DEBUNKING OF ‘EXODUS’ BODES WELL FOR NEWSOM

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
     1720 OAK STREET, SANTA MONICA, CALIFORNIA 90405
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, AUGUST 13, 2021, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

        “DEBUNKING OF ‘EXODUS’ BODES WELL FOR NEWSOM”

 

        The entire recall campaign targeting Gov. Gavin Newsom has been built for months on the presumption that many, if not most, Californians are unhappy with how things are going, dissatisfied with their own lives and losing hope for a solid future here. This, goes the premise, will make them leap to change leaders barely a year before the next regular election would give them the same option anyway.

 

Now come two university-level studies that bode very well for Newsom. Both conclude the mass “California Exodus” that this state’s Republican politicians steadily bemoan is largely a fiction and the vast majority of today’s residents still believes in the California “dream” and has strong hope for the future.

 

High rents and real estate prices have not dented this seriously, say the studies, one from the University of California at San Diego and the other from a compendium of scholars there and at UC Berkeley, UCLA, Cornell and Stanford universities.

 

As the recall vote draws within just a few weeks, the studies agree that at least two-thirds of Californians believe optimistically their lives will improve if they stay in the state.

 

The studies do affirm there was population loss over the last year or so, but they also found much of it was caused by deaths from COVID-19, which has so far killed almost 64,000 Californians and infected about 4 million.

 

For many people, the pandemic induced strong aversions to close personal contacts, a factor that reduced the high birth rate which usually helps California grow.

 

        Among the vaccinated, both those factors are now gone, so the two studies agree that population losses will likely not continue.

 

        All these items are good signs for Newsom, who has been a mixed bag as governor. Despite a slow start, he orchestrated the most successful mass vaccine rollout any state ever saw, driving Covid rates in California far below the Southern Republican-led states that fuel most of the current surge caused by the highly contagious Delta variant of the virus.

 

        His length-of-pandemic rent and eviction controls, set by executive order and valid only until the current state of emergency ends, won him points with the state’s fastest-growing population sectors, Latinos and Asian-Americans.

 

        At the same time, he alienates others with his obvious hypocrisy in sometimes failing to obey the very rules he created.

 

        Newsom, in every poll, figures to lose almost all Republican votes on the recall, while the vast preponderance of Democrats favors keeping him for now.

 

        Those poll results do little to contradict findings of the two academic studies, which concluded less than 20 percent of urban Democrats want to leave California, while about 40 percent of Republicans would consider getting out.

 

        The UC San Diego study queried more than 3,000 Californians, 10 percent of them in Spanish. It found less than a quarter of all Californians seriously considering leaving the state, a slight decrease from the percentage so inclined in a 2019 UC Berkeley survey.

 

        But residents of the Central Valley and rural Northern California counties were significantly less inclined toward staying, with about 30 percent thinking about moving away. It may be no coincidence that those areas lean significantly more to the GOP than the rest of the state.

 

        This geography may have a major bearing on the recall, suggesting strongly that the most dissatisfied Californians reside in counties where the highest population percentages signed recall petitions while they were circulating.

 

        Both studies found middle-class Californians slightly less likely to believe in the California dream than either lower-income or wealthy compatriots.

 

        So the lower income brackets retain strong hopes of improving their lot, while the wealthy know they’re doing fine. The results among varying age groups: 18- to 24-year-olds are far more likely to believe in a good future here than those aged 50 or more.

 

        This is certainly not the picture of a grossly dissatisfied California painted by every Republican running to replace Newsom. The governor has not yet made that point. He needs to do it soon, and loudly.

 

        The bottom line: To beat the recall, Newsom must draw a turnout representative of all these population sectors. If he does, he can thrive. If not, he may be political toast.

       

 

     -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.

  

COLOSSAL ARROGANCE IN THE ‘WATER FIX’ TUNNELS

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, AUGUST 10, 2018, OR THEREAFTER


BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
     “COLOSSAL ARROGANCE IN THE ‘WATER FIX’ TUNNELS”

          The way environmental activists in California’s Delta region tell it, there is no part of government in this state more arrogant than the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California.

          The huge MWD, supplier of water to the majority of the state’s populace, is certainly acting the part as it pushes for a project Gov. Jerry Brown is trying to make an irreversible fait accompli before he leaves office (presumably for the last time) at the end of this year.

          That’s the so-called “California WaterFix” or Twin Tunnels project to bring Northern California river water to San Joaquin Valley farms and urban Southern California via gigantic culverts running around and through the delta of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers east of San Francisco Bay. ( Another desired Brown legacy is the troubled bullet train.)

          No one claims the tunnels project would produce much more water than now comes from the same rivers. But Brown and other supporters assert it would make supplies steadier and more reliable.

His administration and other project backers only lately renamed this the WaterFix because that sounds more positive than tunnels. But environmentalists led by the group Restore the Delta see it not as a fix, but a problem which could deprive the Delta and its fish of much fresh water they now get.

          After substantial lobbying by Brown, the MWD’s governing board without a public vote this summer committed millions of its customers to pay a large share of the project’s costs. About the only recourse customers might have would be voting out many of the myriad city council members and county supervisors who make up that board. This is highly unlikely, so added water charges for millions of customers are pretty much assured.

          It’s much the same in the San Jose-based Santa Clara Valley Water District, whose much smaller board voted narrowly also to help pay the multi-billion-dollar freight. Agricultural water districts in the San Joaquin Valley that stand to benefit most were reluctant to make similar commitments.

          The moves by the urban water districts were the embodiment of arrogance by public officials because they were taken with little public input and without say-so from those who will actually pay. No sooner were those votes over than the water districts and the state formed a partnership for designing and building the tunnels, a move plainly aiming to cement the project in place long before a spade is turned.

          Meanwhile, the only time anything like the WaterFix plan got a full public hearing came 36 years ago, after Brown and state legislators authorized building a so-called Peripheral Canal to bring water south around the Delta via a large ditch. A statewide referendum eliminated that plan by a resounding margin. It became political anathema for decades, but the idea plainly stuck in Brown’s mind. The WaterFix amounts to an updated, more expensive, version of the ditch Brown backed long ago.

          Then there is the move by a Southern California Republican congressman to cement the project via federal law.

          This comes from Rep. Ken Calvert of Corona, one of California’s more secure GOP congressmen, not even close to being a Democratic target this year.

          Calvert in May quietly slipped language into a proposed budget bill to ban legal challenges of the tunnels, a move that could instantly end more than two dozen current lawsuits by local governments, water districts, recreational and environmental groups and tribal governments. To Brown’s credit, his administration after months of consideration, now opposes that bill, but it is very much alive in Congress.

          “A proposal like (this) raises the question: what are the supporters of the tunnels trying to hide?” wrote Democratic Rep. John Garamendi of Mokelumne Hill, the former lieutenant governor who represents part of the Delta area.

          Added Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla, executive director of Restore the Delta, “Bypassing due process and violating states’ rights …creates a constitutional nightmare. Tunnels proponents are attempting to rewrite the rules of the game so they can’t lose.”

          The water district votes and the Calvert move both represent almost unprecedented arrogance. That makes it high time for some major public and consumer protests over the manner in which Brown and his allies are rushing the tunnels into reality without permission of the people who will pay for them.

     -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, go to www.californiafocus.net