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IN THIS ISSUE – “I Just Want to Put Them Under the Bus”
- Gaming California Elections: Are Voters Deceived in “Top Two” Primaries?
- “Radical Changes” Ahead in $1.4-Billion Reform of Mental Health System, Governor Says
- California Green New Deal Author Talks About His Far-Reaching Bill
- Melting Arctic Ice Impacting Weather in California, New Study Finds
- “Deep Decarbonization” – Expert’s Guide to Tech & Business Climate Change Leadership
- Community Colleges’ Bachelor’s Degrees Provide Access for All
FOR THE WEEK ENDING JAN. 31, 2020
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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Gaming California Elections: Are Voters Deceived in “Top Two” Primaries?
CalMatters Special Report
Kathy Garcia is not your typical Republican candidate for the California Senate.
For one, she only just joined the GOP. A lifelong Democrat, she won election to the Stockton school board member with the backing of the county Democratic party. She changed her affiliation to Republican in June 2019, six months before the deadline to enter the Senate race.
She said the idea to run — under the banner of a party she’d opposed most of her adult life — was suggested to her by a Stockton lawyer and powerbroker who, records show, has helped fund the campaign of another candidate in the race. And that candidate, a moderate Democrat, incidentally stands a better chance if the Republican vote is divided.
The 80-year-old Garcia, asked by CalMatters why she’s running under the GOP label, gave a series of distinctly un-Republican explanations.
“I just decided I was going to try something new. And not because I like Trump,” she said, before making a retching noise. As for the Republicans that are running, she said, “I want to just put them under the bus.”
Garcia might get her wish.
That’s thanks to California’s unique “top two” election system, in which all candidates — regardless of party affiliation — are listed together on the same ballot in the first round “primary.” Only the first and second place winners March 3 move on to the general election Nov. 3, also regardless of party affiliation. The race for state Senate in this Central Valley district race is the latest oddball illustration of how the state’s decade-old electoral attempt at reform can distort the typical logic of campaigning, confuse voters and lead to mind-bending results.
Under the top two system, Garcia’s unlikely candidacy as a Republican is — paradoxically — most likely to benefit moderate Democrat and Modesto Councilman Mani Grewal. By running as a Republican along with another long-shot GOP candidate, Jim Ridenour, Garcia could split the local GOP vote three ways. If so, that could very well leave the two Democratic contenders — Grewal and Assemblywoman Susan Eggman — with the top two winning spots.
And it would leave the most viable Republican candidate running, Stockton Councilman Jesús Andrade, who has been endorsed by the state party, flattened under that proverbial bus.
Asked if her motivation was to undermine Andrade, Garcia demurred: “I can’t come out and say that.”
Both she and Grewal say they aren’t working together. The Andrade campaign isn’t buying it.
“It’s shameful that Democrat Mani Grewal would plant a Bernie Sanders supporting, fake Republican like Kathy Garcia in this Senate race to split the Republican vote,” said Andrade’s consultant Steve Presson. “Republican Jim Ridenour is also a Grewal plant whose candidacy is solely to help Grewal make the top two general election run-off. These Nixonian dirty tricks are just deplorable. Central Valley voters deserve better.”
Grewal called that a “ridiculous accusation.”
The top two system was intended to strip political parties of their influence over the candidate selection process, making California elections less prone to backroom dealing and polarization. The jury is still out as to whether the system actually has pushed state politics towards the ideological center, as promised. But ten years into California’s experiment with electoral “reform,” an unintended side effect has emerged. Political insiders have figured out how to game the top two — or, at the very least, how to accuse other campaigns of doing so to muddy the political waters.
But the mere fact that any of this is in doubt is an artifact of the state’s peculiar election system, said Paul Mitchell, vice president of Political Data Inc and frequent critic of the top two.
“Nobody would have questioned (Garcia’s candidacy) under the old system,” he said. The top two, he said, “encourages not only this manipulative strategy, but it also makes the public question a manipulative strategy where maybe there isn’t one.”
Grewal said allegations of coordination between his campaign and any other candidate in the race are “conspiracy theories” and “a cry for some free media” by the Andrade campaign.
“The first time I met Kathy Garcia was at the Modesto Bee forum” on Jan. 14, he said. “I know Jim Ridenour and the last time he endorsed me in my campaign. I would have liked his endorsement this time.”
In a follow up conversation, Garcia, who supported New Jersey Democratic Sen. Cory Booker for president, insisted that her choice to run was not motivated by her antipathy towards the Republicans, despite her earlier comments.
“Look at the people running as a Democrat,” she said. “Everybody is either an incumbent or has a big following or something. So here I am.”
She added that the idea to change parties and run for office as a Republican first came from Stockton lawyer and political operative N. Allen Sawyer, whom she described as “kind of my campaign manager.”
In an email, Sawyer explained that he encouraged Garcia to run as a Republican because the “San Joaquin County Democratic Party is rigged and controlled by insiders…I think as a moderate she has a better chance of being treated fairly as a Republican.”
Last year, prior to Garcia’s entry into the race, Sawyer donated $3,000 to Grewal’s campaign.
“I support financially a wide range of candidates who run for office,” he said.
Grewal acknowledged the early financial support from Sawyer, whom he said he has known for some time. “And about his relationship with Kathy, I’m not aware of that stuff.”
Sawyer isn’t the only financial backer of Grewal’s campaign with connections to the two outsider Republicans, Garcia and Ridenour.
Rex Dhatt, a used car dealer and president of the American Punjabi Chamber Of Commerce, has donated at least $2,000 to Grewal. He’s also contributed to Garcia (the exact value will be disclosed after the next campaign finance filing deadline at the end of January).
Bill Lyons, a farmer, rancher and land developer in Modesto who serves as Gov. Newsom’s Agriculture Liaison and was state secretary of Food and Agriculture under Gov. Gray Davis, donated $1,953 to the Grewal campaign. Since 2017, Lyons, his firms and members of his family have given $26,891 to Grewal’s various electoral efforts.
But this year, four companies owned by Lyons have also been the sole contributors to Ridenour, another Republican in the race, giving a total of $4,000 as of the end of 2019.
Dhatt said he wasn’t involved in either campaign directly. “I know them personally from before,” he said of the two candidates when reached by phone. “They came for a check so I gave them a check, end of story.”
Neither Lyons nor Ridenour responded to requests for comment.
While Grewal insists that none of the various connections between his campaign and those of Garcia and Ridenour amount to much more than a coincidence, common enough in moderately-sized towns like Modesto and Stockton, his campaign has recognized that the presence of three Republicans in the race works to his benefit.
“With three credible Republican candidates — a former Mayor of Modesto, a Stockton school board member, and a Stockton City Council member — those votes will be split,” reads a memo his campaign sent out to supporters last November. “None of the three Republicans will get more than 20% of the March vote.”
Given the moderate lean of the district as a whole, the memo continues “Grewal’s support from law enforcement and business will result in the majority of Republicans supporting him.” Combined with a large share of the district’s Democrats, that will “give him a comfortable November margin.”
This isn’t the first time in California’s top two history that an outside candidate has been labeled a spoiler. Take the case of Scott Baugh.
In 2018, the former Orange County Republican Chair entered a congressional race against then-incumbent Dana Rohrabacher. Baugh, who also happened to be Rourbacher’s former campaign director, claimed to have suffered a falling out with his old boss. But with eight Democrats in the race, some political observers called his last minute entry into the race “suspicious,” suggesting it was an attempt to insert a second well-known Republican in the race to nab the second place spot. As CalMatters’ columnist Dan Walters put it, the state GOP could have been “pulling off one of history’s most audacious political coups.”
Baugh and Rohrabacher’s mutual history didn’t help allay those suspicions. In 1995, Baugh won an Assembly race after Baugh’s campaign manager and Rohrbacher’s wife convinced a friend of Baugh’s to run as a “decoy” Democratic candidate, siphoning off votes from Baugh’s main opponent.
In 2018, Baugh came in fourth and Rohrabacher lost in the general. The plan — if there was one — didn’t work.
That might be thanks to a bit of electoral shenanigans on the Democratic side: The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on ads hammering Baugh and boosting a little known Republican candidate named John Gabbard, hoping to lift up the latter at the expense of the former.
Running political advertising to back a weaker candidate is yet another convoluted strategy enabled by the top two system.
Last year, supporters of both Attorney General Xavier Becerra and Gov. Gavin Newsom ran advertisements that subtly (or maybe not so subtly) boosted the conservative bonafides of their Republican opponents.
Why? In a traditional partisan primary system, a Democrat in California would be forced to face-off against a Republican no matter what. But in California, where a Republican hasn’t won statewide since 2006, ensuring a GOP candidate gets into the top two rather than a fellow party member is a winning strategy for any Democratic candidate.
Newsom said as much when asked which candidate he’d like to run against during a pre-primary debate last May: “A Republican would be ideal.”
These strategies aren’t illegal. It’s not clear they’re even unethical, said Mitchell, who offered the electoral equivalent of the adage “don’t hate the player.”
“You can decry the people who would do those kinds of things, but you could also point to the system,” he said.
“Radical Changes” Ahead for Mental Health System, Governor Says
Capitol Weekly
(CN&N Note: Gov. Gavin Newsom said he planned to announce “radical changes” in the state’s dysfunctional mental health system in his Feb. 19 State of the State Address. His comments came this week in a speech this at the Public Policy Institute of California policy lunch.
The Capitol Weekly provides a comprehensive and essential summary of the tortuous history of the Byzantine mental health system, which Newsom said to study.)
“There are a lot of pieces to this puzzle, and we need to look at it as a whole – courts, prisons, police, state hospitals, community programs – and re-engineer a system that works better.” — Randall Hagar, California Psychiatric Association, Capitol Weekly, 2011
“The State of California is treating homelessness as a real emergency – because it is one.” — Gov. Gavin Newsom, State Budget Preview, Jan. 8, 2020
The modern history of mental-health care in California begins more than half a century ago with passage of the landmark 1967 Lanterman-Petris-Short Act, an ambitious — but ultimately disastrous — overhaul of a draconian “system” of hoary old mental hospitals throughout California.
Most of the hospitals were closed, but the “community care” that was to take institutionalization, and increasing numbers of mentally ill Californians wandered the streets, or languished in jails and prisons. Skyrocketing housing costs forced more people out of their homes, and California now leads the nation in the number of homeless people on its streets.
As Gov. Gavin Newsom, with great fanfare and reams of statistics, launches his ambitious $1.4 billion budget plan targeting mental illness and homelessness, there is both hope and a question: Will it really mean lasting change?
The odds are not good.
Link to the reportage:
https://capitolweekly.net/mental-health-care-from-the-snake-pit-to-the-streets/
California Green New Deal Author Talks About His Far-Reaching Bill
CalMatters
Earlier this month, Democratic Assemblymember Rob Bonta of Oakland described dire consequences of climate change: Australia is burning; the Philippines, where he was born, is regularly hit by typhoons; and California faces drought, wildfire and the threat of sea level rise as global temperatures warm.
Bonta can’t fix the world, but he has a plan for California. The California Green New Dealwould build on existing climate change policies to accelerate the state’s decarbonization while prioritizing historically marginalized populations. The bill’s details are still vague, so some politically powerful special interest groups like the Western States Petroleum Association have yet to take a position. But the legislation aims to address big goals, like doubling public transit capacity and affordable housing by 2030.
California has been at the forefront of policies designed to combat climate change. The state reached its goal to reduce emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 four years early. Former Gov. Jerry Brown in 2018 committed California to achieving carbon neutrality by 2045. And a cap-and-trade program launched in 2013 has been pulling in revenue to help fund environmental initiatives, including improving public transit, providing affordable housing and preventing wildfire.
But Bonta said that’s not enough.
“I’m not saying at all that California has failed to respond to the crisis, in fact the opposite. California has led,” Bonta said at a Jan. 6 press conference when he announced the bill. “But the facts, the evidence, the data – all good fuel for sound policy – tell us we must do more.”
The bill would extend the rights of Californians to include things like access to clean air and water; justice for institutional – including environmental – racism; debt-free public education through college, and affordable health care. It calls for considering phasing out fossil fuels and addressing disparate standards of living.
This isn’t the first time that Bonta has tried to bring a Green New Deal to the Golden State. His 2019 bill borrowed heavily from its federal namesake, a pair of resolutions introduced around the same time. Bonta chose to hold his 2019 bill, and the federal effort has stalled.
This time, Bonta said, will be different.
“We’re much further along with our language, with our thinking, with the development and evolution of the bill, with our coalition,” he said. “Another year has passed of increased urgency to address our climate crisis.”
Similar efforts have divided labor groups in the past. Cesar Diaz, legislative and political director of the State Building and Construction Trades Council of California, said his organization will want to see fair labor practices worked into a Green New Deal. That means hiring local workers, using union labor, paying prevailing wages and offering apprenticeship programs, retirement benefits, and health care.
Bonta spoke with CalMatters about this bill, his motivation for it and some of what he called its “big, bold goals.”
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
California has a whole suite of environmental policies already — why does the state need this bill?
Nowhere – California, the United States – that I’m aware of, on the scale that is required, has taken the action necessary to address the full threat of global climate change. A lot of progressive steps, including many incredibly significant steps in California, have been taken that we should be proud of. But the challenge is so large that we need to do more; we need to do it faster because science tells us we must.
SB 100 has targets around getting to 100% clean energy by 2045. California, as one of the leaders, should be doing that earlier and making sure that we’re showing other parts of the world what’s possible. If we do it at 2045 and then others do it at 2050 and 2055 and 2060 and 2065 — it’s too late.
Last year, you introduced a similar bill, AB 1276, and then you pulled it. Why was that?
To do that engagement process with our stakeholders, that bottom-up instead of top-down process where we’re working with leaders throughout the state to get input. We wanted to take the time to put more meat on the bill, give more thought to the bill, build our coalition and prepare for introduction at the beginning of the session.
Why are you introducing this bill? Why is it important to you?
I recently had a conversation with my daughter. She’s 20. She’s in college. She’s my oldest. And unsolicited, she said, “Dad, I love coming home, I love being with the family. I want to have my own family, but I don’t think I should have kids, because I don’t think it’s responsible to bring them onto a dying planet, and I don’t want to see them suffer if I do.”
And that was a gut punch for me. A lot of young people feel that, and that’s not rare. But it hit me. That’s never how I’ve had to think, and we all certainly as parents – as mothers and fathers, but also as leaders – we want to give a world to our children that’s better than the world we have. And we are facing the possibility of not doing that.
So why me? I’m a father, I’m a policymaker, I’m in California, and I know in my heart of hearts when we ask ourselves, “Are we doing enough to address climate change and to save our planet?” the answer has to be no. And so my answer to that is the California Green New Deal, to actually put something in a bill that is enough.
How are you going to pay for the Green New Deal?
Of course, the California Green New Deal is going to require a significant investment to achieve the change and the action that we want. First: we can’t afford not to do this. We certainly don’t want to have an epitaph or a gravestone that says, “Here lies Earth, our leaders said we couldn’t afford it.”
We need to act, and there’s basically three buckets of how we can pay for this: We can generate revenue to help pay for it, we can have discretionary funding, and the Green New Deal, because it will help generate significant economic activity, will be helping generate revenue as well by helping really stimulate a green energy economy.
You said one option was to raise revenue. How would you do that?
I think it’s appropriate to have the revenue source have a nexus to the goals of the bill. So if we’re going to be working on transportation, we would have a source that’s connected to the transportation goals of the bill: doubling public transit capacity. Same for housing, there could be fees or other revenue-generating components that help us build the housing.
For some of the climate change stuff, people have talked about things like oil extraction fees or taxes. Carbon taxes have been talked about. Those are all possibilities. We haven’t decided on any of those at all, but those are examples.
How will the California Green New Deal ensure fair labor standards during the “just transition” to the green economy?
Our workers will benefit from the California Green New Deal — that is my commitment. In fact, I’ve always seen it as the California Blue-Green New Deal — labor and the environment being championed and prioritized. We’re working with labor to identify the language that we’re going to put in the bill. We’ve committed to amendments that will have fair labor standards, that will have protections for working people, that will have apprenticeship components to it, that will have things around project labor agreements, prevailing wages, union jobs. We’re going to put those details into the amendments.
California has passed legislation like cap and trade in the past on the theory that other states will follow, but they haven’t. Why do you feel that one state should act?
California’s leadership is required and needed more now than ever, given the vacuum by the federal government. We can’t throw our hands in the air; we need to do more.
I don’t think that one metric on one policy, whether it be cap and trade or any other policy, is a way to determine whether or not we should do this. There are many things where, when California has gone first, others have followed. Sometimes it takes time. Our governor has often said California is the coming attraction; we’re the previews. It happens here first. It might be that others haven’t done cap and trade yet, but they will.
As more folks realize the urgency and the scope of our climate crisis, more people will be looking for ways to act, and California will have a whole menu of options.
Melting Arctic Ice Impacting Weather in California, New Study Finds
Fresno Bee
Melting ice in the Arctic Ocean is driving weather changes as far afield as the equator, newly published research reveals — and those changes may fuel downpours that later drench California.
The study shows that the accelerating ice melt near the North Pole is linked to weather changes in the equatorial Pacific Ocean, researchers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, said in a news release. Researchers note that the Pacific Ocean drives weather patterns worldwide, including in California.
The findings were published Monday in the journal “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,” with researchers calling the study “the first time that researchers have looked at both world regions together in this context.”
Each summer, up to twice as much Arctic sea ice melts as used to melt during the 20th century, researchers said. And as more Arctic ice has melted, trade winds have intensified near the equator in the Central Pacific Ocean, the study found.
“There’s a definite relationship and a change in tropical Pacific climate,” Charles Kennel, a physicist and the former director of Scripps, said in a statement. “There’s now a network of consistent correlations.”
Here’s how the Arctic melt influences the Pacific: As sea ice turns into water amid hotter conditions, there’s more dark Arctic Ocean water exposed to the sun — and that water absorbs roughly 93 percent of sunlight, unlike the ice that was once there and bounced away the sun’s rays, according to researchers.
That means water temperatures go up, Kennel said. The warm air rises in the atmosphere, reaching the boundary of the troposphere and the stratosphere above it, researchers said.
“It’s like applying a candle to the bottom of the atmosphere; you set off convection that rises to high altitudes and once it gets up there it has no place to go, so it gradually moves southward,” Kennel said, according to Mongabay, an environmental news site.
And that has global implications.
“This movement goes hand in hand with contortions of typical weather patterns that have caused frigid ‘polar vortex’ weather in the U.S. Midwest and deadly flooding in Asia in recent years,” researchers said. “Though many researchers had thought that air originating in the Arctic couldn’t make it to the equator, Kennel and [co-author Elena] Yulaeva said their work suggests it does.”
But how would thosechanges influence California’s weather?
The San Francisco Chronicle reported that the Arctic-fueled wind and weather shift in the Pacific “in turn, triggers El Niño weather events and the violent ‘atmospheric rivers’ that bring deluges of rain, sometimes causing havoc in the Bay Area.”
El Niño and La Niña, patterns of warm equatorial water in the Pacific, impact weather worldwide, the researchers said — meaning “the melt of Arctic sea ice could have a global reach by influencing the influencer of weather set in motion around the world.”
And while “classical El Niños feature build-ups of warm water at the eastern end of the Pacific Ocean off South America, … El Niños starting in the Central Pacific Ocean are the ones that respond to the arrival of Arctic air near the equator,” the researchers said.
The researchers also said that “since so much of California’s rain comes from atmospheric river storms that develop in the Central Pacific, the Arctic-Tropics connection merits further study.”
https://www.fresnobee.com/news/california/article239699048.html#storylink=cpy
“Deep Decarbonization” – An Expert’s Guide to Tech & Business Climate Change Leadership
Yale e360 commentary
One of the planet’s leading climate change researchers opines that multiple tech revolutions – including crop GMO – and radically new business models, with incentives for participation, are immediately needed. He writes:
Global emissions have soared by two-thirds in the three decades since international climate talks began. To make the reductions required, what’s needed is a new approach that creates incentives for leading countries and industries to spark transformative technological revolutions.
More here:
https://e360.yale.edu/features/deep-decarbonization-a-realistic-way-forward-on-climate-change
Community Colleges’ Bachelor’s Degrees Provide Access for All
CalMatters commentary
The Legislative Analyst’s Office, which advises state lawmakers on budgetary matters, prides itself on taking an independent, nonpartisan and even nonpolitical approach to important policy issues.
That well-established tradition continues in a new LAO report on a pilot program that allows a few community college districts to offer four-year degrees in a few obscure subjects.
However, by divorcing itself from the program’s political aspects in this case, it’s also separating itself from reality.
The reality is that California’s economy needs more well-trained and well-educated workers, but obtaining a four-year college degree these days is very difficult given the inability of the state’s public universities to handle the demand.
That’s especially true for low-income students from the state’s less-populated regions because they must also cope with high living costs as they are forced to leave home to attend college.
Community colleges, which offer close-to-home, low-cost educations, do provide lower-division courses, but students still must transfer to four-year universities to complete their degrees.
Other states, facing the same dilemma, have responded by broadly authorizing community colleges to offer baccalaureate programs and California’s pilot program has been an effort to replicate that rational approach.
However, political reality has made that expansion difficult. The state university system guards its place in the academic pecking order jealously and as a result, the pilot program was very limited, allowing the community colleges to offer degrees just in a few relatively obscure subjects that the universities ignored.
Ironically, the state universities’ resistance to what it regarded as competition for money and students mirrors the resistance that the University of California displayed when the state universities wanted to begin offering some doctorate programs.
The LAO report ignored these three-way turf struggles, which have bubbled up for decades, in its lukewarm report on the community college pilot program.
“We found little evidence that graduates from these pilot programs were better prepared to fill these positions compared to those with other bachelor’s degrees or that pilot program graduates were helping employers fill hard-to-staff positions,” the LAO said. “The most common benefit of the pilot cited by students was the relatively low cost of attending the community college bachelor’s degree programs.”
Having four-year programs in the community colleges would be unnecessary, the report suggests, if the two- and four-year systems would simply cooperate more on developing targeted training programs and better aligning course offerings to make transfers from community colleges to four-year schools easier.
Well, that’s stating the obvious — but only if, as the LAO does, one ignores the fact that we don’t have a well-integrated system of public higher education in California, despite the existence of a so-called “master plan” for the last half-century that assumes we do.
We have three separate, often competitive systems and as long as we do, we should embrace allowing community colleges to offer as many baccalaureate programs as they are financially and institutionally capable of doing, thereby giving students more options and the state more of the well-educated workers it needs.
California Community Colleges Chancellor Eloy Ortiz Oakley said it well in a statement responding to the LAO report:
“These programs are serving many students who might not otherwise have a path to a bachelor’s degree. The programs are of high quality and lead to meaningful jobs for graduates.”