“Our official name is the New Democrats, but everyone refers to us as the ‘mods’ and that’s fine too,” says Assemblyman Henry T. Perea, a Fresno native. “When I took over chairing the mods, our reputation for a long time — since our founding — had really been a group of Democrats that kills bills. I wanted to change that reputation.”
And with Perea at the helm, inland Democrats were vocal in staking out their turf in the year’s prominent battles.
Throughout this year’s critical negotiations on the multibillion-dollar water bond on the November ballot, New Democratic state legislators from the region sided with Republicans on the issue of financing storage projects.
The coalition was steadfast in their call for $3 billion for projects, like the Temperance Flat Dam in Fresno County.
“Because everyone was taking a hair cut, we knew we weren’t going to get that. So we needed to stay as close as possible,” Perea said.
In the end, the group managed to sway even Gov. Jerry Brown – who by his own description is “tight with a buck” — to bump up his allocation for water storage by $700,000.
Water bond revisions caused divisions in regional priorities and, despite the opposition of Central Valley lawmakers, groundwater regulations passed in the final hours of the legislative session.
But this struggle, Perea says, gave Central Valley Democrats the opportunity to convey to colleagues from other areas of the state why regional priorities – like investing in water storage projects, clean drinking water and water recycling – are important to the Valley. There is support in the valley for these issues from Republicans, too.
Though they had their successes this session, the New Democrats also lost battles. Senate Leader Darrell Steinberg last month quashed a last minute so-called “gut-and-amend” bill by Perea that would have delayed until 2018 the expansion of cap and trade to include transportation fuels.
Experts, and even the Brown administration, say the policy will drive up consumer gas prices by as much as 76 cents, according to an Air Resources Board estimate. That cost is sure to hit hard the residents of the Central Valley, where people tend to travel primarily by car due to a lack of public transportation options and the reliance on alternative energy vehicles is at a statewide low.
“I was disappointed because I saw it as an opportunity for Democrats to really show that we’re still progressive on the environment, but we care about working people,” Perea said.