Gavin Newsom combines those roles so routinely that the picking up of trash has become a defining image of California’s chief executive. He’s lifted away litter in the Bay Area. He’s helped Caltrans crews grab garbage along the highway in Fresno. He’s gone to the same Southern California stretch of the 110 freeway twice, first to paint over graffiti and pick up abandoned mattresses, and later to dedicate a new mini-park. And most recently, he was back in L.A. to gather up the cardboard remains of packages stolen from trains.

The governor’s devotion to detritus is so determined that it’s caused head-scratching among political insiders and even his own aides, one of whom recently wondered in my presence why the boss spends so much time with trash.

Back when these public displays of cleanliness began during last year’s recall campaign, the pick-ups seemed to be a practical response to short-term policy and political needs. On policy, the governor was securing more than $1 billion from the legislature to clean up a California that had grown dirty and trashy during the pandemic. As a political matter, community cleanups seemed to bring down to earth a governor who, in dining at the French Laundry and depending on a preponderance of polysyllabic words in his public pronouncements, seemed to float above the rest of us.

But even with the recall vanquished, and re-election all but assured (despite the latest masking controversy), the governor keeps picking up trash. And that raises questions about the deeper emotional, cultural, and even spiritual meaning of a California governor who can’t stop pursuing cleanliness.

Is this some New Age political metaphysics? Has some strange compulsion afflicted the second most powerful elected official in the world’s most powerful country? Or is Gavin Newsom, a man of so many words that we’ve all lost count, saying something profound by constantly getting his hands dirty?

On these queries, your columnist sees the trash can as half full. In fact, I would go so far to say that, at the level of metaphor, Newsom has now surpassed all 39 of his gubernatorial predecessors in locating his job’s essence: picking up other people’s trash.

In too many ways, California’s governor is nothing so much as a garbage man, albeit one with the power to call up the National Guard. Californians have a lot of ideas, many of them bad, and for a century and a half, they’ve been transforming bad ideas into laws and ballot measures. All this legislative litter has turned the state’s governing system into a dump, with piles of unsorted garbage making the treasure—the new policies and practices worth pursuing—nearly impossible to find.

Governors, thus, don’t really govern the state freely. Instead, they spend their terms trying to pick up trash—rejecting budget proposals, vetoing bills, or saying no to proposals to add to the junk pile. And when governors make progress on their own agenda, they must start by tidying up all the legislative and constitutional messes made by previous voters, lawmakers, and courts, which stand in their way.

So, when our janitor-in-chief picks up trash on the side of the 99, he’s acting out in the real world what he must do back at the Capitol.

In this year’s budget, Newsom is trying to find his way around a 43-year-old piece of voter-approved trash known as the Gann spending limit, an outdated formula standing in the way of necessary spending. Tackling the emergency of homelessness involves the literal cleanup of encampments and a thorough scrubbing of the state’s junkyard of old and overlapping homeless programs.

And that’s not to mention the state’s own trash and recycling policies, which constitute a veritable landfill of highly contested fights over composting requirements and a ballot initiative to reduce single-use plastics coming up in November.

In this context, removing trash carries a symbolic power, as Newsom himself has noted during his public cleanup appearances. “It’s about restoring a sense of pride and sense of spirit, a sense of place, a sense…of community,” he said at one cleanup. “Because once people feel connected to something, once they feel ownership to something, they’re more apt to protect it, to preserve it, to cultivate, support and invest in it, and we just need more of that.”

Among Californians who feel more connected by cleaning up is the governor himself.

I recently asked Newsom, who is Catholic, whether there was a spiritual dimension to his garbage devotion. In watching his constant cleanups, I was reminded of Jesus’s criticism of the Pharisees, high religious officials who demand cleanliness and obedience from others, while remaining so distant from real people that they are blind to lived realities. “Thou blind Pharisee, cleanse first that which is within the cup and the platter, that the outside of them may be clean also,” Jesus advises in Matthew 23:26.

Replying by text, Newsom referred to his previous job as San Francisco mayor. Part of his devotion to cleaning up trash, the governor said, “has to do with living in a ‘moment’ where so much seems outside our control… the ‘cause/effect’ of getting out and cleaning up is deeply satisfying—particularly having served as Mayor where I could see results/failure in real time—unfiltered. So much of state government is disconnected from that feedback loop (or is filtered).”

He added: “The physical not just the mental is what I miss most—faith and works!”

Even in California, cleanliness is next to godliness.

The post Dear God, Why Does Gavin Newsom Keep Picking Up California’s Trash? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I moved to my corner house in Avenal in 2003 because it was across from the high school and the park, which had beautiful, humongous green trees. Avenal is a little town on the west side of the Central Valley, close to I-5. There’s about 9,000 residents and another 4,000 are in the state prison. Most people in town are farmworkers.

Eight years ago, a huge storm knocked the big trees in the park down. So then I could see the brown humps of the Kettleman Hills just outside of town. I’ve always loved those hills. Over the years I’ve often driven to the highest mountain over there. You can see Harris Ranch and the Lemoore Naval Air Station lights from the top. At night, you can see the lights from the Coalinga Prison and the I-5. I liked the view of the mountains from my house, but I didn’t get to keep it for long.

Behind that mountain, in a pit, the town of Avenal had a small landfill with an entrance in town, but in 2005 they got a permit to accept trash from other cities. The idea was that our town would make money by accepting trash from other towns. Once they started they really started! You could see trucks coming to unload day and night. We heard they were coming from L.A. and Southern California, but I’ve seen trucks come from the northeast too.

When I stood outside my house at night I started seeing the lights of tractors and Caterpillar machines on the top of the mountain. They’d work all night long. Soon I realized that they were removing the top of the mountain and using it to cover the garbage in the landfill behind it. Today that mountain is completely gone, and when I come out of my house I see a big yellow squared-off mound, like the base of a pyramid, instead. It’s hard to even remember that there used to be a brown mountain there, and before that beautiful green trees.

When I ask people what they like about Avenal, sometimes they say “nothing,” even though they’ve lived here for 20 years! Avenal is one of the few places where houses are cheap and you can get jobs year-round in the fields if you’re willing to drive an hour or two for work. There’s some work here in the prison and with the Wonderful company, which grows and packages pomegranates, pistachios, almonds, and other things. But mostly people live here because you can make just enough money to get your family through life.

So I was surprised at a community meeting about six months ago, when everyone started getting excited about trash. The organization I volunteer with—Valley LEAP—had gathered about 15 people around a table to talk about Avenal with some professors from the UC Davis Center for Regional Change. We were free to talk about whatever community concerns were on our minds, but suddenly everyone was talking about the landfill.

I thought I was the only one who spent time wondering about it. I heard all sorts of comments about what people knew and what they didn’t know. I got upset—not just about the landfill, but with myself because there’s so much we don’t know. The trucks are big and they’re all tightly covered, so we never see what’s really going into the dump, and we don’t really know how it’s affecting us. So we decided to work with the people from UC Davis to create a survey to find out how people felt about the dump.

We spent many Saturdays working on the survey, with five of us training in how to administer it. We’re not supposed to explain to people which answer to give, or lure them to answer a certain way. We need to know what they really think. So far I’ve done about 30 surveys and they’ve surprised me. It takes 30 to 40 minutes to administer the survey but it usually takes longer because people start talking about everything.

Yesterday I was talking to a lady who said she’d lived here for 40 years. Before, she said, you’d never see the strange insects we see now. She said there are a lot of flies, and there’s a bug that is black and round, and another one that is more like a large, black, long ant. There are also a lot more crickets and cockroaches. After I talked with her I thought about it. I had noticed the flies getting bigger. And I’ve noticed the other bugs, but were they here before the landfill? I don’t know. You start connecting one thing with another but you don’t know if it’s right.

I think some of the bugs are new. You can see them on the road over the sewers at night. They surprised me suddenly a few years ago. One night it was fresh and cool and the grass looked so nice and pretty that I decided to walk across the high school yard. But when I stepped on the grass something was moving—lots of cockroaches. They were scary and unexpected.

And then there’s the smell. Sometimes when the wind is blowing from the east side of town from the dump it smells rotten and awful: like dead animals but not recently dead. Some people told me they got headaches from the smell.

I talked to a lady who lives in an apartment on the Southeast side that faces the dump. Her son has autism and asthma. She says she can’t open the windows because she’s afraid the dust and the smell will make her son’s condition worse.

People have told me that they wonder if the dump is affecting their health, but long before the dump there were a lot of health issues here. Asthma is really common: Six of my nine children have asthma. And their children have it too. But the problem is made worse because parents are always working and sometimes they miss the signs of an attack coming on, which means the kids may end up in the ER more often. In addition, many people have Valley fever—it’s so bad that inmates are being transferred out of the state prison here to avoid infection. There aren’t many resources for families dealing with chronic illnesses.

One aspect of living in Avenal is that most residents don’t think a lot about their health. They’re working minimum wage jobs, and in the summer when it’s hot they can only work six hours a day, which means they don’t get paid very much. A lot of people are barely making it from week to week, which means that even simple health issues can turn into big problems. For example, for the last few years there’s been a bedbug epidemic. It’s expensive to treat the mattresses, or throw them out, or fumigate the house. People can’t sleep comfortably at night, and it makes it hard to function at school or work from the lack of sleep. Not to mention the bug bites that result from that, which are extremely noticeable and embarrassing. The realities of life here can magnify problems that might be small somewhere else.

When we have completed 200 surveys, the professors at UC Davis will prepare a report on them and give a presentation. People can attend and then decide what things we’d like to work on or get help with. Then we’ll have a better idea of what we all know, and what we still need to learn. I don’t think we’ll arrange to close the dump—I think it has a contract to accept trash for many years. But I think people need to go to a meeting and express their feelings and thoughts and the city council needs to hear about them.

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