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IN THIS ISSUE – “I Guess California Will Have to Rely on #Batman.”
Assemblymember Jacqui Irwin (D) tweets on the defeat of her retail crime bill
POLITICS
- Newsom’s Voter Approval Tumbles to Bare Majority
- Legislative Seats & Leadership in Flux
- Crime & Punishment Split Democrat Progressives & Moderates
- Democrats, Republicans Battle for Latino VotesEnvironmental Voters Group Downgrades California from “C” to “D”; Launches Climate Change Ad Campaign
POLICY
- Legislature Moves Against State Departments’ Quick E-Mail Deletions
- Gen. Warns 3rd City to Approve Low-Income Housing
DROUGHT & FIRE
- Drought Death Grip on the Valley: “The World Should Be Worried About What is Happening Here”
- Fire Season 2022 Begins…in March
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 MAR. 25, 2022
Newsom’s Voter Approval Tumbles to Bare Majority
Politico & Public Policy Institute of California
A new Public Policy Institute of California poll will no doubt fuel the frets of candidates and campaign managers on the left.
Two Democratic standard-bearers, Gov. Gavin Newsom and President Joe Biden, have seen their numbers slide in the less than two months since PPIC’s last poll: Newsom is down to 50-45 approval from 57-41 two months ago, and Biden has dipped underwater, to 46-51 approval from 49-49. Also, Sen. Dianne Feinstein plunged to a new nadir of 55 percent disapproval.
That doesn’t mean Newsom is in serious peril of losing reelection. But it does indicate a broader disillusionment — something Democrats will need to surmount.
And according to the poll, most Republican likely voters said the upcoming midterms were more important than the last round, a significantly greater share than Democrats. It can be easier to rally the troops to take back the House than to defend it, as Democrats’ massive 2018 gains in an anti-Trump wave demonstrated — particularly when the majority party is contending with significant headwinds on some key issues.
Among those issues, inflation is unmistakably the one that’s most directly pinching Californians. Roughly two-thirds of voters said price increases have caused them financial hardship — a third, serious hardship — all amid high housing prices.
Two-thirds called homelessness a big problem and said it has worsened in the last 12 months.
“Uncertainty around the economy and that uncomfortable feeling about prices rising” are taking their toll, PPIC director Mark Baldassare said, while a lack of progress on homelessness “makes (voters) feel that government is failing.”
The poll, scroll down about halfway for the referenced data:
https://www.ppic.org/publication/ppic-statewide-survey-californians-and-their-government-march-2022/
Legislative Seats & Leadership in Flux
Associated Press
New political maps have upended the California Legislature this year by prodding more than two-dozen state lawmakers into early retirement or career changes, while others are forced into unfamiliar new districts ahead of the November election.
Democrats still vastly outnumber Republicans in both legislative chambers. But all the jockeying endangers the power base of Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon and forced Senate President Pro Tempore Toni Atkins to intervene to avoid head-to-head June 7 primary battles between her Democratic members.
The number of seats in flux hasn’t been seen since the last redistricting a decade ago, said legislative historian Alex Vassar of the California State Library. It’s also unusual, he said, because just seven lawmakers, all senators, are departing because of term limits compared to 17 legislators in 2016.
Some of the departures include Democratic members of the Assembly who were elected with Rendon during the last redistricting year, in 2012. Like him, they all were eligible to serve through 2024.
Among them are Assembly Speaker Pro Tempore Kevin Mullin and Rudy Salas, both running for Congress; Lorena Gonzalez, who left midterm to lead the California Labor Federation; Ed Chau, appointed to a Los Angeles County judgeship; and Jim Frazier, who also resigned midterm.
In addition, class of 2012 Democratic members Richard Bloom, Tom Daly, Bill Quirk and Mark Stone opted not to seek reelection, with Stone saying it would be “inherently unfair” to voters if he ran in a new district for just two years.
“Redistricting creates a lot of opportunities and a lot of churn,” said Rob Pyers, research director of the nonpartisan California Target Book, which closely tracks redistricting.
A typical election cycle might see fewer than a half-dozen incumbents not seek reelection for various reasons, he said.
This time there are 26 races with no incumbent in the 80-member Assembly, while 10 of the 20 Senate seats on the November ballot will have no incumbent. Half of the 40-member Senate is up for election every two years, while all Assembly members run every two years.
Rendon is among those who see advantages in the upheaval, saying the changes “add new energy to our house.”
What some are calling this the Legislature’s “Great Resignation,” Susannah Delano, executive director of Close the Gap sees it as the “Great Opportunity” to elect more women.
About 80% of departing lawmakers are men, making this year “the start of California’s best opportunity yet to elect a Legislature that raises the national bar on equity” said Delano, whose organization promotes progressive female legislative candidates. Before this year’s early departures, 39 of California’s 120 legislators were women.
Across the Capitol Rotunda, Atkins hasn’t faced the same mid-term defections. She helped de-escalate one intraparty battle in the Central Valley when Sen. Melissa Hurtado agreed to relocate into the new 16th Senate District rather than face fellow Democratic Sen. Anna Caballero in the 14th Senate District.
That pits Hurtado, with Atkins’ pledge of support from the Senate Democratic Caucus, against former Democratic Assemblywoman Nicole Parra. And Sen. Connie Leyva opted not to seek reelection when she was lumped into the same Senate district with fellow Democrat Sen. Susan Rubio.
On the Republican side, Sen. Andreas Borgeas dropped his reelection bid rather than play musical chairs with Sen. Shannon Grove for the same seat.
Several members of the Assembly also opted not to seek reelection rather than run against fellow Democrats after they were drawn into the same legislative districts. But in the San Francisco Bay Area former Assemblyman Kansen Chu is trying to unseat incumbent freshman and fellow Democrat Alex Lee, the Legislature’s youngest lawmaker in decades.
On the Republican side, Assemblymen Thurston Smith and Tom Lackey are running for the same seat, as are Randy Voepel and former GOP leader Marie Waldron. And two incumbents from opposing parties — Democrat Cottie Petrie-Norris and Republican Steve Choi — are running against each other in a Southern California district.
Former Assembly GOP Leader Chad Mayes, now the Legislature’s only independent; Republican Assemblyman Jordan Cunningham; and Democratic Assemblyman Patrick O’Donnell all are retiring even though each could serve at least four more years.
Four Democratic lawmakers are giving up their seats to seek higher office: Assembly members Cristina Garcia and Adam Gray and Sen. Sydney Kamlager are running for Congress, while Assemblyman Marc Levine is running for state insurance commissioner.
Assemblyman Kevin Kiley is leaving to challenge fellow Republican and retiring Sacramento County Sheriff Scott Jones for an open congressional seat. And Democratic Assemblyman Jim Cooper is leaving to seek Jones’ old job as sheriff.
Crime & Punishment Split Democrat Progressives & Moderates
Politico’s California Playbook
California won’t be discarding or diminishing Proposition 47 any time soon.
Less than a decade after voters overwhelmingly slashed drug and property crime penalties, scrutiny of this landmark criminal justice initiative has risen in parallel with crime concerns.
The same share of voters who passed the measure in 2014 told a 2022 poll they’d amend it to stiffen punishments for theft. State lawmakers have reflected those trends by introducing a flurry of bills to let voters amend or outright abandon Prop 47.
But that legislation is going nowhere.
The Assembly Public Safety committee has extirpated a series of Prop 47 bills in the last few weeks.
That has included Republican bills whose demise will fuel a midterm narrative of Democrats forsaking crime fears; gone are GOP measures to repeal Prop 47 or reinstate petty theft offenses for repeat offenders. It has also encompassed Democratic bills like an effort to expand the jurisdiction for prosecuting thefts, which led Assemblymember Jacqui Irwin to tweet: “This morning my bill on organized retail theft failed before the Assembly Public Safety Committee. I guess California will have to rely on #Batman.”
On Tuesday, the committee halted a measure that would’ve lowered the threshold for felony property crimes. Moderate Democratic Assemblymember Rudy Salas — who happens to be challenging Rep. David Valadao in one of California’s marquee midterm races — noted the aforementioned poll and said elected officials must “show we not only recognize this problem, but we’re trying to address it.”
That failed to persuade Democratic chair Reggie Jones-Sawyer, who argued the change would merely “fill prisons again.” (Jones-Sawyer previously carried legislation creating an organized retail theft task force.)
Some larger dynamics to remember: the Legislature’s respective public safety committees tend to be led by progressives rather than law-and-order types. (There’s a reason a prison guards union spent more than $1 million to unseat Jones-Sawyer last cycle.)
And that affects what types of bills can or cannot get through. We’re also less than two years removed from voters rebuffing law enforcement’s ballot initiative to unravel aspects of Prop 47.
But Democrats are not oblivious to the public mood. Two Democrats hardly considered moderates, Assemblymembers Mia Bonta and Miguel Santiago, held off on Salas’ bill. Many Democrats are seeking a balance, safeguarding criminal justice reforms while demonstrating they’re attentive to public safety — and showing that the two goals needn’t be in conflict.
Senate President Pro Tem Toni Atkins said earlier this year that lawmakers should “be able to say where change is needed,” even as they “uphold the will of the voters.” Progressive Attorney General Rob Bonta said he was open to “tweaks and changes” to deal with “unintended consequences.”
Gov. Gavin Newsom has defended Prop 47, while pointing out prosecutors can go after organized retail crime under current law — and encouraging them to do so. “These are not victimless crimes, Newsom said last year, “and I have no empathy for these criminal elements.”
Democrats, Republicans Battle for Latino Votes
NY Times commentary from Mike Madrid, Republican political consultant and co-founder of the Lincoln Project
Democrats working to save their slim majority in the House in November’s elections have been sounding alarms lately over research showing that Republican attacks on culture-war issues are working, particularly with center-left, Hispanic and independent voters.
Hispanic voters, many of us alienated by progressive labels and mottos like “Latinx” and “defund the police,” have been drifting rightward as Donald Trump marginally increased the G.O.P. Hispanic vote share in 2016 and again in 2020 — a phenomenon, it should be noted, that goes beyond Mr. Trump or any individual campaign.
Democrats now understand that they are losing support among Hispanics on culture as well as pocketbook issues, leaving little in the message arsenal for the party’s candidates to stanch what appears to be a long-term bleed.
The Democrats’ problems with Hispanics are especially glaring when you consider that Republicans are not exactly flawless when it comes to appealing to these voters. Both parties have committed a mind-boggling form of political malpractice for years: They have consistently failed to understand what motivates Hispanic voters, a crucial and growing part of the electorate.
As the growth of the Hispanic eligible electorate continues to outpace other new eligible voting populations’, the caricatures and stereotypes of “Hispanic issues” are proving further and further removed from the experience of most Hispanics. Yet, for all the hype and spin about Republican gains with Hispanic voters, the rightward shift of these voters is happening despite Republicans’ best efforts, not because of them.
In the eyes of some on the American right, Hispanics are hyperreligious Catholics or evangelicals and entrepreneurial, anti-Communist social conservatives reminiscent of the ethnic white voters of yesteryear. To some on the left, we’re seen as angry, racially oppressed workers of the cultural vanguard who want to upend capitalism while demanding open borders. While none of these caricatures are accurate, in them there are enough grains of truth to lull self-righteous partisans on both sides into believing that they may be on the winning side of the emerging ethnically pluralistic American majority.
In our current era of negative partisanship, voters are motivated as often to oppose the party they dislike or view as extreme as they are to support the party with which they align. Latinos, of course, are no different, and it is at the cultural extremes where Democrats face the greatest threat of losing what they have long viewed as the foundational base of their long-term majority prospects. As “culture” grows as a proxy for “race,” the electoral math for Democrats will most likely get bleaker as political campaigns continue as referendums on “critical race theory” and “defunding the police.” It will be worse still if Hispanics increasingly do not view themselves as an aggrieved racial minority.
This understanding will help determine which party controls Congress and the White House, beginning with the 2022 midterms. Under newly drawn district lines, four of the most competitive House seats will have Hispanic populations of at least 38 percent and are in California, Texas, New Mexico and Colorado. Additionally, Hispanic voters will be essential components of Senate and other statewide contests in Arizona and Nevada. The Latino voters in these states and districts are important for both parties. As the Democratic Party drifts away from its working-class roots and emphasizes cultural issues, Republicans are well positioned to pick up these politically untethered voters and with them the reins of power.
The recent debate over the term “Latinx” symbolizes the cultural alienation of institutions far removed from the realities of life for an overwhelming number of working-class Hispanics. “Latinx” was created as a gender-neutral alternative term in Spanish, a gendered language, that refers to a male as “Latino” and a female as “Latina.”
Commonly used by media, political and academic elites as a sign of gender inclusivity, “Latinx” is virtually nonexistent in the communities it refers to. In 2020, Pew Research revealed that only 3 percent of Latinos use the term, while 9 percent of white liberals think it is the most appropriate term to use. In fact, only 14 percent of Latinos with a high school degree or less had even heard of it.
This was not a sign of intolerance but rather was emblematic of one class with the luxury of being consumed with such matters trying to impose its values on working-class families trying to keep up with paying the rent. Members of the Democratic Party don’t just live in a distinct cultural bubble removed from the realities of their blue-collar counterparts; they are so removed from the rapidly growing Hispanic working class that many of them are now literally speaking a different language.
The growing cultural divide in America, in which Hispanics appear to be increasingly turned off by progressive mottos and movements, is linked to the education divide in America between college-educated and non-college-educated voters of all ethnicities. According to Pew Research, Republicans increasingly dominate in party affiliation among white non-college voters, who make up 57 percent of G.O.P. voters. This in a country where 64 percent of voters do not have a college degree.
The Democratic Party is losing its brand among white working-class voters and Hispanics. This is especially pronounced among Hispanic men and Hispanic non-college-educated voters, who are trending more Republican, just as their white non-college-educated peers are. Latinos are increasingly voting similarly to non-college whites, perhaps because they don’t view themselves as all that different from them. Pew Research studies on Hispanic identity have shown that fully half of the country’s Hispanics viewed themselves as “a typical American”; fewer identified as “very different from a typical American.”
For all the discussion about diversity within the Latino community and the now trite adage that the community is not monolithic, in fact what unites most Hispanics is that they are an important share of the blue-collar non-college-educated work force, and their presence in the labor force is only growing. The essential workers of the pandemic are disproportionately Black and Latino, and as a decidedly younger demographic, Hispanic workers are filling the manufacturing, agricultural and construction trades in states with large Hispanic populations.
Democrats have increasingly become a party shaped by and reliant upon white voters with college degrees. Compared with 40.1 percent of white adults age 25 and older, only 18.8 percent of Latino adults in that age group have a bachelor’s degree. Latinos are and increasingly will be a key part of the blue-collar work force, and their politics are reflecting that.
From Hispanics’ 71 percent support for President Barack Obama in 2012 to 66 percent for Hillary Clinton and 59 percent for Joe Biden in 2020, Democrats find themselves slowly but measurably losing hold of Latinos, the fastest-growing segment of the electorate. As Latino voters grow in number in key battleground states, they are increasingly rejecting the minority construct promulgated by the media, academia and Democratic politicians and consultants.
The party that is able to express the values of a multiethnic working class will be the majority party for the next generation. As we continue to watch the country’s culture war increasingly divided by education levels, it is quite likely that Latino voters will continue to trend, even if marginally, into the ranks of Republican voters. The country stands on the precipice of a significant political shift. As President Ronald Reagan once quipped, quoting a Republican nominee for sheriff, “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party; the Democratic Party left me.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/22/opinion/politics/latinos-democratic-party.html
Environmental Voters Group Downgrades California from “C” to “D”…
CalMatters commentary from Mary Creasman, CEO of California Environmental Voters.
This decade is our last chance to prevent a climate crisis catastrophe and ensure a safe and healthy future for all Californians. But our state’s leaders are failing to act.
Each year, we assess if California is doing enough to fight the climate crisis. We look at the actions of the governor and state legislators. We see how climate legislation fared and if our leaders in Sacramento championed climate solutions or delayed our response to the crisis. And we share this information with voters.
This year, we have assigned California its first “D” grade for inaction on the climate crisis in 2021. This grade reflects that California is not on track to meet its current goals to address climate change and has not passed significant climate legislation in more than three years. This is despite the reality that we are experiencing severe climate impacts: wildfires, extreme heat, pollution and drought.
We’re plagued by “climate delayers” in Sacramento – members of the Legislature who talk about climate change but don’t back up those words with action. Many Californians may be surprised to learn that these “climate delayers” are Democrats; 18 Democratic legislators received failing grades in our 2021 Scorecard.
Because of these “climate delayers,” we are falling behind in lowering emissions and building out clean energy sources. From 2018 to 2019, emissions dropped only 1.6%. Based on the most recent data, the state needs to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at roughly two to three times its current rate.
Curious about why our state is failing to take meaningful steps to address the climate crisis? Follow the money.
Corporate polluters spend millions of dollars to influence the Legislature. A shocking 63% of California state legislators accepted direct campaign contributions from oil companies and major oil industry Political Action Committees since 2018. This includes 52% of Democrats and 96% of Republicans.
The influence of corporate polluters in Sacramento should infuriate us all. They have already done irreparable damage to our public health and economy. Their opposition to climate action could cost us our future. This month, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a report that underscores the impact climate change has on our lives. Their research makes clear that incremental attempts to mitigate the effects of climate change are not sufficient. The time is now for transformational, systemic change.
The good news is that we have the solutions to the climate crisis, what we’re lacking right now is the political will. We can make 2022 the year of climate action instead of climate rhetoric. We can step up and reclaim California’s place as a leader on climate policy.
Already, we’re seeing some signs of progress in 2022. In January, the California Senate passed Senate Bill 260, the Climate Corporate Accountability Act, introduced by Democratic Sens. Scott Wiener of San Francisco and Henry Stern of Calabasas. This bill would require big corporations conducting business in California to disclose their total greenhouse gas emissions. One hundred corporations are responsible for 71% of all global industrial carbon emissions, so corporate disclosures and reductions are critical.
Our biggest opportunity to make up lost ground on climate action is the state budget. With record surpluses, we have the chance to put a big dent in solving the climate crisis with large scale investments in clean energy, transportation and resilience. We are calling for at least 5% of the budget – $75 billion over 5 years – to be dedicated to fighting climate change. This would be a real downpayment making people’s lives better now while protecting our future.
Let’s continue this momentum. We must drastically reduce our emissions, clean up toxic air quality, transition our buildings and cars to clean energy, and make our communities and landscapes more resilient. We’re at the beginning of a new legislative session, and we will all be watching to see how our elected officials respond.
Will 2022 bring climate leadership in California again?
…And Launches Climate Change Ad Campaign
Sacramento Bee
California Environmental Voters, also known as EnviroVoters, has launched its ad campaign with a combination of digital ads and a billboard off I-5 near Sacramento International Airport “urging the governor and lawmakers to double down and think bigger to pass a state budget that ensures victory in the fight against climate change,” according to a statement from the group.
EnviroVoters is specifically calling on state leaders to dedicate at least $75 billion over the span of the next five years — a minimum of 5% of state spending — to pay for investments in clean energy, zero-emission transportation and transit, building decarbonization, water and wildfire resilience, jobs and justice, according to the statement.
“Climate spending must match the scale of the threat we face from unchecked climate change in order to be effective. Only a massive investment can overcome the destruction we face from record drought, record wildfires, and record heat waves,” said EnviroVoters’ Mike Young in a statement. “California has the know-how, and our huge budget surplus gives us the resources to unleash it. We just need leaders with the courage to stand up to corporate polluters profiting from the climate crisis.
Legislature Moves Against State Departments’ Quick E-Mail Deletions
Sacramento Bee
When the California Department of Insurance announced a plan to start deleting employees’ emails automatically after 180 days, an employee raised concerns that had nothing to do with scandals at the top of the department.
The employee worried instead that their work would suffer if they couldn’t pull up old emails related to past enforcement activities. The employee requested anonymity to discuss the proposal with The Sacramento Bee, fearing retaliation. “Memory is not my strong suit,” said the employee, explaining the need to refer to emails.
So when the department pushed ahead with the plan over employees’ objections, the employee became a whistleblower, contacting Consumer Watchdog, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit that’s in a legal fight with the department over public records.
Amid public scrutiny, the department pulled back the policy weeks after it went into effect in January, according to reporting from the San Diego Union-Tribune.
“The committee representing all branches of the Department on IT matters voted to withdraw the policy,” Insurance Department spokesman Gabriel Sanchez said in an email Tuesday. “The updated data and email retention policy was developed to manage an ever-growing number of records in compliance with state law.”
But the department still deletes other records in as little as 90 days under its records retention policy, and other state agencies delete emails and other records in as little as 90 days.
Advocacy and trade groups, including Consumer Watchdog, California News Publishers, the First Amendment Coalition and Californians Aware, say short retention periods create risks that important records will be destroyed before members of the public have a chance to ask for them under the California Public Records Act.
“We have this ridiculous situation where records must be produced under the Constitution but they might be deleted before journalists or the public know about them,” said Jerry Flanagan, Consumer Watchdog’s litigation director.
The groups are supporting a legislative proposal that would require state agencies to preserve records for at least two years, the same length of time cities and counties are currently required to preserve records in California.
Consumer Watchdog sued Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara in 2020 after Lara refused to provide emails and other records related to his meetings with campaign donors in response to a Public Records Act request.
Lara has been under scrutiny for seeking out and accepting thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from insurance industry executives despite a campaign pledge not to do so. The Insurance Department’s proposal would have required employees to set aside any emails they wanted to keep for more than 180 days. The whistleblower said it’s often not obvious in that amount of time which emails will be important later on.
After the whistleblower contacted Consumer Watchdog, the organization sent the department a letter with concerns over the auto-delete policy.
“The Department’s top priority throughout this process has been to have a policy for archiving and preserving records that serves the public interest and is workable for staff,” Sanchez, the department spokesman, said in an email. “The committee voted to withdraw this proposal entirely as it is not workable in implementation.”
While the department reversed course on the email policy, it still deletes some other records, including those related to “invitations, schedules, deadlines (and) contracts” in as little as 90 days, according to its records retention schedule.
Other state agencies have similarly short retention periods. Agencies’ retention policies are posted in a database on a Secretary of State website. The California Environmental Protection Agency directs employees to delete emails sent “primarily for the communication of informal information” in as little as 90 days, while directing employees to preserve some more “official” emails longer.
The California Public Employees’ Retirement System deletes general emails after six months unless employees select them for preservation, CalPERS spokesman Brad Pacheco said in an email.
Some emails are identified for longer holds, and the system’s Investment Office keeps emails for seven years, Pacheco added. In 2010, amid investigations of bribery and other misconduct by CalPERS CEO Fred Buenrostro and a former board member, the retirement system adopted a policy of deleting emails after just 60 days, the LA Times reported in 2011. At the time, the retirement system said the since-retracted 60-day plan was aimed at eliminating obsolete records that were taking up server space.
Cal Fire directs employees to destroy some records related to fire safety inspections and burn permits after a year, according to policies on the Secretary of State’s website.
Under current law, state agencies decide for themselves how long to hold onto records before destroying them. Retention periods range from a few months to several decades.
The new proposal supported by transparency advocates, Assembly Bill 2370, would require state agencies to preserve records for two years. The bill cleared the Assembly Judiciary Committee in a unanimous vote Tuesday.
Assemblyman Marc Levine, D-Greenbrae, introduced the proposal, saying in a news release that it could help “restore ethics and transparency” at the Insurance Department.
Levine is campaigning to replace Lara as insurance commissioner. “We have a Public Records Act law that says that people should have access to records, and yet there’s no retention law to help protect access to those records,” Levine said in an interview. “This bill would make sure the Public Records Act is respected and the public has access to important information.”
The Legislature approved a proposal similar to Levine’s in its last session. That proposal, Assembly Bill 1184, would also have set a two-year minimum retention period for state agencies while adding other requirements for all public agencies in California. Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed that proposal, saying in a veto message that it would have caused a “dramatic increase in records-retention requirements, including associated personnel and data-management costs.” Levine said his proposal would cost little, given how cheap hard drive and Cloud data storage has become.
https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/the-state-worker/article259638169.html#storylink=cpy
Atty. Gen. Warns 3rd City to Approve Low-Income Housing
Sacramento Bee
California Attorney General Rob Bonta is threatening legal action against another California city that the state says is moving too slowly to approve badly needed housing.
Bonta’s office on Thursday sent a letter to Encinitas, a city in northern San Diego County, urging leaders to approve a revamped proposal for a 277-unit apartment complex in an affluent neighborhood. “Based on our current understanding of the revised project, it appears that approval of the revised project would be in the best interests of Californians and consistent with the city’s obligations under state law,” the letter said.
In February, Bonta’s office warned Woodside in Silicon Valley that it could not declare itself a mountain lion sanctuary to avoid a state law requiring communities to allow duplexes on single family lots.
Earlier in March, the Attorney General sent a similar warning to Pasadena, which tried to avoid the same law by exempting “landmark districts,” even though the law does not contain provisions for historic neighborhoods, the Los Angeles Times reported.
Encinitas got Bonta’s attention after leaders didn’t approve the apartment complex, even though it was slated for the only property designated for multifamily housing in the Olivenhain neighborhood.
The City Council in November denied a developer’s appeal for a permit to build Encinitas Boulevard Apartments, which drew opposition from residents, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported.
The complex would feature 41 units for low income residents, and the developer was seeking affordable housing exemptions from Encinitas’s building height requirements and other standards, the Union-Tribune reported.
The developer in January filed a lawsuit in San Diego County Superior Court over the project’s denial. Bonta’s letter to Mayor Catherine Blakespear said state law requires Encinitas to approve housing that complies with planning, zoning and other standards ”absent public health or safety concerns.”
The city also must take steps to affirmatively further fair housing by “replacing segregated living patterns with truly integrated and balanced living patterns, transforming racially and ethnically concentrated areas of poverty into areas of opportunity, and fostering and maintaining compliance with civil rights and fair housing laws,” the letter said.
The apartment complex site is the only one in the Olivenhain neighborhood set aside for “multifamily, lower-income housing,” the letter said. “Thus, the project presented the ideal opportunity to provide fair housing and foster inclusive development in the city,” the letter said. “The city’s decision to instead block the creation of 41 lower income households in this community is a contravention of state law.”
When the city considers the revised proposal for the apartment complex, leaders must approve it, the letter said. It doesn’t pose threats to residents’ health or safety, and the complex fits with Encinitas’ zoning and land use designations.
Plus, the city still hasn’t met state requirements to provide housing for very low and low income residents. “Although the city violated state law when it disapproved the project, it appears that the city will have the opportunity to correct that error by approving the revised project in the near future,” the letter said.
https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article259739290.html#storylink=cpy
Drought Death Grip on the Valley: “The World Should Be Worried About What is Happening Here”
Washington Post
FIVE POINTS – After a rainy and snow-filled December, the state endured its driest start to a year in at least a century. The end-of-year storms that raised the level of state reservoirs and brought a bounty of essential snow to the Sierra Nevada and Cascade ranges are a distant memory.
A survey this month found that the year’s historically dry start has resulted in a snowpack more than 60 percent below average. Not a single major reservoir is filled to its average for this time of year. The one that serves the water district here, the nation’s largest by area, is less than half full as the state’s wet season ends this month.
Wind and wildfire have been more common than rain this year. Less than half an inch of rain fell one day last week on Sacramento, the capital 180 miles north of here through the valley, to break a record 66-day streak without precipitation during winter months.
The whiplash has prompted the federal Central Valley Project, the vast Depression-era system of pumps, aqueducts and reservoirs that provides much of this region’s surface water, to declare a second straight year of no water deliveries. The announcement means farmers across the valley must rely on depleted groundwater supplies and what they have been able to store.
Last week, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) announced an additional $22.8 million in aid for what his office called “an immediate drought emergency.” The state, too, announced earlier this year that it would provide only 15 percent of its scheduled water deliveries, which primarily serve residential customers in Southern California. On Friday, given the withering recent weather, state water officials cut deliveries to 5 percent.
About one-third of the drought relief money will go toward encouraging conservation efforts, which have proven unsuccessful so far. In recent weeks, hundreds of farmers and residents have gathered for drought “town halls,” mostly in the rural north, where the message has been to prepare for a planting season with the scant water on hand.
“There’s a basic question that we need to address and that is do we want to sustain irrigated agriculture in California?” said Tom Birmingham, general manager of Westlands Water District, which oversees federal water deliveries to more than 700 farms here spread over 1,000 square miles.
“If the answer is yes, then we need to determine how we’re going to invest in the infrastructure we need and what policies need to be changed to preserve it,” he continued. “If the answer is no, then how are we going to deal with the socio-economic impacts of its elimination?”
Those consequences can already be seen in the heart of California’s nearly $50 billion annual agriculture industry with implications for the nation’s food supply and the state’s long-term environmental health.
California’s Central Valley, which includes the San Joaquin, produces around 8 percent of the nation’s fruits, vegetables, dairy products and other food, as measured by value, according to the federal government.
That translates into roughly a quarter of the nation’s food, according to federal government statistics, and 40 percent of its fruits and vegetables. Farmers in the Westlands district produce nearly $2 billion worth of food and fiber crops annually.
But the scarcity of water and the now-exorbitant price for it has prompted many farmers to leave large tracts of land fallow, an alarming trend that is accelerating with each dry year.
According to a UC Merced study conducted for the state, California farmers left nearly 400,000 acres of agricultural land unplanted last year due to a lack of water. The result, the study found, was a direct economic cost to farmers of $1.1 billion and the loss of nearly 9,000 agricultural jobs.
Nearly all of the fallowed land is here in the Central Valley. Farmers in the Westlands district left 200,000 acres idle last year — an area almost five times the size of Washington D.C. — and some say they expect to leave even more unplanted this year.
The environmental implications of the drought are also grave. In 2014, the state legislature passed a law that requires water districts to eliminate any “overdraft” in pumping — removing ground water faster than it can be replenished — within two decades of its passage.
Westlands water officials say groundwater within the district is being pumped today at almost twice the rate deemed sustainable. Hundreds of groundwater wells are running dry as the water table sinks with each dry year.
“We’re on a collision course with economics,” said Michael Wara, a senior research scholar at Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment. “We’re going to end up fallowing millions of acres, so politically what does that look like? I think the decision is being made, although no one is making it, about the future of agriculture. And I think the answer is not what people want.”
This is a state where nearly all the water comes from one end — the north — and the vast majority of the population lives in the other.
It is a dilemma of geography and planning that has shaped California’s politics for a century, inspired on-the-ground violence and pop-culture monuments such as “Chinatown,” and more recently placed environmentalists in conflict with farmers.
The state’s well-organized environmental lobby argues that farmers for too long have received too much of a scarce commodity, primarily at the expense of habitat essential to salmon, smelt and other wildlife.
In 1992, Congress passed the Central Valley Project Improvement Act, which requires that 800,000 acre-feet of water be used to protect fish and habitat annually. That amount is almost as much as Westlands’ annual federal allocation.
Farmers, some still old California families but increasingly large corporations, say such decisions, including many made at the state level, are killing the industry.
The surface water here is delivered first by the Sacramento River, its headwaters in the far north near Mount Shasta. From there it rushes south toward the capital and swerves slightly west for miles, until it joins the San Joaquin River to form a vast delta east of the San Francisco Bay.
The Central Valley Project then pumps the water south through 400 miles of aqueducts to eventually irrigate the almonds and pistachios, garlic and lettuce, and tomatoes and citrus in this valley and beyond. This is part of what Birmingham calls California’s “engineered ecosystem.”
What farmers want is a larger share of the water, as well as more dams and reservoirs built to conserve rainfall in wet years. They argue that California has plenty of water, but public policy and plumbing have hampered the way it is managed and delivered.
They received some good news last week. On Thursday, the Environmental Protection Agency announced it would loan $2.2 billion to help finance a decades-long planned federal reservoir north of Sacramento. That is roughly half the planning and construction costs of the Sites Reservoir, whose final approval, even with this essential financial boost, is still years away.
“It is challenging for an optimist like me who has deep ties to the community and great affection for it to see the stranglehold that state and federal regulators have on the key to our economy,” said Diane Sharp, the mayor of Hanford and a fifth-generation resident of the valley. “Many are upset by this. They believe they are losing control of a life they have had for generations.”
Sharp, 58, is upbeat and garrulous. Her father and grandfather worked in the valley as water-rights lawyers and she has lived on a farm. Her family business is commercial real estate, among other holdings.
But it is agriculture here that floats the economy, and in Hanford today that is mostly nuts, dairy, cherries, peaches and apricots. What has helped Hanford, with a population of 56,000, weather the decline in agriculture is an abundance of nearby jobs in several prisons.
“The pride factor is really important here,” Sharp said. “We are justifiably proud that we are known as a place that feeds the world. So when we hit these droughts, which are a function of how much rain we get but also of public policy, it is hard to see how we are able to produce as we have. Our ability is being restricted. It stinks.”
The state’s shifting climate — from cold to hot, wet to dry in rapid turns — also means there is simply less water here than there was decades ago. In the last water year, which runs from October through September, the quick turn in climate resulted in only 20 percent of snowmelt making it into aquifers. The rest evaporated.
“We’re seeing the effects of these very dry and warm and temperatures that are driving this,” said Jeanine Jones, the drought manager for California Department of Water Resources. “So far this water year we have been warm, but we haven’t been as dry, so fingers crossed we do better on runoff this winter. We’ll have to see how that happens.”
This crossroads town is among a crescent of once-thriving, now-declining places west of Fresno, the state’s agricultural capital.
Once a primary destination for Latino immigrants, the area now has the air of resigned frustration that in many nearby communities has replaced abiding hope.
There is still evidence, though, of its spirit in an against-the-odds kind of way.
“The drought puts us on edge and we hope for rain,” said Jonathan Meza, a 30-year-old entrepreneur in Mendota, the self-proclaimed cantaloupe capital of the world. “And the rest of the world should be worried about what is happening here.”
Meza just opened Oasis, the town’s first carwash. Operating on 80 percent recycled water, Meza wants the five-month-old business to stand as evidence of hopeful investment in Mendota, a luxury in a dusty, threadbare place.
“This is a town of hard-working people who came here for the American Dream,” he said. “They will always adapt.”
Farming has always been a long-game business. The fat years help farmers survive the lean ones. But the changing environment has disrupted the balance.
Over the last 35 years, as the climate has shifted to one of extremes, federal water deliveries have averaged less than half their scheduled annual amount. The effect can be seen along Mt. Whitney Ave.
Mark Borba lives along the flat stretch of road in the town of Riverdale, past the empty big-top circus tent and service station selling nearly $6-a-gallon gasoline.
He is the fourth generation of his family to farm the land — in his case, 8,500 acres that he plants with almonds, garlic, tomatoes, lettuce and melons. He stages the crops carefully — garlic is harvested in May, when he needs to concentrate his water on almonds and other crops — to spread his supply out over the course of a year.
He has received no scheduled water deliveries from the Central Valley Project in four of the last ten years.
Borba fallowed 1,800 acres of his land last year and will do the same this year. Water costs have jumped from $7.50 an acre-foot, when he took his first Central Valley Project water delivery in 1967, to $280 an acre-foot today.
But there will be no water deliveries this year anyway. So he will pump it from the ground, as will his neighbors.
“From that point, it has been a downward slide, partly because of the climate and partly because of regulation,” said Borba, a fit 71-year-old, referring to the advent of the three-decade-old Central Valley Improvement Act. “People are spending their equity now to buy water in hopes of keeping their investment alive.”
Cotton, sugar beets, melons and other row crops filled the valley when Borba’s family began farming it. Those are no longer cost effective, and the shift to more lucrative crops such as almonds and pistachios have remade his farm and the valley landscape, blooming snow white from the nut trees on a recent afternoon.
He was born here, grew up here, and has worked this land ever since.
“You want to know the bad news? I’m the last,” said Borba, who recently put his farm up for sale after his 44-year-old son, Derek, told him he would not be running it and was considering a move out of state. Borba and his wife may follow, given that four grandkids would be heading out with his son.
“You know who I am talking to about this? Canadian pension funds, Wall Street hedge funds and big real estate investment firms,” Borba said. “They are saying this is an investment. But they are not talking about growing anything. Who will?”
There are no promises he can make. The fallowing means exodus.
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Fire Season 2022 Begins…in March
San Jose Mercury
CHICO — Each year in California seems to get dryer and dryer, with an ongoing drought and an ever-expanding fire season.
The 2022 fire season is shaping up to continue the pattern.
Fire season officially begins when the various jurisdictions throughout Northern California begin staffing up and reopening airbases. These talks typically begin in spring but can vary based on weather conditions and other factors.
Cal Fire-Butte County Capt. Jacob Gilliam said making these determinations can often be tricky.
“Fire season has been starting earlier every year and is always a moving target,” Gilliam said. “We are moving into a warmer and drier period so those folks doing burn piles and trying to create defensible space need to be careful.”
Gilliam said both working toward defensible space and burning fire fuel piles is still important in the time leading up to fire season, but because of this year’s conditions, residents need to be especially cautious and follow the guidelines.
Because of the lack of rain, brush and grass in the wild is far more dry than usual for this time of year, Gilliam said.
“A lot of our (fire) fuels are dry,” Gilliam said. “Usually, this time of year, the fields are absorbing moisture. Right now, moisture just isn’t as high for this time of year. This means we could have an earlier fire season. We could have more fires in April or May.”
Earlier in March, a residential burn conducted in Shasta County just west of Shasta Lake quickly became out of hand thanks to the dry surrounding conditions. While no structures were damaged and there were no injuries, the fire spread to 88 acres of wilderness and took nearly 11 days to contain. The blaze was dubbed the Flanagan Fire.
Gilliam said more information would likely be released in the next couple of weeks as to the staffing process and the start of this year’s fire season.
“Let’s hope for some rain,” Gilliam said. “We definitely need more rain.”
In the last week of 2021, a consistent trend of storms moved over Northern California, giving some hope that this might be a wetter winter than previous years, but since Jan. 1, there have been record-breaking dry conditions.
Emily Heller, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service’s Sacramento office, said the meters in Oroville have recorded a total of 1.29 inches of rain since the beginning of 2022.
These dry conditions have continued with very little rainfall.
Heller said this week is expected to be much hotter than the average.
“Temperatures will be about 20 degrees above normal for this time of year,” Heller said. “We’re basically going to be back into the upper 80s, so 87 degrees through 89 degrees and in the mid-80s Thursday.”
Heller added that there likely won’t be a significant cool down until Sunday, at which point there is a slight chance of rain.
“There are some chances for rain but it looks light,” Heller said. “Being so far out, it is hard to say when and how much. Maybe a half-inch at the moment but definitely some uncertainty with the timing.”
Gilliam stressed the importance of creating defensible space during the off-season, adding that the season is never truly over and the wet months should consist of preparing for the coming fire season.
More:
https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/03/22/fire-season-could-be-coming-early-again/