.Wednesday Must Reads: Napolitano Threatens to Cap UC Admissions; Foodie Market Coming to Jack London Square

Stories you shouldn’t miss:

1. UC President Janet Napolitano has upped the stakes in her battle against Jerry Brown, announcing that the UC system will cap enrollment of California students next year — unless the governor and the legislature agree to increase funding for higher education, the Chron reports. The fiscally conservative Brown has refused Napolitano’s request for more funding for the UC system, and instead wants to pad the state’s rainy day reserve. Napolitano also announced that she will cap enrollment of out of state students at UC Berkeley and UCLA, but will admit more out-of-state students, who pay much higher tuition, to other UC campuses.

2. A developer is planning to create a high-end, artisanal food market in Jack London Square, the Trib$ reports. The developer, Steve Carlin, who was behind the San Francisco Ferry Building Marketplace, plans to put the foodie market in a vacant building on the southeast side of Jack London.

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3. The developer who is rehabbing the old Sears building in Uptown plans to restore huge glass windows and a brick facade that once graced the building before they were eliminated in the 1990s in a hasty earthquake retrofit, the Trib$ reports.

4. State officials have ordered the closure of a dozen oil wells near Bakersfield in which oil companies had been injecting toxic wastewater into underground drinking water supplies, the Chron$ reports. The state shut down eight similar wells last year.

5. Californians are failing to conserve adequate amounts of water as the four-year drought intensifies statewide, the Mercury News$ reports. State residents only slashed water use by 8.8 percent in January, compared to the year before — far short of the 20 percent needed in cutbacks. Meanwhile, the snow pack in the Sierra measured at just 19 percent of normal for the first week of March.

6. San Diego Assemblymember Lorena Gonzalez plans to introduce legislation today that would ban gender bias in workers’ compensation cases, the Chron$ reports.

7. The US Department of Justice issued a scathing report on the Ferguson, Missouri police department, charging the mostly white department with rampant discrimination against African Americans, the LA Times$ reports.

8. And GOP House Speaker John Boehner agreed to abandon Tea Party demands to defund the US Department of Homeland Security because of President Obama’s immigration reform efforts, Politico reports.