At the very center of state government, you’ll find a hole in the ground demonstrating that the people who make California laws can’t live by them. 

That hole is, for now, the Capitol Annex Project. The project is supposed to replace a 72-year-old office wing of the Capitol building—the “annex” where the governor and legislators kept their offices—with a 21st-century building. The new annex would connect to the 19th-century main Capitol building.

Like much of California, the previous annex needed renovation—plumbing, sprinklers for fires. Décor was drab. Rooms were cramped. Governors complained about the lack of space for ceremonies and big staff meetings (Arnold Schwarzenegger complained the bathrooms were so small he couldn’t pull down his pants in them). Lawmakers wanted additional space for hearing rooms and to allow policy committees and their staffs could be inside the Capitol complex.

A renovation, with expansion, might have met those needs. But in 2018, the state legislature and Gov. Jerry Brown decided to tempt fate, by tearing down the annex and building an expensive new building for themselves. 

Six years later, the old annex is gone, but nothing has risen in its place. And there is as yet no completion date for the new building.

If you ask people in and around the Capitol why they can’t build themselves a new home,  you’ll hear much speculation. It was the pandemic. It was all the extra time it took to tear down the annex with great care, so as not to damage the historic Capitol building. 

But no one really knows because of unusual secrecy surrounding the project. The project website has gone years without updates. State employees involved in the Capitol Annex can’t talk because they were required to sign a confidentiality statement, called Amendment D. The project’s leaders have excluded the Historic State Capitol Commission, which is supposed to oversee the annex and Capitol Park, from planning. Environmentalists, who object to the removal of trees from Capitol Park to accommodate the annex, are also frozen out.

As a result of secrecy and delays, no one really knows what it will cost. The initial price was supposed to be $445 million. By 2019, that number had increased to $755 million. More recent estimates, gleaned from sources outside the project, put it at over $1.2 billion.

No single entity or person is really in charge. A project MOU that I obtained puts the state Department of General Service in charge of some facets of the project, and the legislature’s Joint Rules Committee in charge of others, with the two different entities sharing decision-making on still other facets. The project also has leaned on a Utah consultant to State Capitol projects.

But if you ask people at the Capitol who is really running things, most will tell you that the project’s greatest champion—former Assemblymember Ken Cooley—is the real decision-maker, even though he left office two years ago. (Cooley told me that he believes strongly in the project—“I believe it will serve the public very well, and It will serve public policy very well”—but that he is not running it.)

The publicly available details of the annex project do not inspire confidence. The design is ahistorical, making it incompatible with the classical Capitol building. It also could be dangerous. The all-glass façade “offers no protection from gunfire and allows terrorists to see where the CHP is taking the public or the Legislators,” wrote Dick Cowan, a former chair of the Historic State Capitol Commission, who resigned from that post in 2020 to protest the annex project.

But what’s most galling about the project is the way that state government has sought to exempt itself and the project from the rules that govern building in California. 

In 2022, as opponents were making progress in a court challenge to the annex project for violating historic preservation laws, the legislature slipped a last-minute trailer bill into the budget to exempt the project from having to consult the state’s historic preservation officer. The judge hearing the legal challenges to the annex declared that this legislative maneuver “gutted” the case “like a fish.”

This year, the legislature acted again after an appeals court found that the annex project violated CEQA, the California Environmental Quality Act. 

Interest groups have long abused CEQA to block housing, renewable energy, and other construction in the state. But for decades, the legislature has defended the law and mostly opposed efforts to reform it. When it came to their own annex, however, state lawmakers brazenly bent the rules.

Their tool was, again, a budget trailer bill that specifically exempted the annex from CEQA’s provisions, and from public scrutiny and judicial review. Gov. Newsom signed the bill, which included $700 million in funding for the project, earlier this summer. 

Save Our Capitol!, an unincorporated group opposing the project (and funded by a local preservation who has remained anonymous), declared: “Politicians are not above the law, and they should not be permitted to simply undo environmental protections that inconvenience their pet projects.” 

Despite the exemptions, construction so far has been limited. In recent weeks, there does seem to have been some concrete foundation work. Privately, state officials tell me the annex will eventually be built.

I wonder if retreat might be the wiser option. In tough budget times, many other state infrastructure programs could make better use of the $1 billion-plus dedicated to a new annex. And the Capitol does not require an annex. Lawmakers have been working in nearby office space since 2021. They can stay there, or find other offices among the empty commercial buildings of the Sacramento area. One project supporter suggests reducing the budget back to the original $445 million and pursuing a more modest building at that price.

Whatever the fate of the annex, state officials should at least show that they’ve learned a lesson from their own faltering project—and give everyday Californians relief from the very laws and regulations that state government itself can’t abide by.

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Maybe I’ve been watching too many old movies.

Or maybe the body snatchers are back.

We’ve seen them twice before in my home state of California. Both invasions—of pod aliens, who secretly arrive from outer space to make our bodies their own—may have been interstellar, but they showed up first as attacks on local communities, forcing local governments to handle the response.

Neither our institutions nor our officials were up to the challenges back then. Today, with the body snatchers back, and not just in the Golden State, local governments seem less prepared than ever to fight back and defend themselves against these insidious enemies and the existential threat they pose to human survival.

The first invasion came in 1956, in Santa Mira, California—though you won’t find the city on any map—and no one was ready. Yes, several townspeople noticed that their relatives and friends, who looked and sounded the same, no longer seemed to be quite themselves. Only a local health official, Dr. Miles J. Bennell, investigated. But by the time he figured out what was up, there were no humans left in town to believe him. The pod people had taken over their bodies. He fled.

Then, in 1978, the body snatchers arrived in San Francisco. Only a San Francisco County health inspector, Matt Bennell (no obvious relation to the Santa Mira doctor), recognized the problem. But he and the local health bureaucracy couldn’t keep up with the pod people. In just a few days, the aliens, demonstrating an otherworldly commitment to using the Bay Area’s famously disjointed transit system, replaced virtually all the humans across the region.

Now, at this point I must confess that not everyone believes these body snatchers were real. Many people maintain they were just the villains in two different classic horror films, both named Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

And perhaps the body snatchers were just cinematic.

Or perhaps that’s what the pod people want us to believe.

Regardless, cultural pundits have seized on possible larger meanings of the body snatcher invasions, and how they reflected the political and cultural fears of their respective eras.

Critics suggested the 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers was about how McCarthyism had seized our minds, transforming many Americans into paranoid, red-hating anti-communists. “I’ve been gone for five years. I feel like a stranger in my own country,” says one Santa Mira resident who suspects that their neighbors are no longer the people he once knew.

The 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers, set in gritty San Francisco, was said to be about the alienation created by that decade’s violence, urban chaos, pollution, and the loss of social trust. Adding to the anxiety of the era, the film appeared in theaters just three weeks after the assassinations of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk.

“It’s like there’s some kind of hallucinatory flu going around,” says a San Francisco psychiatrist, who looks a lot like Leonard Nimoy. The health inspector Bennell, the spitting image of Donald Sutherland, says, “I know I feel like I’ve been poisoned today.”

While watching these two films during the scarily hot and fear-filled summer of 2024, I found them timely, relevant—and real.

Today, our neighbors and friends don’t seem quite themselves. It’s as if they have been taken over by loneliness. It’s as if their once-open minds have been seized by conspiracies or political extremism.

Is the unusual heat of this summer the reason why so many people don’t move like they usually do? Or have the pod people taken over their bodies? Are the people we encounter online real humans, or digital replicants, created by AI? And are those really conservative Supreme Court justices who keep taking away our rights over our own lives and bodies, or just pod people in black robes?

The pod people don’t want us to ask these questions. “Don’t be trapped by old concepts, Matthew,” says one pod person to the health inspector in the 1978 film. “You’re evolving into a new life form.”

But the power of body snatchers stories is more than metaphorical. These movies are also straightforward stories of local officials just trying to do their jobs against overwhelming odds. And that’s the really scary thing: our local governments are nowhere near strong enough to protect us from planetary threats—be they climate change, disease, or even pod people from outer space.

The trend lines on local power aren’t good. The second time the body snatchers showed up, in 1978, was also the year that voters passed Proposition 13, taking taxing power from California’s local governments. Today, those governments, after flailing through the pandemic, are even weaker. Local health departments have been gutted, and our municipalities are unable to solve, or even much reduce, persistent homelessness.

In the final scene of the 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the health inspector Bennell walks toward the San Francisco City Hall, that domed symbol of self-government. The audience thinks he might be going to help the few humans who have hidden themselves in the city. But it turns out that the health inspector’s own body has already been snatched, and the Bay Area’s remaining humans must survive on their own.

The post Who Will Defend Us From the Body Snatchers? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I hereby propose a new rule to improve the quality of California’s local democracy. When the bars in your city close, so must your city council.

The idea occurred to me while watching recent Santa Monica City Council meetings, including one gathering so long (nine hours plus) and so full of nonsense and hate (from hundreds of public commenters) that it could make you reconsider your support for free speech and self-government.

The bars had shut at 2 a.m., but the council was still going, groggily, at 3:30 a.m. when it logged its latest late-night failure: canceling plans to organize a representative assembly of city residents to help decide the future of its airport. The vote came after a couple of hours of public testimony from residents who spewed misinformation about such democratic processes (which are common in cities around the world). Their ramblings on old ballot measures, capitalism, and interest group power could only make sense at such a late (or rather, early) hour.

Alas, this sort of decision-making is to be expected in Santa Monica, which takes perverse pride in meeting agendas that run longer than the U.S. Constitution, and in sessions so long they exceed the length of a legal work shift (one recently clocked in at 10-and-a-half hours). Residents and councilmembers waste a considerable amount of that time listening to off-point rants, or arguing about the lengths of the meeting themselves.

Long meetings are also a defect of councils in other California political hothouses—from Huntington Beach, where conservative culture war battles extend meetings into the late night, to Richmond, where the council recently stayed up past 1 a.m. to endorse the Palestinian side in the Gaza war. Perhaps the late hours explain why such cities are so politically out there; researchers at UC Berkeley (located in another city with a history of late council meetings) have found that the sleep-deprived brain is more risk-taking and extremist.

But even less politicized cities fall into the long meetings trap when they start sessions in the evening, controversies intrude, and more and more speakers show up. City councilmembers end up debating and taking votes at hours when they should be home in bed.

The pandemic-prompted switch to remote meetings has contributed to the problem, since more residents make public comments when they can do so from home.

There are ways to avoid going so late. Some councils start meetings early in the afternoon, and begin with a closed session to get work done before bringing in the public at 5 or 6 p.m. Many councils have cut the length of time members of the public can speak—from the old-school five minutes down to three, two or one. A few councils have even applied speaking limits on the councilmembers themselves.

In some places, however, such limits are not enough, and councils have adopted curfews. San Jose’s city council established a midnight curfew back in 2017. Other councils require members to agree to let a meeting go past a certain hour—11 p.m. is common.

As a frequent attendee of council meetings, both in California and around the world, I’d suggest the problem is structural: We pack too many things into these gatherings.

Council meetings serve two essential but very different purposes. First, they are business meetings of a city, which is essentially a corporation. Second, they are democratic events where people make their voices heard and perform politics.

We’d be better off if we separated those two functions. Cities should have short and formal “business meetings” to make decisions they’re legally required to make—on budgets, hiring, and contracting. But, before making such decisions, councils should have separate gatherings, both in-person and online, devoted to getting real input—and not three-minute rants—from citizens.

The 21st century provides new ways to do this. Local governments around the world use participatory processes that allow citizens not just to weigh in on council decisions, but to set budgets and write laws themselves. Madrid and more than 100 other cities have created online environments in which everyday people can become co-creators of policies.

If you’re a night owl who loves the late-night council meetings of Santa Monica, there’s an invention for you, too. More than 50 cities around the world, including Montreal, Amsterdam, and Bogota, have started some form of “night councils,” governing bodies that meet late and tend to focus on problems that affect cities after dark.

Santa Monica would benefit from reforms like these, because the city’s longest meetings tend to produce head-scratching decisions. For example, municipal watchers around California have long puzzled at Santa Monica’s decision to launch an expensive, years-long, and mostly losing fight against voting rights lawsuits that demanded the city switch from at-large to district elections. Almost all other California cities and school boards have settled such lawsuits cheaply and quickly. When I asked a former Santa Monica official why they fought so long in a case one local calls “Bleak House on the Beach,” he said the city had made too many decisions on the litigation late at night.

Former Santa Monica Councilmember Bobby Shriver has complained publicly that when he tried to recruit more diverse candidates to serve on the body, they often turned him down, citing the length of the meetings.

“It seems that every meeting of the Santa Monica City Council there’s a debate or controversy caused by how darned long the meetings are,” wrote Damien Newton, the executive director of the Southern California Streets Initiative, which publishes nonprofit news site Santa Monica Next. “These meetings are bad for Democracy… The current process makes it difficult or even impossible for normal people to give comments at meetings and the late hours are bad for the Councilmembers themselves.”

The fault lies not just with overly talkative politicians but with the public itself. One evening earlier this year, the council cut off public comment on its very first agenda item after five hours—the item was, ironically, a proposal to regulate overnight noise. But the Santa Monicans attending the meeting refused to go along. Instead, more than 40 people stuck around to speak on the motion to end public comment. Councilmembers, stymied, gave up and ended the meeting.

The bad news: the council failed to conduct business on an agenda that included an emergency ordinance, a proposal for downtown housing, and, of course, rules for meeting participation.

The good news: the meeting ended before 11 pm—early enough for councilmembers to stop for a drink on their way home.

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If California wants to curb poverty, its local governments must become richer.

That may be the most important lesson of the recent history of Stockton, as recounted by Stanford Law School professor Michelle Wilde Anderson, a scholar of poverty and local government, in her Zócalo Book Prize-winning book, The Fight to Save the Town.

Anderson expertly portrays the challenges of four troubled U.S. localities, including Stockton. Her work is noteworthy for how it connects the dots between the poverty of people and the poverty of our local governments.

Anderson begins by detailing a woefully underappreciated Californian, and American, problem: deep, decades-long declines in federal and state support for local governments. The cuts have been especially deep at the community level. Between 1979 and 2016, the author notes, federal funding to neighborhood development decreased 80%.

Cities with lots of business and wealthy residents can weather these storms. But the trend has been devastating to municipalities and rural places with high percentages of poor residents, who have less to offer in tax and fee revenues, and desperately need the local programs—in areas like health, recreation, and crime prevention—that get cut. Local governments responded by taking on debt, reducing services and staff, selling public land, and raising taxes and fees—all measures that hurt local residents.

“When local governments are populated mostly by low-income people, there is typically much less money for public services,” Anderson writes. “Weak, broke local governments make it harder for residents to lead decent lives on low incomes or get their families out of poverty. Entire towns become poverty traps.”

One of those poverty traps is Stockton, which Anderson depicts both before and after its 2012 bankruptcy, then the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history.

Stockton, a city of 322,000 at the southern edge of the California Delta, is one of the state’s oldest and most diverse places. Its history is too long and complicated to recount here, but segregation, drug trafficking, police violence, overdependence on the military, and long commutes (to Bay Area jobs), have all been major factors disrupting the lives of its people, impoverishing neighborhoods, and making Stockton a “city of orphans,” Anderson writes.

Stockton’s government has long failed to address such problems. Facing declines in federal and state support, the city subsidized real estate developers instead of investing in existing community members. It chased new residents, visitors, and tax revenues by building retail, new housing, and tourist attractions in its center. And it prioritized local government employees, and their unsustainable retiree health and pension programs, some of which were financed with debt.

The strategy fell apart in the Great Recession, with record home foreclosures and the failure of high-profile developments. The city’s giveaways to its powerful local government employees overwhelmed its budget. The results? Layoffs (including 20% of police officers, 38% of public works employees, 46% of library personnel, and 56% of recreation staff), huge cuts in programs, and the 2012 bankruptcy.

Anderson’s book is deeply interested in how community groups, nonprofits, and a new generation of local officials, led by a Stanford-educated twenty-something city councilmember-turned-mayor Michael Tubbs, responded after the bankruptcy. The story she tells is at once encouraging—it shows the ability of local people and officials to make progress in the most difficult of circumstances—and also sobering, because the progress is so tenuous.

What worked best were intense, multifaceted efforts to empower residents to solve problems in South Stockton neighborhoods after decades of stigma and disinvestment.

Working together, local officials, nonprofits, and community groups listened to residents and pursued their priorities. This work, mostly by people involved in the Reinvent South Stockton Coalition (RSSC), started with cleaning up and reclaiming public spaces—first shoring up a park, then shuttering an open-air drug market near a liquor store. Community members opened a clinic that offered mental health resources. And Tubbs and other allies led the way in taking a series of small and large steps focused on treating and reducing the trauma local residents felt.

Poor cities, the scholar concludes, often cut everything except emergency services and public safety, leaving them without the fundamental ingredients that fight poverty: mental health resources, a sense of personal safety, access to living-wage jobs, and secure housing.  “Our theory of change,” one RSSC leader tells Anderson, “is investing in people. We have to shift the language from people’s problems to their assets.”

South Stockton, and the city as a whole, saw significant gains from this work, though it’s far from clear if the progress can be sustained. Tubbs and his allies lost their re-election bids in 2020. The pandemic undermined local systems and community projects. The founder of one important group, Fathers & Families of San Joaquin, was arrested, undermining trauma recovery work.

Anderson is clear-eyed about the need to change the very structure and organization of local government. One of her suggestions for places like Stockton is “changing jurisdictions,” which could mean moving around municipal lines or combining cities into regional units. She also argues that we need new ways of thinking and talking about troubled cities—not as “hellholes” that are “dying” but as places that, with the right resources and new structures for residents, can make poor residents wealthier.

In California, I’d go even further than Anderson and suggest that empowering cities requires restructuring the state itself. California, since the passage of Prop 13 in 1978, has become heavily centralized, with tax policies and resource allocations for localities mostly decided at the state level. Returning power to local governments would require so many different changes to existing policies and budgeting that the best path forward would be a new constitution.

Our last two governors, Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsom, have both championed local government and fighting poverty, at least rhetorically. Meanwhile, both men centralized more power in their offices, and eschewed constitutional reform. Fighting poverty in this state requires politicians at the state level to do the very opposite—and place more resources and power in the hands of people, their communities, and their local governments.

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To get at the answer, a panel of democracy experts and L.A. political insiders discussed the history and future of L.A.’s embattled city council—and why, in this moment of pain and division, there’s a real opportunity to demand change in the way the city is run.

Moderator Janaya Williams, KCRW’s host of All Things Considered, started off the conversation by addressing the elephant (or, as she put it, the “two slightly racist elephants who will not stand down and resign”) in the room: councilmembers Kevin de León and Gilbert Cedillo. The legislators have ignored calls to step down following a leak of their conversation with the now-former council president Nury Martinez, where they were captured on tape using racist, crude, and homophobic language while conspiring to expand their political power.

“I was appalled at the remarks that I heard, embarrassed for the body that I serve on, and sad for Los Angeles,” said L.A. city councilmember Nithya Raman, who called on Cedillo and de León to step down before the scandal encourages “more pain and more division to form in the city.”

The leaked recording, she said, was all about power. But not, as her colleagues alleged, about consolidating Latino power; this was about consolidating their own, personal grip on L.A. “The more we focus on that, and the more we talk about how we can change processes in the city so that we don’t have a repeat of that kind of divisive conversation again, I think that to me is the way forward.”

Weingart Foundation president and CEO Miguel Santana agreed with Raman. This was a conversation about hoarding power, he said, something that he called “an L.A. tradition.”

“It wasn’t unique—it’s happened generation after generation, and in many ways, the city was founded on those principles,” he said. That’s because Los Angeles matured at a time when redlining—the systemic discriminatory practice of denying housing loan applications and other services based on race or ethnicity—was “the law of the land,” which meant that the majority of the city couldn’t buy property. Systems of governance at the time echoed this—“it was all about maintaining the privilege of some at the expense of others.”

Santana finds himself invigorated by the ways that Angelenos are reckoning with this reality in real-time today.

“It is very powerful to see all of Los Angeles react the way Los Angeles has,” he said. “To see the public testimony—20% of it being done in Spanish—to see folks say this isn’t the Los Angeles that I know, that I love, that I want us to be. And demanding that we do something dramatically different.”

But what should our new vision for Los Angeles be?

Public Access Democracy director Leonora Camner argued that we can’t just elect our way out of this situation. “Power is corrupting, even for people who have the best intentions.”

Instead, she suggests we think about the best ways to make a more democratic system. “There are a lot of exciting opportunities for us to do more experimentation and try out more innovative forms of government that really get to the heart of the problem,” she argued.

For instance, Camner said, we can think about using democratic lotteries that engage a representative cross-section of the community. “They elevate expertise more because people impartially listen to expert opinion when deliberating, without the worry of re-election,” she said.

This is something we already do with juries, and there’s a reason for that: “If you were on criminal trial and your fate was on the line, you’d never want that to be a political process,” she said. You’d want the process to be guided by facts and experts.

Why is it, California 100 executive director Karthick Ramakrishnan asked, that you can see innovation everywhere in California, but “not in the realm of democracy?” We can do so much more, he argued.  He cited innovations from around the world, like Japan’s intergenerational simulations, in which half of the participants represent citizens in, say, the year 2050, and the other half represent citizens in the present moment. The groups have to come together and make decisions that serve both parties.

Whether solutions are old or new, we need to look at them with fresh eyes and determine what kind of political system we want, he argued. “What are the things we want to optimize for and encourage? What are the harms we want to minimize?”

Raman, too, pointed to existing innovations at the state level, the county level, and across America. “The question is,” said the councilmember, “if there is an idea we can consolidate around and how would you make it happen?” Among other issues, Raman said she’s especially interested in creating a “truly independent” redistribution commission and expanding the size of the city council.

Before the night ended, Williams asked all the panelists what they think L.A. would look like under a truly representative government. Would a city council be part of that picture?

“Maybe we’ll continue to have a city council,” said Camner. “But I hope that we make sure there are more opportunities for Angelenos to directly serve in some of these decision-making roles.”

Ramakrishnan called on Angelenos to “ground ourselves in core values—innovation, resilience, inclusion, and equity. These need to go from slogans to being operationalized.”

Santana pointed to the current urgency: “We need to reimagine it now,” he said. “We need to rely on those who have spent their careers thinking about these issues. We should give ourselves some permission and grace to imagine something different.”

And speaking from her role as a councilmember, Raman said she is heartened by how so many elected officials are now saying, “take away the number of my constituents, reduce the control I have over my district.”

This, she said, is “a revolutionary moment.”

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Californians certainly shouldn’t. The pandemic demonstrated what things are essential in California, and what things we can live without. Among our superfluous assets: the designation of Sacramento as our capital city, and the various buildings occupied by our state government there.

In the biggest emergency of our lives, our elected officials managed to respond and govern with the Capitol, the seat of government, closed. Public employees in Sacramento-based agencies kept the government running while working remotely or from home.

Having the capital effectively closed didn’t diminish state ambitions. To the contrary, there was a historic expansion in state government and its goals, with new programs in health and homelessness launched on the fly, and the state budget growing at record speed.

And rather than limiting public access to state government, the absence of a capital brought regular people closer to our government than ever before. Suddenly, Southern Californians like me—who used to have to drive eight hours or get on a plane to attend a hearing or session in Sacramento—could participate online from our kitchens. Californians could join calls where decisions of great consequence, including about opening and closing public institutions, were made. Meanwhile, state officials including the governor, who are traditionally cocooned inside well-guarded Sacramento buildings, were forced to meet people outside in every corner of the state.

This pandemic decentralization served two of California’s greatest causes: equity and environmental protection. Before COVID, you needed resources—either in time to travel to Sacramento or in money to hire a lobbyist—to get yourself heard by the state government. The pandemic made it possible for officials to see and hear everyday Californians, especially in the working class, as never before. The pandemic closures also saw state employees reduce their greenhouse-gas-producing commutes, and limited the number of flights to and from Sacramento.

None of these changes, of course, should have required a pandemic to be implemented. This state is a global technology capital that long ago should have moved beyond the antiquated idea of having to gather its government in one city. But entrenched interests in Sacramento long resisted applying technology to state government in ways that might make it more accessible—until the pandemic forced their hand.

Now that the pandemic is winding down, Californians should rally together to make sure that power is never restored to the capital.

That won’t be easy. The powers-that-be in Sacramento, desperate to protect their money and prerogatives, are already demanding a return to the bizarrely centralized California governance that they call “normal.”

The Sacramento Bee, in an awful editorial, recently demanded that state workers return to the city’s downtown. Their self-serving reason: protecting local property tax, hotel tax, and parking revenues that the city of Sacramento needs to pay off ill-conceived public investments in downtown developments, including an arena for its miserable pro basketball franchise.

The editorial omitted the larger context: Sacramento’s rapid downtown growth is an artificially created bubble, built on the dysfunctional and overly centralized Prop 13 tax system. That system requires the rest of California to send its local revenues to Sacramento and then hire expensive lobbyists to try to return some of those dollars back home.

But if California ended Sacramento’s status as its capital, the biggest winner might be Sacramento itself. The no-longer-capital city would have the rare opportunity for a fresh start, including a more balanced economy. The loss of government jobs would take some pressure off rapidly escalating housing prices there. And the Capitol and state buildings left behind could be repurposed for housing or other offices. Thinking bigger, Sacramento could become home to a huge new Cal Poly or University of California campus that would allow those systems to serve more students—and produce more new economic possibilities for Sacramento than state office workers do.

Giving up on the idea of the capital could benefit the rest of California, too. And this goes beyond the billions of taxpayer dollars that could be saved by not constructing more unnecessary state buildings, like the new California Natural Resources Agency headquarters. While politicians will argue that they can get more done by meeting together in Sacramento, the truth is that elected leaders are far more effective and responsive when they are seeing their constituents more than their colleagues.

Offering Sacramento-based state workers incentives to relocate to poorer neighborhoods around the state would also put their stable incomes and pensions in the service of regional equity. Local governments would find it easier to cooperate productively with the state if more workers and offices were spread among our communities. And a state workforce extending into every corner of California should be more responsive to local concerns.

Of course, total decentralization is not possible. State legislators may well insist on holding some sessions and meetings all together. If they do, the location should rotate among different places, as my friend, the former deputy state treasurer and journalist Mark Paul, has suggested. To raise revenue, the state government could even put the right to host the legislature up for bids from different cities and counties—like with the Super Bowl or the Olympics.

California is too great and large of a place to have a single center or seat of power. The state government should be present, and accessible, wherever you can find one of California’s greatest assets—its nearly 40 million people.

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Unincorporated communities—places that aren’t part of an incorporated city or town, and thus don’t have their own municipal government—live at the whims and mercies of their counties, which may or may not provide necessary services. The pandemic is giving all Californians a taste of unincorporated life, thanks to state officials deciding to let the virus-fighting performance and preferences of our counties and county governments determine whether we can shop, play in a park, or send our kids to school.

As we’re learning, life under the thumb of your county is full of uncertainties about the future, frustrations about our powerlessness, and feelings of abandonment. The good news for most Californians is that COVID-19 will recede someday, and we’ll reclaim the power of self-determination from our counties.

The bad news is that California’s thousands of unincorporated communities will have to keep on living like this.

Unincorporated places vary in context—they can be islands of development surrounded by cities, suburbs, or exurbs (like Marin City or San Lorenzo, in the Bay Area), or small towns in remote areas (like Three Rivers, outside Sequoia National Park, or Mecca, near the Salton Sea)—but typically they are full of people desperate for any affordable place to live in an expensive state. Without municipal government and taxes, such places can lack sidewalks and reliable water and sewage services. County sheriffs handle emergencies; there often are no local police to call, much less defund.

I’ve been thinking about California’s unincorporated places while reading BuzzFeed investigative editor Jessica Garrison’s new book, The Devil’s Harvest, about one of our state’s most prolific and least known contract killers, Jose Martinez. Garrison’s spellbinding account explains that Martinez got away with killing at least 36 people over three decades for two big reasons. One was that he murdered people the authorities didn’t care about—poor, non-white migrants who might be criminals themselves. “Some lives count more than others, and nothing reveals this as starkly as death,” she writes.

The other reason was where he committed his crimes.

Martinez made a habit of killing people in out-of-the-way unincorporated jurisdictions with little law enforcement. It also helped that Martinez himself lived in and around such communities, notably Earlimart, an unincorporated settlement of 8,700 along State Highway 99 at the bottom of Tulare County, in the San Joaquin Valley.

In telling the story of a killer, Garrison gives us a powerful account of how such communities refuse to die. She points to a footnote from the 1971 update of Tulare County’s General Plan, which declared Earlimart and other unincorporated places “nonviable communities” with “little or no authentic future.” To encourage people to leave, the county withheld services, meaning there was no big playground, no civic center, and no police station in this island of people surrounded by vineyards and almond groves.

Yet, despite the county policy of discrimination and neglect, Earlimart survived and grew as a home for farmworkers who toiled nearby. “Down on the valley floor,” Garrison writes, “any notion of California as a progressive egalitarian land of opportunity disintegrates under the relentless, baking sun.”

The Earlimart narrative of attempted, and failed, murder of community is common for California’s unincorporated places, and not just in the San Joaquin Valley, where counties from Madera to San Joaquin have had their own explicit policies of starving similar towns. The inland deserts of Southern California, from the Victor Valley to the eastern Coachella Valley, have more than their share of such communities. And then there are the low-income urban islands, like the one in west Modesto where my cousins long lived in a house next door to a smelly sewage treatment plant that served the city, but not their own unincorporated neighborhood.

Many of these urban islands are small, poor, and non-white suburban developments that cities declined to annex as they added better neighborhoods further out. This “leap-frogging” pattern of development—skipping the poor places while seizing the wealthier ones—is an unacknowledged cousin of racist zoning laws. In more rural parts of California, our poorest unincorporated places often started out as supposedly temporary camps for migrant workers from the South, the Dust Bowl, or Latin America.

(This being California, there is, of course, another context for communities without governments: some of California’s wealthiest places, from Rancho Santa Fe to Pebble Beach, are unincorporated, with millionaire residents who choose to fend for themselves.)

Over the past generation, federal and state government have tried to do better by such places. In 1990, federal housing law designated certain parts of California “colonias,” making funding available to such communities for housing, environmental, and agricultural projects. And in the past decade, state legislation in California designated such places “DUCs”—Disadvantaged Unincorporated Communities—and required local governments to identify, map, and include them in planning and some service delivery.

Recent years also have seen lawsuits and organizing to demand better services in some unincorporated settlements. And in her book, Garrison recounts another hopeful phenomenon: young adults who grew up in Earlimart returning home to teach in the schools and build the community.

Still, it’s not clear if the state government is willing to invest enough to bring such communities up to parity. What is clear, from decades of evidence, is that counties—with limited resources and too little power—can’t be trusted to do right by unincorporated places. That history, in combination with our shared experience of county failures during the pandemic, argues strongly for reorganizing California to eliminate or combine counties, and to create more effective forms of regional government.

With all eyes on public health amid this pandemic, it would be a fitting time to do more for unincorporated communities. Poor sanitation and weak infrastructure, especially around water and sewage systems, have left residents with higher rates of respiratory, gastrointestinal, and other chronic diseases.

Californians could start by paying more attention to such places and the people who live in them. In her book’s concluding chapters about the contract killer Jose Martinez, Garrison notes that there was little coverage of his case in the diminished local media, and that authorities didn’t seem interested in accounting fully for all crime victims.

“Each time I published anything about his story, heartbreaking queries landed in my inbox,” Garrison writes. “The specifics vary, but the gist was always the same: Someone they love has been murdered or gone missing in the San Joaquin Valley. The authorities didn’t seem to care. Could I help them find out what happened to their loved one, find some semblance of justice or peace?”

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