They are preaching nonsense. California’s real problem is underspending.

Go ahead and dismiss my claim as blasphemy. After so many years of budget crises and big deficits, Californians have adopted a budget theology grounded in self-flagellation, even though our recent budgets contain small surpluses. You can probably recite the catechism yourself: We’re still sinners who spend too much on state services! Far more than we take in! So save us, Non-Denominational Higher Power, from our profligate selves! Punish us with budget cuts or spending limits or a rainy day fund!

I’m sorry, but what our spending religion really needs is reformation.

And that requires genuine revelation. Our state’s tendency to produce big deficits is not caused by big spending. We have had big deficits because our state budget is based on volatile formulas that tend to expand deficits in unpredictable ways. In fact, California has long been on par with other states in expenditures per capita and in spending as a percentage of state GDP. Still, we cling to our budget religion and, fearing overspending, we take the cheaper path—which often costs the state more money in the long run.

The problems of underspending are most obvious when it comes to pension obligations. California governments and employees have long spent too little money on contributions to pension funds, which are underfunded. So, to try to catch up to our pension obligations, California taxpayers are having to make much bigger contributions now. And those catch-up contributions are leading to even more underspending on critical services, as money that should go to schools or health care or infrastructure is used to cover pensions.

The costliness of underspending is also the story behind rising public higher education costs in California. Over generations, the state has cut back its relative contribution to the University of California and California State University systems. This underspending has been made up for in part with ever-higher tuition fees for students. And, despite what you may read, the latest UC scandal is also about underspending; a state audit’s central allegation is that UC’s office of the president accumulated more than $100 million in funds that it wasn’t spending.

That scandal reveals a hypocrisy in our budget religion; overspending may be the stated enemy, but underspending gets you into far more trouble. The state parks department kept a secret reserve of unspent funds that became a major scandal in 2012. In California’s prisons, underspending led to an intervention by the federal courts, which ordered the state to spend more on its unconstitutionally overcrowded prisons and reduce its prison population.

Underspending also explains problems with our basic services. Studies have found that the state spends tens of billions less on schools than would be necessary to provide all Californians with an adequate education. And that underspending has real costs: California is not producing enough college graduates and skilled workers.

The state has made bold promises on child care and early childhood education that it hasn’t adequately funded, leaving citizens to pay for the rest. Child care now costs more than college tuition here. And housing costs more than just about anything, in part because we’ve spent so little on housing that we have a massive shortage, which forces Californians to pay housing prices more than twice the national average.

That the state has failed for generations to spend enough to build and maintain infrastructure is obvious in the degraded condition of roads, bridges, and waterways. The state’s failure to create strong enough spillways at Oroville Dam is forcing California to make hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of repairs and upgrades before the next rainy season.

Our state’s leaders understand the problem with underspending, but they haven’t been successful at explaining the problem, credibly, to the public. It also hasn’t helped that when state officials do need to spend big, they haven’t been very good at it. Examples include the new Bay Bridge, with its delays, cost overruns, and questions about the integrity of its steel rods, and the high-speed rail project, where spending and construction has been so slow that many people think the project will die.

In recent budgets, Gov. Jerry Brown and the legislature have sought to counter the state’s tendency to underspend now and pay later. They’ve made a great show of efforts to pay down debt. In his current budget proposal, Brown suggests making a large advance contribution to pensions now, in order to reduce liabilities later.

But that payment, unfortunately, is achieved in a questionable manner: by borrowing billions from a state special fund. As Stanford lecturer and former Schwarzenegger advisor David Crane wrote recently, since pension contributions get invested, that payment amounts to a “leveraged bet” on a stock market that Governor Brown himself has warned is overdue for a correction.

Brown has grown popular as a proselytizer of the credo that California can be managed on the cheap. That’s appealing dogma for a state whose people struggle with a very high cost of living.

But the realities of our state should remind us that successfully running California on the cheap is a fantasy that has curdled into a costly article of faith. And we parishioners are being stuck with the tab.

The post California’s Real Budgetary Sin—We Spend Too Little, Not Too Much appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The Collier-Burns Act of 1947 created the California freeway system by substantially raising the gasoline and other motor vehicle taxes and earmarking the resulting revenues for highway construction. If you drive on freeways, you are utilizing a legacy of Collier-Burns.

State Senator Randolph Collier and Assemblyman Michael Burns both played a part in enacting the law and received the titular credit for it. But the Act would never have been passed without the leadership of then-Governor Earl Warren.

Warren is well remembered, but not as the Father of the California Freeways. His career as a California state politician is largely eclipsed by his national service as Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and the landmark decisions of the “Warren Court” in desegregation, criminal justice, and political reform. To the extent that any governor is given credit for the California freeways nowadays, it is likely to be Pat Brown, our current governor’s dad.

But the true origins of Collier-Burns are worth knowing, as they bear on today’s difficulties with building and maintaining essential infrastructure.

The story of Collier-Burns takes us to the period immediately after World War II. California’s population had grown at a rapid pace in the 1940s, from 6.9 million in the 1940 census to 10.6 million in 1950. The state’s roads hadn’t kept up with growth, given the scarce tax receipts during the Great Depression and the diversion of public resources to the war effort.

Southern California in particular already had a reputation for heavy reliance on the automobile before World War II, but neither the north nor the south had a road system that matched their car-oriented reputation. The absence of modern roads in California in the 1940s wasn’t due to lack of planning. There were plans gathering dust in drawers for a system of limited access highways with maps that look similar to what we have today. The problem in implementing these grand plans was the cost of building roads. You could float bonds to stretch out the expense. But eventually, the bonds had to be paid off. And apart from debt service, roads, once built, needed continuous funding for maintenance and repair.

The state financed major roads as one-off ventures; the Arroyo Seco Parkway, now known as the Pasadena Freeway, was partly financed by the federal government as a Depression-era jobs creation project and completed in 1940. But such financing was not enough to develop a system of roads.

Governor Warren ran for re-election to a second term in 1946. Under the state’s then-existing cross-filing system, he won the nominations of both the Republican and Democratic parties in the primary, although he was a Republican. As the nominee of the two major parties, he had only token opposition in the general election. Armed with an overwhelming victory and evident popularity, he proposed a hike in the gas tax and other vehicle fees, with the money to be placed in a trust fund and earmarked for modern road construction.

Gov. Warren faced strong opposition to his highway plan. Trucking companies wanted the revenue to come mainly from the gasoline tax, not a tax on the diesel fuel that trucks used. Utility companies wanted reimbursement for the cost of shifting the wires that were in the paths of the new roads. There was a north vs. south political split in the legislature and regional suspicion over how the proposed revenue bounty for roads would be divided. And there was a similar urban vs. rural divide.

These legislative frictions were important barriers to getting a bill passed. But the chief opposition was from oil companies that didn’t want a gasoline tax hike to be the major funding source. There were various communications from Warren supporters to oil executives trying to explain that more roads would mean more driving, more cars, and therefore more gasoline sales. But this simple and obvious proposition was strongly resisted by the oil lobby.

The result was months of conflict and jockeying in the legislature and a near-death experience for the Collier-Burns Act. Warren, rather than play a defensive game, went on the radio denouncing the oil companies as ruthless special interests. One particularly damning charge made by Warren was that California’s obsolete roads caused accidents and that those resisting passage of Collier-Burns would therefore have blood on their hands if their efforts succeeded in killing the bill.

Compromises reshaped the bill as it moved through the legislature. Warren’s proposed two-cent tax hike was reduced to 1.5 cents. One reluctant legislator was persuaded to vote for the bill in exchange for a deal on pet food labeling. In the end, Collier-Burns was enacted in late June 1947. Gov. Warren proclaimed that the new law would keep California “among the most progressive and forward-looking states in the Union.”

However, the influence of Collier-Burns ultimately extended beyond California to other states. When the Eisenhower administration took office in 1953, it envisioned a new federal road system. Originally, the administration favored toll roads as the basis of the proposed interstate system. But the California model was already influential. By the 1950s, California was the second most-populous state (behind only New York) and had a large and powerful congressional delegation. Vice President Richard Nixon was a Californian, as was William Knowland, the Republican minority leader in the U.S. Senate. As House and Senate committees considered the Eisenhower proposal, experts from California were brought in to testify.

Eventually, the toll road idea was dropped, although a provision accommodated those Eastern states that already had built toll roads. The federal bill became a larger projection of the California approach, i.e., gas tax and trust fund, and was enacted by Congress in 1956. For California, the federal bill became a matching source of money that accelerated and expanded what the state was already building or planned to build. Pat Brown was elected governor in 1958, just in time to inherit Earl Warren’s legacy in highway construction.

Of course, the same California freeways that were seen 70 years ago as a model for the nation are now heavily congested and in need of repair. Critics say the freeways encourage urban sprawl, displace public transit, and cause environmental damage. Nonetheless, Gov. Jerry Brown recently pushed a bill through the legislature to raise the gas tax and other vehicle fees for road repair and other transportation purposes. Along the way, he used some tactics to obtain the necessary votes that Earl Warren would have found familiar.

From an historical perspective, Collier-Burns was more than a state highway bill. It marked California’s entrance as a major influence in the American polity. California became seen as a model of public policy and planning. It is only natural that, after 70 years, our views regarding the freeway system that resulted from Collier-Burns would have changed. But at a time when California’s politics seem to be moving in the opposite direction from much of the rest of the country, it’s nice to look back to an era when what California was doing was what the other states hoped to emulate.

*An earlier version incorrectly referred to California State Senator Randolph Collier as Raymond Collier.

The post How California Created a Road Map for America’s Interstate System appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But today, it is little more than a gag rule.

Over the past six decades, the Brown Act—famous for its guarantee of a 72-hour notice for public meetings—has become a civic Frankenstein, threatening the very public participation it was intended to protect.

The act’s requirements of advance notice before local officials hold a meeting has mutated into strict limitations on the ability of local officials to have any kind of frank conversation with one another, even over email. Brown Act requirements that we, the public, be allowed to weigh in at meetings have been turned against us, by way of a standardized three-minute-per-speaker limit at the microphone that encourages rapid rants and discourages real conversation between local officials and the citizens they represent.

And by effectively prohibiting deeper exchanges among officials and citizens, the Brown Act has empowered professionals outside the civic space—lawyers, labor unions, and especially developers—to fill the conversation void.

At a recent UC Irvine conference on the Brown Act in which I participated, speakers discussed how local elected officials and their staff members, wary of talking to or even emailing each other and violating the Brown Act rules against unannounced meetings, often communicate with each other through developers, who are much freer to meet and talk.

This is one reason why allegations that developers have too much power are routine in California communities. But it is also why proposed reforms to limit the influence of developers—Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti just announced a ban on meetings between city planning commissioners and developers—never last. Under California’s Brown Act, developers are often the most practical conduit for local officials to get information to their colleagues.

“The Brown Act gives developers superior access, because it cuts [local government] staff off from talking to the decision makers in the same way,” said one California local official, quoted in a conference paper.

The problem with the Brown Act is not that the law has changed. It’s that the law has stayed too much the same, while California governance has changed radically.

Back in the 1950s, when the Brown Act was passed, local governments largely ruled via broadly applied laws, policies, and plans. But in subsequent decades, a combination of court decisions, state laws, and ballot initiatives like Prop 13 have limited the power of governments to control their own revenues, and to make and enforce laws.

So to retain some self-determination, local governments have worked around the law, ignoring plans and policies they once followed, and instead embracing ad-hoc decision-making, considering proposals on a case-by-case basis. The most important tool for today’s local governments is not the ordinance or the general plan but rather the closed-door negotiations that produce labor contracts and developer agreements. In the latter, developers typically receive exemptions from present and future rules in exchange for benefits they give to the city.

In this era of government by negotiation, the Brown Act is unhelpful when it’s not beside the point. First, the act’s limits on meetings end up restricting the ability of elected officials to participate fully in such negotiations; such talks end up being conducted by staff or outsider lawyers.

Second, the Brown Act covers public meetings, and doesn’t get the public into closed negotiations. All too often the public hears about negotiations only once deals are done, and brought to a council or a board for approval.

At those late stages, public comments—especially public comments that are limited to just a few minutes—don’t matter very much. And the elected officials to whom they are complaining may have been left out of the talks. So California citizens typically and understandably respond either by checking out of the process entirely or by opposing their local politicians fervently and uncompromisingly. In this way, the Brown Act encourages the worst sort of NIMBYism.

The good news: There are many methods for encouraging earlier and deeper public participation in the deal-making that governs our local communities. Proven approaches to dialogue and idea-gathering should be tried. I personally like participatory budgeting—by which residents of some California cities decide directly how some municipal money is spent—and believe the same model could be applied to planning decisions. Regular citizens could be brought into negotiations and allowed to help decide the particulars of exemptions and community benefits in developer agreements.

The bad news is that such ideas require conversation between elected officials and citizens that would run afoul of the inflexible Brown Act. Indeed, some of the more innovative local government experiments in California—notably the neighborhood councils in the city of Los Angeles—have found their influence and ability to communicate limited by the meetings restrictions of the Brown Act.

At the UC Irvine conference, many ideas were raised for amending the Brown Act. The state’s Little Hoover Commission has also suggested several changes in the law. But the act has created a regime so antithetical to the goal of public participation that it might be better to scrap it and start over—with a new framework providing local governments with more flexibility as long as they pursue policies that enhance public participation in decisions.

The National Civic League has a model participation ordinance that suggests what such a law could look like. Such an ordinance might work even without repealing the Brown Act. Instead, the ordinance could be allowed to supersede the Brown Act rules, exempting from the act’s edicts any process that enhances public participation and civic conversation.

Who could oppose such sensible changes? Answer: Some civic and media organizations are suspicious that reform would limit access. And they claim local officials and lawyers are being overly cautious in limiting conversations because of fear of Brown Act violations. But local governments maintain the caution is well-advised, given how easy it is to sue for violations of the act, and thus block important projects.

While the debate over the Brown Act continues, the everyday reality of California public meetings grows ever more absurd. On a recent Saturday at my local school board, our city’s mayor—one of only a handful of people in attendance—rose to ask questions about the board’s management of a newly passed school bond, the largest in our small district’s history.

The mayor is a public works lawyer with long experience with bonds, and her questions were fair and straightforward. But the board members wouldn’t answer them. Instead, they tried to cut her off after just three minutes, noting that’s the limit on public comment. When one board member sought to answer the mayor’s questions, the school superintendent interrupted to say that any exchange could be a violation of the Brown Act.

Any law that won’t let a mayor and a school board talk about their city’s most important construction project—and at a public meeting—is a bad law. Until our local governments move past the Brown Act, Californians will find it hard to have the kinds of conversations that local democracy requires.

The post How California’s Open Meetings Law Became a Gag Rule appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Are you finally growing up, Sacramento?

I pose that question not to our state government but to the real Sacramento, by which I mean the Sacramento Capital Region. It’s a query that should be aimed at all of the Central Valley’s big urban areas. Are you ready for civic adulthood, Fresno, Bakersfield, Stockton, and Modesto?

The maturity of these cities is more than a regional question. The Valley persistently lags California as a whole in employment, access to health care, and educational attainment. If California is going to make big gains in the decades ahead and reduce inequality, Valley cities will have to lead the way.

The importance of Valley cities should be conventional wisdom by now, but unfortunately, the narrative feels unfamiliar and counterintuitive. That’s because the Valley is stuck in a state of agriculture-based denial. That’s understandable, given the region’s rural history and the outsized influence that agriculture retains over land use and politics. But that influence obscures the 21st-century reality—most people in the Central Valley live in cities. And so the true economic engines of the region are not the groves and fields but an archipelago of urban islands connected by State Route 99.

Far too often these cities are underestimated by everyone, including their own inhabitants. The cities of the Valley are “small” only compared with the global mega-regions on the coast. More people live in the cities of Fresno and Sacramento than in the cities of Atlanta or Miami. Bakersfield is bigger than the cities of Tampa or St. Louis, and Stockton has as many people as Pittsburgh or Cincinnati.

But the Valley cities all face different versions of the same problem: They have grown into places far larger and more complicated than the governments and infrastructure that once sustained them. One of the great underappreciated dramas in California is the race of these cities to catch up to their urban needs, by adding cultural venues, revamping downtowns, and developing new infrastructure.

Cities are in different stages of this process. Stockton, which is emerging from bankruptcy, and Bakersfield, which is suffering from a decline in oil prices, are the laggards.

The struggle in Fresno has been particularly dramatic, with the city making big if uneven progress. There is new life and housing in its downtown; by summer, Fulton Mall should be transformed into Fulton Street, a main avenue. The new Midtown Trail for bicyclists and pedestrians will connect Fresno and the Clovis Old Town Trail, creating a 17-mile link between the two cities, and including space for future transit. A bus rapid transit system is being launched, a water upgrade should make Fresno less dependent on groundwater, and planning is underway to establish mixed-used zoning districts on thoroughfares and to develop the neediest neighborhoods.

But the most promising—and often most puzzling—case is greater Sacramento.

The Capital Region has long had advantages that give it a more diverse economy than other Valley cities—from the presence of the state government to its proximity to the Bay Area. Sacramento was never that small a town—it instantly became a city during the Gold Rush, and prospered as the terminus of the transcontinental railroad. But for much of its history it coasted—“Stockton with a governor” was one insult—happily lagging the fast-growing coast and developing a slow reputation, enshrined in Mark Twain’s letter from the city: “You needn’t rush down here right away by express. You can come as slow freight and arrive in time to get a good seat.”

Today, it’s a bigger, more ambitious place. Sacramento County has a population nearly the size of Manhattan’s, and the nine counties around the region have 2.8 million residents, on par with the city of Chicago. And there are signs of urban progress, particularly in the center of the city of Sacramento, where the past decade has brought more than $1 billion in public and private investment. A sports arena opened last year, a hospital is planned for the railyards, housing is coming to K Street, and midtown Sacramento’s neighborhoods of restaurants, galleries, and loft apartments are livelier than ever.

But beyond those gains, the picture is as muddy as Sacramento’s rivers. A leadership class heavy in real estate and state government types can seem less interested in improving poorer neighborhoods than peddling empty slogans (Earth to Sacramento: “Farm to Fork” is how the whole world eats). What’s worse, this crew appears to be gripped by a rampant inferiority complex, seeking validation—and outside visitors and tourists—with showy projects of dubious value.

The city of Sacramento is now ludicrously considering building an aquarium—though Monterey’s world-class aquarium, and the ocean, are not so far away. The city is also contemplating expansion of an already struggling convention center. Building of such showy destinations is part of what brought Stockton to bankruptcy (an arena and marina), and nearly sunk Fresno (the Granite Park sports complex, the Fresno Metropolitan Museum of Art). The basketball arena may expose Sacramento to similar peril; the city gave the NBA Kings a $272.9 million public subsidy, via a risky parking bond.

Beyond the city, getting the disparate parts of the Capital Region to work together remains difficult. While there are recent examples of regional progress on transportation, water, and workforce development, the Capital Region is not cohesive. There’s not even consensus on which of the area’s counties are part of the region. The Sacramento Bee says there are four; government documents often refer to six counties (Sacramento, Sutter, El Dorado, Placer, Yolo, and Yuba), while a few academics list nine.

One Sacramento disadvantage as a region is its political diversity; unlike the Democrat-dominated Bay Area and L.A., Sacramento is a swing region, from the left-wing NIMBYs of Davis to the Republican NIMBYS of the foothills. Another challenge to developing urban strategy is all the people who live in the so-called UnCity—unincorporated Sacramento County.

“Though Sacramento often sees itself as the byproduct of forces outside of its immediate control, or as a step-child of the Bay Area,” said a report used at this decade’s beginning by the UC Davis Center for Regional Change, “It both deserves and needs to view itself with a greater degree of identity and autonomy.”

That lack of identity has made it harder for greater Sacramento to address its most stubborn regional problems. Housing affordability has reached crisis level here, as in other parts of the state. Transit is a regional sore spot; Sacramento County voters defeated a transportation sales tax hike in November that, while lacking in imagination, would have restored previous service cuts. And the lack of economic and job growth in the region deserves greater attention. The Brookings Institution ranks Sacramento 95th among the nation’s largest 100 metro regions in economic output per capita, with a 9.5 percent decrease over the past 10 years.

Sacramento’s optimists argue that efforts to address such regional problems, and political and public awareness of them, are deepening. In that vein, the city of Sacramento is now the stage for what may be the state’s most intriguing local political story: new mayor Darrell Steinberg.

Steinberg is a former state Senate leader with broad perspective and deep contacts among the overlapping governments of the region. To the good, he has made decreasing homelessness a priority, and is addressing it regionally, in a way that should force Sacramento County to offer more mental health services. (To the bad, he’s been talking up the aquarium idea.)

Californians are understandably wary when big plans emerge from the Capitol. But we should be rooting hard for the Capital Region. Our state will be much better off if Sacramento can fully launch itself.

The post Grow up, Sacramento! appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

And together they epitomize big changes within the world-renowned California movement to fight climate change.

She is Fran Pavley, 67, a state senator from the San Fernando Valley who is in the final months of a distinguished legislative career that established her as the mother of California climate change policy. He is Eduardo Garcia, 39, a first-time assemblyman from a working-class Coachella Valley family known for a relentless focus on the needs of his constituents, not environmental causes.

Their fledgling alliance—over the last year they have been co-authoring each other’s legislation—embodies two tricky transitions in the building. One involves a shift in personnel, as older environmentalists and legislative champions age out of leadership and are replaced by younger leaders. The other, related transition involves a shift in focus, from greenhouse gases to the impact of climate change—and measures to combat it—on people and specific places.

California is now halfway through its second decade of pursuing path-breaking climate legislation. And since this struggle is long-term—and far longer than term limits or the attention spans of Californians—those who worry about climate change also must reckon with the state’s political, demographic, and other kinds of change.

It’s been a decade now since Pavley authored AB 32, the nation’s first cap on greenhouse gas pollution, and 15 years since she authored AB 1493, which became the model for national vehicle emissions standards. So the coalition she helped build for those landmarks—a coalition that went beyond environmentalists to include scientists, water agencies, local governments, labor unions, religious institutions, and Hollywood celebrities—has needed updating to better represent the California of 2016—more working-class, more Latino, and more inland.

But the sprawl and diversity of the state, in combination with the success of climate change legislation in creating new businesses and industries in California, have made coalition-building harder. There are more constituents for climate change legislation, and thus higher expectations. And that has forced climate legislation to do more than mandate reductions in greenhouse gases; representatives of the state’s poorer, inland places are demanding that regulations and programs improve public health and create job opportunities in their communities.

Garcia has been particularly insistent on bringing the benefits of climate investments to his massive desert district in California’s southeast corner, bordering both Mexico and Arizona. So, after consulting with Democratic leaders, Pavley forged a close partnership with the assemblyman, who quickly became her co-author on major bills, including SB 32, the highest-profile legislation of the session that concludes August 31.

His own story supports the narrative of the broader coalition. He is a lifelong resident of the Coachella Valley, a product of a family that includes farmworkers, and a graduate of Coachella Valley High with degrees from UC Riverside and USC. But the partnership is also based on what Garcia and Pavley have in common.

While Bay Area environmentalists often have the loudest voices and biggest ideas on climate, the climate cause has made progress because of the work of people whose feet actually touch the ground. And Pavley and Garcia are both unfussy, practical Southern Californians who are good at listening and at legislative details. Garcia broke unofficial records by getting 16 bills and resolutions signed in his first year, many of them complicated technical fixes of existing laws.

Garcia and Pavley also have taken similar paths to politics, albeit a quarter-century apart. Both grew up in the places they represent, both worked as teachers (Pavley jokes that her transition from middle school to the Capitol was seamless), and both rose through local government. Pavley was elected mayor of Agoura Hills at age 32, in 1982. Garcia became mayor of the city of Coachella at age 29, in 2006.

“Eduardo and Fran are the perfect transition,” says State Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon, who suggested Pavley work with Garcia. The speaker describes visiting Garcia twice in the desert and being driven around the district, as the assemblyman offered detailed descriptions of the history and needs of even the smallest parks.

Rendon recalls the partnership coming together at the Paris climate talks in December, when Garcia was added to a California delegation that included Gov. Jerry Brown, legislative leaders, and Pavley. Garcia brought his wife and very young daughter and impressed the older delegates by eschewing sightseeing for intensive work. Garcia later said he was impressed by how other countries, particularly in Europe, are focusing climate change investments on poorer communities and he returned determined to shift California policy in a similar direction.

On a recent Friday, I shuttled between the two halves of the alliance. At her district office in Calabasas, Pavley walked me through the evolution of the climate movement in the state. She is termed out of the legislature at the end of the year, and made clear that she sees Garcia as a promising successor on climate change.

“We work very well together,” she says. “And we’re looking for the next generation to carry this work forward.”

I met Garcia—the rumpled, stocky picture of the multitasking Gen X professional/father—in a restaurant near the Burbank airport. He was traveling without aides, and mixed a casual bearing with an intense intelligence. We shifted between looking at smartphone video of his preteen son shooting basketballs and his detailed description of the solar potential of Blythe and how brine from the Salton Sea can be turned into lithium for electric vehicle batteries.

“I don’t consider myself a climate change activist,” he says. “I do consider myself someone who is interested in building consensus on policies that are focused on people, especially the people in my district.”

In these closing days of the legislative session, Pavley and Garcia say they are focused on keeping lines of communication open within their broader coalition—and between members of the Assembly and Senate, whose leaders, Rendon and the Senate pro tem Kevin De Leon, both are considered leaders on the issue. They are pushing hard for SB 32, which extends the greenhouse gas reduction targets to 2030, and AB 197, which creates oversight of state climate programs to make sure their benefits help the economies and public health of poorer and more polluted communities.

If these bills become law, give credit not just to the governor and legislative leaders, but also to Eduardo and Mrs. Pavley.

The post The Next Big Shift in California’s Climate Change Movement appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Don’t think of “a Brexit” as a vote to leave a larger political or economic union. (California isn’t about to leave the U.S.—though a Trump presidency would sure stir a movement for Calexit). Brexit is better understood as a special kind of ballot measure—a plebiscite. Plebiscites are placed on the ballot not by civic or interest groups to advance a cause but by powerful politicians to serve their own political needs.

And plebiscites—to put it bluntly—are cursed. The term comes from the Latin pleb-, the common people, and scitum, decree. But given the way it’s played out, these days it may as well mean “backfire.”

The plebiscite curse—a phrase I first heard from political scientists studying direct democracy globally—describes a tendency of plebiscites to blow up in the faces of the powerful people who pursue them. There are hundreds of examples around the world. Among the most famous was Chilean strongman Augusto Pinochet’s 1988 plebiscite to extend his constitutional power; clever dissidents exploited the opening to beat the plebiscite and end his hold on power (a campaign brilliantly portrayed in the 2012 Oscar-nominated film, No).

The British Brexit was a classic of the plebiscite curse. Here, the self-cursed politician was Prime Minister David Cameron, who wanted his country to remain in the European Union but put the Brexit question to the voters in order to quiet, once and for all, the anti-EU voices within his own party. He assumed that after wresting some pro-British concessions from the EU, he could win the vote, and put the Tories’ longstanding Hamlet-like “to be or not to be European” debate to rest. Instead, the British voters decided to leave—and the U.K. lost its way in the world, and Cameron lost his job as prime minister.

This should all sound vaguely familiar to Californians. Our elected officials have long put measures on the ballot—and been hurt by their defeat or hamstrung by the unintended consequences of victory. The biggest and most recent example of the plebiscite curse here was Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 2005 special election for four ballot initiatives of his own making. All four lost, and he only saved his governorship by repudiating his own effort and replacing his top advisors. Governors going back a century—including Ronald Reagan, who distanced himself from his own failed budget reform Proposition 1 in 1973 by saying he himself hadn’t understood it—have been damaged by their own cursed plebiscites.

And while similar outcomes are seen in other states and countries that permit ballot measures, no place has been as frequently or deeply cursed as California. One reason: our state is the only place where a law made by ballot initiative can’t be changed except by another vote of the people—forcing even plebiscite-averse politicians to go to the ballot.

Indeed, California’s inflexible form of direct democracy—and a good part of the famously dysfunctional and wickedly complicated systems for budgeting, taxation and regulation that direct democracy has spawned—is itself a plebiscite curse. In 1911, Gov. Hiram Johnson held a massive plebiscite—with 23 measures on one special election ballot—to alter the constitution, introducing the initiative and referendum process. It didn’t take long for Johnson to rue his own creation—he was badly weakened by a defeat of his own 1915 plebiscite to make state elected offices nonpartisan.

This year, the November ballot is getting criticism for its excessive length—17 statewide ballot measures—but we should pay extra attention to the handful of these that amount to plebiscites, the ones placed on the ballot by elected officials who seek advantage in calling on the people to deliver their desired results, instead of relying on the power of their offices.

Gov. Brown has his own plebiscitary initiative on the ballot. It would liberalize sentencing laws, but it’s risky, and not just because it might keep more dangerous people on the streets. With crime up a bit in California and public safety a bigger concern nationally, Republicans (including San Diego’s ambitious mayor Kevin Faulconer, who is leading the campaign against the Brown measure) might defeat it and cripple the governor’s larger efforts to reduce the state’s prison population and boost programs to better re-integrate former prisoners into California communities.

Gavin Newsom, the lieutenant governor, is taking on the plebiscite curse even more forcefully with two initiatives—one to tighten gun controls and the other to legalize marijuana. He’s using both measures to show leadership and gain popularity as part of his nascent campaign to succeed Brown as governor in 2018.

But his gun control measure is resented by some Democratic legislators who are pursuing similar measures in the Capitol. And the possibility of a greater curse is real. If marijuana legalization creates social problems, Newsom will be blamed. And if Newsom’s two plebiscites lose, it could badly damage his candidacy—and his career.

The legislature also has put two measures on the ballot that should count as plebiscites—one loosening restrictions on bilingual education, and an advisory measure calling for repeal of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. If they are defeated, they could hurt movements for language-immersion schools and for campaign finance reform.

The dangers of plebiscites go beyond the risks to politicians and their causes. When powerful elected officials use the ballot for their own devices, they can raise serious questions about the credibility of our democracy. Attorney General Kamala Harris has faced criticism for writing favorable ballot titles and expediting legal reviews of plebiscites put forth by the governor and other allies. In another eyebrow-raising move, the California Supreme Court, whose chief justice has been pressing for more funding for the courts, recently allowed the governor’s sentencing plebiscite to make this year’s ballot despite alterations to the measure that have delayed previous ballot initiatives. It would seem direct democracy can be more direct for insiders.

As the Brexit vote in Britain reminds us, when the leadership of a state or country loses credibility, great and risky political earthquakes can result. From Europe to California, the plebiscite is a curse that can feed on itself.

The post California’s Coming Election Has More in Common With Brexit Than You Think appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Those reasons—economic anxiety, budget surpluses, tax schemes, housing prices, prison reform, health care expansion, urban wealth, and political opportunism have combined to create today’s “homeless moment” in California.

For decades, combating homelessness has been a civic obsession in the San Francisco Bay Area, with its long tradition of progressive politics and generous homeless services. Now that homeless hubbub has spread statewide. To the surprise of many at the State Capitol, a $2 billion bond to pay for housing for the mentally ill homeless—previously a backburner issue in tax-and-education-obsessed Sacramento—became a central focus of this month’s budget negotiations. And around the state, local law enforcement officials have stirred the pot by claiming that recent measures to reduce the California prison population have exacerbated the homeless problem.

In Los Angeles, which has the nation’s second largest homeless population according to federal figures, homelessness has become the dominant political debate. Mayor Eric Garcetti has talked big about addressing the problem—declaring an emergency, promising that no military veterans will be living on the street—and now faces criticism for weak follow-up. L.A.’s city and county governments are now ensnared in huge debates about how to pay for additional public housing.

A similar pattern—of big plans to end homelessness followed by conflict about how to do it—has emerged in cities from Redding to Riverside. In San Diego, with America’s fourth largest homeless population, a leading city councilman called for ending all homelessness by the end of this year. (He’s since backed off). In Orange County, there have been calls for a “homeless czar” to speed up the building of shelters and housing. In Fresno, Mayor Ashley Swearengin just held a press conference at the city’s baseball stadium to tout a plan to end homelessness in the next three years. In Sacramento, homelessness was a leading issue in the just-concluded mayoral election, with the victor pledging to build more housing for the homeless.

Given all this drama, you might expect that the number of homeless people is rapidly rising. To the contrary, homeless counts (the accuracy of which is another big debate) show relatively flat or even declining homeless populations in most of these cities. So why the sudden urgency? The short answer: the homeless are now more visible to the rich people who drive civic conversation. Fancy restaurants and new high-end housing have brought wealthy folks into urban neighborhoods and old industrial areas that once were havens for the homeless. Downtown L.A., home to a large population of unsheltered homeless for decades, has rapidly been transformed from one of the most affordable to one of the most expensive places to live in the city.

At the same time, anxiety about housing has never run deeper. The housing crisis of the previous decade cost many Californians their homes. California’s total failure to build housing—we’ve produced just one new unit for every eight new Californians in this decade—has led to sky-high prices. Many Californians are forced to spend more than half of their incomes on housing, and the prospect of sleeping on the street no longer seems so unlikely.

Politicians, who read polls showing this growing fear, have seized on the opening. Homelessness has become an almost perfect issue for politicians. Expectations of success are low (homelessness is persistent) so any progress can be spun as heroic. Few homeless people vote, so democratic accountability is close to nothing. And the issue doesn’t have a strong partisan profile, so there is room for political horse-trading and risk-taking.

Downtown Los Angeles’ Skid Row.

In an extraordinary public letter late last year, Santa Cruz Mayor Don Lane urged experiments with different approaches to the problem—and took himself to task for not having done so previously. “I am as responsible as anyone in this community for our failure to address our lack of shelter and our over-reliance on law enforcement and the criminal justice system to manage homelessness,” he wrote. “I have been a direct participant in many of my city’s decisions on homelessness. I have failed to adequately answer many of the questions I am posing.”

Such self-criticism is easier for politicians when money is on the way. The federal government has stepped up funding for housing the homeless—especially for veterans. The state is running a surplus, and a state fund for mental health services, funded by the Proposition 63 tax on millionaires, is so full of extra dollars that even Gov. Brown, a notorious tightwad, agreed to borrow $2 billion from it to fund housing and other services for the homeless. He and the legislature also threw another $400 million in affordable housing dollars into the budget.

In some places, the notion of a homelessness emergency is seen as a justification for a money grab. L.A. County supervisors want the state—which famously limits local taxation—to permit them to impose their own millionaire’s tax to pay for more homeless programs. That money, of course, could free up other funds for other purposes—which is all the more reason to decree a homelessness emergency.

To be fair, much of this money will be spent on a strategy that has shown some success—providing permanent supportive housing for the homeless. This housing-oriented approach is a welcome departure from decades of efforts to fix the ills of the homeless—be they substance abuse or trauma or mental illness—before getting them housing.

But the focus on housing is narrow for a problem this complex. And today’s windfall for homeless services is unlikely, in California’s volatile budget system, to last. Even if it did, the disparate nature of the funding—a bundle of incentives and grants—isn’t efficient enough to create the capacity to cover the fluid and shifting homeless populations in California cities.

In his acclaimed new book, Evicted, Harvard professor Matthew Desmond argues that ending homelessness would require greater ambition than anything on the table in California, or anywhere else in the U.S. He advocates “universal housing” as a clear right, like the well-established right to public education.

Under Desmond’s proposal, the government would issue housing vouchers to families below a certain income threshold so that they pay no more than 30 percent of their income on housing. The vouchers could be used to live anywhere they wanted—just as families use food stamps to buy groceries almost anywhere.

Such rental assistance is common in other developed countries like Britain and the Netherlands, which don’t suffer from American-style homelessness. In the U.S., universal housing via vouchers would cost $60 billion, Desmond estimates—real money, but a mere fraction of the hundreds of billions spent subsidizing the housing of wealthier people via the mortgage-interest tax deduction.

Universal housing wouldn’t have much chance of passage in Washington. But universal housing is just the sort of idea that California should try—if this homeless moment is really about ending homelessness.

The post What’s Behind California’s Sudden Urge to Help the Homeless? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

So why doesn’t my state make things easier for me? In this internet age, shouldn’t there be a one-stop shop where I can go to renew my driver’s license and vehicle registration, register to vote, research state records, pay all my state and local taxes, and buy passes to take the family to a state park?

Mine is not a new notion. To the contrary, the one-stop shop for government services is one of the oldest and most repeated ideas in California governance—a staple of candidate position papers, chamber of commerce white papers, and commission reports. In the last year, California worthies have suggested one-stop online shops for poor people to sign up for multiple public assistance programs at once, for businesses to handle all their permitting and licensing, and for California parents signing up for child care.

“Imagine if Californians had one personalized log-in account to manage all their business with the state, from updating address information and voter registration to paying taxes and applying for and managing benefits, ” the Little Hoover Commission, the state’s independent oversight agency, suggested dreamily last fall. “And they could do it all from a mobile device while taking the bus to soccer practice or at home after putting their children to bed for the night.”

These are sweet dreams, kids. And they are only dreams. Because, like the Holy Grail, the effective California one-stop shop exists only in the realm of myth.

Why?

Here’s my one-stop answer: California has too many governments—literally thousands of them—and nearly every single one sees compliance with its separate standards and rules as a way to protect its very existence.

Indeed, our state government seems designed with the opposite of one-stop shopping as its guiding principle. California has more permitting agencies than most other states, all sorts of strange regional bodies, huge incentives for endless litigation, a divide between local governments that oversee land use and state agencies that regulate what you can do on the land, and the California Environmental Quality Act, which can kill almost any worthwhile project.

Hence, the paradox of the one-stop shop: Californians need one-stop shops to deal with the government because of the very inefficiencies that make creating one-stop shops nearly impossible here.

This paradox is also why the idea of the one-stop shop (though not the reality) is so very useful. It’s an essential dodge for politicians and governments that have no real interest in doing the hard work of consolidating agencies and making things clearer and more efficient for us taxpayers. So they instead invoke the magical notion that they will somehow put all the different layers of government and regulation together in one place.

Given the dysfunction these one-stop shops are proposed to mask, it’s hardly surprising that they ever make it very far off the ground. That’s why you’re constantly reading about the abandonment of state government technology projects—from payroll to the courts—that were supposed to upgrade and combine different systems. While such abandonments can waste hundreds of millions of dollars, they can be preferable to those rare moments when our governments actually open things that purport to be a one-stop shop.

If you must visit such places, you’ll sometimes wish you hadn’t. The best-known example is the Covered California exchange, which is supposed to be a one-stop shop for health insurance. Its main virtue is that it produces so many errors, unexpected cancellations, and unexplained switches into the Medi-Cal morass that it has inspired the creation of whole industries of consultants and fixers to help those who must navigate it.

Then there’s the much-touted California Business Portal, launched last year by the Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development (GO-Biz) with the goal of helping people start businesses. The site skillfully lays out all the things you need to do, but it doesn’t provide what you need to get it done then and there: one form that could be filled out and sent to all the governments that must approve your enterprise. And once you’ve seen the sea of requirements on the portal, any business owner with any sense and dollars would hire lawyers and consultants to manage the process.

It’s true that the private sector has developed what are effectively one-stop shops—but those are rare and require a corporate dictator, like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos or Uber’s Travis Kalanick, crazed enough to destroy old industries. The few governments around the world able to pull off the one-stop shop don’t have America’s system of divided government and competing jurisdictions. Check out Great Britain’s miraculous GOV.UK, and dream of a California parliament.

For now, the best option available to those who want customer-friendly service in California is to hire consultants and lobbyists. The absence of a one-stop shop has been a boon to such influence peddlers; the numbers of lobbyists and other fixers keeps growing, a trend visible when you visit Sacramento and see the newer offices and restaurants around the Capitol.

Which gives me an idea. If California governments won’t give us a one-stop shop for the state, the least they can do is provide Californians with their own fixers. That’s right—concierges for all! With a ballot measure, we could make concierge service a constitutional right.

California government has experimented with concierge-style service before. Veterans of Pete Wilson’s administration like to talk about the “Red Teams”—essentially, concierges for companies—it organized in the 1990s. But concierges-for-all would be much costlier, with most of the approximately 100,000 (my best estimate) concierges being private contractors rather than government employees (we couldn’t afford the pensions).

These concierges wouldn’t have to wear uniforms or those golden-key badges like real hotel concierges—unless they were into that sort of thing. But each California adult would be assigned a concierge; we’d receive our concierge’s email and cell phone, and we could put them on speed dial like we do with the plumber or the dentist. These concierges would have to respond to our requests in 48 hours, and state and local officials would have to respond to their requests in 24 hours. Our concierges would have the power to secure permits and licenses, make appointments for us with any government official, or even schedule visits to our relatives who might be doing time in state prisons.

Call it a dream if you like, but it’s no less dreamy than a one-stop shop. Really, I want nothing from California government, except somebody whose job it is to get me whatever I need right now.

The post Can California Bundle Its Bureaucracy Into a Single Handy Website? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Twenty-four thousand acres. More than 4,000 homes were in the burn area. Yet not a single home, including ours, was lost to the fire.

I’ve often heard that regulation is “strangling the economy” and “limiting individual choice.” Texas Governor Rick Perry has visited California seeking to lure businesses to his state by promising a more permissive regulatory environment.

My home is still standing: I credit Big Government.

The National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) estimates that the average impact of regulations on the cost of a single-family home in California is $32,000. This includes costs associated with where and how one can build a residence. The NAHB sees these costs as a burden.

But what about the benefits of those regulatory costs?

Homes in our area are required to have fire-retardant roofs and fire-retardant siding. Our subdivision is required to have roads with sufficient width to allow the passage of wide-bodied emergency vehicles. Every few hundred yards in a California development you will find a fire hydrant. All of these precautions, and many others, adds to the cost of a California home. But when an inevitable wildfire threatens, my home remains standing.

CAL FIRE is a California State agency that helps to organize the response to such fires; the cost of doing this is more than $1 billion per year. At the height of the blaze, nearly 2,000 firefighters from dozens of areas throughout California and several other states were engaged in the battle. We are responsible for salaries, training, facilities, and buying equipment for these fire companies—and we are on the hook for their costs of retirement. They are among the public employees about whom small-government conservatives complain.

In April this year, Americans were horrified when a fertilizer plant in West, Texas caught fire, triggering a massive explosion that killed 14 (mostly volunteer first responders), injured 200, obliterated 50 homes, and destroyed the West Texas Intermediate School located next to the plant. Rick Perry’s critics quickly seized on the disaster as an example of how a laissez-faire approach to government regulation results in disaster, a criticism he angrily denied.

But my concern is less about the lack of regulation of the plant—and more about why, once the plant was established, a school was built next door and homes were located within the blast area.

“In Texas, counties have almost no regulatory authority,” Kelly Haragan, director of the Environmental Law Clinic at the University of Texas told NPR. “And we kind of don’t like land use [policies] in Texas. So we’ve ended up where facilities are very close to people.”

California also allows permits development in vulnerable areas, of course—but with reasonable precautions in the event of disaster.

This doesn’t mean we turned everything over to government. When we evacuated from our home—which is situated 40 feet across one of those required wide streets from the burn area—our Camarillo social network was crucial. A friend and neighbor helped us to evacuate our animals; many people offered their homes to us; and one intrepid family took us and our pets into their home overnight.

Too often, American politics is described as a contest between Big Government and civil society. Westerners, in particular, are vulnerable to this point of view. But the historical truth is that we “won” the West through the efforts of individuals and government; yes even the federal government. We continue to win the West through the combined efforts of government and civil society in cooperation.

Less regulation and smaller government would not have saved my home, and no one but my neighbors could have promptly taken in my family in during evacuation. Both were crucial. So thank you, neighbors, and thank you, Big Government.

The post ‘Big Government’ Kept My House From Burning appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Throughout its 161-year history, California has seen attempts by its citizens to split the state. One history counts more than 200 attempts and some 27 “serious” proposals to do so. Today, the difficulties of governing a state so sprawling and populous have renewed the conversation, bringing forward proposals from inland elected officials to break the state up. And people are listening. In advance of “Is California Too Big?”, a Zócalo event in Fresno, we asked several knowledgeable Californians if they thought there was any merit to such ideas. Should California be spit in two?

No, guys, just learn to compromise.

The latest version of California’s longest-running comedy routine, Split the State, is a Republican attempt to create an independent region called South California, leaving the remainder of the state with its original name and two-thirds of its present population. Much of so-called South California would actually be made up of Central California–Fresno, Kings, Tulare, Kern, Mono, and Inyo Counties, but not include distinctly southern but too liberal Los Angeles. (Such geographical ignorance tells you how seriously to take the proposal.)

All but two of the aforementioned counties are part of the Great Central Valley, a unique realm as large as Egypt, with virtually no innate connection to the so-called Inland Empire, let alone to the Los Angeles Basin or the greater Bay Area.

The new proposal falls into the old trap of thinking that somehow a north-south division makes sense. Why not divide the state into coastal, inland, mountain and desert dominions? Why not wet and dry? How about urban, suburban and rural? And on and on.

A tortured argument might be made for a tripartite division along parallel lines: North (above the Central Valley, with Sacramento River water as its bargaining chip), Center (the Great Valley plus whatever’s east and west of it, with San Joaquin River water), and South (below the Tehachapi Mountains, with some water from the Colorado River).

As for San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Sacramento, why not declare them free cities, as Danzig once was? Let them negotiate with water marshals in the Sierra or farmers in Fresno or fishermen in Eureka.

But all those variants would defeat the purpose of South California, which is to defy the American system by eliminating political competition via a kind of neo-gerrymandering, a profoundly un-American idea.

This native son likes this complicated, contentious, semi-governable state just as it is. It’s by far the most interesting state in the nation. California’s politicians should get to work on compromising and innovating and quit trying to find shortcuts.

Gerry Haslam is a Central California-based writer. He is author of In Thought and Acton: The Enigmatic Life of S. I. Hayakawa.

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Sure–and why stop at two? Not that it’ll solve anything.

About 60 percent of the countries that make up the United Nations are smaller than Los Angeles County, yet many of these nations would prefer to split themselves into even smaller entities. There is a sense that smaller is better, and this notion is heightened by deep-seated tribal allegiances that are still paramount in much of the world.

In the U.S., political differences, not tribal allegiances, are creating the pressure for separation. Conservatives don’t want to pay more taxes, and liberals would like more government regulation. So maybe it would be better if conservatives were in one state and liberals were in another. But people change their minds, and factors like immigration are changing the spaces in which we live. We might create new spaces and then find that they don’t solve our problem.

So what about California? The Inland Empire, the Central Valley, Berkeley and the Bay, and the Far North are all viable self-contained entities. Then there is the loosely connected five-county metro area of Southern California. So, if we’re going to start dividing, we should be divided into at least five parts.

And that’s fine, as long as no one thinks that dividing up California will solve any of the major issues facing the state (taxes, redistricting, legislative gridlock, and so on). That said, it would at least help remedy one thing: a lack of equality in the U.S. Senate, where a Wyoming resident has 70 times the power of a Californian. Dividing California by five would lower that ratio to merely 14 times the power of a Californian.

William A.V. Clark is distinguished professor of geography at UCLA.

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For the last time–no! We’re better than that.

Let’s try this for the 221st time: dividing California into two or more states. The latest high-profile proposal to split the state, an idea put forward by Supervisor Jeff Stone in Riverside, would create a red California and a blue California. According to Stone, “California is too big to govern, which has led the state to raid local government coffers because of runaway spending.” Splitting the State will “stop the destruction of California.”

We are told that California is too diverse to be governable. But runaway spending is not automatically stopped just by dividing the state in two. If we are re-aligning ourselves to become homogenous populations–then we have other options. For instance, Southern California can merge with Arizona to become, as someone once suggested, the State of Calzone.

California is the sixth-largest economy in the world–giving us clout in the global market today. How would having two states competing against each other help on that front?

Creating multiple states would create more representatives, which would create bigger government. How would that produce more cohesive government?

This entire notion of dividing the state to solve our problems is a cop-out.

As Californians, we should pride ourselves on our diversity and our size. We need to get beyond labels, the red-blue divide, and sound bites.

We all share certain values and aspirations for ourselves and our communities. We need to create comfortable and safe spaces for people to have civil conversations and opportunities to understand different perspectives. And each of us must have a chance to practice democracy in its true spirit so that we can collectively begin to address issues. That’s what the Reviving California initiative of the American Leadership Forum is committed to doing.

Anu Natarajan is Reviving California Program Director at the American Leadership Forum-Silicon Valley and is Vice Mayor for the City of Fremont.

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No–it wouldn’t fix a thing

Shouldn’t happen. Can’t happen. Won’t happen. Since the Gold Rush, Californians have imagined alternative cartographies for their state. Over the years, these schemes have varied in their proposed boundaries, but the rationale remains the same: that reconfiguring or subdividing the state will finally exorcise the crises that keep haunting us. We’ll finally realize our potential.

In reality, while the size of California’s population, the reach of its economic production, and the scope of its political crises may stand out, they are hardly exceptional. Other large states–Texas, Illinois, New York, and Florida–are riven by similarly complicated patterns of growth, governance, and geographic difference.

The quantity of California’s problems may be different, but the quality is not. California, like many large states, has become marked by wide-ranging inequalities in wealth, income and access to opportunity. Its economy is deeply dependent on low-wage labor, yet its social and political infrastructure facilitates the upward, rather than downward, redistribution of resources. Trenchant racial hierarchies remain, evidenced most dramatically in the state’s expansive system of prisons and its emaciated system of public education.

No act of geographic metamorphosis will insulate the state from these problems.

Daniel Martinez HoSang is the author of Racial Propositions: Ballot Initiatives and the Making of Postwar California.

*Photo courtesy of queenkv.

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