GROUNDWATER STILL AN UNSETTLED PROBLEM

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, JULY 26, 2024, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
   “GROUNDWATER STILL AN UNSETTLED PROBLEM”

 

No one ever explained why the so-called Sustainable Groundwater Management Act of 2014 allowed 26 years – until 2040 – before all users of California’s ever-smaller groundwater supplies would have to meter their wells.

 

Meanwhile, two straight winters of record-level rain and snow have not solved the problem of aquifer depletion. Sure, groundwater supplies ticked slightly upward this spring, after massive downpours filled the state’s rivers and reservoirs and piled snow on the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

 

But the groundwater increase was pretty slim, about 8.7 million acre feet of water was replaced over the two years. One acre foot is the amount of water need to cover an acre of ground to the one-foot level.

 

        That hasn't even begun restoring land levels in the Central Valley. The same old irrigation pipes and water lines that stood several feet above ground in many parts of the San Joaquin and Sacramento valleys in 2014 still stand tall.

 

        But there is some progress aside from those almost 9 million acre feet of liquid now stored underground. Increasingly, wells on private property and those operated by water districts are being metered, with many owners paying fees to the state for using a supply they once could waste, but now is beginning to be treated properly as a rare public resource.

 

        That’s what five or six years of drought will do to state policy. Still, no one knows precisely what portion of California wells are now metered.

 

        For sure, it’s difficult to track water loss. For example, the owner of a 100-foot-deep well can have no idea how much the aquifer below their land might be reduced when the nearest neighbor taps into the same aquifer with a far more costly to drill 300-foot well. For sure, since water flows downward, the owner of the deeper well can grab more water than whoever owns the shallower one. But no one can see it happening through the hundreds of feet of dirt and rock between the well bottom and the ground surface.

 

        It’s also impossible for anyone to know exactly how much water is actually available in the state. Yes, the Department of Water Resources tries to track this, but well metering is far from universal and the actual amount of water in California’s 4,000-plus miles of irrigation canals is also uncertain because many irrigation canals are on private land.

 

        But UC Davis experts estimated last year that California loses 63 billion gallons of water yearly to evaporation from canals. That’s probably a lowball guess, too, with many irrigation canals unmapped.

 

        Just what this can mean was revealed last spring in a Fresno County courtroom, where the former general manager of the Panoche Water District, which serves much of the land on both sides of Interstate 5 in the western San Joaquin Valley, pled guilty to stealing water from the government and selling it to farmers and other water districts.

 

        Dennis Falaschi admitted finding an abandoned water pipe connected to the Delta-Mendota Canal that was leaking into a nearby ditch. Rather than fixing the leak, he and other Panoche employees set up the pipe to be opened and closed at will and took an unspecified amount of unmetered water.

 

        That could not have lasted very long if anyone knew how much water the canal carries at any particular time. Which implies that metering water wells is not enough; tracking of supplies should also start on at least the major canals of both the State Water Project and the federal Central Valley Project, which includes the Delta-Mendota Canal.

 

        Perhaps this kind of water crookedness is one reason big corporate farmers resisted metering for decades.

 

        The 2040 deadline for all wells to be metered seemed a long way off when the law setting that date passed 10 years ago, and it still does.

 

        Which makes it about time politicians from the governor on down stop bragging on how beneficial the existing law has been and get on with passing a much tougher measure that might actually bring both honesty and equity to California’s water scene,

 

-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

DANGERS LURK IN FULLY ELECTRONIC HEALTH RECORDS

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS

FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, JULY 26, 2022, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
     “DANGERS LURK IN FULLY ELECTRONIC HEALTH RECORDS”

 

        If you’re in Southern California and get laboratory workups at UCLA Health Services, any Providence Health Center or the Cedars Sinai hospital network, the results are quickly available to every doctor linked to any of those systems.

 

        The same in the San Francisco Bay area if you’re a patient getting lab work at any hospital in the Stanford University system and the University of California’s San Francisco network of medical centers.

 

        But if you visit an independent specialist or a mental health professional, reports on your visits may not make it onto either of these or any other large computerized health care network.

 

        For there now are few official links between the major regional hospital systems around the state.

 

        This reality, this little bit of privacy, figures to end on Jan. 1, 2024, whether patients like it or not. Among others, that could affect women coming to California for abortions from states where they are now illegal. It will also create computer data when patients visit psychologists and psychiatrists, where office visit reports mostly are not now computerized.

 

That’s because, as part of an omnibus health care bill passed a year ago, state lawmakers almost as an afterthought ordered creation of a unified statewide electronic records system for virtually all types of patient information.

 

        Also in the bill was a well-publicized expansion of Medi-Cal’s patient population to include many undocumented immigrants. So were expanded payments by Medi-Cal to physicians, aiming to give them parity with doctors paid by the federal Medicare system. And much more.

 

        But little attention went to Section 1862 of the bill (known as AB 133), which required just one public hearing about the rules and operating principles for the largest-ever state compendium of private medical records.

 

        The high-minded idea behind this was to make all medical data and treatment plans for any patient seeing any California provider instantly available to all eligible practitioners. Taking medical histories on first visits would become very simple.

 

        But it will also end the concept of patients keeping any secrets from doctors, psychologists or other medical folk.

 

        All this information will supposedly be available only to  those who need it, including hospitals, health plans, provider groups and doctors. But less than two years ago, thieves used the nominally confidential records of the Employment Development Department to steal upwards of $20 billion. Just last spring, hackers pried open supposedly confidential state lists of applicants for concealed weapon permits.

 

        So no matter what anyone says, there’s no guarantee of privacy for medical patients under this system, even if doctors respect patient confidentiality.

 

        If a husband sees a psychiatrist and doesn’t want his wife or friends to know, reports on the visits will appear on the system.

 

If a patient seeks a second opinion but doesn’t want the original doctor to know she’s checking up on his diagnosis or treatment plan, the original doctor can eventually see details of the second opinion session. Visits to abortion clinics may not remain secret from officials of other states, either.

 

        Under these conditions, how many people will forego treatments they now get? No one can predict, especially when input on the new plan all has come from “stakeholders,” the same people and companies who will legitimately access the new system.

 

        The “guiding principles” of this plan do look benign: Assure that everyone gets state-of-the-art treatment, regardless of race or finances. Make maximum data available prior to vital medical decisions. Give patients access to all their medical records. Reinforce data security. And make sure every provider enters all information on every patient visit.

 

        But there has been too little public input into all this, no formal venue for individuals to express misgivings or make suggestions. A lone (poorly-advertised) public hearing is not enough input for something so far-reaching.

 

        Proponents of the new system gripe that too much medical information now resides in isolated “silos” where it usually doesn’t help save lives or trauma.

 

        But when only so-called “stakeholders” – and not the patients whose records will be compiled – are consulted about a change this big, trouble inevitably awaits, and will probably arrive sooner rather than later.

-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

UPDATE: TRUMP THREATS END; CALIFORNIANS MUST GET COUNTED

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, JULY 26, 2019, OR THEREAFTER

EDITORS: TO ENSURE TIMELINESS, DISREGARD EMBARGO DATE

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
     “TRUMP THREATS END; CALIFORNIANS MUST GET COUNTED”

          The Census ball is now very much in California’s court. It turns out, President Trump’s bald effort to punish California for providing Hillary Clinton with her 2016 popular vote majority has been ended by a narrow 5-4 U.S. Supreme Court decision in June tossing the issue of a citizenship question back to a lower court that previously nixed it.

          Trump at first insisted he would defy the court and insert the question anyhow, but pulled back this week, saying he will get all the citizenship information he wants from other government sources. That, of course, is what Census Bureau officials about one year ago advised him to do.

          For weeks after the Supreme Court ruled, Trump fostered doubt about what he would do. But there’s no guesswork about what could happen if that query is included. Since 1949, Census officials have said using the question widely would cause vast undercounts of undocumented immigrants who don’t trust Census assurances of confidentiality and fear deportation as a consequence of participating.

Trump’s minions lied consistently throughout their legal appeals about why they wanted the question in. They said it was to help the Justice Department enforce the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which has never been enforced under Trump. New evidence emerging since the lower court decision ruled the question out, in the form of previously secret emails, plainly showed the motive for the question was entirely political.

          The Supreme Court’s decision hinged on the obvious disgust of Chief Justice John Roberts, a Republican appointee of ex-President George W. Bush, over lies told by Trump’s secretary of commerce, Wilbur Ross. Roberts wrote that those falsehoods demanded he cast a rare vote with the high court’s four-member liberal minority, possibly deep-sixing the question.

          Meanwhile, the Constitution requires every human being in the country be counted, citizen or not.

Ross insisted he sought to insert the citizenship query used before 1950 because of the Justice Department’s desire. The prior lack of Voting Rights Act enforcement made that statement enough of a lie to offend Roberts.

          There was immediate speculation that Trump backed down on the question because defying a Supreme Court order would almost automatically bring impeachment, and might even be offensive enough for Senate Republicans to convict him. For sure, it would have been a threat to constitutional government.

Trump had also speculated about delaying the Census, contrary to law and precedent, but backed off that, too.

          All this leaves any Census-driven parts of California’s future up to Californians. If a citizenship question spurs millions of the undocumented to refuse participation, this state could lose at least one seat in Congress, one or two electoral votes in presidential elections and many billions of federal dollars earmarked for housing, highways, sewers, public schools and much more.

          But now an undercount will only happen if Californians let it, as they did ten years ago. Most Census experts believe low participation rates caused at least one million to two million Californians not to be counted in the 2010 Census. A repeat would make life more difficult and less consequential for many Californians.

          So Californians, whether citizens or not, must step up now and protect their own interests. Anticipating something like today’s scene, ex-Gov. Jerry Brown and state legislators last year allocated $90.3 million for Census information and outreach.

          That’s about $3 for every California resident, which the state will spend encouraging participation and discouraging anyone who’s thinking of hiding from federal Census takers. Brown and his allies considered spending $90-plus million on TV and newspaper ads, social media and community meetings a prudent investment that promises to produce far more in new money than it costs.

          The effort is needed because, even without the decrements brought by a Census undercount, Trump already allots an average of about 6 billion less federal dollars each year to California than it got under ex-President Barack Obama.

          The one way to change this kind of steady mistreatment, minimization and denigration of California while Trump holds office is to maximize the state’s Census count. That will only happen if virtually all Californians participate.

         

 
-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 CALIFORNIANS MUST GET COUNTED, TRUMP MACHINATIONS OR NO

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, JULY 26, 2019, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
      “WHY CALIFORNIANS MUST GET COUNTED, TRUMP MACHINATIONS OR NOT”

          The Census ball is now very much in California’s court. President Trump’s bald effort to punish California for providing Hillary Clinton with her 2016 popular vote majority has been at least blunted by a narrow 5-4 U.S. Supreme Court decision in June tossing the issue of a citizenship question back to the lower court that previously nixed it.

          It’s anyone’s guess whether the Census Bureau now controlled by Trump lied when it said it has started printing Census forms without the question: “Is this person a citizen of the United States?”

          But there’s no guesswork about what could happen if that query is included. Since 1949, Census officials have said using the question widely would cause vast undercounts of undocumented immigrants who don’t trust Census assurances of confidentiality and fear deportation as a consequence of participating. Census confidentiality promises have been honored in the past.

Trump’s minions lied consistently about why they want the question in. They said it was to help the Justice Department enforce the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which has never been enforced under Trump. New evidence emerging since that federal court in Maryland ruled the question out, in the form of previously secret emails, plainly shows the motive for the question is entirely political.

          The Supreme Court decision hinged on the obvious disgust of Chief Justice John Roberts, a Republican appointee of ex-President George W. Bush, over lies told by Trump’s secretary of commerce, Wilbur Ross. Roberts wrote that those falsehoods demanded he cast a rare vote with the high court’s four-member liberal minority, possibly deep-sixing the question.

          Meanwhile, the Constitution requires every human being in the country be counted, citizen or not.

Ross has insisted he sought to insert the citizenship query used before 1950 because of the Justice Department’s desire.

         

          The prior lack of Voting Rights Act enforcement made that statement enough of a lie to offend Roberts. Did Ross also lie when he said the Census Bureau, which he supervises, had to start printing forms by July 1 for them to be ready for the March 1 beginning of the count?

          Meanwhile, Trump proposes to ignore the Supreme Court and include the question by executive order. If Ross and the Census Bureau are not lying about the print timetable, of course, Trump would have to be content with including the query only on some forms or as an addendum.

Trump also has speculated about delaying the Census, contrary to law and precedent.

          All this leaves any Census-driven parts of California’s future up to Californians. If a citizenship question spurs millions of the undocumented to refuse participation, this state could lose at least one seat in Congress, one or two electoral votes in presidential elections and many billions of federal dollars earmarked for housing, highways, sewers, public schools and much more.

          Question or none, an undercount will only happen if Californians let it. Most Census experts believe low participation rates caused at least one million to two million Californians not to be counted in the 2010 Census. A repeat would make life more difficult and less consequential for many Californians.

          So Californians, whether citizens or not, must step up now and protect their own interests. Anticipating something like today’s scene, ex-Gov. Jerry Brown and state legislators last year allocated $90.3 million for Census information and outreach.

          That’s about $3 for every California resident, which the state will spend encouraging participation and discouraging anyone who’s thinking of hiding from federal Census takers. Brown and his allies considered spending $90-plus million on TV and newspaper ads, social media and community meetings a prudent investment that promises to produce far more in new money than it costs.

          The effort is needed because, even without the decrements brought by a Census undercount, Trump already allots an average of about 6 billion less federal dollars each year to California than it got under ex-President Barack Obama.

          The one way to change this kind of steady mistreatment, minimization and denigration of California while Trump holds office is to maximize the state’s Census count. That will only happen if virtually all Californians participate.

         

 
-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

DESPITE WHINERS, TOP TWO PERFORMED AS INTENDED

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, JULY 26, 2016, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
      “DESPITE WHINERS, TOP TWO PERFORMED AS INTENDED”

          Go back in time six years to 2010, when the “Top Two” primary election system awaited a decision from California voters. Up until then, Republicans could only cast ballots for fellow Republicans in primary elections, while Democrats allowed votes from people who declined to choose a party.

          But in fall general elections, the many lopsided races in congressional or legislative districts where voter registration is dominated by one party or the other were essentially done deals before any ballots were counted. In Democratic-dominated districts, Republicans had no voice, even if their party put a name on the ballot. The same for Democrats in Republican districts.

          The result was extremism in both major parties, with extreme liberal Democrats and extreme conservative Republicans virtually guaranteed election, often leaving moderates in both parties essentially unrepresented.

          The Top Two system ended that. It has often allowed Republicans in Democratic districts to decide which Democrat they prefer in either Sacramento or Washington, D.C., and vice versa. It has forced the majority party in one-sided districts to heed voters in the other party, for the first time in generations. It has basically taken minor parties from the ultra-liberal Greens to the usually conservative-leaning Libertarians off almost all general election ballots.

          That, in turn, eliminates the possibility of those parties being used to manipulate voters and distort elections, a la what the late Democratic U.S. Sen. Alan Cranson did in 1986. Faced with a close race against tough GOP opponent Ed Zschau, Cranston backers advertised heavily for the previously unknown, extreme conservative American Independent Party candidate Ed Vallen, who took 1.5 percent of the vote in an election Cranston eventually won by just 1.3 percent.

          Top Two also produced a new reality in California politics, creating a quasi-party within the Democratic spectrum, loosely called “business Democrats,” who vote with their more liberal colleagues on social issues, but often seem a bit like Republicans on money-related items.

          All this caused little furor for the last six years, even though dozens of races for the Legislator and Congress were all-Democrat or all-Republican affairs.

          But this summer is different, mostly because Democratic Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez of Orange County snagged the second spot in the November runoff for the U.S. Senate seat held by Democrat Barbara Boxer since 1992. Without the Top Two system, Sanchez would have finished a distant second to state Attorney General Kamala Harris in a Democratic primary. This would have left Harris with only token November opposition, as no Republican managed more than a fraction of her primary election vote.

          Minor party officials have griped for years that Top Two deprives their voters of a November election voice. But they will have a general election presence any time their candidates earn it. Similarly, Republicans are whining this summer about the Senate race, where they can either stay home or vote for a Democrat, either Harris or Sanchez.

          That’s happening because those same Republicans were unable to coalesce around a single candidate last spring, instead fracturing their votes among 11 Republicans in a field of 34 Senate candidates. Had Ron Unz or Tom del Beccaro or Phil Wyman or George (Duf) Sundheim drawn support from even one of every five voters, a Republican would be running now.

          But in a state where Democrats hold a voter registration edge of more than 17 percent, any such Republican would have little chance in the fall against Harris, the leading Democratic vote-getter. Like all other statewide GOP candidates of the last 20 years other than muscleman actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, the GOP survivor would have been autumn mincemeat.

          Not so Sanchez, who now is free to expand her mostly Latino voting base by going after Republican voters dismayed by the likelihood that Harris, part of the San Francisco political establishment that has held almost all major offices in this state for the last six years, might get at least six years in the Senate.

          It’s up to Sanchez to make those GOP adherents comfortable with her, because they cast well over 25 percent of the primary election votes, enough to make her a credible challenger for Harris if she can attract most of them.

          That’s what Top Two was designed to do, and it performed this year exactly as advertised.

         

-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

FRACKING AND WATER TUNNELS: IS THERE A LINK?

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, JULY 26, 2013 OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
          “FRACKING AND WATER TUNNELS: IS THERE A LINK?”

          By now, most Californians have probably heard that a huge geologic formation known as the Monterey Shale contains oil and natural gas in Saudi Arabian-style quantities, locked up in underground rocks lacing an area extending more than 100 miles along the west side of the San Joaquin Valley and beyond.

          Getting that oil out would require hydraulic fracturing, known as fracking, a process involving high-pressure underground injection of water and chemicals. No one has yet said publicly how much water it would take to exploit the oil and gas in quantities large enough to make America energy independent.

    No one also knows whether this might damage underground water tables. But there is no doubt oil drilling companies would need a reliable source of water before they invest heavily in the Monterey Shale, which one USC study claimed could produce as many as 500,000 new California jobs.

          Enter the Bay Delta Conservation Plan (BDCP), which includes two parallel 35-mile-long freeway-width tunnels to bring Sacramento River water under the Delta formed by that river and the San Joaquin. This region now supplies much of the water used by California’s largest cities and farms.

          Environmental laws like the federal Endangered Species Act now can make that water supply unreliable, especially in dry years. The tunnels, accounting for most of the projected cost of the BDCP, would aim to make the supply reliable, even though they can’t add much to overall amounts of Delta water. About the only additional supply they might produce would come from winter storm runoff that now flows into the San Francisco Bay, which would have amounted to less than a 20 percent increase in supplies this year.

          The entire BDCP proposal would cost almost $15 billion. It includes plans to shore up many miles of levees in the Delta and create new habitat for the endangered minnow-like Delta smelt, whose presence sometimes causes shutdowns of the big pumps putting Delta water into the state Water Project. The money would come from revenue bonds which don’t need voter approval because water users would pay them off.

          A presumption in many quarters has been that users would pay according to how much they take from the Water Project, but no formula has yet been decided. Farms now get about two-thirds of Water Project supplies, the rest flowing to the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California and several smaller districts. Repaying the bonds, then, could raise water prices in cities from Napa to San Diego, but would likely hike the water bills of farms much more.

          Jim Beck, general manager of the Kern County Water Agency, whose member farms now get about one-fourth of Water Project supplies, estimates their rates would double if the tunnels plan is carried out, from about $200 to $400 per acre foot. A truly usage-sensitive pricing formula, however, could drive their rates much higher than that.

          Yet farmers on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley avidly support the tunnels plan, even though they can’t be assured prices for their cotton, pistachios and other produce would also rise.

          This leads some to suspect they might harbor hopes of selling water at a large profit to oil drillers for use in fracking, something made eminently possible by the fact that the Water Project’s main aqueduct runs very close to the Monterey Shale, even above it at some points.

          There is currently nothing to prevent this, state law saying only that the water be used for “reasonable and beneficial” purposes. Fracking would qualify.

          A 1980s-era law prevents exploitation of wild Northern California rivers like the Trinity, the Smith and the Klamath. So fears of water “theft” that made opposition to the 1982 Peripheral Canal plan almost unanimous in Northern California have not yet arisen around the BDCP, and likely won’t.

          But environmentalists fret about what fracking might do to ground water, even though the method has been used harmlessly to extract oil from old wells in California for decades.

          Although it's not a very vocal issue yet, then, fear of fracking could become the center of the tunnels dispute. If the Legislature or state Water Resources Control Board ever forbade such use of Delta water, much of opposition might melt away. So might some support for the plan, since there are other, cheaper ways to shift the Delta smelt habitat and shore up levees.

          This leaves only one thing certain: A true understanding of this project will be obtained the same way it is in most things political, by following the money.

          -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

YET ANOTHER SILLY, HOPELESS STATE SPLIT PROPOSAL

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, JULY 26, 2011, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“YET ANOTHER SILLY, HOPELESS STATE SPLIT PROPOSAL”

It’s silly season again in California. For the sixth time in the last 25 years or so, a politician is suggesting the state needs to be split.

The interesting thing is that while the first four such fairly recent attempts involved a north-south divide roughly at the ridge atop the Tehachapi Mountains between Los Angeles and Bakersfield, the two most recent ones advocate roughly an east-west, inland-coastal split, with San Diego and Orange counties tacked onto the eastern, inland portion.

The latest secession proposal comes from Riverside County Supervisor Jeff Stone, a Republican previously best known for his fervent defense of since-discredited and -disallowed electronic voting machines.

Stone wants to take his own county, along with the counties of Imperial, San Bernardino, Orange, San Diego, Kings, Kern, Fresno, Tulare, Inyo, Madera, Mariposa and Mono out of California and form a new state, which he tentatively dubs “South California.”

The last successful split of this sort came in the Civil War era, when West Virginia was formed as a pro-Union state after the rest of Virginia joined the Confederacy.

Californians may be divided today, but feelings can’t begin to compare with that era. So why does Stone want out of the current California?

“We have a state Legislature that has gone wild,” he told a reporter just after the new state budget was approved in late June. “They just don’t care. Their goal was to get a balanced budget so they could continue to get a paycheck. There is only one solution: A serious secession from the liberal arm of the state of California.”

It’s that last sentence that reveals the most about Stone’s proposal and the previous one that came just two years ago from termed out Republican Assemblyman Bill Maze of Visalia (Maze also proposed an east-west split, with San Diego and Orange Counties included, but his quickly-ignored plan had the new state extending all the way to the Oregon state line).

In both cases, the demographic makeup of the new state would assure election of a Republican governor, mostly Republican legislators and two Republican U.S. senators.

So this can be seen as a move by disgruntled Republicans who have failed repeatedly to register anywhere near as many California voters as the rival Democrats.

They’re tired of being outgunned politically by the state’s two big coastal population centers around Los Angeles and San Francisco. Stone and Maze might also be interested in becoming statewide officials in a new jurisdiction, since neither has a realistic hope of achieving that in the current California.

In the sense that they both fear and abhor political domination by the other folks who make up at least the state’s plurality, the latest state-split sponsors have something in common with the 27 state-split efforts that preceded theirs over the last century.

All those efforts to separate Northern California played on fears that Southern California’s greater population would eventually leave the north state little voice in its own affairs. Of course, things have not worked out that way. Both the state’s longtime U.S. senators, Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, are former San Francisco Bay area officials, even though Boxer now lives in Rancho Mirage, within Stone’s own Riverside County.

The governor is an Oakland resident and former mayor. The last three presidents of the state Senate have hailed from Northern California. The lieutenant governor and attorney general are both former top San Francisco officials. What Southern California dominance? In fact, an argument could be made that Southern California is woefully underrepresented among top state officeholders.

The latest proposals also ignore reality: No new state could arise without an overall yes vote of all Californians, something that’s not very likely. Plus, Congress would have to give its okay. Also not likely with a Democratic majority in the U.S. Senate. There’s also the fact that small-state senators would see their clout diluted if California in effect got two more senators. And rural states might not like giving two new Senate seats to what would in fact be a largely urban new state, including sizeable cities like San Diego, Santa Ana, Fresno, Riverside, Bakersfield and San Bernardino.

These realities don’t faze the likes of Stone and Maze, who complained when introducing his own proposal in 2009 that too many radical social ideas percolate inland from the coastal counties he sought to get rid of.

“We certainly can no longer overlook the radical-thinking paradigms that have invaded California, particularly in the last two decades,” Maze said then.

His idea drew more ridicule than support, which was probably appropriate. Stone’s fatuous notion deserves similar treatment.

-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