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IN THIS ISSUE – “Leader of What’s Ahead”
1st TIME IN 130 YEARS: DEM-TO-DEM GOVERNOR TRANSITION
- Newsom’s “Big Hairy Audacious Goals”
- Brown (Canoe Paddler) / Newsom (Cyberwarrior)…Big Difference in Political Styles
- Unprecedent Joint Action: Delay Controversial River Flow Plan
ELECTION POST-MORTEM
- Brown Offers Insights; Assembly GOP Changes Leaders
- CA GOP…“It’s Not 1978 Any More”
- First Female LtGov Overcomes Labor-Backed Legislator
- Gas Tax Repeal On “E”
- California Campaigns 2018 – Billion-Dollar Election
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.
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READ ALL ABOUT IT!!
FOR THE WEEK ENDING NOV. 9, 2018
Newsom’s “Big Hairy Audacious Goals”
Gavin Newsom first ran for governor in 2010, an effort he abandoned and then relaunched in 2015 with the long, long campaign that crescendoed tonight. Now that California voters have given the 51-year-old Democrat the job he has sought for eight years, he is about to discover that winning was the easy part.
Governing is hard, particularly in a state as big, complex, troubled and expensive as California. We have the world’s fifth largest economy and, with our cost of living, the nation’s highest rate of poverty.
He hasn’t always detailed how he would pay for his promises, nor which policies he would be willing to jettison in the face of political pushback or certain budgetary constraints.
That changes on January 7 with his inauguration. On key issues, here’s what to expect.
Housing and homelessness: Millions more units?
The governor-elect is a self-described fan of “Big Hairy Audacious Goals,” and they don’t come much bigger, more audacious and presumably more hairy than his plan to solve California’s housing crisis.
On the campaign trail, he pledged to lead an effort to build 3.5 million units of new housing by 2025, a construction pace Californians haven’t seen since they started keeping track of that type of thing.
He says he can reach that goal—which some have criticized as impractically astronomical—by significantly increasing funds for government-subsidized housing and rolling back some regulations that impede new development, especially for housing around public transit.
“It’s an enormous number and a necessary number,” said Assemblyman David Chiu, Democrat from San Francisco and head of the Assembly’s housing committee. “Just the fact that he has laid out that goal is exciting.”
When pushed, affordable housing advocates and others that work on housing issues admit the 3.5 million goal probably isn’t realistic. Still most welcome Newsom as a refreshing change of pace from the outgoing governor.
Despite a much-celebrated package of housing legislation he helped shepherd to passage last year, Gov. Jerry Brown was criticized for not prioritizing housing in a state where the median price of a single family home rose to over $500,000 on his watch and ever-rising rents are forcing low-income residents to leave the state en masse.
“It’s what you focus on as governor, it’s what you meet with your staff about every day, that’s what important for housing,” said Dan Dunmoyer, president of the California Building Industry Association. “That’s what most people don’t realize, how a governor can influence on housing.”
Rumors of a major housing package in Newsom’s first year as governor are already circulating around the Capitol, although no one will say so outright. What would that package contain? Bank on increased funding for subsidized units one way or another, likely via increased tax credits for affordable housing developers and/or a revamped form of “redevelopment,” a controversial and abuse-fraught program Brown eliminated in 2011.
But the other policies Newsom referenced either explicitly or obliquely in his campaign are far hairier politically. If Newsom is indeed able to broker a compromise on rent control, or tweak Proposition 13, or limit local control on housing development decisions, he will have accomplished something that has vexed politicians for decades. He also must decide whether to throw his weight behind major zoning changes, given that state Sen. Scott Wiener, Democrat from San Francisco, has promised to reintroduce a controversial and highly publicized bill that would strip from cities their zoning authority around public transportation. Newsom was lukewarm on the bill earlier this year.
Beyond the herculean task of making California affordable again, Newsom confronts a humanitarian crisis that has haunted him since his days as mayor of San Francisco: how to help the estimated 130,000 Californians who are homeless.
Fixing the state’s homelessness problem is among the many items that Newsom has, at various times, cited as his top priority, and he has pledged to create a first-ever cabinet-level position exclusively dedicated to solving it. But Newsom’s record on combating homelessness while in San Francisco remains deeply divisive among advocates for the unsheltered.
Newsom defends his “Care not Cash” program—which redirected direct cash payments for those experiencing homelessness to permanent supportive housing and bus tickets out of San Francisco to rejoin family—as a successful and innovative strategy that made the city’s homelessness crisis far less severe than it would have been otherwise. Critics have called the program unethical.
Health care: Embrace single payer but maybe settle for less
As the incoming Newsom administration prepares to unveil its legislative priorities, the single-payer health care concept he has touted will generate a lot of talk. But Capitol skeptics say that despite his promises to make it happen, action will be much more difficult—especially given the idea’s federal obstacles and huge costs.
Newsom may be more likely to initially pursue a less ambitious strategy: getting more of the uninsured covered under current government programs.
Except that is not what he promised the California Nurses Association, the powerful union that then endorsed and enthusiastically campaigned for him. The union says it’s not going to take no for an answer, and plans to insist on meetings with the governor-elect about how to move forward as soon as he takes office.
“Given the statements that Newsom made at our convention a year ago, we believe he is fundamentally committed to changing the health care system,” said Stephanie Roberson, director of government relations for the union. “He said that in a room full of nurses. His sentiments were very clear.”
Extending health care to all Californians has been, hands down, Newsom’s signature health issue.
In a January gubernatorial debate, he said: “I’m also very enthusiastic about taking a system that’s fragmented, that’s disjointed, that’s complicated and wasteful, and building a new system. Not on top of it, but replacing the existing system with a single payer financed system of universal quality health care.”
Newsom, the one-time mayor of San Francisco, pledged to create a statewide universal health care program of the sort he backed when he was leading that city. The Healthy San Francisco program, primarily funded from city coffers, provides basic insurance to residents who lack access to health insurance regardless of legal status.
Although it is not a single-payer system, the governor-elect has often cited it to illustrate his commitment to coverage.
The model would not work across the state but it has the right goals and values, said Anthony Wright, executive director of Health Access California, which advocates for consumers.
Newsom has not said how he would pay for a statewide single-payer program, which has been estimated to cost up to $400 billion—roughly triple the entire California state budget, although supporters say much of that would be offset by eliminating consumer costs such as for-profit insurance premiums and deductibles. Newsom contends that a government-run, taxpayer-financed health care program shouldn’t cost that much.
The governor-elect has called the current system “inefficient and wasteful” and said his plan would do away with premiums, deduction and co pays and be paid for by taxes.
Those challenges will likely keep Newsom from pushing for single-payer out of the gate, said Gerald Kominski, senior fellow at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research. “He understands the barriers are difficult to overcome,” said Kominski. “I suspect he’ll support ways to reduce the remaining uninsured further.”
Even that could be tough given the federal government no longer mandates everyone have insurance or face a tax penalty.
Opponents of single-payer health care insist there are better ways to decrease the number of uninsured in the state.
“With so much uncertainty in our nation’s politics, now is not the time to walk away from the (Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare) in favor of establishing a new and undefined health care system that would wreak havoc on our patients’ health and the Golden State’s economy,” said a statement from the Coalition to Protect Access to Care, made up of physicians, dentists, nurses and other health care professionals who oppose single payer.
Roberson of the nurses union said a new bill in the works will be a fine-tuned version of that bill. “What it’s going to take is political will, to sit in a room and not emerge until we find a way to reach that goal,” she said.
Newsom has also called for increasing funding for mental health, with a focus on diagnosing and supporting younger patients.
Environment: Making a global climate agenda work
When it comes to environmental bona fides, Gov. Jerry Brown casts a long shadow—really long, with a lifetime of ground-breaking climate change action behind him.
A new chief executive with his own environmental credentials will want to chart his own path, so what might Newsom do to get out from behind Brown’s environmental legacy?
“He will definitely try to differentiate himself from Brown,” said Mary Creasman, chief executive officer of the California League of Conservation Voters. “But what I don’t think we will see is a departure from the big pieces—cap and trade, a commitment to 100 percent clean energy, those are consensus issues.”
It will fall to Newsom to reach the lofty goals Brown and the Legislature set. Nearly everyone agrees that the easy work is done, and what comes next will be painful and require the full attention of the state’s leader.
“The next governor has to be in the “how” business,” Newsom told CALmatters, referring to mandates about electric cars, renewable energy and emissions reductions, among others. “The next governor actually has to deliver on all that… This is very difficult, very challenging. The good news is I love this stuff. This is in my wheelhouse. It’s a point of passion.”
But Brown’s decades-long environmental legacy has not been comprehensive, and has been heavily weighted to pet projects.
Chief among them is the state’s cap-and-trade system of setting emissions limits on major industry and auctioning credits for companies that can’t operate under their pollution caps. Newsom favors maintaining the program, calling it “vital.” (Besides, the Legislature already extended the system to 2030.)
Nor is he inclined to dump plans for the state’s multi-billion-dollar plumbing project, a proposed system of tunnels to channel water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta south to connect to the thirsty farms in the Central Valley to the browning lawns in Southern California.
Newsom has rejected Gov. Jerry Brown’s long-sought plan for twin tunnels, optimistically named the California Water Fix, telling CALmatters “I think if we walk down the path of two tunnels, we’re in litigation and no project.” Instead he has signaled support for narrowing the project to a single tunnel, telling the Los Angeles Times. “I’d like to see a more modest proposal, but I’m not going to walk away,” he has said. “Doing nothing is not an option….The status quo is not helping salmon.”
Environmental advocates are hopeful that Newsom takes a harder line against California’s powerful oil interests, a heavily polluting industry that critics say got a free ride during Brown’s terms. Brown was unapologetic about accepting campaign contributions from oil and gas groups; Newsom pointedly notes he does not.
The governor-elect is on the record opposing fracking, a controversial technique that uses high-pressure injections of water, sand and chemicals to open underground fissures to stimulate production from new and already existing wells. Brown consistently rejected calls to ban the practice.
State officials also face mounting calls to cease oil and gas production outright from the Keep It In The Ground movement, which argues we have enough fossil fuels to transition to a clean power future. Few elected officials have championed that politically loaded cause.
“There is a huge opportunity for this governor to start addressing the supply side,” said Kathryn Phillips, director of the Sierra Club in California. “Brown was very reluctant to go there.” She suggests a first step: Newsom should commission a study examining how to assist areas of the state economically tied to the oil industry.
Environmental justice issues are likely to be higher on Newsom’s agenda, advocates say. He’s talked about putting people at the center of all environmental policies, a critical consideration for low-income communities that bear the brunt of poor air and water quality. Although many state resource agencies now include advisory groups representing “fence-line communities”—homes and schools sited near oil refineries and industrial plants—critics say they are window-dressing.
Higher education: More data and ‘cradle to career’
Advocates hope Gavin Newsom will be the higher education hero who rescues the state’s massive, nationally renowned system from the twin challenges of lean budgets and growing demand. But will he deliver?
Newsom says he sees higher education as the culmination of a cradle-to-career journey towards economic opportunity, and his calls for the state to increase funding for the University of California and California State University have fueled speculation that he will loosen the purse strings more than has Gov. Jerry Brown, who often admonished the universities to live within their means.
“There’s no greater return on investment,” Newsom said during the campaign.
He has proposed the state offer two years of community college for free and provide college savings accounts for every kindergartner, an idea he implemented as San Francisco mayor amid a recession.
As lieutenant governor, he has been a member of the UC and CSU governing boards, repeatedly voting against tuition and fee hikes—drawing praise from students and concern from some administrators.
“He was supportive of higher education in general but he certainly didn’t always do things that (UC President Janet Napolitano) thought should be done,” said Henry Brady, dean of UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy.
Now he’ll face pressure to address improving but still anemic graduation rates at CSU, campuses that need retrofitting and a rising cost of living for students—a stubborn issue on which Newsom has not made specific commitments.
Newsom told CALmatters the state needed to boost spending on Cal Grants to help cover students’ living expenses, though he didn’t say how much. He’s also championed an unusual approach to the student debt crisis: creating a state bank to offer low-interest loans.
Faculty unions who often considered Brown out-of-touch have helped fund Newsom’s campaign.
“There is very much a wonkiness about Gavin that is good—he understands research and data,” said Michele Siqueiros, executive director of the Campaign for College Opportunity.
One area of uncertainty: how Newsom will approach California’s new online community college. Aimed at providing job training for younger adults, the controversial college, still in development, was one of Brown’s signature higher education projects. Will Newsom side with his union supporters, who have been critical of the plan?
Community colleges Chancellor Eloy Ortiz Oakley, who has spearheaded the project, says he’s confident Newsom’s desire to support technological innovation will win out. Besides, he pointed out, other labor unions helping design the school’s curriculum, such as the Service Employees International Union, have also backed Newsom.
Justice: A continued pendulum swing
In recent years, California has shrunk its state prison population in part by reducing some nonviolent felonies to misdemeanors and making it easier for nonviolent offenders to be released on parole. As the pendulum has swung away from reflexive tough-on-crime legislation, voters have legalized marijuana and lawmakers have passed a plan to end cash bail.
Newsom steps into office having championed these changes, and bearing expectations that he will see them through amid pressure to roll them back.
“The criminal justice reforms that have begun thus far—all of them are still in the process of being implemented. It takes many years to update local… practices to align with changes in state policy,” said Lenore Anderson, executive director of Californians for Safety and Justice, an advocacy group that has pushed for many of the recent changes.
For example, the new law banning money bail calls for each county to set up ways to evaluate people who have been charged with crimes to help determine if they should be held in jail while they await trial. That work could start now—even while the bail industry is trying to overturn the law—so supporters of ending bail will be watching to see how much money Newsom proposes to help counties establish pretrial services. If the bail industry qualifies a referendum for the 2020 ballot, Newsom will likely play political defense to try to protect the precedent-setting law signed by Gov. Jerry Brown.
Anderson worked on criminal justice policy for Newsom when he was San Francisco mayor, and said she expects that as governor he will consider efforts to expand crime reduction programs already in place in some California cities. That could mean more programs to divert homeless people who commit low-level crimes away from jails and into housing and drug-treatment programs, or more “restorative justice” practices that bring criminals and crime victims together with a facilitator to come up with ways for offenders to repair the harm they’ve caused.
Newsom’s experience as a mayor “means he’s familiar with what kind of new innovations need to be scaled up,” Anderson said.
Furor over police shootings may also shape Newsom’s first year as governor, with legislators likely to consider bills meant to reduce the number of civilians killed by police. It’s an emotional issue on all sides, with civil rights advocates calling for a tougher legal standard to justify use-of-force and police arguing they need maximum legal protection to perform a dangerous job.
Legislators shelved a bill this year to raise the legal standard for police use of force, but a new version will likely be back next year.
“We are not all on the same page right now, but we think there are ways to get there. I think the new governor is going to play a big role in that,” said Ronald Lawrence, vice president of the California Police Chiefs Association.
Newsom opposes the death penalty and has said he would pursue another ballot measure asking voters to repeal it. (Voters rejected such measures in 2012 and 2016.) Other death penalty opponents will likely push him to do something more directly as governor.
On drug policy, Newsom has already demonstrated his differences from Brown. The governor-elect led the campaign to legalize marijuana, which Brown did not get involved in, and said he is “very open” to a bill Brown vetoed allowing San Francisco to establish a legal clinic where addicts could shoot illegal drugs.
The Economy: The reality of the coming downturn
The problem with starting at the top is that there’s nowhere to go but down.
Newsom will be taking the reins of state government at a time of strong (if unevenly distributed) economic growth and flush state coffers. All that cash will come in handy if he hopes to enact even a fraction of his ambitious policy proposals.
Even so, it’s impossible to seriously consider ending child poverty or funding universal pre-school, as Newsom plans to do, “without having a revenue conversation,” said Chris Hoene, the executive director of the California Budget & Policy Center.
The brewing 2020 ballot battle over whether to strip commercial landowners of Proposition 13 property tax breaks is the most obvious—and potentially lucrative—opportunity. Newsom has not stated clearly whether he supports such a proposal.
But the good times won’t last forever.
“Economic growth may be in the process of peaking as the impact of tax cuts fade and rising interest rates start to curb spending,” said Lynn Reaser, who chairs the state treasurer’s Council of Economic Advisers.
Even if the economy as a whole holds strong, Washington D.C. is its own source of uncertainty. Significant changes to Medicaid spending—which could reduce federal transfers to Sacramento by tens of billions of dollars, for example—“would feel like a large recession hit to the state budget,” said Hoene.
Gov. Jerry Brown has been warning about coming hard times for years now.. He’s been preparing too. By the end of next July, the state is projected to have $13 billion socked away for a rainy day. But most analysts say that cushion will only last a year or two in the face of even a moderate recession.
A downturn will hit the state budget, and Newsom’s ambitions, particularly hard. That’s because recessions tend to have a disproportionate impact on investment returns and roughly 30 percent of the state’s discretionary spending comes from the top 1 percent of earners—the investor class.
Newsom has spoken broadly, if a little vaguely, about the need to rejigger the state’s tax code to flatten things out. Expanding the sales tax to services, an oil severance free and revising the property tax limits of Prop. 13 are all “on the table,” he has said.
But making more dramatic changes to the tax code would be a “multi-year effort,” he concedes. And there’s a reason that governors have avoided tackling this issue for decades.
“Wouldn’t it be nice if we got ahead of that?” said Chris Thornberg of the consulting firm Beacon Economics. “But of course what I would argue is that given history, given what we’ve seen in the past, you bring somebody like Gavin or (former governor) Gray Davis in and, instead of trying to be fiscally prudent, they say, ‘f— it, man, let’s make everybody happy right now.’”
And however the next governor handles the good times, sooner or later, said Mike Genest, finance director to former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, he will have to confront the “slow moving monster:” the growing costs of retirement benefits owed to public-sector workers.
The state Supreme Court will soon hear a case about whether future benefits can be pared down. But even if the court give the governor that tool, he may be reluctant to wield it. And for many cities whose budgets are already being swamped by these costs, that ruling may not hold off bankruptcy, said Genest.
“It’s conceivable that (Newsom will) slide through the whole eight years without it getting to that point,” he said. “But if he does, then the next guy or gal is totally hosed.”
Brown (Canoe) / Newsom (Cyberspace)…Big Difference in Styles
Commentary from the LA Times
The cliche that has followed Brown for decades is his “canoe theory” of politics, a belief that paddling a little on the right and then on the left ensures the vessel of government steers in a straight path. Few leaders could pull off a multibillion-dollar expansion of Medi-Cal while at the same time coming across as a frugal guy who canceled state worker cellphones and stashed money in a rainy-day fund.
Conservatives never thought the iconic Democrat was all that straight in his paddling. But Brown’s approach stood the test of time; public opinion polls consistently found a majority of voters liked the way he handled the job these last eight years.
Newsom, in contrast, made his campaign slogan “Courage for a change.” It came across as equal parts swagger about the path forward and a not-so-subtle rejection of what came before. If the governor-elect intends to recalibrate that bold promise in the weeks and months to come, he didn’t offer any hints Tuesday night.
“The sun is rising in the west, and the arc of history is bending in our direction,” he said to supporters at a crowded Los Angeles victory party. “This is not just a state of resistance. California is a state of results.”
Newsom, only the third California lieutenant governor in the last 70 years to win the top job, must quickly focus on the practical. Gubernatorial transitions are a dive into the deep end of the pool, with state budget decisions that must be made — in consultation with Brown — in a matter of weeks, long before Newsom takes the oath of office.
The new governor also may have to contend with the other Democrats elected to statewide office Tuesday, each seeking a platform to demand change. Most of them, like Newsom, will be new to the job. None ran on a platform of moderation.
In Sacramento, they will join a California Legislature where Democratic leaders have spent two years pushing forward an agenda that has become the nation’s most persistent repudiation of Trump. That effort remains largely intact, thanks to Brown’s signature on a series of environmental and immigration laws. The president has largely ignored the state, although his administration unsuccessfully asked the courts to block the “sanctuary state” immigration enforcement law enacted this year.
Brown has only occasionally criticized the president, often sounding a note of indifference to any taunt from Trump about the state’s actions. “We can follow our own trajectory,” he told reporters Wednesday. “I would rather focus on the creativity and the unique opportunities and needs of California, as opposed to defining everything in relationship to the president.”
Newsom has been far less restrained. He didn’t reference Trump by name on Tuesday, only by reputation. “It’s been a long two years, but tonight America’s biggest state is making America’s biggest statement,” he said. “We are saying — unmistakably and in unison — that it’s time to roll credits on the politics of chaos and cruelty.”
Nor has the governor-elect held back in his embrace of ideas that embody the base of his Democratic Party. No topic looms larger on that score than universal healthcare — Newsom has insisted, as he did during a candidates’ forum last year, that “single-payer is the way to go to reduce costs and provide comprehensive access.”
So will he lead an effort in 2019 or beyond to revive a stalled attempt in the Legislature to do just that? The party’s base may demand it, a test for Newsom in his early days as governor. The topic was a key point of contention during the 2018 primary, when former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said the proposal floating around the statehouse in 2017 was nothing more than “snake oil,” lacking the details necessary to be taken seriously.
Newsom snapped that his fellow Democrat was nothing but a “defeatist” on the issue. Should he call for patience as governor, he will surely hear the same criticism from progressives. Other topics also will be tricky, as Democratic legislators are eager to push bills vetoed by Brown onto the desk of the new governor. Higher education officials, meanwhile, say they intend to demand more college funding in 2019.
Here too the question arises: How progressive is too progressive? Legislative Republicans may play a small role, but they will be all too happy to sound the alarm in hopes of resetting at least part of the state’s political narrative by 2020.
The relationship between new governors and legislators is often contentious. Former Gov. Gray Davis, fresh from a 20-percentage-point victory in 1998, boasted to a newspaper editorial board that the Legislature’s job was “to implement my vision.” Five years later, facing a recall by voters, Davis eagerly signed a handful of liberal-leaning bills in an unsuccessful effort to rally turnout among the party’s base.
Unlike Brown, who was governor before some current legislators had even been born and received a lot of deference from his fellow Democrats, Newsom will probably be seen as the newcomer. He may have an office in the historic Capitol building, but his post for the last eight years has been more understudy than a starring role. The leaders of the Senate and Assembly, on the other hand, will reprise their roles from the last few years. And most legislators who will serve alongside the new governor can remain in office beyond his four-year term.
“Every new governor going in with an established legislative leadership, there’s a little bit of a question of how power is shared,” said John A. Perez, a former Assembly speaker. But the governor, he acknowledged, has real power in shaping the state’s budget — key leverage over programs championed by liberal Democrats.
Newsom may look to Brown’s track record for guidance, one he praised on the campaign trail. “You do not need to be profligate to be progressive,” he told a San Francisco audience in 2016.
Unlike Brown, who oversaw the final touches on fixing many of the leftover problems from California’s 20th century, the new governor seems poised to be its first leader of what’s ahead. Along with the others who will take office in January, he is not only part of a new chapter for the state, but also represents a different brand of Democratic politics crafted during a time when choosing sides has sometimes taken precedence over building bridges. How he responds as the party’s leader — and as the governor of millions who don’t always agree with him — will be a key test.
Unprecedented Joint Action – Forcing Delay of Controversial River Flow Plan
Under pressure from Gov. Jerry Brown’s administration, state regulators once again postponed a vote on a contentious plan to force San Francisco and several big San Joaquin Valley irrigation districts to give up some of their water supplies for environmental protection.
On the eve of Wednesday’s scheduled vote, Brown and the man who will succeed him next year, Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, asked for a month’s delay and promised to get involved in ongoing settlement negotiations.
If adopted, the State Water Resources Control Board proposal to boost flows on three salmon-bearing rivers would amount to an unprecedented step to hold districts with historic water rights accountable for the environmental toll of their massive diversions.
The agricultural districts, which staked their claims to the river flows a century or more ago, have bitterly contested the proposed restrictions, calling them economically devastating and vowing to challenge them in court.
The water board staff spent years developing the proposed standards and the Brown administration has long advocated voluntary agreements to avoid a prolonged legal battle. Talks between state officials and river users picked up after the final board proposal was released in July.
The board postponed a scheduled August vote, but with no settlement on the immediate horizon, appeared ready to adopt the flow requirements on Wednesday.
At the last minute, Brown and Newsom wrote board chairman Felicia Marcus, asking for a postponement. “During this time, we pledge to actively and meaningfully engage to bring this vital matter to a successful closure,” the Democrats said.
At Wednesday’s meeting, environmental advocates argued that more delay would weaken the state’s hand in settlement negotiations.
State officials and river users, on the other hand, insisted that by December they could come up with an agreement that would meet the board’s ecological objectives.
“This is it. No more time beyond the next 35 days,” said California Fish and Wildlife Director Chuck Bonham, who represents the state in the confidential negotiations. “The Brown administration will not seek another delay.”
Marcus said she agonized over whether to again postpone the vote. But she ultimately chose to heed Brown’s call for more time.
“Reluctantly — but with hope — I will support giving it a try. I’m firmly committed to act in December,” she said.
Board members are appointed to four-year-terms by the governor, so Wednesday’s discussion played out against the coming change in administration.
The letter’s language seemed to signal that Newsom would not change course and continue to support the board in requiring greater river flows to help migrating salmon.
“It is an amazing letter,” board member Tam Doduc said, citing a paragraph in which the political leaders said any agreement would “obligate water rights holders to improve stream flows and restore habitat.”
The current board proposal would collectively cost water districts 300,000 acre-feet of supply — or roughly 15% of their total diversions on the Stanislaus, Tuolumne and Merced rivers. But the board has left the door open to relaxing those requirements if water users agree to other measures to improve fish conditions, such as expanding floodplains and restoring habitat.
San Francisco and several big irrigation districts draw so much water from the three tributaries of the San Joaquin River that their average flows range from 21% to 40% of what they would be without dams and diversions. At times the river beds hold as little as 10% of the natural flow.
Combined with pollution and habitat loss, the diversions have helped drive once abundant salmon runs to the brink of extinction and contributed to a cascade of ecological problems downstream in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the heart of California’s water system.
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-river-flows-20181107-story.html
Election Aftermath: Brown Offers Insights; Assembly GOP Changes Leaders
Gov. Jerry Brown offered some insights for his successor and had a wide-ranging conversation with reporters from his Sacramento office. A few highlights:
- On Proposition 3 water bond measure failing: “We do have a lot of bonds. You have to make sure that you’re long-term obligations are manageable, so people probably thought about that. I personally think investing in the environment is very, very important.” He declined to say how he voted.
- OnProposition 6 failing: “I think it was a good title and summary. … People knew what they were voting for.”
- OnDelta tunnels proposal: “If they don’t (get built), the Delta will be absolutely destroyed. … Newsom will bring different perspectives to it.” He says he’ll work to reach a settlement within the next 30 days and says the tunnels have to be built.
- Possible Supreme Court pick: “I’ve never regretted an appointment I haven’t made.” Brown declines to comment on a potential nominee for a current opening.
- On his plans after his term expires: He says he’ll remain very involved in addressing climate change issues. “I have a lot of exciting things to do, so I’m not going to be missing a lot.”
Brian Dahle vacated his leadership post at the start of the next legislative session. Dahle will instead run for a seat in the California Senate to be vacated with Sen. Ted Gaines election to the state Board of Equalization. Dahle’s successor? Assemblywoman Marie Waldron of Escondido. She had a majority of support within her Assembly GOP caucus to lead the group. Waldron said in a news release the caucus will “seriously consider why our party continues to decline.”
Democrats are all but guaranteed a supermajority in the Assembly, and they are in prime position to do retain a supermajority in the Senate.
As for Gaines’ Senate seat, Dahle, R-Bieber, will not have a free ride. Assemblyman Kevin KIley, R-Rocklin, also announced he is running.
https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article221313360.html#storylink=cpy
CA GOP…“It’s Not 1978 Any More”
Just as the polls predicted, John Cox, California’s Republican candidate for governor, lost the job to Democratic Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom. In fact, none of the five Republicans vying for statewide office this year won their races. In the contests for the two remaining statewide offices and the U.S. Senate, a Republican candidate didn’t even make it onto the general election ballot. That leaves GOP voters without a single statewide representative for the third election cycle running.
Adding insult to injury, the only right-of-center candidate to mount a realistic statewide campaign was former Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner, who got as far as he did after ditching the Republican brand entirely and running as a political independent.
With votes still being counted, Democrats also were within striking distance of reclaiming supermajorities in both the state Assembly and the Senate.
Maybe most painful of all was the fate of Proposition 6. This was the effort to repeal a recent increase in the gas tax—or, at the very least, to tap into the California voters’ historic dislike of higher taxes and expensive commutes, and convince them to once again vote Republican. Whether the appeal worked to gin up enough turnout to avert catastrophe in the GOP’s vulnerable congressional districts, was not yet clear. But the measure failed.
Republicans were quick to blame the defeat of Prop. 6 on Attorney General Xavier Becerra, a Democrat whose office was responsible for writing the text describing the measure on the ballot.
But as national Republicans secured their grip on the U.S. Senate while surrendering control of the House, for California Republicans, the 2018 midterms do feel like a new low.
It’s been more than 130 years since Californians replaced a Democratic governor with another Democratic governor. And while Gov. Jerry Brown was a fiscal conservative by Sacramento standards, Newsom could be considered the stuff of Republican nightmares: a San Francisco progressive who supports single-payer healthcare, picks Twitter fights with the president and has flirted with the idea of reforming Proposition 13, the property tax-capping ballot measure that helped give birth to the modern conservative movement and the Reagan revolution.
“This will be the third time that higher taxes have won as an argument at the ballot in California,” said Bill Whalen, a former speechwriter for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. In 2012, voters approved Proposition 30’s “millionaire’s tax” and then voted to extend it again four years later.
The fact that the average California voter elected not just to stick it to millionaires this time, but agreed to pay higher taxes at the pump, might suggest that “taxes are not the third rail” of California politics that they once were, he said.
“I think Republicans forgot that it’s not 1978 anymore,” added Jack Pitney, a political science professor at Claremont McKenna College, referring to the year that voters approved Prop. 13 by a nearly 30 point margin. “That was a different time and a different electorate.”
For sure, California has changed a lot over the last 30 years. But even as the state has become more ethnically and racially diverse, the profile of the typical Republican voter has stayed relatively static: relatively white, old and affluent. Fortunately for the state GOP, this is the same demographic niche that most predictably turns out to vote. But in the absence of a message that might begin to convince Democrats and independents to switch parties, that may only postpone the inevitable. According to the Public Policy Institute of California, millennial voters are more likely than their elders to identify themselves as liberals, favor single payer healthcare, and oppose the president.
“This is a failing franchise,” said Whalen. He argued that the state party has two fundamental problems: “message and messengers.”
Cox himself lays the blame for whatever messaging shortcomings his own campaign experienced, at least in part, on the press.
“I wanted to have a dialogue and a discussion about what we needed to do to get rid of that money in politics,” he said. “At some point in time the message has got to get out and it’s got to be the media.”
But according to Whalen, the party puts itself at a disadvantage when the most prominent state Republican on this year’s ballot, Cox, was relatively unknown to most California voters prior to the final months of the campaign. Those further down on the ballot were—and likely still are—largely anonymous to all but the most politically engaged. With the exception of Steven Bailey, the retired El Dorado County judge who ran for attorney general, none of the party’s statewide candidates had experience in elected office.
“You’re counting on rookie quarterbacks to lead you to the Super Bowl,” said Whalen.
But even where experienced Republican political leaders do exist in California—city, county and congressional representatives increasingly concentrated in the exurbs and rural stretches away from the state’s populated coasts—it’s tough to convince an all-star player to join a team with such a lousy track record. A Republican hasn’t won statewide since 2006. And one of those candidates was Arnold Schwarzenegger, the rare “international movie star willing to run for office,” said Pitney. “But that bracket seems empty right now.”
In the lead up to the June primary election, state party insiders at least thought that they finally settled on an appealing message.
The gap between the preferences of the state party’s base and those of the average voter seem increasingly impossible to bridge. And yet that is precisely the task before any Republican candidate who hopes to compete statewide.
The state party won’t have an easy time distancing itself from Washington D.C. anytime soon, even if it wanted to, said Graeme Boushey, a political science professor at the UC Irvine.
“With a national GOP that has itself moved towards more extreme politics, it’s hard for the state GOP to escape that shadow,” he said. Politics are increasingly nationalized, he continued. Many voters don’t know who represents them in Sacramento, or even in Congress, but they do know who the president is and to which party he belongs.
Once again shutout from statewide office, some of the California candidates for statewide office said they hope to instead to advance conservative policy in California through ballot measures.
Voters “don’t want anything with an ‘R’ next to its name,” said Konstantinos Roditis, the candidate for controller who had the “R” next to his name. “If we want to make change in California that people want, the best way, I believe is to do it through the initiative process.”
Both he and the candidate for treasurer, Greg Conlon, discussed the possibility of putting a state proposition on the ballot aimed at reducing California’s public sector pension liability as soon as 2020.
“Our positions are not really Republican, they’re really bipartisan because the people want it,” said Roditis. “Democrats in Sacramento don’t want it.”
In the short-term, the California Republican party’s greatest hopes for broader political relevance may lie with the governor-elect. Many Republicans believe that Californians will tire of Democratic rule if and when Newsom begins to push through the many ambitious and expensive policies he’s promised on the campaign trail.
First Female LtGov Overcomes Labor-Backed Opponent
Former ambassador to Hungary Eleni Kounalakis will become California’s first woman elected lieutenant governor, charging to victory over state Sen. Ed Hernandez in a race that pitted her campaign cash and diplomatic resume against his labor connections and legislative experience.
The highest ranking among a record-setting three women to be elected Tuesday to California constitutional offices, Kounalakis will join Controller Betty Yee and newly elected Treasurer Fiona Ma as one of the state’s top government officials. Like U.S. Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Kamala Harris, all were elected statewide.
“We ran a people-powered campaign driven by a positive message, a powerful platform, and joyful volunteers & staff,” Kounalakis tweeted, after spending election night with supporters at a party hosted by Emerge America, which trains women to run for office as Democrats. “We have made history, and I am so proud of what we will accomplish together.”
She led Hernandez with 56 percent of the vote to his 43 as the final precinct results came in Wednesday, in an election year that featured a wave of female candidates galvanized by the #MeToo sexual harassment scandals and the resistance to President Donald Trump.
Both Democrats, Kounalakis and Hernandez came from contrasting backgrounds but struggled to differentiate themselves on the issues. The lieutenant governor’s few official duties include serving on the governing boards for the University of California and California State University, as well as the State Lands Commission and the Commission for Economic Development.
But the position can also serve as a gateway to higher office, as it did for current lieutenant governor Gavin Newsom, who handily beat Republican John Cox in this year’s gubernatorial race.
Despite never having held elected office, Kounalakis—a longtime Democratic Party volunteer—won the endorsement of high-profile Democrats including former President Barack Obama and Senator Kamala Harris. In a race that saw $26 million in donations pour in, she raised far more than her opponent, much of it from her own wealth and that of her father, Sacramento developer Angelo Tsakopoulos.
Her pitch to voters, however, underscored her background as the child of a Greek immigrant, the first in her family to graduate from college, as she argued that her family’s rags-to-riches story helped her relate to average Californians.
“We were surrounded by fields and swam in the irrigation canals…and had a very rural kind of experience,” Kounalakis told CALmatters of her Sacramento County upbringing.
She has pledged to make higher education her top priority, oppose tuition increases at the state’s public universities and boost financial aid for poor and middle-class students. She also said she’d draw on her experience running her family’s company, AKT Development, to help solve the state’s housing crisis—including ensuring universities are not overcharging students for housing. And she promised to fight offshore drilling on the lands commission.
Hernandez, who has served in the Legislature since 2006, also stressed college affordability on the campaign trail. He said he hoped to increase the budget and profile of the lieutenant governor’s office, using it as a bully pulpit to push for universal health coverage.
An optometrist from Azusa, he built a reputation as a health care advocate in the Legislature, authoring a law forcing drug companies to disclose information about their pricing. He tried and failed to overturn California’s Proposition 209, which bans public universities from considering race in admissions and hiring.
The California Labor Federation backed Hernandez, who is serving his final year in the Senate due to term limits, and both the San Francisco Chronicle and the Los Angeles Times endorsed him.
“Though this was not the outcome we hoped for, I congratulate my opponent and know she will work hard to create a better California for all of us,” he said in a statement Wednesday.
Kounalakis’ victory came during an election year many dubbed The Year of the Woman, which saw Americans elect the youngest congresswoman in the country’s history along with the first Native American and Muslim congresswomen.
She emphasized her identity as a female candidate while campaigning, saying she was first inspired to become involved in politics while watching another Democratic woman, Geraldine Ferraro, run for vice president in 1984. She touted her support from the National Organization for Women and NARAL, and in interviews joked about the “power of the ponytail,” her signature hairstyle.
Proposition 6, which would have repealed an increase in California’s gas tax, failed to win the majority vote needed for passage on Tuesday after Gov. Jerry Brown warned it would halt urgent repairs to the state’s crumbling roads and bridges.
Brown, who leaves office in January, said after the first vote tallies were announced that it was important that the initiative be defeated for the future of the state.
“This is one of the most significant votes in America tonight, because where else have people voted to tax themselves to pay for what they need?” Brown said to cheers at a Sacramento election watch party thrown by the initiative’s opponents.
“People know that you get what you pay for,” he added. “The people knew that the flim-flam of the yes people were exposed. When this Trump recession comes we’re going to have $5 billion going to transit and roads and bridges in California.”
Top Republicans including House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield, House Speaker Paul D. Ryan and GOP gubernatorial candidate John Cox put the initiative on the ballot in hopes of boosting conservative voter turnout for the party’s candidates for Congress and governor.
At one point it appeared the initiative could be a defining issue for the state’s midterm election. The repeal effort gained momentum in June when backers succeeded in recalling state Sen. Josh Newman (D-Fullerton) over his vote for the higher taxes. Three weeks later, the repeal measure qualified for the ballot when those behind it turned in more than 585,000 signatures of registered voters.
But then the money from deep-pocketed Republicans dried up as GOP leaders shifted their attention to helping their party’s candidates in close congressional and state legislative races.
The more than $5 million raised by those pushing the repeal was eclipsed by the $47 million brought in by initiative opponents from the construction industry, organized labor and Democrats.
Initiative backers also said their campaign was disadvantaged by the ballot title placed on the measure by the state.
“We’ve known that politicians have been stealing our gas taxes for years and will continue to do that,” said Carl DeMaio, a Republican activist who headed the campaign. “Tonight we learned that they can also steal our votes by changing the ballot title on our initiative. We are not going to accept that. They think we are going to go away. No.”
With Brown about to leave office, many Capitol observers saw the massive transportation improvement program as a part of his legacy, one that was threatened by the repeal initiative.
“Killing Proposition 6 is the right thing to do,” Brown said at a campaign rally days before the election. “It’s a bad idea. It’s dangerous, and it was cooked up by some shady politicians who used their campaign funds because they thought they could fool the people. Well, the people aren’t fooled.”
In another campaign appearance, the governor said the measure was being “pushed by Trump’s Washington allies.”
The television and mail ad blitz from the measure’s opponents featured highway patrol officers, firefighters and engineers who said the loss of the road-repair money would jeopardize the safety of motorists.
http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-proposition-6-gas-tax-increase-repeal-20181106-story.html
California Campaigns 2018 – Billion-Dollar Election
California candidates and political action committees spent more than $1 billion on 2018 political races, according to data from the nonpartisan California Target Book.
The $1.033 billion total equals roughly $50 spent for each registered voter in the state, California Target Book research director Rob Pyers wrote in a news release.
More than $366 million was spent on the state’s 11 propositions. Opponents of Proposition 8 spent $111 million trying to dissuade voters from regulating dialysis payments, while opponents of Proposition 10 spent $75 million against the rent control initiative.
U.S. House of Representatives races totaled about $307 million, led by $35 million between Republican Young Kim and Democrat Gil Cisneros in Orange County’s 39th Congressional District. Rep. Dana Rohrbacher and challenger Harley Rouda were right behind at $33 million for the neighboring 48th Congressional District.
PACs spent more on the Superintendent of Public Instruction seat than the seven other statewide positions combined. Outside contributors pitched in $54 million to elect Marshall Tuck or Tony Thurmond, both Democrats, while spending a mere $38 million on the governor’s race.
In the Central Valley, Jeff Denham and Josh Harder’s race for the 10th Congressional District seat cost $25 million, while Tom McClintock and Jessica Morse’s race for the 4th Congressional District east of Sacramento cost $5.4 million.
State Assembly candidates and PACs spent a combined $114 million on 80 races, headlined by $5.5 million between incumbent Democrat Rudy Salas and challenger Justin Mendes in AD-32 near Bakersfield.
National races are expected to generate much more than the $3.84 billion spent in 2014, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/election/article221235510.html#storylink=cpy