Alameda County Supervisor Wilma Chan – a former Assembly Health Committee chair who championed health insurance for kids – on Monday will host the first in a series of hearings on local implementation of national health care reforms.

The hearing, from 9 to 10:30 a.m. in the Board of Supervisors’ chambers on the fifth floor of 1221 Oak St. in Oakland, will bring together local health care leaders for an overview of the Affordable Care Act and its impact on the county. Speakers will include Richard Thomason, program officer at the Blue Shield of California Foundation; Alex Briscoe, director of the Alameda County Health Care Services Agency; and Peter Harbage, the state’s former Assistant Secretary for Health under Gov. Gray Davis.

Chan’s office says that by 2018, more than 150,000 people in Alameda County will be newly covered by Medi-Cal or private insurance as a result of the Affordable Care Act. Health care providers are getting ready for major delivery system changes, including more availability of medical homes and integrated care delivery through accountable care organizations.

Future hearings will address a different issue area each month, trying to fit specific local issues into the big picture through community feedback and policy recommendations.

Incumbent California State Treasurer Bill Lockyer, who it seems has barely lifted a finger to fend off Republican challenger state Sen. Mimi Walters, R-Laguna Niguel, dropped another $110,000 on his wife’s campaign for Alameda County Supervisor this week.

That brings Lockyer for Treasurer 2010’s total contributions to Nadia Lockyer‘s supervisorial campaign to almost $1.32 million. Nadia Lockyer, who directs the Alameda County District Attorney’s Family Justice Center, is competing with former state Sen. Liz Figueroa, D-Sunol, for the District 2 supervisor’s seat, which represents Hayward, Newark, Union City, a chunk of Fremont and unincorporated Sunol.

The Alameda County Registrar of Voters reports that the 2nd Supervisorial District has 128,168 registered voters; thus, Bill Lockyer has given Nadia Lockyer about $10.29 for every person who could possibly vote in this election. Of course, the turnout will be far less; watch for a cost-per-vote analysis once all the returns and campaign finance reports are in.

Bill Lockyer’s campaign committee still had $5,064,132.91 cash on hand as of Oct. 16, the end of the last reporting period.

Having all four candidates for the Alameda County Board of Supervisors District 3 seat on the same stage might’ve been the high point of this afternoon’s Alameda County Democratic Lawyers’ Club endorsement luncheon.

Former Assembly Majority Leader Wilma Chan of Alameda, San Leandro political activist Lou Filipovich, Alameda Mayor Bev Johnson and Oakland financial advisor Harold Lowe each said her or his piece, and then the panel took a few questions from the crowd in the back room at Everett & Jones near Oakland’s Jack London Square.

Filipovich, the lone registered Republican in the bunch, spoke about ensuring that taxpayers don’t continue subsidizing non-productive citizens, and so forth; boy, was this the wrong room for him, and he eventually acknowledged as much.

Lowe said current supervisors have no answer for the loss of jobs at New United Motor Manufacturing Inc. (NUMMI), no clear plan for the county’s economic development and job creation, no sense of how to capitalize on the county’s three major sports franchises. “Nothing is going to change unless we have real citizens pushing the envelope,” he said, warning that without good planning, “we are five years away from becoming Vallejo.”

(Vallejo just can’t get any love, even during its self-declared Tourism Month.)

Johnson touted Alameda’s economic development successes over the past dozen years (she was elected to the city council there in 1998 and has been mayor since 2002), including Webster Street’s bounce-back from the Naval Air Station’s closure, improvements on Park Street and the South Shore Center’s revitalization as Alameda Towne Center. With a $184 million county budget deficit, bringing new jobs to the area is more important than ever, she said.

And Chan billed herself as the one who can “hit the ground running, who doesn’t need any training,” having spent six years on the board before her six years in the Assembly. She noted it was legislation she authored that required Anthem Blue Cross to notify the state about its now-notorious, now-withdrawn rate hike proposal; she said she expects she would spend most of her first term working on a top-to-bottom restructuring of the county’s health care system, as tens of thousands of county residents newly insured under the federal health care reform law start seeking care.

Chan got the club’s endorsement.

Luncheon attendees also heard today from Justin Jelincic, the self proclaimed “conservative Democrat” and “Bible believing Christian” who’s taking on Rep. Pete Stark, D-Fremont, in the 13th Congressional District’s Democratic primary. He said he was there to represent “the other side of the big tent” in the party, and filed to run only when he realized nobody else would; Jelincic said Stark himself noted 38 years ago, as he ran to unseat a longtime incumbent, that 30 years in Congress was too long because a lawmaker would lose touch with those he represents. A contested primary is “an opportunity for us as a party to say to people, ‘We want the best and the brightest.’”

Stark staffer Jason Teramoto read a message on his boss’ behalf, saying he’d been a longtime advocate for seniors, workers, children and the disabled, especially when it comes to health care, and he wants to continue doing so for another term. Stark got the club’s endorsement.

And Fremont City Councilman Bob Wieckowski sought the club’s endorsement in his campaign for the Democratic nomination in the 20th Assembly District; opponent Garrett Yee wasn’t there. “My opponent is a nice guy, served in Iraq, has a wonderful family, but this is not about being a nice guy,” Wieckowski said – rather, it’s about being a forceful advocate for Democratic ideals. He vowed that if the oil-severance tax to fund education isn’t successful as carried this year by Alberto Torrico, D-Newark, he’ll reintroduce it next year because he’s “mad as hell” about cuts to state colleges and universities. Wieckowski got the club’s endorsement.

Others at the luncheon included Rep. Jerry McNerney, D-Pleasanton; state Sen. Ellen Corbett, D-San Leandro; Assemblywoman Mary Hayashi, D-Castro Valley; and Assemblyman Sandre Swanson, D-Alameda, all of whom are unopposed in the primary election.

I’ve never seen so much hue and cry about ballot designations – the two or three word titles appearing beneath a candidate’s name on the ballot – as I’m seeing this year.

Los Angeles District Attorney Steve Cooley, a Republican candidate for state Attorney General, complains that GOP primary rival former Chapman Law School Dean John Eastman wants to call himself an “Assistant Attorney General” (he received the title last month when he agreed to represent South Dakota in a specific U.S. Supreme Court case) and that state Sen. Tom Harman, R-Huntington Beach, wants to call himself a “Prosecutor/Attorney/Senator.”

It’s a local phenomenon, too – and in some cases, a circular firing squad. Alameda County Family Justice Center Executive Director Nadia Lockyer, seeking the county Board of Supervisors’ District 2 seat, announced Tuesday that someone is suing rival candidate former state Sen. Liz Figueroa, D-Sunol, for wanting to call herself a “job developer/educator,” when her job on the California Unemployment Appeals Board doesn’t involve either. The next day, another candidate in that race – Hayward City Councilman Kevin Dowling – filed a complaint against Lockyer for wanting to call herself a “county manager,” a title he says doesn’t exist; her formal title is “project director.” (For a while she was referring to herself on her Web site as a Deputy District Attorney, but that got scrubbed.)

And it’s happening in LA. And Orange County.

Last week I asked state Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner why he wants to call himself a “businessman” rather than going by his current, elected title. Poizner told me nobody knows what the Insurance Commissioner actually does and the title requires too much explanation, and he has 20 years of experience in building businesses.

Now, it’s one thing for proponents and opponents of ballot measures to argue or sue (as is happening a lot this year, too) over the official title and summary and/or the ballot-pamphlet arguments – those words are all many voters ever learn about some of these measures, and so jockeying for the high ground there seems worthwhile. But do you think it’s the same for candidates and their ballot designations? Are those two or three words really so important, or is all this bellyaching more a matter of getting media attention now rather than voters’ eyes on election day?

The Legislature really dropped the ball with its version of the gas-tax-swap deal, state Treasurer Bill Lockyer told Alameda County officials today, and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger was right to promise a veto.

Lockyer addressed the county Board of Supervisors Budget Workgroup, with attendees including supervisors Keith Carson, Alice Lai-Bitker and Gail Steele; County Administrator Susan Muranishi; and dozens of county department heads and staffers, local nonprofit officials and other stakeholders.

Schwarzenegger’s version of the gas-tax-swap deal would’ve saved a lot of money, but the changes and compromises it underwent while wending its way through the Legislature reduced the General Fund savings to a fraction of what they had been, he said.

“Why do all this complicated shifting around if the net result is confusion,” Lockyer later elucidated outside the budget session. “It didn’t make sense to change everything around and have lawsuits about it … for a very modest net result.”

Lockyer said he also agrees with the governor’s pitch for a sales-tax exemption for green tech manufacturing equipment.

Inside the budget session, Lockyer had delivered a somewhat sobering assessment of the state’s fiscal situation – and so, the outlook for cities and counties – in the months to come.

Cash flow is fine now, he said, but if the Legislature and Schwarzenegger can’t reach a budget deal early in the summer, the state’s payments of gas tax funds, mental-health tax funds and other monies to cities, counties and school districts “almost inevitably” could be deferred for up to two months, to the tune of billions of dollars.

And Sacramento is counting on “unrealistically high” estimates of federal aid to help balance its books, meaning lawmakers and the governor will have to scramble to backfill an even bigger hole when that money from Washington doesn’t materialize.

Lockyer said he intends to sell about $14 billion worth of general obligation bonds this year to pay for infrastructure projects, and as much as $10 million (depending on when we have a budget deal) in short-term borrowing this summer to tide us through our annual cash-flow issues.

He said California gets a bad rap from bond-rating agencies, not because there’s any real risk of default – he’s constitutionally empowered to service the state’s debts no matter what the Legislature does or doesn’t do – but rather because of the widespread perception of legislative gridlock Sacramento exudes year after year, a perception unlikely to be dispelled so long as the state constitution requires two-thirds votes of the Legislature for all budget and tax bills. But with no significant chance of changing that any time soon and no chance of reforming Proposition 13 to allow for reassessment of commercial property, California will keep having to find ways to muddle through, he said.

Alameda County Supervisor Scott Haggerty is among those scheduled to testify tomorrow before U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer’s Environment and Public Works Committee, in a hearing on “Mobility and Congestion in Urban and Rural America.”

Haggerty will be testifying on behalf of the National Association of Counties, for which he chairs a Transportation Steering Committee. Transportation long has been his top issue: He chairs the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, which state and federal funds to regional transportation projects; related to MTC, he chairs the Bay Area Toll Authority, which administers the toll program for the Bay Area’s seven toll bridges including operations, maintenance and management, seismic retrofit and capital improvements. He’s also a member and former chair of the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, which oversees regional air quality regulations and programs. Within Alameda County, he’s a member and former chair of the Alameda County Congestion Management Agency; vice chair of the Alameda County Transportation Improvement Authority and the Alameda County Transportation Authority, which was formed to oversee projects funded through voter-approved Measure B dollars; a member and former chair of the Altamont Rail Express Joint Powers Authority; vice chair of the Livermore-Amador Valley Transit Authority, which operates the WHEELS bus service in the Tri-Valley; and a member of the Board of Supervisors’ Transportation & Planning Committee.

The hearing will be webast live starting at 7 a.m. PDT at http://epw.senate.gov.

Rolling into this weekend’s California Republican Party convention, it seemed this was a much better week for Steve Poizner than for Meg Whitman in the Republican gubernatorial primary. He got endorsements from the California Republican Assembly and conservative mainstay Congressmen Tom McClintock and Dana Rohrabacher; she got bogged down in bad press over refusing to talk to reporters and then turning a town-hall meeting into a carefully scripted infomercial. On the other hand, a Research 2000 poll conducted Monday through Wednesday on behalf of Daily Kos showed Whitman supported by 52 percent of likely voters in the GOP primary compared to Poizner’s 19 percent. So for whom was it truly a good week?

The run-up to the convention saw a flurry of endorsement roll-outs, but perhaps nobody has had ‘em so hot and heavy as Attorney General candidate and Los Angeles District Attorney Steve Cooley. This week he announced the endorsements of the California Police Chiefs Association (in the GOP primary – the CPCA picked Alberto Torrico in the Democratic primary); former governors Pete Wilson and George Deukmejian; and former state GOP chairmen Mike Antonovich, Dr. Tirso del Junco, Mike Montgomery and Frank Visco.

(UPDATE @ 12:19 P.M.: I’m now told that, in yet another case of multiple endorsement, the CPCA has endorsed Ted Lieu in the Democratic AG primary, too.)

Republican U.S. Senate candidate Carly Fiorina announced her campaign’s regional grassroots co-chairs. In the Bay Area, one is Laurel Pathman of San Jose, who seems to be senior manager of commercial and government contracts at Sunnyvale-based Cepheid, which deals in genetic testing technology; I can’t find much else about Pathman online besides her signature (#86) on a 2008 petition supporting controversial evangelical pastor John Hagee. The other is Shahin Shabahang of Los Altos, an attorney at San Jose-based Pedersen, Eichenbaum, Lauderdale & Siehl, which is the in-house staff counsel of the Farmers Insurance Group of Companies.

Even as San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom formally announces his bid for lieutenant governor (note the updated Web site!), the candidate who has been leading that Democratic primary so far, Los Angeles City Councilwoman Janice Hahn, is campaigning practically in his backyard. She’s keynoting the monthly luncheon of the National Women’s Political Caucus’ Marin Chapter at noon today in San Rafael. Hahn picked up the endorsement of Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa on Wednesday, but I’m sure Newsom’s entry into the race – in which Hahn had been seeming to trounce state Sen. Dean Florez, D-Shafter – made this week pretty grim at Hahn HQ.

On the local front, Alameda County Family Justice Center Executive Director Nadia Lockyer this week scored the endorsement of the Alameda Labor Council AFL-CIO in her bid for the Alameda County Board of Supervisors District 2 seat. But not every union member in the county will be behind her: One of her rivals, Hayward City Councilman Kevin Dowling, announced his endorsement by Hayward Firefighters Local 1909.

Although many expect former Assemblywoman Wilma Chan to seek and probably win the Alameda County Board of Supervisors Distrct 3 seat (to which incumbent and former Chan aide Alice Lai-Bitker won’t seek re-election), it doesn’t mean the field will be clear: Alameda City Councilwoman Lena Tam filed a candidate intention statement for the seat Jan. 25. District 3 includes the cities of Alameda and San Leandro; the San Lorenzo, Ashland and Hillcrest Knolls unincorporated areas; and Oakland’s Fruitvale, San Antonio and Chinatown districts.

The Democratic primary race for the 20th Assembly District seat (from which incumbent Alberto Torrico is term-limited out, and running for Attorney General) seems pretty evenly matched, moneywise. Fremont City Councilman Bob Wieckowski reported raising $50,810 and spending $13,132.81 in the latter half of 2009, leaving him with $95,672 cash on hand and $7,905 in debt ($87,767 unencumbered) at year’s end. Ohlone College Trustee Garrett Yee reported raising $70,864 and spending $42,663 in the latter half of 2009, leaving him with $126,660 cash on hand and $53,188 ($73,472 unencumbered) at year’s end. But there isn’t much happening on the Republican side: GOP candidate Adnan Shahab reported raising $1,455 – of which $1,350 seemed to come from him and his family – and spending $1,232 in the latter half of 2009, leaving him with $223 cash on hand and no debt at year’s end.

If Republican Jeff Wald of Fremont is going to give incumbent state Sen. Ellen Corbett, D-San Leandro, a run for her money this November, he’d better start finding some money of his own. Wald reported having raised $400 and spent $225.50 in the latter half of 2009, leaving him $174.50 cash on hand at year’s end; the 48-year-old computer network specialist, who challenged but lost to Torrico in 2008, received $100 from Sondra Wald of Henderson, Nev., and $300 from himself. Meanwhile, Corbett raised $80,505 in the latter half of 2009, leaving her with $227,368 cash on hand and $2,179 in debts at year’s end.

Three candidates have emerged so far for the one vacant Alameda County Superior Court seat on June’s ballot. Administrative Law Judge Victoria Kolakowski of Oakland, who ran unsuccessfully for a Superior Court seat in 2008, filed a new candidate intention statement Jan. 29. Criminal defense attorney and former prosecutor Louis Goodman of Hayward has filed papers as well. And Deputy District Attorney John Creighton confirmed to me this afternoon that he’s running; the 25-year veteran of the DA’s office was in the headlines for a while about a year ago as he handled the early phases of prosecuting Johannes Mehserle, the former BART Police officer charged with murder in the death of Oscar Grant.

Alameda County Supervisor Nate Miley isn’t up for re-election to a fourth term in his District 4 seat until 2012, but that didn’t stop him from raising $26,362 in the latter half of 2009. Of that amount, $1,000 is came from the “canna-business” sector supporting medical marijuana and total legalization: $500 from Tax Cannabis, the committee supporting the legalization measure expected to be on this November’s ballot; $250 from the Oakland Cannabis Buyers Cooperative, now known as the Patient ID Center; $200 from the Berkeley Patients Group; and $50 from medical marijuana attorney/activist Robert Raich of Oakland. And as in the past, Miley has kept some of his campaign spending in the family, paying $2,000 to his son, Chris, of Alameda.

I reported last week on Nadia Lockyer raising big bucks – including a significant chunk of change from her husband, state Treasurer Bill Lockyer – in her race for the Alameda County Board of Supervisors District 2 seat. Today: many more details, now that I’ve gone over her filing with the count’s Registrar of Voters.

First, the $75,000 direct contribution she’d noted from the Bill Lockyer for Treasurer campaign isn’t the only support her husband rendered. His campaign also made another $43,253 in non-monetary contributions to her campaign, paying for things such as office equipment, website support, polling, fundraising, consulting and mailers.

Second, of all those running for this seat, Lockyer had the most far-flung donors – not only from all over California, but from 15 states and Washington, D.C., too.

Third, Lockyer had said she raised $168,200 in the latter half of 2009 and had $135,708 cash on hand at the year’s end. True dat, but she also had $36,605 in unpaid debts at year’s end, so her unencumbered war chest would be more like $99,103.

Fourth, that’s still waaaay than anyone else has available in this race. Next closest is Hayward City Councilman Kevin Dowling, who raised $31,955 in the latter half of 2009 and ended the year with $38,037 cash on hand and only $500 in debts; among his donors was Alameda County “sheriff emeritus” Charlie Plummer, who contributed another $2,000 atop the $1,000 he’d given in the year’s first half. In third place is another name of significant renown, former state Sen. Liz Figueroa, D-Sunol; she raised $8,903 in the latter half of 2009 and ended the year with $4,815 cash on the hand but $16,418 in debts. And bringing up the fundraising rear was Union City Mayor Mark Green, who raised $2,200 in the latter half of 2009 and ended the year with $2,854 cash on hand and no debts.

Fifth and finally, Lockyer already is flexing her money muscle: She spent $137,268 in the latter half of 2009, compared to Dowling’s $19,374, Figueroa’s $12,337 and Green’s $314.

The District 2 seat represents parts of Hayward, Newark, Union City, Fremont, and Sunol; incumbent Gail Steele isn’t seeking re-election in this nonpartisan June 8 vote.

UPDATE @ 1:29 P.M.: Dowling has just issued a news release noting he raised 76 percent of his contributions from within the district, while only 1 percent of Nadia Lockyer’s money came from the district and 30 percent of her money came from outside California. Of course, he’s counting Bill Lockyer’s money as coming from Sacramento; that’s where the Bill Lockyer for Treasurer campaign is based, but the couple lives in Hayward.

Dowling said Nadia Lockyer campaigns as “A New Voice for Our Community,” while he has lived in Hayward for 46 years and has served on City Council there for 11. “Voters are looking for a Supervisor who has a record of making local government work right here in Alameda County, and the broad support I have received from folks in the District shows that.”

In what proves to be an interesting follow-up to the question I raised last week about whether and when a candidate’s marriage to another elected official should be noted, Nadia Lockyer announced today that her campaign for the Alameda County Board of Supervisors District 2 seat collected about $168,000 in the latter half of last year – including, she notes, a $75,000 contribution from her husband’s Bill Lockyer for Treasurer re-election campaign.

Bill Lockyer can certainly afford it; his committee had almost $9.4 million in the bank by mid-2009, and raised at least $58,000 more since then. He’s unopposed in the Democratic primary; only state Sen. Mimi Walters, R-Laguna Niguel, has announced her intention to run on the GOP ticket, and she starts at a significant name-recognition deficit compared to the incumbent Lockyer.

Nadia Lockyer says she raised over $237,000 in all of 2009, leaving her at year’s end with cash on hand of $135,000. She also noted she and volunteers (including former state Democratic Party chairman Art Torres) have been walking the district’s precincts to chat with residents and build grassroots support.

“I am so grateful for the support people have shown my campaign,” she said in her release. “When I am Supervisor, I will fight to ensure that southern Alameda County gets a fairer share from our County government in order to maintain public safety in our communities and continued access to programs critical to our families.”

Also in this race are former state Sen. Liz Figueroa, D-Sunol; Hayward City Councilman Kevin Dowling; and Union City Mayor Mark Green. I’ll be checking on their campaign finance filings ASAP. The District 2 seat represents parts of Hayward, Newark, Union City, Fremont, and Sunol; incumbent Gail Steele isn’t seeking re-election in this June 8 vote.