California voters will decide this November whether to impose a one-time wealth tax on the state’s roughly 200 billionaires, a measure pitched by supporters as narrow and temporary. But some high-net-worth Californians are not waiting to see whether it passes. Several prominent founders and investors have already moved, reduced California ties, or shifted assets ahead of the proposal’s Jan. 1 residency date.

Supporters say the tax would directly apply only to the wealthiest sliver of residents. Not everyone in its path is convinced the one-time label will hold.

Joshua Rauh, professor of Finance at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and senior fellow in Economics at the Hoover Institution, argued the exodus carries costs well beyond the billionaires themselves. He sat down with “California Insider” to explain what is written into the measure that has some of the state’s wealthiest residents preparing for it as if it will not stop at one time.

*Views expressed in this video/article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of California Insider.

California’s wine industry is already under pressure, and in Santa Barbara County, wineries now face another cost. Since April 2025, businesses that sell wine directly to customers have been required to pay a 1 percent fee on those sales.

The fee funds a private trade association that wineries are also required to join, with no option under the current county rule to opt out of either the payment or the membership. Similar requirements have already taken hold in other California wine regions, and for some businesses, that has raised a bigger question about how far this kind of arrangement could reach.

Flying Goat Cellars owners Kate Griffith and Norman Yost, along with Goldwater Institute attorney Adam Shelton, explain why their small Lompoc winery is now the plaintiff in a federal lawsuit against Santa Barbara County. Griffith says the outcome could matter well beyond wine, and Shelton lays out the legal argument behind the case.

*Views expressed in this video/article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of California Insider.

The pistachios on supermarket shelves around the world most likely came from California’s Central Valley, where roughly two-thirds of the global supply now grows. The crop has no native history in the state, and most Californians drive past these orchards every day without knowing what they are or how they got there.

The industry’s current chapter is stranger than its rise. Even with worldwide demand increasing, the growers who helped build the industry have nearly stopped planting new trees, and the pause traces back to what’s happening with California’s water. Whether food is grown locally is a question that follows residents on every grocery run, and the people who work this ground are assessing things season by season.

Tom Coleman, chair of the Administrative Committee for Pistachios and owner of Coleman Farming Co., has been growing pistachios since 1982, when the industry barely existed. Alongside Stephen Vasquez, the committee’s executive director, he explains how a crop nobody expected to take hold became a world leader, and what now decides whether it keeps growing. Coleman traces the industry’s rise back to his own worst harvest, and to something that had nothing to do with farming technology.

*Views expressed in this video/article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of California Insider.

California is advancing one of the biggest projects the state has ever planned: a $20 billion tunnel running 45 miles beneath the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. The tunnel would join the State Water Project, which delivers water to 27 million people and 750,000 acres of farmland. Californians have watched big public projects run long and cost more than promised, and this one arrives with the question already attached: can the state still build something this big?

The concerns are familiar. The project has already spent more than six years in planning and permitting, and construction would run well over a decade. Yet the organization responsible for building the tunnel says this project is set up differently from the ones Californians remember, beginning with who pays for it and who answers for the money.

Graham Bradner is the executive director of the Delta Conveyance Design and Construction Authority, the agency responsible for designing and building the project. He explains what his team decided to change before the environmental review ever began, and the one risk he says engineering cannot remove.

*Views expressed in this video/article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of California Insider.

Across California, home prices have continued rising while incomes haven’t kept pace. In Orange County, for example, buying an average home now takes more than a six-figure income. Listings that would have sat for months a decade ago draw multiple offers and sell in about two weeks, with sellers collecting nearly their full asking price. For many young people, the math reads like a door closing on ownership altogether.

The shortage behind those bidding wars never went away. Inventory sits below where it stood before 2020, and new construction is only part of the reason it remains thin. Some of the people who sold and left the state to wait out prices are discovering that the way back in is harder than the way out.

Louis DiGonzini, a Southern California real estate broker and founder of the DiGonzini Group, joins us again with listings stretching from Bakersfield to San Diego and clients ranging from 24 to 85 years old. He explains who is actually buying in this market, where the openings still are, and what he tells young buyers who are convinced they were born too late to own a home in California.

*Views expressed in this video/article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of California Insider.

Californians have heard plenty about businesses leaving the state. The other direction gets less attention: what it takes for a new business to come in. In regulated industries, entry requires licensing, and an application can remain pending for years without a response.

One lender says it entered that process more than two years ago. Similar approvals came through much faster in other states. In California, the application is still pending, and no decision has come back in either direction.

Laine Schoneberger, managing partner and chief investment officer at Yrefy, LLC, is the executive leading that application. The service the company is seeking approval to offer refinances defaulted private student loans at roughly half the borrower’s current payment. He sits down with Siyamak to discuss the two years in the queue and the math that makes a cut that steep possible.

*Views expressed in this video/article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of California Insider.

Parking that was once free now comes with a meter. Trash pickup costs more, and local ballots continue to carry proposals for new taxes and fees. Across California, people are being asked to pay more as cities, counties, and school districts face pressure to maintain the services residents use every day. Each charge can look like a separate local decision.

The financial reports behind them tell a broader story, and the same pressures do not leave every community in the same position.

John Moorlach, senior fellow and director of the Center for Public Accountability at the California Policy Center, is a CPA and former state senator who warned about Orange County’s bankruptcy before it occurred. He joins us to explain how he compares the finances of California’s state and local governments, and what those rankings may show about the condition of a resident’s own community.

*Views expressed in this video/article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of California Insider.

Rats are showing up where Californians live, eat, and park. They’re in restaurants and grocery stores, in the walls of single-family homes, and under the hoods of parked cars, chewing through wiring that costs thousands to repair.

It’s happening in Los Angeles and San Francisco, and it’s reaching smaller cities like Auburn that never expected to deal with it.

For years, this looked like a story about weather, or growth, or the number of people on the street. Those are part of it. But the people who deal with rodents for a living say something else changed, too, and it narrowed what they can do about the rats.

We sit down with Travis Mickel, president of the California Pest Management Association and a manager at Clark Pest Control, along with Jake Plevelich of CAPMA and pest control business owner Simon McKeown.

They walk through why the problem has gotten harder and more expensive to control, and who ends up paying for it. What they take away from it isn’t the lesson most people would expect.

*Views expressed in this video/article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of California Insider.