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IN THIS ISSUE – CALIFORNIA…“BOLDER” OR “OFF THE RAILS?”

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Capital News & Notes (CN&N) harvests California legislative and regulatory insights from dozens of media and official sources for the past week, tailored to your business and advocacy interests.  Please feel free to forward.

Stay current daily!  For our focused updates via Twitter: @jrgualco / @robertjgore / @gualcogroup

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FOR THE WEEK ENDING APRIL 26, 2019

 

California’s Leftward Lean: “Some Might Call It Our Liberal Agenda”

California Democrats now enjoy their biggest legislative advantages in decades, with veto-proof majorities in both the Assembly and Senate. Besides a brief stretch from 1995 to 1996 when Republicans had a slim majority in the Assembly, Democrats have had complete control of the Legislature for the last 48 years.

As Democrats have increased their power in the Capitol, they have championed bolder and more progressive policies in the last decade. While Democrats in office praise the changes they’ve made, Republicans worry the state has gone off the rails.

The Sacramento Bee spoke to more than a dozen current and former lawmakers, asking them to reflect on the most left-leaning laws that have come out of Sacramento. Here are some that made our “liberal list”:

 

BOARDS OF PUBLIC COMPANIES MUST INCLUDE WOMEN

By the end of the year, public companies in California must have at least one woman on their boards of directors. The law by Democratic Sens. Hannah Beth-Jackson and Toni Atkins also requires companies to have at least two or three women on boards by the end of 2021, depending on the number of directors in the company.

The bill narrowly cleared the Legislature last year, as all Republicans and a few Democrats worried about intruding on the business community. Even former Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown said it “may prove fatal” in the courts, although he signed the bill.

For Jackson, increasing female representation in the workplace outweighs all concerns.

“California’s the first state in the country to do this,” Jackson said. “Some might call it our ‘liberal agenda,’ but I look at it as our ‘equality agenda.’ This is the state where we are meeting the expectations and promises of this country.”

While many Republicans acknowledge women need to have a greater voice in the business community, some don’t like the idea of the state forcing companies to do so.

“I don’t like mandates, and I’d rather not government force people to do the right thing,” said Cynthia Bryant, executive director and chief operating officer of the California GOP.

California has led the way on a number of other issues to promote equality for women. Jackson introduced the California Fair Pay Act in 2015 to prohibit employers for paying women less than men for “substantially similar work.”

 

UNDOCUMENTED STUDENTS CAN GET STATE FINANCIAL AID

The California Dream Act has extended financial aid opportunities to undocumented students since 2013.

After President Donald Trump took office in 2017, California saw a drop in applicants seeking financial aid. State officials worried that immigrant families were declining to apply over fears that their information would be shared with the federal government.

In response, state lawmakers and top education officials released a video urging people to apply for state grants.

Eloy Oakley, chancellor of the state’s community colleges, said at the time the only way applicants’ immigration status would be shared is “when there is a genuine court order or subpoena.”

California has taken a number of other steps to benefit people who did not enter the United States legally. By April 2018, more than 1 million undocumented immigrants had received driver’s licenses under legislation Brown signed in 2013.

Over past three years, California set aside tens of millions of dollars to help young immigrants fight deportation.

Former Senate leader Kevin de León, D-Los Angeles, introduced the California Values Act in 2017, which effectively makes California a sanctuary state by limiting cooperation between local law enforcement and federal immigration authorities.

Trump has repeatedly criticized California for its immigration policies. In 2018, he considered pulling Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal law enforcement groups out of California.

“If we ever pulled our ICE out and we ever said, ‘Hey, let California alone. Let them figure it out for themselves,’ in two months, they’d be begging for us to come back,” Trump said.

Top California Democrats insist the state is paving the way on immigration through its more welcoming approach. Once Trump got elected in 2016, de León said he realized there was a greater need to protect residents.

“If Trump is not president, California is still a progressive state,” de León said. “What we’ve done is amp it up 10 times because there is a direct conflict with our values.”

 

YOU CAN REGISTER TO VOTE ON ELECTION DAY WITHOUT AN ID

While some states with Republicans in control have drawn criticism for efforts to restrict voting, California Democrats – who tend to benefit when more voters show up – have made it increasingly easy to cast a ballot.

According to a Cost of Voting Index published last year in the Election Law Journal, California is the third easiest state to vote in, following Oregon and Colorado, respectively.

Californians, for example, can register and vote on the same day – without showing identification.

California’s conditional voter registration process was adopted at the start of 2017. The state uses a voter registration database called VoteCal to prevent ineligible votes from being counted. VoteCal stores registration information for all voters in all 58 counties, and county elections officials use it to transfer records if a person moves to a different county and make sure there are no duplicate registrations.

New policies out of Sacramento have continued to make voting easier.

The state launched a program last year that adds eligible Californians onto the voter rolls when they visit the Department of Motor Vehicles, unless they choose to opt out. Since Motor Voter began in April 2018, the state has registered 1 million new voters.

“Automatic registration is a huge, powerful tool to strengthen our democracy and increase civic participation,” said California Secretary of State Alex Padilla, who championed the proposal.

The California Republican Party has called for a halt to the program, citing errors that included registering 1,500 voters by mistake.

A Democratic-led effort is underway in the Assembly, meanwhile, to lower the voting age from 18 to 17.

YOU HAVE TO ASK FOR A PLASTIC STRAW. PAPER RECEIPTS MIGHT BE NEXT 

California decided to make it more difficult to get plastic straws in an effort to crack down on pollution.

Starting this year, restaurants and other businesses are no longer allowed to give customers plastic straws, unless customers explicitly ask for them. Many cities, such as Manhattan Beach, had already taken the lead in banning the straws.

“It is a very small step to make a customer who wants a plastic straw ask for it,” Brown wrote in a signing message last year. “And it might make them pause and think again about an alternative.”

Businesses would get two warnings if they violate the law, followed by a $25 fine per subsequent violation up to $300 annually.

Assemblyman Phil Ting, D-San Francisco, introduced the bill to ban straws. This year, he’s targeting paper receipts by requiring customers to ask for printed copies rather than be given one automatically.

CALIFORNIA BANS STATE GOVERNMENT TRAVEL TO 10 OTHER STATES

In an effort to promote equality for the LGBT community, California has banned taxpayer-funded trips to 10 states, most of which are located in the South.

The 2016 law by Assemblyman Evan Low, D-Campbell, requires the attorney general to restrict taxpayer-funded travel to any state that adopts a policy allowing organizations to deny services to gay and transgender people.

Since then, Alabama, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee and Texas landed on California’s no-go list.

North Carolina was placed on the list once it took effect at the start of 2017, following the passage of House Bill 2 — a North Carolina law known as the “bathroom bill” that banned people from using restrooms that didn’t correspond with the gender listed on birth certificates. North Carolina lawmakers toned down the original bathroom bill, but the state is still subjected to California’s travel ban because of a law that prohibits local governments from adopting anti-discrimination ordinances.

Last year, California cut travel to Oklahoma after a law was signed allowing private adoption agencies to use moral or religious reasons to prevent same-sex parents from adopting children.

California added South Carolina onto the list earlier this month over a law permitting private faith-based groups to withhold adoption services.

Under certain circumstances, including criminal investigations and meeting contractual agreements, California officials can still visit the 10 prohibited states.

https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article229324884.html?#storylink=cpy

 

California’s Leftward Lean: More Legislation In the Hopper

California is often considered the birthplace of many of the country’s most progressive policies.

Plastic straws? California made it harder to get them. Workers rights? The state passed a plan to increase the minimum wage to $15 by 2023. Tech regulations? The California Consumer Privacy Act that passed last year will restrict how much tech companies can use personal data by 2020. Immigration? Undocumented immigrants are protected in this “sanctuary state,” and the budget allocates millions for immigration-related services.

The list goes on, and it could get even longer.

As Democrats maintain a stronghold majority in the Legislature, and with Gov. Gavin Newsom signaling he’s prepared to sign envelope-pushing legislation that former Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed, liberal lawmakers are championing a progressive agenda that could make California even bluer.

Here’s what’s on deck:

RAISING CORPORATE TAX RATES

California accumulated an “unprecedented” budget surplus at the end of Gov. Jerry Brown’s tenure, in part because of voters’ willingness to adopt new taxes on wealthy households and at the gas pump. State lawmakers have a few more tax proposals on deck.

One tax proposal comes from state Sen. Nancy Skinner’s office. The Berkeley Democrat’s measure targets the top 0.2 percent of companies, and raises their corporate income taxes from 8.84 percent to 10.84 percent. Skinner said the proposal would increase state revenue by an estimated $2 billion and would help fund education.

The bill also increases the tax rate on corporations that have large pay disparities between top executives and average workers. Skinner estimated those taxes could generate up to $3 billion annually.

“Increasing taxes on big corporations and incentivizing those corporations to pay their employees higher wages is a progressive way to capture new funding for our schools and other programs, while reducing the income inequality of regular Californians,” Skinner said.

PROTECTING UNDOCUMENTED IMMIGRANTS’ DATA

Although California limits how much state and local law enforcement can cooperate with federal immigration authorities — per a 2017 “sanctuary state” law — Assemblyman Rob Bonta, D-Alameda, said more needs to be done to protect undocumented Californians from detention and deportation.

Bonta proposed Assembly Bill 1332, which prohibits any state, city, or county agency from creating or renewing a contract with vendors that provide certain services like “extreme vetting,” selling data to federal immigration agencies and providing detention facility support.

The bill targets approximately 50 businesses providing these services to immigration enforcement agencies, part of what Bonta calls “Trump’s mass deportation machine.”

“Every one of these companies can make a decision,” Bonta said. “If they want to have a contract with the state of California or with one of our cities or one of our counties within California, they can simply decide not to be involved in the data brokering business or in the extreme vetting business or detention facility business And then those contracts can continue.”

CREATING THE NATION’S STRICTEST USE-OF-FORCE POLICY

One of the most contentious bills up for legislative debate this session is Assembly Bill 392. The legislation would restrict when officers can employ deadly force, swapping out the “reasonable” standard to a tougher “necessary” qualification.

Officers who use lethal force could face criminal charges if it’s determined other enforcement options were available.

The bill passed its first committee hearing after hours of testimony from family members affected by police shootings. The bill’s principal author, Assemblywoman Shirley Weber of San Diego, said she will continue speaking with law enforcement groups and other opposition members who argue the crack down could lead officers to second-guess their decisions and compromise public safety.

RESTRICTING GUN SALES TO ONE FIREARM A MONTH

Under state Sen. Anthony Portantino’s Senate Bill 61, Californians could only buy one long-gun a month. Current law prohibits anyone from purchasing more than one handgun in a 30-day period.

Portantino is the lawmaker behind the 2018 law that raised the age of who can buy a long-gun in California, from 18 to 21. He also carried a 2012 bill that restricted the open carry law, making it a misdemeanor to carry an unloaded long-gun.

EXCLUDING CONDOMS AS EVIDENCE OF SEX WORK

More than 60 percent of sex workers have experienced sexual assault on the job, according to the St. James Infirmary, a nonprofit in San Francisco. Add that to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s warnings of a particular HIV and STI risk in the sex work community, and you come out with state Sen. Scott Wiener’s Senate Bill 233.

The legislation immunizes sex workers from arrest when they report violent crimes and prohibits arresting individuals who carry condoms, in any amount, as evidence of sex work.

“There are many sex workers who are victimized who are assaulted, or raped or kidnapped who are scared to report the crimes to police because they are worried they will be arrested for prostitution,” Wiener previously told The Bee. “This is a profession that has existed since the beginning of time and we want to make sure that these men and women are safe and healthy.”

The San Francisco Democrat is also pushing two trailblazing LGBTQ measures. Senate Bill 145 aims to dismantle what Wiener calls “blatant discrimination” against the gay community in the registration of sex offenders. Judges can use their discretion in certain cases when an adult has vaginal intercourse with a minor, but have to place that same person in the registry if oral or anal sex is involved.

Wiener also introduced legislation to require correctional facilities to house transgender inmates according to their preferred identity.

“When we have the opportunity to push the progressive envelope, we should absolutely do that,” Wiener said. “Our transgender prisoner bill, housing people according to their gender identity, is pushing the envelope.

MANDATING THAT UC AND CSU CAMPUSES PROVIDE ABORTION SERVICES

Under state Sen. Connie Leyva’s controversial proposal, Senate Bill 24, the University of California and California State University systems would have to provide abortion by medication services to students as part of its health care offerings on campus by 2023.

Most student health clinics provide pregnancy testing and counseling, contraceptives, sexually transmitted infection services and routine women’s health tests, according to the bill analysis. But extending care to include abortions “ensures that students do not have to travel away from their school and work commitments to receive care.”

https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article229395709.html?#storylink=cpy

 

Legislature Weights Several New Taxes

April 15 has come and gone, but the California Legislature is weighing a number of bills that in the near future could make Tax Day more costly for some.

The Golden State could collect more than $15 billion in new revenue, a combination of new taxes and old exemptions being eliminated, according to an analysis by Loren Kaye, president of the California Foundation for Commerce and Education.

“We’re surprised at the number and size of these tax increase proposals, because the state is awash in money, in revenues,” Kaye said in an interview with the Bee on Friday.

That includes a surplus of more than $13 billion.

Democrats are considering a plethora of tax increase bills this session, including the institution of an estate tax and a corporate income tax increase.

“There seems to be a disconnect between what’s being proposed and the state’s apparent very healthy fiscal position,” he said.

Kaye said California has entered its 10th year of “very robust economic expansion,” but that the good times won’t last forever.

A recession is coming, though Kaye says “I’ve given up estimating when it’s going to be.”

When it does come, “it will make it harder when the businesses have to deal with these taxes. They’re going to cut costs in the most efficient way they can, which usually has to do with jobs, compensation, employment,” he said. “It will be hard for the overall economy to deal with the recession when there’s a bigger bite being taken out of the private sector to begin with.”

So where’s that “bite” coming from? Here’s a rundown on all the tax bills under consideration in Sacramento.

  • Assembly Bill 18 imposes a $25 excise tax on the sales of new firearms, with that money going to crime prevention programs.
  • Assembly Bill 138 imposes a $.02-per-fluid-ounce tax on sugar beverages, such as soda, with that money going into a fund to address obesity and health issues related to high sugar consumption.
  • Assembly Bill 755 increases the California tire fee from $1.75 to $3.25, with that money going to a fund aimed at mitigating zinc pollution in stormwater runoff.
  • Assembly Bill 1468 requires opioid manufacturers to contribute to a collective $100 million annual sum, with that money going to opioid abuse preventation and rehabilitation programs.
  • Senate Bill 37 raises the corporate income tax, with the amount raised based on the difference between the company chief executive officer’s pay and the median employee pay, with that money going to fund the state’s K-12 and preschools.
  • Senate Bill 246 imposes a severance tax on oil and gas producers, with that money going to the state’s general fund.
  • Senate Bill 378 imposes an estate tax on the state’s wealthiest residents, with that money going to a “Children’s Wealth and Opportunity Building Fund.”
  • Senate Bill 468 eliminates various tax exemptions and incentives.

California Democrats have also submitted a number of bills aimed at easing the tax burden for California residents.

https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article229482899.html?#storylink=cpy

 

Why Can’t the “Global Capital of Tech” Manage Technology?

California is the global capital of technological innovation, but state officials are much more adept at devising catchy names for their big “information technology” projects than actually implementing them.

Take, for instance, something called “BrEZee,” which is supposed to streamline how the state Department of Consumer Affairs licenses countless thousands of professional workers.

Four years ago, the state auditor’s office concluded “that the BreEZe project has been plagued with performance problems, significant delays, and escalating costs, which based on a January 2015 estimate were $96 million – more than triple the original cost estimate –for implementation of a system at only half of the regulatory entities originally planned for BreEZe.”

Today, the system is still not fully operational and millions of more dollars are being sought to fix its operational problems.

The biggest current headache, however, is the Financial Information System for California, dubbed FI$CAL, which has the motto of “one state, one system,” and was launched 12 years ago to be a multi-agency tool for managing money.

It’s swallowed nearly a billion dollars but is so unreliable, the state auditor found, that some state agencies won’t use it to produce accurate reports that the federal government requires for granting funds.

After the auditor’s office released its latest tale of FI$CAL woe this year, state Controller Betty Yee told the Legislature that she is “gravely concerned” that its unreliability could undermine the state’s credit rating.

“We need to pause and direct resources to making FI$CAL work as it was intended to work,” she wrote. “Continuing to push ahead by adding features that do not work or bringing more departments into the troubled system will cost taxpayers exponentially more in the long run.”

So it has gone, system after system failing to meet timetables for implementation, running up huge cost overruns and not working reliably. And yet, the state also cannot continue to use systems that are so old they can’t be serviced and often break down. One reason the Department of Motor Vehicles has become a managerial morass is that its ancient computer system frequently crashes for hours while customers wait in line.

Then-Gov. Jerry Brown created a “task force” to study IT problems early in his second governorship. It reported that it “is optimistic that with the current leadership and institutional commitment to reform, California’s current and future IT projects can and will be more successful.”

Brown also created a Department of Technology that was to oversee IT projects, rather than have individual departments go it alone. It wrote a “Vision 2020” strategic plan for implementing IT but the problems have persisted.

Brown’s successor, Gavin Newsom, has pledged to shake things up and proposes in his first budget $36 million to create an “Office of Digital Innovation” that he says will take a more creative approach. “If you like the status quo, you’re not going to like these reforms,” Newsom said.

Meanwhile, a Democratic assemblyman from Marin County, Marc Levine, wants to add still another layer of oversight. His Assembly Bill 1055 would require any big IT project, one costing over $100 million, to have an independent oversight committee.

“While oversight of technology projects can be as boring as watching paint dry, California needs much more than a fresh coat of paint on our management of these projects,” Levine said.

True enough, but we’ve heard promises of fresh starts on IT implementation before, and they’ve all fallen short of actually fixing the problem.

https://calmatters.org/articles/commentary/can-newsom-finally-fix-states-tech-woes/

 

Will Newsom Ban Petroleum Production?

California’s legacy of oil drilling should be just that, many environmentalists argue — relegated to the history books.

They are urging Gov. Gavin Newsom to ban new oil and gas drilling in California and completely phase out fossil fuel extraction in one of the nation’s top petroleum-producing — and gasoline-consuming — states.

At the least, they want the state to impose buffer zones prohibiting new oil and gas wells near schools, hospitals and residential neighborhoods and also require monitoring for potentially hazardous emissions from abandoned or plugged wells, proposals already being considered by state lawmakers.

“It sure would make us happy if he made a big splash about this. It’s month four. People are being very patient. By month six, patience may wear thin,” said Sierra Club California Director Kathryn Phillips.

Phillips said her organization and other groups that support curtailing oil production in California have met informally with Newsom administration officials. While Newsom has not made any promises, expectations remain high, she said.

Newsom, who served on the state lands commission for eight years, says he’s well versed in the issues surrounding on-shore and off-shore oil drilling in California and said he would announce his administration’s detailed strategy on energy policy in the next few weeks.

The governor was coy about core aspects of that policy, and declined to say if it would ban the controversial practice of hydraulic fracking, a process that uses drilling and large volumes of high-pressure water to extract gas and oil deposits.

“I’m taking a very pragmatic look at it, in scoping this,” Newsom told The Times last week. “It’s also an inclusive scoping because it includes people in the industry, that have jobs; communities that are impacted from an environmental justice prism but also from an economic justice prism. It’s a challenging issue. There’s a reason Gov. Brown used a lot of dexterity on this issue.”

The Democratic governor emphasized that he would not be “exercising passivity.” But Newsom also said that, despite his strong support for putting California on a path to a 100% renewable energy supply, it would be unrealistic to think that California can just stop its dependence on oil and gas.

“One cannot just turn off the switch. One cannot just immediately abut against a century of practice and policy,” Newsom said.

Though his campaign was endorsed by influential environmental groups that support curtailing oil production, Newsom must weigh the potential, widespread economic impact of undercutting a billion-dollar industry in the state. While oil production in California has been on the decline in recent years, California in 2017 was the nation’s fifth-largest crude oil producer among the nation’s 50 states, federal figures show.

Newsom also has a long personal and financial history with the heirs of the Getty Oil family. The governor’s father, the late William Newsom, was a longtime friend and former high school classmate of Gordon Getty, son of oil magnate J. Paul Getty, and managed the Getty family trust. Gordon Getty also was a longtime financial benefactor to Gavin Newsom, and for decades they were in the winery and hospitality business together. (The governor put those investments in a blind trust after he was elected in November.)

Catherine Reheis-Boyd, president of the Western States Petroleum Assn., says Newsom will take a pragmatic approach. Oil production in California helps support 368,000 “blue-collar jobs with high wages,” she said, and the state still will depend on oil and gas for fuel and energy even during its long-term transformation to a 100% renewable energy supply.

“We have, I think, close to 40 million people in the state who drive 26 million vehicles with internal-combustion engines,” Reheis-Boyd said. “You cannot have a policy that stops production of oil in California for quite some time.”

Reheis-Boyd also noted that California has some of the most strict regulations and environmental protections in the world. If the state decides to shut down oil production, it will be forced to import oil from states and countries with much lower health, environmental and safety standards — increasing risks posed to those populations.

“Without domestic oil, it would mean we would have to import oil from other countries. Now you’re looking at more truck emissions, more ship emissions, possible oil pipeline mishaps. It’s counterproductive,” said Bill La Marr, executive director of the California Small Business Alliance, which has a membership of 26,000 companies statewide.

La Marr said phasing out oil production in the state would also increase fuel prices, driving up costs for business owners and, ultimately, consumer goods.

“In the end, it’s a tax on consumers,” he said. “Most hardworking people can’t afford a brand-new Prius or a Tesla. They rely on the internal-combustion engine.”

During the 2018 gubernatorial campaign, Newsom said he opposed fracking because it posed possible health and environmental risks. Brown, his predecessor, approved restrictions on fracking but environmentalists criticized him for balking at an outright ban of fracking, saying he thought the practice might offer California some economic opportunities.

The effort to sway Newsom mimics the unsuccessful campaign by the so-called Brown’s Last Chance Coalition supported by environmental activists, community groups, labor unions and that tried to persuade Brown to freeze all new oil and gas drilling during his final year in office. Brown, who prided himself in helping California become a world leader in combating climate change and championing renewable energy, bristled at accusations that his environmental record was tarnished by a failure to take on California’s powerful oil industry.

Newsom noted that, just two days after he won the November election, those same activists held a protest outside of his house in Marin County blocking his driveway.

“My wife went down and said hello to them, spent time with them,” Newsom said. “So I’m very familiar with the debate.”

Kassie Siegel of the Center for Biological Diversity said she has more confidence in Newsom than she did in Brown.

In 2018, Newsom joined other State Lands Commission members in protesting President Trump’s efforts to open the coast to offshore oil drilling, saying in a letter the move “creates undeniable peril to California’s ocean and marine environment and economy” and poses an unacceptably high risk of “catastrophic harm from an offshore oil spill.”

“He’s also been very good at pushing back hard at Trump’s climate change denials,” said Siegel, who heads the center’s climate law institute. “We need him to take that bold approach when it comes to the oil industry.”

Siegel and others say the Newsom administration should take a first step of creating health and safety buffers around oil and gas wells in urban areas.

California is home to 72,000 oil-producing wells that, in 2018, produced 165.3 million barrels of oil from both on-shore and off-shore facilities, according to the California Department of Conservation. California also consumes more gasoline than any other state — 366,000 barrels in 2017, according to U.S. Energy Information Administration.

In 2018, the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health called for greater health and safety “setback” requirements on new oil and gas wells, keeping them at least 300 feet from populated areas. It also called for a significant increase in air quality monitoring within the 68 active oil fields in the Los Angeles Basin. Oils rigs, storage tanks and other operations are common sights in the working-class neighborhoods in Wilmington, Long Beach, Torrance and South Los Angeles, where oil production has plagued neighborhoods with foul odors, noise and occasional spills or refinery explosions.

Close to 900,000 Californians live within a half-mile of an active oil or gas well, with the vast majority in Los Angeles and Kern counties, according to a study by the Environmental Defense Fund. There also are 378 schools or certified daycare facilities in California that are that close to an active well, the report found.

The most publicized and politically charged case highlighting the dangers of oil and gas extraction in Southern California was in 2015, when a gas leak at the affluent San Fernando Valley community of Porter Ranch caused thousands of residents to evacuate and triggered complaints of nosebleeds, nausea and headaches. The Southern California Gas Co. agreed to pay $119.5 million to settle lawsuits brought by state and local agencies.

Assemblyman Al Muratsuchi (D-Rolling Hills Estates) introduced legislation in February to ban any new oil and gas wells, or idle wells that are redrilled, to be located with a half-mile of a residence, school, playground or a healthcare facility. Muratsuchi said he’s been focused on the issue ever since voters in Hermosa Beach blocked efforts to drill wells within 100 feet of homes.

Residents in less affluent areas should have the same protections, he said. Even in oil-rich Texas, some cities have mandatory setbacks for wells in residential areas, he said.

“The question should not be whether to have a setback requirement. The issue should be how much,” Muratsuchi said. “I think of regardless of how much we settle upon, the evidence is crystal clear that we do need to have some setback to protect our most vulnerable communities.”

https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-gavin-newsom-fracking-oil-drilling-ban-20190423-story.html

 

Fueled by Rising Pump Prices, Governor Seeks to Know Why

California’s governor wants to know why gas prices are higher than in the rest of the country, blaming potential “inappropriate industry practices” Tuesday rather than the state’s higher taxes and tougher environmental regulations.

Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom asked the California Energy Commission for an analysis of the state’s gas prices by May 15. California drivers were paying an average of $4.03 per gallon Tuesday, or $1.18 more than the national average, according to AAA.

Higher taxes, along with a combination of tougher gas standards and environmental regulations, normally account for about 70 cents of that difference, said Gordon Schremp, a senior fuels specialist with the California Energy Commission. But the rest is a mystery.

In 2017, the state’s Petroleum Market Advisory Committee found that California has had “a continuous and significant unexplained differential compared to the rest of the country” since February 2015. That difference has cost Californians more than $17 billion, or about $1,700 for a family of four, said Severin Borenstein, faculty director at the Energy Institute at the University of California, Berkeley’s business school.

In a letter to energy commission chairman David Hochschild, Newsom defended the state’s environmental standards, accusing critics of using the high prices to “undermine our clean air and safety standards.”

“Independent analysis suggests that an unaccounted-for price differential exists in California’s gas prices and that this price differential may stem in part from inappropriate industry practices,” Newsom wrote.

The commission agreed to do the price analysis but declined further comment.

Western States Petroleum Association President Catherine Reheis-Boyd noted that California’s gas prices have been scrutinized in dozens of government inquiries, “all of which concluded the dynamics of supply and demand are responsible for movements in the price of gasoline and diesel fuel.”

Spiking gas prices have caused headaches for California policymakers since the Legislature approved a 12-cent gas tax increase in 2016.

Last year, voters recalled a Democratic state senator who voted for the increase and replaced him with a Republican. But a statewide ballot initiative to repeal the higher tax failed with more than 56 percent of the vote.

As gas prices kept climbing, 19 state lawmakers in January asked Attorney General Xavier Becerra to investigate the “unexplained surcharge.”

“This mystery surcharge happens between the refinery and retail purchase by the consumer,” Democratic Assemblyman Marc Levine said. “This is a punitive, abusive practice that Californians are paying.”

But it’s unclear if Becerra’s office took any action. Representatives from his office on Tuesday would not confirm or deny an investigation.

https://apnews.com/d9eae4f406024e99b8cd2b87d7875e42

 

All Shook Up…Earthquakes 10X

California has experienced 10 times more earthquakes than previously known, according to groundbreaking new research that has helped scientists better understand the region’s seismology.

Scientists documented 1.8 million earthquakes in Southern California over the last decade — with 90% of them newly discovered and so small they had long been undetectable to modern computing systems. Previously, only 180,000 earthquakes were on record for the last 10 years.

Researchers now have a better ability to identify undiscovered faults, detect patterns of moving earthquake swarms, and identify faint clusters of foreshocks that occur before a larger earthquake.

“We see incredible details,” Caltech seismologist Zachary Ross said of the newly discovered earthquakes he outlined in a study released Thursday in the journal Science, of which he was the lead author. “We start to see new faults emerging.”

“It is a pretty exciting moment in seismology,” said Kate Scharer, a U.S. Geological Survey research geologist who was not involved in the study. “It’s long been desired to understand … what’s happening in the time leading up to large earthquakes. A big question for us is how the state of stress might evolve, anywhere from days to months, leading up to large earthquakes.”

Scientists have long understood a key mathematical relationship in earthquake magnitudes: For each whole-number drop in magnitude, there are 10 times as many earthquakes. For instance, for every magnitude 7 earthquake, there are 10 magnitude 6 temblors, 100 magnitude 5 shakers, 1,000 magnitude 4 events, and so forth.

But until now, scientists hadn’t been able to collect a comprehensive inventory of earthquakes of less than magnitude 1.7 (with some recorded as small as magnitude negative 2) over a wide region and a period of years.

The discovery of these micro-earthquakes in Southern California is the first time magnitude 0 and magnitude 1 earthquakes have been documented over such a vast region during a long period — between 2008 and 2017.

This means a detectable earthquake, on average, occurs every 3 minutes in Southern California — much more frequent than the old estimate of one temblor every half-hour.

An eye-popping result from the discovery was showing just how widespread an effect the last big earthquake had after it shook Southern California — the Easter Sunday magnitude 7.2 earthquake of 2010. That event had an epicenter across the border, close to the Mexican city of Mexicali.

Previously, it was clear only that the Easter Sunday earthquake triggered an increased rate of temblors — within a week of the main quake — up to about 100 miles away from its epicenter, reaching rural eastern San Diego County and the Salton Sea area.

Now, there’s evidence it actually increased earthquake activity as much as 170 miles away — reaching Riverside, San Bernardino and Palm Springs.

“You can really see the extent, now, to which this one big earthquake is able to affect this huge region that we just couldn’t see before,” Ross said. “It shows in a lot of ways that these fault systems are related to each other. … The more that we dig deeper, the more it seems there’s some connection there.”

The data could also help scientists demystify the start to sequences of earthquakes.

“Why do they start the way they do? Is it really just one mainshock that hits, or is there more stuff leading up to it?” Ross said. “Potentially, this could provide more information about how earthquake sequences start.”

There are other exciting advances made possible by this study. Among them:

  • The scientists discovered a previously undetected series of foreshocks leading up to a swarm of earthquakes in the Imperial County town of Brawley in 2012, which causedshaking sharp enough to postpone the first day of school and shift 20 mobile homes from their foundations.
  • It showed how a swarm of earthquakes moved geographically. An animation of an earthquake swarm around the town of Cahuilla, Calif., that started in 2016 andis still ongoing shows how seismic activity gradually moved westward and became shallower, Ross said, probably triggered by the movement of groundwater.
  • The high-definition imaging of microquakes also presents the possibility of identifying new faults and understanding their shapes better; in some cases, instead of being flat, they’re found to be curving, which could alter our understanding about how earthquakes move.

https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-small-earthquake-discovery-20190418-story.html

 

Newsom Administration “Fresh Approach” On Water

One of California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s first actions after taking office was to appoint Wade Crowfoot as Natural Resources Agency secretary. Then, within weeks, the governor laid out an ambitious water agenda that Crowfoot, 45, is now charged with executing.

That agenda includes the governor’s desire for a “fresh approach” on water, scaling back the conveyance plan in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and calling for more water recycling, expanded floodplains in the Central Valley and more groundwater recharge.

Crowfoot and Newsom have worked together in the past, when Newsom was San Francisco’s mayor and Crowfoot served as his senior environmental adviser.

As Natural Resources secretary, Crowfoot oversees a sprawling agency of 19,000 employees engaged in the stewardship of the state’s forests and natural lands, rivers and waterways, coast and ocean, fish and wildlife and energy development. As a cabinet member, he advises the governor on natural resources and environmental issues.

Part of Newsom’s agenda is ratcheting down the twin tunnels approach to Delta water conveyance to a single-tunnel plan. Crowfoot said the idea is to build on the existing analysis to assess and design a smaller project that meets safety and reliability goals with less impact.

Meanwhile, the federal government has proposed to raise Shasta Dam by adding 18 feet of steel and cement to the rim of the dam, increasing Lake Shasta’s storage by 634,000 acre-feet. Former Resources Secretary John Laird in 2018 asked Congress to not pursue the project because raising the dam would violate the protection for the McCloud River provided under the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act.

Crowfoot acknowledged the legacy of conflict surrounding California water, most recently evidenced by the State Water Resources Control Board’s controversial flows plan for the San Joaquin River, and the likelihood that those conflicts will continue. Still, Crowfoot said, some answers can be found for solutions that align around “win-win approaches that benefit both people and nature.”

In a recent interview with Western Water, Crowfoot discussed aspects of what he expects to tackle during the next four years, including finding ways to make California more resilient to the extreme swings in drought and flood that are expected to come.

https://www.watereducation.org/western-water/californias-new-natural-resources-secretary-takes-challenge-implementing-gov-newsoms

 

Moving Endangered Fish Is Not Easy

Dozens of fish carcasses — 13 of them Chinook salmon protected by the Endangered Species Act — rotted in the sun Tuesday a couple hundred yards from a new $6.3 million structure that state officials built specifically to keep that grisly scenario from happening.

Before the winter and spring flood season this year, engineers completed work on the new fish passage along the Fremont Weir, a nearly two mile-long concrete structure atop the Yolo Bypass. The bypass is a 40-mile long engineered flood plain that starts near Woodland and shunts flood waters from the Sacramento River into agriculture fields.

The fish passage was intended to keep fish from becoming stranded along the weir and in the bypass once the flood waters receded back into the Sacramento River’s main channel. An automated gate was supposed to open once water levels got high enough to overflow into the bypass, allowing fish to swim back into the Sacramento River.

But in February, state officials who manage the facility noticed it wasn’t working right. Too much water was pouring through the passage, eroding the structure. Officials had to close the gate almost entirely, meaning fewer fish could escape.

The Department of Water Resources is now facing an expensive upgrade to an already multimillion structure to make it ready for the next rainy season — and prevent what happened this week.

“Yesterday was the day of carnage,” Chris McKibbin, a regional fisheries biologist for the Department of Fish and Wildlife, said on Tuesday afternoon as he slowly walked with 11 state biologists in waist-deep water pushing a large net corralling fish along the Fremont Weir’s western stretch.

Over the weekend, someone called a poaching tip line to alert state wildlife officers that fish were stranded in the receding waters along the weir, McKibbin said.

When a team of biologists arrived on Monday to rescue the fish, they were too late for dozens of them. The biologists found the dead adult salmon, plus at least two dead white sturgeon, more than two dozen striped bass carcasses and other dead fish.

The optics of the dead fish rotting next to the new facility raises fresh questions about whether habitat restoration programs championed by former Gov. Jerry Brown’s administration, through his controversial Delta tunnels project, will be completed in time to make a difference. The programs are designed to prevent the extinction of numerous species of fish whose plummeting numbers in recent years have lead to wide-ranging cuts to California’s water supply.

The erosion and design problem at the Fremont Weir facility comes after the Department of Water Resources has faced more than two years of withering criticism for allowing problems to fester at Oroville Dam, which suffered catastrophic damage when its spillways failed in 2017. Investigators cited decades of faulty design and maintenance.

Department of Water Resources spokeswoman Erin Mellon said the setback at the Fremont Weir is a small one that shouldn’t detract from the important work state officials are doing to help the state’s struggling fish populations. She said lessons learned from this winter’s problems at the new passageway will be used to ensure they don’t happen elsewhere.

“We’re always trying to tweak and improve our projects to address either known or unknown design issues to make them operate even better,” she said.

The Fremont Weir, built in 1924, has long been a death trap for imperiled native fish such as green sturgeon, steelhead trout and Chinook, whose various runs are protected under state and federal endangered species laws. Fish that migrate into the flood waters of the bypass think it’s part of the Sacramento River’s natural flood plain.

When the river recedes, fish become stranded in the shallow, rapidly-disappearing water that forms in the L-shaped lip at the bottom of the 1.8 mile-long concrete Fremont Weir.

Over the years, biologists with McKibbin’s agency have staged numerous rescues after the flood waters recede to try to save as many fish as possible before the water dries up or they’re caught by poachers.

After finding the dead adults on Monday, McKibbon and his team were able to rescue some 700 tiny juvenile fish along the weir adjacent to the new passageway. They rescued several dozen more adult and juvenile fish on the weir’s western section, which isn’t connected to the new structure.

McKibbin said the dead adult salmon his team found this week were likely spring run Chinook, which are listed as threatened under the federal Endangered Species act, or winter run, which are among the most critically endangered fish in California.

During California’s last drought, warm, low waters of the Sacramento River proved particularly lethal to the winter run Chinook, prompting regulators to cut the water supply for farms and cities across the state.

People caught killing endangered fish would face hefty fines and prison time, but government agencies often are legally allowed to kill protected fish when they’re unintentionally trapped in California water infrastructure.

In May 2018, state and federal officials held a groundbreaking ceremony at a new fish passage project saying it would help stop fish from being stranded. The $6.3 million passageway is largely funded by the Department of Water Resources and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency that manages dams and water-supply canals for the federal government.

McKibbin said the passage appeared to be working earlier in the flood season, when underwater cameras caught at least 12 sturgeon swimming through the new structure before the flows were reduced to prevent the erosion.

“It did pass some pretty big sturgeon,” he said.

The Fremont Weir project is politically sensitive because it’s one of more than two dozen projects in California EcoRestore — former Gov. Brown’s plan to improve fish and wildlife habitat in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta while the state forged ahead with his controversial Delta tunnels project.

The EcoRestore habitat plan — which was seen as a way of appeasing critics of the multibillion-dollar Delta tunnels project — became controversial because of downsizing.  The state initially said it would spend $8 billion to restore 100,000 acres of habitat. In 2015, Brown reduced that to 30,000 acres and $300 million. The state later committed to restoring an additional 1,800 acres.

The tunnels project — which the state says will protect fish while improving the reliability of water deliveries to the southern half of the state — is now in limbo. Gov. Gavin Newsom said he’d reduce the twin tunnels to a single tunnel. The state continues to move ahead on the habitat work.

For instance, officials are planning in the coming years to build at least two similar passageways along the Frement Weir to ensure even more fish can move back and forth from the river. The new facility is an important test to ensure those passageways and others around the state work correctly, said Kristopher Tjernell, a deputy director at the state Department of Water Resources.

“The bottom line is we’ve actually put a facility in this known man-made impediment to fish passage,” Tjernell said. “And we’re finally going to be able to solve this issue so we can … see wild populations come back.”

https://www.sacbee.com/news/state/california/water-and-drought/delta/article229592929.html#storylink=cpy

 

Own Nothing, Understand the Sharing Economy…

More young people are leaning into the rental or sharing economy — owning less of everything and renting and sharing a whole lot more. Housing, cars, music, workspaces. In some places, such as Los Angeles, this rental life has gone to an extreme.

Steven T. Johnson, 27, works in social media advertising and lives in Hollywood. He spends most of his days using things he does not own.

He takes a ride-share service to get to the gym; he does not own a car. At the gym, he rents a locker. He uses the gym’s laundry service because he does not own a washing machine.

Johnson doesn’t even have an apartment, actually. He rents a bed in a large room with other people who rent beds, for nights, weeks or months at a time, through a service called PodShare. All the residents share a kitchen and bathrooms. Johnson also rents a desk at WeWork, a co-working space.

And he says the only clothes he owns are two versions of the same outfit.

Johnson says he owns so little that he’s even been able to get rid of his backpack. “I gave that up two months ago,” he says.

He says that for him, this lifestyle isn’t cumbersome or confusing. “That’s what’s great,” he says. “When you don’t own things, you don’t have to keep track of them. You just show up.”

He’s part of a new-ish group of young people. He’s educated and owns his own business. He could be considered well off, but he’s also, in a way, homeless. By choice.

There are two big reasons for this shift: the price of housing and student loan debt. A little more than a third of millennials currently own homes, a rate lower than Generation X and baby boomers when they were the same age.

But is there something else going on as well? Does Johnson represent a fundamental shift in American capitalism as we know it?

Skyler Wang, a Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley who studies the sharing economy, says even if young people own less and are less enamored with ownership than their parents may be, they still have a lot of stuff — it’s just not tangible.

“I talked to a lot of minimalists,” Wang says. “They’re the type of people who love to couch surf. They own like 30 things, but … they hoard digitally. They have tons of photographs. They have thousands and thousands of Instagram posts.”

They still live in an economy of stuff — it’s just different stuff. It’s experiences.

How do businesses deal with this? For starters, a lot more companies are getting into rentals. Even Ikea is starting to lease its furniture.

The outdoor chain REI announced recently it is vastly expanding its rental programfor things like camping gear. Eric Artz, acting CEO of the company, says this requires a different kind of outreach.

“We’re selling joy,” he says. “We’re selling inspiration when you get out on a trail or go for a bike ride. We’re selling the adrenaline buzz at the end of a run, and we’re just trying to enable that in any way we possibly can.”

Juliet Schor, a sociologist at Boston College who studies the rental and sharing economies, says not everyone is in it for the same reasons. Some are doing it just for enjoyment. Some are doing it to move toward transactions that are less corporate and more personal. Others are willing to spend more for convenience.

But a lot rent and share because they’re broke and they need to save money.

“I think it’s a mistake to characterize them … with one kind of economic orientation or orientation to money,” Schor says.

That makes it really hard to predict whether renting and sharing is our long-term future, or just a fad — even for Johnson, who is totally plugged in to a rental life.

“It’s not something that you can do forever, because you do need to have a place that you can genuinely point to and say, this is my home,” he says.

https://www.kqed.org/news/11742166/the-affluent-homeless-a-sleeping-pod-a-hired-desk-and-a-handful-of-clothes