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.

The post California Officials Can’t Build By Their Own Rules appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The Oakland A’s are baseball’s biggest losers. But their new temporary home—West Sacramento—is one of California’s greatest winners.

No California city has had a better 21st century than West Sacramento. The municipality of 54,000 people has grown in population and prosperity with striking speed, even as California has stagnated on both fronts.

The A’s will spend three years, 2025 through 2027, in West Sacramento’s minor league ballpark as the team waits for a new stadium to be built in their future home, Las Vegas. Perhaps their relocation will bring West Sac, as it’s often called, more of the notice it merits, both in California’s city halls and among state policymakers.

The city’s success is attributable to smart local governance, and to three paradoxes best explained in light of California peculiarities.

The first paradox: West Sac was able to grow rich because it was so poor. Across the river, Sacramento became a city in 1849, a year before California won statehood. West Sacramento didn’t incorporate until 1987. For most of the 20th century, it was an afterthought—an industrial town of seedy hotels, vacant lots, warehouses, rice silos, and major highways nearby communities didn’t want.

All that kept land prices low, which made West Sac attractive as the rest of the region became more expensive. The city carefully invested in new infrastructure, streets, and sewers to allow for new neighborhoods. A first wave of development, around the turn of the century, focused on the riverfront. Among the catalysts there was the A’s future digs, previously called Raley Field (now named for Sutter Health), which opened in 2000.

This brings me to the second paradox: West Sac achieved big success because it was small. A quarter century ago, it had just 30,000 residents and a median household income of $32,000.  Residents wanted to see improvements. And the powerful unions, environmental groups, and state agencies that so often delay California projects were too busy elsewhere to mess with a poor city with relatively few people.

So, Raley Field took just 19 months from ground-breaking to opening. Restaurants and other businesses found they could launch quickly. And while housing construction languished elsewhere, West Sacramento built both market and affordable housing at some of the fastest rates in California. That speed was a function of West Sac’s ability to create entire new neighborhoods, like master-planned Southport, as well as infill development in the city center.

The small city also faced little public opposition as it used its cheap land to bring in several large retailers, most notably the Capitol region’s first IKEA, a crowning achievement, in 2006. The retailers produced considerable sales taxes that provided the city with revenues for more projects. After the retailers came corporate headquarters, many of them companies involved in food production.

Such speedy development points to the third paradox: West Sac benefited both because of its distance from, and its proximity to, the city of Sacramento.

The two cities lie just across the river from each other. But West Sac is its own separate municipality and is situated in a different county, Yolo, with a mix of rural places and smaller cities. Sacramento runs on constant political competition, which can distract from the slow and painstaking work of governance. West Sac has had the good fortune of stable political leadership for over a generation.

The embodiment of that stability was Christopher Cabaldon, a legislative aide and higher education administrator who first moved to West Sac after taking the wrong freeway off-ramp. He ended up serving on the city council and then as mayor for more than two decades.

In a small community, he could move fast. “We focus on results as opposed to process,” he told Governing in 2019.  “A lot of other communities are into community meetings and workshops and planning and task forces and consultant reports, and, no, that’s not us.”

In contrast to Sacramento, whose city government is prone to obsess about creating signature attractions (an arena, an aquarium), to draw visitors, West Sac focused on building the housing and amenities to attract more residents.

Its proximity to the Capitol eventually became a draw. As California’s growing state government brought more people to Sacramento, and affordable housing became ever harder to find, people took notice of West Sac, with its new housing, new neighborhoods, and new restaurants. Many West Sac residents lived so close to the Capitol that they could walk across the Tower Bridge and be at work in minutes.

In 2014, West Sac was named the “Most Livable City in America” by the U.S. Conference of Mayors. The honor only made West Sac more ambitious. In 2017, with more families moving in, the city devoted its growing revenues to West Sacramento Home Run, an initiative offering universal preschool and college saving accounts. Its household median income now exceeds $87,000.

Ironically, the very same state government whose proximity helped West Sac grow also produces regulations that make it harder for California cities to grow. Now that West Sac is bigger, its leaders confront more obstacles and opposition. But West Sac remains a great counter-example of what California cities might do if they had more freedom.

The A’s decision to come to town brought public joy. Many Capitol region residents say that they can’t wait to go to the West Sac ballpark and marvel at the famous stars of the Dodgers and Yankees as they hit homers against the weak, and temporary, home team.

Of course, the real marvel won’t be the ballplayers, but the small city they’ll be visiting.

The post The Losing A’s Found a Winning City to Host Them appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

California workers’ rights are bolstered by some of the country’s strongest labor legislation, mandating higher minimum wages in many sectors, increased sick days, and other protections. But around the state, “you see quite a bit of suffering” among low-wage workers, Zócalo California columnist and democracy editor Joe Mathews noted Wednesday night.

Mathews was moderating an event on the Capitol steps in Sacramento for the statewide Zócalo Public Square series supported by The James Irvine Foundation, “What Is a Good Job Now?” Many seemingly well-protected workers, he said, deal with wage theft, unpaid overtime, dangerous working conditions, discrimination, and rising employer retaliation.

What has to happen for laws to work on the ground, and why do they fail? The problems are complex, but the solution is usually communication and collaboration, said a panel of three speakers who focus on fairness in the workplace.

Mathews opened the discussion by asking, “What’s the gap between our legislation—our intentions, the policies we put in place—and the realities on the ground?”

Sara Fee, a founding member of Inland Empire Amazon Workers United and a warehouse worker at the Amazon air hub at the San Bernardino International Airport, said, “The gap is enforcement.” Worker power and organizing can help close that gap, and laws give organizers a place to start—but laws are difficult for workers themselves to enforce. For one thing, it’s not clear where complaints should go; human resources, she noted, works to limit company liability. Fee was lucky enough, she said, to have the help of the nonprofit Warehouse Worker Resource Center when she took action against Amazon.

California Labor Commissioner assistant chief Daniel Yu said that there are not enough investigators to cover every single violation in California, so his office focuses on making “each enforcement action more than the specific action itself.” For example, recovering wages for one group of workers gets them the money they are owed while simultaneously putting the employer—and other employers in the same sector—on notice, and offering worker education and outreach.

Mathews asked California State Senator Maria Elena Durazo if the state government is having conversations about the need to allocate more funds to enforcement.

Illustration by Soobin Kim.

Durazo said that unfortunately, budget conversations are typically one-sided: Lawmakers discuss how much something is going to cost, but “we don’t talk about how it’s going to save us from having to provide food or rental vouchers or all those other things” that the government pays for.

Bringing the discussion back to the ground level, Mathews asked where workers who feel they are being treated unfairly can start—what kind of complaint do you file, where do you go, and how do you get educated?

Yu, who acknowledged his answer might seem self-serving, recommended the California Labor Commissioner’s Office. The first step does involve filling out a very long form, he said, but added that he and his colleagues can also help by phone and redirect workers as needed to other government agencies.

Fee said that if she’d seen the form alone, she would probably have said, “Forget it.” But she had the help of a worker center, which does education and outreach at workplaces—including finding out if violations are taking place—and connects workers and enforcement agencies. Ultimately, the center helped build a bridge between workers and government, and helped her learn about her rights and stand up for them.

“Organizing is always the answer. Worker power is always the answer,” said Fee. “When you have people who have your back in your workplace, you can change things, and I know that you can because we’ve done it.”

Durazo added that it’s not a complicated form that keeps people from standing up for their rights but rather the fear of retaliation, job loss, or worse. “Entire industries rely on violations of workplace rights” to operate, she said. And employees in those industries “know that when they assert their rights they’re going to be fired and/or risk deportation, and/or risk other things.”

Mathews asked what more can be done to prevent these violations—could agencies utilize technology, like surveillance or algorithms that predict problems, rather than waiting for the problems to come to them.

“I won’t reveal all of our trade secrets in this conversation,” said Yu. But “we don’t abide by a strict complaint-based model. We are increasingly trying to be proactive.”

Durazo added that the state budget has included funding—which began during rampant COVID lockdown-era labor violations—for worker centers and on-the-ground organizations to do more outreach to help workers connect and build collective strength.

Fee said that putting these many pieces together is changing lives and making workplaces safer. “It’s a little bit slower than a worker on the ground would like it to be,” she said, and wages still aren’t high enough—but she is seeing effective cooperation among government agencies, workers, and organizations.

Yu offered one example of a “highly effective” partnership that led to a significant enforcement action. A janitorial subcontractor that supplied workers for various Cheesecake Factory locations was paying workers below minimum wage, making them work unpaid overtime, and not giving them enough breaks. Yu’s office typically would have gone after the subcontractor, but that business couldn’t afford the backpay, so the office also found the Cheesecake Factory liable. Such actions have a ripple effect. Subcontractors around the state began letting clients know they were following the law“This was impactful not only for the workers, but for the industry as well,” said Yu, adding that some employers have thanked the Labor Commissioner’s Office, “which is rare.”

Before turning to audience questions, Mathews asked the panelists for actionable advice—what are red flags to look for in a new employer, and what do you do when things start to go south?

Yu said getting paid late or not having an accurate pay stub are big red flags, and advised workers to start documenting patterns of violations or abuses.

Fee said to beware, after your honeymoon phase at any new job, if early promises—about future opportunities or a higher salary—seem false. And as soon as possible, organize.

The question-and-answer session came from the livestream audience, who dove into specifics of the panelists’ experiences.

The first question was for Yu: Is there a sector of the California economy that sees the most workplace complaints?

Yu said there are several industries, and named just a few: restaurants, agriculture, warehouse, garment, janitorial, residential care facilities, and construction.

Next up was Fee. What has been the hardest part of your organizing experience?

The retaliation, she said, including getting put “in unfavorable positions.” Retaliation “affects your mental health when you’re not allowed to express yourself or speak to other people in your workplace.” Ultimately, however, standing up is worth it, she emphasized.

The post All’s Not Yet Fair in California Workplaces appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Ana Matosantos has announced she is departing the Newsom administration at the end of the summer, telling the L.A. Times that she needs to sleep.

Can state government survive without her?

Unless you follow state politics closely, you’ve probably never heard of Matosantos, who doesn’t appear on television or give many on-the-record interviews. But for more than 15 years she has been an indispensable insider of Sacramento—depended upon by politicians, parties, and agencies of all varieties.

What makes her so important? The answer lies in a paradox.

Because our state is such a kaleidoscopically diverse and complicated place, one might assume it requires a large and diverse set of people and institutions to govern it. In reality, the opposite is true. The machinery of government here is so complex, no mortals—and certain no elected official—can understand it, much less govern it.

So, real governing in California requires that one-in-40-million sort of person. She must be a wizard with a mind peculiar and powerful enough to comprehend the incomprehensible algorithms of state finance, to make sense of rules and regulations that make no sense, to conjure possibilities from our impossible system. And the wizard must do this quietly, so that politicians can pretend to run the place.

Each generation in Sacramento produces its own wizard. In the later 20th century, the wizard was a soulful and profane state educational official named John Mockler, the author of Prop 98, the impossibly complicated school funding formula that makes the state budget so maddeningly complex.  Mockler was so vital to California that I proposed, in the L.A. Times, that the state constitution be changed to require him to live forever. (Alas, he died in 2015.)

In the 21st century, the unicorn keeping California from cracking up has been Matosantos.

You may think of the last three governors—Messrs. Schwarzenegger, Brown, and Newsom—as very different men with very different agendas. But when it came to the most complicated governing and budgeting tasks, they were flashy figureheads, often doing whatever Matosantos advised them to do.

Matosantos has had different jobs and titles. But, relying on her off-the-charts intellect, a Stanford education, and a freakishly good memory, she developed the rarer-than-rare ability to understand the bizarro world of state budgeting.

Originally from Puerto Rico, she first gained notice on the political stage when she helped Schwarzenegger (who often referred to her “the genius”) negotiate complicated and contentious budget fights in the 2000s. In one such conflict, which has become Capitol legend, Matosantos is said to have drafted both the Democratic proposal and Republican counter-proposal that led to a budget agreement.

In the 2010 elections, Jerry Brown replaced Schwarzenegger, but Matosantos stayed on to direct state finances—and ingeniously found ways to turn the curious koans of the philosopher-governor into real policies. One veteran Capitol wag compared her to the Kyra Sedgwick character in the TV series The Closer, a brilliant LAPD investigator who solved the crimes that no one else could crack. Matosantos was considered so essential to the state’s governance that her 2011 arrest for driving under the influence was treated not like a personal scandal but rather like a near-death experience for state government. What would California do without Ana?

She left state service for a time. But Newsom, after winning office, coaxed her back into state government, making her cabinet secretary, which requires coordinating operations and policy across all departments and agencies.

It’s an impossible job, and Matosantos had missteps in everything from pandemic response to utility regulation. But she also was the administration’s great resource, able to answer seemingly unanswerable questions about state government. She also kept pulling rabbits out of hats—insiders say she was particularly adept at exploiting the details of Trump administration regulations for California’s benefit. She and her administration colleagues managed to make historic investments in new programs while protecting the giant budget surpluses of recent years.

Indeed, some progressives in California privately complained that Matosantos’ ability to manage our messed-up government machinery was too good—her skill at solving difficult problems in the short term allowed state government to postpone systemic reforms.

This may be an election year, but Matosantos’ departure from the administration is the most significant change in California governance.

Possibly, after some well-deserved rest, Matosantos will find a way to keep playing her essential role in governing California, for instance, as a consultant. But if Matosantos is truly departing, this time of transition raises all kinds of fears about what comes next. Without a government wizard, California could fall apart under the stresses of economic downturn.

But, maybe, just maybe, this absence of sorcery might force Californians to redesign our complicated state constitution. Without Matosantos to keep things going, maybe we will have no choice but to remove the formulas and remake how we budget. Maybe we will create a new governing system simple enough that politicians and even everyday Californians can understand it.

But such changes make too much sense to ever happen in this state. California, and Sacramento, will just have to find a new wizard.

The post What Happens When the ‘Indispensable Insider’ of Sacramento Steps Down? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

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.

The post Abolish the California Capital appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Why barstools? If our kids are going to get back to education and socialization anytime soon, their best shot lies in restaurants and bars—the places that adults care most about keeping open these days.

Yes, St. Nick, I realize that turning the bars—at least those with outdoor seating—into havens for those too young to drink legally is not a great idea. But it’s way better than anything California has offered its kids during this pandemic.

The policy of our state’s grown-up Scrooges is transparent: let’s make the kiddos more miserable than we are. That means giving short shrift to data about the low risks and low transmission rates of COVID for kids and missing few opportunities to damage children’s academic, social, and mental health.

To that end, Santa, we naughty adults closed the schools (and, at times, playgrounds), failed to develop the testing and safety regimes needed to reopen them, and imposed distance learning that produces educational regression and screen addiction. We’re advising children not to visit their friends, their coaches, their mentors, and even their beloved grandparents, aunts, and uncles. (Also, on the banned list: you, Santa!)

And parents who dare to defend their kids have been attacked as deniers of science, or racists who don’t understand COVID’s disparate impacts, or heartless haters willing to put teacher health at risk.

The message is unmistakable: adult wish lists are the ones that matter this COVID season. Furthermore, no Elf on the Shelf is watching as the elected representatives of these same adults (who won’t let children, even 17-year-olds, vote), flout the COVID rules of their own making.

This dismissal of child interests isn’t radical or new. It’s long been visible in government budgets that privilege old age, in public indifference to school shootings, and in our go-slow approach to climate change. And it isn’t going away. Barring an organized resistance by children, our only hope for better serving kids is to smuggle their interests into policies that protect adults first.

Which is why my three sons, and kids across the state, need those barstools for Christmas. Since this is a society that prizes small businesses over schools and other public infrastructure, let the kids dine out!

I recognize that may not be possible for the next few weeks, with restaurants and bars required to be closed for service. But with lawsuits and local governments challenging these closures, you can bet that these establishments’ outdoor spaces, at least, will reopen well before schools do.

Under a bars-into-kids-club policy, the food and drinks children order could be paid for by federal school lunch funds—a double subsidy for hungry youth and business owners. While schools have been unable to exploit their ample outdoor space and our warm weather to remain open safely, bars and restaurants have grabbed any sidewalk or parking spot they can—space that could be used for kids to study or for teachers to hold classes. Plus, BYOB—bring your own barstools—would make sanitation a cinch.

Yes, turning restaurants over to kids might make them crowded—but not nearly as cramped as the small dwellings which kids occupy in a housing-starved state. Restaurant wait staff might not be trained educators, but they’d at least represent some adult supervision for the many California children who are left alone at home, or are supervised by older siblings.

Plus, bars and restaurants often have better Wi-Fi than many of the communities where our kids can’t manage to connect to online lessons. It’s a logical extension of the kids you see sitting with school Chromebooks outside McDonald’s, Starbucks, and other fast-food chains that offer free, dependable Wi-Fi.

Now, Santa, adults love to argue that all of the COVID chaos will be over soon, and that kids’ lives will soon be back to normal. But that talking point is a monstrous lie, and you should dump an enormous lump of coal on anyone who uses it.

For one thing, companies have only just started to explore testing vaccines on children, so kids will be among the last to be vaccinated. For another, while the pandemic may end, the damage to children will remain, and adults have shown little interest in repairing it.

Santa, perhaps you could bring California real plans to make up missed instructional time, to give extra support to the majority of kids performing below grade level, to address declining social skills and soaring anxiety (including an escalating suicide rate), and to find all the student dropouts.

Because our state and schools don’t have such plans. Instead, they are using the pandemic to justify doing less for kids.

The most blatant example is the just-released Master Plan for Early Learning and Care, prepared by consultants at the state’s direction. It’s supposed to make real Gov. Gavin Newsom’s signature promise of a “cradle to career” system for child development, but it’s actually a betrayal of 25 years of promises for universal child care and preschool—and an example of why kids simply can’t be too cynical about adults.

The master plan offers no real plan. Instead, it proposes onerous new requirements and confounding consolidations of existing programs, a titanic shifting of deck chairs that could damage those pre-schools and day-cares that close for good during the pandemic. The plan even reverses previous commitments to provide universal pre-school (only some 3-year-olds would get it, and 4-year-olds would get it only after an endless phase-in). Worst of all, this master plan proposes no public funding source for expanding early childhood services, other than imposing complicated new fees on overburdened families.

If California cared about its kids, we’d be making child care universal, seriously enforcing mask mandates, and vaccinating teachers and child care providers first. And we’d have plans to compensate for this useless year: free before- and after-school tutoring for kids, and a new schedule to keep public schools open for the next four summers, from 2021 to 2024, until students have recovered all of 2020’s lost instructional time.

But in California, a place of progressive talk and regressive action, such ideas will be dismissed as too costly and unrealistic.

In that case, Santa, I have one request. Could your elves design a new version of our state seal? It would be just like the old one, except that it replaces “Eureka” with our real motto: “Screw the Kids.”

The post Give California’s Kids Barstools for Christmas 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.

Courtesy of Mark Paul.

The garden has staged memorable spring performances before, though always to small audiences. We live four miles south of the State Capitol, well off the beaten path, on an eyebrow street just six houses long, connecting nothing to nowhere. Our hilly neighborhood of ranch houses was built without sidewalks in the early 1950s, when California planners were certain that walking was obsolete.

Weeks ago, back in normal times, only a few familiar souls would wander by. The dog walkers from the next block over. The slight blond teen walking bent, like a peasant woman carrying a bundle of firewood, under a backpack full of textbooks. The mother going to and from the nearby elementary school to retrieve her kids.

I haven’t seen the mother or the teenager since a substitute teacher at the elementary school died of COVID-19 and the schools shut down. But 13 days into the lockdown, as I sit in the garden to read on a sunny afternoon, what was once a trickle of walkers and bicyclists has broadened into a steady stream of people with nowhere else to go.

Many of the faces are new, and they arrive in family groups. The children are frisky and boisterous; the parents who trail them look like they’ve missed their naps. Some couples push baby strollers. Other couples push themselves, striding by fiercely to get the exercise they no longer get at the gym. In a role reversal, there are middle-aged children walking their elderly parents. The daughters tend to walk six feet to the side of the parent, letting them set the pace. The sons tend to lead, getting far out front, then pausing to let the parent shuffle within the prescribed distance before taking off again.

There are lone walkers, too, talking loudly to their white headphones. One woman gestures with her hands, as if to make the decisive point in what may be a conference call in motion. In a few instances the person ambling up the street is someone we haven’t seen since a school committee meeting or a dinner party sometime in Bill Clinton’s first term.

Courtesy of Mark Paul.

Often people stop to admire the garden. We talk across the wide bed of Jupiter’s Beard, and I answer the horticultural questions if my wife is busy. The one with the tangerine flowers is mallow, I say, and behind it is the lupine, another native.

The irony here is that, for me, the social distancing that now fills our street is a social flowering. Coronavirus isn’t my first epidemic. In 1954, I was one of the 38,476 Americans paralyzed by polio. Sixty-six years later, in a wheelchair and no longer driving, I don’t get around much anymore. That’s especially true during flu season, when I try to stay away from the contagion. My “weak breathing muscles,” as my brother-in-law, the anesthesiologist, puts it, make me a good candidate to become a statistic again. Before the coronavirus arrived, I was fully trained for the loneliness Olympics, and in these recent early heats I haven’t yet had to break a sweat.

Until three months ago, I thought my 1954 epidemic experience had prepared me for the fear too.

Courtesy of Mark Paul.

I have only a few memories of those early days: Waking feverishly on the night the poliovirus took hold and then collapsing on the pink tile floor after my father carried me to the bathroom. Lying the next day on a hard table, under bright lights, in a mint-green operating room, to get the spinal tap that would confirm my illness. Being taken to an isolation room where everyone around me was shrouded in gowns and masks; even my parents were allowed no closer than the doorway. I don’t remember being scared. But I don’t doubt that it was fear that etched those memories into my consciousness.

The boy soon put the fear behind him. Today, the man he became isn’t as successful. The fear comes and goes in waves throughout the day. It follows me to bed in the evening, and it greets me in the morning when I open my eyes.

I am not alone in this.

“Did you sleep well?” I ask my wife.

“Yes,” she says, “but I had a dream about the grim reaper coming to the door to sell Girl Scout cookies.”

I do not fear for us. We have been physically distanced from the rest of the world for a month now. The virus is unlikely to breach our garden moat, not even in the guise of a Thin Mint, but I cannot hold out the images and news of the world around us.

I try to keep things in perspective.

You know from your reading, I tell myself soothingly, that folly and cupidity have marked every epidemic. Mom and dad went through the polio epidemics without losing their poise.

You’re right, I reply to myself. But would they have felt the same if people in their time were holding “polio parties”? And my parents probably took some comfort in having a president who was competent enough to organize and execute an invasion to destroy Nazi Germany.

Close the computer, I tell myself. Go to the garden. You’ll find calm and escape there.

So I pick up a book, roll through the front door and down the ramp. It’s warm and the air is thick with the mingled scents of the blossoms. I hear the footsteps of a jogger coming up the street. I look up and see her head emerge above the borage in the planter. She is wearing a mask. It’s the first I’ve seen.

I look over at the Greek poppies. I had it wrong. They aren’t fluttering, they’re trembling. And inside the incandescent red bowls blazing in the sun, there is a shadow.

The post A Letter From Sacramento, Where Fear Grows as Flowers Bloom appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

As the ACE Train pulls into the Santa Clara station, the conductor pops out—and begins apologizing for his train.

“I’m sorry, but this is not the Amtrak!” he bellows, loud enough to be heard by all boarding passengers on the long platform

“And this is not Caltrain! If you want the Caltrain to San Francisco, do not board this train!” he yells.

This warning is useful: The ACE Train uses some of the same tracks but doesn’t go the same places as Amtrak and Caltrain. It’s also fitting: The ACE Train is important to California because of what it is not.

It’s not a service that operates around the clock, like L.A.’s Metro. It’s not charming and tourist-friendly, like San Diego’s trolley, and it doesn’t connect our fanciest precincts and companies like BART. It’s not expensive to construct, like the high-speed rail project. And it’s not losing riders, like so much transit these days.

Here’s what the ACE Train is: a real, live, and unappreciated story of successful transportation in California. And while its story is modest and narrow for now, it is planning expansion in ways that—if Californians can move past the brain-dead populist politics of the gas tax—should point the way to a future in which Californians can move around more easily.

The ACE—for Altamont Corridor Express—is modest. Its service consists of just four round trips each weekday—limits that reflect the fact that it shares tracks with Union Pacific. ACE sends four trains from Stockton to San Jose, via the East Bay in the morning, and sends four trains back from San Jose to Stockton at the end of the day.

The ACE Train works because it is pure commuter rail, addressing the mismatch between where the jobs are in the Bay Area and where people can afford to buy homes. Every morning ACE takes residents of places like Livermore, Lathrop, Tracy, and Manteca to their jobs in the East Bay and Santa Clara County, and returns them home in time for prime time television. In the process, it keeps them off the madness-inducing parking lot that is the 580 freeway.

ACE started 20 years ago with just two daily round trips, backed by a joint powers authority and funded by a sales tax increase in San Joaquin County, whose residents suffer from some of America’s longest commutes.

The last six years have seen the ACE Train double its ridership to more than 5,000 people per day and more than 1.3 million people annually. At a time when transit use has been flat in major metros, ACE is one of the fastest growing train lines in the country.

ACE’s success suggests that California needs a conversation about inter-regional transit that is more thoughtful than our current one, which focuses almost exclusively on the costs of the high-speed rail project. What we should be talking about is whether high-speed rail will offer smart and seamless connections to other modes of transportation, making it easier for Californians to get where we need to go. The example of ACE suggests that by smartly expanding our lesser-known commuter rail lines—like the Metrolink in Southern California, the Coaster in San Diego, the SMART Train in the North Bay, and the aforementioned Caltrain on the Peninsula—we could build an integrated web of transit that would make our daily lives easier.

One of Joe Mathews’s sons savors the view, and his dining experience, aboard the ACE train. Courtesy of Joe Mathews.

The ACE train is an example because it has improved thoughtfully and incrementally, keeping the needs of its riders in mind. Right now, ACE is expanding service on its existing route by buying cleaner-burning locomotives that allow it to expand from trains that are currently seven cars to 10-car ones. It could add Saturday service in 2019.

In the next few years, the service is scheduled to expand its geographic reach. Under the mantle of creating “Valley Rail,” ACE will push in two different directions at once. In the 2020s, one new branch of the service will head up to the state capital, with new stations in Lodi, Elk Grove, Sacramento, and Natomas, ending with a shuttle to Sacramento International Airport. The other branch will extend south to the cities of Modesto and Ceres before eventually connecting to Merced. In that way, ACE, in combination with expanded service on Amtrak’s San Joaquin line, would form a triangle between three regions—the Bay Area, the Capital Region, and the San Joaquin Valley.

This will also put ACE at two of the most important new transportation hubs of 21st-century California.

The first is San Jose’s Diridon Station, which already links together Caltrain, Amtrak, and Santa Clara’s VTA light-rail system. High-speed rail’s first phase would end there, and the station is also next door to the site where Google wants to build a massive new “village.”

The second hub is downtown Merced, which would be both an ACE terminus and a stop on high-speed rail. That old downtown is already transforming, as the University of California’s newest campus, which was built in the fields outside Merced, expands into its downtown.

Unfortunately, this second extension—to Merced and Modesto—is endangered because it is funded by the controversial gas tax increase that Proposition 6, on this November’s ballot, would repeal.

The gas tax is a statewide political battle, but the geographic center of the fight is the ACE corridor. Two lawmakers from there—State Senator Anthony Canella, a Republican from Ceres, and Assemblyman Adam Gray, a Democrat from Merced—provided their votes in favor of the gas tax in exchange for $400 million for the ACE expansion to serve their communities.

If Prop 6, which is popular among Republicans, passes, the ACE expansion will be threatened. Democratic congressional candidate Josh Harder has cynically come out in favor of Prop 6, even though it would hurt his hometown of Modesto, to create political problems for the area’s incumbent Republican congressman, Jeff Denham, who is heavily funded by transportation lobbies. Denham was previously such a champion of ACE that he held a town hall on the moving train. Now Denham is trying to play the issue both ways: He has quietly endorsed Prop 6 to appease his tax-hating GOP base, while also refusing to give the measure money or vocal public support.

Fortunately, riding the ACE is less complicated than voting on it. One recent afternoon, I boarded the train at its origin, Diridon in San Jose, and then marveled at the big crowds that embarked at the next two stations. The first, Santa Clara, has a shuttle bus to San Jose’s airport, while the second, Great America, is next to the 49ers’ new stadium. The platform there was mobbed with employees of Cisco and other tech firms that run company buses between their offices and ACE.

By the time the train had passed a beautiful stretch along the southeast edge of the bay and stopped in Fremont, there was no longer a seat to be had. A group of Cisco engineers held a business meeting around one table on the second floor of the rail car. At the Pleasanton stop, new riders, who use a shuttle bus connecting with the BART system there, squeezed on.

The train slowly emptied out over the next four stops—at Livermore, Vasco Road, Tracy, and Lathrop/Manteca—as people poured into jammed parking lots to retrieve their vehicles. Some had brought bicycles and rode off on them. ACE riders told me that the traffic jams getting into these station lots is the most difficult part of their whole trip. The crowding might get worse: New construction of housing and retail was visible near most stops. The other complaints I heard were about the strength of ACE’s Wi-Fi, and the cost of the train (monthly passes can run more than $300, and round-trip tickets can exceed $20). But the trip is still cheaper and easier than driving.

My train was mostly empty on the last leg to the lovely Cabral Station, on the edge of Stockton’s downtown. From there, I would walk to a dinner interview at Angelina’s Spaghetti House, a great and unfussy old Italian restaurant. And I didn’t have to hurry—the ACE had arrived five minutes early.

Let’s hope California’s rail future has similar timing.

The post Take the ACE Train appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Further north, welcome as well to Modesto, Sacramento, Placerville, and Yuba City. And, to the south, you’re invited, too, Santa Cruz, Monterey, San Benito, and Salinas. And while you’re almost in another state, don’t worry, Tahoe City, because the Bay waters are warm.

This expanded notion of the Bay Area’s reach isn’t a joke. It reflects the biggest thinking about California’s future. If you’re in a smaller Northern California region struggling to compete with the advanced grandeur of the Bay Area, why not join forces with the Bay Area instead?

The Bay Area would benefit, too. It is one of four connected Northern California regions—along with the greater Sacramento area heading up into the mountains, the northern San Joaquin Valley, and the north Central Coast triumvirate of Monterey, Santa Cruz, and San Benito counties—that face severe challenges in housing, land use, jobs, transportation, education, and the environment. Since such problems cross regional boundaries, shouldn’t the regions address them together as one giant region?

The Northern California Megaregion—a concept developed by a think tank, the Bay Area Council Economic Institute—includes 12 million people, 21 counties, and 164 incorporated cities. It extends from the Wine Country to the Lettuce Lands of the Salinas Valley, and from the Pacific to the Nevada border.

These places, while different, are already linked, by infrastructure and flows of capital and commodities that date back to the Gold Rush. Today, the Megaregion has grown more integrated as people search a wider geography for jobs and schools, while businesses expand by serving more of Northern California.

The trouble is that this growth is imbalanced. The Megaregion is home to the mega-rich San Francisco and Marin and three of California’s poorest cities: Stockton, Vallejo, and Salinas.

The 21-county, 12 million person Northern California Megaregion, a concept developed by the Bay Area Council Economic Institute. Courtesy of the Bay Area Council Economic Institute.

The imbalance of high-paying jobs created in the Bay Area, coupled with scant and expensive housing, results in a sky-high cost of living that blunts the benefits of high salaries. It also has produced an out-migration of younger people and companies. Some of these Bay Area refugees head to East Bay exurbs, the Sacramento area, and even to the Northern San Joaquin Valley, where housing prices are one-third of those in the Bay Area proper and still haven’t recovered to their pre-recession highs. But once there, they often find themselves too far away from their jobs and preferred educational institutions. The result is brutal traffic that slows the movement of goods, produces more greenhouse gases, and creates long, unhealthy commutes for workers.

Figuring out how to rebalance the Megaregion and solve such problems is a high-stakes challenge, and not just for Northern Californians. The entire state relies heavily—perhaps too heavily—on the growth and tax revenues generated by the Bay Area, which accounts for one-third of the California economy.

Nationally, too, the future of megaregions matters. Defined as sets of neighboring metropolitan centers that share infrastructure, environmental concerns, and economic connections, Megaregions are projected to be home to 70 percent of the national population growth between now and 2050. During that period, just 11 American megaregions will be home to 80 percent of the country’s job growth.

For all these reasons, the Bay Area Council Economic Institute’s 2016 report, “The Northern California Megaregion,” deserves more consideration because it offers a vision for how the Golden State might spread out prosperity beyond its richest centers, creating a more distributed version of the California dream.

This is not about letting the Bay Area colonize its neighbors. Rather, it’s a mega-rethinking so that planning and development enable the Megaregion’s pieces—Bay Area tech, Sacramento government, Northern San Joaquin Valley trade and logistics, and the Monterey Bay Area’s farming dominance—to magnify each other.

To pick one example, if new state research-and-development tax credits were to target inland companies, an infusion of technology and investment could allow the Northern San Joaquin to make its logistics industry much less polluting in terms of greenhouse gases as it moves the vegetables of the Salinas Valley to market, perhaps through expanded ports in Stockton, West Sacramento, or Oakland.

The think tank report and its co-author, Jeff Bellisario, a man whose colleagues call him “Mr. Megaregion,” offer dozens of similarly transformative ideas. The Northern California Megaregion could create a “more distributed high tech sector,” with more companies, and more jobs inland, by better connecting universities, laboratories, and research institutions with local entrepreneurs.

Imagine, if the center of gravity in Northern California shifted southeast, landing in the fast-growing Tri-Valley, which includes the cities of Livermore, Pleasanton, Dublin, and San Ramon. The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, better linked with entrepreneurs and investment, could be a jobs hub that turns into something of a megaregional capital.

Such planning should be performed by new economic development entities that extend across the entire Megaregion; companies that now leave the Bay Area for Austin in search of cost savings might be redirected to Sacramento or Santa Cruz. Such an effort would be strengthened if Bay Area entities jointly lobbied Sacramento to improve education outside the Bay Area. Only half of the people in the Monterey and Northern San Joaquin areas have had some type of post-high school education, as opposed to 70 percent in the Bay Area proper.

The report shows such investments could spin off literally hundreds of new ideas. My favorite: The Megaregion could have its own…well, I’ll call it a Nerd Army of overeducated consultants, or, in the report’s words, “a megaregional corps of consulting post-docs and advanced graduate students” that could be dispatched to solve regional problems and prepare local talent for higher-skill jobs.

Of course, making such a shift would require a well-integrated set of transportation connections from one end of the Megaregion to the other. The goal would be to get trucks and commuters off the hellish 80, 580, and 101 corridors, making it easier for the state to hit its targets for reducing greenhouse gases.

Suggested changes include more service on Amtrak’s Capitol Corridor between San Jose and Placer County, an extension of rail service to Salinas, and support of planned expansions of the ACE (Altamont Corridor Express) train down to Modesto and Merced and up to Sacramento. (Political note: The gas tax increase, on the November ballot for repeal, produces $900 million for these ACE expansions.) And all these changes, in turn, would make the actual completion of high-speed rail more urgent, since the first segment, extended from Bakersfield to San Jose, would connect with this expanded Megaregional transit system.

It is easy to mock such mega-visions. For years, real estate interests have broadcast silly promotions, like touting a major housing development in San Joaquin County as being in the “Far East Bay.” (Local joke: Is that nearer Singapore or Hong Kong?)

But if the Megaregion could harness its joint economic and lobbying power, much of this seems possible. It could even inspire imitators. Could Los Angeles, San Diego, and Las Vegas further integrate into their own Megaregional triangle? And might they throw Tijuana and Mexicali into their planning mix as well?

If it built a record of success, the Northern California Megaregion could expand, connecting to planning efforts in the troubled Northstate, and even extending down the San Joaquin Valley to California’s fifth-largest city.

Welcome to the Bay Area, Fresno.

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