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IN THIS ISSUE – “The Biggest Risk Is Not Taking A Risk”
HOUSING TOP GOVERNOR’S TO-DO LIST
- State of the State Part I: “A Disgrace” for Homeless, Newsom Says; Legislature & Local Governments Begin Complex Debate
- State of the State Part II: Mental Health Program Reform; Restore Involuntary Treatment, Governor Says
- “Staggering Housing Costs” at Triple the US Rate – Why?
- Housing is Essential, Housing is Health: How to Build Fast
POWER & WATER
- State Energy Commission OKs Neighborhood Rooftop Solar
- California is 60% “Abnormally Dry”…But Drought Doesn’t Happen Til 2021
- Water Wars Go Nuclear – Trump Signs An Order; Newsom Files Lawsuit
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FOR THE WEEK ENDING FEB. 21, 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.
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State of the State Part I: “A Disgrace” for Homeless, Newsom Says
Legislature & Local Governments Begin Complex Debate
CalMatters
Gov. Gavin Newsom devoted his second annual “State of the State” address today to an issue that has consumed much of his first 12 months in office: the rising number of Californians without a home.
Traditionally, California governors treat these constitutionally-required addresses as an opportunity to announce a laundry list of proposals across a range of issues — education, the environment, criminal justice. Toss in some self-congratulatory remarks on last year’s legislative accomplishments, throw a perfunctory jab at Washington D.C. for political gridlock, gladhand some lawmakers and call it a day.
But with a record percentage of California voters citing homelessness as the biggest issue confronting the state, and with President Donald Trump bashing Newsom’s progressive leadership for letting the problem get this bad, the governor tossed aside convention.
“Let’s call it what it is, a disgrace, that the richest state in the richest nation — succeeding across so many sectors — is failing to properly house, heal and humanely treat so many of its own people,” said Newsom, before outlining a series of proposals he urged the Legislature to adopt.
He departed from past addresses not only by his singular focus on homelessness, but by mentioning it at all. The word “homeless” did not appear in a single one of former Gov. Jerry Brown’s State of the State speeches between 2011 and 2018.
Newsom’s advisors hope this break with tradition is a savvy political maneuver, letting voters know that their top priority is also their governor’s. Fair or not, Newsom will be held responsible for whether average Californians see a visible reduction in sleeping bags along their sidewalks and tent encampments in their parks. He might as well get out in front of the issue so no one can accuse him of evading it.
But placing homelessness at the top of his agenda — and thereby defining his governorship by the progress he makes to solve the problem — is risky. Newsom can only do so much to fix homelessness in the first place, and he’s set himself up to be held accountable for actions that demand buy-in from a web of other players, including state lawmakers, local officials, developers, health care leaders, and the White House.
“The biggest risk is not taking a risk on homelessness,” Newsom said after his address. “The biggest risk is denying the reality that we see on the streets and sidewalks across the state. The biggest risk is abdicating responsibility, pointing fingers.”
But in political terms?
“Yeah,” the governor acknowledged, he is taking a risk.
In some ways, it’s familiar territory. Big bets have worked out well for Newsom in the past when he’s tapped into a zeitgeist that favors policies other Democrats shied away from. As San Francisco mayor, Newsom sanctioned same-sex marriage years before it became a legal right across the United States. As lieutenant governor, he championed the ballot measure California voters passed to legalize marijuana in 2016.
But solving homelessness is arguably more complicated, and the sophomore-year governor will face hurdles ahead.
Most homeless services — emergency shelters, mental illness treatment, street outreach — are run by cities and counties. While they may be funded by state and federal dollars, decisions on where to site a new shelter or whether to buy motels for homeless housing are largely left to local governments.
Nothing legally compels a city or county to do anything on homelessness. Technically, it’s all voluntary — a legal framework that has led neighboring jurisdictions to accuse each other of not doing their fair share.
A task force Newsom created last year to identify new homelessness solutions called for a “legally enforceable mandate” that would allow the state to sue cities or counties that failed to make meaningful progress on homelessness goals.
But in today’s State of the State, Newsom declined to embrace his task force’s signature proposal.
“We know the state’s traditional way of insisting on accountability, which is to write a mean letter,” said Sacramento Mayor Darrel Steinberg, co-chair of Newsom’s task force, who nonetheless applauded the governor for his emphasis on the issue. “But that’s not what he said today and that’s not what the task force said five or six weeks ago.”
Newsom instead proposed a “do it or lose it” approach that would tie new state funding for homelessness to specific benchmarks — building a certain amount of low-income units, for example, or placing a certain number of people in housing.
Steinberg says Newsom has successfully changed the conversation on what is expected from local governments, and “do it or lose it” could well work. But the question remains: Will local governments make progress on reducing homelessness absent the threat of looming litigation?
More than 150,000 Californians are homeless, at last count.
That “at last count” part could be politically problematic for Newsom. Those numbers are a snapshot of Californians living outdoors and in shelters in January 2019, and were not officially published by the federal government until December of that year.
Cities and counties around the state finished their official “one night counts” for 2020 last month. Which means much of the new funding and policy proposals the Newsom administration has announced won’t be reflected in the state’s official 2020 homeless count, due at the end of the year.
If the 2020 homeless count for California is significantly higher than 2019’s, that’s ample political ammunition for Newsom’s critics to pan his proposals. Don’t expect U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson — who singled out California no fewer than nine times when announcing the national 2019 homeless count — to incorporate the nuances of the time lag in next December’s press release.
Newsom administration officials insist they are not beholden to Carson’s public relations strategy. But like it or not, Newsom’s homelessness goals are nevertheless tied to one Trump administration prerogative: funding.
“Clearly Newsom can’t control the federal response, and unfortunately that’s been heading in a really troubling direction recently,” said Sharon Rapport, director of California state policy for the Corporation for Supportive Housing.
The Trump administration has proposed a 15% cut to HUD funding, including the entire elimination of key affordable housing programs. Trump’s new homelessness czar wants to shift funding away from “housing first” approaches that do not precondition shelter on sobriety or participation in drug rehabilitation services.
Many of the homelessness proposals Newsom referenced today weren’t new. But homelessness advocates were elated to hear one significant departure from Newsom’s January budget proposal — a call for “significant, sustainable revenue.”
That’s most likely a new tax to fund homelessness services every year. Newsom declined to specify what that tax would look like, but regardless he’ll need a two-thirds vote of state lawmakers to make it happen. That’s not an easy lift in an election year, even with Democratic supermajorities in the statehouse.
We’re not talking about chump change. Advocates are hoping for annual ongoing homelessness spending in the $2 billion range, and are entertaining the idea of floating a millionaires’ tax for the 2022 ballot if they can’t make headway in the Legislature, according to Rapport.
But just after the speech, Newsom signaled a wariness about more spending. “One thing I can’t support is continuing to send out money with no accountability attached. No expectations, no metrics, no transparency,” he said. “I will not support any additional appropriations — not one dollar — unless it’s attached to real accountability and results.”
The governor also used the State of the State to reiterate his desire to see the Legislature pass a major housing production bill this year, arguing more supply was the only long-term solution to preventing Californians from being priced out of their homes.
Yet his campaign goal of building 500,000 units each year is off to a rocky start. Preliminary data indicates California permitted only 110,000 homes his first year in office, a total lower than 2018.
What type of housing production bill does he want the Legislature to approve? Again, Newsom offered little in the way of specifics. But rumors are circulating in the Capitol that elements of unsuccessful Senate Bill 50 — a controversial housing proposal that would have eliminated single-family-only zoning in much of the state and legalized apartment buildings around transit— might be split up into several different bills.
“I honestly don’t care if it gets passed in one bill or multiple bills. I just want the policy to pass because it’s important,” said Sen. Scott Wiener, the San Francisco Democrat who authored the defeated bill.
CalMatters
In his call to action on the state’s homelessness crisis, Gov. Gavin Newsom zeroed in on the need to treat serious mental illnesses and substance use disorders among people who are chronically homeless.
About a third of homeless people have serious mental illness, according to the Treatment Advocacy Center — even by conservative estimates, that encompasses tens of thousands of Californians. Many of them end up cycling in and out of emergency rooms and jails; close to a third of inmates in California’s jails have a documented mental illness.
In his annual State of the State address, here’s what the governor proposed to deal with people who have fallen through holes in the safety net:
Newsom, in calling for changes to the state’s involuntary treatment laws, described the importance of people “being capable of accepting help, to get off the streets and into treatment in the first place.”
“Some, tragically, are not,” he said.
But changing the law — especially the definition of “grave disability” — is highly controversial, and has been for a long time.
The Lanterman-Petris-Short Act, which passed in 1967, imposed specific timeframes on involuntary confinement and limited involuntary holds to those deemed a danger to themselves or others, or gravely disabled.
Families say the law can prevent them from helping loved ones who don’t recognize that they are ill and need treatment. Disability rights advocates worry that compelling treatment is ineffective and can violate people’s civil rights.
In recent years, several bills that have attempted to alter the law have failed.
That may change with an audit of Lanterman-Petris-Short, which State Auditor Elaine Howle is expected to release in March, along with specific recommendations.
A pilot project to expand conservatorships without altering Lanterman-Petris-Short is underway in San Francisco, and Newsom said in his speech that he wants to see that pilot expand statewide.
But, even without the controversy, changing laws to expand conservatorships isn’t a simple fix. County conservators have been overwhelmed with a huge influx in new clients in recent years, even as the number of appropriate facilities to house them is shrinking.
Newsom himself noted: “Policy is an empty promise without creating more placements.”
He also mentioned changing the conditions imposed on counties to make it easier for them to implement Laura’s Law — currently, some counties haven’t adopted the law because doing so requires them to provide an array of intensive services. The law, which passed in 2002, was named for Laura Wilcox, a college student who was shot and killed by a man who had refused psychiatric treatment. Counties that adopt the law can compel people to accept community-based outpatient treatment through the court system.
Another proposal that’s already proving contentious is the call to expand the kinds of services that can be funded through Proposition 63, the Mental Health Services Act.
When voters passed the act in November 2004, they imposed an additional 1% income tax on millionaires in the state. That money was intended to expand county mental health offerings.
Since then, the Mental Health Services Act has brought billions of dollars into a long under-resourced system. But some critics have been frustrated to see the money sometimes fund programs like horse therapy for troubled teens while the seriously mentally ill go without other important treatments. Others have pointed out, as Newsom did in his remarks, that many counties have not spent all their funds — sometimes sitting on huge reserves.
A state audit in 2018 found that counties and mental health agencies had accumulated hundreds of millions in unspent Mental Health Services Act funds, and required stronger state direction and oversight.
Newsom underscored his frustration in his address, criticizing counties for currently having more than $160 million in unspent funds. “My message is this: spend your mental health dollars by June 30th, or we’ll make sure they get spent for you,” he said.
But loosening the restrictions on what the funding pays for has some county mental health directors nervous, because they don’t want to see dollars diverted away from mental health services.
The California Behavioral Health Directors Association released a statement applauding much of Newsom’s speech, but emphasizing that the state should “consider the need for additional investments, rather than shifts” in what the Mental Health Services Act funds.
Newsom devoted a significant portion of his speech to CalAIM, which was recently rebranded Medi-Cal Healthier California for All. That initiative seeks to dramatically overhaul the state’s Medi-Cal system by integrating mental health, substance abuse treatment and physical health services, increasing funding and making access to mental health care simpler.
Low-income people with serious mental illnesses often have to navigate various bureaucracies to get the help they need — being shuffled from one agency to the next feels can be overwhelming. In the pilot programs Newsom wants to expand, individuals are provided with health and medical treatment as well as social services.
“Doctors should be able to write prescriptions for housing the same way they do for insulin or antibiotics,” he said.
The initiative hinges on two important federal waivers, which allow California to operate its Medicaid program according to special rules. These waivers are expiring this year, which could present an opportunity to change how the Medicaid program is both funded and run — assuming the Trump administration permits them.
For some people with serious mental illnesses and substance use disorders, hope of recovery can be severely impeded by the lack of a place to sleep. Services without housing don’t work well for them; neither does housing without services.
One problem the governor referenced in his address: The state’s spate of board and care home closures. Newsom said he wants to stabilize and expand the number of these homes, but that will prove costly. This week, San Francisco officials announced a plan to purchase two such homes.
The homes are rarely viewed as an ideal housing model for low-income people with mental illness and other disabilities — some are plagued with rat and bedbug infestations.
But they are often the only relatively affordable housing option available to a very vulnerable population. Tenants pay a government-set monthly rent of $1,058 out of their monthly federal SSI checks to cover housing, 24-hour-care and three daily meals.
These homes are fast disappearing. Many owners are selling their properties because they are highly valuable. Once they go to the private market, they’re unlikely to come back.
One topic that the governor did not bring up during his State of the State was his desire to strengthen enforcement of mental health parity laws, which hold private insurers accountable for providing equal access to health and mental health care.
He spoke forcefully on the topic when he revealed his budget plan in January, saying he plans to go “aggressively on the parity issue as a mandate and a mission.” At that time he also chastised the Department of Managed Health Care, saying it will be “getting in the business of real enforcement. Not tacit enforcement….They just need to do their damn job, and they need to go aggressively on parity.”
What that increased enforcement will look like remains to be seen, and today’s speech didn’t shed any further light on it. The governor is expected to be more specific in the spring, when he releases his revised budget.
Legislation to strengthen parity laws in the state has failed repeatedly in recent years – Democratic state Sen. Jim Beall of San Jose has introduced legislation to better enforce state and federal parity laws four times. Each failed.
The push for parity reflects the fact that many Californians are worried about their access to mental health care. According to a poll released last week by the California Health Care Foundation, for the second year in a row, people listed access to mental health care as a top mental health concern. More than half of those who responded said their communities didn’t have enough mental health providers.
The statewide shortage of mental health providers is another significant issue that wasn’t discussed during the State of the State, but will be a key component of any efforts to reform the state’s troubled mental health care system.
“Staggering Housing Costs” at Triple the US Rate – Why?
New York Times
SAN FRANCISCO — The average home in the United States costs around $240,000. But in San Francisco, the world’s most expensive place for construction, a two-bedroom apartment of what passes for affordable housing costs around $750,000 just to build.
California’s staggering housing costs have become the most significant driver of inequality in the state. On Wednesday, California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, mentioned the issue 35 times during an impassioned speech, urging lawmakers to solve the state’s homelessness crisis by building more and faster.
But the vertiginous prices of housing in California show how difficult that will be.
Building affordable housing in California costs on average three times as much as Texas or Illinois, according to the federal government.
The reasons for California’s high costs, developers and housing experts say, begin with the price of land and labor in the state. In San Francisco a construction worker earns around $90 an hour on average, according to Turner & Townsend, a real estate consulting company.
But non-construction costs also weigh heavily.
Not taking into account the price of land, around one quarter of the cost of building affordable housing goes to government fees, permits and consulting companies, according to a 2014 study by the California Department of Housing and Community Development.
For a building to be defined as affordable housing it typically obtains tax credits and subsidies. A single affordable housing project requires financing from an average of six different sources — federal, state and local agencies, said Carolina Reid, a researcher at the Terner Center at the University of California, Berkeley, and an author of a forthcoming analysis of affordable housing costs.
She called the process “death by a thousand cuts.”
Senator Brian Jones, a member of California’s State Senate, remembers laboring over an affordable housing project when he was on the City Council of Santee, Calif., near San Diego.
“It literally took us on the City Council six months to get all of our attorneys, all the developer’s attorneys, all the federal government’s attorneys, to agree on the paperwork. And that was just the financing,” Mr. Jones said.
“I walked away from that process and told the developer I cannot believe this project is going to employ more attorneys than construction workers to get built.”
Mr. Jones, who is head of the Republican caucus in the Senate, argues that California’s housing market is vastly overregulated, starting with California Environmental Quality Act.
California law permits anyone to object to a project under the act, which when it was signed by then Governor Ronald Reagan in 1970 was seen as a landmark effort to protect the environment from reckless development.
Today the law is often used as a legal battle ax by anyone who wants to slow a project down or scuttle it altogether, Mr. Jones and many developers and experts say.
“At very little cost one individual can take a project and tie it up in years of litigation,” said Douglas Abbey, a lecturer on real estate at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Environmental protection is cherished in California but there is also bipartisan agreement that housing prices are too high. Mr. Newsom has pushed through exemptions to the California Environmental Quality Act for homeless shelters, and he says the state should consider more exemptions.
Mr. Abbey, a former developer and real estate investor, says good intentions are backfiring. He argues that laws requiring developers to build a certain percentage of affordable housing as part of their market-rate projects are a hidden tax and a drag on overall housing construction.
“What the state government and local governments need to recognize is that the housing shortage is purely a supply problem,” Mr. Abbey said. “There are burdens to introducing new housing.”
It’s not uncommon for a project in California to be mired for many years in paperwork over zoning or objections by other property owners before ground is broken.
Judson True, the director of a department in San Francisco city hall that seeks to speed up housing construction projects, says the process of building affordable housing is far too cumbersome.
“Nothing this important should take this long or be this hard,” he said.
Last year San Francisco broke ground on 767 subsidized affordable apartments.
“It’s nowhere near what we need,” Mr. True said.
San Francisco has the highest overall building costs in the world, according to a 2019 report by Turner & Townsend.
The average costs of construction in San Francisco are 13 percent higher than New York, 60 percent more expensive than Chicago and 75 percent more than in Houston, according to the report.
It costs seven times more to build in San Francisco, America’s hub of technology, than in India’s technology capital, Bangalore.
Mr. Newsom says he recognizes the threat that the high costs pose to efforts to get people off the streets.
The average cost of a single affordable housing unit is around $500,000 in Los Angeles and around $600,000 in Oakland, according to data by the Terner Center.
“One word insanity — it’s just insanity,” Mr. Newsom said in an interview last month.
If affordable housing cannot be built more cheaply, he said, “taxpayers aren’t going to support these bonds.”
Mr. Newsom’s budget this year calls for $6.8 billion in affordable housing funding including mortgage assistance for first-time buyers and bonds for veterans’ housing.
Mr. Newsom says he is counting on innovations in housing construction to help reduce costs.
But even with significant savings, housing experts say it would be impossible at current cost levels to build homes for the state’s entire homeless population.
It would cost somewhere around $70 billion to build housing for its current homeless population of 150,000.
Professor Reid at the Terner Center says she agrees with Mr. Newsom’s emergency efforts to get people off the streets and into shelters as well as preventing people who have homes from losing them.
But California, she says, does not have the resources to build enough housing for the state’s current homeless population, not to mention those who might become homeless in years to come.
“We are not going to solve the homelessness crisis if what people are expecting is that cities are going to build affordable housing for every one of those individuals,” Professor Reid said.
“It’s going to cost way too much.”
Housing is Essential, Housing is Health: How to Build Fast
CalMatters Commentary from the builders
The Construction Industry Research Board Report should be a wakeup call to California lawmakers.
The report shows that 110,218 housing unit permits were issued in 2019, a 7% decrease from the prior year.
This decrease marks the first statistical drop in permit activity for new residential construction in California in 10 years,” the report says.
Long standing state regulations continue to make it difficult to build. Local governments add fees unrelated to housing, and unnecessary litigation delays. It all adds up to immense costs and complexities faced by homebuilders when they try to build housing for all in California.
In an effort to jump start legislative action and help address Gov. Gavin Newsom’s housing construction goals, the California Building Industry Association has released legislative proposals that, if passed by the legislature in 2020, will increase housing production in the short and long term.
The “Housing for All,” agenda is comprised of eight legislative solutions, the first four which are relatively easy technical fixes, and will have a positive impact on the housing crisis.
- California Environmental Quality Act. The Legislature should require disclosure of individuals who file lawsuits seeking to block new construction.
- Certificates of occupancy. Local governments should be required to allow occupancy of already constructed housing.
- Subdivision bonds. Local governments should be required to follow the law and reduce housing costs by efficiently reducing bond funds.
- The legislature should give California’s Department of Housing and Community Development more authority and staffing resources to hold local governments accountable to existing law.
Those steps are easy, or ought to be. Others will be harder.
The California Building Industry Association acknowledges that the final four proposals require significant political capital, but a significant crisis requires significant action:
- Local impact fees. The responsibility for funding infrastructure should be a combination of holistic oversight of fees with new approaches to funding.
- Regional Housing Needs Assessment reform: The Legislature should provide incentive for local governments to meet their Regional Housing Needs Assessment obligation.
- California Environmental Quality Act, 2.0. The process for complying with the environmental quality act must be reformed to streamline appeals and speed up housing production so that multiple lawsuits over the same project are not allowed, One is enough.
- City and county requirements. Local governments should be incentivized to rethink outdated zoning restrictions, project approval processes and lot-use restrictions.
Gov. Newsom laid out ambitious housing goals when he took office in January 2019. Homebuilders appreciate the challenges legislators face as they seek short- and long-term solutions to the state’s diverse housing needs. Some of these solutions might be tough for some legislators to support. But they offer California a clear way forward. Let’s get to work building Housing for All California.
Dan Dunmoyer is president and chief executive officer of the California Building Industry Association, [email protected]. He wrote this commentary for CalMatters.
State Energy Commission OKs Neighborhood Rooftop Solar
CalMatters
In a closely-watched vote on the future of California’s groundbreaking rooftop solar program, state regulators today approved a proposal to power some new Sacramento housing developments using offsite solar panels instead.
The California Energy Commission’s decision ended a months-long standoff between rooftop solar advocates and the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, commonly called SMUD. SMUD had asked regulators to allow developers to use its offsite solar installations rather than the rooftop solar panels required in California starting Jan. 1.
California’s solar regulation already allowed new developments to be powered by an alternative option called community solar, particularly some apartment buildings or shaded homes. The energy commission chose to leave the term community solar essentially undefined, but today’s decision loosens the regulation, allowing developers to decide themselves whether to use rooftop or SMUD’s community solar.
“I think this is something that’s bold, it’s cutting-edge, it’s something that we haven’t seen folks do before,” commission Vice-Chair Janea Scott said at the hearing.
Environmentalists who fought SMUD’s application said the decision hurts California’s efforts to fight climate change. California must pursue solar power in every way possible — through community solar initiatives and through rooftop solar, they said.
“The concern is that if it’s cheaper for developers to not put solar on people’s homes, then they’re going to opt for that choice,” Laurie Litman of climate group 350 Sacramento said. “That’s going to undermine the solar homes mandate throughout the state because then other areas and other utilities will ask for that waiver as well.”
Other utility companies have not yet said whether they will follow SMUD’s lead but signaled their interest in the outcome. Community-owned public utilities like the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power and the Modesto Irrigation District submitted letters in support of SMUD’s plans. Even investor-owned utility PG&E sent a letter of approval.
Still, major investor-owned utility San Diego Gas & Electric Company does not “have plans to put forth a similar proposal at this time,” said Robert Iezza, communications manager. That’s because municipal utilities like SMUD have more leeway in what they can do compared to their investor-owned counterparts, which are overseen by the California Public Utilities Commission, said Ethan Elkind, director of the climate program at UC Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy, and the Environment.
Energy commission staff initially recommended SMUD’s proposal for approval last November, before commissioners delayed a decision and asked for more information.
SMUD originally proposed drawing from an existing solar installation in Fresno to power new housing developments within its service territory, over 100 miles away. But that plan was fiercely criticized by some environmentalists and rooftop solar advocates who said it was too big, too far away — and already built. The new plan approved today instead proposed to power the homes with solar from a new installation that will be in Sacramento County.
SMUD also pledged it will use only projects that are inside its service territory, 20 megawatts or less and newly built rather than pre-existing.
“There’s absolutely applications where Neighborhood SolarShares makes a lot of sense, and we are trying to fill that gap with options for builders to use instead of restricting them to only a rooftop solution,” said Ed Hamzawi, director of advanced energy solutions with SMUD, of SMUD’s solar program. Even so, he said there’s still “room for both” community and rooftop solar.
Rooftop solar advocates remain unconvinced. SMUD’s program requires participating developers and homeowners to commit to a 20-year contract. While homeowners are able to add solar on their own at any time, advocates say they will miss out on the benefits that make it affordable.
“What is so objectionable about SMUD’s proposal is they’re essentially blocking the growth of rooftop solar so that they can get an edge on their solar farms,” said Dave Rosenfeld, executive director of the Solar Rights Alliance. “What they should be doing is encouraging solar in every possible way.”
SMUD spokesperson Lindsay VanLaningham said their offsite solar program has no upfront cost to residents, guarantees solar power even on cloudy days and is maintained by SMUD, not the homeowner.
Such community solar will matter to some residents. “It’s a viable option for low-income people that cannot pay the upfront cost of getting their solar or are renters,” said Boris Lukanov, co-author of a study on solar power and environmental justice.
Because the new home solar mandate is so new, the energy commission’s decision carries a lot of weight for the future of its enforcement, according to Elkind.
“There is a really strong precedential value here,” he said. “This is a new regulation that just went into effect, and this community solar piece of it hasn’t really been tested, and so it’s going to set a precedent for years to come for how utilities and real estate developers will respond to this regulation.”
Though many environmental groups opposed SMUD’s proposal, like Sierra Club California and 350 Sacramento, the National Resources Defense Council submitted a letter of support for the offsite solar program. Senior scientist Pierre Delforge with the NRDC said “there are things that could be improved” about SMUD’s program, but “it’s a step in the right direction.”
“One of the biggest gaps in our portfolio for clean energy at the moment is community solar,” Delforge said. “We have a lot of central utility scale solar, we have a lot of rooftop solar and we have very little community solar. And we’re going to need all of it to achieve our clean energy goals in an affordable manner.”
California is 60% “Abnormally Dry”…But Drought Doesn’t Happen Til 2021
San Jose Mercury
Following another week without rain — and none forecast through the end of this month across Northern California — the federal government on Thursday announced that unusually dry conditions are expanding across a wider swath of California’s landscape, increasing concerns about summer fire risk and the possible return of at least a modest drought this year.
Overall, 59.9% of the state’s land area is now classified as “abnormally dry,” up from 46.1% last week, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor, a weekly report issued by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
All nine Bay Area counties are now classified as abnormally dry. So are places that have suffered devastating fires in recent years: Sonoma, Napa, Lake and Mendocino counties. Without significant rain in March or April, fire danger in those areas and other parts of the state will be higher than normal again this summer.
“Given what we’ve seen so far this year and the forecast for the next few weeks, I do think it’s pretty likely we’ll end up in some degree of drought by this summer,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA, on Thursday.
Swain noted, however, that the state is equipped to handle one-year droughts pretty well without major water shortages because of water stored in reservoirs, groundwater wells and conservation.
It’s when dry conditions persist for several years, as they did during the state’s historic drought from 2012 to 2017, that problems arise.
“Assuming this year ends dry, which is pretty likely,” Swain said, “the question is what happens next year?”
Of note in Thursday’s federal report: The area of California where abnormally dry conditions are now present is 14 million acres larger than it was last week, a landscape 44 times the size of Los Angeles.
“The plants and the forests don’t benefit from the water storage reservoirs,” Swain said. “If conditions remain very dry heading into summer, the landscape and vegetation is definitely going to feel it this year. From a wildfire perspective, the dry years do tend to be the bad fire years, especially in Northern California.”
Last year, following a wet February and March, the state experienced a mild fire year, with high moisture levels in grasses, shrubs and trees — a welcome departure from prior years when major fires devastated Napa and Sonoma County, along with the town of Paradise in Butte County.
Altogether, Thursday’s report noted, 58% of California’s population, or 21.7 million people, are currently living in areas that are in moderate drought or are abnormally dry.
The amount of the state in “moderate drought,” a more serious category, remained the same this week as last week, at 9.5%. But that’s expected to increase if the National Weather Service’s dry forecast for the next two weeks bears out.
The reason for the dry conditions is a persistent weather pattern that is sending California’s rain toward Seattle.
“High pressure off the California coast kept much of California, Nevada, Arizona, and Utah precipitation-free this week, with above-normal temperatures in California,” wrote David Miskus, a NOAA meteorologist and author of Thursday’s drought report.
“Instead, Pacific storm systems were deflected northward or southward, allowing the Pacific Northwest to receive welcome moisture.”
The area in moderate drought Thursday, the driest in California, was in the Central Valley, covering roughly 10 million acres from Tuolumne County to Kern County.
The new report does not mean, however, that California is heading back into the kind of severe drought that the state experienced from 2012 to 2017.
There is still another month in the state’s rainy season. And California has had very wet “Miracle March” conditions in years past.
By comparison, five years ago, on the week of Feb. 17, 2015, an overwhelming 98% of the state was in at least a moderate drought, and 41% was in exceptional drought, the most severe of the five categories used in the report. That drought was broken by a series of massive atmospheric river, or “Pineapple Express,” storms that roared in off the Pacific in early 2017 and caused flooding in downtown San Jose and the collapse of the spillway at Oroville Dam in Butte County.
This winter season, although California experienced some decent rainfall around Thanksgiving and into December, the storms all but shut down after the New Year, and January and February have been unusually warm and dry.
Just one day in 2020 so far, Jan. 16, has had enough rain to bring at least 1 inch to San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose.
So far in February, not a drop of rain has fallen in San Francisco. If the month ends without any rain, it will be the first time since 1864 when February, usually one of the wettest months of the year, came up completely dry.
Lack of rain has meant lack of snow. On Wednesday, the statewide Sierra snowpack, the source of nearly one-third of California’s water, was at 52% of its historic average for that date, down from 92% on New Year’s Day.
The good news is that last year’s wet winter filled reservoirs, boosting the state’s water supply. On Thursday, Shasta Lake, the state’s largest reservoir, was 78% full — 109% of its historic average for mid-February. Oroville was 64% full, or 93% of its historic average. And San Luis Reservoir near Los Banos was 73% full, or 88% of average for this time of year.
Water managers are watching the weather trend nervously. Because of the reservoir storage, California usually needs at least two dry winters in a row before significant water conservation measures are imposed.
“I’m keeping my fingers crossed for some rain,” Swain said. “But there isn’t any on the horizon right now. At this point the odds of ending up at average for the whole winter are astronomically low. A Miracle March wouldn’t dig us all the way out of the hole, but it could help.”
Water Wars Go Nuclear – Trump Signs An Order; Newsom Files Lawsuit
Sacramento Bee
Gov. Gavin Newsom, in a pre-emptive strike against President Donald Trump, said he plans to sue Trump’s administration to block a controversial plan to increase water deliveries to the San Joaquin Valley.
Newsom’s office said he “will file legal action in the coming days … to protect highly imperiled fish species close to extinction.”
The announcement came just minutes before Trump appeared in Bakersfield to announce he’s finalized an order removing regulatory roadblocks and enabling the giant Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta pumps to deliver additional water to the southern half of the state.
Appearing with farm leaders and elected officials in the heart of Valley agriculture, the president endorsed new rules governing how water moves through the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. The decision is designed to open the floodgates so that millions of gallons additional water can flow to urban Southern California and the Valley, where farmers are constantly clamoring for additional supplies.
Trump, speaking to a cheering crowd at an airport hangar in Bakersfield, said his plan will bring “a massive amount of water for the use of California farmers and ranchers and all these communities that are suffering.” He decried state policies that have allowed “millions and millions of gallons (to be) wasted and poured into the ocean” and said he hopes Newsom would fall into line.
With roadblocks to water delivery removed, “you’re going to be able to farm your land and you’re going to be able to do things you never thought possible,” the president added. “Maybe we can get the governor to come along and really be friendly on this one.”
Newsom, who has sued Trump over everything from air pollution to immigration, originally threatened to sue over the water plan, saying it could harm the environment.
But the Democratic governor has also tried to find common ground with Trump on water. On Monday he sent the Interior Department a letter acknowledging that Valley farmers need more water and pledging to continue negotiating a compromise with federal officials.
“We remain committed to working to resolve these remaining differences in (the) coming weeks and months,” Newsom wrote in a letter to Interior Secretary David Bernhardt.
Newsom has been promoting a grand compromise plan on allocating river flows that are designed to prop up faltering fish populations — a plan that he says could resolve decades of “water wars” in California.
Some farm irrigation agencies, including the influential Westlands Water District in Fresno, have threatened to withdraw from the compromise talks if Newsom sued over Trump’s Delta pumping plan.
After Newsom announced he was going ahead with a lawsuit, Westlands general manager Tom Birmingham said he needs “to assess the situation” before the sprawling farm district continues negotiating on Newsom’s compromise.
“We are so very close to reaching an agreement,” Birmingham said. “It would be a shame to waste the work that has been done.”
Meanwhile, most environmentalists are skeptical about Newsom’s river-flow compromise and are pushing the governor to fight the Trump plan in court.
Environmentalists say the Delta pumps are so powerful that they can alter the natural water flows in the estuary, diverting migratory fish toward predators and the pumps themselves. They argue that additional pumping will put more pressure on endangered species such as Delta smelt and Chinook salmon, whose populations have dwindled in recent years.
“Trump’s shady water deal … seizes more Northern California water and gravely threatens the jobs of tens of thousands of Californians who work in the salmon industry,” said John McManus of the Golden State Salmon Association. He added that administration officials overruled federal scientists who had argued that the Trump plan would harm fish and the Delta’s eco-system.
Bernhardt — a former lobbyist for Westlands — called those criticisms unfair and said new scientific research shows pumping can be increased at strategic times without imperiling fish.
“We’ll be using the best science,” Bernhardt said at a conference Tuesday hosted by Trump’s political ally Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Tulare. “I feel like it’s rock solid.”
The amount of additional water that can be pumped will depend on the weather, he said. In wet years, like last winter, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation could have sent an extra 1 million acre-feet to the southern half of the state, Bernhardt said. An acre-foot is 326,000 gallons; 1 million acre-feet is slightly bigger than Folsom Lake when it’s full.
Valley officials called the decision a great gift to the region’s farms. “ Jason Phillips of the Friant Water Authority, a major water agency on the east side of the Valley, said Tuesday that the decision represents “the first substantive positive action that’s being implemented in the Valley for over 50 years.”
Yet Bernhardt said the president’s decision has benefits beyond agriculture.
“We’re talking about the water supply for 25 million people,” he said at Tuesday’s conference.
https://www.sacbee.com/news/california/water-and-drought/article240437356.html#storylink=cpy
Special Legislative Access for Special Interests?
Contributions & Trips via Nonprofits Proliferate
CalMatters
The California Legislature’s Latino Caucus recently circulated a memo offering a potential perk for members: A trip to Cuba to learn about “culture, history and possibly government structure and policy making.” The caucus’ nonprofit foundation, the memo said, would help pick up the tab. A visit to Israel for the Jewish Caucus was similarly underwritten, in part, by its nonprofit. The nonprofit Irish Caucus has organized three trips to Ireland for legislators and lobbyist friends.
A nonprofit run by a California assemblyman has helped fund a literacy organization led by his wife, who, as CEO, was drawing a six-figure salary. Nonprofits run by lawmakers and their staff are hosting fundraisers where lobbyists can mingle at the Disneyland Hotel with politicians, and policy conferences where tech executives can dine in Silicon Valley with legislators shaping California’s laws on data privacy and the gig economy.
These organizations also underwrite charitable work — scholarships, cultural celebrations, community film screenings — and let public officials help the state or advance causes they care about without tapping taxpayer money. But unlike campaign accounts, they often offer a tax break and can raise unlimited sums from powerful special interests, with fewer disclosure requirements.
In California, their numbers, as well as their donations, are surging. According to a CalMatters analysis, the number of nonprofits affiliated with California legislators or caucuses grew from at least three in 2010 to at least 12 last year, with total revenue of about $2.9 million.
Much of the money has come from corporations and unions with business before the Legislature, including oil, tobacco and other lobbies whose political contributions are officially or unofficially shunned by the member’s party. The upshot, experts say, is a monetary backchannel that, while legal and even sometimes beneficial, has also become an increasingly common way for politicians to raise and spend money outside the limits even of California’s tough regulations.
“It provides another way for the lawmaker to wield influence as well as a way for those who seek to influence the legislator to curry favor,” said Rick Hasen, a professor of law and political science at the University of California, Irvine. “This gives a donor some potential extra influence that they couldn’t buy through a campaign contribution.”
“We have stricter campaign finance laws than many states,” added Ellen Aprill, a professor at Loyola Law School who specializes in nonprofit tax law. “And money will find an outlet. If you can’t do it one way, they will do it another way.”
Nationally, ethical concerns have been raised about nonprofit organizations tied to Republican President Donald Trump and his 2016 rival, Democrat Hillary Clinton. Trump recently paid $2 million to settle a lawsuit by the New York attorney general and admitted misusing Trump Foundation funds. Clinton faced years of scrutiny over whether donations to the Clinton Foundation conflicted with her work as Secretary of State; an investigation, which found no wrongdoing, just wrapped up.
A 2018 report by the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law named presidents, governors, members of Congress and prominent mayors from both major parties who had used nonprofits to raise millions of dollars. Among them: Trump, Barack Obama, Sen. Bernie Sanders, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and, in California, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti. The report found, in particular, that “spending by nonprofits that coordinate with elected officials after they take office goes almost entirely unchecked.”
Closer to Sacramento, a politician’s nonprofit played a role in the corruption case that hit the California Capitol in 2013. An undercover FBI agent posing as a film producer bribed then-Sen. Ron Calderon of Montebello to advance legislation in part by paying $25,000 to a nonprofit run by his brother, former assemblyman Tom Calderon.
Wiretaps captured the senator saying, essentially, that the charity could be fattened in the short term and then tapped to generate a paycheck after he was out of public office. Both brothers wound up in prison. The nonprofit dissolved in 2015.
Despite the high-profile scandal, nonprofits with ties to the state Capitol have mushroomed over the last decade. The strategy isn’t limited to lawmakers with shared heritage. Oakland Assemblyman Rob Bonta, for example, created his own eponymous nonprofit foundation in 2017, and a group of legislators from Los Angeles County created one in 2019. Sylvia Rubio, the sister of two state lawmakers who is herself a candidate for Assembly this year, created a nonprofit Rubio Foundation last year as well.
The trend underscores the expanding role of money in politics since restrictions on political spending by corporations, including nonprofits, were lifted by the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision. While California law caps the amount donors can contribute to politicians’ campaigns, donations to nonprofits are not limited.
“Supreme Court decisions that have opened the floodgates for corporate spending have knocked against state laws that have attempted to limit direct contributions to legislators and candidates in order to avoid corruption,” said Kathay Feng of Common Cause, a government watchdog organization.
“There are a lot of special interests that have creatively found one loophole, which is to direct those corporate or union dollars to nonprofits. What legislators have figured out is that if they can control those nonprofits, it becomes a handy backdoor to continue receiving donations from special interests.”
Nonprofit entities offer politicians enormous flexibility in how much they tell the public about who’s giving them money. Federal law generally does not require that nonprofits disclose their donors to the public.
State law does require California politicians to publicly report payments of $5,000 or more made to a group at the politician’s request for a legislative, governmental or charitable purpose — a transaction called a “behested payment.”Most of the nonprofits affiliated with California lawmakers report the bulk of the donations they receive as behests to the state’s Fair Political Practices Commission. The amount of money lawmakers reported raising as “behested payments” for their nonprofits grew from $105,000 in 2011 to $2.9 million in 2019, for a total of nearly $13.3 million over the nine years.
Much of it comes from industries that routinely have business before the Democrat-dominated Legislature and are consistently big spenders on state politics. Labor unions gave lawmakers’ nonprofits more than $1.9 million between 2011 and 2019, while health care organizations gave $1.4 million and telecom/cable companies gave $1.6 million, according to state data on behests.
But Democratic lawmakers are also using their nonprofits to solicit donations from businesses their party has rejected for being anti-union or damaging to the environment or public health. The California Democratic Party does not take money from oil or tobacco companies, or Walmart. Yet oil companies have given lawmakers’ nonprofits $1.2 million over the last decade. Tobacco and e-cigarette makers have given $507,000. Walmart gave $95,000.
“We are not the party,” said Assemblywoman Shirley Weber, a Democrat who chairs the Legislature’s Black Caucus. “We don’t take positions against this group or that group, whether it’s smoking or alcohol,” she said, because the caucus includes a mix of moderate and progressive Democrats with different views.
The Black Caucus nonprofit reported soliciting more than $606,000 from oil companies and more than $462,000 from cigarette makers over the last decade. The group brings in more money than any other legislative nonprofit — $1.2 million in 2018, according to its tax filing — much of it raised over an annual weekend of golfing with lobbyists at Pebble Beach. The money paid for $155,000 in scholarships in 2018, as well as an annual camp where students learn about civic leadership, Weber said.
“As long as a person wants to help and contribute to scholarships and our leadership program to build the potential of young people,” she said, “there’s never been an effort not to accept contributions from those individuals.”
The timing of many donations to lawmakers’ nonprofits shows how interest groups can use such acts of charity to burnish their images — and curry favor — in the face of political pressure. E-cigarette company Juul gave $105,000 to the Black Caucus foundation in 2018, a month after federal regulators threatened to remove flavored vaping productsfrom the market if it didn’t make a plan to curb sales to minors. GEO Group, which runs private prisons, donated $20,000 to the Irish Caucus in July 2019 as the Legislature considered a bill to end the use of private prisons in California. Dialysis company DaVita gave nearly $250,000 combined to the Black, Latino and Women’s Caucus foundations between 2017 and 2019, as it fought a union-backed ballot measure, and then a bill, that would curb profits at dialysis clinics.
The big checks, while they might buy goodwill, don’t always pay off. The Legislature handily passed last year’s bills reining in dialysis clinics and phasing out private prison contracts (though the chair of the Irish Caucus, GOP Assemblyman Bill Brough of Orange County, voted against them, as did most Republicans, and both measures are now being challenged in court). And though legislation to crack down on flavored vapes died last year, it wasn’t because of the Black Caucus — in fact, one of its members wrote the bill.
Most of the nonprofits affiliated with California lawmakers are incorporated as charitable organizations forbidden from spending on political campaigns. As long as they stay clear of trying to influence elections, the law gives wide latitude on how these groups spend their money, said Phil Hackney, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh who previously litigated cases for the Internal Revenue Service, which regulates nonprofits.
“The notion of ‘charitable’ within 501(c)(3) is pretty expansive,” Hackney said. “It’s a broad standard and a lot of things fit under that umbrella.”
Trips to foreign countries, promotional videos, festivals, galas and conferences — all can be acceptable activities for a politician’s nonprofit “if they’re consistent with the organization’s mission,” Hackney said.
“To the extent it starts getting used to accomplish other purposes, then you’ve got other issues. Congressmen, assemblymen, presidents – when they have these things and spend money in ways that could benefit themselves, it raises ethical issues even if it doesn’t raise an IRS tax law matter.”
The Cuba trip the Latino Caucus is planning would be its first journey overseas, said Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, a San Diego Democrat who is the group’s leader. In her January memo to fellow lawmakers, Gonzalez wrote that the trip will take place over the Legislature’s spring break in April and is expected to cost each traveler about $3,500.
Legislators can pay with their own money or funds from their campaign accounts, Gonzalez wrote, adding that “because this trip is educational in purpose, the Latino Caucus Foundation can cover some member travel costs.”
Later, in response to questions from CalMatters, Gonzalez said the foundation is not likely to cover any costs for legislators who make the trip, only for two staff members. But details have not been finalized, she said, because the caucus is still working on legal clearance to make the trip, given the federal government’s restrictions on travel to Cuba.
“We’re working to make sure we could have the kind of educational experience and opportunity that we thought as a caucus could be used for policy matters we care about,” Gonzalez said, pointing to Cuba’s organic farming practices as an area that could inform how lawmakers try to improve conditions for farmworkers in California.
The Latino Caucus foundation was incorporated in 2004, making it the oldest of the nonprofits affiliated with California lawmakers. It reported revenue of more than $450,000 in 2018, according to its latest tax filing, and gave out $61,000 in scholarships and $157,000 in grants to community groups. The foundation holds an annual fundraiser at the Disneyland Hotel, where lawmakers mingle with lobbyists over dinner after a day of Latino Caucus policy meetings. The Disneyland location makes it easier for participants to include their families, Gonzalez said.
The Legislature’s Jewish Caucus foundation is much newer and brings in far less money — less than $50,000 in 2018, its tax filing shows. The caucus organized a trip to Israel last year to foster economic ties that California and Israel laid out in a 2015 agreement that calls for cooperating on a host of issues including academic research, cybersecurity and water management practices. Two non-legislative foundations paid for 16 legislators to go on the trip while the Jewish Caucus foundation paid for two staff members to attend, said Sen. Ben Allen, a Santa Monica Democrat who chairs the caucus.
“We had very substantive meetings the entire week. It was packed with meetings about everything from the economic situation to the political situation,” Allen said.
The Jewish Caucus also puts on an annual Holocaust memorial service at the Capitol, and its foundation spends roughly $10,000 flying survivors and US military veterans to Sacramento for the ceremony and hosting them for a brunch.
The Irish Caucus is set up differently from the others. Most caucuses are part of the Legislature, receiving some government funding, and operate their nonprofits as an outside arm with private donations. The Irish Caucus itself is a nonprofit, incorporated under the tax code used by social clubs, not charitable organizations. Brough, the assemblyman who chairs it, said he did it that way to avoid using any taxpayer money.
The caucus is meant to provide fellowship for people with Irish heritage as well as connections for companies with a presence in Ireland and California, he said. It reported raising $56,000 in 2018 and has organized three trips to Ireland — 52 people went last year, Brough said, including a bipartisan mix of legislators, lobbyists and staff. The caucus paid for the two staff members, Brough said, while other participants covered their own travel costs.
“We’re ombudsmen between the state and Ireland for relationships and any… companies that want to come here and settle,” Brough said. “We think we’ve been a facilitator for the economic cooperation between California and Ireland.”
Most nonprofits tied to the Legislature do not take trips abroad. More commonly they report spending on community events, such as recognition of local women leaders, an Armenian neighborhood tour or a Lunar New Year celebration.
“Our foundation reflects the fact that our numbers have significantly grown in the Capitol… and the deepening engagement that our caucus has had with broader Asian Pacific Islander communities around the state,” said Assemblyman David Chiu, a San Francisco Democrat who helped organize town hall meetings in California’s varied Asian communities as leader of that caucus.
The nonprofit affiliated with the Technology Caucus puts on an annual policy conference in Silicon Valley. Over the last two years, according to tax returns and the nonprofit’s lawyer, it made three charitable donations, including one for $10,000 to another foundation that shares a board member with the Tech Caucus foundation board.
Tax filings from 2018 also show that the largest donation made by the foundation created by Assemblyman Bonta was a $25,000 payment to Literacy Lab — a nonprofit where his wife was CEO. Bonta said the funds are intended as a loan to support a group that helps children in his district. In 2019 his foundation gave out $26,000 in college scholarships, he said, and this year it helped sponsor a college fair in his district.
Lawmakers from Los Angeles County organized a nonprofit late last year, so public records are not yet available to see how much money it’s raising or where it’s being spent. Assemblywoman Sydney Kamlager, a Democrat who leads the Los Angeles County Delegation Foundation, said the private funding paid for renting a room and catering so legislators could hold a meeting to discuss such policy issues as housing and transportation.
Why would public officials from the same region need a nonprofit to pay for a meeting room when they work together four days a week in the Capitol building?
“Being able to do that is easier said than done,” Kamlager said. “(Gathering) 40 people with very different schedules, representing various parts of the county, which is very big, is challenging. It really is important that we carve out specific time to talk about those issues.”