For Clients & Friends of The Gualco Group, Inc.
IN THIS ISSUE – “We Can’t Build Infrastructure in Under a Decade”
Water district executive on why drought response is moving slowly
- Stark Drop in Start-Up Funding Roils Silicon Valley; May Impact State Revenue
- “Unprecedented” Water Cutbacks From Fresno to Oregon Border
- Water Infrastructure Takes Decades: “No Easy Solutions Left”
- Ending the Petroleum Economy: “If Oil Goes Away, We Don’t Have Anything”
- Propositions Set for Fall Ballot
Capital News & Notes (CN&N) harvests California policy, legislative and regulatory insights from dozens of media and official sources for the past week. Please feel free to forward this unique client service.
FOR THE WEEK ENDING JULY 8, 2022
Stark Drop in Start-Up Funding Roils Silicon Valley; May Impact State Revenue
NY Times
SAN FRANCISCO — For the first time in three years, start-up funding is dropping.
The numbers are stark. Investments in U.S. tech start-ups plunged 23 percent over the last three months, to $62.3 billion, the steepest fall since 2019, according to figures released on Thursday by PitchBook, which tracks young companies.
Even worse, in the first six months of the year, start-up sales and initial public offerings — the primary ways these companies return cash to investors — plummeted 88 percent, to $49 billion, from a year ago. This could soon reduce State revenues – capital gains contribute significantly to the General Fund.
The declines are a rarity in the start-up ecosystem, which enjoyed more than a decade of outsize growth fueled by a booming economy, low interest rates and people using more and more technology, from smartphones to apps to artificial intelligence. That surge produced now-household names such as Airbnb and Instacart. Over the past decade, quarterly funding to high growth start-ups fell just seven times.
But as rising interest rates, inflation and uncertainty stemming from the war in Ukraine have cast a pall over the global economy this year, young tech companies have gotten hit. And that foreshadows a difficult period for the tech industry, which relies on start-ups in Silicon Valley and beyond to provide the next big innovation and growth engine.
The start-up industry still has plenty of money behind it, and no collapse is imminent. Investors continue to do deals, funding 4,457 transactions in the last three months, up 4 percent from a year ago, according to PitchBook. Venture capital firms, including Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital, are also still raising large new funds that can be deployed into young companies, collecting $122 billion in commitments so far this year, PitchBook said.
Start-ups are also accustomed to the boy who cried wolf. Over the last decade, various blips in the market have led to predictions that tech was in a bubble that would soon burst. Each time, tech bounced back even stronger, and more money poured in.
Even so, the warning signs that all is not well have recently become more prominent.
Venture capitalists, such as those at Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners, have cautioned young firms to cut costs, conserve cash and prepare for hard times. In response, many start-ups have laid off workers and instituted hiring freezes. Some companies — including the payments start-up Fast, the home design company Modsy and the travel start-up WanderJaunt — have shut down.
David Spreng, an investor at Runway Growth Capital, a venture debt investment firm, said he had seen a disconnect between investors and start-up executives over the state of the market.
“Pretty much every V.C. is sounding alarm bells,” he said. But, he added, “the management teams we’re talking to, they all seem to think: We’ll be fine, no worries.”
The one thing he has seen every company do, he said, is freeze its hiring. “When we start seeing companies miss their revenue goals, then it’s time to get a little worried,” he said.
The pain has also reached young companies that went public in the last two years. Shares of onetime start-up darlings like the stocks app Robinhood, the scooter start-up Bird Global and the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase have tumbled between 86 percent and 95 percent below their highs from the last year. Enjoy Technology, a retail start-up that went public in October, filed for bankruptcy last week. Electric Last Mile Solutions, an electric vehicle start-up that went public in June 2021, said last month that it would liquidate its assets.
The start-up market has now reached a kind of stalemate — particularly for the largest and most mature companies — which has led to a lack of action in new funding, said Mark Goldberg, an investor at Index Ventures. Many start-up founders don’t want to raise money these days at a price that values their company lower than it was once worth, while investors don’t want to pay the elevated prices of last year, he said. The result is stasis.
“It’s pretty much frozen,” Mr. Goldberg said.
Additionally, so many start-ups collected huge piles of cash during the recent boom times that few have needed to raise money this year, he said. That could change next year, when some of the companies start running low on cash. “The logjam will break at some point,” he said.
More:
“Unprecedented” Water Cutbacks From Fresno to Oregon Border
CalMatters
In sweeping water curtailments stretching from Fresno to the Oregon state line, cities and growers in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta watershed have been ordered to stop pumping from rivers and streams.
The cutbacks, announced Thursday by the State Water Resources Control Board, will affect about 4,500 water rights in the Delta watershed, including 400 or more held by 212 public water systems, beginning Wednesday. But they’re concentrated around the San Joaquin River and its tributaries, where state officials expect “significant, very deep cuts.”
Water board staff called the cutbacks “unprecedented,” although similar curtailments were imposed in the watershed last year, just much later in the year, in August.
California’s water rights system operates on the basis of seniority — those with the oldest claims are typically the last to be cut back. But even those with rights in the San Joaquin watershed that date back to 1900, before California enacted its water rights law, are expected to be hit with the curtailment orders.
“This is now affecting water users that may have not been impacted in well over 100 years, or were affected for the first time just last year,” said Ryan Jacobsen, CEO of the Fresno County Farm Bureau. “This is not only a historic cutback, but we hope it’s not what is now the baseline for the future.”
The pain for growers will vary, depending on their access to other water supplies, such as wells.
“Similar to last year, for some of those agricultural users, they have no other supply, thus they feel immediate pain,” Jacobsen said. “For others, they may have to use groundwater instead.”
Last summer, thousands of water users were ordered to stop diverting water from rivers after many growers had already made planting decisions.
Public water systems that could be affected by the curtailments include the cities of Lodi and Vallejo, and San Francisco’s Regional Water System, according to a water board document. Many cities have a variety of water sources, such as groundwater and stored supplies, and it is not immediately clear how much water they will lose.
The Sacramento River watershed, although hit hard by the drought, is expected to be relatively spared by the new cutbacks for now.
“In the Sacramento watershed, we actually don’t anticipate significant curtailments at this time,” Erik Ekdahl, a deputy director with the State Water Resources Control Board, said at the water board meeting today.
The lack of substantial curtailments there, Ekdahl said, are “largely related to the reduction in water use by the Sacramento River and Feather River settlement contractors,” which have contracts entitling them to certain amounts of water even in dry years.
In the Sacramento Valley, for instance, major irrigation districts have already agreed to reduce their water deliveries to 18%, a massive cut from their typical dry-year reductions that leave 75% of their supply intact.
Smaller tributaries, however, including Cache and Putah Creeks are expected to see curtailments, Ekdahl said.
Deeper cutbacks could come as the summer continues.
The news of the curtailments comes as Californians once again fell short of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s entreaties to conserve water. New data released today shows households and businesses in cities and towns increased water use by 17.6% in April compared to two years ago.
Urban water use decreased in northern coastal and mountain regions by about 10 to 14% and flatlined in the San Francisco Bay Area. But it increased everywhere else — from 2.2% in the Sacramento River area, to more than 40% in the deserts of southeast California. The increase once again cut into the state’s total water savings since last July, which now sit at 2% overall relative to 2020.
Southern California water users haven’t been unscathed by the drought. The giant Metropolitan Water District this month imposed strict water restrictions on 6 million of its 19 million customers, including in parts of Los Angeles, that rely on the parched State Water Project.
Water Infrastructure Takes Decades: “No Easy Solutions Left”
Sacramenbto Bee
Fritz Durst, a farmer in Yolo County, didn’t receive enough water from the federal government to plant a rice crop this spring. But the feds did give him a consolation prize. In March the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency invited the backers of Sites Reservoir — a mammoth water storage project in the Sacramento Valley that’s being personally led by Durst — to apply for a $2.2 billion construction loan.
The loan is far from a done deal, but the invitation means the EPA is seriously interested in backing the project, bringing Sites tantalizingly close to reality after years of planning.
“I was ecstatic. We finally convinced people this was a worthy project,” said Durst, chairman of the Sites Project Authority.
The announcement that the Environmental Protection Agency is interested in loaning big money to the project is proof of the project’s worthiness — and could well prove decisive in getting the project off the ground.
Even if all goes according to plan — a pretty big if — Sites wouldn’t finish construction until 2030.
The status of Sites says a lot about how things stand in the third year of California’s terrible drought. There are no quick fixes, no immediate remedies.
“What people have got to realize is,” Durst said, surveying one of his unplanted rice fields recently, “there’s no easy solutions left.”
Building support for a big water project is often a time-consuming process in California. And once the permits are in hand and the financing is set, it could be years before the goal of increased water supply is achieved.
That point is being driven home time and again with sobering regularity. A simple, non-controversial water project in rural south Sacramento County, designed to “bank” billions of gallons of water below ground as a reserve for drought periods, won’t be ready until late 2024.
A more ambitious project, a multibillion-dollar recycling plant capable of putting a significant dent in the Los Angeles area’s water woes, is moving through the planning process but won’t produce drinkable water for another 10 years.
The fact is, California is responding to the drought at something other than lightning speed.
Its urban residents aren’t heeding Gov. Gavin Newsom’s call to cut their water usage by 15%. Since he made his plea last July, water savings total just 3%. And its public officials are struggling to get water-infrastructure projects over the finish line. A catastrophic development — a city running out of drinking water — could prompt California to slash red tape or push through funding more quickly.
Even so, the big complicated endeavors will still drag well beyond the life of the current drought — to a time, perhaps, when the public appetite for spending money on water projects will have diminished. Then, when the next drought hits, the projects will be at square one.
“We can’t build infrastructure in under a decade,” said Jeff Kightlinger, former general manager of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. “If you don’t start until five years from now, you won’t have it until 15 years,” he said.
In the meantime, Californians can’t look to new reservoirs or other major water projects to ease the current drought. “It takes so long to build something, to get the financing,” said Jeffrey Mount, a water-policy expert at the Public Policy Institute of California. In the short run, “the real progress is going to be incremental — we’re going to fix this canal here, we’re going to fix this dam there.”
It’s always loomed as a tempting remedy for a state that sits on the ocean and seems to be constantly dealing with drought: Pull water out of the sea. Feed it through a membrane to remove salt and other impurities. Drink up. Desalination is a viable, though expensive, technology known around the world. A Carlsbad plant north of San Diego, the largest in the Western Hemisphere, has been humming since late 2015. It creates 50 million gallons of drinkable water a day and accounts for about 10% of the San Diego area’s supply.
But when the project’s developer, Poseidon Water, proposed building a sister plant an hour down the road in Orange County, state regulators said no. Last month the California Coastal Commission voted unanimously to reject a similarly-sized plant in Huntington Beach proposed by Poseidon Water, the company behind the Carlsbad project.
The agency justified its decision mainly on environmental grounds: Commissioners said they feared for the marine life that would get sucked into the Huntington Beach plant’s giant intake valve — and the sea creatures that would suffer from the millions of gallons of briny water that would get discharged into the ocean after the desalination process was completed.
Why did the commission reject Huntington Beach after approving Carlsbad years earlier? In part because the rules are stricter now, particularly the regulations on a plant’s intake valves. The commission also said the risks to the Huntington Beach plant from earthquakes, tsunamis and sea-level rise are greater than previously believed.
As they voted down the Orange County project, commissioners said they weren’t ruling out desalination as a concept. “We need every tool in the toolbox, including intelligent desalination,” said Chairwoman Donne Bronsey.
Drought-stricken communities are taking a fresh look at desalination as a long-term solution to water shortages.
In 2017 the city of Santa Barbara reopened a desalination plant that had operated briefly in the early 1990s before being mothballed after heavy rains returned. The plant accounts for about 30% of the city’s total supply, said water resources manager Joshua Haggmark.
Desalination is among the most expensive sources of water anywhere. The fresh water gushing out of the Carlsbad plant costs $2,725 per acre-foot, or nearly twice as much as the region’s other supplies, said spokesman Ed Joyce of the San Diego County Water Authority.
The net effect: about an extra $5 a month in San Diego residents’ water bills. Given the cost, desalinated water is likely to remain a niche product, available to prosperous communities “if they’re willing to pay a lot and they really need the water,” said Ron Stork of Sacramento environmental group Friends of the River. But they might need to find a new supplier.
After the rejection in Huntington Beach, Poseidon says it doesn’t foresee another big plant opening in the state. “There is not a path forward for large desalination plants,” said Poseidon spokeswoman Jessica Jones.
But Poseidon isn’t giving up on California altogether. Jones said the company is in early discussions with public water agencies around the state about developing other projects — stormwater capture facilities, for instance, and even smaller-scale desalination plants. “We know there’s still a huge demand due to the drought,” she said. “We have answers.”
The Coastal Commission’s rejection of the Huntington Beach project prompted anger. But a few days after the vote, the governor was smiling when he visited the site of a proposed water-recycling project east of Los Angeles.
The project in Carson would be capable of generating 150 million gallons of drinkable water a day — three times as much as the failed desalination plant. While recycling isn’t new, this plant would deploy unusual technologies to achieve new levels of purity. “Water recycling is about finding new water, not just accepting the scarcity mindset,” Newsom said. “This is a profoundly important project for the state’s future.” But not the immediate future.
The Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts, which is developing the $4 billion project, is still assembling financing in partnership with the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California and water agencies in Arizona and Nevada.
It will be five years before the project, known as Pure Water Southern California, can create water that’s clean enough to be used by oil refineries and other industries. It will be another five years after that, a decade from now, before the plant can make water clean enough to drink.
And probably not a moment sooner. “Can we expedite this? Unfortunately, it’s the state of the world. We have to look very carefully at all the environmental impacts, and that takes time,” said Bryan Langpap, spokesman for the sanitation agency.
The fact that a project won’t get done in time to ease the current drought doesn’t mean California should forget about it, Kightlinger said. Just the opposite. The former Metropolitan executive said projects should get started as quickly as possible so they’ll be in place for future shortages. “It’s not like this is a temporary drought and things will be good in two years,” he said. “We need to start moving on these projects.”
The last time California had a drought, voters were happy to spend money on water. In November 2014, Californians overwhelmingly approved Proposition 1, which committed the state to borrowing $7.1 billion for various water projects. The bond included $2.7 billion to build or expand reservoirs and other storage projects.
The California Water Commission has spread that money between seven storage projects. But it’s not enough to get any of them built. Developers of each facility are still cobbling together the rest of their financing — while plowing through environmental reviews, construction permits and other red tape.
Bottom line, not a single project has been built yet, nearly eight years after voters gave their blessings. One project, to increase water storage in Silicon Valley, is being challenged in the courts. A group of environmentalists and landowners have sued over the proposed $2.5 billion expansion of the tiny Pacheco Reservoir southeast of San Jose. The project has been awarded $504 million in Proposition 1 money. The plaintiffs say the Santa Clara Valley Water District must conduct additional environmental-impact studies to comply with the powerful California Environmental Quality Act.
The water district says it has already done the required studies. As it is, the reservoir expansion isn’t scheduled to be completed until 2032. The lawsuit could set the project back a year.
Even the relatively basic projects are still slogging through a lengthy process. The Sacramento Regional County Sanitation District has an ingenious plan for storing water. Its “Harvest Water” plan calls for building a network of pipes and pumps connecting its wastewater treatment plant, near Elk Grove, to an agricultural area at the south end of the county.
Farmers would use recycled water to raise their crops instead of pulling water out of the ground. That would enable a sprawling aquifer — a hidden reservoir half the size of Folsom Lake — to fill up gradually, creating a bank for use in dry years.
In the world of California water, where litigation and controversy are taken for granted, Harvest Water is practically a slam dunk — albeit a slam dunk that will cost $444 million. The state has earmarked nearly $292 million in Proposition 1 money for the project.
Even so, the sanitation district is still working on some of its permits and is scrambling to find additional funding sources. Its consultants haven’t finished designing the pumps and pipes.
If all goes according to plan, construction will start next year and finish in late 2024 or early 2025. “Infrastructure is always a challenge; it can’t happen overnight,” said Terrie Mitchell, the district’s legislative and regulatory affairs manager. “Even in a perfect world, if you had all the stars aligned, it’s going to take time to get things constructed.”
Hoover Dam took five years to build during the Great Depression. The world’s largest dam at the time, the product of 3.3 million cubic yards of concrete, the iconic Las Vegas project was finished two years ahead of schedule. California’s largest, Shasta Dam, was finished in seven years. Folsom Dam, completed in 1956, was an eight-year build.
Once upon a time, the state and federal governments built huge water-storage projects, and they did it relatively quickly, said the Public Policy Institute’s Mount. Elected officials didn’t worry much about the environmental consequences of damming the West’s major rivers, and there was considerably less red tape.
“That era is done,” Mount said.
Which brings us to Sites Reservoir. It’s big — the largest reservoir built in California since the 1970s. It’s expensive — at $4.4 billion, about four times costlier than the Harvest Water groundwater project in south Sacramento. And it’s controversial — a concept based on pulling water out of the overtaxed Sacramento River and storing it for future use.
Not since the federal government’s New Melones reservoir on the Stanislaus River, completed in 1979, has anything like this been attempted in California. Sites would become the first significant reservoir built in the state since the Metropolitan Water District opened Diamond Valley Lake (a facility about half the size of Sites) in the early 2000s.
Little wonder, then, that Sites is proceeding slowly. The reservoir, to be built where a town called Sites once stood, was initially proposed by state officials in the 1980s. The initial plan went nowhere but was revived by leaders of several Sacramento Valley farm-irrigation districts.
They formed a governmental entity called a joint powers authority in 2010 and began working on funding and design work. As it stands today, Sites would hold as much as 1.5 million acre-feet of water, making it the eighth-largest reservoir in the state.
The bulk of the water will be owned by 23 water districts that have pledged to invest in Sites. The largest investor, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, will lay claim to 311,000 acre-feet worth of supply once the reservoir is filled.
If built, the Sites Reservoir would be the state’s eighth largest. Sites would draw water from the Sacramento River via a new underground pipe. That’s the main point of controversy. Environmentalists have criticized the notion of diverting water from the Sacramento, a river that’s already a troubled habitat for fish.
In drought years the Sacramento gets so warm in summer that legions of juvenile Chinook salmon, an endangered species, perish. A group called Save California Salmon gathered 50,000 signatures earlier this year on a petition opposing the project. A lawsuit by project opponents is by no means out of the question.
Newsom recently called Sites “something I’ve long supported,” and the state has committed $875 million in Proposition 1 money, the largest single earmark from the 2014 voter-approved bond.
Yet some state officials have questioned the wisdom of pulling water from the river. In a letter sent to Sites officials in January, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife said the diversions contemplated by reservoir operators could mean “potentially significant adverse impacts” the river’s fish populations, particularly in dry years.
The agency suggested that Sites pull water out of the river more slowly. Sites is evaluating the agency’s comments, and those raised by other stakeholders, and expects to respond when it releases its final environmental impact report early next year, said Sites Authority general manager Jerry Brown (no relation to the former governor, who happens to live near the reservoir location).
Environmentalists and other water experts say building dams these days in California is hard for a reason: Most of the good locations have been taken, and much of the water has been spoken for. “We’ve done all the easy stuff,” Mount said. “Hard projects don’t happen quickly.” In part because of pipeline limitations,
Brown said Sites wouldn’t release more than 500,000 acre-feet of water in any given year — one-third of its capacity.
As far as Stork and other environmentalists are concerned, that alone is reason enough to doubt the viability of Sites — or any other big storage proposal that’s being hailed as a cure-all for California’s droughts. They argue that the harm done to faltering fish populations outweighs the relatively small amount of water these projects are able to capture.
In a state that uses tens of millions of acre-feet per year, the output from Sites would amount to a mere trickle, Stork said. “It’s a demonstration that you can’t dam your way to paradise anymore in California,” he said.
But Fritz Durst says Sites makes perfect sense in a state with chronic water shortages.
https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/article262202937.html#storylink=cpy
Ending the Petroleum Economy: “If Oil Goes Away, We Don’t Have Anything”
NY Times
TAFT — This is oil country, in a state that leads the country in environmental regulation. With wildfires and drought ravaging California, Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, wants to end oil drilling in the state by 2045. That has provoked angst and fierce resistance here in Kern County, where oil and gas tax revenues help to pay for everything from elementary schools to firefighters to mosquito control.
“Nowhere else in California is tied to oil and gas the way we are, and we can’t replace what that brings overnight,” said Ryan Alsop, chief administrative officer in Kern County, a region north of Los Angeles. “It’s not just tens of thousands of jobs. It’s also hundreds of millions of dollars in annual tax revenue that we rely on to fund our schools, parks, libraries, public safety, public health.”
Nestled in the southwest corner of the San Joaquin Valley, Taft was built above the Midway-Sunset oil field, California’s largest, after a gusher in 1910 sent millions of gallons of crude raining from the sky.
Today, Taft is surrounded by roughly 10,000 wells, and oil defines the city.
Downtown features the Oilworker Monument, a towering bronze statue of a derrick and a roustabout wielding a wrench. The Black Gold Brewing Company sells oil-themed beers like Petroleum Highway Porter, along with Thai food, guns and ammunition. The West Kern Oil Museum walks visitors through thousands of modern products derived from petroleum, from fertilizer to nail polish.
“We take a lot of pride in what we do here, in our contribution to America’s energy security,” said Dave Noerr, a former oil field worker and mayor of Taft since 2016, as he drove his pickup truck through town one recent morning. “And our industry partners have been incredibly generous to our community in return.”
Property taxes from oil and gas fund Taft’s well-kept parks and recreation centers. The local college built a new classroom and hired staff to teach anatomy with funding from Chevron. Millions of dollars in donations from oil companies support the Taft Oil Technology Academy, a popular high school program where students learn petroleum geology, fly drones and research topics like carbon dioxide recycling.
Renee Hill, 63, grew up in the city, left, and then returned a decade ago with her husband to open an antique and flower shop on Taft’s main drag, hoping to help revive downtown.
“Oil supports everything we have,” Ms. Hill said. “If oil goes away, we don’t have anything else. We’re 15 miles from the nearest highway, so we’re not going to get Amazon warehouses. This isn’t some seaside paradise that will bring in tourists. I wish there was something else we could do, but that’s the reality.”
But Taft’s boom years may be over, and the future is uncertain. Even as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has sent oil prices soaring, crude production from California’s fields keeps declining. Much of that drop is structural: The state’s output peaked in 1985 after decades of exploitation, and the remaining heavy oil requires sophisticated techniques like steam injection to extract.
At the same time, local officials and oil companies say production has been further depressed because state regulators have made it increasingly difficult to obtain drilling permits. As California has suffered through record-breaking heat waves, droughts and wildfires, the state has moved to slash greenhouse gases that result from burning oil, gas and coal and are rapidly heating the planet.
Since 2019, the annual number of permits issued by state regulators to drill new wells or modify existing ones has fallen by roughly half, and regulators have restricted techniques like hydraulic fracturing. Kern County wants to take over permitting from the state, aiming to approve thousands of new wells by 2035, but courts have blocked those efforts.
The drilling slowdown threatens Kern County’s finances, officials say. In 2020, oil and gas generated nearly one-quarter of the county’s property tax revenue, $197 million, which helps fund schools, hospitals, law enforcement, water agencies and other programs.
In recent years, sharp swings in oil prices have forced painful cuts, including staffing reductions at fire stations and library closures. The latest price spike has provided some relief, but officials say that as drilling declines, it will get harder to provide critical services in a county with 900,000 people and some of California’s highest poverty rates.
Kern County has become California’s most important source of renewable energy, providing half the state’s wind power and one-quarter of its solar power.
One afternoon in Bakersfield, at the union office of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers’ Local 428, former oil workers practiced bending conduit, the tubes used to route wiring, as they trained to become electricians.
Richard Romero, 35, was an oil rig operator for 11 years but left after the last price crash. “I got sick of the ups and downs,” he said. “It just seems like everything’s going green at some point. There’s pretty much no future in oil anymore.”
In theory, renewable energy could offer an economic alternative to oil, gas and coal. A Brookings Institution analysis found that a quarter of U.S. counties with the greatest potential for wind and solar power are currently fossil-fuel hubs.
But the transition is far from simple. Historically, oil and gas has been one of Kern County’s few industries where workers without college degrees can find high-paying jobs; the average salary is $80,000. Solar and wind farms require lots of construction work, but fewer employees to operate. (Kern County’s biggest employer is agriculture, but in 2019 it had roughly 16,000 oil and gas jobs and 2,500 renewable energy jobs.)
There are also revenue concerns. In 2020, Kern County’s solar farms generated just $1.5 million in property taxes, less than 1 percent of what fossil fuels did, partly because of the state tax exemption for solar panels, a policy the county has fought to change.
Local leaders and businesses are discussing strategies to diversify Kern County’s economy by expanding industries like aerospace, manufacturing, new energy sources like hydrogen or biodiesel, or even carbon capture technology.
“Oil is so culturally ingrained here that it’s difficult for many people to imagine we could do anything else,” said Mercedes Macias, a senior organizer with the Sierra Club in Kern County. “At the same time, I don’t envy the supervisors trying to figure this out, because it’s not like anyone has step-by-step instructions for how to reinvent an economy that’s so dependent on fossil fuels.”
More:
Propositions Set for Fall Ballot
CalMatters & Secretary of State
California voters will be asked to weigh in on seven statewide ballot measures in November, the fewest measures in an election year since 1916.
Proposition 1 is SCA 10 by another name, and asks voters whether the right to have an abortion should be enshrined in the California Constitution. It comes in direct response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling overturning Roe v. Wade and handing the legality of abortions to the states to decide.
Proposition 26 is the tribal-backed gambling initiative, which would allow for sports betting on tribal lands, as well as at privately operated horse-racing tracks in four specified counties.
Proposition 27 is the competing, online sports-betting initiative sponsored by companies like FanDuel and DraftKings. It would legalize online and mobile device sports wagering in the state.
Proposition 28 would provide additional funding for arts and music education in public schools, including charter schools, by allocating from the state general fund an amount equaling 1% of required state and local funding for public schools.
Proposition 29 is the latest attempt to regulate the dialysis industry by requiring on-site licensed medical professionals at kidney dialysis clinics.
Proposition 30 would tax people making more than $2 million a year to fund greenhouse gas emission reduction programs, includingrebates for the purchase of zero-emission vehicles.
Proposition 31 is a referendum on the 2020 law that would ban the sale of flavored tobacco products, including menthol cigarettes, in California.
Details:
Secretary of State summaries:
https://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/ballot-measures/qualified-ballot-measures