Budgetism is the false and conventional wisdom—promoted relentlessly by our state’s media and by elected officials of both parties—that the real measure of California’s success is the condition of the state budget.

For decades, if the budget was balanced or in surplus, California was supposedly on the move, a superpower, or even a national model of success. If the budget was in deficit, California was supposedly in crisis, a failed state, or a cautionary tale of excessive ambition.

But now the budget and everyday reality have diverged with tragic force. When Gov. Gavin Newsom earlier in January introduced a new budget with a $15 billion surplus, it occasioned little of the usual celebration and declarations of governance success. Instead, some wondered why the money hadn’t been already spent responding to the greatest emergency of many Californians’ lives.

The COVID-19 death toll is growing by hundreds per day, and has surpassed 30,000. Schools are closed at great cost to children’s development and mental health. Businesses have been shut, many forever, and thousands of people are abandoning the state altogether. Public fury is mounting against the pandemic response decisions of local and state officials, including Newsom, the target of a recall.

In the wake of this massive tragedy, we’ve managed to put aside our obsession with black and red ink, at least for now. But if this shift were to become a permanent thing, it would be a surprise—and a historic passing. That it has taken a once-in-a-century cataclysm to threaten our budget-centric thinking shows just how deeply ingrained budgetism has become in California, and just how divorced from reality our conversations about state governance have been.

Budgetism endured because it provided an easy, one-number scorecard to judge governance in a highly complicated state. Gov. Gray Davis might have reversed two decades of Republican dominance and achieved important education reforms, but he was a failure worthy of recall because he produced a massive budget deficit after the dot-com bust. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger might have brought historic political reform and climate change legislation, but he was a failure because he presided over a big budget deficit after the Great Recession. (“Schwarzenegger legacy is crippled by budget deficit,” the Mercury News editorialized in a typical assessment.)

The Jedi master of California budgetism was Gov. Jerry Brown, who—despite neglecting mounting problems in everything from housing to unemployment insurance—left office as a media darling because he produced big budget surpluses. The Luke Skywalker of budgetism was the young and brilliant finance director and gubernatorial aide Ana Matosantos, a wizard at conjuring surpluses from California’s impenetrable budget rules.

But this particular force has a very dark side. Budgetism—by focusing so much attention on annual accounting—obscures deeper troubles.

Our state’s leaders like budgetism because it offers cover for their inaction and their failures to manage agencies, to reform the state’s many broken systems, and to execute the progressive policies voters say they want. Sure, major educational studies may conclude that California needs universal child care and more and better instruction for K-12 students, but that would require tens of billions in additional spending that could put the budget into deficit. Yes, the state’s faltering infrastructure, from waterways to health facilities, needs hundreds of billions of dollars in new investments, but we only can address a fraction of that need for risk of throwing the budget out of whack. And of course, it’s a matter of life and death that we accelerate management of our forests and wildlands to reduce fire risks, but can we really afford the cost?

Why hasn’t the dark side of budgeting been more aggressively and publicly challenged? Because politicians punish those who do. Democratic legislators who dare challenge legislative budgets and demand stronger investments lose committee assignments and offices, and get beaten up by interest groups and even their own party.

Over the past decade, when I’ve taken on budgetism in public forums, and suggested we need broader constitutional reform to produce better governing systems and management, I’m often dismissed by politicians and fellow pundits as “unrealistic.” (One Democratic consultant even dismissed me, a rather boring father of three living in a Southern California suburb, as “a revolutionary.”) And when I suggested in this space that then-Gov. Jerry Brown stop summing up the state’s prospects along budget lines and instead see more of California’s lived realities and broken systems in its different regions, he referred to me as a “declinist” in his state of the state address.

I pray that now, after this terrible year, politicians will stop the name-calling and the budgetism, and think more broadly about bigger changes in California, and broader measures to evaluate those changes. Good metrics would shift the focus from funding to management—a vital shift, in a state where bigger spending on homelessness hasn’t produced sufficient housing for the unhoused, and more money for unemployment hasn’t always reached the truly unemployed.

It shouldn’t be that hard to come up with broader measures of whether California is succeeding. So far, the most serious effort at quantifying that is the California Dream Index from the reform powerhouse California Forward.

The index tracks progress toward a more equitable California statewide and across 11 regions, on 10 indicators—air quality, short commutes, broadband access, early childhood education, college and career technical education, income above cost of living, affordable rent, homeownership, prosperous neighborhoods, and clean drinking water.

You can quibble with whether those are the 10 best indicators to follow, but the index offers the smartest measurement we have so far of whether California’s performance is meeting its people’s needs. And it’s a much more accurate picture of the state’s health than whether the budget is in balance.

The post How California (Might Have) Learned to Stop Worrying and Love a Big, Unbalanced Budget appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Adjust your California maps: The little dot marking Santa Rosa needs to be a lot bigger.

Dramatic changes in housing, aging, transportation, and criminal justice are altering the Golden State’s geography, and no place in California stands to benefit more than Santa Rosa.

The charms of this Sonoma County seat have been sung at least since 1875, when the legendary horticulturist Luther Burbank, who created new classics like the Shasta Daisy in his Santa Rosa garden, declared it “the chosen spot of all this earth.” In the 20th century, journalist Herb Caen saw the divine in this part of California, calling heaven “a place that is said to resemble Sonoma in spring.”

These days, Santa Rosa seems poised to become the most successful example of a certain type of urbanism—the rapidly growing midsize city that serves as a crossroads between major regions. The city’s current motto—“Out There. In the Middle of Everything”—encapsulates the new and paradoxical centrality of edge cities, from Fairfield and Santa Clarita to Riverside and Escondido. In an era in which California’s coastal regions have soured on traditions as durable as motherhood (by making children and housing prohibitively expensive) and apple pie (too much sugar, too many calories, and not locally grown), these edge cities are bastions of hoary traditions like economic growth and middle-class opportunity.

“We’re on the move and we’re interested in growing,” says Santa Rosa city councilmember Julie Combs of her town.

As the fifth-largest city in the Bay Area, Santa Rosa, population 175,000 on the way to 200,000, plays many roles. It’s the northern spillover area for people and businesses seeking refuge from the closer-in Bay Area’s higher costs. Employers like it too; the city now boasts 88,000 jobs, its highest employment level ever. Santa Rosa also remains an entry point for the wine industry and the tourists who like to visit it.

Cartoonist Charles M. Schulz, a longtime Santa Rosa resident, and his beloved Peanuts characters (seen here greeting airport travelers) helped put the city on the map. But the publicity value of Charlie Brown and friends could be waning, as Santa Rosa expands, urbanizes, and pursues new ventures. Photo courtesy of Prayitno/Flickr.

And by dint of geography and deliberate strategy, the city is emerging as California’s weed crossroads—or, in the words used by the city, the “farm-to-market” center for medical and recreational marijuana, connecting the cannabis growers of the North State with the retailers and consumers of the Bay Area and points south.

While many other California cities have decided to ban the marijuana industry or limit it, Santa Rosa has embraced it, rapidly issuing permits for cannabis operations and creating a run on warehouse spaces in the city’s industrial zones. Sure, some of these facilities will grow marijuana, but what the city wants is higher-wage professional jobs—in sales, finance, distribution or lab testing—that the newly legal $22 billion-a-year industry will require.

“Most of California’s cannabis is produced on the North Coast,” Tawnie Logan of the Sonoma County Growers Alliance recently told Sonoma Magazine. “Mendocino, Humboldt, and Trinity counties are the breadbasket. Then it moves south to major markets in the Bay Area and Los Angeles. Highway 101 handles a very large percentage of that traffic, and Santa Rosa is the logical capture point. We can handle not only growing, but processing and distribution. And I think we’re heading that way.”

And while Marin County to the south is famously anti-growth, Santa Rosa has been busily preparing for all the new people heading its way. In downtown Santa Rosa, there are plans for taller buildings, including a hotel, as well as an effort to convert an old Highway 12 right-of-way into a signature park, modeled on Golden Gate Park.

Santa Rosa’s once-tiny airport has been adding flights; expansion plans could double its number of travelers by the end of the next decade. The first 43 miles of a new 70-mile commuter rail line, the SMART train, opened this summer, connecting Santa Rosa all the way down to San Rafael, and, eventually, the Larkspur ferry to San Francisco.

The city council has distinguished itself by making housing its top priority, with a multi-phase plan that promises more housing both for the city’s younger, mostly Latino families as well as its seniors. The city has put its own money into affordable housing, is working with the county to establish a housing trust, and is encouraging denser, taller construction—while still preserving its urban growth boundaries. Ever alert for sources of new housing, the city has been pushing cannabis companies to provide housing for their workers.

Santa Rosa also has responded aggressively to rising homelessness—declaring a local state of emergency that allows for flexibility in zoning to help house people quickly. (The city has asked the governor to recognize the emergency, but Jerry Brown, ever diffident, hasn’t acknowledged Santa Rosa’s letters.) In the meantime, the city has adopted a “housing first” approach to homelessness—which means getting the homeless into housing first and then working on addiction, counseling, or other issues.

All of this progress has been helped by a series of inclusive community conversations, some called Santa Rosa Together, that have taken place around the city in recent years. The community’s cohesion also opened the door to an extraordinary step: absorbing Roseland and other poorer communities on the city’s southwest side, with the goal of giving the 8,000 or so people there a greater political voice and better services. Expected to be complete by year’s end, the annexation is billed as the largest such expansion in the city’s history.

All this change can be jarring for some Santa Rosans, particularly longtime residents accustomed to a smaller town that identified itself with the cartoon strip Peanuts. Its author, Charles M. Schulz, spent much of his adult life in the area, which named the airport after him. Santa Rosa still remains home to a Charles M. Schulz Museum, part of a complex that includes an ice rink.

But the world is changing. MetLife last year fired Snoopy and the Peanuts gang after 30 years of sponsorship, and the Peanuts brand was sold off to a Canadian company. And Santa Rosans will soon have to adjust to living in a city of 200,000, rather than the 1970 town of 50,000.

Next year, Santa Rosa will celebrate the sesquicentennial of its incorporation as well as the 75th anniversary of Santa Rosa’s most famous star turn, in Alfred Hitchcock’s classic “Shadow of a Doubt.” Hitchcock—who would recognize the old train station, but not much else about the city now— portrayed Santa Rosa as such a small, out-of-the-way place that Joseph Cotten’s serial killer could hide there without fear of detection.

Today, the geography of 21st-century California makes Santa Rosa inescapable.

 
*This essay was written and published prior to the outbreak of wildfires that devastated Santa Rosa and adjoining areas.

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