Business tax hike defeated as California voters reject Proposition 15 [Sacramento Bee]
California voters have rejected Proposition 15, a ballot measure that sought to make the biggest change to California property tax law in decades in order to raise money for local governments and education. The Associated Press said the measure had been defeated as vote-counting showed it failing, 52% to 48%. … Many business groups and the California Farm Bureau fiercely opposed it.
https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article247115592.html
Santa Barbara Vintners Association drops wine tax proposal following opposition [Santa Maria Times]
The Santa Barbara County Vintners Association has withdrawn its plans to enact a 1% wine assessment that it hoped to impose on county vintners to pay for marketing and advocacy purposes. The more than two-year effort by the vintners association to achieve support from the county’s nearly 300 wineries with tasting room sales for paying the extra 1% tax-like fee on all California direct-to-consumer sales, ended on Oct. 28. More than 85 wineries and tasting rooms — 45 in Lompoc alone — opposed the “Santa Barbara County Wine Preserve” tax assessment, according to winemaker David deLaski, of Solminer in Los Olivos.
When pigs fly, they want drinks, leg room [Wall Street Journal]
When pigs fly—and they are doing so a lot this year—they usually take Boeing or Airbus wide-body jets across the world. One of the few bright spots for a global airline industry ravaged by Covid-19 has been an increase in live animal cargo flights. Cargo planes this year have taken thousands of pigs, goats, alpacas, cats and dogs on international flights, and livestock handlers say demand for the fastest mode of animal transportation is rising even as many human passengers shun traveling by plane….China has been buying lots of pigs abroad after losing many of its own hogs to African swine fever. China is expected to import 25,000 live hogs from around the world in 2020, compared with 4,000 in 2019, the Agriculture Department said. Many of those will fly.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/when-pigs-fly-they-want-drinks-leg-room-11605022688?mod=hp_featst_pos5
The Sorghum Solution?: The Salk Institute’s plant-based research to battle climate change gets a boost [San Diego Union-Tribune]
When energy nerds talk about carbon capture and sequestration, CCS for short, the discussion normally centers on finding ways to take carbon dioxide from fossil fuel power plants, transporting it to a storage site and depositing it so the CO2 does not enter the atmosphere. But researchers at the Salk Institute in La Jolla take a different approach to CCS — by working to remove carbon from the atmosphere by developing better varieties of plants, such as sorghum….“It’s a highly productive crop that grows in very warm and hot drought environments,” said Salk professor Wolfgang Busch, co-director of the initiative. A gluten-free cereal grain often used for livestock feed, sorghum is “a crop that will be very much suited to grow in the changed environment that we expect to have in a decade or so … We are thrilled that we can work on a crop that can potentially grow in California and the local environment here.”
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/business/story/2020-11-10/salk-institute-and-sempra
‘Got there just in the nick of time’: 200 queens were in first ‘murder hornet’ nest. But there could be more out there [USA Today]
A nest of a massive, and potentially deadly, invasive hornet species in Washington state likely isn’t the only one in the U.S., a state entomologist said. A team with the Washington State Department of Agriculture that destroyed the first discovered nest in the U.S. found about 500 hornets at various stages of their life cycles in the nest — including approximately 200 queens. Some of the queens could have escaped, mated and formed new colonies next year had they not been captured….However, other sightings of hornets around the area indicate that the team’s work might not be finished. “We do believe there are additional nests,” he said at a virtual news conference Tuesday.
Riverside County approves hemp grower regulations in unincorporated areas [Southern California City News Service]
The Board of Supervisors Tuesday unanimously approved a series of regulations on where and how hemp growers can operate in unincorporated areas of Riverside County, prohibiting grows where water availability is already a challenge. “We cannot allow groundwater basins to be depleted under any circumstance,” Supervisor Kevin Jeffries said. “That would be devastating to a community.” The Industrial Hemp Cultivation & Manufacturing Ordinance was passed following a 90-minute hearing in which water, property setbacks and whether current growers should be “grandfathered” in to the regulatory scheme were all debated.
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