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IN THIS ISSUE – “A Small Mountain of Ballots”
HIGHER MATH
- And Still Counting…the Election Will Last Until April in California
- More Counting – High-Stakes Census Begins
HEALTH, SUN & WATER
- Newsom’s Massive Healthcare Reform a High-Risk Venture
- Electric Vehicle Industry Needs a Boost
- Water 101, A Primer
CALIFORNIA’S UNIQUE CULTURE
FOR THE WEEK ENDING MAR. 6, 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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And Still Counting…the Election Will Last Until April in California
CalMatters
The results are in.
No, not the results you were waiting for, the final tally of California ballots cast for the state’s Super Tuesday presidential primary. We might not have those for days to come and they won’t be officially certified until April.
But yesterday state officials published their first estimate of how many ballots are left to be counted.
In a state that holds an “election month, not election day” — where results will trickle in for weeks to come, sometimes flipping the outcomes of tight elections in the process — this is an election nerd’s landmark. It also gives us a few more clues about the final shape of California’s various primary contests.
According to estimates published by county election registrars, as of Thursday night, there are 3.5 million ballots left to count. (The Secretary of State’s office showed a count of about 3.3 million, but that did not include the latest updated numbers from Los Angeles County.)
That small mountain of unprocessed popular will comes courtesy of last minute voters — those who either put their ballots in the mail on Election Day itself, or who voted in person but exercised their California-given right to register or change their political party on the spot.
They also include ballots that were ripped, bent, marred by typos, or that otherwise gave a voting machine a hard time and will thus require the careful study of a human election worker.
What does all of this mean for the various California races still in limbo? We have no idea what all of those ballots say just yet, but this first report offers a few new clues.
Take Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders current commanding lead over former Vice President Joe Biden. Is there a chance that could narrow in the days to come?
Sanders’ margin over the former vice president is only 271,635. That’s a small fraction of the ballots remaining. Which way will those uncounted vote go? History suggests that the late breaking vote tends to be young, Latino and lower-income — Sanders’ base. On the other hand, there’s evidence that many moderate Democrats were waiting until the last minute to vote and may have rallied to Biden after he was endorsed by fellow centrists Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar and former South Bend, Ind. mayor Pete Buttigieg, after they dropped out.
In other words, as these ballots are counted, they’re likely to run up the margins of both front runners at the expense of the rest of the field.
The other big question hanging over California’s 2020 election is Proposition 13. Can the school bond ballot measure, which is currently down 10 percentage points, recover?
Though these later votes tend to skew left, the school bond would have to win 58% of the ballots left. That is, assuming the estimated remaining ballot count is accurate.
Taken at face value, the unprocessed ballots combined with those that have already been counted add up to 8.8 million votes, or a turnout rate of 43% of all registered voters.
That level of primary electorate vigor falls somewhere in between 2012 and 2016, where turnout was 31% and 47% respectively.
Of course, the estimated number of ballots left to count should not be taken at face value. As long as a mail-in ballot was postmarked by Election Day, any that arrive tomorrow will eventually be counted.
These are also estimates, and pretty rough ones at that. A survey of the ballots left to be tallied shows some suspiciously round numbers: 112,000 in Contra Costa County, 350,000 in San Diego, 80,000 in Fresno.
As Secretary of State spokesman Sam Mahood wrote on Twitter this evening, “It’s still too early to definitively talk about turnout.”
But even as a ballpark figure it suggests that, two days out from Election Day, many California voters have yet to have their ballots counted. In 2016 and 2018, there were more than half a million fewer votes to tally at this point.
That shouldn’t be surprising, according to California Secretary of State Alex Padilla.
In a conference call with reporters before Election Day, Padilla predicted that a higher share of ballots would end up in the late pile this year thanks to a series of recent laws that make it possible for all voters to register to vote or change their party registration on election day itself.
Voters without a registered party were also motivated this year to switch party affiliation or request a special ballot to participate in the presidential primary. That also likely added to the heap of ballots that will take days, if not weeks, to sift through.
Counting Californians – High-Stakes Census Begins
CalMatters
California is preparing for the next federal census, which will begin April 1. It’s part of a survey the U.S. Census Bureau conducts every 10 years to figure out how many people live in the country. The accuracy of the count is important for two reasons: First, it is used to assign the number of seats each state has in the U.S. House of Representatives. Second, census figures are used to direct billions of federal dollars to state and local governments — so an undercount could cost California money.
California is especially vulnerable to an undercount because of its large immigrant population and other hard-to-reach people. In fact, a staggering 29 million Californians belong to one or more historically undercounted groups, including renters, young men, children, African Americans and Latinos.
How much could the state lose? State census officials have estimated that falling short could cost California as much as $1,000 per person a year and a seat in Congress. It’s why the state is investing $187.2 million — the most of any state — for outreach to households that have typically been hard to count.
California households will be getting notices soon asking them to fill out the census survey. And for the first time, the government will try to collect most responses online.
Here’s what you need to know.
https://calmatters.org/explainers/california-census-2020-explaine/
Newsom’s Massive Healthcare Reform a High-Risk Venture
CalMatters commentary
The old adage about tiny acorns growing into mighty oak trees is not confined to dendrology.
It applies as well to governmental programs and there’s no better example than Medi-Cal, California’s program of health care for the poor.
An addendum to the landmark federal legislation creating Medicare coverage for the elderly 55 years ago offered federal subsidies to states for caring for the poor — dubbed Medicaid in most states, but Medi-Cal in California.
At the time, Medi-Cal was seen as providing modest stipends for county hospitals and other providers of charity treatment, but immediately began a never-ending expansion of benefits and recipients.
The Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare, paid for a huge surge of eligibility and today, Medi-Cal provides coverage to 13 million Californians, more than a third of the state’s population, at a cost of well over $100 billion per year, or about $8,000 for each recipient.
Beginning with Pat Brown, every California governor has struggled to manage the ever-growing program, particularly how services would be delivered. At one point or another, each governor attempted to streamline Medi-Cal’s ponderous procedural apparatus — that’s partly state and partly county — while dealing with demands for more financial support from medical care providers and managerial intermediaries, such as managed care organizations.
Now it’s Gavin Newsom’s turn. And with characteristic can-do bravado, he’s proposing a major overhaul dubbed “California Advancing and Innovating Medi-Cal” or CalAIM. It embraces “whole person care,” including non-medical services such as housing, and would “move Medi-Cal to a more consistent and seamless system by reducing complexity and increasing flexibility” with “delivery system transformation.”
“Today, some Medi-Cal enrollees may need to access six or more separate delivery systems,” Newsom’s proposed 2020-21 budget declares as he seeks to merge them into seamless packages of individualized services that “will have significant impacts on an individual’s health” and “ultimately reduce the per-capita cost over time.”
A major focus of the proposal is more intensive management of care for the relatively few recipients with “complex needs” who account for huge portions of Medi-Cal expenditures.
Implicitly, there’s more at stake in what Newsom proposes than just another in a long string of gubernatorial attempts at managerial improvement.
Not only would it take Medi-Cal in an entirely new direction, such as housing, but with Newsom’s other proposal to extend coverage to more undocumented immigrants, it would lay the structural groundwork for his declared goal of “guaranteed health care for all Californians” via a state-managed single-payer system.
The first analytical take on Newsom’s Medi-Cal overhaul was issued late last month by Gabriel Petek, the Legislature’s budget analyst, and it was lukewarm, declaring that “the conceptual approach is promising, and the reforms could bring benefits. At the same time, the proposal raises many questions and presents risks to the state.”
Petek’s analysts are particularly concerned about Newsom’s very tight schedule for implementation with many details as yet unknown. They also mention the creation of new entitlements, such as housing subsidies, that might be difficult to maintain.
It should also be noted that Newsom’s ability to recast Medi-Cal as a “whole person” system must pass muster with the federal government, which supplies most of its money. The outcome of this year’s presidential election will have something to do with that.
Finally, the fate of Obamacare is now in the hands of the U.S. Supreme Court and should it be invalidated, everything reverts to zero.
Electric Vehicle Industry Needs a Boost
LA Times
California is already a world leader in the embryonic electric vehicle industry but needs more government help to flourish, according to a new report from the Los Angeles Economic Development Corporation.
And while Tesla, based in Northern California, gets most of the EV attention, Southern California is becoming a hub of EV manufacturing in its own right.
That includes vehicle manufacturers, battery manufacturers, charging system manufacturers, suppliers to all three, and the sales and service operations that support them.
The report says of 275,600 jobs EV-related California jobs in 2018, 119,200 were in Southern California, mainly in Los Angeles and Orange counties.
It’s not just automobiles. The Chinese company BYD builds electric buses in Lancaster. American company Proterra does the same in Walnut, just outside LA. Romeo Power assembles battery packs; XOS manufactures heavy electric trucks. Fisker is making electric cars, as is Canoo, a startup that plans to sell its cars by subscription, similar to a short-term lease.
Ampere Motors of Santa Monica offers three-wheel electric vehicles, while Hyperion, headquartered in Orange, is commercializing hydrogen fuel cell technology. (Fuel cells are batteries that process hydrogen fuel to generate electricity.)
While totaling only 1.5% of the jobs in Southern California’s five counties, electric-vehicle industry employment is growing almost twice as fast as jobs in general, and the pay averages $91,300 statewide and $80,900 in Southern California.
The report credits government support for goosing the EV market. “The state environmental goals brought this market to California,” said Judy Kruger, senior director at LAEDC. “The environmental goals and policy attracted market solutions.”
The state’s goals are backed by buyer subsidies, zero-emission requirements, and other government support. A combination of new laws from the legislature and executive orders from the governor’s office aim for all new vehicles to have zero-tailpipe emissions by 2050, with ambitions to have 5 million passenger electric vehicles registered in the state by 2030.
The California New Car Dealers Assn. said the number of registrations for pure-electric cars is less than 400,000 today.
“Tesla popped up to bring zero-emission vehicles to California, then this whole ecosystem began to emerge,” Kruger said. “There is no other ecosystem like this in the U.S. We want to protect and support it.”
The report recommends continued subsidies of electric vehicles, local support for EV infrastructure, more publicity about available subsidies, and more EV jobs education at community colleges and other institutions. LAEDC also recommends that tax credits around 5% be considered for EV-related manufacturers. (Consumer subsidies in California fell to $2,000 for electric cars and $1,000 for plug-in hybrids last December, and were limited to vehicles costing under $60,000.)
Drawing on Southern California’s past, the report notes the region was once the second-largest U.S. motor vehicle manufacturing center outside Detroit. In the 1950s and 1960s, General Motors, Ford and Chrysler all assembled cars in Southern California, and a giant Goodyear plant made tires.
Buffeted by competition from Japan, the availability of low-wage workers in Southern states, and strategic errors by auto-company and union managements, the industry disappeared from the area. General Motors closed the industry’s last Southern California auto assembly plant in 1992, sending production of Camaros and Firebirds from Van Nuys to Canada.
Los Angeles, still considered the center of American car culture, today is home to design centers for most major auto manufacturers, as well as parts operations. In fact, LAEDC said, transportation equipment represents about 13% of California’s total exports.
But the area’s status as U.S. headquarters for overseas carmakers is fading. In 2015 Japan’s Toyota moved its U.S. headquarters north of Dallas, partly due to the high cost of living in California and partly because the company wanted to be closer to its U.S. manufacturing plants in Texas, Mississippi and Alabama.
Whether electric vehicles can meet or exceed the auto manufacturing heydays remains an open question. After growing 77% in 2018, all-electric car sales in California grew only 5% in 2019, to 99,704, according to the dealer association. Most of the companies on the LAEDC list are startups, and their ability to succeed long-term is uncertain.
LAEDC believes the push to fight climate change and pollution will continue, setting the EV market up for rapid growth.
“The [electric car] market might be in a holding point,” said Tyler Laferriere, an LAEDC economist. “I think there will be great consumer demand by 2022” as more electric cars from more manufacturers come to market and as electric charging networks grow.
CalMatters
Water plays a lead role in the state’s political theater, with Democrats and Republicans polarized, farmers often fighting environmentalists and cities pitted against rural communities. Rivers are overallocated through sloppy water accounting. Groundwater has dwindled as farmers overdraw aquifers. Many communities lack safe drinking water. Native Americans want almost-extinct salmon runs revived. There is talk, too, of new water projects, including a massive new tunnel costing billions of dollars.
Scientists say climate change will bring more unpredictable weather, warmer winters and less snowpack in the mountains. These challenges and some ideas for remedies are outlined in a new plan, called the California Water Resilience Portfolio, released by Gov. Gavin Newsom in January to a mix of praise and disappointment.
Here is a through explanation of the state’s water development — as well as the challenges, today and tomorrow, of providing water for California’s people, places and things.
How to Survive A Zombie Apocalypse: Relax…Throw An Ax
NY Times
It’s amazing how quickly you get used to an ax in your hands.
Swinging it up over your head, letting the blade hang against your back, pitching it into a spin, and, if you get it just right, your prize: the satisfying thunk of metal wedging itself into soft pine.
I learned this at Mo’s House of Axe, a new ax-throwing venue that opened last month in Koreatown, with lanes arranged around a bar and restaurant tables. The room was all mossy tree trunks and forest-themed wallpaper, lit like an understory in springtime. The servers wore a variety of plaid flannel shirts, all of them red, which made the whole thing feel like someone’s elaborate lumberjack fantasy.
I expected a crowd to match — stout, long-bearded men with leather ax belts and strong feelings about woodworking tools. Instead, there were groups of 20-something women, competitive co-workers slipping in and out of Spanish, couples in wheelchairs and parents playing doubles with their children.
As I threw, I started to understand the appeal, and why competitive ax-throwing leagues had grown across the country in the last few years. Ax-throwing is social, uncomplicated and therapeutic, and beginners are folded in with encouragement.
Entry isn’t expensive, or demanding (Mo’s charges $35 a person for an hour and 15 minutes of throwing time, with optional instruction included). After a quick tutorial on safety and stance, aim and rotation, it’s really just a matter of practice. What surprised me is how inclusive and accommodating a space designed for that practice could be.
On a recent Saturday afternoon, Mo’s vibrated with the optimistic energy of a young start-up after a cash infusion, as players fueled up on kombucha and blood orange I.P.A.s between throws. They roared expletive-filled compliments after a bull’s-eye, and tapped ax blades in convivial low-fives.
Instructors play the part of both coaches and babysitters, helping players to adjust their technique, remember their grip and control their aim. Once you get the hang of the overhead, two-handed throw, you can graduate to others, and once you learn how to stick the ax fairly consistently into the board, you can compete, or play gently competitive games. Players aren’t allowed more than three drinks while throwing. (Also reasonable.)
Deep into the routine of throwing and retrieving my ax, I wondered how long I’d last in a zombie apocalypse, and how my newfound skills might fit into a changing, collapsing world. Normal stuff — though my instructor helpfully noted, “Please keep in mind that if you throw your ax at a zombie, you have to retrieve it.”
In 2016, archaeologists in Australia found remnants of one of the world’s oldest handled axes — a chip from a basalt blade over 40,000 years old. It might have been thrown, all those millenniums ago, but ax-throwing was codified into a sport in 2006, when Matt Wilson, a former bartender, founded the Backyard Axe Throwing League in Canada.
There are now many leagues in the United States and abroad that operate like bowling, though their growth has been largely ignored by those outside it, dismissed as a passing novelty — like swing dancing in the ’90s. But this December, the World Axe Throwing League’s championship will air on ESPN, gratifying the thousands of players who’d like to see it taken seriously as a sport.