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IN THIS ISSUE –
“We own this. We own this moment…we now have the tools and the capacity to turn this ship around.”
Gov. Newsom during his State of the State tour of California
“Californians want solutions to everyday problems. The Governor’s shiny object routine is tired.”
Assembly GOP Leader James Gallagher tweets in response
- Photo: That Sinking Feeling…
- Newsom Barnstorms for “The California Way”
- It’s A Wrap – Governor Ends Tour with Letter to Legislature
- California Population Drain “Unprecedented”; Includes College-Educated & High-Income
- Initiative Process Reform Likely to Consume Legislative Bandwidth
- Show Me the Money! Bipartisan Legislators Tell State Auditor to Examine $22 Billion Homeless Spending
- Not A Shock – EV Owners Are an Exclusive Club
Capital News & Notes (CN&N) harvests 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 MAR. 24, 2023
Photo: That Sinking Feeling…
Newsom Barnstorms for “The California Way”
CalMatters
Gov. Gavin Newsom likes to talk about “the California way.” And as he barnstormed the state with sweeping plans to transform its approach to homelessness, criminal justice and health care, he laid out his ideas for what that “way” means — and his legacy.
Throughout his State of the State tour, the governor was often joking and jovial. But on Sunday, the fourth and final day, he took on a more somber tone, standing behind the lectern of a makeshift event space that was once a nine-bed emergency room to talk about improving mental health care.
He emphasized the far-reaching consequences of inadequate care and shared his own experiences, losing someone he’d attended his high school prom with, as well as his grandfather, a veteran, to suicide.
“We own this. We own this moment,” he said. “But we have now the tools and the capacity to turn this ship around.”
As he dives into his second term, Newsom chose the tour in place of the traditional speech to a joint session of the Legislature. In many ways, the events echoed the priorities that he was focused on at this same point in his first term four years ago — before unexpected crises, a recall effort and a seemingly inescapable pandemic scrambled his agenda.
In his first act as governor, shortly after he took the oath of office in January 2019, Newsom signed an executive order aimed at lowering prescription drug costs by directing state agencies to negotiate collectively with pharmaceutical companies for better prices.
On Saturday, he finally announced that California will partner with Utah-based generic drug company Civica to manufacture its own insulin, available for $30 a vial. The $50 million deal is the first major development in a plan Newsom has pursued for the past three years to create a generic label that can challenge an industry he has criticized for charging far too much for life-saving medications.
Two months into his first term, in March 2019, Newsom enacted a moratorium on executions and dismantled the lethal injection chamber at San Quentin State Prison. His decision stunned the political world by quickly reversing a campaign pledge to respect the will of California voters who have repeatedly upheld capital punishment.
On Friday, nearly four years to the day after that order, the governor was back at San Quentin touting his vision to transform California’s oldest correctional facility from the home of condemned inmates to a center for rehabilitation and training before offenders are released back into society.
In public poll after public poll, these issues are not what Californians identify as the most pressing problems in the state. Yet by regularly resurfacing them, steadily chipping away at breakthroughs on his own terms, Newsom suggests that’s what they represent to him — the issues most fundamental to his platform, those with which he seeks to build his legacy.
Trying to compete, Republicans in the Legislature posted social media videos warning that California is in crisis — on cost of living, crime, homelessness, schools, water and wildfires — and asserting that they have solutions in what they call the California Promise. “Californians want solutions to their everyday problems,” tweeted Assembly GOP leader James Gallagher of Chico. “The Governor’s shiny object routine is tired.”
On each day, and at each event, Newsom was being Newsom — prone to sweeping pronouncements, but less clear on some of the details. At times, he was repackaging or rebranding programs already underway. At others, he urged Californians to imagine a vision for something that doesn’t exist.
Here are some key takeaways and impressions from four days on the road with the governor:
MORE:
It’s A Wrap – Governor Ends Tour with Letter to Legislature
“We are confronting extremes,” Newsom wrote in a letter to the Legislature on Wednesday.
“From extreme politics around the country that threaten to roll back the progress we’ve made — and the rights revolution of the last 60 years — to contending with extreme weather that threatens our way of life with record droughts, increasingly horrific wildfires, and now storms and flood that devastate communities like Planada, Pajaro and the mountain towns of San Bernardino. Despite these threats, my optimism in California has not wavered.”
The five-page letter marked the capstone of Newsom’s state-of-the-state roadshow that wrapped up earlier this week.
GOVERNOR’S LETTER TO THE LEGISLATURE:
California Population Drain “Unprecedented”; Includes College-Educated & High-Income
Public Policy Institute of California
California is in unprecedented demographic territory, one in which population declines characterize the state. Lower levels of international migration, declining birth rates,
and increases in deaths all play a role.
But the primary driver of the state’s population loss over the past few years has been California residents moving to other states. It is a remarkable turnaround for California—long the epicenter of population growth in the United States. Moreover, while net migration losses were once concentrated among lower-income Californians, newly released data suggest that departures have spread beyond this group.
And even as more people move out, fewer are moving in: the state is no longer a significant draw for people from other states of any age, education, or income.
Much has been made of the California exodus to other states, and rightly so. This migration, over the decades, has the power to reshape the state. According to the American Community Survey , from 2010 through 2021 about 7.7 million people moved from California to other states, while only 5.8 million people moved to California from other parts of the country. According to Department of Finance estimates, the state has lost residents to other states every year since 2000. Over the past few years, the movement out of the state has accelerated with a record net outflow of 407,000 from July 2021 to July 2022.
During the height of the pandemic, the flows out of the state became so large that almost every demographic and socioeconomic group has experienced net losses. For example, California used to gain college graduates even as it lost less educated adults. But in the last couple of years, the state has started losing college graduates as well, quite markedly—albeit still not to the same extent as less educated adults. Even among young college graduates in their 20s, a group that California has disproportionately attracted in the past, the flows out of the state have been about the same as the flows into the state.
Perhaps most striking, California is now losing higher-income households as well as middle- and lower-income households. During the pandemic, the number of higher-income households moving to California declined a bit, but the number leaving the state increased dramatically (from less than 150,000 in 2019 to almost 220,000 by 2021).
MORE:
Initiative Process Reform Likely to Consume Legislative Bandwidth
CalMatters commentary from Dan Walters
Over the last decade, as Democrats achieved total control of the state government and their policies took a turn to the left, those who oppose the ideological trend have increasingly used the only avenue still available – ballot measures to overturn what legislators and governors have wrought.
Recent elections have seen a spate of initiatives (to write new laws) and referenda (to block legislative laws) sponsored by business interests to overturn the Capitol’s decrees. Proponents have included the tobacco, bail bond and plastics industries, as well as ride-hailing services such as Uber and Lyft.
Next year, voters are certain to face two other business-sponsored measures: referenda by the fast food and oil industries to block newly enacted regulations on their operations. Others could be added. For instance, were Gov. Gavin Newsom to succeed in imposing fines on gasoline refiners for exceeding profit limits, another oil industry referendum is likely.
New laws being challenged by referenda, including the two already headed for the 2024 ballot, are suspended until voters render final judgment.
Understandably, progressive politicians and their allies, particularly labor unions, dislike business use of ballot measures to thwart their legislative gains. As the syndrome has evolved, there have been efforts to make placing measures on the ballot more difficult.
A few systemic changes have been enacted, affecting the process on the margin, but there hasn’t been a successful frontal assault. In 2018, then-Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed a bill that would have banned paying signature gatherers on a per-name basis, using the same words he used in his 2011 veto of similar legislation.
“Per-signature payment is often the most cost-effective method for collecting the hundreds of thousands of signatures needed to qualify a ballot measure,” Brown wrote. “Eliminating this option will drive up the cost of circulating ballot measures, thereby further favoring the wealthiest interests.”
Contrarily, those who would make qualification of measures more difficult, or at least more expensive, contend that it’s the current process that favors those with the deepest pockets (i.e. business groups), and that their money encourages paid signature gatherers to lie to voters about proposed measures to persuade them to sign petitions.
Does that occur? Absolutely. But it also happens when labor unions and other left-leaning interest groups circulate their measures and when politicians themselves use the ballot process.
Proposition 57, a 2016 measure sponsored by Brown, was especially deceptive, claiming that it would reduce penalties only for non-violent felons, when it also benefited those who commit certain types of rape, domestic violence and other heinous crimes.
The latest effort to kneecap those who resist the Legislature’s progressive legislation was unveiled Monday – a bill to require that unpaid volunteers gather at least 10% of signatures on all referenda and on initiatives seeking to repeal or amend recently enacted laws.
Assembly Bill 421 also would require paid signature gatherers to undergo mandatory training, register with the state for the specific measures they are presenting to voters, wear badges, and use unique identification numbers that would allow their petitions to be traced back to them.
The coalition of progressive groups advocating AB 421, and its author, Assemblyman Isaac Bryan, a Culver City Democrat, argue that the proposed changes would make the ballot measure process fairer and more transparent.
It’s entirely possible that AB 421 will be enacted, but ironically, business interests could challenge it by referendum.
Moreover, it could run afoul of a 1988 U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning a Colorado law that banned a statute against paid signature gatherers. It declared that petition circulation is “core political speech” and the use of paid signature gatherers is “the most effective, fundamental, and perhaps economical means of achieving direct, one-on-one communication with voters.”
WhatMatters e-newsletter
Between 2018 and 2021, California spent nearly $10 billion trying to tackle the state’s homelessness crisis. Between 2021 and the end of this year, lawmakers plan to spend at least $12 billion more. Meanwhile, the population of Californians sleeping on sidewalks, beneath underpasses and alongside railroad tracks has only grown.
So where is all that money going?
A bipartisan group of state lawmakers wants to know. The Joint Legislative Audit Committee voted unanimously to order the State Auditor’s Office to answer some fairly basic unanswered questions about state homelessness policy: How much of it has been spent on services and how much on overhead? How effective are various state-funded programs at actually getting people permanently into homes?
Last month, the Newsom administration put out a report that offered a bird’s eye view of state homelessness spending. But that report notably did not get into how the money ought to be spent. That task now falls to the auditor.
Sen. Dave Cortese, a Campbell Democrat, initially proposed the audit after touring an encampment in San Jose last fall. Since then, he’s been joined by Cupertino Democratic Assemblymember Evan Low and three Republicans — Sen. Rosilicie Ochoa Bogh of Rancho Cucamonga, Sen. Roger Niello of Sacramento and Assemblymember Josh Hoover of Folsom.
That rare bipartisan coalition also wants the auditor, Grant Parks, to look at the management of homelessness dollars in the city of San Jose, plus in another city of the auditor’s choosing.
Cortese: “This audit isn’t really about any city. It’s certainly not about going after any city and it’s not an indictment… But it is an indictment on the indecency that’s going on out there right now.”
LETTER:
Not A Shock – EV Owners Are an Exclusive Club
CalMatters
CalMatters’ statewide analysis of ZIP codes reveals a strikingly homogenous portrait of who owns electric vehicles in California: Communities with mostly white and Asian, college-educated and high-income residents have the state’s highest concentrations of zero-emission cars. And most are concentrated in Silicon Valley cities and affluent coastal areas of Los Angeles and Orange counties.
This racial and economic divide may be unsurprising — but it illustrates the mammoth task that California faces as it tries to electrify its 25 million cars to battle climate change, clean up its severe air pollution and reduce reliance on fossil fuels. Under a state mandate enacted last year, 35% of cars sold in California, beginning with 2026 models, must be zero-emissions, ramping up to 68% in 2030 and 100% in 2035.
But if people who buy electric cars are largely white or Asian, highly educated, wealthy, coastal suburbanites, will the state’s transformation succeed? Will new electric cars be attainable for all Californians — no matter their race, income and location — in the coming decade?
High upfront vehicle costs, lack of chargers for renters and inadequate access to public charging stations in low-income and rural communities hamper California’s ability to expand EV ownership beyond affluent parts of the Bay Area and Los Angeles area.
The cost of new electric cars is the most obvious factor driving the racial and income disparities in who buys them: The average as of February was $58,385 — about $9,600 more than the average car — although it dropped from about $65,000 last year. Lower-end fully electric cars start around $27,500.
Kevin Fingerman, an associate professor of energy and climate at California State Polytechnic University Humboldt, said the primary reason why more people in white, affluent, college-educated communities own electric cars is that they tend to be early adopters of new technology, with easier access.
“California is prioritizing the rapid electrification of the light-duty vehicle sector and it’s right in doing so. But it’s going to be important in the process to make sure that there is equitable access,” said Fingerman, who co-authored a study on racial and income disparities to electric vehicle charging.
MORE:
https://calmatters.org/environment/2023/03/california-electric-cars-demographics/