SLEEPING LATINO ELECTORAL GIANT WAKENS, GOP PAYS

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, APRIL 12, 2019, OR THEREAFTER


BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
     “SLEEPING LATINO ELECTORAL GIANT WAKENS, GOP PAYS”

          For decades, it was been one of the biggest nightmares of the California Republican Party: What happens when the sleeping giant of California politics finally wakes up?

          That feared sleeping giant was the great mass of legal Latino residents in the state, who didn’t bother to vote in telling numbers through most of the years it was growing into the largest ethnic group in this state.

The latest numbers show the sleeping giant in fact did waken in a big way last fall, one of the main reasons why Democrats took over seven seats in Congress that had long been held by Republicans. Yes, Latinos voted Democratic in only slightly higher proportions than they usually have. But the raw numbers told a different story.

          The awakening was actually a gradual thing and it is far from complete. While Latinos surpassed whites five years ago as the state’s largest population bloc by a margin of 39 percent to 38.8 percent, even now, they account for less than 24 percent of all California voters.

          That means Hispanics can wield even more political clout than they have over the last few years, when they at times simultaneously held both the Assembly speaker’s chair and the presidency of the state Senate.

          What they did last year was already enough to shake things up considerably here and in Washington, D.C. Without its new California members, Congress would look quite different today.

          Here’s what actually happened: Where just 16 percent of the total votes in the seven districts that switched parties last year were cast by Latinos in 2014, the last previous non-presidential general election year, in 2018 Latinos accounted for 22 percent.

          This was the single biggest reason why turnout in the districts targeted by Democrats equaled what is usually seen only in presidential elections.

          That flipped those seats.

          The best example may have been the 21^st District south of Fresno where current Democratic Rep. T.J. Cox ousted longtime Republican Rep. David Valadao by a slim margin of 50.4 percent to 49.6 percent. In 2014, when Valadao won the district handily, Latinos accounted for 44 percent of votes there. Last year, that number was up to 52 percent. This amounted to an increase of almost 8,000 Hispanic votes in a district Cox carried by only about 1,000 votes.

          Increased Latino turnout plainly did Valadao in. Another way to see it was that President Trump’s regular insults of Latinos and other ethnics aroused them sufficiently to cost his party that seat.

          At the same time, turnout was 58 percent among eligible Latino voters in the Modesto-centered 10^th District, compared with just 29 percent during the last previous non-presidential year.

          Latinos in that district, long represented by Republican Jeff Denham, produced 26 percent of the 221,000 votes cast, up from 18 percent four years earlier. The increase did Denham in.

          In other districts, the Latino difference was also pronounced: The Orange County district that went to Democrat Gilbert Cisneros by a slim 51.6 percent to 48.4 percent margin over Republican Young Kim saw a 7 percent increase in Latino votes over 2014. Differences weren’t quite so great in other districts the Democrats flipped, but each of them saw increases of 3 percent to 4 percent in the Latino share of the vote.

          There’s a lesson here for every politician in California and nationally: When the interests of a large demographic group are denigrated by the leading figure of a major political party, consequences will follow.

          The backlash Trump created this time proved there’s a major price to pay for insulting behavior and rhetoric.

          Some Latinos thought their group’s turnout should have been even larger. “You’re definitely going to see higher numbers in 2020,” Virginia Maduena, a former mayor of the small city of Riverbank in Stanislaus County, within the 10^th district, told a reporter. “As long as Republicans continue to support Trump’s rhetoric, I just don’t see how a Republican can succeed here.”

          She’s convinced the once-slumbering giant will stay awake and perhaps become even more alert and influential.

          If she’s right, Democrats stand a good chance of hanging onto many of the seats they took from the GOP last year.

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    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

HOUSING BILL PROBLEM: IT LOOKS LIKE ONE SIZE FITS ALL

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, APRIL 9, 2019, OR THEREAFTER


BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
    “HOUSING BILL PROBLEM: IT LOOKS LIKE ONE SIZE FITS ALL”

          As they consider Senate Bill 50, many who are aware of the latest attempt by San Francisco’s Democratic state Sen. Scott Wiener to solve California’s housing shortage believe the plan treats this state as if it were monochromatic.

          Wiener offers the same basic solution for everyplace in this vast state of 58 counties and 482 cities, many of which are quite unique. Will the same tactics create significant amounts of new housing in Corona and Chico, Torrance and Trinity County?

          Yes, the bill’s author says many things would still be under local discretion, like building setbacks and design. But not density. The entire premise is that making housing dense will make it more affordable.

          Wiener would force cities to permit three- and four-story housing within a quarter-mile of all rapid transit stops in the state. Never mind that BART stops along the 580 freeway east of San Francisco don’t look or function like Gold Line stops between Pasadena and downtown Los Angeles.

          The senator’s bill also demands that cities OK dense housing along all major bus routes, regardless of objections from present residents with their life savings invested in their homes. It eases requirements now in place for adequate parking in new construction.

          Aside from its housing goals, this is part of a move to force Californians out of their cars, never a popular idea. The measure assumes large numbers will be attracted to the new housing even if it features tiny apartments – and seems to assume that almost everyplace with rapid transit stops and significant bus lines has a comprehensive public transportation system to go with them.

          Wiener says that view of his bill is incorrect. “This treats various geographies very differently,” he said in an interview. “But it does change density.”

          Some SB50 assumptions are simply incorrect, even if sustainability purists believe in them. New rail lines opened in recent years by the Los Angeles area’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority, for example, have not significantly increased overall regional transit ridership. There is also no evidence that the mentally ill, a significant portion of California’s homeless populace, are either interested in or financially able to move into small new apartments.

          SB50 essentially glosses over these and other realities. But a new white paper from the South Bay Cities Council of Governments, made up of 16 cities in southwestern Los Angeles County, offers a different perspective.

          The report from the multi-city group including Manhattan Beach, Torrance, Inglewood and Los Angeles, notes that SB 50 does not assure residents of new housing will have adequate sewers, parks and other public services.

          The paper recommends “infill” housing that uses vacant land within built-up areas rather than razing existing low-rise development, saying that would produce more homes if combined with development in outlying areas. By contrast, SB 50 condemns developing the far suburbs.

          Some advocates of SB 50 see this potential mix as contributing further to the urban sprawl they despise, but which helped attract many Californians to the state.

          Wiener and some major groups backing his bill are based in locales like San Francisco, Santa Monica and downtown Los Angeles, which already have plenty of dense housing, comprehensive streetcar or bus systems and both light and heavy rail. But most of the state, including the regions surrounding those locales, doesn’t have much of those things. And yet, some SB50 co-sponsors come from less dense areas like Orange County and the Central Valley.

          Says Wiener, “You can never guarantee how people will get around, but if you allow a lot of housing near transit, you at least offer people the opportunity to use it.”

          Wiener also insists SB 50 is not a manifesto by big city residents telling everyone else how to live.

          But so long as that remains a common perception of the bill, it will cause resentment and resistance by those affected to new rules imposed upon them.

The question: Can SB50 be altered enough to defuse the sense that it’s monolithic and dictatorial? If not, count on resistance to this major proposal if it passes, along with a ballot referendum, and possible repeal. Which would leave California’s very serious housing problems back at Square 1.

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    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

SHOULD 17-YEAR-OLDS HAVE THE RIGHT TO VOTE?

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, APRIL 5, 2019, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

          “SHOULD 17-YEAR-OLDS HAVE THE RIGHT TO VOTE?”

          No one protested back in the 1970s, when first Congress and then every state granted 18-year-old citizens the right to vote. If they were old enough to die for their country, went the reasoning, they were also old enough to help make its decisions.

          Now a top-ranking Democratic state legislator wants to expand the franchise to let 17-year-old Californians vote in primary elections if they will turn 18 before the next general elections.

          “If a voter is going to be eligible to vote in a general election, why wouldn’t we want to allow them also to have a say in who they will be voting for in that election?” said Assembly Speaker pro tem Kevin Mullin of San Mateo. He wants the Legislature to put a proposed state constitutional amendment allowing this new right on the March 3, 2020 primary ballot.

          This is not exactly a new idea: 23 other states already allow 17-year-olds to vote in primaries. And it’s been proposed before in California: Just last year, Democratic Assemblyman Evan Low of Campbell introduced another amendment lowering the voting age to 17 in all elections. That one died in an Assembly committee.

It’s easy to see this idea as a ploy by Democrats to assure they stay in power indefinitely. After all, it would be yet another way to expand the electorate, and a political truism says that the more voters turn out in any election, the better Democrats will do.

The effort is part of a series of moves by California Democrats since 2015 to get ballots into the hands of more and more voters. They enacted Election Day voter registration – used by more than 40,000 new voters last fall. They legalized “ballot harvesting,” where operatives of all parties can help voters fill out ballots, show them how to sign the ballots and then assist them in mailing those ballots or otherwise turning them in. Democrats also passed “motor voter,” making voter registration automatic for anyone getting a drivers license unless they decline. Despite management problems that saw some voters registered to parties they didn’t want, this also produced tens of thousands of new votes.

It all contrasted sharply with simultaneous Republican moves to restrict voting rights in states where they controlled both governor’s offices and legislatures. Some of those rules may be loosened considerably soon, as Democrats took over eight governor’s posts and six legislatures last fall, still leaving the GOP with 21 states where it controls the entire state capital.

Although Republicans lately have tried to suppress voting numbers while Democrats do all they can to open ballots for virtually everyone, this has only been a partisan issue for about the last eight years. Before then, voting was a matter of civics, almost all Americans agreeing that the more voters turn out, the better for the nation’s social and political fabric.

That’s still the rhetoric Democrats use, while Republicans maintain all the Democrats’ vote-expansion moves are aimed at groups more likely to vote Democratic, including undocumented immigrants.

          California Republicans have had little to say about the state’s recent voting expansions, but they were the first to take advantage when mail voting opened to all in the late 1970s, after previously being available only to those who could not get to the polls. For one example, many analysts attributed ex-Gov. George Deukmejian’s 1982 upset win over Democratic Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley to the GOP’s skillful use of newly legalized unlimited absentee votes.

          Now some Republicans blame the new rules for their big losses last year, saying they must do what Democrats did in the ‘80s: master the new tactics.

          Democrats today use the old-fashioned civic rhetoric to plump for their voter-expansion efforts, including 17-year-old primary voting. “I’m a strong supporter of civic engagement,” says Mullin. “This is about getting more Californians involved in the political process regardless of their political affiliation.”

          And who knows? If this state’s Republicans ever manage to expand their appeal beyond their current conservative base, they also might find ways to turn 17-year-olds and other new voters their way, rather than letting them go lemming-like to the Democrats.

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     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, go to www.californiafocus.net

AFTER DEATH PENALTY REPRIEVES, MULTIPLE MANSONS CONFRONT NEWSOM

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, APRIL 2, 2019 OR THEREAFTER


BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

   “AFTER DEATH PENALTY REPRIEVES, MULTIPLE MANSONS CONFRONT NEWSOM”

          Given the obvious proclivities of the California Board of Parole Hearings, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that multiple “Manson Family” members are and will soon be up for release, just short of 50 years after they helped carry out the most notorious murders of the 20^th Century.

          They pose a test for new Gov. Gavin Newsom, now that he’s decided the more than 700 felons on California’s Death Row deserve to live no matter how heinous their crimes. The possibility that more than one of mastermind/guru Charles Manson’s killer gang members could soon be back on the streets was unheard of just a few years ago – and should still be.

          Manson himself died a convict in late 2017, never having had a realistic hope for freedom.

          But some Parole Board members who voted during the winter to free Bobby Beausoleil and Leslie Van Houten because of good behavior in prison are too young to remember the fear that suffused much of California during the “Family’s” reign of terror. So is Newsom.

          And more Manson acolytes likely will be recommended for freedom soon. Both Bruce Davis and Charles (Tex) Watson have applied several times, thwarted only when past governors Jerry Brown and Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed Parole Board actions.

          Davis’ next chance at parole comes in August, while Watson gets a new try in 2021.

This gives California’s new Gov. Gavin Newsom – the first governor not old enough to have been sentient during the Manson crime spree – an opportunity to make a strong statement about how he’ll treat perpetrators of the most heinous crimes, even if he won’t tolerate executing them.

          Brown used one parole attempt by Davis, known as Manson’s right-hand man, to make a statement about gruesome criminals. "In rare circumstances," Brown wrote, "a murder is so heinous that it provides evidence of dangerousness by itself."

          Will Newsom make a similar declaration? Or will he cater to more forgiving Californians by allowing the Beausoleil and Van Houten paroles? Either way, there will be implications for Newsom’s future in state and national politics, especially in combination with his death penalty move.

          Newsom was a toddler during the public uncertainty that accompanied the ultra-bloody Manson crimes, including the murders of actress Sharon Tate and several friends in her home in the Benedict Canyon area near Beverly Hills and the next-day killings of grocer Leno LaBianca and his wife Rosemary in the Los Feliz district of Los Angeles, several miles away.

          Beausoleil and Davis carried out the murder of musician Gary Hinman a bit earlier, Beausoleil slashing Hinman to death on Manson’s direct order in the wake of a drug deal gone bad. Beausoleil’s parole recommendation came on his 19^th try for release.

          Van Houten’s role in the week’s-long Manson slaughter spree was very different. She wasn’t present for the Tate killings because she stayed on the Spahn Movie Ranch in Chatsworth where the gang squatted for months without permission. But the next night, the former homecoming queen from Monrovia joined Watson and others as they burst in on the LaBiancas.

          Court testimony showed Watson stabbed Rosemary LaBiana with a bayonet, then handed a knife to Van Houten. She testified she stabbed her victim in the back at least 14 times, then used blood from her and her husband to scrawl messages implying a race war was imminent.

          “I take responsibility…I looked to men for my value and I didn’t speak up,” she said in a parole hearing. Van Houten later led self-help groups for women prisoners.

          Rosemary LaBianca never got a chance to do anything like that, her life snuffed out in large part by Van Houten.

          Van Houten and Beausoleil now want to become just the second and third Manson gang murderers out on parole. So far, Steve (Clem) Grogan, released in 1985 after leading police to the dismembered body of movie stuntman Donald (Shorty) Shea on the Spahn ranch, is the lone gang member to have been released.

          Now it’s up to Newsom to decide whether to set more elderly Mansonites free in California. If he says yes, the choice, along with his death penalty reprieves, will follow him for a long time.

         

         

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    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.

LATINO VOTING DREAMS NOT COMING TRUE FOR BIG PARTIES

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, MARCH 29, 2019, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

    “LATINO VOTING DREAMS NOT COMING TRUE FOR BIG PARTIES”

          Both Democrats and Republicans have long harbored big dreams about Latino voters. Now, as California gets set for its first seemingly influential presidential primary in decades, the dreams of both parties may not be coming true.

          Here are their high hopes: Democrats in California and elsewhere want Latino voting rates to climb ever higher on the assumption those voters will always lean their way and guarantee victories next year and beyond. Republicans dream that Latinos will eventually shift their way as more Hispanics move from the Roman Catholic church into evangelical Christian denominations that emphasize what are loosely known as “family values,” including opposition to abortion and a stress on heavy punishment for crimes.

          If there was ever a year when Democrats figured to see the percentage of Latino votes move strongly in their direction, it was 2018. In fact, Latino voting numbers were up both in California and nationally last fall, with more than 40 percent of eligible Hispanics casting ballots. Their added numbers aided in the Democratic takeover of the House of Representatives, especially in California, where Democrats flipped seven formerly Republican congressional districts.

          That increased turnout was in part the result of President Trump’s immigration policies, which led to detention of many asylum seekers and separating more than 5,000 children from their parents, a tactic judges later ruled illegal.

          But the proportions of Latinos voting Democratic and Republican remained pretty static, right about where they’ve been since the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s, when Ronald Reagan ran first for California governor and then for President.

          Reagan always won about 36 percent of Hispanic votes, peaking at 39 percent in 1984 after bottoming out at 33 percent in his last run for governor in 1972.

          Last year, after Trump repeatedly called Mexican immigrants criminals and rapists, seizing on occasional major crimes by undocumented immigrants, 32 percent of Latinos voted Republican, according to Associated Press VoteCast data collected by the University of Chicago. That’s not much of a change in percentage over the last half century.

          Other surveys and exit polls had similar numbers for Latino voters.

          This disappointed Democrats and relieved Republicans, who have long feared they might face almost unanimous opposition from the nation’s fastest-growing ethnic group.

          As usual, the Republican Latino vote came largely from evangelicals who made up one-fourth of all Hispanic voters last fall and from military veterans who comprised 13 percent of Latino votes. There was some overlap between the two categories, but the final numbers suggest Republican support among these two groups came in at about 90 percent.

          That’s slightly higher than the proportion by which African-American voters – the single most reliable part of the Democratic voting coalition – usually votes that way.

          Frustrated Democrats can’t understand why more Latinos are not offended by Trump’s frequent Twitter tirades against immigrant “caravans” and his family separation policies. Their puzzlement grows when they see polls showing immigration is by far the most important issue among Hispanic voters.

          Some suggest Democrats should expend as much effort and money to win over the one-third of Latinos who persistently go Republican as they did while winning four formerly Republican congressional seats in Orange County last year.

          But Democrats have long taken Latino voters for granted. Meanwhile, Republicans want to maximize whatever Hispanic votes might be available to them. Example: Steve Frank, a longtime Republican activist, blogger and campaign manager based in Ventura County, suggested while running for GOP state chairman this winter that his party should stage vote-harvesting parties in evangelical churches everywhere in California, making sure their conservative-leaning congregants vote and that their ballots are collected and filed.

          But both parties may find their frustration continues indefinitely, because no tactic yet tried has caused Latino voting preferences to change much over the last 50 years, even while the number of Latinos voting has vastly increased. It all suggests that only something dramatic can ever break these longstanding voting habits and preferences.

         

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    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

ARE FIREFIGHTERS USING ALL THE RIGHT STUFF?

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, MARCH 26, 2019, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

    “ARE FIREFIGHTERS USING ALL THE RIGHT STUFF?”

          It’s pretty clear to anyone who’s watched firefighters try to control the massive blazes bedeviling California over the last two years that they have the right stuff. But questions have arisen over whether they are using all the right stuff.

          The maker of a rival firefighting substance has cried foul over an exclusive contract between suppliers of Phos-Chek fire retardant fluids and the state Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, known as CalFire.

          That pact sees the state use no long-term fire retardant other than Phos-Chek, a highly visible pinkish-red fluid dropped from air tankers onto fast-moving flames. Phos-Chek, produced by the St. Louis-based ICL Performance Products in Ontario, CA and Moreland, ID, slows fires and can steer them, but doesn’t put them out.

          With ingredients including ammonium polyphosphate and attapulgus clay, it is toxic to most fish; firefighters must try to avoid spills into rivers and creeks. It is the only long-term fire retardant recommended by the U.S. Forest Service.

          CalFire pays just under $3 per gallon for Phos-Check, about $47,000 per full load for a Boeing 747 tanker, a total of $28.4 million last year.

          But backers of the less toxic competitor Pyrocool maintain their product is better, partly because it actually extinguishes fires, partly because it is cheaper at about 17 cents per gallon and partly because of its lower toxicity. It won a major federal Environmental Protection Agency safety award in 1998.

          “We’ve been trying for at least 10 years to get CalFire to use our product,” says Pyrocool CEO Robert Tinsley, a resident of the San Francisco suburb Brentwood. “With these devastating fires, you’d think they’d take a look at something else that has credentials.”

          In fact, some California locales have used Pyrocool, including the University of California’s Davis campus and the cities of San Rafael and El Centro. It’s also been employed by the federal bureaus of Land Management and Indian Affairs, British Petroleum and the U.S. Navy and Air Force.

          But CalFire won’t try it because it’s not on the approved list of the U.S. Forest Service. “We don’t do the testing; they do,” says Scott McLean, CalFire spokesman. “We’re very comfortable following the USFS lead.” CalFire does not have a chemicals testing lab, relying on the USFS, whose own lab is not accredited.

          Meanwhile, the Forest Service won’t certify Pyrocool because it failed a safety test almost 20 years ago. In that episode, Pyrocool says it provided two drums of its product to the USFS. One passed, the other failed as too corrosive of magnesium-based substances.

          Pyrocool refuses to pay for a USFS retest, maintaining the Forest Service lab is unaccredited and unreliable, unable to duplicate results. The USFS said in an email its wildfire products lab is not accredited because “there is no legal requirement” for that.

          Tinsley offered to let CalFire test Pyrocool at an accredited lab in California, at company expense. But McLean said in an email that “Due to being a state agency, we cannot honor the offer by Pyrocool to have another lab test their product specifically for CalFire.”

          McLean also said CalFire is not sure Pyrocool (like Phos-Check, a mix of water with a base concentrate) would stay in solution in an air tanker. But Pyrocool officials recount a January 2017 case where during raging wildfires in Chile, the Walmart-linked Walton Family Foundation paid to send a 747 loaded with Pyrocool in solution to the rescue of the city of Llico, which was threatened with the same fate suffered last year by Paradise, Calif.

          When it arrived and made several drops, disaster was averted.

          Tinsley also cites the case of the oil tanker Nassia, burning in the Bosporus Strait near Istanbul, where the Lloyds of London insurance consortium estimated flames would burn at least 12 days. A salvage firm dropped a helicopter load of Pyrocool and the fire was out in 20 minutes.

          No one can be sure Pyrocool or some other product would do better than Phos-Chek against California wildfires. But given CalFire’s inability to stop recent big fires, it’s an open question whether this state’s very capable firefighters are getting the right stuff to do their job well.

         

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    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

NO DEAL IS BEST DEAL ON SPLIT ROLL

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, MARCH 22, 2019, OR THEREAFTER


BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
          “NO DEAL IS BEST DEAL ON SPLIT ROLL”

           It’s open season these days on ballot initiatives, propositions placed on California’s ballots every two years after hundreds of thousands of voters sign petitions to put them there.

          The as-yet-unnamed and -unnumbered initiative known as the “split roll” is not exempt.

          Thanks to a 2014 law, legislators and others state officials who don’t like ordinary citizens to make this state’s biggest policy decisions now can maneuver to get already-qualified initiatives taken off the ballot. If they work out a deal with the initiative sponsors, the measure will go away.

          For the split roll measure, whose sponsors including the League of Women Voters gathered more than half a million signatures, that means it would not be Californians at large deciding what is arguably the most important tax issue now before the state, but rather a bunch of insiders.

          British Prime Minister Theresa May, opposing a second national referendum on whether the United Kingdom should pull out of the European Union, said for much of the winter that holding a second vote “would undermine public faith in democracy.”

          That’s just what a back-room deal taking the split roll initiative off the November 2020 ballot would do.

          No doubt, split roll would upset quite a few applecarts. But that is what the early 20^th Century Republican Progressive Gov. Hiram Johnson had in mind when he engineered the initiative process to let voters make key decisions.

          Make no mistake, the split roll verdict is a key decision. It would make the first significant change in Proposition 13 since that landmark property tax-cutting measure passed by almost a 2-1 vote in 1978. For almost 41 years since then, commercial property has been taxed at the same rate as residential, owners of both types paying 1 percent of the latest purchase price, plus a 2 percent yearly increase. Property in the same hands since 1975 gets taxed at 1 percent of its assessment that year, plus the same 2 percent annual increment.

          Split roll would change this formula for commercial property, while leaving homes alone. Business property would immediately be taxed based on current valuations, bringing in as much as $11 billion in new government revenue every year. Business interests like chambers of commerce around the state will fight this change.

          But the question may never actually get to a yes-or-no vote. Last summer, for example, the Legislature passed new privacy rules entitling all Californians to know what information Internet giants like Google and Yahoo and Facebook and eBay and Amazon have about them. They will soon be able to prohibit companies from selling that information and force companies to delete it after they learn what’s been gathered.

          That was progress, but a far cry from the ballot initiative those new rules replaced. The original would have forced companies to get consumer permission before gathering, maintaining or selling information on what Internet searches people make, what they buy and what products they look at but don’t buy – and much more.

          Initiative sponsors scrapped those things when they compromised with Big Internet, sparing the sponsors from having to raise many millions of campaign dollars while still risking a loss and a return to Square 1.

          This was the kind of compromise intended when the 2014 law passed. But it deprived voters of a voice via a classic backroom deal made shortly before the deadline for ballot measures to be assigned proposition numbers.

          Now Gov. Gavin Newsom has said he’d like to broker a deal staving off an expensive and emotional campaign over Proposition 13. He wants to simplify California’s tax code in the process and make it more fair, at the same time making the state budget less dependent on income taxes generated by stock and bond investments.

          No one is now claiming a far-reaching tax deal is likely or even possible. But if it happens and it takes the split roll off the ballot, voters will again lose the chance to make an important decision that could affect all Californians for many years to come.

          And that would be a major detriment to democracy.

         
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    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

CAN NEWSOM HOUSING CAMPAIGN SUCCEED?

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, MARCH 19, 2019, OR THEREAFTER


BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
     “CAN NEWSOM HOUSING CAMPAIGN SUCCEED?”

          It turns out Gov. Gavin Newsom was deadly serious when he insisted as a candidate last year that California needs to build 3.5 million new housing units each year for the next ten in order to solve its affordable housing crisis. That’s a total of 3.5 million, more than double what builders around the state have put up in any of the last few decades.

          Newsome resent that message a few weeks into his new job, when he successfully urged Attorney General Xavier Becerra to sue the Orange County city of Huntington Beach for allegedly failing to allow enough new housing to handle its population growth.

          With about 202,000 residents, the median home value in “Surf City” tops $830,000, according to the website Zillow.com. Typical one-bedroom apartments there rent for between $1,500 and $2,700 per month. For those rents to eat up less than 30 percent of a tenant’s income, the renter must earn more than $60,000 per year, making many tenants “rent-burdened” by federal standards.

          The state lawsuit charges Huntington Beach has for years ignored a state law requiring cities to zone land for new housing construction. Meanwhile, many city residents feel Huntington Beach is growing too fast.

          So the Newsom/Becerra lawsuit is likely just the first salvo in a state vs. local conflict over the governor’s preferred way of solving the housing problem.

          But even if cities like Huntington Beach can be forced to allow the millions of “affordable” units Newsom and some activist state legislators want, it’s highly questionable they can solve the most visible part of California’s housing crunch – homelessness.

          Yes, cities have built thousands of transitional housing units (generally small apartments) for formerly homeless persons, who pay low, federally subsidized rent. But that hasn’t reduced homelessness.

          “Every time we build new units and move people in, at least the same number of homeless people move into whatever cities do the building,” said the city manager of a city of more than 100,000, who previously was the top administrator of two other cities. “With our climate and our policies, we are attracting homeless people from all over America.”

          Then there’s the question of affordability. Anyone who’s visited a homeless shelter like those in gymnasiums and National Guard armories on cold winter nights will know that not many of their occupants could afford even low rent.

          So while affordable housing in most cities is set up to remain relatively low-priced a long as it stands, well below market rates, the rents or costs to buy are still above what most homeless folks can pay. Especially the large component of the homeless who are mentally ill, but not institutionalized, largely because of policies that began almost 50 years ago, when then-Gov. Ronald Reagan spurred the shutdown of several public mental hospitals, intending to replace them with community-based housing.

          Such housing never materialized in significant quantities, and mentally ill homeless became a California staple.

          Meanwhile, rents on affordable apartments generally run about 30 percent of the median income in any region. Under those terms, an affordable unit in the Los Angeles region would rent for about $1,350 per month, more in the San Francisco Bay area.

          Not exactly affordable if you’re unemployed, mentally ill and living on the streets.

          So it’s naïve to believe affordable housing or the governor’s new initiative can solve the homeless problem.

          And there’s still the problem of housing being too expensive for even middle-class workers to buy. So the percentage of renters in California continues to rise, meaning that ever fewer residents feel rooted in the state, with a stake in its future.

          All this makes some wonder if it’s sensible to invest heavily in affordable housing. In 2017, the average affordable unit in the state cost $425,000 to build if it was part of a project of 100 units or more. The cost was higher when fewer units were involved.

          This picture leaves many questions to be answered before the state goes full blast on a government-funded or government-mandated home building spree. But don’t expect anything to dampen Newsom’s deeply felt drive to solve the housing issue, and quickly.

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    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