Sacramento, CA, USA. For these castaways of the California press corps, oversight work provides a new outlet for shoe-leather reporting skills.

A few months ago, Nancy Vogel, a longtime reporter for the Sacramento Bee and the Los Angeles Times, published her investigation into the use of affordable housing money by California’s redevelopment agencies. The results were not pretty.

By law, the roughly 400 locally controlled agencies are supposed to use 20 percent of their funds for affordable housing. The bulk of them do.

But Vogel found that dozens have been getting away with putting a disconcerting amount of that money into “planning and administration,” not building actual affordable housing.

Washington, DC, USA. Transition Watch monitors the people, policies and power shifting in states after the Nov. 2 elections.

The personal finances of Georgia Governor-elect Nathan Deal caused him trouble on the campaign trail. Now he wants nothing to do with them. He's placing his assets in a blind trust, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports. In doing so, Deal is breaking with the practice of his predecessor, fellow Republican Sonny Perdue. Perdue faced scrutiny for keeping control of his personal finances, especially after he refused to discuss large loans that he received from a bank that included political supporters on its board.

Earlier Georgia governors placed investments in a trust, but Deal appears to be going beyond the precedent they set, even placing control of his homes in the hands of the trustee. Political opponents have questioned both Deal's ethics and his personal finances. He faced an investigation by the U.S. House Ethics Committee before resigning from Congress and some accounts suggested he is close to personal bankruptcy. Now, it will be up to the trustee to determine how Deal's debts are paid off.

Columbus, OH, USA. The minority party in any state tends to complain that political map making is unfair. Until it becomes the majority.

The common thinking is that last Tuesday’s state victories brought Republicans a bonanza when it comes to redistricting Congress and the legislatures. In general, that’s probably right. Thanks to the new legislative seats and governorships the party won, Republicans will have vastly more influence than Democrats over the redrawing of district lines. But it’s a little more complicated than that. Every state is different. Consider the case of Ohio and its new secretary of state, Jon Husted.

As secretary of state, Husted will be one of the most influential Republicans in one of the most important redistricting battlegrounds. He also happens to be Ohio’s most prominent opponent of using redistricting for partisan interests. “Everybody,” Husted says, “gets the fact that the idea of a handful of people drawing maps in a partisan way is a flawed system.”

Harrisburg, PA, USA. The Democratic-led Pennsylvania House of Representatives, which will fall under Republican control in January, will convene for a special voting session on Monday (November 15). The lame-duck meeting will give outgoing Democrats the chance to pass legislation before Republicans take over state government, including the governor's office, next year.

Democratic House Speaker Keith McCall of Pennsylvania will call his chamber into special session on Monday (November 15) to vote on an unfinished pension reform bill, according to The Patriot-News of Harrisburg.

The decision will give outgoing Democrats the chance to pass at least one more bill before newly elected Republicans take over both the legislature and the governor's office in January. Such "lame-duck" legislative sessions are common in Washington, D.C., where Congress is set to meet next week — with Democrats still in control of the House of Representatives — to consider an agenda that includes the extension of Bush-era tax cuts. But lame-duck sessions are rarer in the states, which usually finish their work by the summertime and are called into post-election meetings only for pressing matters that cannot wait until regular legislative terms begin.

Chelsea, MA, USA. Alaska's Sean Parnell dismisses cabinet members working on a massive infrastructure project, Ohio's incoming House Speaker calls for Medicaid cuts, and other news of the historic shift in power.

Even though Sean Parnell will continue to serve as Alaska's governor for the next four years, the state will have a new team working on one of the most ambitious infrastructure projects in American history. Parnell announced that the person heading up the state's natural gas pipeline project, deputy natural resources commissioner Marty Rutherford, will not be returning, the Anchorage Daily News reports.

Parnell also accepted the resignations of six department heads, including two other commissioners who were part of the group working to build the 1,700-mile pipeline to send natural gas from Alaska's North Slope to the continental United States. The moves come as Parnell seeks to put his own stamp on the state government he inherited from Governor Sarah Palin when she resigned last summer. But they also may reflect the struggles the pipeline has faced.