For Clients & Friends of The Gualco Group, Inc.
IN THIS ISSUE – “Two in Three Californians Will Receive A Check”
- “Roaring Back” at Recall Foes, Newsom Takes A Victory Lap
- California’s Record $100-Billion Windfall & the Recall
- Legislature Must Make the State Budget & Recovery Add Up
- Recall Support Waning, New Poll Finds
- Newsom Expands Drought Emergency to 41 Counties
- Why Did California Lose Population?Re-Open the People’s House, Says Bipartisan Group of CA Lawmakers
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.
READ ALL ABOUT IT!!
FOR THE WEEK ENDING MAY 14, 2021
ADVISORY TO READERS – The governor is due to release the annual May Revision to the State Budget later today. CN&N will provide extensive analyses next week when the Legislature begins the final stages of drafting the FY21-22 Budget.
“Roaring Back” at Recall Foes, Newsom Takes A Victory Lap
Politico
Gov. Gavin Newsom has been on a victory lap around the state all week, touting and teasing his highly anticipated May budget revision. Today, he’ll finally fill in the details — and likely face some hard questions — on the massive ‘21-’22 financial plan for the state that he says is “roaring back” from the Covid pandemic.
Newsom hit the trail this week with numerous events around the state to talk up key points from a budget that benefits from a jaw-dropping $74.7 billion budget surplus, a stark reversal from the years of deficits that seemed to loom this time in the budget cycle. Newsom already unveiled his big pitch: a proposal to send $600 tax rebate checks to households making up to $75,000 and an additional $500 to families with kids, which delivered Newsom big bragging rights and national headlines as he faces a recall.
The Democratic governor this week also touted his $20 billion in proposed education investments for areas like transitional kindergarten and school mental health services, and a $12 billion plan to tackle the homelessness crisis. On Thursday, he unveiled what his office called “the most extensive small business plan in the state’s history,’’ a proposal to pump an additional $1.5 billion into small business Covid relief grants. Bulking that up: another $1 billion for new infrastructure improvements, tax credits and other measures to boost the state economy.
Speaking to the California Chamber of Commerce remotely yesterday, Newsom’s barnburner was chock full of “I told you so” to the naysayers (and Fox News hosts) who have played up “California dystopia” stories for months. “People think our best days are behind?…You’re full of it,’’ he said defiantly. “You have no idea what this state represents, and what it’s going to represent to the rest of the world over the course of the next 10 years, 20, 30, 40 years.”
At least one Republican is ready to go mano a mano with Gavin: San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer in Emeryville this week brushed aside the competition from businessman John Cox (still on tour with Tag the Bear) and reality TV star Caitlyn Jenner (still in damage control mode after some campaign gaffes ) with a no-nonsense approach that delivered the strongest and most substantive GOP challenge yet to Newsom. Expect to hear more of his pointed argument that the huge budget surplus is, more than anything, Exhibit A that California is overtaxing its citizens.
The former San Diego Mayor — saying the recall race is about “genuine versus phony’’ — charged Newsom was cribbing from his own “California Comeback Tax Plan” that calls for ending income tax on anyone making less than $100,000 a year. Faulconer also hit Newsom on one of his vulnerabilities, the schools: “It’s a travesty that our public schools are not fully reopened,’’ he said. “Our kids deserve to be in school — full time.”
California’s Record $100-Billion Budget Windfall & the Recall
Politico
Nothing smooths out political turbulence like having money to spend.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom embarked on a cross-state road show this week to trumpet the fruits of an astonishing $75.7 billion state surplus thanks to soaring capital gains during the pandemic. His first order of business: tell Californians he wants to give them cash and pay some of their utility bills and back rent.
The stimulus play demonstrates how an unexpected windfall offers the Democratic governor a powerful tool to ward off a recall threat. Checks would arrive in voters’ mailboxes not long before ballots do this fall.
“It’s very significant, and it dovetails into the general perception that we are coming out of the pandemic, the worst is behind us, the future looks brighter as evidenced by the checks the public will soon receive,” former Gov. Gray Davis, who was recalled in 2003, said in an interview Monday. “It all flows into the same narrative that the problems are mostly behind us today and will be substantially behind us come this fall.”
California’s record windfall is a product of its prosperous tech sector, high share of professional workers and steeply progressive tax structure. While unemployment remains higher in California than in most states because of job losses in its travel and service sectors, upper-income earners had a boom year as they adapted to remote work and enjoyed another surge in the stock market.
The windfall is so great that it is likely to trigger a 1979 vestige of California’s anti-tax movement that hasn’t been invoked for more than three decades. Under a constitutional spending cap known as the “Gann Limit” after fiscal conservative Paul Gann, the state must refund taxes and direct more money to schools once revenues top a certain level.
Besides the surplus, Newsom touted $26 billion in direct state aid from the federal stimulus plan that Democrats passed in March. He’s including that in a $100 billion package he’s labeling his “California Comeback Plan.” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell suggested in December that the federal package would “supply the Governor of California with a special slush fund.” It drew new attacks on Monday after Newsom’s announcement.
“This is one more reason why borrowing and sending tens of billions to California was a crying shame — and why every Republican in Congress opposed it,” Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) said on Twitter.
California’s strong budget marks just the latest difference between the 2021 recall election and the one 18 years ago. While many people remember that rolling blackouts soured voters on Davis, the state’s rickety finances may have been the final straw. Staring down a record budget deficit, the Democrat cut spending and then made the politically perilous decision to enact a California vehicle tax hike — essentially the opposite of what Newsom is proposing by giving cash back to residents.
“Gray Davis was never in a position to play Santa Claus,” his former press aide Steve Maviglio said.
Newsom sidestepped a question about how the proposal might buttress his efforts to defeat an all-but-certain recall vote. Instead, he returned to a regular theme of touting California’s minuscule coronavirus rate, its brimming budget and its accelerating pace of job creation. Those are all pieces of evidence for his central pitch to voters of a revivified California “roaring back” from the pandemic. Stimulus checks give more weight to that argument.
It didn’t take long for Republican recall backers to take credit, with some already dubbing it the “Recall Refund.” “Chalk another one up for the pressure of the recall on Gavin Newsom’s policies,” stated an email from the official proponents.
They were unmoved by Newsom’s effort to channel $600 checks to some two-thirds of state residents in households making up to $75,000, along with $500 to families with dependents. Republican consultant Dave Gilliard, who worked to qualify the recall, argued that Newsom’s paean to taxpayers demonstrated the governor had become “a born-again tax-cutter because of the recall.”
“That’s not exactly what you expect to hear from one of the most liberal governors in the country,” Gilliard said, but he predicted it would do little to sway voters who have become accustomed to stimulus checks during the pandemic.
“It’s going to look like a stunt,” Gilliard said, and “I don’t think they’re going to give [Newsom] a whole lot of credit for it.”
However voters react, Newsom is unquestionably in a stronger position than Davis was before voters toppled him in 2003.
Davis’ efforts to balance the budget alienated both allies and foes. Budget cuts antagonized Democrats while conservatives attacked the car tax hike, rallying voters against a concrete hit on their wallets. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who ultimately toppled Davis, made the car tax a symbolic centerpiece of his campaign and derided Davis to great effect when he crushed an old car with a wrecking ball just before the election.
“He was forced to slash a lot of programs in the Legislature, so he was making enemies on the left and enemies on the right,” Maviglio said. “When you have an angry left and a Democratic governor, that’s not a good equation.”
Susan Kennedy, who worked for both Davis and Schwarzenegger, argued that Davis was hamstrung by the budget crunch following a series of disasters like blackouts and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. By contrast, Newsom will face a vote as California emerges from the coronavirus cataclysm on sturdy footing.
Newsom “is facing the largest windfall in state history after having steered the state successfully through a global health crisis that shut the world economy down,” Kennedy said in an email. “He’s going to get a lot of credit for that with voters if he keeps the state open and handles the surplus well.”
The Democratic governor is also in better position because polls continue to show that more voters oppose the recall than want to remove Newsom. That was not the case for Davis in 2003 months before the recall election.
“With Gray, it went on for two years, and the cause was just seen as Sacramento and Washington dysfunction. It was just more diffuse,” Kennedy said, adding that the car fee increase carried similar symbolic weight to Newsom’s stimulus checks. “It became the standard-bearer issue. It was so perfectly symbolic for why Democrats don’t think Republicans manage finances well.”
The $100 billion should satisfy Newsom’s Democratic base, which has called for everything from homeless support to Medicaid for undocumented residents. By comparison, Democrats in 2003 ultimately fractured, with Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante reneging on a promise not to run and then finishing in second. Newsom has sought to hold his party together and forestall a Democratic candidate from entering the race — a task that’s much easier when the state has money to spend.
Underscoring that unity on Monday, Newsom was flanked by state lawmakers who chair the Legislature’s budget committees and will thus be his principal budget negotiating partners. They showered praise on his proposals, as did Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf.
“Direct aid to people is what is going to get our economy roaring back,” Schaaf said, hailing “one of the greatest California budgets we have ever seen.”
Legislature Must Make the State Budget & Recovery Add Up
CalMatters commentary by Dan Walters
The $100 billion “California Comeback Plan” that Gov. Gavin Newsom unveiled Monday makes perfect political sense.
The question, however, is how much will be for one-time or short-term expenditures like those he revealed and how much will be in new entitlements whose costs will continue year after year, such as the expansion of child care he announced on Mother’s Day.
Newsom’s fellow Democrats in the Legislature and advocates for expansive health and welfare services have a long list of proposals for permanent new spending commitments. We’ll soon learn how many of them will wind up in the revised state budget.
“California’s recovery is well underway, but we can’t be satisfied with simply going back to the way things were,” Newsom said. “We are tripling the Golden State Stimulus to get money in the hands of more middle-class Californians who have been hit hard by this pandemic. Two in three Californians will receive a check from the state and more than $5 billion in aid will be made available to those who need help paying their rent or utility bills.”
The largesse, one can assume, will make recipients less likely to vote for the recall.
One might even say that the plan makes humanitarian sense. So many Californians lost their incomes and ran up those rent and utility debts because of the business shutdowns that Newsom ordered to curb spread of the deadly virus. Helping them get back on their feet is an acceptable, or even laudable, use of the $75.5 billion budget surplus that Newsom announced.
“We want to get money in people’s pockets as rapidly possible,” Newsom said as he unveiled his plan in Alameda County.
But economic sense? Not so much.
Newsom bills his plan as a way of jump-starting the economy and returning to the prosperity that California was enjoying prior to the onset of the pandemic 18 months ago. However, while the $100 billion in state tax revenues and federal aid that Newsom wants to inject into the economy is a hefty sum, it’s a relative drop in the bucket of an economy that approaches $3 trillion a year.
True recovery would come when the more than 1.5 million Californians who are either unemployed or have stopped looking for work are once again on the job, supporting their families and paying taxes. There’s precious little in Newsom’s plan to make that happen and it could have the opposite effect.
Throughout California, as employers resume operations, they complain that they can’t find enough workers to fully staff up. The phenomenon is not confined to California and economists agree that one factor is that enhanced unemployment insurance benefits and other pandemic relief programs have removed some incentives for the jobless to seek work.
Newsom loves to announce grandiloquent schemes, what he has termed “big hairy, audacious goals,” and having a relatively massive projected budget surplus — the result of high-income Californians’ huge taxable gains in stocks and other capital investments over the past year — gives him an opportunity to think big.
The relief plan he announced this week would consume about $20 billion and he intends to roll out other spending plans this week, leading up to proposing a revised 2021-22 state budget that will spend many billions more.
Newsom faces a recall election next fall and while the odds favor his retention, he knows that California’s economic recovery from the COVID-19 recession has been sluggish and personal financial angst played a role in getting enough signatures on recall petitions.
https://calmatters.org/commentary/2021/05/california-comeback-plan-newsom-recall-budget-surplus/
Recall Support Waning, New Poll Finds
UC Berkeley Institute for Government Studies
The latest Berkeley IGS Poll completed last week finds that the proportion of California voters who support recalling Governor Gavin Newsom stands at 36%, unchanged from late January.
However, a larger proportion of voters now say they intend to vote NO in the recall(49%), up four points from three months ago. Another 15% remain undecided. Opinions about removing Newsom from office continue to be sharply divided along partisan and ideological lines.
But the poll also finds some striking regional differences. For example, while greater than two-to-one majorities of voters in the state’s two major urban hubs, the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles County, are lining up on the NO side, supporters outnumber opponents in several parts of the state, including the Inland Empire, the Central Valley, and the sparsely populated North Coast/Sierra region.
The recall election has yet to arouse a great deal of interest among the state’s overall electorate, with fewer than half(46%)expressing high levels of interest. In addition, early interest is heavily skewed toward the state’s GOP voters, with more than twice as many Republicans as Democrats or No Party Preference voters expressing high interest.
The recall ballot will also ask the voting public who they would choose to replace Newsom should he be removed from office. In a show of solidarity with the Governor, the state Democratic Party in recent weeks has been openly discouraging other Democrats from running as replacement candidates in the election.
However, when Democratic voters in this survey are asked their opinions about this, more (48%) favor having a prominent Democratic included among the replacement candidates than not(29%), although a relatively large proportion(23%) are undecided about this. None of four prominent Republicans currently running in the replacement election are generating much support among the overall electorate at this stage.
When voters are asked whether they would be inclined or not inclined to vote for each candidate, fewer than one in four voters statewide say they are currently disposed to back them. Former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer and former gubernatorial candidate John Cox receive the largest shares of voters inclined to support their candidacies (22%).
However, in each case more than twice as many are not inclined to do so and about three in ten have no opinion. Former congressman Doug Ose receives the backing of 14%in this setting, although 48% of voters are not inclined to back his candidacy. Attracting the least support of the four Republicans measured is reality TV personality Caitlyn Jenner. Just 6% of the state’s registered voters say they are inclined to back her candidacy, while 76% are not.
The poll also finds that Newsom’s job performance ratings among the state’s voters have rebounded from what they were three months ago. At present, 52% of registered voters approve of the job Newsom is doing overall, while 43% disapprove.
Three months ago, the poll found voters about evenly divided in their assessments. Newsom’s improved job ratings appear largely due to voters much more positive view of the Governor’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic compared to three months ago. However, voters continue to be highly critical of Newsom in his handling of several other major issues facing the state, especially in the areas of homelessness and housing costs.
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1m66w3d9
Governor Expands Drought Emergency to 41 Counties
Gov. Gavin Newsom expanded his drought emergency declaration to 39 more counties Monday, underscoring the rapid deterioration of California’s water supply in recent weeks.
The governor broadened his earlier drought order, which was limited to two counties on the Russian River, to cover most of parched California, which is plunging into its second major drought in less than a decade.
The new order covers the Sacramento and San Joaquin river watersheds, the Tulare Lake basin region and the Klamath region in far Northern California. About 30% of the state’s population is now covered by the declarations, including the greater Sacramento area and Fresno, Merced and Stanislaus counties in the San Joaquin Valley.
Newsom didn’t issue any mandatory drought conservation measures, as his predecessor Jerry Brown did during the last drought.
But such mandatory orders, which could force urban Californians to cut back on outdoor usage, “are on the table” if the state has another dry winter, said Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot.
Newsom issued the declaration shortly before arriving at San Luis Reservoir on the west side of Merced County, where he announced a proposal for a plethora of short- and long-term drought-assistance measures totaling $5.1 billion.
If approved by the Legislature, his “drought and water resilience package” would be part of a $100 billion economic stimulus plan he announced earlier in the day in Oakland.
Some Newsom critics say he has been reluctant to declare a statewide drought for fear of angering voters with a recall election coming this fall. But hydrology is forcing the issue.
Since he issued a regional drought emergency last month for Sonoma and Mendocino counties, warm spring temperatures have melted and evaporated most of the Sierra Nevada snowpack, which was well below average to begin with. Relatively little snowmelt — normally a big piece of the state’s summer and fall supply — reached California’s reservoirs.
The Sierra is producing “far less inflow into the reservoirs than any modeling would have predicted,” Crowfoot told The Sacramento Bee. “Much of the snowpack has melted into the ground.” Many of the major reservoirs, such as Folsom Lake and Lake Oroville, are just half as full as they normally are this time of year.
Crowfoot said the state has lost 500,000 acre-feet of water in the past few weeks, enough to supply as many as 1 million homes for a year.
While Newsom stopped short of declaring a statewide emergency, he acknowledged that the pain from the drought is spreading throughout much of the state at a rapid clip.
“We looked at the issue of hydrology, we looked at the issue of snowmelt,” Newsom said as he stood in front of San Luis Reservoir, where much of the shoreline was exposed because of low water levels. He bemoaned “this climate-induced drought, which obviously is extreme and self-evident.”
Newsom said he doesn’t think California needs orders requiring mandatory cutbacks in water consumption, saying Californians have already reduced their usage by 16% since the last drought. “We have changed our habits,” Newsom said.
Still, he urged Californians to take voluntary steps, like keeping showers to five minutes, fixing leaks and switching to drought-tolerant landscaping.
Crowfoot said the emergency declaration could lead to orders from the state water board that would curtail farmers and others from pulling water from rivers that feed into the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the hub of the California water delivery network. That will leave more water flowing through the system, which is necessary to flush salinity out of the Delta and into the ocean.
The emergency order could also speed up the installation of temporary rock barriers in the Delta, like the state used in the last drought, to prevent salt from getting into the estuary.
The order in the the Tulare basin would enhance the state’s ability to truck emergency supplies to communities that ran out of drinking water in the last drought and could become vulnerable again, he said.
Newsom’s $5.1 billion water resiliency proposal represents a huge increase on the $745 million he proposed spending in January. Crowfoot said Newsom is now proposing spending hundreds of millions of dollars to help at-risk rural communities improve the reliability of their water supplies, and funding to enhance environmental monitoring on California’s rivers to safeguard endangered steelhead and salmon during the drought.
In addition, Newsom is proposing spending for long-term projects, including $500 million to help communities that will have to permanently retire farmland because of the state’s groundwater-management law; and $200 million to help repair major San Joaquin Valley canals that have buckled because of subsidence — the phenomenon that occurs when so much groundwater is pumped that the valley floor sinks. That includes the California Aqueduct, the Delta-Mendota Canal and the Friant-Kern Canal.
Elected officials who accompanied Newsom to the reservoir applauded his plans for improving the state’s water infrastructure. “We can stop the boom-and-bust cycle of drought and no water, and a wet year,” said state Sen. Anna Caballero, D-Salinas, whose district includes parts of Merced County.
Why Did California Lose Population?
NY Times & State Dept. of Finance
California’s population fell by nearly one-half of a percentage point last year, its first decline in at least 120 years, according to data released this week.
The nation’s most populous state lost 182,083 people during 2020, the California Department of Finance said, bringing the total to 39.47 million. It attributed the decline to pandemic-related trends including increased deaths, less immigration and fewer births.
But the drop comes as California’s population growth had already plateaued before the pandemic, due to a years-long decline in the birthrate and rising migration to other states. More people have left California for other states than the opposite for all but two of the last 30 years and beginning in 2018, net domestic out-migration outpaced net international migration.
“We believe that we will be back to a positive [growth] rate” in 2021, said H.D. Palmer, a spokesman for the Department of Finance. “Not a booming rate, to be sure, but a slightly positive rate.”
California, which was the epicenter of the nation’s surge in Covid-19 cases for much of the winter, experienced a 19% increase in the average death rate last year, according to the finance department. To date, 61,027 Californians have died of Covid-19.
For the first time in more than a century, California recorded a net loss in population last year, a demographic reversal caused by the deadly toll of the coronavirus and declining immigration and birthrates.
The small but startling 0.46 percent drop — a decline in 2020 of 182,083 Californians, or the equivalent of about two Santa Barbaras — was reported on Friday by the state’s Finance Department. Most of the loss appeared to occur in the second half of 2020, during the worst of the pandemic, and after the April cutoff for the 2020 census.
H.D. Palmer, the department’s spokesman, said the state’s growth will likely rebound as the pandemic recedes and last year’s spike in Covid-19 deaths is no longer a factor.
“We’ll be back, maybe not to blazing growth rates, but at least to slightly positive growth,” said Mr. Palmer, who has advised the last four California governors on fiscal and budget policy.
“As more shots get into more Californians’ arms, Covid deaths will continue to decline, and we should also start seeing the effects of a changing immigration policy,” he added. “So when we do this same estimate this time next year, our demographers expect we’ll have returned to a slightly positive growth rate for 2021.”
Still, the downtick was a reality check for the nation’s most populous state.
In both the census and more studies of who is moving to and from the state, it has been clear for some time that the booming growth that has been a core feature of California’s identity since the Gold Rush has leveled off in the 21st century.
“This is a sea change,” said Hans Johnson, a senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California. “Of course there is the asterisk — the effects of the pandemic — but the bigger picture, that California is now a slow-growing state, that’s not going away.”
Census figures released last month revealed some of the effects of the slowdown. For the first time in its 170-year history, California will lose a congressional seat, with the new population numbers from the 2020 census trimming its delegation in the House to 52 members.
But the census data indicated that California was still growing — it was just not growing as rapidly as the rest of the country. The data showing a population loss in 2020, released on Friday as part of the state’s regular economic reporting, offered a glimpse of the state’s trends beyond the census.
Mr. Palmer said the contraction was the first to be recorded by the state since 1900, when California began collecting population figures.
The state data showed that the population of 39,648,994 in January 2020 had dropped to 39,466,917 in January 2021. Interim numbers showed that although the population had continued to grow through the first months of the pandemic, the number of Californians dropped precipitously after July.
Mr. Palmer said more than half of that drop — roughly 100,000 people — was the result of federal policies that blocked international immigration and global lockdowns imposed to curb the pandemic, including restrictions on H-1B and other visas during the last year of the Trump administration.
Enrollment of international students in the state, for example, declined last year by 29 percent, Mr. Palmer said, as California colleges and universities pivoted to remote instruction. Some 53,000 fewer international students moved to the state last year, he said.
However, domestic migration was also a factor. For the past three decades, more people have left California each year than have moved in. The pandemic intensified that trend last year, Mr. Palmer said, prompting new employees in particular to work remotely and postpone moves they otherwise would have made into California.
A recent analysis of 2020 census data that was done by Mr. Johnson at the Public Policy Institute of California found that those who move in are “more likely to be working age, to be employed, and to earn high wages — and are less likely to be in poverty — than those who move away.” Numerically, however, the analysis found that 4.9 million people moved into California from other parts of the country, while 6.1 million Californians decamped to other states.
Within the state, work-from-home and remote study options also redistributed Californians, shifting the population from the coasts to inland counties last year. One of those inland counties, San Joaquin County in the Central Valley, grew last year by 1.3 percent, or more than 10,000 people. Another inland county in the Sierra Nevada foothills, Placer County, gained nearly 6,000 people, growing by 1.5 percent.
Population also was tragically lost to the pandemic, which increased California’s overall death rate by 19 percent in 2020. Some 51,000 more lives were claimed last year than would have been normally, according to the state’s three-year average, Mr. Palmer said, including more than 17,000 excess deaths in Los Angeles County, where the death rate was 27 percent higher than average last year.
Driven by Covid-19, death rates rose in 51 of the state’s 58 counties, with a dozen reporting increases of 20 percent or higher. Deaths last year were 62 percent higher than usual in Imperial County, on the Mexican border. San Bernardino and Riverside Counties, in Southern California’s Inland Empire, each reported more than 4,000 deaths in excess of their usual loss.
Declining birthrates — a nationwide trend that has been particularly acute in California — also slowed the natural increase in the population by some 24,000, Mr. Palmer said.
The average age of first birth in California has risen since 2010 from 28 to 31 as women have delayed motherhood, a function of improved employment prospects, higher living costs and the state’s higher levels of education. Fertility rates — defined as births per 1,000 women of childbearing age — have declined in California by more than twice the national average since 2010.
Mr. Johnson said the apparent shift was unlike contractions that have occurred elsewhere in the country.
“California is not a Rust Belt,” Mr. Johnson said. “We don’t have homes that are vacant and need to be demolished. We don’t have core parts of our cities reverting back to nature or parkland because no one lives there. It’s a very different kind of population loss than you’ve seen elsewhere in the country.”
But, he said, the high housing prices and income disparities that appear to be pricing the middle class out of the state will affect not only California, but the rest of the country.
“It could be,” he said, “that California is once again a bellwether. Maybe this is California leading again, in a new and different way.”
Dept. of Finance report:
https://www.dof.ca.gov/Forecasting/Demographics/Estimates/e-1/documents/E-1_2021PressRelease.pdf
Re-Open the People’s House, Says Bipartisan Group of CA Lawmakers
Sacramento Bee
A bipartisan group of California lawmakers is urging the Legislature’s leadership to open the Capitol for greater public access by May 19 in according with COVID-19 health and safety guidelines.
The coalition of five Democrats, four Republicans and one independent wrote in a letter to Senate President Pro Tem Toni Atkins, D-San Diego, Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon, D-Lakewood, and Gov. Gavin Newsom that California’s low coronavirus positivity and hospitalization rates and strong vaccination campaign have made it possible to safely reopen the building to more people.
They pointed to businesses beginning to operate more traditionally as evidence of the “terrific progress” California has made in recent months toward defeating the virus and being able to return to a “semblance of pre-pandemic normalcy.”
“A notable — and increasingly troubling — exception is our State Capitol,” the legislators wrote. “Access to the Capitol Building remains limited well beneath other public spaces.”
Sacramento County is currently in the red tier on the state’s color-coded blueprint that details which businesses are allowed to open and at what capacity. Certain businesses remain closed, like bars that don’t serve food and convention centers. Others, like restaurants, retail stores, movie theaters and churches can operate at a reduced capacity.
The letter outlines three specific requests: remove barricades that surround the Capitol and Capitol Park; reopen the building and hearing rooms at appropriate levels; and publish access to reopening guidelines ahead of the June 15 date Newsom set as his goal to “fully reopen” California’s economy.
Barricades have been in place for the past year following racial justice protests and other events led by critics of Newsom’s coronavirus emergency orders.
“This is the people’s house and we are elected representatives here to do the people’s work,” they argued. “Ensuring access to our proceedings is a vital part of our democracy — in ways that are both practical and symbolic. With that in mind, we urge you to act now to restore access to the people’s house for the people of California.”
The group includes Democratic Sens. Steven Bradford, Melissa Hurtado and Josh Newman, Democratic Assemblywoman Cottie Petrie-Norris, and Republican Assembly members Jordan Cunningham, James Gallagher, Adam Gray, Tom Lackey and Suzette Martinez Valladares. Assemblyman Chad Mayes, the only Independent in the Legislature, also signed on to the letter.
“The Assembly is awaiting guidance from the Governor’s Office, California Department of Public Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and CalOSHA that will help us develop our reopening plan,” Rendon said in a statement in response to questions about the letter. “In the meantime, the California State Capitol remains open to the public and members of the media for floor session and committee hearings.”
https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article251358493.html?#storylink=cpy