CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 2022, OR THEREAFTER
BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“SECESSION FEVER HITS STATE’S
BIGGEST COUNTY”
In land area, San Bernardino County is California’s largest,
stretching from the Nevada state line to just north of Riverside and from near
Los Angeles to the Colorado River and the Arizona state line.
It is physically larger than nine states, including
Connecticut, Delaware, Rhode Island and New Jersey combined.
Even though Californians by the million drive through it
regularly en route to Las Vegas, Phoenix, Salt Lake City and other Western
cities, some of San Bernardino County’s 2.2 million citizens feel neglected.
They want more state money for things like welfare, homelessness,
road building and repair and many other items.
Some of them think they can do better on their own than as
part of California, to which the county has belonged since there first was a
California.
They especially want two U.S. senators of their very own,
even though San Bernardino County is often a bellwether in presidential
elections, usually switching back and forth from party to party in tandem with
national outcomes.
The first thing to say about this proposal, the latest in a
long line of attempts by localities to split off from the nation’s largest
state, is that it won’t happen in the lifetime of anyone sentient today.
But there just might be a fun campaign on the issue over the
next few weeks.
Yes, San Bernadino County won’t do much better in the reality
department than the State of Jefferson (a proposed splitoff of many rural
Northern California counties) or the 2011 proposal from former Riverside County
Supervisor Jeff Stone to make a new state from a dozen or so
conservative-leaning inland counties, or a more recent plan to carve up current
California into five states.
In fact, state-splitting has been proposed periodically since the 1850s, when transplanted Southerners
tried to draw a line from San Luis Obispo to Nevada and make everything south
of it into a new slave-owning state.
Plainly, none of these plans passed muster, even though a few
counties have voted for them from time to time.
San Bernardino County gets a chance in November to join that
list. But let’s say the county votes to study leaving California. Regardless of
the vote margin, actual secession would have to be approved by the full state
Legislature, most likely a vote of all Californians, and then by Congress.
None of those approvals will be forthcoming, no matter what some
officials in San Bernardino may say.
Fontana Mayor Acquanetta Warren is a vocal proponent of a San
Bernardino state. She gripes that the vast county, containing everything from myriad
commercial warehouses to bedroom suburbs of Los Angeles to vast tracts of empty
desert to some of the planet’s most advanced solar thermal power plants, is
often “overlooked by the state and federal governments.”
“They act like we don’t exist,” she said. “We are the economic
engine of the state and you need to pay attention to that.”
It’s uncertain that is correct, despite all those warehouses
and the 18-wheeler trucks emblazoned with myriad corporate logos heading from them
to points all over California and the West.
There has never been a study of any kind examining her claim,
or whether San Bernardino County, whose eponymous seat of government is infamous
for its 2012 bankruptcy, could survive on its own.
For sure, if it became a separate state, its residents would
no longer be eligible for everything from in-state tuition at California’s
dozens of public universities, rent subsidies or many other programs that a new
state might or might not create on its own.
Imagine the expense of creating a University of San Bernardino
of the caliber of the current UCLA, for just one item.
But county voters will get no information on any of this when
they vote this fall on the local proposition to look into splitting. The short
notice on which the proposal was plopped onto the ballot allows few answers to
any questions.
But that doesn’t matter to local politicians, who most likely
are really interested in grandstanding to win new name recognition they can utilize
if and when they run for higher offices, where they might ironically be called
upon to help run the existing state of California.
-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
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