This new year, perhaps we should all resolve to model the spirit of SLO, the acronym that embodies San Luis Obispo, perhaps the easiest place in California to catch your breath and get a little rest.

SLO has been central to my own coping strategy during this miserable COVID year. Whenever work pressures or distance learning horrors or home confinement makes our family feel like we’re going insane, the five of us take our 2006 Toyota Scion three hours north from L.A. to some empty and beautiful spot in that empty and beautiful county. So far, we’ve taken five short SLO breaks of three or four days each.

In pursuing this strategy of escape, we’ve been exploiting not only extreme pandemic discounts on lodging, but also a geographic and metaphorical truth about California. The Golden State is loudest and most exhausting at its extremes and on its geographic edges, where most Californians live. If you want to find more room, and a little solitude and peace, you should look to the state’s middle.

The paradox of San Luis Obispo County is that it feels like a place apart precisely because it’s centrally located. The Cal Poly historian Daniel E. Krieger called it California’s “Middle Kingdom,” with a nod to Tolkien. In this Middle-earth, both San Francisco and L.A. hold sway but neither dominates; electricity comes from PG&E in the north, and gas from Southern California Gas.

And this middle identity runs deep. San Luis Obispo was the middle mission in the chain of Franciscan missions, and the place where coastal rail links to the north and south finally met in 1901. SLO also takes middling pride in having invented the motel in 1925, with the opening of the Milestone Mo-Tel, which served middle-class vacationers who couldn’t afford finer lodging but wanted a cheap place to stop and sleep on long coastal drives. (Eventually renamed the Motel Inn, it closed in 1991, but there are plans to redevelop the site with guest rooms and a restaurant.)

Today, San Luis Obispo County retains a decidedly middle-class vibe, amidst the rich-and-poor extremes of 21st-century California. SLO incomes are a little lower and costs, while still too high, are less than in many other parts of the coast. Its politics, while trending left, are middle of the road by California standards.

While SLO County may be small in people—with just 283,000 residents, or about as populous as the San Diego suburb of Chula Vista—it retains a big sense of itself. In recent weeks, its elected officials and media protested the state’s new stay-at-home order, which put the county in the “Southern California region” along with counties as distant as Riverside and Imperial. The San Luis Obispo Tribune editorialized, with fervor unusual for SLO, that “If Gov. Gavin Newsom doesn’t want a full-scale rebellion,” he’ll recognize the Central Coast as its own region.

Most of the time, San Luis Obispo, rather than a place for revolt, is an escape from the permanent revolutions of life in our urban regions. I’ve loved the place since childhood, when my family stopped there on frequent drives from the San Gabriel Valley to see my grandparents in the Bay Area. As an adult, I’ve dreamed of vacations on the super-cool SLO coast during hot L.A. summers, but summertime SLO hotel and motel prices were too much for a nonprofit journalist. Until the pandemic hit.

We first snuck away one sweltering July week when it was 100-plus in Southern California, and 62 on a hill outside Cambria, where a motor lodge with summer rates often above $400 a night was offering rooms for $99. Social distancing was easy—the lodge didn’t have indoor hallways, and there was hardly anyone around, making it far more COVID-safe than our dense L.A. County community. Even just a few days there felt restorative—mental health therapy far cheaper and more effective than any shrink.

We certainly haven’t become SLOcals. We don’t drink wine or have a taste for olallieberries. And try as we might, we don’t quite understand the boomer-vs.-millennial debate over whether this glorious place should be called “San Louie” or just plain SLO.

But we’ve come to appreciate the different worlds of the Middle Kingdom. There’s no denying the sun-splashed beauty of the Five Cities area (from Pismo Beach to Oceano), and the pleasures of splashing in the creek that runs under downtown San Luis Obispo, before emerging at Mission Plaza. I’ve been so impressed by Cal Poly, an unfussy educational treasure with the best graduation rates in the Cal State system, that I dream of sending my science-minded oldest son there.

Still, those are all South County places, and we’ve learned that we prefer to spend time “over the grade”—that is, above the steep Cuesta Pass that divides North from South in SLO. We’re partial to the North County’s oak trees and gardens, to drives along Highway 46, to the Mexican food and mini-golf in Atascadero, and to the cookies and coffee in Cambria.

For me, the least stressful day of a very stressful 2020 came on the cold late summer afternoon when I left my wife to her work and the kids to online lessons, and walked alone for a couple miles along the beach at San Simeon State Park. My eyes delighted in the landscape—looking over the coast, out to sea, and then up at Hearst Castle, closed for COVID. For two hours, in the middle of California, this middle-aged newspaperman didn’t see a single other person, and imagined the Middle Kingdom was his own.

I walked as SLO-ly as I could.

The post SLO Down, You Move Too Fast, California appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

So let me suggest a healthier alternative to wrapping your mind around this moment’s carnage. Visit the largest, prettiest cemetery you can find. I recommend the original Forest Lawn, the first of the six Forest Lawn memorial parks, a place sprawling enough to have graves in two cities, Glendale and Los Angeles.

I recently spent two days walking all 290 acres of Forest Lawn-Glendale—the most historic, and Californian, of our state’s cemeteries—and found that it clarified my thinking and even improved my mood.

The place also helped me to put in perspective the full human toll of COVID-19. Since Forest Lawn opened here 114 years ago, in 1906, it has interred 340,000 souls on this property. Under current projections, the United States will experience 340,000 COVID deaths by sometime in January, 10 months after the March lockdowns began.

Those numbers also made me think of Colma, the Bay Area’s lovely and haunting city of cemeteries, just south of San Francisco. That necropolis, after more than a century of existence, is now the final resting place for an estimated 1.5 million people. Worldwide, we are on track to pass 1.5 million confirmed COVID deaths before Christmas.

Such statistics are sobering and tragic. They also reflect a fundamental human failure: We experience individual death intensely, but struggle to recognize death in the aggregate. That’s why we can more forcefully rally together in response to one death—like the police killing of George Floyd—than in response to escalating numbers of COVID deaths scrolling across our screens.

Our myopia is why we need cemeteries right now, and not just as places to bury our dead.

“Cemeteries are not just a place to reflect on the past,” wrote the longtime Forest Lawn chief executive John Llewelyn in A Cemetery Should Be Forever. “They remind us to keep the present in perspective.”

Especially, perhaps, when the present is so frightening.

Forest Lawn’s mission, originated by its early leader and builder, Hubert Eaton, was about putting a sunny California spin on death. An innovator, like so many Golden State institutions, Forest Lawn was the first “memorial park,” the first to ban tombstones (requiring ground-level markers that didn’t obstruct views), and the first to provide all your death needs—a cemetery, crematory, church, flower shop, mausoleum, columbarium, and mortuary—together on one site.

Photo by Joe Mathews.

“I believe in a happy eternal life,” Eaton wrote in Forest Lawn’s “Builder’s Creed” in 1917. “I therefore know the cemeteries of today are wrong, because they depict an end, not a beginning.” To better serve humanity, he pledged, “I shall try to build at Forest Lawn a Great Park, devoid of misshapen monuments and other customary signs of earthly death, but filled with towering trees, sweeping lawns, splashing fountains, singing birds, beautiful statuary, cheerful flowers, noble memorial architecture with interiors full of light and color, and redolent of the world’s best history and romances.”

Forest Lawn has been relentlessly satirized (by Evelyn Waugh in his 1948 novel, The Loved One) and critiqued (by Jessica Mitford in her 1963 exposé, The American Way of Death). Serious types have dismissed it as a “Disneyland of Death.” But at this particular moment, I found visiting the happiest cemetery on Earth soothing, and thought-provoking.

I encountered joggers, bikers, landscape painters, and people walking babies in strollers. From a distance, I listened to a funeral full of jokes and laughter. I heard birds sing as I enjoyed 360-degree L.A. views from the esplanade. A half-dozen people chatted amiably about the weather while admiring “The Mystery of Life,” a sculpture group of 18 human figures gathering around a stream that flows from an unseen source toward an unknown destination.

By its usual standards, Forest Lawn was pretty quiet. Its art museum—which houses an important collection of stained glass, the world’s largest black opal, and William Bouguereau’s 1881 painting “Song of the Angels”—was closed. There were no school field trips on the grounds. Tens of thousands of people, including Ronald Reagan, have been married at Forest Lawn, but during my visit there were no weddings in the cemetery’s three churches, which were locked.

Still, I enjoyed the way the place resembles Southern California in miniature, with its different topographies (windswept hills, cool valleys, a sprawling basin), cultural mishmash (Italian statues, Scottish and Irish churches, and crypts with inscriptions in every modern Asian language), and obsession with being big (Forest Lawn notes that its large wrought-iron gates are twice as wide as those at Buckingham Palace, and the Hall of Crucifixion houses “the world’s largest permanently mounted religious painting”).

Forest Lawn is perhaps the best place in Tinseltown to get close to a celebrity—everyone from Walt Disney to Jean Harlow to Michael Jackson is interred there—though you have to do some detective work, since the staff won’t tell you where they are. I did manage to find the famed early 20th-century L.A. preacher Aimee Semple McPherson, who, in her Divine Healing Sermons, advised, “get alone in the wilderness of quiet and stillness before God.”

I found powerful stillness in the Great Mausoleum, where I chatted with a woman who was looking for the crypt of Paramahansa Yogananda, the Indian guru who popularized yoga and meditation in the U.S. And I laughed at discovering that the crypt of California Gov. Culbert Olson, famous for being an atheist, is just steps away from the mausoleum’s stained-glass reproduction of da Vinci’s “The Last Supper.”

Down the hill from the mausoleum is an older, flatter cemetery section so filled with light it feels like heaven’s front porch. There I walked amid many graves from 1918 and 1919. Most of the people buried in them had died in their teens, 20s, and early 30s, the most common ages of Spanish flu victims.

From there, I headed up to the Court of Freedom, which includes a mosaic reproduction of John Trumbull’s “Signing of the Declaration of Independence” that’s three times larger than the original painting in the U.S. Capitol. I read the text of the Declaration inscribed next to the painting, and reflected on Jefferson’s wisdom in putting “life” before “liberty” and the “pursuit of happiness.”

Death is a constant of course, but the speed of this pandemic is overwhelming us, to the detriment of the living and the dead.

We are in such a desperate rush to get past COVID that we’re trying to ignore its realities. It seems likely that we’ll forget this era as fast as we can.

We shouldn’t ever put the pandemic behind us. We will all need to remember its lessons, to honor its sacrifices and its heroes, so we might see its after-life as a beginning, not an end. Here in California, I hope we will memorialize every last one of our pandemic dead, with a monument that is beautiful and colorful and big, and makes people happy when they visit it.

The post Contemplating the COVID Carnage at California’s Most Historic Cemetery appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

No? OK, maybe you’re not ready to recognize how much you need me. I understand.

I know you’ve never liked me, and for that I’ve never blamed you. You Californians like to live your lives fast, and I’m all about slowing you down. So I try not to let it bother me that you complain about me more than drought or Donald Trump.

I understand that I make you late to school and to work. I lengthen brutal commutes that keep you behind the wheel for hours when you’d rather be working out, watching a game or playing with your kids. And I contribute to pollution that causes everything from asthma to climate change.

But give me this much: When COVID-19 came, and I took a vacation, California suddenly didn’t feel like California anymore.

At first, you celebrated my disappearance as a rare ray of light in a dark time. The roads were wide open. You could actually get from downtown San Diego to North County, or from Pasadena to Long Beach, or from San Francisco to Palo Alto, in 30 minutes. The Bay Area bridges were no longer jammed. Even when businesses started to reopen, traffic was less than 80 percent of normal around the state.

But as the pandemic drags on, I suspect many of you secretly wish I would come back. There is something disorienting, even apocalyptic, about all those empty roads. Your state just isn’t the same without me.

Truth be told, under normal circumstances, California isn’t the most congested place in the United States. Much of our giant state is empty, while Hawai‘i’s small island roads are packed with too many Californians who like to drive. My fearsome reputation is really based on the fact that California’s giant urban regions have some of the world’s worst traffic.

People also tend to dwell on my costs—in gas, vehicle maintenance, air quality, and lives—without appreciating the many benefits I provide. Now that those benefits have vanished, I wonder if you might give me a little more respect.

For starters, I’m the best excuse you have for your flakiness and irresponsibility. When you’re ludicrously late to school or work, or when you miss your brother’s wedding, all you need is to invoke me, traffic, and your fellow Californians will absolve you of your sins. Now, in the pandemic, you probably don’t have to be anywhere, but if you do, and you’re late, you’ve got no excuse. You’re just rude!

So, in the spirit of forgiveness, I hope that COVID has given you a more permissive perspective on time. Transportation agencies across California like to issue studies that accuse me, traffic, of being a thief, by robbing from you 60 or 80 or 100 hours of time each year that you could instead have spent with your families. But now that so many of you are stuck with your families all the time, I detect a new appreciation for all the quality time you used to spend stuck with me. I let you listen to whatever awful music you like without ever complaining. Can you say the same of your kids?

Those points may seem trivial, but the carnage on our roads—more than 3,500 traffic deaths annually—is serious. And the pandemic suggests that my talent for congestion actually keeps you safer. In the early weeks of the lockdown, traffic accidents, injuries, and deaths dropped precipitously. But since then, without me around to slow people down, drivers have been speeding, and the roads have gotten much deadlier. In fact, even with much less traffic, we’re on track to have just as many deaths on the roads this year as we did in 2019, which is why Californians are seeing roadside warnings to slow down.

Controlling speeding is just one of the many social goods for which I, traffic, deserve more credit. Research shows that, despite conventional wisdom that traffic slows commerce, congestion is good for the economy and jobs. So you won’t escape economic depression without me.

I support millions of jobs directly, from car dealerships to car repair shops and car washes (I’m very proud of the fact that California leads the nation in per-capita car washes). But I also create positive economic incentives. I’m a force for innovation, encouraging the concentration of high-tech and other industries. And the gas taxes that drivers pay is how our society funds much of its transportation infrastructure, and the construction jobs that come with it.

Contrary to popular belief, I’m also a huge proponent of public transportation. People get on trains and buses to avoid dealing with me. Now transit ridership has completely collapsed, and that’s not all because of fear of the virus. I’m no longer there to scare drivers. My buddies at BART have lost most of their ridership, and Caltrain, which connects San Francisco and San Jose by rail, may go under. Local and state governments will have to bail out transit systems until I can return to do my essential artery-clogging work.

I don’t limit my environmental work to supporting transit. Fear of my congestion also creates incentives for infill development in dense urban areas, and for people to live closer to work, to walk and bike more, and to use ridesharing rather than owning cars. Best of all, congestion forces people to congregate in places, where they can talk, plan a rally, or meet a significant other.

You may still hate me, but I create opportunities for you to fall in love!

That’s why I’m asking you to wear those masks and maintain social distance. The sooner California can beat back the pandemic, the sooner you and I can be together again.

The post Don’t Be Ashamed to Admit It<span class="colon">:</span> You Miss California Traffic appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“Medicare for All,” the political dream of extending federal health program for the elderly and disabled to all Americans, still gets the headlines. But here in the nation’s most populous state, it is Medicaid—or Medi-Cal, as the federal health program for the poor is called in California—that comes closest to providing a universal safety net. Medi-Cal deserves more attention now because its no-or-low-cost health services provide a vital backstop in this time of pandemic and freefalling employment, and because it holds possibilities that have yet to be realized.

Medi-Cal spending, which comes mostly from federal funds, has grown rapidly over the past decade. And this past week, even as the governor and legislature agreed on a state budget with plenty of cuts, Medi-Cal kept on growing. Overall spending on Medi-Cal is budgeted for a 12 percent increase in 2020-21, to more than $110 billion. This increase covers surging enrollment—the governor’s office has estimated an additional 2 million people will join Medi-Cal this year after losing jobs or insurance.

Medi-Cal now is the most important anti-poverty program in a state with persistently high poverty rates. An estimated 14.5 million Californians—more than one-third of us—will be on Medi-Cal by summer’s end, double the number in 2010. Medi-Cal has been woven into the fabric of our lives, from infancy to near-death. Roughly half of California children are on Medi-Cal. So are some two-thirds of our nursing home residents. And if the current economic collapse becomes a long-term depression, millions more Californians will end up depending on Medi-Cal for our healthcare, too.

Medi-Cal’s rapid expansion into a safety net for all Californians represents triumph, trouble—and opportunity.

The triumph belongs to the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. Before that law passed in 2010, Medicaid, originally an after-thought in the 1965 federal law that established Medicare, covered only certain categories of poor adults—like parents with children, or people with certain conditions. But Obamacare funds states to open Medicaid eligibility to virtually all low-income adults under 138 percent of the poverty line—about $17,600 for an individual, or $36,000 for a family of four. No state embraced Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion more fiercely than California, which even covered income-eligible children and young adults (up to age 26) who had been excluded from the federal program due to their immigration status.

This expansion, combined with the establishment of exchanges for purchasing insurance, got results: the percentage of uninsured Californians dropped from 18 percent to 7 percent over the last decade. The impact of this shift is visible in poorer places like the San Joaquin Valley, where Medi-Cal expansion, and the money it brought into healthcare, produced a surge of new clinics and health facilities. (Staffing such places, however, remains a challenge.)

But that expansion caused trouble—the program struggled to keep up with the needs of all the new enrollees. While millions now may be protected from financial ruin if they get sick because Medi-Cal is paying the bills, Medi-Cal does not guarantee them high-quality healthcare.

The obstacles lie in the way care is disbursed. In California, more than 80 percent of people on Medi-Cal are enrolled in managed care organizations, which are paid by the state to provide enrollees with care. And managed care is not performing as well as it should. A 2019 report on Medi-Cal managed care plans found that the quality of their care declined or stayed flat on most measures between 2009 and 2018, according to the California Health Care Foundation. The same study showed declines in two-thirds of measures involving healthcare for children.

Improving quality is difficult because Medi-Cal mirrors the complexity of the state. Though Medi-Cal is a federal program overseen by the state, the managed care plans operate at the county level. Depending upon the county they live in, Californians on Medi-Cal are offered different plans from different entities. Some counties have just one publicly managed plan; other counties have the “two-plan” model, with a public and a commercial option; and other counties, notably San Diego, offer multiple commercial choices.

So if you’re on Medi-Cal, your experience varies depending on your plan and where you live. You’re more likely to get the care you need in Yolo County, which has just one plan, the well-regarded Partnership Health Plan, than next door in Sacramento County, which has a confusing array of commercial plans. Health plan management can differ widely within regions. In Southern California, Orange County’s CalOptima is still associated with scandals in the past decade. But Inland Empire Health Plan, serving Riverside and San Bernardino counties, is considered a model.

These Medi-Cal challenges represent an opportunity. Before the pandemic hit, 2020 looked like the year the state was going to improve the program. Health advocates were pushing to raise the state’s standards for the Medi-Cal managed care plans, so that they would have to show continuous improvement in the health outcomes of their customers. Children’s advocates were working to make Medi-Cal better for kids.

And earlier this year, the governor was pursuing a highly ambitious set of proposals called CalAIM (for California Advancing and Innovating Medi-Cal). The proposals involved using Medi-Cal more broadly to help the most vulnerable Californians—particularly people who are homeless and those caught up in the justice system—with their most difficult challenges, from mental health to housing. At the same time, CalAIM proposed to simplify the complex Medi-Cal program, with the goal of producing better health outcomes for more people.

But now, with the state’s health bureaucracy consumed by COVID, CalAIM is on hold. So is a proposed expansion of Medi-Cal to cover senior citizens who are undocumented.

In this pullback you can see the shadow of political reality: Medi-Cal, as part of a federal program, remains vulnerable to the national partisan struggle over healthcare. Congressional Republicans still seek cuts in Medicaid, and the Trump administration remains committed to overturning Obamacare through legal challenges and regulatory changes. What’s more, if Congress doesn’t produce more aid for California, it could force future cuts in payments to Medi-Cal providers.

Nevertheless, the program seems poised to keep growing because the need is so great. Payments to managed care plans should be tied to measures of access, quality of care, and patient outcomes. And California must train more and better healthcare workers if quality is going to improve. Medi-Cal is such a big part of California healthcare that improvements to the program could benefit the whole system.

Starting today, Californians—especially those of you who get health insurance from your employers—should demand that the state do better by Medi-Cal. Because the way the world is going, you’ll need Medi-Cal before you know it.

The post How a Health Care Safety Net for the Poor Became California’s Top Priority appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

It’s also a symbol of Sacramento’s porcine business model. As our state government hogs ever-greater authority for itself at the expense of California communities, our capital city, and its most powerful people control more of our tax dollars and more of our lives.

We are now living in the fifth decade of California’s great era of centralized power. Back in the 1970s, liberals seeking equality in local school funding and conservatives seeking local tax limits robbed California’s local governments of most of their fiscal and political power—and transferred that power to the state Capitol. In the 40 years since, the single greatest enterprise in Sacramento—pursued by governors, legislators, and political interests of various stripes—has been the ever-greater expansion of state government power.

Downtown Sacramento is a living monument to our centralized era. In response to state government’s ever-expanding power, our local governments and other interest groups had to spend more money to influence and elect Sacramento’s power players. This spending built an army of lobbyists, consultants, organizers, party officials, and media mavens, who turned once-sleepy downtown Sacramento into their campus, with office towers, restaurants, snazzy entertainment venues like the arena, and expensive baubles, including Piglet.

This army of statewide influencers also became major powers in the political life of the city—as donors, officeholders, campaign consultants, and lobbyists. Darrell Steinberg, perhaps the most accomplished state legislator of this century, is now mayor.

Understandably, such ambitious people wanted to do big things that would get noticed around the state—hence all the high-profile construction downtown. But as they made Sacramento less sleepy, they too often neglected the less glamorous tasks of meeting neighborhood needs and managing fundamental departments.

That neglect has long left crucial institutions in Sacramento (pop. 509,000) in bad shape. The city government has struggled in bad times (Sacramento was hit especially hard during the Great Recession) and in good (Sacramento has been especially deficient in meeting local housing demands, especially with the arrival of Bay Area refugees). The once-vital daily newspaper, the Bee, self-destructed and is now bankrupt. Even before COVID-19, the city’s largest school district was nearing collapse, with chronic mismanagement, faulty accounting, and falling enrollment putting schools at risk of—irony alert—a state takeover.

Under the shadow of COVID-19, these two Sacramento dynamics—greater statewide power, greater local failures—have accelerated. The pandemic has given the state government even more power over Californians (with individual cities now needing to wait for decisions on when to open their nail salons) while the outlook has darkened for the city.

The story of Sacramento City Unified School District is probably most damning, as it reveals an elite unwilling to face its failures honestly. For years, leading Sacramentans have ignored warnings from county education officials and even the state auditor that excessive spending—especially escalating pay and retirement benefits to teachers—was putting the whole district at risk.

Even as schools and neighborhoods languished, Sacramento obsessively pursued showy projects to make itself a “major league” destination for tourists and conventiongoers, with particularly risky investments in Piglet’s downtown neighborhood. And now that obsession threatens the city’s future.

The downtown sports arena, which opened in 2016, embodies the treat. While other California cities wisely stopped offering giveaways to the wealthy owners of pro sports franchises, Sacramento helped fund construction of the Golden 1 Center, because it wanted to keep the Kings. But because the city didn’t have the money itself, it borrowed $273 million—arguing that parking revenues would be enough to pay it back. The Bee newspaper served as chief cheerleader for this scheme.

If this was a weak financial proposition before COVID, it became even weaker with the pandemic, which shut the arena and made hardly anyone want to park downtown. Now there isn’t enough money to make bond payments.

If the city put its people first, it could re-negotiate with bondholders or simply default on the debt. But Sacramento officials have indicated that they may force their citizens to pay the price, by reducing services to cover the arena debt.

The arena scheme is hardly the only example of debt-fueled ambition run amuck. In 2018, the city sold $350 million in bonds to revive its convention center—long a loser—and to remodel a civic auditorium and a theater. Those bonds are supposed to be paid back from the city’s hotel tax revenues, which have now evaporated. City officials suggest that they could make those payments by pausing or cutting capital improvement projects.

All these failures raise questions not merely for Sacramento, but for the rest of California. Chief among them: How much longer are Californians going to put up with Sacramento making decisions about our regions and local communities when the capital city can’t even put its own people first?

Overthrowing our centralized state regime, and Sacramento’s power over us, will take popular revolt and systemic change. That might seem too heavy a lift to Californians, but as another Winnie the Pooh character, Christopher Robin, counseled, “You are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.”

Perhaps we could start small. If we first topple Piglet, then we can overturn the California system Piglet represents.

The post The Shiny Sacramento Statue That Reflects California’s Failures appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Of course, California’s nearly 80,000 sworn officers don’t bother with the small-time grift of stealing electronics during civil unrest. Instead, they prefer to sack the treasuries of the governments that employ them, in both good times and bad.

In communities across our state, the escalating salaries, benefits, and pensions of police are swallowing up municipal budgets—and crowding out the other services, from libraries to summer programs, that poorer Californians depend on most. Over the past 40 years, police spending more than doubled, while parks, recreation, and maintenance budgets remained flat or declined. Police departments are by far the largest piece of any local budget, often consuming at least one-third of the general fund (as in my San Gabriel Valley hometown) and more than half of discretionary revenues.

As policing costs have come to dominate city finances, the police have gained nearly unchecked political power. Police unions, enriched by higher dues from well-paid officers, make the campaign contributions that determine who wins local races. So city council members rarely move to curb the pay or power of police officers who installed them in office. The result is that in many places in California, the city government does not run the police department; the police department runs the city.

This flawed local government structure deserves more attention in our current crisis—because it provides part of the answer to the question Americans are asking: Why does abusive, racist, and deadly police behavior keep happening? The deeper response to that question starts not with Twitter-fueled conspiracy theories about the protestors who have taken over our streets, but rather in recognizing just how thoroughly our police have taken over our city halls.

Police dominance of municipal budgets is a problem all over the country, but it’s most extreme in California. Our 120,000 full-time law enforcement officers—that includes police, sheriffs, and prison guards—are the highest paid in America. California consistently ranks, along with New York and Alaska, among the national leaders in spending on police ($414 per resident, compared to a national average of $354).

The peculiarities of California governance have long accentuated police power, as well as its costs. While local budgets were limited by the Prop 13-tax system, the “maintenance of effort” provisions in the state constitution—via Proposition 172, approved by voters in 1993—required local governments to maintain their spending on police and other public safety personnel. So police budgets, constitutionally, were programmed to gobble up ever higher shares of a limited local tax base.

Then things got worse. The full-scale police looting of municipal budgets began 20 years ago, when unions forced changes in pension rules that made it possible for officers to retire as early as age 50, with pensions that would be nearly as high as their salaries. These pension changes were both retroactive and permanent, and included easily-abused rules that allowed cops to maneuver to spike their pensions astronomically. A Los Angeles program allowed police officers to “retire” briefly and pocket part of their pension and salaries in a lump sum; the current LAPD Chief Michel Moore used it to take home $1.27 million.

With cops also receiving generous disability benefits and costly retiree health coverage, cities have experienced a crushing increase in their retirement costs. In effect, California cities are paying for two police forces—the current one and the retired one. And the last decade of recovery did not produce enough new revenues to keep up with these increases in police salaries and retirement benefits. (Firefighter pay and benefits also have taken big bites out of cities).

These escalating police costs add an irony to the current crisis on our streets. Today’s young protestors will get less in local services because they are paying for the unaffordable retirements of the cops who are using tear gas and rubber bullets against them. The police really should be kinder to their benefactors.

In another irony, police response to today’s protests will only add to another rising municipal cost: legal settlements. In recent years, cities have seen multimillion-dollar increases in amounts paid to settle lawsuits over police shootings, use-of-force, and in-custody deaths. Look for the current police-community clashes to produce hundreds of millions of dollars in new settlements, ultimately paid for by the taxpayers suffering under COVID and curfews.

Maddeningly, all the massive increases in police budgets haven’t given us more policing. Most cities have fewer sworn officers than they did in 2008. The lack of personnel was apparent in recent days, as police departments struggled to muster enough officers to protect property from vandalism, arson, and looting.

To be fair, California police are neither irredeemable nor unaware. Police collaborated with their critics to negotiate pioneering state legislation last year that limits police use of force. Some cities, notably Richmond, have transformed police-community relations.

And the LAPD, once a paramilitary citadel, is now a national model of community responsiveness and diversity, with two-thirds of officers now hailing from ethnic or racial minorities. Watching police and protestors up close recently in L.A.’s Fairfax district, I was struck by how the protestors were more male and white than the cops facing them.

But police departments have faced little pressure to surrender any of their local fiscal and political power—until now. Researchers at Black Lives Matter are building a strong case for rolling back local police budgets. They successfully targeted Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti’s initial budget proposal, which offered deep cuts in virtually every city program except the LAPD, which got a 7 percent increase. After activists launched a “People’s Budget” to replace police spending with money for the homeless and renters, the mayor announced he would trim the police budget instead. Nationally, some activists even want to end police departments altogether.

That’s unlikely to happen, but California’s system of local government must change so that police no longer dominate our cities. This means empowering citizens to challenge police power in city hall, and perhaps forcing police to work under neighborhood service departments with a broader sense of community needs.

But first, let’s stop the looting.

The post To Rein in California’s Cops, Reclaim City Hall appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

California is an orphan of a state, and Monterey’s beginnings are the closest thing we have to a birth story. Admission Day—September 9, 1850, when California became an American state—doesn’t really amount to a birthday, since California was a province of two other countries, Spain and Mexico, long before that. Other birthday options are problematic, too. We can’t know the exact day, thousands of years ago, when native peoples arrived. And 16th- and early 17th-century Europeans (like Sebastián Vizcaíno, who gave Monterey its name) didn’t stick around long enough to establish much.

So the closest thing we have to a moment of birth is probably June 3, 1770. On that day, Junípero Serra, California’s controversial and cruel saint, held Mass and Spanish military Capt. Gaspar de Portolá planted the Spanish colors in Monterey, which would become California’s first capital—and most enduring place.

A quarter-millennium later, Monterey, for all its rough history, is often dismissed as too precious, and too much a place apart. But the same has been said about California. Indeed, the peninsula city—by serving both as a hideaway enclave and an open door to the world’s diverse peoples—has become an emblem of the state.

“Monterey was California’s experiment,” writes Dennis Copeland, the city of Monterey’s museums, cultural arts, and archives manager. “Monterey today represents California’s past, present, and future.”

Indeed, Monterey has a special ability to keep its past alive and connect its story to California’s future.

The famous—and famously brutal—mission system began in San Diego in 1769, but Monterey’s mission, at Carmel, would become the headquarters. In 1776, Spain declared Monterey the capital of its Alta California colony—inspiring the creation of other Spanish settlements in the late 18th century, including San Jose and Los Angeles.

Monterey survived a brief 1818 attack from—of all countries—the newly independent Argentina (its revolutionaries burned the presidio, stole what they could, and left). The Mexican government took over from Spain in 1822, and Monterey remained the provincial capital. Mexico also designated Monterey an official port of entry, making it a center of trade and commerce and California’s first “front door,” according to the late local historian J.D. Conway.

In that role, Monterey changed the world’s perception of California—from a feudal Spanish frontier backwater into a highly desirable destination. “The cosmopolitan atmosphere created by the international trade helped make Monterey a hotbed of liberal thought,” which produced elections and local self-government, wrote Conway in his terrific 2003 history, Monterey: Presidio Pueblo and Port. California’s tradition of political revolt got its start when Montereños rebelled against a series of provincial governors who were seen as favoring Mexico City’s needs over their own.

Monterey was where the Americanization of California began, with Commodore John Drake Sloat’s peaceful conquest of the city in 1846, and the establishment of the first American fort. In 1849, Monterey hosted the convention to produce the state constitution that California would use to muscle its way into the United States in 1850.

In the decades after statehood, a misguided conventional wisdom held that Monterey no longer mattered. Sure, the place suffered some indignities. Legal chicanery allowed a land baron to steal 30,000 acres. Santa Cruz, fueled by its American prejudice against the more Mexican Monterey, formed its own separate county. And in the 1870s, Salinas stole Monterey’s status as the Monterey County seat through a corrupt bargain that allowed the city of Hollister to make itself the seat of its own breakaway county, San Benito.

Despite these blows, Monterey—a global-facing, Spanish-Mexican-Catholic city—kept on prospering. Its sleepy reputation reflected the ignorance and bigotry of the rest of California, which was growing more Anglo, more nativist, more Protestant, and more violent towards native peoples than the missions had ever been. “California’s change from a Hispanic culture to an Anglo-Protestant culture made Monterey appear to be out of the mainstream,” Conway wrote.

Monterey quietly kept welcoming people: Chinese fishermen, Portuguese whalers from the Azores, even wealthy tourists who came to stay at Charles Crocker’s Hotel Del Monte. Artists arrived to form colonies, while marine scientists made camp to study the bay and the ocean. Waves of migrants from Sicily, Spain, the Balkans, Japan, and the Dust Bowl formed communities and businesses that local boy John Steinbeck would make famous in Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row.

In the 20th century, Monterey kept making itself the capital of new things. As the state grew interested again in its Spanish heritage, Monterey mined its own history and architecture to become the Adobe Capital of California. Monterey’s fishing and canning innovations also made it become the Sardine Capital of the World. And in the century’s second half, Monterey cemented its reputation a capital of tourism and cosmopolitan cool, with the establishment of the Monterey Jazz Festival in 1958 and opening the Monterey Bay Aquarium in 1984.

Monterey’s embrace of military training and education facilities, especially for the study of foreign languages, has paid huge dividends. The Navy’s Postgraduate School found a home at the old Del Monte Hotel, and the military’s Defense Language Institute grew up at the Presidio of Monterey, spinning off the Monterey Institute of International Studies. Taken together, these institutes have allowed Monterey to host a cultural festival that celebrates it being a Language Capital of the World.

In all this, Conway, the local historian, saw a civic “schizophrenia”; Monterey, like California, clings to its past while relentlessly seeking out future new identities. That two-sidedness has made the city difficult to govern. Locals have fought for decades over water, growth, and downtown redevelopment.

But Monterey’s ability to remain so attractive and alluring—over these 250 years—also holds an important lesson for Californians: size and political power are not what make a city great. Instead, it is the places that truly welcome strangers, that collapse time and space, that connect us to history and the future, that remain worth celebrating.

I’m sad that COVID-19 forced the cancelation of the 250th birthday party Monterey spent two years planning for itself. But you can still honor the occasion the next time you visit the peninsula. First, savor the views from Lower Presidio Historic Park, where a native village once stood, where Vizcaíno landed in 1602, and where Serra and Portolà got things started in 1770.

Then wander over to San Carlos Cathedral, one of oldest buildings in this state, and say a prayer that California, and its real capital, will still be around to celebrate in another 250 years.

The post Why Monterey’s 250th Birthday Bodes Well for California’s Future appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

You’ll find one answer to that question in Gonzales, a city of just 9,000 people in the Salinas Valley, where local leaders spent 15 years seeking to connect all residents to the internet.

Right now, even California’s biggest and richest cities are struggling to provide the internet access necessary for their people to work or study from home. But Gonzales solved that problem a few months ago. Before the pandemic hit, the town offered broadband service, free of charge, to all its residents. The story behind its rare achievement—tiny Gonzales is the first Central Coast city to do this—offers all kinds of lessons about power, and how communities can beat the odds.

Gonzales’ leadership is not entirely a surprise. The town, populated by farmworkers and surrounded by fields, is one of our state’s smallest wonders. In a region notorious for high crime and child poverty, Gonzales boasts low crime and high graduation rates. And while other California cities chase sales taxes by developing big retail and tourist attractions, Gonzales focuses on nurturing a diverse industrial base that employs local residents. Its local leadership is well-known for novel partnerships that provide innovative health services and extensive supports for children, who make up nearly 40 percent of the town’s population.

But even for a creative and nimble city, securing broadband has been very challenging. Gonzales’ long path to universal broadband suggests that it will be difficult to turn the temporary internet measures of the pandemic—like short-term service discounts from providers—into long-term bridges over our digital divides.

Gonzales’ broadband quest is also a tale of a David taking on multiple Goliaths. In 2005, internet service in Gonzales was slow and unreliable, and municipal officials couldn’t get service providers to work with the town.

So the city joined the Central Coast Broadband Consortium, which includes governments and organizations that seek better internet access. Gonzales officials also started regularly visiting the state’s Public Utilities Commission in San Francisco to press their case for rural broadband, including a link between Santa Cruz and Soledad.

At some PUC meetings, Gonzales was the only city represented. But as a small town, it didn’t have much leverage—until officials discovered how to advance their case by filing legal protests against corporate mergers and acquisitions.

In 2015, when Charter Communications sought to merge with Time Warner in a $78 billion deal, Gonzales moved to block California from offering its approval of Charter’s acquisition of Time Warner and Bright House cable systems, on the grounds that the deal wouldn’t help small towns. City officials fought so hard that PUC officials urged Charter to negotiate. Ultimately Gonzales dropped its opposition after Charter upgraded the system serving the town, bumping Gonzales’ upload speeds from 1 Mbps to 60 Mbps, and its download speeds from 5 Mbps to 100 Mbps.

A tech backbone was in place, but access to the internet at home still remained a problem for poor families. On my frequent stops to Gonzales in recent years, I saw kids sitting outside McDonald’s, Starbucks or even City Hall, using the free WIFI to do their homework. In 2017, such scenes inspired the city to add a Broadband Strategy to its general plan, with a commitment to “Universal Broadband for All.”

Gonzales then requested proposals from internet service providers to provide universal broadband. Four such proposals were filed, but Gonzales rejected them all, citing slow speeds or holes in the commitment to universal access. Instead, the city began to negotiate individually with providers. The city found a willing partner in T-Mobile.

In Gonzales, Wi-Fi for all. Courtesy of Carmen Gil.

T-Mobile’s offerings were well-suited for Gonzales’ needs. The company has a program called EmpowerED to get students online. T-Mobile also has an unusually dense network of cellular towers in the area—which provide cell coverage to people driving through on the 101. T-Mobile also was willing to shift its model, which focuses on school districts, and work with the city government as well.

The T-Mobile/Gonzales partnership was approved by the city council last October. T-Mobile upgraded wireless internet infrastructure, and donated 2,000 Wi-Fi hotspots—one for every city household. The hotspots offer speeds four times those required by the Federal Communications Commission, and can support up to 12 different devices at once.

The city, not residents, pays monthly service charges, at a discounted rate of $12.50 monthly per household device. Partnership documents value T-Mobile’s donation at more than $504,000. The total annual cost to the Gonzales government is $300,000—paid for with general fund revenues and a special ½-cent sales tax approved back in 2014.

Hotspot distribution started in schools and low-income housing complexes. Anyone presenting proof of residency in Gonzales received them; so did households outside the city who attend Gonzales schools. Since COVID forced shutdowns, the city has offered drive-by service for equipment pickups.

Residents tell me the devices are already activated when you get them, so they are easy to use. And with education and other services now moving online, the hotspots have become indispensable for Gonzales’ many multi-generation families. Grandparents sing the hot spots’ praises, and some college students from Gonzales, now back home, say their city internet connections are better than their campus ones.

“They work really, really well, even with all the people suddenly online—Google Docs, Google Classroom, Zoom, are all working,” says Isabel Mendoza, 17, a Gonzales High senior and commissioner with the Gonzales Youth Council, a youth government with a role in city and school district decision-making. “Before, because we have five people in my house, and a number of electronics, the internet was really slow.”

René Mendez, the longtime city manager, has been fielding inquiries from towns around California asking for broadband advice, and nearby Greenfield is now moving forward with a similar program.

“I think this is doable across the state,” Mendez says, particularly if cities aggressively seek out internet providers and make deals that mix new broadband investment with cost-sharing. “Why can’t you provide broadband for the whole community, just like you do with sewer and water and streets?”

Of course, it should be much easier for poor towns and people to secure internet in California, which invented our tech world, than it was for Gonzales. But the city doesn’t dwell on past struggles—it’s moving forward. Gonzales’ deal with T-Mobile is for two years, but it’s renewable. City officials are planning a trip to T-Mobile headquarters, and plotting the next chapter of universal broadband. It starts with 5G.

The post One Small California Town’s 15-Year Fight for Universal Broadband appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Distance learning is the term for our new COVID 19-era educational regime, which forces teachers and students to conduct classes and handle schoolwork at a distance, using the Internet. Under this system, we California parents must bridge this distance, valiantly instructing our own children at home to make sure that actual learning takes place.

Millions of California parents, including yours truly, have found this a frustrating, even impossible task. But after seven long weeks of distance learning, I’ve made my peace with flunking this particular exam.

Because failure isn’t merely an option when your job is to transform into a teacher in the midst of the worst pandemic in a century. Failure is the point of the exercise.

If parents were to turn into awesome teachers under this hastily organized set-up for internet home schooling, imagine the fallout for our educational system! If parents could surpass some teachers in instruction, how could teachers’ unions still defend their weaker members? If I could administer my home classroom effectively, what justification would California school districts have for employing expensive administrators? And if students performed just as well at my kitchen table as they do in a classroom, why would construction firms ever again make campaign donations to school board members who approve new buildings?

Educational success, in these circumstances, would be nothing less than an attack on public education. So if you’re one of those parents who is still following every instruction on Google Classroom, and trying to give your kid a leg up, I must ask: What the hell is wrong with you?

For the sake of California and social cohesion, those of us with school-age children must accept that we are merely actors in a show that, like the tasteless musical in Mel Brooks’ The Producers, is supposed to flop. Even Governor Gavin Newsom, who imposed distance learning in March, has dropped any pretense that this statewide experiment in homeschooling is anything more than educational theater. The governor blames this period for massive “learning loss,” especially among disadvantaged kids. And around the state, school boards are conceding that, with powerful teachers’ unions opposing online learning, they never invested enough in online education to make it work.

As the superintendent of our local San Gabriel Valley district recently wrote to our community: “California’s public-school system does not have the infrastructure or appropriate regulations to support a comprehensive, all-in, distance learning program for all students.”

I fear, however, that some parents are misinterpreting such acknowledgements, and feel that their parental assistance with distance learning is now unimportant. To the contrary, our role is now even more vital! Our job is to accept the blame for distance learning’s failure, so that our schools, teachers and kids don’t have to.

I confess that I was slow to embrace my own role as scapegoat in this drama. I had never gotten a grade less than an A until my freshman year of college, and so I took it hard when distance learning began and I immediately seemed to be failing three grades—my sons are in first, third, and fifth. That’s an academic record surpassed only by the Adam Sandler character Billy Madison (who flunked all 12 grades).

At first, I made excuses for failure, like my full-time job was getting in the way.

Then I lashed out.

I blamed my wife for offering no help. Her “lame” excuse is that she’s covering COVID-19 around the clock as a health reporter for a major American newspaper. Also, that I’m on her health insurance.

I blamed the confounding technologies and educational apps that my kids must use but that I can’t keep straight—Sumdog, Think Central, Flipgrid, BrainPOP, and of course, the head of the distance-learning snake, Google Classroom. (One sleepless night, while re-reading Dante’s Inferno, I convinced myself that the Googleplex is not actually in Mountain View but rather sits along a causeway leading to the Ninth Circle of Hell).

I blamed the teachers, who kept sending me online assignments full of broken Internet links—and mixed messages. One day, they’d advise not to stress about distance learning, offering assurances that it didn’t matter whether things got done. The next, they’d ask why a particular assignment was not turned in, or remind me that school was still in session and that attendance was being taken online.

But most of all, I blamed my three students—who are lazy (refusing to rise from bed before 9), undisciplined (they ignore my schedules), and ungrateful (not a word of thanks to their father-teacher). I especially resented how they exploited the fact that they needed to be on their screens all day to sneak video games whenever I wasn’t looking. With them skipping work and bombing tests, I threatened to call their parents, until I remembered I was their parents.

I finally understood distance learning’s true purpose after reporting my first grader’s work refusals to his teachers and school administrators. In a call, they politely declined my request that he be made to repeat first grade, while also offering him extra attention via Zoom. My 6-year-old, recognizing his victory and my diminished power, soon took to making me write down his answers to school assignments. Recently, he warned me: “If I get an email from Google Classroom that I need to do this again, you will be to blame.”

So I have accepted my fate. I am not anyone’s teacher. I have no training in instruction or classroom control. I can’t give students a grade, or even ground them—because the whole world is already grounded. I am a powerless functionary, an IT troubleshooter, and an unpaid messenger between two groups—my children and their teachers—who have bigger worries than schoolwork in the midst of a pandemic.

I am sometimes asked, Does distance learning work? The answer is we will never know, if we employ it only in these crazy circumstances, when it is certain to fail.

Sometimes I think turning distance learning into farce must have been the intention of powerful educational interests, which before COVID-19 opposed online education as a threat to teaching and administrative jobs. After this failed “experiment,” it may be a long time before California schools invest in online education that could work, and perhaps curb equity gaps in our education system.

But that’s a concern for the future. Right now, I’m just relieved that distance learning has allowed the state to justify continuing to pay teachers and other school employees during this crisis. If that means I have to play Potemkin, and pretend the distance learning village is real, I’m happy to serve.

Unfortunately, not all of my fellow California parents are content to suffer in such productive silence. On social media and in grocery store lines, they rage against distance learning, and how hard it is on them. That’s understandable, but it’s also bad form. We California parents must save all our anger for the many fights ahead.

In June, we’ll need to challenge the governor and legislators if they use the COVID crisis to make huge, lasting cuts in our schools. More broadly, we should pressure the state to use the crisis to reverse its underinvestment in services for children—particularly when it comes to childcare and mental health. And when it is safe to reopen schools, we must insist that the instructional time our kids lost this spring is made up, and that no one falls behind. We’ll need longer school years and school days, and maybe a real and robust system of distance learning, to accomplish all that.

Most of all, we must demand that our students honor their parents’ distance-learning failures in the best way possible: By studying harder and learning even more in the years to come.

The post I Deserve an ‘A’ for Flunking My Kids’ Distance Learning appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

And, thankfully, it’s going to be even worse than I had hoped.

For the record, I love and revere local government. In most of the world, it’s the most democratic, participatory, and effective level of government, and it deserves to be the most powerful and best-funded.

But in California, local governments are too weak and too small to be of much use. Why? There are simply too many of them. And so, for the past decade—in columns, speeches, and a book I co-authored—I have pined publicly for an “extinction event” that would kill off thousands of California local governments. Now COVID-19 is fulfilling my awful wish, causing declines in local tax revenues so steep that many cities, counties, and school districts may never recover.

Heartless as it may seem, the only way to save local government in California is to eliminate some local governments.

Our ship of state is barnacled with governments. In addition to the state, with its hundreds of agencies and commissions, we have 58 counties, 482 cities, 977 school districts, 72 community college districts, and nearly 5,000 special districts, governing everything from mosquitoes to cemeteries.

Taken together, all these governments resemble nothing so much as San Jose’s Winchester Mystery House, with an incoherent design and an overabundance of rooms that produce feelings of frustration and futility.

Our myriad local governments struggle to come together to solve regional problems like crime, transportation, or economic development. Indeed, they usually get in each other’s way. Citizens are represented by so many different governments that neither they, nor our shrinking local media, can monitor agencies’ behavior. With so little scrutiny, our local governments produce corruption, unsustainable retirement benefits, and other fiscal messes.

Our messy conglomeration of governments doesn’t represent the people’s will. Instead, it saps their trust. And it is this distrust of local government that has led Californians to limit the powers of local officials—especially the power to tax, via Prop 13 and related ballot measures. The result is that our city councils and school boards are among the weakest in the U.S. And developers and public employee unions exploit local governments’ weakness to suck out most of their money, leaving few resources, even in good times, for parks, libraries or arts.

Local government weakness also has centralized California power at the state level. Our cities, counties and school districts spend much of their time begging for cash in Sacramento, where local governments are the biggest lobby.

COVID-19 only deepens this dysfunctional dynamic. Our local governments lack the resources or expertise to decide how to respond to the crisis by themselves; Sacramento makes the big decisions. And with financial support slow in arriving from the federal government, local governments are already cutting services and laying off employees. Local bankruptcies of cities, and state takeovers of school districts, are now on the horizon.

In all this pain lies great possibility. The local apocalypse is so big and that every local government may need a bailout to survive. But there are simply too many governments, and too little money, to save them all. In this moment, we need two enormous changes in the nature of our local governments.

First, we will need to have fewer of them—that’s the extinction for which I pined. Second, we must make remaining local governments more powerful and resilient, so they can give us more in good times, and hold up in future crises.

To do these two things requires confronting a great California curse. Yes, we have the economy, size, and population of a large nation—we’d be the 35th most populous on Earth if we were independent (something Governor Gavin Newsom’s highly publicized brag that California is a “nation-state” acknowledges, in a backward way). But because we’re a state within a larger country, we don’t have our own regional governments—our own states—like real nations do.

We should. Our regions—the North State, the Bay Area, the Central Coast, Sacramento’s Capitol Region, the San Joaquin Valley, the Inland Empire, greater Los Angeles, and greater San Diego—have the size and character of American states. And in our daily lives, we Californians are really citizens of those regions. Our economies are regional, our sports teams have regional fan bases—and our biggest problems are regional. But, unfortunately, instead of having powerful regional governments, we’re split up into tiny shards of local governments instead.

Let’s fix that, by allowing California citizens to establish regional councils—an idea first suggested by California’s constitutional revision commission in 1996. These regional councils could form plans to consolidate our local governments and build real power.

A good start would be folding our thousands of special districts into existing city and county governments. Fiscally weak local governments could be merged into stronger ones. It also would make sense to combine small, contiguous counties, cities, and school districts.

My home county of Los Angeles, with 88 cities, is ripe for this. Do we really need both an El Monte and a South El Monte, a Covina and a West Covina, a Pasadena and a South Pasadena? Artesia, Cerritos, and Hawaiian Gardens already share one school district—why not a City Hall, perhaps with Lakewood and Norwalk as well?

To avoid having newly combined cities become larger versions of our current local weaklings, consolidation must be accompanied by restoring local government power—above all, the power for local officials to tax whatever they like. Local governments would then have control over their fiscal destinies, and could provide better services and more stable employment. In each region, local governments should jointly enact taxes to address regional concerns like transportation, public health, economic development—and disaster preparation.

More powerful local governments would be more democratic and accountable. Watchdogs are more likely to emerge when governments have more power to reach into our wallets. These newly consolidated governments also could more easily eliminate of outdated programs, and produce more responsive, technology-based systems for providing services.

“We continue to provide [government services] without adequately re-examining their fit for the world we live in today,” former Santa Monica city manager Rick Cole recently told the Planning Report. “If we were starting from scratch today, we would design a government that looked more like the iPhone than the rotary phone.”

One blessing of this terrible pandemic is that we can redesign our nation-state. The politics are more favorable, too. The statewide interests that protect centralized state power—our labor unions and corporations—are also reeling from the effects of COVID-19. Any bailouts for them should be conditioned on their support for empowering local government.

The local apocalypse is here—whether we wanted it or not. Let’s make the most of it.

The post Why California’s Weakest Local Governments Should Not Survive COVID-19 appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.