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IN THIS ISSUE – “This Moment Really Demands Soul Searching”
GOVENOR & LEGISLATURE CONFRONT 2021
- Newsom Confronts Massive Challenges in 2021; Offers Plan for Jobs & Housing to Open Budget Talks
- Legislature Returns Next Week to Historic Heavy Lift
- Governor’s Office Re-Organizes at the Top
- U-Haul Says California is No Longer a Moving Experience
- Silicon Valley’s Tech Dominance Dispersed by Pandemic
NATURAL RESOURCES
- California Environmentalists “Quietly Seething” at Opponents’ Topping of Former CARB Chief for Biden’s EPA
- State’s Largest Housing Development Wins in Federal Court
Capital News & Notes (CN&N) harvests California legislative and regulatory insights from dozens of media and official sources for the past week, tailored to your business and advocacy interests. Please feel free to forward.
READ ALL ABOUT IT!!
FOR THE WEEK ENDING JAN. 8, 2021
NOTE TO OUR READERS – CN&N next week provides detail on the FY21-22 State Budget. Gov. Newsom previews his proposal later today, and the Legislature offers its opening response on Monday.
Newsom Confronts Massive Challenges in 2021; Offers Plan for Jobs & Housing to Open Budget Talks
CalMatters, Sacramento Bee & Governor’s Media Release
Twelve months ago, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s star was ascending as an ample budget surplus bolstered his opportunities to enact his progressive agenda . Sen. Kamala Harris had recently dropped out of the Democratic presidential race but wouldn’t be named Joe Biden’s running mate for months, creating a clearer possible road to the White House for Newsom. Housing and homelessness were California’s preeminent political issues and would be the focus of Newsom’s State of the State address, which positioned housing to dominate the year (a contentious upzoning effort, Senate Bill 50, hadn’t even died yet !). For most of us, the coronavirus seemed a remote and vague threat.
Now we open 2021 with a raging pandemic poised to dominate our politics for months to come, imperiling Newsom by juicing an increasingly viable recall attempt. How the governor navigates the former will directly affect the prospects of the latter. That involves Newsom managing the enormously complex task of vaccinating millions of Californians
Competition for Newsom’s job is heating up. Former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer launched a gubernatorial exploratory committee Monday, two days after the Republican publicly endorsed the movement to recall Newsom. The timing of Faulconer’s formal campaign launch will likely depend on whether the recall effort is able to submit nearly 1.5 million valid signatures by March, prompting an election in late 2021 or early 2022. (If the recall fails, Newsom will still be up for reelection in 2022.) Around 911,000 signatures have already been gathered, according to the recall campaign. One of its major funders is Republican businessman John Cox, who ran against Newsom in 2018 and recently filed a candidate intention statement to run for governor again in 2022.
Another major funder: A mysterious Orange County-based LLC called Prov. 3:9, whose limited paper trail led Ann Ravel, the former chair of California’s campaign finance watchdog, to call Monday for an investigation into the funding source.
Ravel, a Democrat: Prov. 3:9 resembles “a shell company being used to evade disclosure of the person or persons funding the recall contribution.”
Anne Dunsmore, manager of the recall campaign: Ravel’s complaint is “clearly a partisan stab. … The big message to me is that they are taking us seriously now.”
Newsom wants to spend an additional $4 billion in the next state budget to help struggling businesses survive the coronavirus pandemic and invest in green technology, he announced.
Newsom will ask lawmakers to approve nearly $1 billion of that money immediately once they get back this month. Lawmakers are scheduled to return Monday after they delayed their start date due to the surge in COVID-19 cases across the state.
Newsom says he plans to ask the Legislature to allocate $575 million in grants for small businesses immediately to help them through the pandemic. That will build on $500 million that Newsom and lawmakers allocated for small business grants last year, which can provide up to $25,000 for businesses hurt by the COVID-19 restrictions.
The plan offers a glimpse into Newsom’s priorities for the 2021-22 budget, which will be released in full on Friday, kicking off months of negotiations with the Legislature. However, Newsom wants lawmakers to immediately approve nearly $1 billion — mainly for small businesses and housing — when they return to Sacramento on Monday. Legislative leaders seemed amenable to this request, even as they emphasized that they had proposals of their own — signaling they don’t want a repeat of last session, when many felt their role was reduced to “simply giving a yes or no answer to the governor’s priorities,” in the words of then-state Sen. Holly Mitchell, a San Diego Democrat.
- Senate President Pro Tem Toni Atkins and Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon:“A unified effort is critical to success, and we look forward to working with the governor on the specifics of his, and legislative, proposals to take early action in providing meaningful additional relief.”
Here’s a closer look at Newsom’s recovery package:
- $1.5 billionfor constructing electric charging and hydrogen fueling stations, and subsidizing purchases of zero-emissions cars
- $777.5 millionfor job creation and retention
- $575 millionin small-business grants (on top of $500 million allocated last year)
- $500 millionto build more than 7,500 permanently affordable homes
- $353 millionfor workforce development
- $300 millionfor deferred maintenance of state properties
- $70.6 millionfor fee waivers for businesses and individuals impacted by the pandemic
Newsom is also asking lawmakers to immediately approve $250 million for grants to build infrastructure to support new housing, including sewers and roads. He will seek an additional $250 million for the same program through the traditional budget process, during which Newsom and lawmakers will work for months to negotiate the state budget for the 2021-22 fiscal year that begins July 1.
He’s also seeking immediate approval of $70 million in fee waivers for businesses that have been disproportionately hurt by the pandemic shutdown, including bars, restaurants and salons, Department of Finance spokesman H.D. Palmer said.
“These budget proposals reflect our commitment to an equitable, broad-based recovery that ensures California remains the best place to start and grow a business,” Newsom wrote in a statement. “I look forward to continuing to partner with the Legislature to advance these priorities so our economy can emerge stronger, fairer and more prosperous than before.”
Newsom is also proposing the following through the regular 2021 budget process:
- $600 million in business tax credits and sales tax exclusions
- $353 million for workforce development programs
- $300 million for maintenance of state properties that Newsom says will help create jobs and reduce the state’s carbon footprint, including by installing electric vehicle charging stations
- $1.5 billion to help low-income Californians buy zero-emission vehicles and to build infrastructure to support them, including electric charging stations and hydrogen fueling stations
Newsom is scheduled to unveil his full 2021 budget proposal Friday. He has already said he will ask the Legislature to approve $2 billion for school reopenings through early budget action when they return this month, as well as $300 million for the state’s coronavirus vaccination campaign.
In a joint statement, Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon and Senate President Pro Tem Toni Atkins endorsed the idea of acting quickly to provide some assistance to struggling Californians.
“Californians are hurting and need immediate assistance to weather the current crisis,” the legislative leaders wrote. “A unified effort is critical to success and we look forward to working with the Governor on the specifics of his, and legislative, proposals to take early action in providing meaningful additional relief.”
https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article248294580.html#storylink=cpy
Governor’s proposal:
Legislature Returns Next Week to Historic Heavy Lift
Sacramento Bee
In California, pain is everywhere.
At food banks, where hungry families once able to comfortably stock their pantries stand for hours in lines that circle around the buildings. At home, where renters anxiously crunch numbers to make next month’s payment pencil out. At fast food restaurants, where kids connect to free WiFi so they can log on for class.
After a four-month recess, state lawmakers are preparing to return to Sacramento Jan. 11 with a list of proposals to ease the financial agony reverberating through the Golden State.
Yet for some Democrats, COVID-19 has sparked more than legislative ambitions.
After nine months of watching their constituents suffer, COVID-19 has inspired a professional revelation: government isn’t working, despite the fact that their party controls the Capitol.
As federal officials largely left states to fend for themselves, the billions in reserves the state had going into the pandemic couldn’t safeguard millions in the middle and working classes from the worst of COVID-19. Neither could a list of progressive policies considered national examples of how to care for the sick, unsheltered and poor.
The pandemic, they said, laid bare their failure to address issues like housing and hunger even before the crisis hit.
“Normal wasn’t working for so many people,” said Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks, D-Oakland. “Highest cost of living in the country. Education gaps. We don’t have great paid leave policies. We don’t have affordable child care…(COVID-19) really shined a spotlight on some of the issues that are front and center for us.”
Sixty-three percent of Californians believe that children growing up today won’t have the same financial opportunities as their parents, according to a December Public Policy Institute of California survey. Nearly 70% said California’s gap between the rich and poor is expanding.
At least a third of California’s low-income households are either on unemployment or have lost work, can’t pay a bill or are worried about keeping up with their rent or mortgage. Forty-three percent have visited a food bank in the last year, while 38% are on food stamps.
“This moment really demands a level of intentionality and soul searching amongst lawmakers,” Wicks said, “To say, ‘we have to do better for our constituents.’”
But where to begin? And how?
The Legislature isn’t built for speed or flexibility, said Democratic consultant Andrew Acosta, which hamstrings lawmakers who are eager to address “a crisis where people are looking for answers yesterday.”
They can write letters asking Gov. Gavin Newsom to keep playgrounds open, lobby on behalf of essential workers for a top spot in line for the COVID-19 vaccine or launch a fundraising effort for furloughed restaurant employees.
What’s really needed, however, is courage to break from standard legislative protocol to finally address the root issues of what’s caused so much suffering this year, Acosta argued.
“If you can’t change how the process works, then you’re limited in how you can move quickly and adjust on the fly,” Acosta said. “But now that we’re in COVID, in my opinion, you have to rise up and break up out of the status quo, the ‘we always have to do it this way.’”
Here’s where Democrats said they will start:
Around 1.3 million renters in California are “extremely low income,” according to 2018 data from the National Low Income Housing Coalition. Seventy-seven percent of these households are considered “severely cost burdened,” meaning they spend more than half of their income on housing costs.
The pandemic disproportionately slammed these households, with many of its residents already living a “paycheck or two away from the streets,” said Assemblyman Jesse Gabriel, D-Encino.
Democrats have imposed too many fees and environmentally driven barriers to construction, some acknowledged, resulting in less supply and higher rents for their constituents.
It didn’t have to be this way.
In early 2020, Newsom called for a bill that would spur construction to help alleviate a statewide multi-million unit shortage following years of lukewarm interest in the Legislature to fundamentally change how California builds homes.
Even as COVID-19 forced legislators to shear hundreds of bills from their agenda, Senate President Pro Tem Toni Atkins, D-San Diego, built a blueprint in 2020 with her Democratic colleagues to modify California’s zoning restrictions, allow for infill residential development on commercial property and to let cities build more duplexes.
The plan failed amid what Isaac Hale, political science lecturer at UC Davis, called “inter-chamber” politics and “divides within the Democratic caucus” over how best to solve California’s housing crisis.
“That was a choice,” Hale said.
Several sessions of stalled housing solutions helped create the state’s most pressing shelter emergency: hundreds of thousands of California renters face eviction by Feb. 1.
Extending an eviction ban beyond that date with Assembly Bill 15, Assemblyman David Chiu, D-San Francisco said, is critical to keeping Californians in their homes during COVID-19, and while the Legislature works on proposals to put more units online.
“Production absolutely needs to be part of the agenda for 2021,” Chiu said. “We can’t allow for politics as usual to stymie a critical solution for saving Californians. Too many people are suffering. We have to grapple with the hardest questions and hammer out solutions for them.”
Within California’s COVID-19 statistics dashboard is a story of racial, wealth and medical inequity, especially among certain populations historically denied health care.
About 12% of California Latinos lack insurance, a December California Latino Economic Institute report includes, which is “double the rate of other groups.”
Though they make up 39% of the state’s population, Latinos in California represent 55% of COVID-19 cases and 47% of deaths.
The numbers have reinvigorated a legislative appetite to expand coverage to every Californian, regardless of immigration status.
Low-income undocumented children and young adults already qualify for Medi-Cal.
But as the virus continues devastating Latino communities, Assemblyman Joaquin Arambula, D-Fresno, said it’s imperative to provide coverage for undocumented adults.
He said this expansion, which would cost an estimated $2.6 billion, would offer desperately needed relief for “those who work in our fields and in other essential jobs to keep our economy and health care delivery system going during this crisis.”
The list of failures within the California Employment Development Department since the start of the pandemic reflects more than an antiquated system pushed to its technical limitations.
Instead, some Democrats have argued, the mountain of backlogged cases indicate a fundamentally flawed labor system that leaves too many low- and middle-class families living paycheck to paycheck while the state gets more expensive.
“We’ve never been really honest about our middle class simply hanging on. Yes, they’ve been able to get by,” said Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, D-San Diego. “(But) we’re starting to see the middle class feel the stressors the working class has felt for years.”
The state’s current Pandemic Unemployment Assistance maxes out at $450 a week, according to the agency’s website.
Most checks totaled less than that, said Sylvia Allegretto, co-chair of the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics at UC Berkeley, which is “just not enough.”
“What were people thinking was going to happen? The idea that people don’t have paid time off, don’t have sick leave, don’t have child care, that essential workers are CEOs,” Allegretto said. “That’s laughable. We know who the essential workers are.”
With unemployment hovering around 8%, and stay-at-home orders likely to remain in effect for several more weeks, Gonzalez said now is the time to push for stronger labor protections. Her ideas include expanding the state’s paid family leave program to cover at least 90% of workers’ income and working to increase sick days from three to five, two goals Gonzalez said COVID-19 has made that much more important.
“Sometimes we take baby steps in order to get the policy,” Gonzalez said. “But now we say, ‘Ok, we know it’s tough, but we have to push this.’”
All of it costs money.
John Kabateck, California director for the National Federation of Independent Business, said now is the time for California to save, not spend, and to avoid raising taxes or caving to special interest groups’ expensive requests.
“Our policymakers never met a dollar bill they didn’t like,” Kabateck said. “Hopefully this pandemic has given all of our state leaders an Economics 101 lesson on how to be better at spending our dollars.”
Still, teachers unions will want more money to safeguard their classrooms from COVID-19. Affordable housing advocates want a low-income housing tax credit for developers. Social safety net advocates are petitioning against cuts to services.
Chris Hoene, executive director of the California Budget and Policy Center, said lawmakers would be wise to use the budget as a tool to ease pandemic inequities, which will require “a shift in public policy that is also unprecedented.”
Everything from small business assistance to child care subsidies, he said, will be necessary to get the workforce moving again.
“And I am not sure that state and federal leaders are comprehending the extent to which there is a need to shift,” Hoene said. “The policy levers are there, but the political will is not there. They approach austerity at their own peril.”
Wicks said it will take legislative grit to accomplish the bold proposals the pandemic mandates.
“We do have legislators who are trying to figure this out,” Wicks added. “And maybe that’s the silver lining. When there’s a crisis, there’s urgency to address these things that needed to be addressed for a long time.”
https://www.sacbee.com/article247950105.html#storylink=cpy
Governor’s Office Re-Organizes at the Top
Sacramento Bee
California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s chief of staff Ann O’Leary resigned her post and political operative Jim DeBoo will step into a new executive secretary role, the governor’s office announced Monday.
As executive secretary, DeBoo will lead Newsom’s office “alongside” Cabinet Secretary Ana Matosantos, according to Newsom’s office.
“I could not think of a more qualified or committed team in their respective roles to help me and my Administration lead California to a healthier, more inclusive future for all,” Newsom said in a statement.
As executive secretary, DeBoo will take over O’Leary’s work overseeing the governor’s “overall strategy including communications, legislative, external affairs and intergovernmental affairs,” Newsom’s office said in a news release. Matosantos will continue to oversee state government agencies and departments. Traditionally, the cabinet secretary is the second-highest-ranking role after chief of staff.
DeBoo has been a close political adviser to Newsom. During California’s March primary elections, DeBoo led an unsuccessful ballot measure campaign spearheaded by the Democratic governor that would have provided bond funding to update school buildings. He previously worked as a lobbyist representing landlords and medical groups, but de-registered as a lobbyist to join the Newsom administration, according to the governor’s office.
“I am humbled to return to public service during these challenging times to serve the people of California under Governor Newsom’s leadership,” Jim DeBoo said in a written statement.
Newsom’s office did not announce where O’Leary will go next, although she is widely believed to be in contention for a job in President-Elect Joe Biden’s administration. She will continue in her role through mid-January.
“She led the Administration through unprecedented crises – a global pandemic, the PG&E bankruptcy, a climate crisis and a national reckoning on race,” Newsom said. “She has left her mark on California through what we have accomplished over these two years – from expansions of paid family leave, the Earned Income Tax Credit and child care opportunities to our first-in-the nation zero-emission vehicle mandate and California’s death penalty moratorium.”
A former aide to Bill and Hillary Clinton, O’Leary led Newsom’s staff starting at the end of 2018 when she spearheaded his transition and through his first two years as governor.
Newsom said O’Leary agreed to join his administration if he promised to pursue an expansion of paid family leave programs. As his chief of staff, she made kid-friendly policies a priority both in the governor’s office and in the state policies she helped shape.
She and Newsom, both parents to school-age children, have spearheaded expansions to early childhood education and paid family leave programs in California over the last two years.
O’Leary got her start in D.C. politics out of college in Bill Clinton’s White House, where she held escalating roles and helped develop the Children’s Health Insurance Program.
She worked closely with Biden’s pick for chief of staff Ron Klain during Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign. O’Leary served as a top policy adviser to Clinton alongside Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris’ sister Maya Harris and Biden’s newly appointed national security adviser Jake Sullivan.
After Clinton lost the election, O’Leary became a partner at law firm Boies Schiller Flexner, where she worked for nearly two years before she left to join the Newsom administration.
While O’Leary came from a national politics background, DeBoo has a long history in Sacramento. Before he became a lobbyist, DeBoo held a host of jobs in the Legislature, including director of the Assembly Democrats, the campaign arm of the Assembly Democratic Caucus. He also served as interim chief of staff for Speaker John A. Pérez.
https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article247709890.html#storylink=cpy
U-Haul Says California is No Longer a Moving Experience
Sacramento Bee
U-Haul, the national rental truck company, provided yet more evidence California is dropping in popularity as a place to live, even as Sacramento is gaining ground as a COVID-19 era landing spot.
The company’s annual migration analysis ranks California last among states in net migration to and from other states. Put another way, California lost more residents to other states than any other state, as measured by “one-way” U-Haul trucks crossing state lines.
Tennessee saw the biggest net influx nationally, followed by Texas and Florida.
At the same time, though, the Sacramento region ranked as the 11th most popular area in the country for U-Haul moving truck arrivals, ranking behind only Surprise, Ariz. and St. George, Utah among “go-to” areas in the western United States.
Redding was the only other California city to make the list, in 16th place.
The U-Haul data represent do-it-yourself movers, not all people who moved. The data show that people are moving into California from others states as well, just not as many as are leaving.
The company’s data, however, does corroborate a slew of other recent data that suggest California, particular the urban coast, is no longer a growth area. California’s annual Department of Finance population numbers last month showed that state growth had essentially stalled for the first time in modern history.
Overall, some 200,000 more people left the state than moved here in that time period, July 2019 to end of June 2020, according to the finance department’s demographics unit.
Sacramento, Placer and Yolo counties, however, grew in population during that same period, according to the state. El Dorado in fact had the largest percentage growth in the state at 1.7%.
The U-Haul analysis suggests that the Sacramento region’s population growth during the pandemic came at the expense mainly of the Bay Area, where housing costs are among the highest in the country.
According to U-Haul, the top landing sites for people leaving the Bay Area were Sacramento, San Diego and Stockton. Outside of California, the top destinations were Reno, Las Vegas, Portland, Phoenix and Seattle.
https://www.sacbee.com/news/business/article248267715.html#storylink=cpy
Silicon Valley’s Tech Dominance Dispersed by Pandemic
Politico
Dozens of tech hubs around the world have dreamed of nipping at Silicon Valley’s heels, but in 2020 those dreams are starting to look like reality.
Thanks to Covid-19, “the spreading out of tech is having a 10-year acceleration,” says Rana Sarkar, Canada’s consul general for San Francisco and Silicon Valley.
Before the pandemic, mid-size cities across North America and Europe and major Asian centers would create startup accelerators only to struggle to retain their local talent or attract venture capital — one of the leading measures of success, pre-pandemic. Today it’s more about keeping talent at your company, wherever that talent happens to be. “The more broadly we can appeal to people, in terms of letting them work from anywhere and … letting them contribute at a high level from anywhere, that’s our plan,” Okta CEO Todd McKinnon told CNBC on Dec. 3.
Silicon Valley’s ability to cluster talent has long been tied to colleges like Stanford University and a profusion of venture capital. Stanford is going strong — pandemic disruptions notwithstanding — but Palo Alto’s famed Sand Hill Road is no longer the only place startup founders flock as they seek to raise cash. The world’s biggest tech-focused venture capital fund is now SoftBank’s Vision Fund, which is Japanese-owned and Saudi-financed.
Startups can also now go online to make deals. Or they can make connections at events like Portugal’s Web Summit, which attracts 100,000 in a normal year and has been credited with doing more than any other event to shape the world’s startup ecosystem. Paddy Cosgrave, Web Summit’s co-founder and CEO, said in an interview that “Silicon Valley will one day resemble the Detroit of today,” referencing the city’s decline from its auto industry golden age. Technology and talent concentrates for a time, Cosgrave said, but in a pattern repeated across empires and ages, it always moves on.
Today, the country with the most startups per capita is Israel. The U.S. is ranked tenth.
America’s veteran tech investors and companies are looking elsewhere for success, too. Steve Case, who co-founded and grew AOL into the first huge internet company, preaches “the rise of the rest,” while working to spread venture capital to America’s heartland. Michael Moritz, the British journalist turned billionaire VC investor, is now placing his bets in Sweden as the new chair of Klarna, a fintech firm.
Established companies from Oracle to HP and Tesla to Palantir have made headlines in recent weeks with announcements they are moving headquarters and production out of California. While the moves may be mostly a symbolic protest against California’s governance and tax regime, the decisions have stirred a debate around whether Silicon Valley-style innovation is delivering the change the world needs.
“To the extent that moves from Silicon Valley reflect a desire to escape California rules and regulations, it’s a bit like running from responsibility. Running will only empower regulatory forces that are less inclined to support the innovation side of the equation,” said Eileen Donahoe, executive director of Stanford University’s Global Digital Policy Incubator. “At some point, companies and regulators need to recognize we need both innovation and responsibility to the larger communities in which the companies operate,” she said.
Benedict Evans, a former partner at the storied Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz who is now based in London, says the choices startups make matter more to the Valley’s future than what legacy companies like Oracle and HP do. Startups are not “rejecting the Valley startup model — they’re being driven out by house prices and quality of life,” Evans said.
In between the startups and tech’s old guard are the middle-aged companies that have provided the industry’s biggest successes of 2020. To find them, you need to look to Seattle-based Amazon, and Shopify, the e-commerce backroom engine often pinned as the anti-Amazon, based in Ottawa.
Shopify is hardly the only Canadian tech success story — the country’s tech scene is now among the hottest globally. In the five years up to 2020, the city of Toronto created more tech jobs than the Bay area, Seattle and Washington, D.C. metro area (home to Amazon’s new second headquarters) combined, said Rana Sarkar. Toronto is Canada’s biggest tech hub, but others, including Ottawa, Vancouver, and Waterloo, are growing at even faster rates, bringing Canada’s tech workforce to around 900,000.
It helps that Canada shares time zones and culture with its southern neighbor, and that rents in Toronto and Ottawa are around half that of the Bay Area. But Sarkar says that Canada has spent decades ploughing resources into creating “embedded advantages” — like early artificial intelligence investments, public universities and a huge immigration program. Together he calls them Canada’s “weapons of mass attraction.”
Sarkar wants startups interested in “intentional growth” to make Canada their home. His bet is that helping people “build something meaningful by letting them plan for their family and company for 20 years” is more in-tune with what millennials and Gen Z entrepreneurs want. He’s working to lure back home any of the 250,000 Canadians — and their companies — who feel they’ve outgrown Silicon Valley’s mantra of “move fast and break things.”
Marietje Schaake, International Policy Director at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center, said we are now in “a real catch-up moment” where democratic governments are seeking to “counterbalance the uncontrolled and outsized power the Silicon Valley giants have amassed.” Self-regulation “clearly did not work and trust has run out,” she said.
Schaake, a former member of the European Parliament, sees the same dynamics playing out on both sides of the Atlantic: While the EU announced a package of draft laws this week to restrict big tech companies, American states are filing lawsuit after lawsuit with similar aims, including, most recently, one from more than 30 states demanding Google’s breakup. Legislators from both parties are rounding on tech CEOs.
The message from Washington to Brussels appears to be that Silicon Valley needs a new, more responsible model. If Valley-based investors and innovators don’t want to change, “there is room for more ecosystems of innovation,” Schaake said.
Politico
The last-minute toppling of Mary Nichols as the leading contender for the nation’s highest environmental post has left many in California’s green movement quietly seething at more liberal colleagues who openly advocated against her.
Nichols, the state’s longtime California Air Resources Board chair, was often considered the most qualified leader in contention for the Environmental Protection Agency position and believed to have been the frontrunner for weeks, enjoying support from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and numerous House Democrats.
But Biden on Thursday chose to nominate Michael Regan, the top environmental regulator for North Carolina who has been praised for his work on behalf of poor and minority communities. It came after California environmental justice advocates wrote a letter to the Biden transition team urging the president-elect to choose someone other than Nichols, whom they said had not done enough to curb pollution in the state’s hardest-hit neighborhoods.
Their victory portends more clout for environmental justice advocates, within California and nationally.
California mainstream environmentalists have expressed their frustration and anger behind the scenes. But almost none was willing to publicly criticize the progressive movement nor openly advocate for Nichols in the final days before Biden made his decision. It’s not clear how much effect the environmental justice letter had, but Biden’s choice means California will not have one of its own leading U.S. EPA.
“I’ve been a bit challenged in understanding the political calculus or positioning of some of the groups that have come out strongly in opposition to a Californian leading the Environmental Protection Agency,” said Assemblymember Eduardo Garcia (D-Coachella), one of the few people willing to speak on the record about Nichols losing out. “Ultimately I feel it’s a really lost opportunity for California, for the country and for us in the environmental justice advocacy world.”
Nichols fell from the frontrunner position this week after 74 activists signed a letter to the Biden transition team arguing that she hadn’t worked well with environmental justice groups. Although environmental justice groups have long protested the state’s cap-and-trade program and associated policies, mainstream environmentalists didn’t anticipate they would air those grievances on the national level, or that they would get the traction that they did.
Biden may also have been concerned that Nichols would face a tough road to confirmation in a Republican-held Senate. Regardless of the weight the environmental justice letter had, it laid bare a difference in tactics that has distinguished the EJ movement for years in California.
Where mainstream environmental groups often take measured positions on legislation and regulations they don’t fully support, environmental justice groups are more strident, staging protests at CARB meetings and refusing to endorse market-based policies. That approach has helped them to claim victories like the spending of at least 35 percent of cap-and-trade proceeds in disadvantaged communities.
“With all the successes that the environmental justice groups have had within California, they have typically started with a form of conflict, then collaboration,” said Michael Mendez, an environmental policy professor at University of California, Irvine and author of the recent book “Climate Change from the Streets.”
“The letter reflected the zeitgeist moment that we’re living in,” Mendez said. “It’s a new era. And a new political calculus for ambitious policymakers working in the climate sphere.”
Environmental justice groups’ opposition to Nichols’ nomination has become a case study of the tension between the left and more centrist wings of the Democratic Party. Nichols is a towering figure in environmental policy, having served as CARB chair under three governors, implemented the state’s economywide carbon cap and held the line against the Trump administration’s environmental rollbacks. But groups representing disadvantaged communities charge she hasn’t done enough to rein in the conventional air pollution that persists in many areas of the state and has contributed to asthma and other health problems.
Nichols ultimately found herself in the same position that other California politicians have on the national stage: pilloried by the in-state left while being considered too liberal for red states. Some compared Nichols’ treatment to how Vice President-elect Kamala Harris fared when she ran for president. And state Attorney General Xavier Becerra has already been branded as a “radical” Californian by Republicans despite facing criticism from liberals for not doing enough on police reform.
“I think EJ is nuts,” said one former lawmaker. “Seriously. I would rather know the person in charge than not know them. How many of these folks have Michael Regan’s cell number? Just Politics 101.”
But Martha Arguello, executive director of Physicians for Social Responsibility-Los Angeles and a signatory of the letter against Nichols, said principles were more important than access to a Californian.
“The environmental justice community does not trade in that kind of ‘Oh, somehow she’s from California or they’re from California, I will have access, and that is actually more important than somebody’s record on the issue that I care most about,'” she said.
Following the environmental justice letter, which was sent with three signatories Nov. 24 and then again Dec. 2 with 74 backers, public support for Nichols was scant.
A trickle of endorsements began flowing in the following days, including a letter from 29 House Democrats and one from two Latino state officials. Another letter, from 164 California officials, environmentalists and academics, was sent Wednesday.
Behind the scenes, mainstream environmentalists were incensed at the attack but kept quiet for various reasons: They felt they would make the situation worse for Nichols by responding publicly or they didn’t want to jeopardize their relationships with EJ groups.
“I tried to get environmentalists to say something; they just said, ‘It’s too awkward for us,'” said CARB board member Dan Sperling, director of the Institute for Transportation Studies at UC Davis.
The handful of mainstream environmentalists willing to speak on the record were deferential to the growing power of the environmental justice movement.
“People that have ignored the environmental justice community have done so at their own peril,” said Dan Jacobson, legislative director for Environment California. “It’s not a fleeting issue, it’s not a flash in the pan; this is what California politics are going to look like for the indefinite future.”
“The reason I’m thrilled with them having more power is because even if we disagree, it’s a very small percentage of the time, and in the fight we’re in for climate change and protecting the environment, we need all the powerful allies we can get.”
Environmentalists are hoping the two wings of the movement can stick together despite the fracture. State lawmakers are expected to introduce a proposal in the upcoming session to rein in hydraulic fracturing, and potentially another that would attempt to mandate minimum distances between oil and gas wells and homes, schools and other sensitive sites.
The Air Resources Board, meanwhile, is implementing Gov. Gavin Newsom’s September executive order calling for an end to new internal-combustion passenger vehicles by 2035 and is updating the “scoping plan” that sets out which policies it will use to reach its 2030 emissions targets. Environmental justice groups want less reliance on cap-and-trade and more emphasis on direct pollution reduction at industrial facilities located near low-income neighborhoods.
“It’s been very hurtful to see this eating of our own,” said one environmentalist. “I reject the split. Some people have tried to create one, but I think we’re all trying to get the same thing, and that breaks my heart.”
Not all environmental justice advocates agreed with the letter, but all agree that the movement’s star is rising.
“This is a better time for EJ than for mainstream,” said Luis Olmedo, executive director of the Imperial Valley group Comite Civico del Valle. “Let’s take our seat. Let’s stop walking around the table.”
State’s Largest Housing Development Wins in Federal Court
Bakersfield Californian
A federal judge has rejected the latest lawsuit aimed at stopping Tejon Ranch Co. from building an upscale residential project near the company’s Lebec headquarters.
California Central District Judge Cormac J. Carney ruled Dec. 4 that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service did not violate federal guidelines when it approved a habitat conservation plan the plaintiffs alleged should have recognized the California condor as a “traditional cultural property” deserving special protection. Such a recognition could have sunk the housing development as proposed.
Carney wrote that the condor is not itself a traditional cultural property and neither is the condor’s habitat. He also found there is no evidence the defendant — the USFWS — ignored tribal input about proposed measures to reduce the impacts of development on the condor.
Tejon Ranch said in a news release Carney’s summary amounts to a repudiation of the anti-development efforts of the Arizona-based Center for Biological Diversity, which was a plaintiff in the suit along with the Ventura-based Wishtoyo Foundation and Delia Dominguez.
“The tactics employed by CBD to litigate, delay and obstruct proposed housing developments throughout California, including Tejon Ranch, are a significant contributing factor to the housing crisis in California,” the company said in the release.
CBD staff attorney J.P. Rose said by email the ruling “doesn’t change the fact that condors are critically endangered and sacred to Native peoples.”
“When agencies do things that are so plainly unwise and illegal, we look to the courts for relief,” Rose wrote. “Unfortunately, the court here deferred to the Fish and Wildlife Service despite the agency’s complete lack of expertise regarding the condor’s cultural significance.”
Tejon Ranch has proposed three major housing developments on its 270,000-acre property straddling southern Kern and northern Los Angeles counties. The one targeted in the lawsuit, Tejon Mountain Village, would site more than 3,400 homes, 750 hotel rooms and two golf courses near Frazier Park.
Tejon Ranch noted the CBD has repeatedly tried to delay development on Tejon Ranch. The group filed an environmental lawsuit against Kern County in 2009 and lost in superior and appellate state courts. It also sued to stop expansion of the Tejon Ranch Commerce Center but lost in superior and appellate courts.
“Even in the face of this onslaught by CBD and other environmental groups who rush to court to try and derail Tejon Ranch’s efforts to responsibly develop its landholdings and create thousands of homes and jobs for Californians,” it said in a news release, “Tejon Ranch Company remains fully committed to the ongoing stewardship of the ranch’s 270,000 acres, as it has done for over 175 years.”