’DON’T CALIFORNICATE US,’ OTHER STATES BEGIN SAYING

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
     1720 OAK STREET, SANTA MONICA, CALIFORNIA 90405
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, OCTOBER 29, 2021, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
        “’DON’T CALIFORNICATE US,’ OTHER STATES BEGIN SAYING”

 

        Memo to all those Californians now thinking seriously of moving to another state, thus cashing out on their high-priced homes, avoiding high prices on their new homes, but risking higher property taxes and utility bills in those new locations, while avoiding many of California’s regulations on things like indoor smoking and plastic straws:

 

        Your new neighbors might not be so happy to see you move in.

 

        Sure, whoever you buy that next house or condo from will be delighted to greet you. But everyone else? Not by a long shot.

 

        Anti-California sentiment began as early as the 1980s, when migrants from this state began moving to neighboring Oregon, driving up real estate prices and creating traffic headaches as more and more arrived.

 

 

        Oregonians began putting up signs beside roads near their southern border. “Don’t Californicate Oregon,” they read – and still do in some places.

 

        Now that sentiment has spread to a significant number of other Western states. One candidate in 2020’s election for mayor of Boise even suggested building a wall around his city to keep newcomers out, stymied mainly by the fact it would have cost $26 billion.

 

        Some states would apparently be glad if the Constitutional guarantee of free movement between the states were amended away. Some of the Republican politicians who govern Texas, for example, have suggested their domination could end if too many Californians migrate to that relatively-affordable housing state and vote Democratic.

 

        Their rhetoric doesn’t quite match that of Wayne Richey, an auto-body repair man defeated last November in his run for Boise mayor. “It’s not just a California thing,” he told a reporter. “It’s new people. They’re driving up the price of housing here so much that people I know are moving away.”

 

        Actually, 21,272 Californians moved to Idaho between July 2017 and July 2018, the latest period for which U.S. Census information is available. During the same time, 5,262 persons left Idaho for California. So this state’s net out-migration to Idaho was 16,010 during a single year. That’s just one state, helping account for California’s slowest-ever decade of growth during the last 10 years and for its net loss of 40,000 persons during 2018 to out-migration.

 

        Those Californians helped make Star, ID, 17 miles northwest of Boise, the fastest-growing city in both Idaho and America.

 

        Some California officials point out that the out-migration of Californians isn’t quite as unprecedented as it may seem. The state Finance department, for example, noted that federal defense spending cuts in the mid-1990s spurred an even larger exodus.

 

        Some of the California outflow making other states nervous stems from the efforts of those same states. Take Texas, whose former governor Rick Perry spent many years making radio and TV commercials touting the advantages for businesses that moved from California to the Lone Star state.

 

        The biggest fish to bite at this pitch, which included huge property tax exemptions and civic aid in building new plants and facilities, was Toyota, which relocated its U.S. headquarters from the Los Angeles suburb of Torrance to the Dallas suburb of Plano.

 

        Perry never figured that many of the Toyota executives and workers moving to Texas might vote Democratic. Some lean that way, and they contributed to a narrow electoral escape in 2018 for Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz in a campaign that made Democratic rival Beto O’Rourke a national figure.

 

        The annual inflow of about 60,000 Californians to Texas shows few signs of abating. Combined with more political activity from the almost 3 million Latinos in Texas, they have given the Lone Star state a faintly purple hew.

 

        Similarly, an influx of Californians working for aerospace companies that opened facilities in Phoenix and Tucson over the last 15 years has been a major factor in changing Arizona from a solidly Republican state to an electoral tossup.

 

        So the change in California’s longtime pattern of fast growth may be as bad news for some of the emigrants’ new neighbors as it seems to politicians in the state they’ve left behind, which is about to lose one seat in Congress for the next decade.

       

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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

MORE FIRE PROSECUTIONS, BUT STILL NO PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, OCTOBER 19, 2021 OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

     “MORE FIRE PROSECUTIONS, BUT STILL NO PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY”

 

        There were headlines all around the state late last month, when local prosecutors filed criminal charges including several counts of manslaughter in Shasta County over deaths in the 2020 Zogg fire, at least partially ignited because of negligence by the state’s largest utility, Pacific Gas & Electric Co,

 

        That fire blazed for about two weeks starting in late September 2020, burning more than 56,000 acres in Shasta and Tehama counties.

 

        Chances are the legal outcome this time will be similar to what followed the Camp fire that destroyed the Butte County town of Paradise, the Woolsey fire that decimated much of Malibu and other cases dating back as far as the 2007 Witch fire in San Diego County:

 

     In all those cases, utility companies like PG&E, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric have admitted fault, some racking up dozens of criminal convictions – but none for executives or employees who made the key decisions leading to fire ignition.

 

 

        The most recent such case prior to the Zogg fire came in Sonoma County, where District Attorney Jill Ravitch filed 33 criminal charges last spring against PG&E over the 2019 Kincade fire.

 

        In every case, utility executives said they cooperated fully with state investigators trying to pinpoint the exact cause of ignition.

 

        When the Shasta County charges arose, new PG&E CEO Patti Poppe made a similar statement, adding that “We’ve accepted CalFire’s determination that a tree contacted our electric wire and started the Zogg fire… But we did not commit a crime.”

 

        An interesting contention for a company that has filed dozens of guilty pleas over the 11 years since its negligence caused a massive natural gas explosion that killed eight in the Crestmoor neighborhood of San Bruno.

 

        But just like the Zogg fire case, no prosecutor ever went after any individual PG&E decision maker. Yet, someone decided which trees to clear away from the company’s Shasta County lines – and which to leave standing or untrimmed.

 

        The county’s court filing essentially says as much, noting PG&E’s “statutory and regulatory duties to mitigate fire risks by removing hazardous trees from around their electric lines.”

 

        OK, but as Howard Cosell famously wondered in an inadvertent radio clip during a 1970s-era football game, “Who goofed? I’ve got to know.”

        In the case of California’s years- long plague of wildfires with higher intensity, area and temperatures than any before them, that’s a vital question. Call it personal responsibility.

 

        Many dozens of Californians now lie dead and many thousands are struggling to rebuild homes and lives in the wake of these fires, but the people responsible for preventing them have suffered not a bit. No one has had a personal conviction. No one has spent so much as an hour in jail for all the convictions; no one has even been demoted or seen salary cuts because of the harm.

 

        Yes, possible penalties in the Zogg fire, like others, can include fines and remedial measures. The companies may even pay off some of those who suffered damages. But they easily make up those expenses in their regular rate increases.

 

        Who decided to let that tree stand? And why? These key questions have not been answered in any of California’s fires of the last few years except those set by individual arsonists.

 

        Yet, for all we know, people whose actions caused immense death and destruction are getting promoted regularly, serving on local school boards and city councils and are otherwise treated as responsible citizens – when they are not.

 

        Gov. Gavin Newsom was suddenly handed a unique opportunity to do something about this the other day, when the president of the state Public Utilities Commission, Marybel Batjer, resigned effective at year’s end, with five years left on her term.

 

        The new question for Newsom, who along with Batjer, has long favored utilities over their customers, is whether he will appoint someone to this powerful post who is dedicated to protecting consumers, or yet another faceless bureaucrat ready to go along and get along with utility executives while never using the commission’s great powers to investigate who’s really responsible for billions of dollars of damage and scores of lives lost.

       

       

 

   -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

SACTO DEMS DUMP PROP. 13 REFORMS

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2021, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
        “SACTO DEMS DUMP PROP. 13 REFORMS”

 

        For more than 40 years, Democrats in Sacramento have talked fervently about reforming the 1978 Proposition 13 and some of its landmark limits on property taxes, but time and again they’ve done nothing when presented with real opportunities for positive change.

 

        What would be positive change in this context? Anything that breaks up the destructive fantasies preserved by the reluctance of most in the state Legislature to change anything at all about Prop. 13. This recalcitrance extends even to administrative rules adopted not in the ballot initiative, but rather by lawmakers in the year or two after it passed.

 

        The mass of voters has similar reluctance to alter Prop. 13, hence rejection of last year’s Prop. 15, which would have created a “split roll” taxing commercial and industrial property at higher rates than residences.

 

        Right now, Prop. 13 limits property tax on any sort of real estate to 1 percent of the 1975 assessed value or 1 percent of the most recent purchase price if the property has changed hands. This levy can subsequently increase by no more than 2 percent each year.

 

        It’s easy to gloss over the words “change hands” in that description, as it seems obvious that changing hands means a shift in who controls a property.

 

        But that’s not how Prop. 13 works. Rules set by the Legislature less than a year after the measure passed define a new owner as a person or entity that owns more than 50 percent interest in a property. This means, for example, that a married couple can each buy a 40 percent interest in a house, but still pay the same tax bill as if they’d owned the place for many years. It’s the same for partnerships and corporations.

 

        Changing this rule would not be a change in Prop. 13 itself. But Jon Coupal, head of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn. (named for Prop. 13’s prime author), has always opposed it.

 

        Yet, as long ago as 2004, former Democratic state Sen. Martha Escutia of eastern Los Angeles County asserted the change would produce between $1.5 billion and $12 billion for schools and city and county governments. That cost has only risen since then.

 

        Coupal asserted when this dispute began that “Prop. 13 opponents can only point to a handful of alleged abuses of the law.” But some of those are major, including shopping malls, a winery, large luxury hotels and myriad houses now used as rental properties.

 

        The notion of treating actual changes of control like full changes in formal ownership for tax purposes had another chance this year, but Democrats in the Legislature voted it down.

 

        While previous efforts to make this obviously-needed revision in the definition of ownership all were carried by Democrats, this time the idea was sponsored by Orange County Republican state Sen. Patricia Bates. Her bill, known as SB 706, would have altered the definition of “change of control” of a corporate entity owning property to include situations where 90 percent or more of ownership changes hands within a three-year period.

 

        That’s a lot easier on new property owners than Escutia’s original plan where change of control was defined as a new party acquiring decision-making power or a similar 2010 plan by then Democratic Assemblyman Tom Ammiano of San Francisco.

 

        Escutia cited one hotel in Santa Monica where 100 percent of ownership changed, but there was no reassessment of the property because no one new individual or entity owned more than a 50 percent interest. In that case alone, Bates said, Los Angeles County loses over $1 million in tax revenue every year.

 

        She added that the state plainly needs to “close a loophole that allows businesses to game the system and avoid being taxed on the full value of the property they buy.”

 

        The existing law does nothing but help the rich get richer, yet even the mild reform Bates proposed got no traction among Democrats who control Sacramento. It was quickly rejected by the state Senate’s Governance and Finance Committee.

 

        Which is too bad, because small as this proposed change would have been, it represented a step toward fairness, a concept that seems of little interest to the current Legislature.

 

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     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

WHITHER FEINSTEIN: TO RETIRE OR NOT?

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2021, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
        “WHITHER FEINSTEIN: TO RETIRE OR NOT?”

 

        One thing for sure: If Gov. Gavin Newsom had lost the recall election, if replacement candidate Larry Elder now awaited taking over the state’s top political job shortly, there would be no doubt about what Democratic U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein must do: resign.

 

        With the ultra-conservative, Donald Trump-loving Elder in the wings and Feinstein’s age (88) making health problems or disability possible anytime, the pressure on the 29-year incumbent senator would be enormous to step down while Newsom could still appoint her successor.

 

        But Newsom survived, and handily, so the pressure on Feinstein eased. But it’s not gone and Newsom is up for reelection next year, figuring to face some of the same Republican rivals who tried to topple him this summer, plus the possibility of a challenge from some significant fellow Democrat.

 

        Feinstein over the last year has also heard from others a lot of the same “too old” talk spewed by fellow Democrat Kevin de Leon, her reelection rival in 2018.

 

        Back then, the shrill Los Angeles councilman de Leon, a former state Senate president, realized he might never again have a statewide voice like he did at that moment and that 2018 might be his only shot at the U.S. Senate seat he eagerly covets.

 

        So the entire thrust of his campaign was “It doesn’t matter what Feinstein does. The mere fact she’s 85 is enough reason to dump her.”

 

        That’s an argument never made against more aged male senators like J. Strom Thurmond or Daniel Inouye,  while Feinstein has lately been reviled by her party’s far left.

 

        They see as a negative her tendency to make things collegial rather than continually contentious. They see her getting along with Republicans like Iowa’s Chuck Grassley and South Carolina’s Lindsay Graham as an extreme negative even though those connections helped her shepherd into law liberal items like desert protection and coastal oil drilling moratoria.

 

        But now Feinstein’s performance –beyond the press releases her office pumps out far more regularly than those coming from her far younger new colleague Alex Padilla – is often perceived as lacking.

 

        Feinstein hasn’t been seen in public much lately, goes one complaint, so how can anyone know if she’s physically OK or mentally competent? She’s become even more friendly with Republicans, goes another gripe, even hugging Graham last fall and complimenting him on his conduct of hearings that confirmed the newest Supreme Court justice, Amy Coney Barrett, a Trump appointee.

 

        These complaints led Feinstein to allow Illinois’ Dick Durbin to become chairman of the Judiciary Committee where Supreme Court confirmations are staged, rather than taking the job that could have been hers.

 

        Even Feinstein’s longtime Senate colleague, the retired Democrat Barbara Boxer, allowed the other day that retirement might be a good idea for Feinstein. “If Sen. Feinstein were to call me today and ask my advice,” Boxer told a reporter, “I would say only you can decide this. But from my perspective, I want you to know I’ve had very productive years away from the Senate doing good things. So put that into the equation.”

 

        This wasn’t exactly a demand for instant retirement as it might have been had Newsom been fired by the voters and Feinstein’s presence therefore made Democrats fear their razor thin Senate control was seriously threatened.

 

        By comparison, those same Democrats are far louder in their demands that 82-year-old liberal Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer step down and allow President Biden to appoint his replacement while Democrats can still assure a Biden nominee of at least getting a hearing – something Republicans denied to Barack Obama appointee Merrick Garland the last time a Democrat was president and Republicans controlled the Senate.

 

        Regardless, a Feinstein retirement would likely give California somewhat more energetic representation than it now has in the Senate, where her critics correctly observe she hasn’t been seen in many committee hearings lately.

 

        But Boxer ably summed up the way things stand now: With no immediate threat of a Republican replacement if something happens to her, this choice will be Feinstein’s alone. If she opts to depart soon, 2022 could become California’s most active political year ever, with elections for governor and two slots in the Senate.

       

 

     -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

NEWLY NOTICED DAMAGE FROM FIRES, DROUGHT

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, OCTOBER 12, 2021, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
        “NEWLY NOTICED DAMAGE FROM FIRES, DROUGHT”

 

        It’s always easy to see direct effects of both the unprecedented spate of wildfires that has hit California over the last five years and the advent of this state’s newest multi-year drought.

 

        Those include burned buildings, lung problems from direct smoke inhalation and lingering smoke and ash in the air of distant locations. Plus, ground subsidence, more expensive food as irrigation water becomes scarcer and more expensive, and brown lawns in almost every city and town.

 

        But unseen, less obvious ill effects of both drought and the wildfires intensified by dry conditions are now turning out to be about as pernicious as the more visible direct effects seen on television news shows nightly.

 

        Drought, for one thing, always leads to more groundwater pumping in the Central Valley, where farmers deprived of water supplies from both the state Water Project and the federal Central Valley Project turn straightaway to tapping underground aquifers.

        Yes, in a way that’s an obvious drought effect, as the spouts of irrigation pipes that once barely peeked out from the earth’s surface now sit several feet over ground level, plain measures of subsidence easily visible to drivers along major highways like U.S. 99 and California 152.

 

        But a new study from the U.S. Geological Survey this fall shows that intensive underground pumping has also sped deterioration of groundwater quality over widespread areas. “This could lead to more public drinking water wells being shut down if costly treatment or cleaner water sources to mix with ground water are not available,” reported Zeno Levy, a USGS research geologist.

 

        In short, many Central Valley cities draw water from underground when they don’t get surface supplies derived from snowfall runoff originating in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. They get water from the same underground supplies farmers also use.

 

        The problem, as revealed by 30 years of studying nitrate concentrations in Central Valley wells, is that those chemicals increase in drinking water when more groundwater is drawn. A USGS chart shows how most public drinking water wells start out taking water from levels far below where nitrates are most common. But as neighboring farmers’ wells draw more from those deep levels, the depth at which nitrates are thickest steadily drops and the unhealthy chemicals can eventually make their way into drinking supplies.

 

        This turns out to be a regional problem, even with groundwater pumping more intense in some locales than others. The USGS doesn’t say so, but it’s a problem that could lead to some cities becoming ghost towns unless supplemental potable water is trucked in, and in large quantities.

 

        Then there are the side effects of fires. A new Stanford University study, for one example, finds that pregnant women exposed to smoke from wildfires have an increased chance of giving birth prematurely. The study found that about 7,000 California preterm births between 2007 and 2012 were probably caused by such exposure.

 

        Premature birth leads to incomplete development of babies, which heightens risk of a variety of neurodevelopmental problems, stomach and lung complications and sometimes even early death.

 

        And a reader in Magalia, near the ignition point of the 2018 Camp Fire that destroyed most of the Butte County town of Paradise, reports that benzene has been found in some local drinking water supplies.

 

        Benzene in drinking water has been linked to various cancers including non-Hodgkins Lymphoma and acute myelogenous leukemia. Reported the reader, “Months after the Camp Fire evacuation ended, the grandson of a well-known and adored retail manager was born. Weeks later, he was diagnosed with two forms of childhood leukemia.”

 

        For sure, tens of millions of dollars have already been paid to victims of benzene exposure from motor fuels and other sources. If it now turns out that benzene from burning natural substances has infested drinking water, an entire new source of damage claims against fire-causing utility companies like Pacific Gas & Electric will emerge, and it will be look out below for those firms.

 

        What’s clear is that the cataloging of side effects of both drought and wildfires has barely begun. Which ought to add even more urgency to this state’s often-incomplete and inadequate fire prevention efforts.

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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

CRITICAL ETHNIC STUDIES BACKDOOR APPROACH HITS UNIVERSITIES

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, OCTOBER 8, 2021, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

      “CRITICAL ETHNIC STUDIES BACKDOOR APPROACH HITS UNIVERSITIES”

 

        Ethnic studies classes are nothing new on the many campuses of the California State University system, but they are about to become a graduation requirement for everyone expecting to get a CSU undergraduate degree.

 

        Those courses are increasingly under the sway of authors of the rejected version of California’s ethnic studies model curriculum for elementary and high school students.

 

        Some of those same authors are also writing and influencing the new ethnic studies programs being commissioned by local school districts, each able to adopt an individualized version of such programs, to be included in coursework of virtually every classes taught by those districts.

 

        It’s a form of guerrilla warfare, with the inaccurate version of ethnic studies rejected and rewritten before the state adopted its model curriculum figuring to sneak gradually through the back doors of thousands of classrooms and into the minds of millions of schoolchildren.

 

        The rejected version painted virtually all whites as oppressors throughout history, with all other ethnic groups their victims. In reality, human history has been much more complex. One example:  European whites did run the African slave trade that brought most blacks to the Americas. But it could not have worked without help from Africans who warred on and forcibly enslaved other Africans, then brought them to ports where they were sold to European slavers. So whites were far from the only ones in the slave trade, which still persists in large scale in much of the Moslem world – something almost never mentioned in critical ethnic studies.

 

        The same rejected version ironically portrayed Jews as privileged oppressors despite their eons of persecution in every imaginable manner from slavery to expropriation to mass expulsions and genocide to state- and church-sponsored burnings at the stake.

 

That’s why early versions of the California ethnic studies plan were rejected. But now many local school board members voting millions of dollars to write new curricula for local schools and allocating more millions for hiring teachers to purvey the rejected misinformation have no idea which version of history reflects reality and what is self-serving fantasy from the authors of the state’s rejected first draft.

 

        This is happening not only in local districts, but also at the college and university level, where some students are being taught distorted history making whites and the tiny Jewish minority among them into the vilest of villains.

 

        Nowhere is this better exemplified than in a UCLA class taught by Ethnic Studies Asst. Prof. Loubna Qutami, titled “Palestine in Comparative Ethnic Studies Frameworks.”

 

        This is the same Qutami who wrote on a blog several years ago that she had “decided to commit my whole self to Palestine.”

 

        She has also written that her mother’s family was forcibly driven from the Israeli city of Haifa during the 1948 Israeli war of independence which saw Israel invaded by armies from seven Arab states, including Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Jordan.

 

        Asked via email which frameworks her class would cover, Qutami did not respond. Nor did she answer when asked how she might react if a student informed her in class that Haifa’s Arabs were not expelled in 1948, the city having long had a large Arab population.

 

        Nor would she say how she might treat a student from Israel who enrolled in her class.

 

        It’s difficult to understand why this course taught by someone who has declared herself a strong partisan in the Israel-Palestine conflict should be subsidized as objective learning by taxpayers on the UC campus in most demand among graduating high school seniors.

 

        But the consequences could eventually go much farther. Classes much like this one, promoting anti-Jewish “alternative facts,” were commonplace for decades in German schools, laying the groundwork for the Holocaust.

 

        Violent effects of curricula like this, which could soon be widespread, at state university levels, might not be felt for many years to come.

 

But their influence would likely be strong, as they are “educating” many of the folks who will teach ethnic studies for the foreseeable future.

 

In the meantime, they could poison the academic atmosphere in California not merely for Jews, but for other whites like Armenian-Americans and Irish-Americans who fought discrimination for generations.

 

    -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

THIS RECALL SPURRED SOME FRESH IDEAS

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, OCTOBER 5, 2021 OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

        “THIS RECALL SPURRED SOME FRESH IDEAS”

 

        Until the campaigning got serious in the recall election that unsuccessfully targeted California Gov. Gavin Newsom, this state had not for years heard very many new and creative ideas for solving its many problems.

 

        But suddenly during the recall, the air was full of them. Sure, the campaign season saw a lot of old ideas rehashed, but there were also new thoughts.

 

        On water shortages, the usual bromide solution has long been “build more and higher reservoirs and dams to capture more rainwater and snowfall runoff.” That idea got plenty of airing during the campaign among the 46-person corps of wanna-be replacement governors.

 

        But there was a new idea, too, this one coming from YouTube financial advisor Kevin Paffrath of Ventura. Build a tunnel across most of America to bring Mississippi River water to parched California. That, he said, could relieve the Midwest’s frequent flooding while also slaking this state’s never-ending thirst.

 

        Never mind that the idea was quickly and legitimately laughed off because few of the many states en route would agree to hosting a massive new pipeline tunnel, while most states along the big river’s path would object to losing any of their water.

 

        Still, it was a new idea, the first fresh thought in California water circles since the late Los Angeles County Supervisor Kenneth Hahn campaigned in the 1970s for towing calved icebergs here from Antarctica and then draining their melt into the state’s water systems.

 

        For sure, both ideas are more inventive than merely enlarging reservoirs when there isn’t enough water available to fill them at their present capacity.

 

Democrat Paffrath, who finished second among replacement candidates, showed more moxie than other hopefuls by crashing some of his rivals’ rallies. He also had other creative ideas. Example: make non-violent criminals do unpaid public service work right where they committed their crimes, like cleaning streets and painting over graffiti. He also advocated paying students over 18 to finish high school and attend college or trade school and proposed a two-week limit for granting new building permits to developers willing to pay for an accelerated timetable.

 

        And he suggested tunneling under existing roads and freeways to create more capacity and ease traffic.

 

        These might not all be practical ideas, but they were refreshingly original.

 

        Most Republican replacement hopefuls were far less inventive, but still expanded on older ideas, like former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer pushing to clear much more deadwood from forests to give wildfires less fuel. Never mind that this interferes with natural forest life cycles. Faulconer also wanted to let parents decide whether their children should repeat a school grade level because of learning lost in remote teaching during the pandemic shutdowns and he advocated holding utilities more responsible for damage from wildfires they cause.

 

        Celebrity candidate Caitlyn Jenner advocated reviewing all state regulations and eliminating any that have outlived their usefulness. This sounds good, and ex-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger tried it, but it did not fly, almost most regulations remaining in force.

 

        And Green Party candidate Dan Kapelovitz advocated ranked choice voting, now used to avoid runoff elections in local elections in Oakland and San Francisco. This saves money and time, but produces weak, unpopular mayors in both cities. He also advocated full personage status for animals, arguing that if court decisions like Citizens United can give corporations such standing, why not animals? Voters were left to wonder how animals might exercise their freedom of speech.

 

        Some Republicans like Board of Equalization member Ted Gaines wanted to overturn the 2014 Proposition 47, which lowered many former felonies to misdemeanor status with little or no punishment. But like any voter initiative, that law can be overturned by another public vote, if that’s what the voters want.

 

        Plenty of candidates advocated more affordable housing, but none even mentioned the obvious solution of converting the billions of square feet now idled in office buildings whose former workers now operate from home.

 

        It added up to one of the most free-thinking campaigns California has seen, with far more interesting ideas raised than in “normal” elections.

 

        Maybe some versions of these ideas would actually work. That possibility can be tested in the regular elections coming up next June and November.

 

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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