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IN THIS ISSUE – “At Times You Are Just Baffled…It’s Not Even a Partisan Thing”
POLITICS & ECONOMY
- Newsom Emerges from Seclusion, Touts California Economic Power; But New Poll Finds Voters Worried, 26% Consider Moving
- Daily Life in Golden State Costs More As Port Congestion Grows:
- A Governor, a Speaker, a Mayor Walk Into a Wedding…
- State Attorney General Race Early Leader in 2022 Campaign Heat
- Drawing New Legislative District Lines:
- First Maps Posted As Commission Races to Meet Dec. 27 Deadline;
- Controversy Ensues…“It’s Not Even a Partisan Thing”
- Conflict Over State Auditor Selection; Integrity & Credibility At Stake
CLIMATE CHANGE & INFRASTRUCTURE
- At Global Climate Summit, Assembly Speaker Says:
“I Don’t Feel We Are Leading The World Anymore”
- Largest SoCal Water District Declares Drought Emergency
- California Short-Changed in Federal Infrastructure Funding?
- US Labor Dept. Rules State Not Eligible for $12 Billion in Transit Funding
FOOD BANKS
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.
READ ALL ABOUT IT!
FOR THE WEEK ENDING NOV. 12, 2021
Newsom Emerges From Seclusion, Touts California Economic Power;
But New Poll Finds Voters Worried, 26% Consider Moving
CalMatters & Public Policy Institute of California
Gov. Gavin Newsom, whose paucity of public appearances this month had been puzzling — and the subject of much social media speculation — emerged in Monterey, where he delivered a very upbeat, even bragging, appraisal of the state’s economy.
Newsom ticked off data points he said prove that “the California dream is still alive and well” and the state “continues to dominate in every category.”
“The future is still invented here,” he told California Forward’s annual economic summit. “I hope we can stop beating ourselves up, he added. “We need to focus on what’s right.”
Simultaneously, the Public Policy Institute of California was releasing a new survey of Californians’ attitudes about the state’s — and their own — economic well-being that was anything but upbeat.
One finding: “Fewer than half expect good economic times in the next 12 months. Majorities across income groups are pessimistic about the economy.”
Another: “Most Californians say the availability of well-paying jobs is a problem in their part of the state, and 22% consider it a big problem.”
“Overwhelming majorities across age, education, gender, and racial/ethnic groups view this as a problem,” PPIC said. “Notably, 26% of Californians say they have seriously considered moving from their part of the state because of the lack of well-paying jobs. Among those who have considered moving, most would leave the state rather than go somewhere else in California.”
Overwhelmingly, survey respondents believe that the state’s yawning gap between haves and have-nots is getting wider. “Majorities across partisan groups and regions say that children growing up in California today will be worse off than their parents,” PPIC reported.
Another revelation: “Twenty-five percent of Californians and 36% of lower-income residents worry every day or almost every day about housing costs. Lower-income residents also worry more than those at higher income levels about paying their bills, the amount of debt they have, and saving enough for retirement.”
So is the surging and dominant economy that Newsom pictures the reality, or is PPIC’s poll a more accurate snapshot of a society with deep-seated and perhaps even intractable socioeconomic inequities?
In a sense, it’s both. The positive data points that Newsom ticked off so eagerly are not, unto themselves, inaccurate, but their beneficiaries primarily are those already in the state’s overclass. Its members escaped most of the negative effects of the pandemic-induced recession and have benefited greatly from steep increases in the stock market and other assets, such as real estate.
https://calmatters.org/commentary/2021/11/newsom-is-upbeat-but-californians-are-worried/
Poll:
Daily Life In Golden State Costs More As Port Congestion Grows
CalMatters
Day-to-day life is getting more expensive in California, which already has a higher percentage of residents living in poverty than any other state in the nation when the cost of living is taken into account.
That’s because skyrocketing inflation rates pushed consumer prices nationwide up 6.2% in October compared to the same time last year — the largest annual increase in more than three decades, according to federal data released Wednesday.
Gas prices shot up a jaw-dropping 49.6%, with California snagging the title of the nation’s most expensive market. A gallon of gas cost an average of $4.63in the Golden State on Wednesday, with some cities — including San Francisco, Oakland and Sacramento — notching their highest-ever recorded average gas price in the past week. But it isn’t just gas: Californians are paying more for goods ranging from food to used cars to electricity. In the Bay Area, for example, home electricity costs 9% more than it did last year, and price tags for meat, poultry, fish and eggs have jumped 14%.
Economists say rising consumer prices are partly due to ongoing supply chain backlogs. coupled with persistent labor shortages, continue to drive prices up.
Scott Anderson, chief economist with San Francisco-based Bank of the West: “Companies are successfully passing along higher costs stemming from supply chain bottlenecks and higher wage rates to consumers.”
78 container ships were waiting to unload cargo at the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports as of mid-week, up from the 58 idling in mid-October, when President Joe Biden announced the two ports would move toward 24/7 operations. But officials said their plan to start charging shipping companies on Nov. 15 for leaving containers too long at the ports appears to be working: More than 10,000 boxes have already been cleared from the docks.
A Governor, a Speaker, a Mayor Walk Into a Wedding…
Politico
A governor, a mayor and a speaker of the House walk into the opulent wedding of a politically connected family’s scion.
It’s no joke. There’s been quite a stir over the images from Ivy Getty’s extravagant San Francisco nuptials, where attendees included San Francisco Mayor London Breed, Speaker/officiant Nancy Pelosi and Newsom — long a business and political beneficiary of the Getty family and patriarch Gordon. Vogue’s report and photo spread from the glittering event, in which masks are scarcely visible, has spurred followup coverage from the Daily Beast, the Washington Examiner and others. There were accusations of pandemic hypocrisy from the right — French Laundry references abounded — and broadsides from the left against Pelosi for participating in an oil heiress’s nuptials while much of the country struggles. “Powerful editorial in support of a wealth tax,” quipped Washington Post reporter Philip Bump.
State Attorney General Race Early Leader in 2022 Campaign Heat
CalMatters
With mounting concern over California’s rising crime rates, the race for state attorney general could be more of a nail-biter — and candidates are already ratcheting up their campaigns.
Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert last week launched a podcast called “Inside the Crime Files,” a project that apparently aims to satisfy people’s zest for true-crime content while also promoting Schubert’s career as a prosecutor.
“I put away the Golden State Killer and Second Story Rapist,” Schubert proclaimed on Twitter. “Now, I’m taking you inside crime files.” A serial rapist case solved by Schubert’s office was also the subject of an October episode of Bloodline Detectives titled “Sacrilege in Sacramento.”
Not to be outdone, Attorney General Rob Bonta — whom Newsom nominated for the position in March — has been publishing a slew of press releaseshighlighting his office’s efforts to crack down on hate crime and push local governments to comply with state housing law. For example, on Monday he urged a federal court to block a proposed New Jersey hospital merger that he said could prevent access to affordable and accessible health care; asked the federal government to protect renters from eviction during the pandemic; and offered a glimpse of the state’s lawsuit against an online for-profit college that allegedly engaged in false advertising and unlawful business practices. Joining Bonta, a Democrat, and Schubert, an independent, as candidates in the 2022 attorney general’s race are Republicans Nathan Hochman and Eric Early.
Drawing New Legislative District Lines:
First Maps Posted As Commission Races to Meet Dec. 27 Deadline;
Controversy Ensues…“It’s Not Even a Partisan Thing”
Politico
California’s hectic redistricting process has already been described as turning one proposed district into a “hot mess” and taking a “chainsaw to our congressional maps.”
And that was from one of the commissioners overseeing the map-drawing.
Weeks before California will get new district maps governing the next decade of elections, the political landscape remains in a state of flux. Commissioners have released district visualizations and then dismantled them on the spot after some campaigns and interest groups reacted with something between bewilderment and panic.
All of it comes as congressional power hangs in the balance next year, potentially tipped by battleground seats in Southern California and the Central Valley. Yet nobody knows quite yet what the battleground turf will actually look like.
The commission last week released its first official draft maps, but initial versions of the House and state Assembly districts were so clunky that boundaries in heavily populated regions were comically difficult to discern.
California must finalize new House and state legislative districts by Dec. 27 — just six months before midterm primary elections. Commissioners have been racing to draw draft maps ahead of a mid-November deadline, slogging through marathon sessions of shifting boundaries and indignant public feedback.
The painstakingly complex process has played out in public view. More than a decade ago, California voters traded a system stage-managed by the majority party for an open, nonpartisan process overseen by a board of commissioners designed to be objective.
That may be beneficial for democracy, transparency and citizen advocacy. But it is giving political players heartburn while keeping candidates in a restless holding pattern during a season they would normally be laying campaign groundwork in their districts. But the pandemic delayed California’s map drawing well beyond the normal period, as it did elsewhere.
“People are upset by the chaos of it. There’s no direction that can be discerned with each new set of maps. It’s just random changes,” said Democratic campaign consultant Katie Merrill. “It appears that their effort to be transparent has really resulted mostly in chaos.”
Those preliminary maps are supposed to provide clarity. But the work of crafting them has largely generated confusion, according to campaign officials and advocates who have followed the process. Even seasoned political professionals have struggled to keep up.
“At times you were just baffled as to how they were drawing what they were drawing in the congressionals,” said Political Data Inc. Vice President Paul Mitchell. In some cases, “it’s not even a partisan thing: Are they going to draw districts that have a cohesive sense of themselves?”
Commissioners have floated and discarded proposals that seemed to place multiple Sacramento-area Democrats into overlapping seats. Some Bay Area residents recoiled when a commissioner mused about Marin County, across the Golden Gate Bridge, being folded in with San Francisco. Campaign officials are watching to see if a battleground Central Valley district loses a liberal population hub. Advocates are raising concerns about the number of Black-represented seats, or proposals that could carve up LGBTQ communities.
“When you empower a community of interest to band together and elect a candidate of choice, that candidate can then go on to advocate for that community’s interests,” said Samuel Garrett-Pate, a spokesperson for the LGBTQ organization Equality California, which has been heavily involved in the process. Conversely, he said, “redistricting can even inadvertently be used to divide and disempower communities.”
The ever-shifting maps have had the equivalent effect of a dam holding back a flood. California is losing a House seat due to anemic population growth for the first time in state history, dropping the still-massive delegation to 52 members. It is widely expected that some incumbents will retire rather than run in new districts, creating a cascade of open seats and fresh candidates. But that sea change is largely on hold until new maps emerge.
“In some of these seats, you don’t know if you’re going be running against your seatmate or have a whole new opportunity,” Democratic consultant Courtni Pugh said. “These lines have changed so much.”
Pugh noted that commissioners must account for profound demographic changes in the last decade. Ethnic groups have grown or diffused to different parts of the state, and the other side of slow growth in Los Angeles has been rapid population gains elsewhere. Commissioners must balance demands to maintain districts with primarily people of color, keep “communities of interest” intact and try to hew to existing community lines.
Those dynamics will inevitably create openings for some prospective candidates and slam doors on others.
“Some people are nervous because they’ve seen things move around a little bit, other folks are excited, particularly people that aren’t incumbents — is this going to be an opportunity?” Pugh said. “There are hard conversations and opportunities.”
The amount of change has undercut the predictive power of the November draft maps. There is a broad belief that full extent of the turnover won’t be evident until around Christmas, when the final maps are set to drop, or later.
“I don’t think there’s been any pre-positioning or hints of retirements, and there shouldn’t be because these maps are all over the place. No one should draw any conclusions from any versions of the maps that have come out, and they really can’t,” Merrill said. “The only thing I hear from my clients is, ‘Am I going to have a district to run in?’”
That isn’t to say all candidates are staying on the sidelines. Several challengers have already declared they are running for competitive House, Assembly or state Senate districts despite not knowing the shape of the seats they are seeking to represent. That early start may buoy some campaigns.
“The folks who have already gotten in are just going to have such a significant head start,” said consultant Lindsay Bubar, who is working on multiple Assembly campaigns. “You’re going to see candidates for the Legislature reporting hundreds of thousands of dollars already.”
But Bubar predicted that some people now running “won’t be anymore because they’re not in the district or the district changes.” (Unlike House candidates, state legislative hopefuls must live in the district they represent.) And she noted that many political players are waiting to spend money or issue endorsements.
“There are a number of large organizations, some donors who are holding off on support until we have final maps,” Bubar said.
The pandemic compressed the entire process by slowing the decennial census, which supplies the data undergirding new districts. That in turn delayed the dates for releasing maps, even as midterm primaries remain on the June calendar.
Redistricting Commission’s Map Viewer:
https://www.wedrawthelinesca.org/map_viewer
Conflict Over State Auditor Selection; Integrity & Credibility At Stake
CalMatters
Although California lawmakers don’t return to Sacramento until January, political conflicts are already starting to brew.
The latest partisan battle: choosing the next state auditor, who leads the nonpartisan, independent office that evaluates the performance of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration and other government agencies.
The position will open up for the first time in 21 years at the end of this year, when State Auditor Elaine Howle plans to retire. And Republican lawmakers are concerned that Democrats — who exercise supermajority control in the Legislature — will shut them out of the process of recommending her successor to Newsom.
In the letter to Assemblymember Rudy Salas, the Bakersfield Democrat who leads the committee responsible for sending nominations to Newsom, seven Republican legislators asked that “one Democrat and one Republican from each house” be “assigned to a subcommittee to review applications, vet candidates, and make a recommendation to the full committee.”
The GOP lawmakers: “Government inefficiency, along with waste, fraud, and abuse, affect all Californians, so it only makes sense that this process should be open, transparent, and enjoy bipartisan cooperation from the start.”
Committee staffers said Thursday that both Democrats and Republicans will be involved in the process of deciding which names are sent on to the governor.
The political jockeying underscores the power and influence of the office: As I discuss in a sit-down interview with Howle, the state auditor is the only entity under state law that has full access to all records, accounts, correspondence, property and files of any publicly created group.
And Howle’s office has illuminated the pitfalls of California’s pandemic response, uncovering — among other things — rampant fraud at the Employment Development Department, inequitable distribution of federal relief funds among cities and counties, and delays in getting federal rent relief to struggling tenants and homeless Californians.
I talked with Howle about California’s most and least cooperative state agencies, her thoughts on EDD and high speed rail, which areas of the Newsom administration should receive more oversight, and the political pressure she’s faced.
Howle: “The minute anybody in this position agrees to, ‘OK, I’ll wait and issue (an audit) a week later,’ or, ‘OK, I won’t say that,’ the integrity and the credibility of this organization is destroyed, and we can’t afford to let that happen. And I hope my successor understands that that cannot happen.”
Full Howle interview:
At Global Climate Summit, Assembly Speaker Says: “I Don’t Feel We Are Leading The World Anymore”
Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon delivered that stark assessment of California’s efforts to combat climate change in a Monday phone call from the United Nations conference in Scotland — turning on its head Gov. Gavin Newsom’s view that California is taking “action that is unprecedented in both nature and scale” by phasing out oil production and the sale of gas-powered cars.
The Lakewood Democrat rattled off examples of other cities and countries outperforming California: Paris is “ahead of us” on dealing with extreme heat, the German state of Baden-Württemberg is “certainly ahead of where we are” on transportation, and there are “various governments in India that have more aggressive goals than we have.”
Rendon depicted California as a state that is pursuing outdated solutions to the climate crisis. “This is not a matter of ego,” he told me. “This is a matter of these folks having aggressive goals that are consistent with where we know the climate crisis is. When we developed our goals a couple of years ago … they were adequate for where we thought … climate change was. Things are much worse now than we thought they were.”
Indeed, California’s global ranking for zero-emissions vehicle sales is slipping behind “almost everyone,” Daniel Sperling, a member of the California Air Resources Board,
And State Sen. Bob Wieckowski of Fremont suggested that California’s landmark climate strategy — which allows companies to buy and sell pollution credits to meet an annual cap on greenhouse gas emissions — could learn a thing or two from a “better program” in Washington state that requires companies “to make actual reductions” in emissions rather than “allowing people to continue to pollute.”
Largest SoCal Water District Declares Drought Emergency
CalMatters
Despite the bomb cyclone that bulldozed across California last month and the light sprinkle of rain across the northern part of the state early this week, California’s drought is still, to put it mildly, really bad. On Tuesday, the Metropolitan Water District — the largest urban water district in Southern California — declared a drought emergency and urged local water suppliers to immediately stop using resources from the State Water Project, which delivers water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta to southern cities and agricultural land. California’s drought is also wreaking destruction on migrating birds by drying out key wetlands and waterways that birds rely on to travel between their summer and winter homes, CalMatters’ Julie Cart reports. And as the wetlands disappear, so, too, do the birds.
California Short-Changed in Federal Infrastructure Funding?
CalMatters commentary by Dan Walters
California will receive about $45.5 billion from the infrastructure improvement legislation that Congress approved last week, which sounds like a lot of money.
In fact, it’s the largest share of the $1.2 trillion program of any state and President Joe Biden wants Californians to be appreciative.
“The historic Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act will make life better for millions of California residents, create a generation of good-paying union jobs and economic growth, and position the United States to win the 21st century,” the White House said in a statement detailing the state’s share.
Gov. Gavin Newsom echoed the White House, saying, “This historic infrastructure package stands to accelerate investments in our clean transportation infrastructure, help mitigate some of the worst impacts of climate change and accelerate new projects that will create thousands of jobs.”
Virtually every Democratic member of Congress from California issued a similarly upbeat statement predicting that the new federal funds would have a transformative impact.
From a relative standpoint, however, California’s allocation is small. At just over $1,200 per Californian, it’s one of the lowest of any state. States with relatively small populations, such as Alaska and Vermont, benefit the most on a per-resident basis.
Two-thirds of California’s share, about $30 billion over five years, is reserved for repairing roads, highways and bridges and we can certainly use it because, as the White House breakdown observes, “For decades, infrastructure in California has suffered from a systemic lack of investment.”
Our highways rate at or near the bottom vis-à-vis those of other states simply because ever since the 1960s, governors and legislators have been unwilling to impose the taxes on motorists to keep what was once the nation’s best roadway network in good repair.
Four years ago, then-Gov. Jerry Brown and legislators passed a $5.4 billion per year package of taxes and fees to slow the system’s deterioration but while it narrowed the gap, it did not close it. The new injection of federal money will be welcome, but will fall short of doing what’s needed to restore our roadways to their previous levels.
Another $9.45 billion (over five years) is ticketed “to improve public transportation options across the state.”
There will be no shortage of applicants for those funds. Local and regional transit systems will be vying for slices of the pie and it could be a factor in whether Newsom and legislative leaders resolve their impasse over the state’s much-troubled bullet train project.
Newsom wants the Legislature to provide the remaining $4.2 billion from a 2007 bond issue to finance continued construction of a bullet train section in the San Joaquin Valley while legislative leaders want to divert the money into local and regional commuter transit.
The new federal money could lubricate a compromise – using it to satisfy the legislative demands while giving the bullet train the $4.2 billion.
The remainder of California’s share of the infrastructure bill, roughly $5.5 billion, would mostly be spent on improvements in water systems ($3.5 billion) and airports ($1.5 billion).
So will the federal largesse make a big difference in Californians’ lives, as the White House and Newsom proclaim?
Not likely. In a state with nearly 40 million residents, a $3 trillion economy and a $200-plus billion state budget, spending an extra $45.5 billion over five years is the proverbial drop in the bucket.
By overstating its impact, Newsom and other politicians may give the impression that all of California’s infrastructure problems will be solved when, in fact, we will still have huge deficiencies, particularly in transportation and water.
https://calmatters.org/commentary/2021/11/california-gets-small-share-of-infrastructure-bill/
US Labor Dept. Rules State Not Eligible for $12 Billion in Transit Funding
Sacramento Bee
The U.S. Labor Department recently determined California is ineligible for federal money for public transit, putting in jeopardy about $12 billion in grants including a portion of the infrastructure spending Congress approved last week. The Labor Department’s determination targeted a 2013 state pension law that the department said eroded public transit employees’ rights to negotiate over their pay and benefits. A 1964 federal law says that before state and local agencies may receive federal grants for mass transit, the department must certify the agencies are protecting the interests of any affected employees. California, by restricting pension benefits for any new employees hired after Jan. 1, 2013 with its Public Employees’ Pension Reform Act, ran afoul of those federal protections, according to the Labor Department’s Oct. 28 determination.
The determination would affect about $9.5 billion Congress earmarked for California public transit agencies in the infrastructure bill the U.S. House of Representatives approved Friday, said Michael Pimentel, executive director of the California Transit Association, a nonprofit representing public transit agencies in the state.
In total, the $1.2 trillion bill included about $45 billion for California. Also affected would be about $2.5 billion in American Rescue Plan Act grants for public transit in California, which several agencies have already applied for, Pimentel said.
“This relief funding has served as a lifeline for them, and in the absence of these federal dollars flowing to California transit agencies, we will absolutely see a reduction in service and losses in our workforce, making it more difficult for agencies to rebound,” Pimentel said.
Pimentel said the dollar figures are estimates, and that the amount could ultimately be smaller depending on how the Labor Department implements its determination.
Gov. Gavin Newsom urged Labor Secretary Marty Walsh in a letter Wednesday to reverse the decision, which he said is legally flawed and would harm transit agencies and their riders.
“Public transit agencies rely more than ever on these federal grants just to keep trains and buses running and their workforces employed,” Newsom said in the letter. “The grants being withheld also help provide vital mobility to low-income seniors, individuals with disabilities, and other transit-dependent riders.”
As an example, Newsom said a project expanding Bay Area Rapid Transit service — the Transbay Corridor Core Capacity Program — could not be completed as planned without more federal money.
California Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Alex Padilla also urged Walsh on Wednesday to restore California’s access to the federal grants, saying the department’s determination was “at odds with multiple state and federal court decisions and past Labor Department precedent.”
The Labor Department’s determination reverses its own position from 2019 on California’s pension law. The determination, written by Deputy Director Andrew Auerbach, said the department initiated a new review after President Joe Biden’s election.
The dispute over the state pension law goes back further. In 2012, the Sacramento Regional Transit District and Caltrans — on behalf of Monterey-Salinas Transit — submitted applications for federal transit grants, according to background information in the determination.
The Amalgamated Transit Union, representing employees at the agencies, objected, saying PEPRA harmed their members in a way that violated the 1964 federal law.
The Labor Department agreed, and blocked the money. California and the transit agencies sued. The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California ruled in their favor in 2014, saying the agencies should get the money and that their employees’ collective bargaining rights remained intact.
The court’s 2014 ruling was restricted to the Sacramento Regional Transit District and Monterey-Salinas Transit, according to the department’s determination letter.
Its new determination affects prospective grant disbursements. Pimentel said it’s not clear if the court’s ruling means the Sacramento and Monterey-Salinas agencies can still receive new federal money or if the ruling applies only to the funds they applied for in 2012.
The 2013 pension law, among other things, increased employees’ required contributions to their pensions and made pension accrual formulas less generous.
In the Labor Department’s view, since those changes were imposed by law rather than through collective bargaining, they were improper, according to the determination letter.
Newsom’s letter argued the court’s ruling set a precedent that the department shouldn’t overturn. He also said the fact that public employee unions in California have successfully negotiated new contracts since 2013 show collective bargaining remains intact.
The department’s letter, however, says PEPRA “continues to interfere with the collective bargaining process regardless of the specific terms of workers’ collective bargaining agreements now in existence.”
https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/the-state-worker/article255720896.html#storylink=cpy
Thanksgiving Approaches…Food Banks See Long Lines Growing
Associated Press
(The Gualco Group founded and hosts the California Food Waste Roundtable, a pro bono group of nonprofit, trade association and state executives dedicated to feeding hungry people and food waste reduction.)
On Wednesdays, hundreds of people line up outside a church in east Oakland for its weekly food giveaway. Shiloh Mercy House feeds about 300 families on those days, far less than the 1,100 families it was nourishing at the height of the pandemic, said Jason Bautista, the charity’s event manager. But he’s still seeing new people every week.
“And a lot of people are just saying they can’t afford food,” he said. “I mean they have the money to buy certain things, but it’s just not stretching.”
Families can also use a community market Shiloh opened in May. Refrigerators contain cartons of milk and eggs while sacks of hamburger buns and crusty baguettes sit on shelves.
Oakland resident Sonia Lujan-Perez, 45, picked up chicken, celery, onions bread and and potatoes — enough to supplement a Thanksgiving meal for herself, 3-year-old daughter and 18-year-old son. The state of California pays her to care for daughter Melanie, who has special needs, but it’s not enough with monthly rent at $2,200 and the cost of milk, citrus, spinach and chicken so high.
“That is wonderful for me because I will save a lot of money,” she said, adding that the holiday season is rough with Christmas toys for the children.
It’s unclear to what extent other concurrent government aid, including an expanded free school lunch program in California and an increase in benefits for people in the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, will offset rising food prices. An analysis by the Urban Institute think tank in Washington, D.C. found that while most households are expected to receive sufficient maximum benefits for groceries, a gap still exists in 21 percent of U.S. rural and urban counties.
Bryan Nichols, vice president of sales for Transnational Foods Inc., which delivers to more than 100 food banks associated with Feeding America, said canned foods from Asia— such as fruit cocktail, pears and mandarin oranges— have been stuck overseas because of a lack of shipping container space.
Issues in supply seem to be improving and prices stabilizing, but he expects costs to stay high after so many people got out of the shipping business during the pandemic. “An average container coming from Asia prior to COVID would cost about $4,000. Today, that same container is about $18,000,” he said.
At the Care and Share Food Bank for Southern Colorado in Colorado Springs, CEO Lynne Telford says the cost for a truckload of peanut butter —40,000 pounds (18,100 kilograms)_has soared 80% from June 2019 to $51,000 in August. Mac and cheese is up 19% from a year ago and the wholesale cost of ground beef has increased 5% in three months. They’re spending more money to buy food to make up for waning donations and there’s less to choose from.
The upcoming holidays worry her. For one thing, the donation cost to buy a frozen turkey has increased from $10 to $15 per bird.
“The other thing is that we’re not getting enough holiday food, like stuffing and cranberry sauce. So we’re having to supplement with other kinds of food, which you know, makes us sad,” said Telford, whose food bank fed more than 200,000 people last year, distributing 25 million pounds (11.3 million kilograms) of food.
Alameda County Community Food Bank says it is set for Thanksgiving, with cases of canned cranberry and boxes of mashed potatoes among items stacked in its expanded warehouse. Food resourcing director Wilken Louie ordered eight truckloads of frozen 5-pound chickens —which translates into more than 60,000 birds— to give away free, as well as half-turkeys available at cost.
For that, Martha Hasal is grateful.
“It’s going to be an expensive Thanksgiving, turkey is not going to cost like the way it was,” said Hasal as she loaded up on on cauliflower and onions on behalf of the Bay Area American Indian Council. “And they’re not giving out turkey. So thank God they’re giving out the chicken.”