SOLANO COUNTY PLAN COULD HAVE CHANGED HOW CALIFORNIA DEVELOPS

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2024 OR THEREAFTER

 

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“SOLANO COUNTY PLAN COULD HAVE CHANGED HOW CALIFORNIA DEVELOPS”

 

A measure allowing voters in Solano County this fall to approve – or not – a vast new development about 45 miles northeast of San Francisco just might have been the most influential local ballot proposition California has seen in decades. If it had gone forward.

 

This measure would have allowed a brand-new full-scale city to be built by a corps of billionaires as a partial solution to the housing shortage that has wracked the state’s lifestyle and politics for years, threatening both the nature of many neighborhoods and the independence of city governments.

 

But the billionaires pulled their proposition from the ballot at midsummer because they thought it might lose.

 

Instead of piecemeal infill developments and replacement of mini-malls and other relatively small buildings with huge high-rises containing hundreds of apartments and a few stores, this plan could have seen an entire new city plopped down on open space and farmland.

 

Land for this already belonged to an outfit called “California Forever,” which quietly spent years buying up pieces of property south and west of Suisun City, Fairfield and Rio Vista, eventually aggregating 50,000 acres. The billionaires, who did this gradually in order not to drive the price of land to forbidding levels, include LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, venture capitalist Mark Andreessen, Lauren Powell Jobs, widow of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, and former Goldman Sachs trader Jan Sramek, with Sramek now the project CEO.

 

Their purchases at one point had federal officials suspecting foreign agents might be angling for access to intelligence about the nearby Travis Air Force Base, a key facility for military flights to the Far East.

 

But this was no spy adventure. Rather, it’s a land use gamble, with the investors banking on the 259,000 registered voters of a medium-sized county about midway between San Francisco and Sacramento to okay a gigantic new kind of development. It won't go forward this year; but maybe next time.

 

The proposed new city was to be completely walkable and bikeable and might eventually house as many as 400,000 persons. So large a development by itself could put a sizeable dent in the state’s housing shortage, promoters say. They said they had arranged with a dozen potential employers to provide at least 15,000 jobs for residents in fields from retail sales to robotics.

 

Instead of parks and schools going in gradually while new residents filter into a raw development, all 17,500 acres in this one were to be ready almost simultaneously – stores, homes, apartments, parks, schools and offices all opening about the same time.

 

The billionaires also promised a $500 million fund to help new residents make down payments on homes. They planned a new sports stadium (are you listening, former Oakland A’s, now that Las Vegas shows signs of stadium hesitation?). Public transit would exist from the get-go.

 

It all would be a huge contrast with the way other cities – even master-planned ones like Irvine in Orange County – arose, with their sometimes haphazard placement of buildings, homes, parks, schools and other services.

 

The notion of using currently open land contrasts sharply with the trend of the last 10 years, stressing ever-greater urban density and the remaking of cities under threats of state legal action or funding cutoffs for services like police and sewers.

 

If the Solano County plan eventually happens, some of the vast desert spaces north and east of Los Angeles might also eventually find themselves hosting large new developments.

 

That’s the way much of California was built, long before politicians like Democratic state Sen. Scott Wiener of San Francisco successfully campaigned to make urban sprawl political anathema.

 

But voters in Solano County apparently were set to say no to all this. Now no one is quite sure what happens next in a high-stakes story that could eventually affect not only Solano County but the entire state, whose development priorities could stand some major changes.

-30-

 

    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

A SUPREME COURT-ENABLED ATTACK ON CALIFORNIA’S HOMELESS

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2024, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“A SUPREME COURT-ENABLED ATTACK ON CALIFORNIA’S HOMELESS”

 

It’s been largely obscured by the mainstream media’s justifiable and almost continuous focus on the ongoing presidential election. But the U.S. Supreme Court’s  summertime decision allowing cities and counties to take down and remove encampments erected by homeless persons has expanded into a growing campaign to virtually ban them from public spaces.

 

If the misery index of the homeless, 186,000 strong in California’s last semi-official count, was already nearing intolerable levels, new tactics authorized by local governments around the state seem about to turn the homeless into the hopeless.

 

This applies even in some cities once well known for their steadfast kindness toward and tolerance of the unhoused, including Berkeley and Santa Monica.

 

Just last month, on the same Tuesday evening Donald Trump and Kamala Harris debated in distant Philadelphia, Santa Monica’s city council voted 4-3 to eliminate a section of its anti-camping ordinance that has allowed homeless individuals to use pillows, blankets and bedrolls while sleeping outdoors. This includes sleeping bags, which church and charity volunteers have often distributed free at seasonal homeless shelters.

 

So the ultra-poor homeless populace – once able to get regular meals served on the lawn of the Santa Monica City Hall – now may be compelled to rest their heads on curbs while sleeping uncovered except by cardboard boxes in driving, near freezing January rains. Unless they are simply forced to keep moving along.

 

Local police say the revised law won’t change how they enforce the anti-camping measure, claiming they mostly use it to regulate encampments in public spaces.

 

But no one will likely know the full impact of the change until winter, when rains in recent years have flooded many of the homeless out of what little shelter their tents and tarps could provide.

 

Remember, this is a populace composed in large measure of the mentally ill, drug and alcohol addicts, persons suffering from PTSD and women driven from their homes by domestic violence, few of whom would be involved if they had enough money to avoid the situation.

 

Santa Monica is far from alone. In just over three months since the Supreme Court ruling, at least 17 other California locales -- and counting -- have taken similar actions. The new laws allow police to arrest homeless individuals apparently violating anti-camping laws, which vary only slightly from place to place.

 

They raise major questions: If the unhoused can’t camp on sidewalks or in parks, where are these virtually penniless folks to go? How long can they survive?

 

“Our residents are demanding a solution,” said the mayor of Vista, in northern San Diego County. His city has reactivated a 1968 ordinance banning encampments in the city.

 

In Berkeley, some local merchants don’t care where the homeless go, so long as it’s away from them.

 

A group of businesses filed suit this fall against the city government over homeless encampments near them. They claim financial harm from encampments due to unsanitary conditions, safety issues and “increased criminal activity,” as some encampment denizens threaten or intimidate potential customers.

 

Berkeley officials did not comment on the litigation, but its city council adopted a new policy allowing city officials to take down tent cities even when all indoor shelter beds are occupied if an encampment is a fire or health hazard.

 

No one knows where the tent residents might go if this should be enforced. Businesses and courts offer no solution.

 

Neither does anyone else. The city of Los Angeles this fall issued a report saying it would take ten years and $20 billion to solve its homeless problem. That would involve building 36,000 permanent housing units for homeless persons with chronic health conditions and 25,000 more apartments for very low-income residents.

 

The plan, not yet adopted by city council vote, assumes the city would continue operating shelters with 17,000 beds for several more years while all that is built. No one knows where funding might come from, especially now, with a major homeless housing operator having recently gone broke without accounting for millions of public dollars it received.

 

It’s an almost intractable problem, with few proven villains in sight, but plenty of very visible victims about to see their situation become much more difficult.

       

     -30-       
Elias is author of the current book “The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government's Campaign to Squelch It,” now available in an updated third edition. His email address is tdelias@aol.com

STATE BALLOT PROVIDES PLENTY OF INCENTIVE TO VOTE

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, OCTOBER 18, 2024 OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“STATE BALLOT PROVIDES PLENTY OF INCENTIVE TO VOTE”

 

There are occasional elections where voters are not asked to decide very much – as in last March’s primary where the presidential votes were not close and it was hard to find other significant issues.

 

Things are very different this fall.

 

Not only does the California ballot feature a unique presidential choice with a former prosecutor facing off against a convicted felon who's also a former President, but control of the House of Representatives may hinge on several congressional races here and the list of ballot propositions contains some that could create big changes for many people.

 

Voting begins soon, as mail-in ballots will start hitting mailboxes around California within the next two weeks.

 

Plenty has been written here and elsewhere about the congressional choices, where some races involve Republicans who have won repeatedly in districts where Democrats hold registration advantages. This means efforts by both parties to get their voters to actually vote could decide who will control policymaking in Congress for at least the next two years.

 

Polls indicate California’s Senate race between Democrat Adam Schiff and Republican Steve Garvey is no real contest, with Schiff holding leads that average about 20 percent in virtually every poll.

 

But the statewide questions posed by 10 propositions provide fodder aplenty for voters to consider while marking their ballots.

 

For some, the most controversial of these is Proposition 5, placed on the ballot by state legislators who want to make it easier for cities and counties to raise money for affordable housing projects and infrastructure like sewers and bridges.

 

Since 1978, it has taken a two-thirds majority vote of local voters to pass bonds for such projects, other than schools, which for more than 10 years have needed only a 55 percent majority to raise money for buildings and other causes.

 

Prop. 5 would lower the passage threshold to that same 55 percent for many non-school projects, marking a fundamental change in 1978’s tax-limiting Proposition 13. This one is strongly opposed by the tax-fighting Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn.

 

There’s also Proposition 6, another issue placed on the ballot by legislators. It would end forced labor by convicts in prisons and jails. If it passes, prisons could no longer compel inmates – no matter what crimes they’ve committed – to work. Prisoners could not be penalized for refusing assignments.

 

Of course, inmates could still get credit toward earlier-than-normal release for things like serving on fire-fighting crews, but they would have to be paid much more than the current pennies per hour.

 

That would mark a major change in prison life, giving convicts more choices and the chance at having even more empty time to while away than now.

 

Rent control is also back on the ballot, after voters twice earlier voted down statewide controls. Under Proposition 33, local governments would not need approval from their own voters to enact controls on residential property, not even on relatively new units built since 1995 that are now exempt from most rent control. The concept of vacancy decontrol of rents, allowing them to rise to market rates when tenants move out, would also disappear; local officials could keep controls in effect even when units are vacated.

 

Meanwhile, Proposition 34 goes after the tax-exempt status of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, aiming to strip its non-profit status. It would also allow Medi-Cal to negotiate many drug prescription prices for its clients, just as the federal Medicare system recently did with several drugs used nationwide, including insulin.

 

And Proposition 32 would raise minimum wages statewide to $18 per hour starting Jan. 1, less than two months after Election Day.

 

There’s also the ballyhooed Proposition 36, which aims to make felony prosecutions easier to conduct against repeat shoplifters and thieves even if their take from any one episode does not exceed the $950 bottom limit on the value of stolen goods needed for felony processing.

 

At the very least, this all presents a ballot that should be fascinating enough to hold voter interest for the few minutes it takes to mark choices that might affect millions of lives for many years to come.

       

    -30-

Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net.

 

Suggested pullout quote: “The ballyhooed Proposition 36, aims to make felony prosecutions easier to conduct against repeat shoplifters and thieves.”

POLITICIZING CENSUS: THWARTED TRUMP AIM REAPPEARS IN PROJECT 2025

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2024, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“POLITICIZING CENSUS: THWARTED TRUMP AIM REAPPEARS IN PROJECT 2025”

 

There is no 2024 election phenomenon from which former President Donald Trump has tried harder to distance himself than Project 2025, an inch-plus thick manifesto from the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation written largely by former officials in Trump’s 2017-21 administration.

 

“I haven’t read it. I don’t want to read it, purposefully. I’m not going to read it,” he said during his Sept. 10 debate with Vice President Kamala Harris.

 

But days later, he said of the Heritage Foundation: “They’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do…when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America.”

 

Every poll shows that when voters hear what’s in Project 2025, the vast majority recoil, reason enough for Trump to deny any link to it.

 

Among other things, the manifesto advocates criminalizing abortion nationwide, increasing some taxes and reducing Social Security and Medicare benefits.

 

But another provision, a direct call to politicize the U.S. Census, will ring bells with many Californians who remember Trump’s effort to do that in 2019, a move that could have cost California many millions of dollars in federal funds.

 

The Constitution says that every 10 years, the Census is to “enumerate” every person in this country, not property owners or voters or citizens or any other category. Just live bodies. The information is then used to divvy up seats in Congress and federal spending in many categories, from grants to police to funding new sewers.

 

Trump was determined during his administration to include a question on citizenship in the Census. Doing that, said opponents, would likely cause many undocumented immigrants who fear deportation to avoid being counted, even if it meant heading out the back door while Census takers knocked on the front one. This threatened to cause a drastic undercount of the undocumented, translating into significantly lower federal support for many programs, from Medi-Cal to assistance for teaching English learners in public schools. It also could have cost California a seat in Congress, because this state hosts more undocumented immigrants than any other, by far, and a severe undercount would show California population as far lower than it is.

 

That would be fine with Project 2025’s authors at the Heritage Foundation. One passage says, “A new (Trump) administration should work to actively engage with conservative groups…to promote response to the decennial Census.”

 

The idea, says Project 2025, would be to ensure that every conservative gets counted. It says nothing about Native Americans, immigrants or low-income communities, groups that reportedly often go undercounted.

 

So Trump’s supporters want to use the next Census to promote their interests, and his. They call themselves conservatives, while seeking to control what young women do with their bodies and the most private of their decisions, the opposite of the small government American conservatism has usually promoted.

 

For California, a positive in all this is that the next Census will not be conducted until 2030, with new congressional district lines effective in 2032. If Trump were elected next month and leaves office as scheduled in January 2029, that would leave plenty of time for a reversal of whatever changes he might attempt in the Census.

 

So this front in Trump’s long campaign to punish Californians for voting against him heavily in 2016, 2020 and maybe in 2024, could at least be delayed and might be avoided altogether despite what the Project 2025 blueprint says.

 

That would not stop him from acting against California on other fronts, like attempting to eliminate the state’s authority to regulate its smog levels and threatening (as recently as this month) to cut emergency services after fires and floods.

 

Should Trump get elected this fall and if his previously attempted plans to change the Census endure until 2030, California could be a big loser, given that the funds at stake cover government nutrition programs, public schools, highways, anti-pollution assistance and much more.

 

That’s just some of what’s at stake in the election that begins very soon.

 

 

    -30-

Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

 

Suggested pullout quote: “This is one front in Trump’s long campaign to punish Californians for voting against him heavily in 2016, 2020 and maybe in 2024.”

LARA, NEWSOM APPEAR BENT ON ENRICHING INSURANCE COMPANIES

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, OCTOBER 11, 2024 OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

      “LARA, NEWSOM APPEAR BENT ON ENRICHING INSURANCE COMPANIES”

 

        From the way they’re acting, it’s clear Gov. Gavin Newsom and state Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara believe they have no choice other than caving in to insurance industry blackmail.

 

        Or maybe it’s extortion. Either way, these two supposedly strong and independent officials have been working steadily this year to enrich insurance companies.

 

        When State Farm announced a 30 percent hike in property insurance rates, neither elected official blinked. The same when Allstate and others announced even larger rate increases.

 

        Newsom, at least, has the grace to gripe about inflation at the same time he’s helping cause it. Lara doesn’t even mention the fact that astronomically higher homeowner and business property insurance premiums create burdens on individual citizens just as much as seemingly unending increases in grocery prices.

 

        Here’s the nature of the blackmail/extortion these men face: Insurance companies are steadily canceling more and more property insurance policies in known wildfire areas because, they say, the risks of writing or continuing that kind of coverage in those places are simply too high.

 

        Never mind that they have always in the past written such policies, making strictly local price increases when risks and replacement costs rose. If they now won’t write insurance, homeowners are forced to turn to the state Fair Plan, California’s insurer of last resort, where rates are much higher than even the companies charge.

 

        Newsom, who pushed unsuccessfully over the summer for a new law to greatly speed up processing rate increases, lost out when his plan went nowhere in the state Assembly and Senate.

 

        But…not to worry, Gavin. No sooner had that proposal died than Lara proposed virtually the same thing, but as a regulation, not a law. The essence is the same. The consequences for homeowners and businesses would be the same.

 

        Neither Newsom nor Lara needed to react to insurance company blackmail (“We’ll stop writing any policies in California if we don’t get our way.) by simply caving in. They could have told the companies something like this: If you don’t sell property insurance here, then you won’t be selling any car insurance or life insurance or coverage on luxury items, either.

 

        That’s called linkage, and California had it for earthquake insurance until the aftermath of the 1994 Northridge Earthquake. Until then, companies that did not sell quake insurance couldn’t sell other coverage in this state.

 

     But then-Insurance Commissioner Chuck Quackenbush set a precedent for caving in to the companies. Rather than fighting back, he lobbied the Legislature to create the California Earthquake Authority, which has had the good fortune to see its reserves pile up over 30 years in which the state saw no urban quakes of magnitude above 6.0 on the Richter Scale.

 

        The latest in Lara’s series of moves aiming to placate and bring more profit to insurance companies is his attempt to bring Newsom’s rate-hike speedup plan to reality via the back door.

 

        Primarily because of public hearings aimed at letting consumer groups shed light on rate increase requests, it usually takes some months to get a premium increase through. When rate hikes have been forced through faster, with only sketchy hearings, the companies have usually gotten about 97 percent of what they ask. But with full hearings, according to the Consumer Watchdog advocacy group, that percentage has been cut by about 25 percent.

 

        Even though the rate-making process takes about the same time with or without full hearings, Consumer Watchdog claims hearings have cut the prices paid by customers just over $6 billion over the last few years.

 

        The group says the 1988 Proposition 103 – which also made the insurance commissioner an elected post – requires full-scale hearings. Consumer Watchdog’s founder, Harvey Rosenfield, wrote that initiative.

 

        The bottom line: While Lara says “We do not have the luxury of time” in processing rate increases, reality suggests following the full procedures its author says are required by Prop. 103. This saves consumers money while not damaging the companies. Why, then, would Lara be trying to squelch that process if he’s really acting for consumers and not for the companies whose excesses he’s supposed to rein in?

       

 

-30-

    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

TRUMP’S ANTI-CALIFORNIA RIFF IGNORES POSITIVES

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, OCTOBER 8, 2024, OR THEREAFTER

 

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

     “TRUMP’S ANTI-CALIFORNIA RIFF IGNORES POSITIVES”

 

        A bright sun, blue sky and equally blue Pacific Ocean formed the backdrop the other day when ex-President Donald Trump came to his golf course on the Palos Verdes Peninsula near Los Angeles essentially to run down California and blame everything he listed on Vice President Kamala Harris, whom he trailed by slim margins in most polls of that moment.

 

        It was like listening to the ultimate “declinist” diatribe, to borrow a term for this state’s critics coined by former Gov. Jerry Brown.

 

        Yet, for every claim Trump mentioned (true, false or partially correct), another observer might have named a positive, based on several recent independent studies.

 

        For one example, Trump said California has “the highest inflation” in America. Incorrect. This state has seen significant inflation, but nevertheless had only the seventh largest price increases in the nation over most of this year.

 

        Trump didn’t mention the WalletHub.com study indicating Californians had among the highest confidence in their own financial futures, based on personal spending and plans for it. Another sign of optimism: Californians ranked first in the nation, increasing their credit card debt by $4.5 billion in the second quarter of this year. Of course, California has by far the largest population among the states and therefore the most active credit card accounts.

 

        Trump claimed, too, that California has the highest taxes in America. Not true. Yes, this state has the highest sales tax, 7.5 percent. But overall, the tax burden here ranks eighth among the states, largely because of the 1978 Proposition 13, which puts California property taxes in the bottom half nationally despite the state’s ultra-high real estate prices. The Trump golf course benefits directly from this.

 

        But Trump neglected to mention that California ties Washington State as the best in the West for finding jobs, according to CommercialCafe.com rankings. San Francisco ranks in that study as America’s best city for starting a post-college career. Six other California cities ranked in the top ten of that category, including Sacramento, Stockton, Fresno, San Bernardino, Victorville and Menifee. And it had four cities ranked in the top 10 best places for working parents: San Francisco, Fremont, Irvine and Oakland.

 

        Plus, California tops all states in the number of major corporations headquartered here, at 57, outstripping the 52 in New York and 50 in Texas.

 

        The ex-President blasted this state for its homeless problems, saying that “After Kamala Harris and Gavin Newscum (sic) took charge of San Francisco, homelessness increased by 200 percent.” Yes, homelessness has risen in California, standing at 186,000 unhoused statewide in the most recent surveys, but in San Francisco, it was at its lowest level since 2015 when surveyed early this year.

 

        At the same time, Trump never mentioned that California ranks in the top ten states for teachers' wellbeing, according to another new analysis, this from the WalletHub website. California has the seventh highest teacher salaries, when adjusted for the cost of living. It ranks first in digital learning for schoolchildren, and fifth in the pace of teacher pay increases. 

 

        For Trump to have cited any of California’s many positives (none cited here are related to the state’s best-in-the-nation weather), would not have benefited him politically.

 

        Instead, he compared California’s forest maintenance with Finland, ignoring that country’s location in far more northerly Scandinavia, where forest fires are scarce. Thickly wooded forests with dense underbrush that Trump believes should be cleaned out also are uncommon in the far north. Trump, aware he has no more chance than ever of winning California’s 54 electoral votes this year, also threatened to withhold federal firefighting assistance if the state sticks with recently adopted clean water standards.

 

        Trump’s anti-California riff was plainly designed for use in campaign commercials airing in other states where the positives of California life get short shrift on newscasts that often feature lurid video of wildfires and the mudslides that often follow. Not to mention car chases.

 

        But Californians would be wise to remember that news coverage generally features negatives more than positives, which means that declinist visions of California will always get more exposure than the positives, no matter what or when.

       

   -30-

    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

WHY WE NEED NEWSOM’S SPECIAL SESSION ON GAS PROFITS

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, OCTOBER 4, 2024 OR THEREAFTER

 

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
      “WHY WE NEED NEWSOM’S SPECIAL SESSION ON GAS PROFITS”

 

        The gasoline price gouging that has plagued Californians sporadically for decades appears no longer to be merely occasional. Rather, it’s become pretty steady.

 

        Oil companies and refiners have so conditioned millions of California drivers that today’s prices, still well above national averages, now draw few complaints because they are about a buck lower than a few months ago.

 

        But the facts remain: Every time refiners allow their stocks to dwindle while blaming either in-plant accidents or routine maintenance, pump prices skyrocket and profits of the oil companies that own California’s Big 5 refineries rise to record or near-record levels.

 

        This means any slight disruption in supplies, intentional or not, resulting from collusion between the companies or not, produces huge margins for the companies. They include Chevron, Marathon, PBF, Phillips 66 and Valero, which together produce the vast bulk of gasoline consumed here.

 

        They also supply neighboring states like Nevada and Arizona, but consistently refuse to cut back out-of-state shipments when those shortages occur, putting virtually all the high-price burden on Californians.

 

        When state legislators refused to confront these realities during their regular session ending as September began, Gov. Gavin Newsom called them back into special session.

 

        The session was to start immediately, but the state Senate leadership refused to heed Newsom’s order and its members headed home for what was scheduled as a three-month break.

 

        Senators later relented, saying they would return to work if the state Assembly passes a steady-supply bill. Most senators are Democrats who campaigned in part as consumer advocates. Did Newsom get them to partially relent by hinting he might cut back some of their perks and staffing funds, or maybe some of their expense accounts, at next summer’s budget time?

 

        Said Newsom in calling the session, “It should be common sense for gas refineries to plan ahead and backfill supplies before they go down for maintenance, in order to avoid price spikes. But the price spikes are actually profit spikes for Big Oil, and they’re using the same old scare tactics to maintain the status quo.”

 

        Among the scare tactics: Some refiners threaten to reduce operations or even shut down parts of their facilities if the state imposes new rules requiring consistent on-hand reserves.

 

        For sure, special legislative sessions focused on just one subject can generate powerful momentum for change.

 

        It took a special session in early 2023 to get the Legislature to create a new Oversight Division in the state Energy Commission and force refiners to file monthly supply and profit margin information with it. The division has the power to set price limits, but has never exercised it.

 

        This may be one sign of the clout Big Oil still has in California politics, even though all the state’s big refineries are owned by out-of-state companies, now that Chevron is moving its head office to Texas.

 

        Newsom ordered this fall’s supposed special session, the first in modern history to be rejected by any part of the Legislature, after lawmakers refused to act on his proposal to require that refiners maintain stable gasoline inventories at all times. This is opposed by the governors of Arizona and Nevada, which get their gasoline from California and worry a high inventory here will make their supplies less certain.

 

        But it would be one step toward preventing sudden spikes like the $2 per gallon hike that hit California consumers suddenly in February 2023, but barely touched Nevada and Arizona.

 

        Another step could be having the new Energy Commission division use its authority to set a limit on profits. Some consumer advocates suggested a limit of 70 cents margin per gallon of gas, far below their take when price spikes occur.

 

        No one knows how long Newsom’s special session order will stay in effect; it might thrust legislators into a special session running concurrently with regular business once the lawmakers return to Sacramento in December.

 

        But the bottom line is clear: If California ever is to stop the constant cycle of sudden gasoline price spikes followed by record profits and then by a gradual lowering of prices – but never down to prior levels – there has to be action sometime. As the old saying goes, if not now, when? 

-30-

 

    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net