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Housing. In the late 1990s, Riverside county cracked down on illegal mobile home parks that were home to many farm workers, saying they violated local housing codes. In response, Harvey Duro, a member of the Torres Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indians, opened the 40-acre Desert Mobile Home Park (known as Duroville) with 350 trailers on tribal land near California's biggest illegal dump, now closed (two miles west of California 86).

In May 2007, a fire destroyed six trailers in Duroville and left eight families homeless; an investigation showed that deficiencies identified at Duroville in 2004 had not been corrected. The park does not have to adhere to local building and safety codes because it is on Native American land, which the Bureau of Indian Affairs regulates.

The BIA filed suit in October 2007 to close Duroville, which houses 4,000 Latino farm workers and their families, alleging the tribe is not enforcing its own rules on housing standards; many residents stopped paying their $275 a month rent. There are four other mobile home parks on the reservation, and BIA says all are unsafe.

In July-August 2007, BIA and the US Environmental Protection Agency inspected the parks and found failing electrical and septic systems, unfenced sewage ponds, arsenic in the drinking water and inadequate fire protection. Duro in September 2007 sued the BIA, alleging that the agency falsely accused him of being a slum lord. BIA says the parks on Indian land are illegal because they do not have government-approved leases.

In August 2007, Napa county prosecutors charged Kenefick Ranch Vineyard with housing farm workers in buildings that are "seriously substandard." Kenefick, a former San Francisco doctor, was also charged with covering less expensive grapes with more expensive grapes to get higher prices.

Dairy farmer Sam Etchegaray won approval in March 2007 to operate a 12,000-cow dairy adjacent to Colonel Allensworth State Historic Park, the site of an historic all-black community founded in 1908. In September 2007, the California Department of Parks and Recreation paid $3.5 million to Etchegaray for a guarantee that the dairies will not be established near the park.

Air. The farm worker city of Arivn (13,000 residents) has the worst air in the US, averaging 73 "bad air" days a year. Much of Arvin's bad air comes from heavy trucks using Interstate 5, but some blows in from the Bay area and southern California. One result is that a sixth of children in Kern county have asthma.

California. The state approved a $145 billion budget in August 21, 2007, 51 days past the July 1 deadline. It includes delayed cost of living increases for the 1.2 million residents receiving payments under the SSI-SSP programs, federal Supplemental Security Income and the State Supplementary Program. Recipients receive an average $856 for an individual and $1,502 for a couple.

The 500,000 families receiving Cal-Works (welfare cash grants) are paid an average $723 for a mother with two children, plus $330 in Food Stamp benefits. The budget delayed their cost of living as well, but preserved benefits for up to 155,000 children in families where the parents did not meet their work requirements.

The holdouts preventing approval of the budget were Senate Republicans who insisted the budget be balanced; California requires a two-thirds majority vote in the 80-member Assembly and 40-member Senate to approve budgets. California was not alone in missing its July 1 budget deadline by a month-- Illinois and Wisconsin also entered August without state budgets.

The California Budget Project in August 2007 reported that earnings at the top of the state's job ladder are rising, while wages at the bottom are falling- the two extremes were defined as $83,000 and $21,000 a year. Between 1999 and 2005, 43 percent of new jobs in the state paid less than $11 an hour. There was a significant increase in wages at the bottom of the job ladder as the minimum wage increased. Latinos, a third of California's workers, earned 58 percent as much as white workers in 2006, down from 71 percent in 1979.

The California Legislature began a special month-long session in September 2007 to deal with water and health insurance. The goal of the focus on water was to develop an initiative for the February 2008 ballot that would call for asking voters to approve $7 billion to $9 billion in state funds for additional storage of water in new and expanded reservoirs.

The health care issue also floundered on disagreements between the Legislature and the governor. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger wanted to require all California residents to have health insurance, thus covering the 6.7 million uninsured in the state, and provide a tax credit worth about $2,000 a year for a family of four earning up to $72,000 a year, with $2 billion a year for health care collected from a private firm that would "lease" the state's lottery. Employers would have to provide health insurance to their employees or contribute an amount originally set at four percent of payroll, but later revised to a variable rate based on the number of employees and average wages. The state estimates that an additional $14 billion would have to be spent to provide universal health coverage for California residents.

The Legislature approved, and the governor vetoed, a bill that would have required employers provide health insurance to their employees or pay 7.5 percent of their payroll to the state. Democrats noted that employers providing health insurance pay an average 13.5 percent of their payroll to cover the cost

The New York Times praised Schwarzenegger October 14, 2007 for finding the right balance in dealing with immigrants. Schwarzenegger signed a bill prohibiting cities from requiring landlords to check whether tenants are in the country legally, and vetoed a bill that would have allowed new citizens to register to vote on Election Day if they naturalized less than seven days before an election. Six California cities have adopted ordinances requiring that landlords verify the legal status of tenants, but all have been rescinded or have stalled in the face of lawsuits.

David Kelly, "U.S. inspectors find numerous health violations at desert trailer parks," Los Angeles Times, October 5, 2007.