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IN THIS ISSUE –“They’ve left a lot of hard stuff on the table to be resolved over the next two months”
Chris Hoene, California Budget and Policy Center director, on the Legislature’s budget deficit reduction vote yesterday
- Legislature Approves Spending Cuts, But “We Have Some Tough Decisions to Make”
- State Lawmakers Duck Tough Votes…And Tough Media Questions
- Free Trips & Gifts – All In A Day’s Work
- Business Groups, Progressives Take Tax War to the Ballot; A Battle 50 Years in the Making
- Newsom Pushes Delta Tunnel to Address Climate Change
- 1 Narrow Victory Makes Schools & Water Bond Backers Cautious
- Federal Fishery Managers Cancel Salmon Season for 2nd Year
Capital News & Notes (CN&N) curates California policy, legislative and regulatory insights from dozens of media and official sources for the past week. Please feel free to forward this unique client service.
FOR THE WEEK ENDING APRIL 12, 2024
Legislature Approves Spending Cuts, But “We Have Some Tough Decisions to Make”
Associated Press
California lawmakers don’t know for sure how big their budget deficit is, but on Thursday they decided it’s big enough to go ahead and reduce spending by about $17 billion.
The vote represents a preemptive strike from Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is trying to get ahead of a stubborn shortfall that has been increasing every month and will likely extend into next year and beyond — when the second-term governor could be eyeing a campaign for the White House.
The true size of the deficit has been difficult to pin down. In January, Newsom insisted it was about $38 billion. But the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office said it was actually $58 billion because Newsom didn’t include some reductions in public education spending.
Then in February — after state revenues continued to come in below expectations — the LAO revised its estimate to as much as $73 billion.
State budgets across the country have tightened as economic growth has slowed and states have exhausted the billions of dollars in aid from the federal government during the coronavirus pandemic.
The problem is more pronounced in California, where the budget is easily the largest in the country — and in fact the state’s economy is bigger than most countries.
As the deficits have increased, more Democrats are pushing for bigger changes. In public hearings this week, Democratic Assemblymember Cottie Petrie-Norris said the state is “not going to solve this problem anymore by just stopping one-time spending.” And Democratic state Sen. Aisha Wahab said she believed the state must “be even more conservative on what we’re planning.”
Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas told reporters on Thursday that he believes the deficit is “a longer structural problem,” adding: “That is concerning.” He noted lawmakers are considering a number of proposals to borrow money to pay for policy priorities, including housing, the environment and school facilities. Each of those would require voter approval.
“We’re a little bit closer to closing this budget deficit,” Rivas said. “We have some tough decisions to make moving forward.”
There were no headline-grabbing cuts in the reductions lawmakers approved on Thursday.
The deficit could be a liability to Newsom, particularly as he steps into his role as a top surrogate of President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign. Newsom and his allies in the state Legislature have been doing everything possible to reduce the deficit.
For instance in December, the governor ordered state agencies to immediately cut costs. And last month, Newsom signed a law raising a tax on companies that manage California’s Medicaid program, raising another $1.5 billion.
Newsom won’t announce an updated deficit number until next month, after Californians have filed their tax returns and state officials have a better idea of how much money they have.
Thursday’s vote in the state Legislature means Newsom can announce a number that will be much smaller than it would have been. The $17 billion in reductions lawmakers approved, combined with the anticipated withdrawal of about $13 billion from the state’s various savings accounts, means Newsom can already count on reducing about $30 billion of the shortfall.
“The reality is that even with the deal, the state still faces a deficit of tens of billions of dollars,” said Chris Hoene, executive director of the California Budget and Policy Center. “They’ve left a lot of hard stuff on the table to be resolved over the next two months.”
Despite California’s recent budget woes, the Democrats in charge have refused to raise income taxes or impose steep cuts to the most expensive programs, including health care and public education.
Instead, most of the savings comes from either cancelling or delaying spending that was approved in previous years but hasn’t yet been spent. It also relies on a number of accounting tricks to make the shortfall appear smaller, including shifting paychecks for state workers by one day from June 30 to July 1 so the state can count $1.6 billion in salaries for the next fiscal year.
Republicans have long assailed this strategy, arguing that Democrats are just pushing spending into the future in the hopes the deficit will be temporary and revenues will recover quickly. Both the LAO and the Newsom administration have projected multibillion-dollar budget deficits not just this year, but also for next year and the year after that.
“This is really crisis budgeting with optimism,” said Republican state Sen. Roger Niello.
Democratic leaders don’t look at it that way.
For much of the past decade, California lawmakers have enjoyed strong surpluses that have enabled a vast expansion of government services. That includes paying for free lunches for all public school students and making all low-income adults eligible for government-funded health insurance regardless of their immigration status.
By delaying spending and shifting expenses to other funds, Democrats say they are protecting essential programs from budget cuts for as long as possible.
“We’re trying to make thoughtful choices here,” said Jesse Gabriel, a Democrat and chair of the Assembly Budget Committee. “One of the worst outcomes here would be to make a cut to a critical program that serves our most vulnerable folks and to later realize that you didn’t need to make that cut.”
State Lawmakers Duck Tough Votes…And Media Questions
CalMatters
Mike Fong has cast more than 6,000 votes since he joined the state Assembly in 2022 and never once voted “no.” Pilar Schiavo is newer to the Assembly, but she has yet to vote “no” after more than 2,000 opportunities.
Remarkably, their Democratic colleagues in the Legislature are not much different. Using our new Digital Democracy database, CalMatters examined more than 1 million votes cast by current legislators since 2017 and found Democrats vote “no” on average less than 1% of the time.
Why? It’s not something they want to talk about. Democrats have had super-majorities in both legislative chambers since 2019, so most votes involve bills from their political colleagues.
But the legislative leaders and lawmakers contacted by CalMatters declined repeated requests to explain a pattern that might appear like a rubber stamp for deals made out of public view. And it seems to be sanctioned by leaders.
“There’s only two fucking buttons on your desk: There’s a green button, and there’s a red button,” then-Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon told the California Labor Federation last year in remarks reported by Politico.
“Ninety-nine percent of the time, the green button is the labor button. Ninety-nine percent of the time, the green button means you’re doing the right thing, and the red button means that you’re an asshole.”
Rendon’s office declined to comment or make him available for an interview.
Instead of voting “no,” the data, video and transcripts in CalMatters’ Digital Democracy project reveals that legislators will often decline to cast a vote. Lawmakers widely use the tactic as a courtesy to avoid irking fellow legislators who’d get upset if they vote “no” on their bills, but it’s a controversial practice that critics say allows them to avoid accountability.
“There are a lot of people who abstain and who years later will claim, ‘Oh, I was in the bathroom,’ or ‘I was gone,’ or ‘I was in a meeting,’” said Mike Gatto, a former Democratic Assemblymember from Los Angeles. “It provides them an excuse after the fact to claim that they were not there. I always thought that was cowardly, the opposite of courageous.”
Last year, at least 15 bills died due to lack of votes instead of lawmakers actually voting “no” to kill them.
The most notorious example was when a bill to increase penalties for child sex trafficking died in the Assembly Public Safety Committee because Democrats did not vote. After widespread condemnation, Gov. Gavin Newsom got involved, prompting some committee Democrats to apologize and re-vote on the measure that Newsom later signed.
At least three fentanyl-related bills also died last year due to Democrats refusing to vote on them, infuriating Regina Chavez, who advocated for the legislation. Her 15-year-old daughter, Jewels Marie Wolf, died from the drug in 2022.
“I personally am insulted, because I think everything should be on the record when you hold a state title,” she said. “That is what they signed up for to represent us.”
Chavez along with a group of mothers of youth who died from fentanyl learned about the prevalence of non-votes by exploring the Digital Democracy database.
In a glaring example they found, a bill had 22 bipartisan cosponsors and would likely pass if it reached the Senate floor, but it died in the Senate Public Safety Committee when the four Democrats — Nancy Skinner, Steven Bradford, Aisha Wahab and Scott Wiener — declined to vote by staying silent during the roll call. None of them responded to interview requests.
The bill, called “Alexandra’s Law” for a young woman who died from the drug, would have required judges to read a warning to defendants who’d been convicted of dealing fentanyl that if they dealt the drugs again, they could be charged with murder if someone died after taking their fentanyl.
More than 100 people testified in the hearing, almost all in support of the bill and many sharing their own experiences with fentanyl deaths. Some of the Democrats who did not vote had a lengthy discussion with the bill’s author, Sen. Tom Umberg, a Democrat and former federal prosecutor. (This link to Digital Democracy includes information about the bill, SB 44, as well as video and transcripts of the hearing).
“It’s beyond frustrating,” said Laura Didier, who has testified several times in Sacramento about fentanyl legislation and whose 17-year-old son, Zach, died from the drug in 2020 (See video and transcripts of all Laura Didier’s testimony).
Didier said it took an enormous amount of work to assemble the bipartisan group of bill sponsors and the supporters who testified. “To me, it just makes no sense that … people, by withholding their vote, can kill that momentum. You know, it’s very, very frustrating.”
In another example last year, the former chairperson of the Assembly Public Safety Committee cast a “no” vote to kill a bill, AB 367, that would have led to longer prison sentences for fentanyl dealers. Seconds later, he withdrew his vote after all five of his fellow Democrats on the committee killed the bill by not voting.
The then-chairperson, Reggie Jones-Sawyer, a Los Angeles Democrat who is running for Los Angeles City Council when his term expires this year, didn’t return a message from CalMatters.
He told the committee last spring that he was a mortician during the crack cocaine epidemic, so he empathized with families who lost loved ones to fentanyl, but he sided with activists who testified that people of color have unfairly and disproportionately borne the brunt of harsh sentences for drug crimes.
“Our communities were decimated by the War on Drugs,” he said.
The CalMatters data analysis included more than 1 million votes currently sitting lawmakers have taken since 2017 in committees and on the Senate or Assembly floors. The analysis only included votes on actual bills. Routine resolutions were not included. The data was collected by Digital Democracy from the Legislature’s official bill-tracking website.
The site records each lawmaker’s “aye,” and “no” votes. If a lawmaker does not vote on a bill, it’s listed as “NVR,” short for “No Vote Recorded.” The online system does not distinguish between a vote to abstain, an absence or when the legislator is present but no vote is cast.
The CalMatters analysis reveals that 38 of the 94 members of the Democratic caucus have voted “no” 20 or fewer times since 2017. This, despite each senator and Assemblymember having thousands of opportunities to vote. Some of those lawmakers have served since 2017.
While all Democrats rarely vote “no,” some members stand out in the analysis.
They include Assemblymember Jesse Gabriel of Encino. He’s been in office since 2018 and has cast more than 12,000 “aye” votes. He’s voted “no” just nine times. Lisa Calderon of City of Industry has served in the Assembly since 2020 and cast nearly 9,000 “aye” votes. She’s voted “no” once.
Assemblymember Eduardo Garcia of Coachella has cast more than 15,000 “aye” votes since 2017. He’s only voted “no” eight times. Assemblymembers Schiavo of Santa Clarita Valley and Fong of Los Angeles are the two current members who have never voted “no.”
None of those lawmakers responded to CalMatters’ interview requests.
Meanwhile, the Digital Democracy analysis showed wide discrepancies in not voting. Garcia, the Assemblymember from Coachella, had more than 2,000 NVRs, the most of any of his Democratic colleagues since 2017.
Fong, who serves on the powerful Appropriations Committee, stood out for another reason other than never voting “no.” As of last week, he only had 25 NVRs, the lowest abstention or absence rate of any lawmaker.
Robert Rivas, who became speaker of the Assembly last year, has only voted “no” nine out of 12,308 times since he joined the Assembly in 2018. He abstained or was absent from voting 673 times during that period.
“The Speaker will not be available for your story,” his press secretary, Cynthia Moreno, said in an emailed response to CalMatters’ request to discuss his voting record and the records of his fellow Democratic lawmakers.
Republicans and the red button
It’s no surprise that vastly outnumbered Republicans in the Legislature regularly vote “no” on Democratic bills. They do so on average 21% of the time. But CalMatters’ analysis shows they tend not to vote on bills at higher rates than Democrats.
The average Republican “No Vote Recorded” rate is around 12%. The average rate for Democrats is 4.5%.
James Gallagher, the Assembly’s minority leader, said it’s due to Democrats largely cutting the Republicans out of bill discussions, leading to situations where Republicans might not oppose a bill’s intent, but they don’t feel comfortable voting for language they can’t change.
“That (bill) might be at a place where you sort of agree with where they’re trying to go with it,” said Gallagher, a Republican from Chico. “But you’re just not really sure that the policy is really right and it’s taking into account all the different unintended consequences.”
Gallagher has voted “no” 3,236 times since 2017, and he’s been listed as a “No Vote Recorded” 1,708 times.
Gallagher said he’d support making the process more transparent by requiring lawmakers to officially declare an abstention instead of the way it’s reported now, where the public has no easy way of knowing whether a member was actually absent or just declined to vote on a bill.
https://calmatters.org/digital-democracy/2024/04/california-democrats-no-votes/
Free Trips & Gifts – All In A Day’s Work
CalMatters
Last June, more than half of California’s lawmakers — Republicans and Democrats alike, with no particular ideological preference — attended a celebratory gala for new Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas. They left with a gift: A personally engraved box worth $85.94.
These gifts are documented in financial disclosures that elected officials in California have to file every March for the previous calendar year. The reports, officially called Form 700, provide insight into gifts, sponsored travel, plus any property they own and stocks they hold.
As part of the new Digital Democracy initiative, CalMatters has extracted the information from these reports into a series of spreadsheets that are accessible to the public and has analyzed them to give a glimpse into potential financial conflicts of interest.
How much were gifts worth?
First, the rules: If you take a legislator out to dinner and the bill is at least $50, they have to report it. And if you give them something that puts them over the $590 annual gift limit, they have to give it back.
In 2023, gifts worth a total of more than $330,000 were given to legislators, according to the reports. That total is more than double the $163,000 worth of gifts reported in 2022. All but one of the 120 lawmakers received a gift. The outlier: Sen. Dave Cortese, a Campbell Democrat, who hasn’t reported taking a gift for at least the last three years.
An analysis of the gift givers reflects who controls the Legislature — Democrats. Nearly 20% came from party leaders, a total of $24,000, almost all for food and drinks at policy retreats. The value of all the gifts Democrats reported receiving is more than five times reported by Republicans, who hold 26 of the 120 seats.
The “Speaker 2023 Inaugural Fund” run by Rivas gave $22,000 worth of stuff at that big reception, including those engraved boxes. The fund accepted donations of at least $25,000 each from labor unions, including those representing nurses, prison guards and teachers. Businesses, such as Kaiser and PG&E, cut checks for $50,000 each.
Anthony Rendon, Rivas’ predecessor as Assembly speaker, ranked third on the list of top gift givers, doling out $16,000 worth of food and jackets to 19 lawmakers.
Wining and dining comprised more than a quarter of all gifts last year; at least $85,000 was spent picking up the tab for more than 100 legislators on more than 750 occasions. (Legislators get paid $128,215 a year, plus $214 a day for expenses when they’re in session, and leaders get more.)
But not all the gifts were from interest or advocacy groups, and some even show the human connection between legislators.
Assemblymember Corey Jackson, Democrat from Moreno Valley, gave 16 of his female coworkers flowers for their birthdays, at a total cost of about $1,000. They were bipartisan bouquets; three went to Republicans in the Assembly.
Assemblymember Lori Wilson, a Democrat from Suisun City who underwent treatment for breast cancer last year, received flowers from Jackson and from 14 other individuals and groups, worth about $1,400 in total.
Fancy dinners and receptions are nice, but the annual gift limit keeps the total relatively low. That isn’t the case with sponsored travel, which is effectively unlimited.
Special interest groups and nonprofits flew lawmakers to Argentina, Canada, France and elsewhere around the globe. In 2023, more than 100 groups spent about $1.1 million on sponsored trips, compared to 85 groups and $950,000 in travel in 2022.
While 105 legislators reported taking at least one trip last year, three accepted more than $30,000 worth.
Sen. Nancy Skinner, an Oakland Democrat, reported her four trips were worth $38,000, the most of any legislator. The trips are valuable for getting ideas about what works well, including countries with similar infrastructure, she said.
“We did intensive learning about France’s high speed rail, which is of course much harder to learn about in the U.S. since, where we do have examples of electric high-speed rail?” she said.
Skinner also said she doesn’t accept every invitation for a trip, only those on her key interests: energy, the environment, housing and public safety.
Assemblymember Mike Gipson, a Gardena Democrat, reported trips with the second highest value — 10 journeys worth more than $31,000. Assemblymember Mike Fong, a Democrat from Monterey Park, accepted 15 trips that were worth more than $30,600.
Assemblymember Blanca Pacheco, Democrat from Downey, was the most frequent traveler. She reported taking 18 trips last year, but they were valued at only $27,150.
Even if the trips lead to policy or ideas for legislators, when nonprofits invite legislators and their representatives attend as well, it creates at least the appearance of a potential conflict of interest, said Carmen Balbar, executive director of Consumer Watchdog.
“If you have somebody’s ear, you have a chance to influence them. And most constituents of every lawmaker isn’t going to be able to sponsor a trip for their representative,” she said.
More transparency could help reassure Californians that their legislators are working in the public interest, she said: “Maybe, when we pull back the curtain and have an idea of who was there and what their interests might be, we’ll be able to better parse if they’re lobbying or not.”
https://calmatters.org/digital-democracy/2024/04/california-legislature-gifts-travel/
Business Groups, Progressives Take Tax War to the Ballot;
A Battle 50 Years in the Making
CalMatters commentary from Dan Walters
Californians will be coughing up many billions of dollars this month as they file their federal and state income tax returns and pay the second installment on their property taxes.
How much?
Annually, individual Californians and California-based businesses pay roughly a half-trillion dollars in federal taxes – personal income taxes, Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes, primarily.
They also pay at least another half-trillion dollars to state and local governments – personal income taxes, sales taxes and property taxes, primarily.
By any measure, California is a high-tax state.
The Tax Foundation, a Washington-based organization that tracks nationwide tax trends, recently reported that California’s state government levies the nation’s highest taxes per capita at $7,200, which translates into about $280 billion a year. As a portion of California’s $4 trillion economy, its $540 billion in state and local taxes rank fifth highest at 13.5%.
These numbers – and the state’s multibillion-dollar budget deficit – set the stage for a monumental, multi-front war over taxation this year, including three statewide ballot measures that could dramatically alter the politics of taxation.
The Democratic Party’s progressive wing, strongly backed by public employee unions, contend that new taxes are needed to maintain vital welfare, education and health care services. However, Gov. Gavin Newsom has publicly rejected tax hikes and proposes a budget that closes the deficit, at least on paper, with spending deferrals, bookkeeping maneuvers, loans and an injection of money from the state’s rainy day reserves.
Two years ago, California’s two most authoritative polling organizations, UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies and the Public Policy Institute of California, asked residents about their tax burdens and both found increasing discontent, in part because they were feeling the pinch of other costs of living.
The polling punctuated voters’ rejection of a tax increase measure on the 2020 ballot that would have changed Proposition 13, the iconic property tax limit approved by voters in 1978, by increasing taxes on commercial property.
Hoping to leverage popular resistance to tax increases, business and anti-tax groups led by the California Business Roundtable have qualified a measure for the November ballot that would make raising state and local taxes much more difficult.
If passed, the measure would require two-thirds votes for any local tax increases, effectively overturning a state Supreme Court ruling that local taxes proposed via initiative require only simple majority votes. It also would subject any state tax increases to voter approval as well as two-thirds votes by the Legislature.
The measure’s qualification has touched off a legal and political war with Newsom, the Legislature and pro-tax interests, such as unions. Newsom and the Legislature have filed suit, hoping to persuade the state Supreme Court that the measure is a constitutional revision, rather than an amendment, and thereby cannot be enacted by initiative.
The contending interests have filed written arguments with the court, which has not formally decided whether to accept the case. If it does, it will have only a few months to declare whether or not the measure goes on the ballot.
The Legislature has also placed its own measure on the ballot that, if passed, would require the business tax limit measure itself to get two-thirds voter approval. And it passed another ballot measure to reduce vote margin for local tax and bond measures that increase spending on housing and infrastructure to 55% from the current two-thirds, potentially nullifying the Business Roundtable measure.
It’s a showdown that’s been building for nearly five decades, ever since Prop. 13 won approval. With countless billions of dollars at stake, hundreds of millions of dollars are likely to be spent for and against the three interrelated measures.
https://calmatters.org/commentary/2024/04/raising-california-taxes-ballot-measure/
Newsom Pushes Delta Tunnel to Address Climate Change
Politico
Gov. Gavin Newsom has a new sales pitch for a tunnel to move more water south from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta that past governors have tried and failed to build for five decades.
“The Delta conveyance is an adaptation project,” he said last week in a snowy field in the Sierra Nevada, where a winter that started out dry eventually delivered a just-above-average snowpack that will soon melt into the Sacramento River and its tributaries.
It was a pretty good backdrop for his pitch: that not only will climate change make precipitation “flashier,” with bigger storms and floods, but it’ll make it scarcer overall — reducing the state’s water supply by up to 10 percent by 2040.
Building a new tunnel to reroute water deliveries through the state’s main water hub will help maximize scant supplies, Newsom argued, while running it only during wet weather will minimize harm to local communities and endangered fish like the Delta smelt and salmon.
“It’s critical if we’re going to address the issue of climate change,” he said. “It is one of the most important projects this state can advance.”
Governors have used various arguments to advance the tunnel, which has been around in one form or another since former Gov. Jerry Brown backed a “peripheral canal” in the 1970s. Brown argued the project would protect the region’s labyrinth of levees from earthquakes.
Long-skeptical Delta lawmakers aren’t convinced by the latest rationale.
“He’s searching for a reason,” said Representative John Garamendi, a Democrat from the western part of the Delta. “The only way it could relate to climate change is sea-level rise, and that is a legitimate concern. But the tunnel would not solve the problem.”
He said rebuilding levees to protect Delta communities from flooding would be more of a climate adaptation project than pumping more water out.
Environmentalists also dismiss the climate argument.
“It’s really cynical to portray this as an adaptation,” said San Francisco Baykeeper science director Jon Rosenfield, who argues the tunnel would further harm fish and who with other green groups asked state and federal officials in a letter on Tuesday to reduce Delta pumping to save them. “It’s doubling down on the status quo that’s gotten us to a very critical point.”
So whom is Newsom talking to when he says the Delta tunnel is a climate adaptation project?
“Water agencies,” said Jerry Meral, a former top Brown water aide who now directs the California Water Program at the National Heritage Institute.
The water agencies who would use the water from the tunnel are the ones who are going to pay for it, eventually, but most haven’t yet decided to commit. The administration estimates the construction price tag at $16 billion.
Eighteen water agencies have already chipped in for the design and environmental review of the project (construction itself is estimated to cost $16 billion). But only two small ones in the arid Inland Empire, the San Gorgonio Pass Water Agency and San Bernardino Valley Municipal Water District, have agreed to help finance the next step, pitching in $8.2 million and $11.2 million each.
The biggest fish is the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which delivers water to 19 million people in Los Angeles, San Diego and the surrounding areas. General Manager Adel Hagekhalil said he’s receptive to the climate argument — but he’s still circumspect on the broader question of whether to back the tunnel.
“The board of Metropolitan is very supportive to the concept of being able to provide resiliency in the middle of this climate change, and I think the governor is saying that,” he said in an interview last week. “The question is, what are the tools to get that done and how we get it done and how much we pay for it and who pays for it.”
Met will decide whether to pay more for the tunnel as part of its broader climate planning this year or next. It’s currently dealing with a budget hole because conservation has driven down sales beyond what it expected. At a February meeting, one board member questioned why the agency would fund new infrastructure if people aren’t using as much water. A vote on rate hikes to make up for reduced sales is set for tomorrow.
Prop. 1 Narrow Victory Makes Schools & Water Bond Backers Cautious
Politico
Prop 1’s recent narrow victory suggested Californians are wary of more bond spending. But a new poll suggests there’s nevertheless still support for a potential statewide school bond measure.
The survey released last night by the Public Policy Institute of California shows a majority of Californians (58 percent), likely voters (53 percent) and public school parents (72 percent) said they would vote “yes” on a state bond to pay for school construction projects.
Support is not as high as it’s been in previous years — in June of 2023, 64 percent of Californians approved of the same bond idea — but it’s a positive sign for lawmakers as they consider sending such a bond measure to voters in November.
Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi and state Sen. Steve Glazer both have proposed bills that would ask voters to borrow $14 billion and $15 billion, respectively, to provide facilities support for TK-12 schools and institutes of higher education.
But legislative leaders have signaled that the state has a limited bond capacity this year — somewhere between $15 billion and $20 billion — and an education bond may have to compete with climate and housing bonds for room on the November ballot.
Whatever the legislature puts forth, there’s always the question of whether voters have an appetite for borrowing large sums of money, especially in a year when California has a gaping budget deficit. For some, Prop 1’s narrow passage is a warning that the electorate won’t be keen to approve borrowing, but bond proponents are hoping a stronger turnout in November, especially from Democrats, will be enough to push them over the halfway mark.
Federal Fishery Managers Cancel Salmon Season for 2nd Year
CalMatters
Federal fishery managers unanimously voted today to cancel all commercial and recreational salmon fishing off the coast of California for the second year in a row.
The decision is designed to protect California’s dwindling salmon populations after drought and water diversions left river flows too warm and sluggish for the state’s iconic Chinook salmon to thrive.
Salmon abundance forecasts for the year “are just too low,” Marci Yaremko, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s appointee to the Pacific Fishery Management Council, said last week. “While the rainfall and the snowpacks have improved, the stocks and their habitats just need another year to recover.”
State and federal agencies are now expected to implement the closures for ocean fishing. Had the season not been in question again this year, recreational boats would likely already be fishing off the coast of California, while the commercial season typically runs from May through October.
In addition, the California Fish and Game Commission will decide next month whether to cancel inland salmon fishing in California rivers this summer and fall.
The closure means that California restaurants and consumers will have to look elsewhere for salmon, in a major blow to an industry estimated in previous years to be worth roughly half a billion dollars.
“It’s catastrophic,” said Tommy Graham, a commercial fisherman based in Bodega Bay who now drives a truck delivering frozen and farmed salmon and other fish. “It means another summer of being forced to do something you don’t want to do, instead of doing something you love.”
About 210,000 fall-run Chinook Salmon — a mainstay of the fishery — are estimated to be swimming off the coast. Though that’s an improvement over last year, the forecast remains the second-lowest on record since the fishery was closed in 2008 and 2009, Yaremko told the Pacific fishery council.
The numbers this year, plus the fact that the forecasts for salmon returning to spawn are routinely overestimated, “add concern,” Yaremko said.
Many in the fishing industry say they support the closure, but urged state and federal officials to do more to improve conditions in the rivers salmon rely on. Fishing advocates and environmentalists have lambasted Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration for failing to prioritize water quality and flows to protect salmon in the vital Bay-Delta watershed.
“Our fishing fleets and coastal communities cannot be the only ones making sacrifices to save these fish,” said Sarah Bates, who owns a commercial fishing boat called the Bounty, berthed at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco. “Water policy needs to take the health of our river ecosystems seriously.”