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IN THIS ISSUE – “Public Office Shouldn’t Be Used for Private Gain”
GOVERNOR & RECALL
- “Champion Donors” Write Five-Figure Checks for First Partner’s Nonprofit
- Newsom Recall Election Could Be As Early As August
- Largest State Employee Union Donates $1 Million to Newsom Recall Campaign; Controversy Ensues
- Labor Lines Up Behind Governor
DROUGHT & FIRE
- Wildfires Already Consume 5X More Acreage Than Same Point in 2020
- “Mind-Blowing”: 10% of Planet’s Sequoias Burned in One Fire Last Year
CA ECONOMY & JOBS
- UCLA Forecast Finds “Boom Time,” But Unemployment Highest in US
- New Manufacturing Plants Rise in Southwest, Skip California
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 service.
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FOR THE WEEK ENDING JUNE 4, 2021
“Champion Donors” Write Five-Figure Checks for First Partner’s Nonprofit
Sacramento Bee
A week after he was elected governor in 2018, Gavin Newsom went to a trendy music hall in San Francisco’s Mission District where his wife, filmmaker Jennifer Siebel Newsom, was the center of attention.
The event was a fundraiser for a nonprofit founded by Siebel Newsom called The Representation Project, which promotes feminist causes, finances her documentary films and has paid her more than $2.3 million since its founding in 2011.
Photos from the party show Newsom mingling with guests — wealthy Californians and “celebrities, scholars and youth leaders,” as the program described them — before a panel discussion and gourmet buffet.
Also in attendance — and writing five-figure checks to finance the gala — were executives of some of the most powerful corporations in California, all with reasons to ingratiate themselves with the governor-elect.
Pacific Gas & Electric, then facing multiple state investigations for its role in sparking a series of devastating wildfires, was acknowledged as a “champion donor,” indicating a $25,000 donation, according to the program.
AT&T and Comcast, heavily regulated telecoms that hoped to retain their market dominance in California, each gave $10,000.
Another donor was the Kaiser Permanente health care system, an opponent of a proposal to create a “single-payer” health plan for the state, which the new governor campaigned on. Kaiser’s president at the time, the late Bernard Tyson, was on the event’s host committee.
So was John Fisher, heir to the Gap clothing fortune and owner of the Oakland Athletics baseball team, which wanted state permits for a new stadium.
The flow of corporate donations to Newsom’s wife’s nonprofit that night are part of a pattern, a Sacramento Bee investigation found.
From 2011 through 2018, the nonprofit has paid Siebel Newsom more than $290,000 per year — $2.3 million in all — for her leadership work and for creating three documentary films on social justice themes, according to the nonprofit’s tax returns. That’s more than 20% of the $10.4 million it received from contributors. The Newsoms’ tax returns and financial disclosure forms show she has continued to draw a salary since her husband became governor.
Many donations came from California philanthropists, venture capitalists and people who inherited great wealth.
But in recent years, as Newsom’s political star ascended, records show his wife’s nonprofit received more than $800,000 from a dozen corporations that regularly lobby state government on matters affecting their financial bottom lines. In 2015, the year Newsom announced he would run for governor, The Representation Project’s contributions increased by 30% to almost $1.6 million.
The nonprofit isn’t required to disclose its donors, but The Bee identified more than 70 of them through interviews, promotional material and public records.
The donations were not explicitly political, but they helped the companies deepen relationships with the most powerful man in California politics.
Meanwhile, Representation Project donors also gave about $1.3 million to Newsom’s political committees, records show, and some have also donated hundreds of thousands to other charities at Newsom’s behest.
California ethics laws do not regulate charitable fundraising by the relatives of government officials, and the practice seems to be growing more common.
In February, The Bee reported that companies with business before the Legislature had pumped $500,000 into nonprofits run by the wife of Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon.
Last year, the news website Cal Matters reported that then-Assemblyman Rob Bonta of Alameda had set up a nonprofit and steered $25,000 of its funds to another nonprofit where his wife was CEO. In March, Newsom appointed Bonta attorney general.
Ethics experts from outside California said this fundraising dynamic raises red flags.
“Public office shouldn’t be used for private gain, even if the private gain is a charitable cause,” said Kathleen Clark, law professor at Washington University in St. Louis.
Donors may give to the spouse’s nonprofit because they hope to win favorable treatment from the official, or because they fear they will be politically “disadvantaged” if they refuse, she said. And when the official’s spouse is getting paid from the donations, “that raises the possibility of personal enrichment,” Clark said.
Mark Davies, a Fordham University law professor and former director of the New York City Conflicts of Interest Board, expressed a similar concern.
“This is just a subtler variation of a lobbyist hiring an elected official’s spouse,” he wrote in an email.
Since November, when his dinner with a lobbyist at a pricey Napa restaurant called the French Laundry prompted embarrassing headlines, Newsom has sought to tighten ethics rules for the governor’s office. In December, he barred his political consultants from lobbying his administration.
In March, as the recall movement against him gathered steam, he extended the lobbying ban to include his unpaid political advisers.
He also barred top administration officials, including his wife, from accepting gifts from lobbyists. The moves were intended to reflect Newsom’s “commitment to an administration that exceeds California’s already strong legal standards,” his top aides wrote in a letter to staff announcing the rules.
Newsom hasn’t addressed his wife’s nonprofit.
The Newsoms refused multiple requests to be interviewed for this story through The Representation Project and through spokespeople for the governor’s office and campaign.
“The Governor is proud of the First Partner’s longstanding leadership on gender equity, as well as her continued advocacy on behalf of California women and their families,” spokeswoman Erin Mellon wrote in an emailed statement. “His decisions, always grounded in sound policy and good governance, are made in the best interest of the State of California.”
In an email, The Representation Project’s executive director Caroline Heldman wrote that donations to the nonprofit fund “vital work to fight sexism through films, education, research, and activism.” She said Siebel Newsom has not overseen fundraising since 2015.
“With regards to donation transparency, The Rep Project goes above and beyond non-profit industry standards,” Heldman wrote. “We do not accept anonymous donations, and we publicly disclose all donations above $5,000 on our website.”
Siebel Newsom grew up in Marin County, graduated from Stanford with a business degree and worked for nonprofits in Africa and Latin America, where she helped women start businesses, according to her bio on Newsom’s campaign website. She then moved to Hollywood, eager to break into films. As an actress, she played minor roles in the movie “Rent” and the television series “Mad Men.” On a blind date in 2006 she met Newsom, then mayor of San Francisco, and they married two years later.
In 2011, soon after her husband was elected lieutenant governor, she founded The Representation Project and produced her first documentary, “Miss Representation,” which explored the harm caused by female stereotypes in media. The film never made it into theaters, but the Women’s Film Critics Circle honored it as the year’s “best theatrically unreleased movie.The year Newsom was elected governor, Siebel Newsom stepped back from her role as CEO and instead took the title chief creative officer. She is working on her fourth film, Heldman said.
The Representation Project financed the films by making payments to Siebel Newsom’s film company, Girls Club Entertainment, records show. For example, a tax return filed for the 12 months ending in March 2019 shows the nonprofit paid Girls Club $150,000 for “writer/producer/director” services. Siebel Newsom also drew a $150,000 salary that year from the nonprofit.
The nonprofit hasn’t posted a tax return since then, but the Newsoms’ 2019 tax returns show she was paid $150,000 by The Representation Project and $50,000 by Girls Club Entertainment. Newsom’s financial disclosure form says she continued to be paid by The Representation Project and Girls Club Entertainment in 2020.
Renee Irvin, director of the University of Oregon’s nonprofit management program, said Siebel Newsom’s income from The Representation Project didn’t seem excessive for a nonprofit of its size. If it topped $400,000, that might be out of line, she said.
Siebel Newsom’s films promote many liberal political priorities her husband has championed as governor. Newsom himself is interviewed in two of the films. Also featured are his political allies, including Sen. Dianne Feinstein and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Newsom has appointed several experts who appear in the films to top roles in his administration, including Dr. Nadine Burke-Harris, now the state’s surgeon general, and Dee Dee Myers, now Newsom’s top economic adviser.
The nonprofit, the films and Newsom’s political world overlap in other ways.
PG&E, a reliable Newsom donor since his days on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, was listed as “associate producer” of Siebel Newsom’s first film. Her second film was produced “in association with” the utility, according to the credits. In 2017, Brandon Hernandez, PG&E’s top government affairs executive at the time, served on The Representation Project’s board. (After he was elected governor, Newsom said he would no longer take donations from PG&E, blaming the company for wildfires.)
Other board members served as the governor’s political operatives: Ann O’Leary, Newsom’s former chief of staff, and political strategist Nathan Ballard, Newsom’s former spokesman and confidant, whose clients have included ones that lobby state government. (Ballard left the board last year after he was charged with domestic abuse.)
Corporate donors insisted that politics played no role in their decision to give money to a nonprofit run by the governor’s wife. In interviews and emails, officials said the companies simply wanted to support The Representative Project’s efforts to promote inclusiveness and diversity.
Some big donors lobbied on multiple issues. Here are details:
Health care provider Kaiser Permanente donated $20,000 to sponsor Representation Project events in 2018 and 2019, Kaiser spokeswoman Jennifer Scanlon said. At the governor’s request, the Kaiser Foundation also gave $9 million to COVID-19 relief efforts, and Kaiser employees gave $21,000 to Newsom’s 2018 run for governor.
The governor has close relations with the health care giant, and Newsom’s executive secretary, Jim DeBoo, is a former Kaiser lobbyist.
Early in the pandemic, the Newsom administration signed a $500 million no-bid contract with Kaiser, Dignity Health and the Los Angeles County Public Health Department to operate a field hospital to reduce strain on the health care system.
In February 2021, Newsom tapped Kaiser and health insurance company Blue Shield to run the state’s vaccinations campaign.
The Newsom administration said it made sense to involve Kaiser in the effort because it is California’s largest health care provider. The governor said Blue Shield and Kaiser would not profit from the arrangement, but experts said they could still benefit. Kaiser got a carve-out so it would receive vaccines more directly, for example.
Michael Johnson, a former Blue Shield executive-turned industry critic, said the arrangement was probably in the public interest. But he said Kaiser’s efforts to build a relationship with Newsom, including through its Representation Project donations, may have helped the company secure the agreement
“If Kaiser didn’t have any relationship with the governor’s office, getting that kind of special treatment, even if merited, might have been more difficult,” Johnson said.
Companies like Kaiser use charitable contributions to win good will from government officials, said Wendell Potter, who oversaw charitable and political giving at insurance giant Signa before becoming an industry whistleblower.
“These donations are strategic,” Potter said. “They are made not just because you are altruistic, but for a purpose.”
Meanwhile, Kaiser has reported lobbying Newsom and nine state agencies on dozens of other measures and regulations.
One big issue concerns whether California will create a state-run health system, known as “single-payer.” Newsom campaigned on the issue, but has backed awayfrom it since taking office.
“They want to make sure the governor doesn’t fulfill that campaign promise,” Potter said. “Something like that would radically change the way they do business.”
Scanlon said in a statement that Kaiser made the donations because they aligned with the company’s “mission to improve the health of the communities we serve, in this case by educating and raising awareness to combat harmful gender stereotypes.”
Telecom giants AT&T and Comcast both gave to The Representation Project while lobbying Newsom’s office on measures that critics said sought to preserve their dominance in broadband communications in the state.
AT&T has donated over $185,000 to The Representation Project from 2017 through 2020, spokesman Steve Maviglio said. Meanwhile, donors associated with AT&T gave nearly $100,000 to Newsom’s political campaigns. The company also gave $100,000 to the governor’s inauguration fund, as well as $300,000 at Newsom’s behest to “provide tele-learning devices” to students during the pandemic lockdown.
For its part, Comcast gave more than $15,000 to The Representation Project during the same period, according to posts on the nonprofit’s website. Comcast donors have given nearly $200,000 to Newsom’s gubernatorial campaigns, while the company contributed $35,000 to Newsom’s inaugural and $26,000 at Newsom’s behest for COVID-19 awareness advertising.
In 2020, the companies helped kill a proposal to expand broadband technology in underserved areas of California and close a “digital divide” made worse by the COVID-19 pandemic. The telecoms claimed the measure would actually slow the effort to provide internet in rural areas.
This year, Newsom has promised to focus on expanding broadband in poor and rural areas where spotty connections have hurt students trying to attend school remotely during the pandemic. Lawmakers are weighing a series of broadband bills that could land on Newsom’s desk, some of which AT&T and Comcast have reported lobbying on.
Ernesto Falcon, a lobbyist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said AT&T and Comcast have financial interests in broadband legislation. As a cable company, Comcast in particular stands to face more competition if the state gives local governments money to build their own broadband infrastructure, Falcon said.
Maviglio said AT&T gave to The Representation Project because it wants to create “an inclusive entertainment industry,” he wrote in a statement. “We support a number of initiatives and programs that empower emerging filmmakers from underrepresented communities,” he also wrote.
Comcast liked the nonprofit because it “helps girls get interested in the media,” a company priority, spokeswoman Joan Hammel said. She would not disclose how much the company had donated, but said the donations had nothing to do with lobbying.
In 2019, Newsom criticized PG&E for its role in sparking California’s devastating wildfires, accusing the company of “corporate greed” and declaring he would refuse its political donations.
Before that, PG&E was a generous donor both to Newsom’s political career and his wife’s nonprofit. PG&E donors pumped more than $100,000 into his race for governor, records show. Meanwhile, from 2016 through 2018, the company donated $290,000 to The Representation Project, according to filings with the Public Utilities Commission.
Even after his break with PG&E, Newsom helped negotiate legislation critics said was of tremendous benefit to the embattled public utility, which by then had filed for bankruptcy.
In 2019, Assembly Bill 1054 created a $21 billion wildfire fund as a safety net for investor-owned utilities. Critics, including some wildfire victims, called the measure a bailout for PG&E, complaining it saddled customers and taxpayers with financial responsibility for future fires.
The bill whipped through the Legislature in only two weeks and passed overwhelmingly. Newsom has credited the measure with forcing PG&E to clean up its act and take essential safety precautions to keep its equipment from sparking fires.
PG&E spokesman Ari Vanrenen said the company’s longstanding support for the nonprofit was not about politics, but part of a company effort to provide “support for underserved and traditionally disenfranchised communities.”
Other donors, well known and obscure, also gave money to The Representation Project while trying to shape policy in Sacramento.
United Airlines paid between $25,000 and $49,000 to host a “VIP Reception Sponsor” at the 2019 Representation Project gala, the nonprofit’s online posts indicate. United gave to the nonprofit to “break down barriers and promote inclusion,” spokeswoman Annabelle Cottee said. She declined to detail how much the airline donated.
United donors also gave Newsom about $12,000 for his 2018 campaign, and the airline gave $10,000 for the governor’s inaugural. At Newsom’s request, the airline last year provided free air travel for COVID-19 medical volunteers.
Meanwhile, United has lobbied the governor’s office to argue for economic relief for airlines during the pandemic, records show, and has urged state subsidies to increase production of so-called sustainable aviation fuel to cut smog and fight global warming.
Personal genetics company 23andMe donated $25,000 to The Representation Project in 2017, spokesman Andy Kill said. The company’s founder Anne Wojcicki gave $25,000 through her foundation in 2020, according to Representation Project social media posts. At the same time, the company has lobbied over language in bills that seek to protect the privacy of customers’ DNA.
The company gave money to support The Representation Project’s youth leadership summit “to foster skill development, organization and self confidence in the world’s next generation of leaders,” Kill wrote in a statement. He said the company advocated on legislation “completely separately” from its donations.
Wojcicki said in a statement that her foundation supports “the Representation Project’s mission to help all humans achieve their full potential.”
California American Water, a private water and sewer company that serves the of the company’s effort to promote “inclusion and diversity,” said government affairs chief Evan Jacobs. The company also donated $10,000 to Newsom’s campaign.
Meanwhile, California American is seeking state permits to build a seawater desalination plant on Monterey Bay to relieve a chronic local drought.
The project faces opposition from customers who fear hefty rate hikes and from residents of the oceanside town of Marina, where the plant would be built. They worry the project will foul local wells with seawater, said Marina Mayor Bruce Delgado. Lately the project seems stalled, he said.
Delgado said he knew the company lobbied aggressively on the issue, but he had no clue it was donating to a nonprofit to help the governor’s wife make films.
He called it a “classic” lobbying play.
“That’s how things happen,” he said. “That’s politics and influence.”
https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article251851903.html#storylink=cpy
Newsom Recall Election Could Be As Early As August
CalMatters
The special election to recall Newsom could be held earlier than expected — the result of the governor’s Finance Department asking counties to accelerate their timelines for developing election cost estimates, Politico reports.
The letter came just days after state Sen. Steve Glazer, an Orinda Democrat and campaign strategist for former Gov. Jerry Brown, suggested that lawmakers schedule the recall election as early as August to take advantage of Newsom’s rising approval rating and to avoid fallout from a severe drought, an impending wildfire season and potential rolling blackouts.
Yet holding the recall election in August — rather than in November, as expected — could also put Newsom in the crosshairs of a contentious battle over school reopenings. Both Los Angeles Unified and San Francisco Unified this week announced plans to return to full-time in-person instruction in the fall, though students will likely have to keep wearing masks — a condition that undoubtedly won’t go over well with many parents.
Largest State Employee Union Donates $1 Million to Newsom Recall Campaign; Controversy Ensues
Sacramento Bee
The board of directors of California’s largest state employee union voted Wednesday night to give $1 million to fight the recall of Gov. Gavin Newsom, authorizing the donation weeks before a newly elected president who is opposed to the donation takes over.
In a hastily scheduled emergency meeting, the union’s board voted 44 to 9, with five abstentions, to support making the donation to SEIU State Council to help oppose the recall, according to a meeting notice and vote tally.
President-elect Richard Louis Brown, who defeated longtime president Yvonne Walker in an election that was tallied last week, has opposed giving any union money to Newsom. Brown is scheduled to assume the presidency by June 30 under union rules.
“I’m disappointed,” Brown said after learning of the vote’s result. “And this is just another sign of just how afraid the union is of me winning the election.”
Brown pledged during his campaign to “run Newsom out of office,” appealing to union employees frustrated with the pay cuts Newsom’s administration imposed on state workers — with support from the Legislature — last summer, when the state faced a projected $54 billion budget deficit.
State employees were still working at reduced pay during the Local 1000 election, despite the deficit turning to a surplus months ago. Brown won 33% of the vote, defeating four other candidates. About 7,880 of the union’s 54,000 dues-paying members voted in the election.
Newsom said in a budget address last month, during which he announced a $76 billion surplus, that he intends to restore state employees’ pay in the fiscal year that starts July 1.
The administration has invited the unions, including Local 1000, to negotiate agreements to restore their pay.
“Labor unions in California and across the country are united against this partisan recall effort,” read a statement on the agenda supporting the donation. “As governor, Newsom is fighting for California working families every day. Californians know he has worked in unprecedented times to keep them safe during a global pandemic and is ensuring they are getting on the road to recovery. While Governor, Newsom has demonstrated capable, and focused leadership necessary to get through the health crisis.”
Among those voting “no” were a trio of union vice presidents — Tony Owens, Anica Walls and Kevin Menager — who were elected in 2018 on a message of change, and who have remained at odds with Walker over the last three years. David Jimenez, a newly elected vice president, also voted “no.”
California unions have been lining up behind Newsom in the recall election.
The Professional Engineers in California Government made an early $250,000 donation to support the governor.
The SEIU California State Council announced its support for Newsom two days after the Local 1000 election, and the California Labor Federation announced last week that it would provide a large force of “boots on the ground” to support Newsom.
Brown said during the campaign that he wants to get the union out of politics, try to make it easier for union members to strike, allow non-dues payers to vote in union elections and cut union dues in half, a proposal that he said has met resistance.
“They’re criticizing me for wanting to reduce dues by 50%, yet they want to give a millionaire a million dollars,” he said Wednesday.
SEIU Local 1000 represents about 96,000 public sector employees in nine bargaining units across California. It declined to comment on Brown’s social media posts or its board meeting.
Labor Unions Line Up Behind Newsom
Associated Press
California labor unions representing workers in manufacturing, retail, grocery stores, hospitality, health care and other businesses announced their support Tuesday for Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom as he faces a likely recall election.
The California Labor Federation delivered the endorsement on behalf of 2.1 million workers and 1,200 affiliated unions on the steps of the Capitol, blasting the recall and Newsom’s competitors as “anti-worker.”
Art Pulaski, head of the labor federation, and leaders of the federation’s affiliated unions said Newsom kept workers safe during the pandemic by distributing personal protective equipment and, more recently, helping essential workers access vaccinations. They praised him for signing legislation that required workplaces to report outbreaks and expanding paid sick leave for people who contracted coronavirus.
They warned a recall would roll back worker rights and remove an ally to organized labor from the governor’s office.
“It makes no sense to attack the one person who gets up every day with the intent of keeping the state safe and keep it moving forward,” said Jacques Loveall, president of UFCW Local 8, which represents supermarket and drug store workers.
Republican candidates running include former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer, former Congressman Doug Ose, businessman John Cox and reality TV star Caitlyn Jenner. The unions broadly blasted the field as “anti-worker” but provided few specifics on each candidates’ policy positions on labor and pay issues.
Cox charged Newsom’s pandemic policies were bad for workers. “The truth is Gavin Newsom did more to hurt workers than any governor in history when he closed California down and kept it closed. Millions of people lost their jobs,” he said in a statement.
After sitting out traditional campaigning last year due to the pandemic, thousands of California Labor Federation members will be knocking on doors, talking to their neighbors and making the case in person that Newsom deserves to stay in office. Leaders said workers would spend their nights and weekends campaigning.
“Today’s launch signifies the return of the ground game in California elections,” Pulaski said. “This is where union members shine.”
Pulaski said the effort will be aimed at persuading people who may be interested in a recall to stick with Newsom and on turning out voters who already support him. A recent poll from the Public Policy Institute of California showed 40% of people support removing Newsom from office. A majority of voters must approve his removal for a recall to succeed.
Recall supporters have their own army of volunteers. Organizers with little to no formal political training successfully gathered more than 1.7 million valid signatures to place the recall on the ballot, relying on volunteers across all 58 counties who stood on street corners and in parking lots collecting signatures throughout the summer and fall.
Orrin Heatlie, the leader of that movement, said recently that his volunteers were taking a much-needed break but they would soon be back out campaigning.
“They’ll be handing out fliers and educating the public as to the reasons behind the recall, the need for a yes vote,” he said.
Water Restrictions Begin; Federal Deliveries Cut
Politico
Urban water agencies are planning to impose mandatory conservation orders after federal water managers slashed deliveries this week amid a rapidly deepening drought.
The Bureau of Reclamation cut water deliveries from the Central Valley Project by about half. That has prompted the Santa Clara Valley Water District, which serves 2 million residents in the Silicon Valley region, to consider a potential conservation order at its board meeting next month. And the Contra Costa Water District, which serves 500,000 residents in the East Bay, is now planning to vote on one in July.
“This is basically an emergency situation for us, and we’re going to take all the actions necessary to ensure we can provide enough water,” said Santa Clara Valley spokesperson Matt Keller.
Reclamation reduced urban and industrial customers from 55 percent to 25 percent of their maximum contracted deliveries and cut agricultural customers from 5 percent to zero. It’s the first time the agency has cut expected water deliveries for urban customers north of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta following a regular initial allocation announcement in February.
Agricultural customers who have junior water rights are growing accustomed to having deliveries cut as supplies dwindle, but it’s unusual for urban users to feel the pinch of the state’s shrinking snowpack so late in the season.
Reclamation made the move after seeing precipitation runoff drop far below projected levels. Over the course of April, projected runoff to the Sacramento River and its main tributaries fell by 685,000 acre-feet — enough to supply about 1.2 million households. The basin is on track to have its second driest year on record, only behind the record drought of 1977.
“The climate is warmer, it’s drier,” said James Peifer, executive director of the Regional Water Authority, which represents 20 water agencies in the Sacramento area and is calling for customers to voluntarily reduce consumption by 10 percent on the back of relatively robust groundwater supplies. “The climate is changing. And I think that caught people by surprise.”
On the state level, regulators on Wednesday ordered about 900 water-rights holders on the Russian River, mostly wineries and vineyards, to stop taking supplies due to low flows. The Sonoma County Water Agency, which serves about 600,000 residents in Sonoma and Marin counties, said it plans to reduce use 20 percent as a condition of its application to the State Water Resources Control Board to waive water quality standards on the river.
Each agency’s situation is different based on whether they have other supplies to tap. Contra Costa has Los Vaqueros Reservoir, and the Sacramento agencies have groundwater supplies. But Santa Clara can’t fall back on its largest source of backup water, Anderson Reservoir, because the agency drained it last year in order to start earthquake retrofits.
Both Contra Costa and Santa Clara are asking Reclamation to increase their allocations to the minimum required for health and safety purposes, which they estimate to be more than the 25 percent level the agency announced this week.
Gov. Gavin Newsom has declared a drought emergency covering 41 counties, allowing regulators to more easily waive water quality standards and curtail water rights. But he hasn’t yet issued any orders for statewide conservation, as former Gov. Jerry Brown did during the last drought. Water agencies said they don’t think it’s necessary.
“Regions should address this regionally,” Peifer said.
Jennifer Allen, spokesperson for Contra Costa, said demand has been 10-15 percent lower since the last drought thanks to lawn replacement and other efficiency upgrades.
“Local agencies, some of them have done their due diligence since the drought to work on water supply reliability,” said Thad Bettner, general manager of the Glenn-Colusa Irrigation District, which serves 175,000 acres of agricultural land in the Sacramento Valley. “I don’t know it’s fair to impose conservation on them when they’ve invested.”
PHOTO ESSAY: California Dries Up, Statewide Views of the Fast-Moving Drought
Wildfires Already Consume 5X More Acreage Than Same Point in 2020
Associated Press
As California sinks deeper into drought it already has had more than 900 additional wildfires than at this point in 2020, which was a record-breaking year that saw more than 4% of the state’s land scorched by flames.
The danger prompted Gov. Gavin Newsom to propose spending a record $2 billion on wildfire mitigation. That’s double what he had proposed in January.
“Clearly we recognize we need to step up our efforts here in the state of California and that’s what we began to do early this year,” he said.
California’s mountains and foothills are expected to see above-normal wildfire potential from June through August and possibly into the fall, which is the usual peak fire season, according to the National Drought Mitigation Center and the Southwest Coordination Center.
While some parts of the Southwest saw cool and moist conditions over the past month, that wasn’t the case in California. said Chuck Maxwell, a meteorologist and predictive services manager with the Southwest Coordination Center in Albuquerque. About 94% of California has drought conditions ranging from moderate to exceptional, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor that measures conditions.
This year’s fires so far have burned nearly five times as much acreage as they did last year at this time. But the 24 square miles (62 square kilometers) scarred by about 2,600 fires this year is a small portion of last year’s totals of nearly 10,000 fires and an astronomical 6,653 square miles (17,231 square kilometers) burned. The fires killed 33 people and burned more than 10,000 homes and other structures.
Last year’s epic fire season lasted so long that it slowed Cal Fire’s attempts to set its own fires — the prescribed burns that they want to make an increasing part of their long-term efforts. They’ve been able to deliberately burn about 17 square miles (44 square kilometers) through April 30, down about 40% from last year.
Even a dry winter would have allowed for the prescribed burns, but officials got a late start due to the extreme fire activity the second half of last year, said Christine McMorrow, a spokeswoman for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
“Prescribed burns are a big part of our strategy,” said Newsom, who included $50 million for them in his proposed budget.
Cal Fire Chief Thom Porter called them “our best and most cost effective tool” for clearing both overgrown areas and invasive non-native plants. But he cautioned that “not every piece of California is ready for prescribed fire yet” with “a lot of areas where it’s not safe to put fire on the ground under any circumstances.”
Smoke from deliberate burns is also an issue, he said, though the state tries not to burn near sensitive locations like hospitals. And the state can’t intentionally allow fires to burn on private land without permission and safeguards in place, Porter said, although it is trying to get blanket approval from large forestland owners to allow fires to continue in a safe manner once they’ve started.
That means in many areas officials will have to continue using hand crews, machinery or animals to clear overgrown areas.
“Once we have safe areas to burn we will reintroduce fire and that will be the primary tool in the future, but I’m talking about decades out,” Porter said. “We have to build that over an incremental basis over the next many, many years to get to the right place and the right combination.”
The budget proposal that lawmakers will consider before June 15 includes more than $48 million to phase in a dozen new Cal Fire Fire Hawk helicopters and seven large C-130 air tankers like those Newsom highlighted at a Sacramento-area firefighting airbase Monday. It has nearly $34 million to replace two state helicopter bases and create a new emergency operations center in Southern California.
More than $182 million would go for an additional 33 fire crews as the state makes up in part for a dwindling number of inmate firefighters amid earlier releases because of the coronavirus pandemic and years of easing criminal sentencing laws. The money includes hiring an additional 1.399 seasonal firefighters. That will bring the total of seasonal firefighters to nearly 4,000, augmenting nearly 3,400 permanent firefighters, Cal Fire said.
Lawmakers this year already approved $536 million so the state could quickly start approving local contracts to build fuel breaks near vulnerable communities or manage forestlands, with more money going toward efforts to make homes less likely to burn.
The rest is in the budget for the fiscal year starting July 1, although Porter said most of the firefighters already have been hired.
“Mind-Blowing”: 10% of Planet’s Sequoias Burned in One Fire Last Year
Visalia Times-Delta
What was once a lush forest is now a “moonscape.”
At least a tenth of the world’s mature giant sequoias were destroyed by a single wildfire that tore through the southern Sierra Nevada late last year, according to a draft report prepared by scientists with the National Park Service and shared with the Visalia Times-Delta.
The catastrophic discovery that forest managers called “mind-blowing” comes five months after firefighters contained the Castle Fire — which scorched 175,000 acres across the Sequoia National Park and forest.
Between 7,500 and 10,000 monarchs perished in the wildfire, which equates to 10% to 14% of the world’s mature giant sequoia population, the study found. Researchers used satellite imagery and modeling from previous fires that burned through old-growth sequoia groves to arrive at the figure.
“I cannot overemphasize how mind-blowing this is for all of us. These trees have lived for thousands of years. They’ve survived dozens of wildfires already,” said Christy Brigham, chief of Resources Management and Science at Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks.
The consequences of losing large numbers of giant sequoias could be far-reaching, forest managers said. Redwood forests are among the world’s most efficient at removing and storing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The groves also provide critical habitat for native wildlife and help to protect the watershed that farmers and communities on the San Joaquin Valley floor rely on.
Brigham, who is the study’s lead author, cautioned that the numbers are preliminary and the research paper has yet to be peer-reviewed. Beginning next week, teams of scientists will hike to the groves that experienced the most fire damage for the first time since the ashes settled.
The snow, at some of the higher elevations, is just starting to melt.
“I have a vain hope that once we get out on the ground the situation won’t be as bad, but that’s hope — that’s not science,” she said.
Brigham was “lulled into a sense of, ‘Oh, we have time to figure this out,’ she said. “These trees are incredible. We’re working on it, but it’s not super urgent … This is going to unfold over the next few decades.”
Seeing aerial photos of the Freeman Grove was a rude awakening for the scientist. Large swathes of one of the Sierra’s most impressive sequoia groves had been reduced to a moonscape, she said.
“Five years ago, we had never seen anything like this. The sequoias are so huge and fire-adapted, we thought they might fare better,” said Amarina Wuenschel, an ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service.
The extent of the damage to one of the world’s most treasured trees is noteworthy because the sequoia themselves are incredibly well adapted to fire. The iconic sentinels of the forest — some of which are more than 2,000 years old, 250-feet tall and 30 feet in diameter — require fire to burst their pine cones and reproduce.
For millennia, the towering trees have thrived in the Sierra Nevada, where fire was a natural part of the landscape.
Native American tribes inhabiting the Sierra understood the virtue of fire and often set the brush ablaze, clearing the forest floor for new growth to take hold.
When settlers arrived in central California in the 1850s, Indigenous burning practices came to a halt — to be eventually replaced with the likes of Smokey the Bear and anti-fire policies that quickly stomped out even the smallest of blazes.
“One-hundred years of fire suppression, combined with climate change-driven hotter droughts, have changed how fires burn in the southern Sierra and that change has been very bad for sequoia,” Brigham said.
Sequoia and Kings Canyon have conducted controlled burns since the 1960s, about a thousand acres a year on average. Brigham estimates that the park will need to burn around 30 times that number to get the forest back to a healthy state.
The Castle Fire erupted on Aug. 19 in the Golden Trout Wilderness amid a flurry of lightning strikes. The Shotgun Fire, a much smaller blaze burning nearby, was discovered shortly after and the two were renamed the Sequoia Complex.
Brigham and Wuenschel are now targeting high-priority groves that are most in danger should another wildfire happen, which is likely given an intensifying drought that has left the Sierra measuring one of its driest years in recorded history, they said.
Conditions in the park remain so dry that a sequoia tree was discovered still burning in a remote area of the forest earlier this month — essentially meaning the Castle Fire hasn’t stopped destroying.
This year’s extreme drought conditions could prevent the thirsty sequoia seedlings from surviving, scientists fear. Even if they do regrow, it’ll likely be centuries before the monarchs come to inspire the same sense of awe that draws tourists annually from around the globe.
UCLA Forecast Finds “Boom Time,” But Unemployment Remains Highest in US
Politico & San Jose Mercury
UCLA’s prestigious Anderson Forecast team released its highly anticipated June 2021 Economic Outlook, finding…
EUPHORIA AHEAD: In the nation and in California, “we are about to have one of the best years of economic growth that we’ve had since World War II,” Leo Feler, the UCLA Anderson Forecast’s senior economist, told the LATimes’ Margot Roosevelt. “We’re looking at a boom time for the U.S. economy.”
Jerry Nickelsberg, director of the UCLA Anderson Forecast, delivered point after point of good news Wednesday regarding the recovery from the pandemic — and evidence that California’s comeback is indeed worthy of some bragging rights when compared to just about any other state.
CALIFORNIA FORECASTS:
— Home sales, particularly of single-family homes, “are higher than they’ve been at any time since prior to the great recession,” with prices “up double digits around the state.” That means developers have been getting back to work, prompting “a 30 percent increase in home building.”
— California’s four largest ports are booming, with “ships lined up waiting to unload,’’ making logistics a particularly strong sector, he says.
— No mass exodus: “There’s really no evidence in the data that we have tech leaving California or people leaving California. It is still all about the pandemic. There’s no mass exodus from California.’’
— General fund revenues are “higher than they have been in the last two years,’’ reflective of the fact that the tech sector “has prospered in general in the pandemic” — benefiting the highest income residents. And their tax dollars are boosting state revenues to record surplus levels.
— When will business travel recover? “Not this year, but fairly quickly.’’ California’s businesses that get back to their pre-pandemic ways — conventions, training and travel, and more creative work scheduling — will bounce back faster, though it still may be until 2022 until fully recovered, the UCLA team said.
— On jobs, California’s unemployment rate is projected to remain above that of the nation’s because of its relatively younger population. So, as Roosevelt writes, “by the end of this year, the state’s unemployment rate will average 5.9%, compared with 4.5% for the U.S., according to calculations by Nickelsburg and economist Leila Bengali. But California’s job growth is expected to jump past the nation’s by the end of 2023, they predict. By the end of 2023, joblessness in California could be 4 percent, compared with 3.7 percent for the U.S.
BUT UNEMPLOYMENT REMAINS HIGH: The closer California gets to reopening, the worse its unemployment numbers look. Nearly 75,000 residents filed new jobless claims for the week ending May 29, according to federal data released Thursday — the state’s highest total since April 24. California now accounts for nearly 18% of the nation’s jobless claims, despite making up only 11% of its workforce, the Mercury News reports. The disappointing numbers highlight the paradox of California’s post-pandemic economy: Although experts predict the Golden State will recover more quickly than the rest of the nation, its unemployment rate is expected to remain higher.
New Manufacturing Plants Rise in Southwest, Skip California
Wall Street Journal excerpt
Companies producing everything from steel to electric cars are planning and building new plants in Southwest states, far from historical hubs of American industry in the Midwest and Southeast. The lure is open land, local tax breaks and a growing supply of tech-savvy workers.
The Southwest, comprising Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and Oklahoma, increased its manufacturing output more than any other region in the U.S. in the four years through 2020, according to an analysis by The Wall Street Journal of data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
Some growth in the Southwest has come at the expense of California, classified in U.S. statistics as part of the Far West. In 2019, nearly 2,000 manufacturing workers in Texas and more than 1,300 in Arizona arrived from California, the most in a decade, the most recent Census Bureau data show. More than 2,700 manufacturing workers have come to Nevada from California in 2017 through 2019.
Those states plus Nevada added more than 100,000 manufacturing jobs from January 2017 to January 2020, representing 30% of U.S. job growth in that sector and at roughly triple the national growth rate, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Executives say the region’s growing population makes for plenty of available labor, and its lower cost of living is a draw for new talent.
“I was surprised how straightforward a choice it was,” said Peter Rawlinson, chief executive for Lucid Motors Inc., an electric-vehicle startup that plans to open a $700 million vehicle factory this year in Arizona, where state officials rolled out the red carpet. “There was only one logical conclusion.”
The company had looked at more than 60 sites in 13 states before settling on the 590-acre site in Pinal County, Ariz., a rural area dotted with dairy and cotton farms. The company’s roughly 1 million-square-foot plant will be the state’s first auto-assembly operation.
California has seen a longer-term decline in manufacturing employment, but it is well-positioned to compete in advanced manufacturing sectors that require specialized skills and which pay higher wages, a spokesman for the state Department of Finance said.
Manufacturers in the Southwest have been relatively insulated from pandemic shutdowns and layoffs, and job growth there is expected to continue. More than a year of global supply chain disruptions are nudging more manufacturers to reshore or expand U.S. production, likely benefiting Southwest states the most, said Eric Stavriotis, the head of location incentives for CBRE Group, a Dallas-based real-estate company.
Chip maker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. last year selected Arizona for a new 1,600-worker factory near Phoenix, a $12 billion facility that ranked as the single largest capital investment announced in the U.S. last year.
A hiring website for the company seeks to lure workers by promoting the area’s affordable housing as well as rock climbing, river rafting and other outdoor recreation. “It doesn’t hurt that Phoenix enjoys an average of 299 sunny days each year,” the website said.
Intel Corp. said in March it would invest $20 billion to expand its manufacturing in Arizona and pledged to add 3,000 high-tech jobs. The company said last month it would spend another $3.5 billion to expand its manufacturing operations in New Mexico, adding 700 jobs.
Tesla Inc. is opening a new assembly plant and battery factory in Texas, more than 1,400 miles from its headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif.
New factories create fewer jobs than they did in the postwar boom, with automation and other technologies helping produce more output with less labor. But many new plants pay higher wages. Semiconductor factories are among those that require more engineers and trained technicians than traditional assembly line workers.
Manufacturing helps diversify economies, such as those in Arizona and Nevada, that have depended on real estate, tourism and other cyclical industries.
“There’s cranes everywhere,” said Robert Hess, a vice chairman of the Newmark Group Inc., after a visit to the Southwest with a client this year.
Arizona politicians and economic development officials hustled to attract Lucid’s electric-vehicle plant, company executives and local officials said.
Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey and other state officials visited Lucid’s Bay Area headquarters to pitch tax incentives and other benefits. The city of Casa Grande, Ariz.—where the plant is being readied to open—purchased and annexed plots of land that it zoned for industrial use.
A trade school opened a training center nearby this year, working with Lucid to craft a curriculum to train new hires, company executives and local officials said. The company hopes to draw local workers, as well as those from Phoenix and Tucson. The town is within a day’s drive of the Mexican state of Sonora, a center for auto-parts suppliers, Mr. Rawlinson said.
The factory will build the Lucid Air, a luxury electric sedan starting around $70,000. It will employ around 750 people when it opens and expand to more than 2,000 workers, the company said.
Mr. Rawlinson said California was the company’s first choice for a factory, in a spot close to Lucid’s designers and engineers. But Arizona proved more favorable, current and former company executives said.
California’s losses are small relative to the state’s $3 trillion economy. But higher taxes and steep housing costs in the Golden State are prompting production firms to look elsewhere, according to executives and site-selection firms, which help companies pick new factory locations.
“Every sort of tax you could imagine that could hit manufacturers has gone down,” said Glenn Hammer, former head of Arizona’s Chamber of Commerce who recently moved to the one in Texas. Arizona this year expanded a tax credit for infrastructure investments that create jobs. It also allows manufacturers to deduct energy spending from their sales tax bills.
In Texas, which has no state income tax, some municipalities offer tax abatements to new businesses or exemptions from local property taxes.
Nevada also has offered aggressive tax incentives, said Stephen Miller, a professor at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. Those include abatements on sales, property and business taxes, in addition to tax credits that can be resold to other businesses.
Newcomers drawn in part by abatements include Haas Automation, the largest producer of precision tools used on assembly lines in the U.S. To complement its Oxnard, Calif., factory and headquarters, the company is building a second plant in Henderson, Nev., about 10 miles south of Las Vegas. It will employ 500 workers when it opens in early 2023, Haas said.
Within five years, the company expects to add more than 1,500 additional jobs in Nevada, and hopes at least a few hundred of its 1,500 workers in California will move to fill them, said Peter Zierhut, a company vice president.
The company had looked at other sites in Texas and in North Carolina. Nevada won out, in part, Mr. Zierhut said, because it was only a day’s drive to the Port of Los Angeles, where it can ship its machines overseas.
“Housing prices here are making it very difficult for us to find workers” for the Oxnard factory, he said, which is by the coast about 60 miles west of downtown Los Angeles.
Employees start around $17 an hour, he said, and three-bedroom apartments in Oxnard rent for about $2,800, according to real-estate listings platform Zumper. The company will pay its Nevada workers around the same, but similar-size apartments there rent for about $1,000 less a month, according to Zumper.
Steel Dynamics Inc., a steel producer based in Fort Wayne, Ind., is opening what will be the region’s largest mill in Sinton, Texas this year. It will employ around 600 workers and produce three million tons of steel annually, Chief Executive Officer Mark Millet said.