and summaries can have an extreme effect on the passage or failure of a ballot initiative. Often, this is the only information that a voter ever reads about a ballot initiative, and if that language is written with an inherent bias…there is no doubt that it can have an effect on the outcome.

Recently, we’ve seen many initiatives written this way…but the most recent and timely example is what the Attorney General has done with Senator George Runner’s initiative to require an ID to be shown at the polls. Senator Runner writes about the issue in this article in the San Bernardino Sun.

Regardless of what you think of the initiative, you cannot deny the fact that in a short time span of four years, a vastly different title and summary was put on this initiative. The former attorney general, Bill Lockyer, titled nearly identical initiative language in 2005, the “Voter Identication Requirement”. The first line of the summary simply says that the initiative “requires that voters present one of four types of picture identification before voting…”

Attorney General Jerry Brown has now titled Senator Runner’s initiative, that contains nearly identical language, “Limits on Voting.” And the first line of the summary states, “Prohibits citizens from voting at the polls unless they present a government-issued photo ID card.”

Last week, I did a wide ranging interview with a new website/blog based out of Placer County. Conservative Rule.Com.

The topics included my thoughts on the status of the Republican party, my thoughts on nationwide emmission standards, the state budget deficit, illegal immigration, and the legalization of marijuana.

I invite you to read the interview here.

I had the opportunity last week to sit in on a panel discussion of the Western Climate Initiative.

According to the Western Climate Initiative website, the The Western Climate Initiative, launched in February 2007, is a collaboration of seven U.S. governors and four Canadian Premiers. WCI was created to identify, evaluate, and implement collective and cooperative ways to reduce greenhouse gases in the region, focusing on a market-based cap-and-trade system.

Below is the video of my opening comments at the hearing.

Niello Western Climate from CA Assembly GOP on Vimeo.