California

Subterms

    More stories

    • 175 Shares109 Views

      in US Politics

      California has a $5.2bn plan to pay off unpaid rent accrued during the pandemic

      by

      California is pursuing an ambitious plan to pay off the entirety of unpaid rent from low-income tenants who fell behind during the pandemic, in what could constitute the largest ever rent relief program in the US.The state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, is negotiating with legislators and said the $5.2bn plan would pay landlords all of what they are owed while giving renters a clean slate.If successful, the rent forgiveness plan would amount to an extraordinary form of aid in the largest state in the US, which has suffered from a major housing crisis and severe economic inequality long before Covid-19.An estimated 900,000 renters in California owe an average of $4,600 in back rent, according to a recent analysis. Without aggressive protections and relief, experts say the state would experience a tsunami of evictions and a dramatic worsening of its homelessness crisis. Even with restrictions on evictions in place since March 2020, vulnerable renters have continued to be pushed out of their homes while out of work and unable to pay the high costs of rent in the state.Federal eviction protections are due to expire at the end of June, as are California’s regulations which applied to more renters. Lawmakers, who are currently negotiating over the state’s roughly $260bn operating budget, are debating whether to extend the restrictions on evictions beyond June. The vast majority of people who have applied for relief have not yet received funds, according to state officials, which is why tenant groups are pushing for protections to remain in place.“The expectation for people to be up and at ’em and ready to pay rent on 1 July is wholeheartedly unfair,” said Kelli Lloyd, a 43-year-old single mother, to the Associated Press. She said she had not worked consistently since the pandemic began in March 2020.Lloyd, a member of the advocacy group Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, is supposed to pay $1,924 a month for a two-bedroom, two-bathroom rent-controlled apartment in the Crenshaw district of south Los Angeles. But she said she was $30,000 behind after not working for most of the last year to care for her two children as daycare centers closed and schools halted in-person learning.That debt will probably be covered by the government. But Lloyd said she recently lost a job at a real estate brokerage and had yet to find another one. She is worried she could be evicted if the protections expire.“Simply because the state has opened back up doesn’t mean people have access to their jobs,” she said.Meanwhile, in the wine country area of Sonoma county, property manager Keith Becker told the AP that 14 tenants are more than $100,000 behind in rent payments. It’s put financial pressure on the owners, who Becker says have “resigned themselves to it”. He argued that the eviction protections should end. The $5.2bn fund to pay off people’s rent comes from multiple federal aid packages approved by Congress. Jason Elliott, a senior counselor to Newsom on housing and homelessness, said that figure appeared to be more than enough to cover all rent debts in the state.But the state has been slow to distribute that money, and it is unlikely it can spend it all by 30 June. A report from the California department housing and community development showed that of the $490m in requests for rental assistance through 31 May, just $32m has been paid. That does not include the 12 cities and 10 counties that run their own rental assistance programs.“It’s challenging to set up a new, big program overnight,” said assemblyman David Chiu, a Democrat from San Francisco and chair of the assembly housing and community development committee. “It has been challenging to educate millions of struggling tenants and landlords on what the law is.”While employment among middle- and high-wage jobs has exceeded pre-pandemic levels, employment rates for Californians earning less than $27,000 a year are down more than 38% since January 2020, according to Opportunity Insights, an economic tracker based at Harvard University.“The stock market may be fine, we may be technically reopened, but people in low-wage jobs, which are disproportionately people of color, are not back yet,” said Madeline Howard, senior attorney for the Western Center on Law and Poverty.Some housing advocates are asking the state to keep the eviction ban in place until the unemployment rate among low-wage workers has dropped to pre-pandemic levels. It is similar to how state officials would impose restrictions on businesses in counties where Covid-19 infection rates were higher while those with lower infection rates could reopen more quickly. More

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Elections

      What You Need to Know About the California Recall, Explained

      by

      The 12 questions that help explain the historical, political and logistical forces behind the effort to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom of California.The coronavirus pandemic is rapidly receding in California, but for Gov. Gavin Newsom, at least one side effect has lingered: the Republican-led push to relieve him of his job.How a Democratic star in the bluest of blue states could have ended up confronting a recall remains one of the more remarkable mysteries of the moment. In a perfect storm of partisan rage and pandemic upheaval, the effort to oust Mr. Newsom has become only the second recall attempt against a California governor to qualify for the ballot.With only a few procedural steps remaining, a special election appears destined for autumn, or perhaps even sooner. Next week marks an obscure yet significant milestone: the Tuesday deadline for voters who signed the recall petition to change their minds and have their names removed.If you haven’t been paying attention to every detail — every in-the-clutch mega-donation, every Kodiak bear appearance — we totally understand. So here is the California Recall Encyclopedia of 2021.So what’s with California and recalls?California Republicans are pushing to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom.Justin Sullivan/Getty ImagesDirect democracy is a big part of Golden State political culture. Since 1911, when California approved recalls as part of a sweeping Progressive-era reform package, 179 recall attempts have been made against state officeholders. Launching a recall in California is easier than in almost any state, and every governor since 1960 has faced at least one.But the vast majority of those efforts against governors fizzle. California is enormous, with a population of nearly 40 million and at least five major media markets. The cost of campaigning statewide tends to thwart all but the most moneyed and determined critics.Besides Mr. Newsom’s, only one other recall of a California governor, Gray Davis, has ever reached an election. Mr. Davis lost in 2003 to Arnold Schwarzenegger, who went on to face his own blitz of attempted recalls.How do California recalls work?A recall petition must be signed by enough registered voters to equal 12 percent of the turnout in the last election for governor. The organizers do not need to give a reason for the recall, but they often do. The petition must include at least 1 percent of the last vote for the office in at least five counties. Proponents have 160 days to gather their signatures.The signatures must then be examined and verified by the California secretary of state. If the petitions meet the threshold — 1,495,709 valid signatures in this case — voters who signed have 30 business days to change their minds. Mr. Newsom’s critics have turned in more than 1.7 million signatures, and voters have until June 8 to reconsider.After that, the state finance department has up to 30 days to determine the cost of a special election and a joint legislative budget committee has up to 30 days to weigh in. Those calculations are underway, but the cost of a special election has been estimated at more than $100 million.The secretary of state must then officially certify the petition, and the lieutenant governor has to set an election that is 60 to 80 days from the date of certification. If the proposed date is so close to a regularly scheduled election that the two could be reasonably consolidated, the deadline can be extended to 180 days.Who can run in a recall?Candidates to replace the governor must be U.S. citizens registered to vote in California, and must pay a filing fee of about $4,000 or submit signatures from 7,000 supporters. They cannot be convicted of certain felonies, and they cannot be the governor up for recall. They have until 59 days before the election to file.The ballot asks voters two questions: Should the governor be recalled? And if so, who should be the new governor? If the majority of voters say no to the first question, the second is moot. But if more than 50 percent vote yes, the candidate with the most votes becomes the next governor. The 2003 winner, Mr. Schwarzenegger, had only 48.6 percent of the vote.Who is challenging Newsom?John Cox, a San Diego businessman, has been touring the state with a live Kodiak bear.Mike Blake/ReutersThirty-seven candidates have officially announced their intention to challenge Mr. Newsom in the recall. The most high-profile candidates are Republicans. No serious challenger has emerged from Mr. Newsom’s party.The Republicans include Kevin Faulconer, the former mayor of San Diego; Doug Ose, a former congressman from Sacramento; John Cox, a San Diego businessman who recently distinguished himself by touring the state with a live Kodiak bear; and Caitlyn Jenner, a reality television star and former Olympic athlete.Who started the recall?Three sets of critics tried five times to recall Mr. Newsom before the sixth recall petition caught on in 2020. The first two groups were led by unsuccessful Republican candidates for Congress in Southern California, and the first papers were filed three months after Mr. Newsom’s inauguration in 2019.All three groups were Trumpian conservatives who, at least initially, raised familiar arguments against the governor’s liberal stances on such issues as the death penalty, immigration, gun control and taxes.The lead proponent of the current recall campaign is Orrin Heatlie, a retired Yolo County sheriff’s sergeant who had handled the social media for one of the earlier failed recall bids. He and his group, the California Patriot Coalition, took issue in particular with the Newsom administration’s resistance to Trump administration crackdowns on undocumented immigrants.Why pick on Newsom?Mr. Newsom, 53, the former mayor of San Francisco, has long been a favorite target of Republicans.His liberal pedigree and deep Democratic connections push an array of G.O.P. buttons. His aunt, for instance, was married for a time to Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s brother-in-law. Mr. Newsom, a wine merchant, got his start in politics and business with support from the wealthy Getty family. In 2004, he and his first wife, the cable news legal commentator Kimberly Guilfoyle, appeared in a spread for Harper’s Bazaar shot at the Getty Villa and titled “The New Kennedys.”As mayor, Mr. Newsom made headlines for sanctioning same-sex marriage licenses before they were legal. As governor, he has remained a progressive standard-bearer. He championed ballot initiatives that legalized recreational marijuana and outlawed possession of the high-capacity magazines often used in mass shootings. One of his first acts as governor was to declare a moratorium on executions.Mr. Newsom is now married to Jennifer Siebel Newsom, a filmmaker, and is the father of four small children. Ms. Guilfoyle is Donald Trump Jr.’s girlfriend.Isn’t it hard to recall a Democrat in California?A man signed a petition at a booth run by conservative activists in Pasadena, Calif.David Mcnew/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesCalifornia is less liberal in the aggregate than its reputation. Some six million Californians voted for Donald J. Trump in the 2020 election. That’s roughly quadruple the number of signatures proponents needed to put a recall onto the ballot.And although Mr. Heatlie and his group describe themselves as mainstream, a significant portion of the energy behind the recall is coming from the fringes. Early rallies to promote it were heavily populated by Proud Boys and anti-vaccination activists. Backers of Mr. Heatlie’s campaign have made social media posts bashing immigrants and depicting the governor as Hitler.“Microchip all illegal immigrants. It works! Just ask Animal control,” Mr. Heatlie himself wrote in a 2019 Facebook post. He now says that the remark was “a conversation starter” that he did not intend to be taken literally.Did the pandemic play into the recall?Not at first.Californians initially approved of Mr. Newsom’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic. Mr. Newsom was the first governor in the nation to issue a stay-at-home mandate, a decision that seemed prescient as the virus ravaged the Northeast. But Mr. Newsom’s on-again, off-again health rules began testing Californians’ patience.Separately, Mr. Heatlie’s recall campaign had languished. It had to be filed twice because of technical errors. By last June, when the secretary of state gave the group permission to start circulating petitions, the governor’s emergency health orders had dispersed the usual signature-gathering crowds at supermarkets and malls.Citing the pandemic restrictions, the group asked Judge James Arguelles of the Sacramento Superior Court for an extension. Judge Arguelles granted it. The governor’s supporters say the recall would never have gotten off the ground had the judge not extended the signature-gathering deadline.Public school parents expressed widespread dissatisfaction with the sustained shutdown of public school classrooms during the pandemic. (Mr. Newsom’s children attend private schools.) But the governor’s approval ratings were relatively healthy even in the winter when Covid-19 was still pummeling California. They have risen markedly as the virus has waned.What happened at French Laundry?On the evening of Nov. 6, hours after the court approval was made final for the signature gathering extension, the governor went to a birthday party for a Sacramento lobbyist and friend at French Laundry, a pricey Napa Valley restaurant. After photos leaked of Mr. Newsom mingling, maskless, at the restaurant, he apologized, but Californians were outraged.And Republicans were ecstatic: Mr. Heatlie’s petitions, which had only 55,588 signatures on the day of the dinner, had nearly half a million a month after Nov. 6.Who is backing the recall now?Orrin Heatlie leads the California Patriot Coalition, which took issue in particular with the Newsom administration’s resistance to Trump administration crackdowns on undocumented immigrants.Max Whittaker for The New York TimesMr. Heatlie said the 1,719,943 voters who signed his group’s petition are a grass-roots cross-section of Republicans, independents and Democrats who no longer trust the governor. Their names are not public information, and petitions have not yet been formally certified.Newt Gingrich, the Republican former House speaker, has promoted the recall. Mike Huckabee, the Republican former governor of Arkansas, donated $100,000 through his political action committee.John E. Kruger, an Orange County entrepreneur and charter school backer who opposed Mr. Newsom’s pandemic health restrictions on churches, remains by far the largest donor. Mr. Kruger, who has donated to candidates of both parties, gave $500,000 to the recall shortly after the French Laundry affair.How has Newsom responded?For many months, he did not utter the R-word. But since March, when it became clear that it had traction, Mr. Newsom and his campaign team have launched an all-out war on the recall.They have actively discouraged Democrats — including Tom Steyer, a former presidential candidate, and Antonio Villaraigosa, a former mayor of Los Angeles who lost to Mr. Newsom in the 2018 primary — from launching rival campaigns.And Californians, meanwhile, have in some ways had it better than a studio audience on “Oprah.” Mr. Newsom has tweaked health rules to hasten the reopening of businesses and classrooms. He rebated large portions of an enormous state surplus in the form of stimulus checks to poor and middle class taxpayers for up to $1,100 per household. And in late May, he announced the nation’s largest vaccine lottery.Pollsters note that Mr. Newsom has less personal popularity to fall back on than his predecessors, including Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jerry Brown.But the latest poll, conducted in early May by the Public Policy Institute of California, found that nearly six in 10 likely voters would vote to keep Mr. Newsom, and 90 percent of likely voters believe the worst of the pandemic is behind the state.Which side raised the most money?Supporters of the recall have raised approximately $4.7 million so far, and opponents have raised about $13.2 million, according to the nonprofit news site CalMatters.Campaign finance rules have worked in Mr. Newsom’s favor. California law treats his defense against the recall as a ballot issue, but treats the candidacies of his challengers as regular elections. So the governor can raise unlimited sums to fend off the recall, while donors to his rivals must abide by a $32,400-per-election limit on contributions they can make to a single candidate. Mega-donations for and against the overall recall campaigns are not restricted by those single-candidate limits.In late May, Mr. Newsom’s campaign announced a jaw-dropping $3 million donation from the founder of Netflix, Reed Hastings, who supported Mr. Villaraigosa in the 2018 primary. Labor groups, tribal organizations and the California Association of Realtors have also pledged large sums. More

    • 125 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      California launches first-in-nation taskforce to study reparations for Black Americans

      by

      A first-in-the-country taskforce to study and recommend reparations for African Americans held its inaugural meeting in California on Tuesday, launching a two-year process to address the harms of slavery and systemic racism.The meeting of the first state reparations committee in the US coincided with a visit by Joe Biden to Oklahoma, during which the president marked the centenary of the Tulsa race massacre and commemorated the hundreds of Black Americans who were killed by a white mob in a flourishing district known as the “Black Wall Street”. It also comes just over a year after the murder of George Floyd by a white police officer in Minnesota.A federal slavery reparations bill passed out of the House Judiciary Committee in April, but it faces an uphill battle to becoming law. The bill was first introduced in Congress in 1989 and refers to the failed government effort to provide 40 acres (16 hectares) of land to newly freed slaves as the civil war wound down.California’s secretary of state, Shirley Weber, who as a state assemblywoman authored the state legislation creating the taskforce, noted the solemnity of the occasion as well as the opportunity to right a historic wrong that continues today, in the form of large racial disparities in wealth, health and education. African Americans make up just 6% of California’s population yet were 30% of an estimated 250,000 people experiencing homelessness who sought help in 2020.“Your task is to determine the depth of the harm, and the ways in which we are to repair that harm,” said Weber, whose sharecropper parents were forced to leave the south.The state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, a Democrat who signed the bill into law last year, issued a formal apology to Native American tribal leaders in 2019. He also announced the creation of a council to examine the state’s role in campaigns to exterminate and exploit indigenous people in the state.Critics have said that California was not a slaveholding state and should not have to study reparations, or pay for it. But Weber said the state is an economic powerhouse that can point the way for a federal government that has been unable to address the issue. It would not replace any reparations agreed to by the federal government.In 1988, Ronald Reagan signed legislation providing $20,000 in redress and a formal apology to every surviving Japanese American incarcerated during the second world war.Members of the taskforce pointed out that Black Americans have heard all their lives that they need to improve themselves, yet the truth is that they’ve been held back by outright racism and discriminatory laws that prevented them from getting conventional bank loans and buying homes.Slavery may not have flourished in California as it did in southern states, they said, but African Americans were still treated harshly. Their neighborhoods in San Francisco and Los Angeles were razed in the name of development.The nine taskforce members, appointed by Newsom and leaders of the legislature, include the descendants of slaves who are now prominent lawyers, academics and politicians.Steven Bradford, a taskforce member and state senator, said he would like to model a reparations program on the GI bill, allowing for free college and assistance with home-buying.“We have lost more than we have ever taken from this country,” Bradford said. “We have given more than has ever been given to us.” More

    • 50 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      Dissecting the California Recall

      by

      Tuesday: We explore the historical, technical, logistical and financial aspects of the attempt to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom.Gov. Gavin Newsom speaks during a press conference after the mass shooting in San Jose last week.Mike Kai Chen for The New York TimesGood morning.The coronavirus pandemic is rapidly receding in California, but for Gov. Gavin Newsom, at least one side effect has lingered: the Republican-led push to relieve him of his job.How a Democratic star in the bluest of blue states could have ended up confronting a recall remains one of the more remarkable mysteries of the moment. In a perfect storm of partisan rage and pandemic upheaval, the effort to oust Newsom has become only the second recall attempt against a California governor to qualify for the ballot.With only a few procedural steps remaining, a special election appears destined for autumn, or perhaps even sooner.If you haven’t been paying attention to every detail — every reconsideration deadline, every Kodiak bear appearance, every Kruger mega-donation — we totally understand. So here’s the June edition of the California Recall Encyclopedia of 2021.So what’s with California and recalls?Direct democracy is a big part of the Golden State’s political identity. Since 1911, when California approved recalls as part of a sweeping Progressive-era reform package, 179 recall attempts have been made against state officeholders. Launching a recall effort in California is easy compared to most states, and every governor since 1960 has faced at least one.But the vast majority of those efforts fizzle. California is enormous, with a population of nearly 40 million and at least five major media markets. The cost of campaigning statewide tends to thwart all but the most moneyed and determined critics.Besides Newsom’s, only one other recall of a California governor, Gray Davis, has ever reached an election. Davis lost in 2003 to Arnold Schwarzenegger, who went on to face his own blitz of attempted recalls.How do California recalls work?Twelve percent of voters registered in the last gubernatorial election must sign a recall petition. They don’t need to give a reason, but they often do. The petition must include at least 1 percent of the registered voters in at least five counties. Proponents have 160 days to gather their signatures.The signatures must then be examined and verified by the California secretary of state. If the petitions meet the threshold — 1,495,709 valid signatures in this case — voters who signed get 30 business days to change their minds. Newsom’s critics have turned in more than 1.7 million signatures, and voters have until June 8 to reconsider.After that, the state finance department has up to 30 days to determine the cost of a special election, a joint legislative budget committee has up to 30 days to weigh in, and the secretary of state officially certifies the petitions. Those calculations are underway, but the cost of a special election has been estimated at $100 million or more.The lieutenant governor then has to set an election between 60 and 80 days from the date of certification. If the proposed date is close enough to a regularly scheduled election, the deadline can be extended to 180 days.Who can run in a recall?Candidates to replace the governor must be U.S. citizens and registered to vote in California, and must pay a filing fee of about $4,000 or submit signatures from 7,000 supporters. They cannot be convicted of certain felonies, and they cannot be the governor up for recall. They have until 59 days before the election to file.The ballot asks voters two questions: Should the governor be recalled? And if so, who should be the new governor? If the majority of voters say no to the first question, the second is moot. But if more than 50 percent vote yes, the candidate with the most votes becomes the next governor. The 2003 winner, Schwarzenegger, only had 48.6 percent of the vote.A rally in support of the recall of then-Gov. Gray Davis at the State Capitol in Sacramento in July 2003.Paul SakumaWho is challenging Newsom?The most high-profile candidates are Republicans. No serious challenger has emerged from Newsom’s party.The Republicans include Kevin Faulconer, the former mayor of San Diego, and Doug Ose, a former congressman from Sacramento. Other Republicans include John Cox, a San Diego businessman who recently distinguished himself by touring the state with a live Kodiak bear, and Caitlyn Jenner, a reality television star and former Olympic athlete.Who started the effort to recall Newsom?Three sets of critics tried five times to recall Newsom before the sixth recall petition caught on in 2020. The first two groups were led by unsuccessful Republican candidates for Congress in Southern California, and the first papers were filed three months after Newsom’s inauguration in 2019.All three groups were Trumpian conservatives who, at least initially, raised familiar arguments against the governor’s liberal stances on such issues as the death penalty, immigration, gun control and taxes.The lead proponent of the current recall campaign was a retired Yolo County sheriff’s sergeant named Orrin Heatlie who had handled the social media for one of the earlier failed recall bids. He and his group, the California Patriot Coalition, took issue in particular with the Newsom administration’s resistance to Trump administration crackdowns on undocumented immigrants.On the evening of Nov. 6, Newsom went to a birthday party at French Laundry, a pricey Napa Valley restaurant. After photos leaked of the governor mingling, maskless, at the restaurant, Newsom apologized, but Californians were outraged and Republicans were ecstatic.Heatlie’s petitions, which had only 55,588 signatures on the day of the dinner, had nearly half a million a month after Nov. 6.A sign calling for the recall of Gov. Gavin Newsom is posted next to an agricultural field in the Central California town of Firebaugh.Justin Sullivan/Getty ImagesWho is backing the recall now?Heatlie says the 1,719,943 voters who signed his group’s petition are a grass-roots cross-section of Republicans, independents and Democrats who no longer trust Newsom. Their names are not public information, and petitions have not yet been formally certified.Newt Gingrich, the Republican former House speaker, has promoted the recall. Mike Huckabee, the Republican former governor of Arkansas, donated $100,000 through his political action committee.John E. Kruger, an Orange County entrepreneur and charter school backer who opposed Newsom’s pandemic health restrictions on churches, remains by far the largest donor. Kruger, who has donated to candidates of both parties and is registered with neither, gave $500,000 to the recall shortly after the French Laundry affair.Cristian Ruiz got his coronavirus vaccination shot at California State University, Northridge, after the state extended vaccines to walk-ins amid low demand last month.Allison Zaucha for The New York TimesWhat’s the latest?The latest poll, done in early May by the Public Policy Institute of California, found that nearly six in 10 likely voters would vote to keep Newsom, and 90 percent of likely voters believe the worst of the pandemic is behind the state.Supporters of the recall have raised approximately $4.6 million, and opponents have raised about $11.1 million, according to the nonprofit news site CalMatters. Thirty-seven candidates have officially announced their intention to challenge Newsom in the recall.After nearly 3.8 million cases and more than 63,000 deaths, coronavirus infections are as low now as they were at the start of the pandemic, and 56 percent of Californians have received at least one vaccination shot. The state is running a record budget surplus as the stock market has soared and fewer white-collar Californians lost their jobs than expected. Reopening is scheduled for June 15.Could this happen in other states?Most states don’t allow recalls at the state level. If voters want a new governor, the argument goes, they can wait for the next election and vote. Only four gubernatorial recalls in U.S. history have even made it onto the ballot, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures: in 1921 in North Dakota, in 1988 in Arizona, in 2003 in California and in 2012 in Wisconsin.Fourteen governors faced recall efforts last year, according to Joshua Spivak, a senior fellow at Wagner College’s Hugh L. Carey Institute for Government Reform. Twelve recall campaigns focused explicitly on how the pandemic was handled. But only California’s got off the ground.Here’s what else to know todayRelatives of the nine victims in the San Jose mass shooting were among those who gathered at a vigil at City Hall, including the family of Michael Joseph Rudometkin, 40. Mike Kai Chen for The New York TimesA clearer picture has emerged of a mass shooter’s anger. Samuel Cassidy, the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority maintenance worker who killed nine co-workers in San Jose last week before taking his own life, was a highly disgruntled employee who had angry outbursts on the radio system and had told his ex-wife he had wanted to beat up or kill his colleagues, The San Jose Mercury News reports.A ransomware attack on the Azusa police put crime-scene photos, payroll files for officers and other highly sensitive material online, The Los Angeles Times reports.A homeless man who was captured on video attacking an Asian-American police officer in San Francisco on Friday was being held on hate crime and other charges, The San Francisco Chronicle reports.Amid a push to continue working from home as the pandemic wanes, developers in the San Joaquin Valley and other areas are racing to build homes in places that buyers used to regard as outside the limits of an acceptable commute.The San Diego Union-Tribune tells the Memorial Day story of Rudy Martinez, a 22-year-old San Diegan and Navy sailor who was the first Mexican-American to die in World War II.A San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputy was shot and killed on Monday by a motorcyclist who had led the authorities on a chase in the Yucca Valley area. The deputy, Sergeant Dominic Vaca, 43, was a 17-year veteran of the department, ABC 7 reports.It is a time of journalistic soul-searching at The Press Democrat in Sonoma County, after a wine country mayor resigned amid allegations of sexually abusing women. Its top editor admitted the newspaper failed to pursue the story when a reporter first brought forward the accusations. The reporter, Alexandria Bordas, left the paper and took the story to The San Francisco Chronicle, The Los Angeles Times reports.Motorists on one Southern California freeway got an unexpected visitor on Monday. A single-engine Cessna plane made an emergency landing on the southbound lanes of the 101 freeway in the city of Westlake Village, NBC4 Los Angeles reports.California Today goes live at 6:30 a.m. Pacific time weekdays. Tell us what you want to see: CAtoday@nytimes.com. Were you forwarded this email? Sign up for California Today here and read every edition online here. More

    • 150 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      Push to review 2020 votes across US an effort to ‘handcuff’ democracy

      by

      Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterConservative activists across America are pushing efforts to review the 2020 vote more than six months after the election, a move experts say is a dangerous attempt to continue to sow doubt about the results of the 2020 election that strikes at the heart of America’s democratic process.Encouraged by an ongoing haphazard review of 2.1m ballots in Arizona, activists are pushing to review votes or voting equipment in California, Georgia, Michigan, and New Hampshire.Meanwhile, in Wisconsin, the powerful speaker of the state house of representatives recently hired ex-law enforcement officers, including one with a history of supporting Republicans, to spend the next three months investigating claims of fraud. At least one of the officers hired has a history of supporting GOP claims. The announcement also came after state officials announced they found just 27 cases of potential fraud in 2020 out of 3.3m votes cast.The reviews are not going to change the 2020 election results or find widespread fraud, which is exceedingly rare. Nonetheless, the conservative activists behind the effort – many of whom have little election experience – have championed the reviews as an attempt to assuage concerns the 2020 election was stolen. If the probes don’t turn up anything, they will only serve to increase confidence in elections, proponents say.But experts see something much more dangerous happening. Continuing to review elections, especially after a result has been finalized, will allow conspiracy theories to fester and undercut the authority of legitimately elected officials, they say. Once election results are certified by state officials, they have long been considered final and it is unprecedented to continue to probe results months after an official is sworn in. It’s an issue that gets at the heart of America’s electoral system – if Americans no longer have faith their officials are legitimately elected, they worry, the country is heading down an extremely dangerous path.“It is either a witting or unwitting effort to handcuff democratic self-governance,” said David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Research.The efforts also come at the same moment that Republican legislatures around the country are pushing new restrictions to restrict voting access. Unable to point to evidence of significant fraud, Republican lawmakers have frequently said that new restrictions are needed to restore confidence in elections.In New Hampshire, activists have tried to co-opt an audit in the 15,000 person town of Windham to try and resolve a legitimate discrepancy in vote totals for a state representative race. They unsuccessfully tried to pressure officials there to drop experienced auditors in favor of Jovan Pulitzer, a conspiracy theorist reportedly involved in the Arizona recount who has become a kind of celebrity among those who believe the election was stolen. Even though the experienced auditors have found no evidence of wrongdoing, activists have continued to float baseless theories of wrongdoing in a Telegram channel following audits.“Nothing today is showing evidence of fraud. Nothing today is showing evidence of digital manipulation of the machines,” Harri Hursti, an election expert and one of the auditors, said this week, according to WMUR. “It’s amazing how much disinformation and dishonest reporting has been spreading.”Activists are also pressuring officials in Cheboygan county, Michigan to let an attorney affiliated with Sidney Powell, a Trump ally who brought baseless lawsuits after the election, conduct an audit of election equipment. The chair of the board of commissioners told the Detroit News he could not recall a more contentious issue debated before the board in more than two decades.The Michigan efforts prompted a letter from the state’s top election official, who warned the clerks in Cheboygan and Antrim county – another hotbed of conspiracy theories – that boards didn’t have authority to order audits and not to turn over election equipment to unaccredited outside firms, the Washington Post reported. Michigan conducted more than 250 audits after the 2020 race that affirmed the results.Dominion voting systems, which sold equipment to the state, also warned that counties may not be able to use machines in future elections if they turned them over to uncertified auditors.“We have every reason to want transparency,” Jocelyn Benson, the state’s top election official, said in an interview. “But that’s not what this is. This is about an effort, as has been proved time and time again by the actions of these individuals, in Arizona and elsewhere, this is an effort to actually spread falsehoods and misinformation under the guise of transparency.”San Luis Obispo county in the central coast of California has been another target for calls for an audit. During a meeting earlier this month, officials played hours of recorded messages calling for an audit, including one asking whether Tommy Gong, the county’s clerk and recorder, was a member of the communist party.Activists are also targeting Fulton county, Georgia, another place that was at the center of Trump’s baseless election attacks last year. Earlier in May, a local judge said that an group led by Garland Favorito, who has reportedly pushed conspiracy theories about 9/11 and the JFK assassination, could inspect absentee ballots, though in a key break from the Arizona review, the judge made it clear that the actual ballots would have to remain in county officials’ custody. Georgia has already manually recounted all of the ballots in the state, which confirmed Joe Biden’s win over Trump last year.Even in Arizona, the crown jewel of the audit movement, activists may have plans to do even more auditing after the current review of 2.1m ballots wraps up. Republicans are finalizing a plan to use untested software to analyze images of ballots, the Arizona Republic reported Friday.“Rarely do the losers believe the they have lost, but historically those who fell short graciously concede once all legal channels are exhausted,” said Tammy Patrick, a former election official in Maricopa county who now serves as a senior adviser at the Democracy Fund.“The proliferation of these actions undermine and erode the very foundation of election integrity and our adversaries need only sit back and watch as we chip away at our democratic norms. We should be telling the American voter the truth – the election had integrity, real audits and recounts were done, court challenges heard.” More

    • 88 Shares129 Views

      in Elections

      The State of California’s ‘State of Jefferson’

      by

      Wednesday: In California’s rural far northern counties, furor for the recall has taken hold alongside the region’s fascination with secession.Mark Baird displayed a “State of Jefferson” flag at his ranch in Siskiyou County. Flags promoting secession can be seen around far Northern California.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesGood morning.Roughly 1.7 million of California’s 22.1 million registered voters signed the petition to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom. Many of those who signed it technically live in California but symbolically live in another state entirely.California’s rural far north, sometimes styling itself as the “State of Jefferson,” has long viewed itself as a land apart. Its dozen or so counties, mostly north and east of Sacramento, voted for President Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020.In Shasta, Lassen, Modoc, Siskiyou and other State of Jefferson-friendly counties, more than one in six voters signed the petition to recall Newsom, according to the Secretary of State’s data. And, as The Sacramento Bee and The Los Angeles Times have reported, members of a Shasta County militia have for months been threatening violence over the governor’s pandemic health restrictions. (Those rules, Newsom has said, will end on June 15.)Last week, in a nonbinding but revealing election, five counties in eastern Oregon endorsed a plan to secede from the liberal-leaning parts of their state and take a chunk of the State of Jefferson with them. The master plan: to become part of Idaho and then add all or parts of Siskiyou, Shasta, Tehama, Del Norte, Modoc and Lassen Counties on the California side of Oregon’s southern border.“Those of us in rural Oregon are written off,” Mike McCarter, the 74-year-old retiree leading the secession drive, told our colleague Kirk Johnson.McCarter, who bought a gun club in retirement and now helps people get their concealed-carry permits, said eastern Oregon and California’s northern border counties had more in common with conservative Idaho than with the more liberal majorities of their states. “We just want to come alongside them and bolster the conservative support,” he said.Last week’s vote brought to seven the number of Oregon’s 36 counties that would, if they could, join the grass-roots movement to “Move Oregon’s Border For a Greater Idaho.” The group’s website describes the California annexation as a kind of Phase Two.Mount Shasta, a 14,162-foot dormant volcano, towers over Weed, Calif.Max Whittaker for The New York TimesCould it happen?Unlikely, although Northern California has periodically threatened to secede since the state was founded in 1850. Mountainous and woodsy (as opposed to beachy, aggie, foggy, desert-y or glitzy), the region makes up more than a fifth of the state’s land mass but only 3 percent of its population. It is also generally whiter, older and poorer than the rest of the state.This is the California that the rest of the country doesn’t talk about — a California where hunting and fishing, not surfing, are the signature pastimes and the jobs are more likely to be in timber than in tech. The region has felt chronically neglected and dismissed by California’s lawmakers and coastal population centers.In fact, the modern State of Jefferson concept arose in 1941 from an effort to get more state funding. One of Oregon’s rural mayors talked the California border counties into declaring that they would all form a separate state unless Salem and Sacramento stopped taking their tax money and leaving their roads in disrepair.A tongue-in-cheek naming contest was held by a newspaper in Siskiyou County, and “Jefferson” got the most votes (after the founding father), beating out “Discontent” and “Bonanza.” A group of young men, toting rifles, proclaimed a “patriotic rebellion” in which they would “secede every Thursday until further notice.”The movement was cut short when the attack on Pearl Harbor prompted the rebels to rethink their allegiance. But the State of Jefferson still has its own flag — a gold pan with two X’s that stand apart, conveying the region’s sense of having been “double-crossed” by far-flung state capitals.The Jefferson state of mind has lived on, particularly lately.Oregon’s Legislature, which is dominated by Democrats, would have to go along with the proposed defection to Idaho, as would Idaho’s Republican-dominated Legislature — not to mention California’s Legislature and the U.S. Congress. But as polarization persists in and beyond California, it’s not completely unthinkable.Here’s what else to know todayThe Block Island wind farm, the first commercial offshore wind farm in the United States, off the coast of Rhode Island in 2016.Kayana Szymczak for The New York TimesCompiled by Jonathan WolfeThe federal government said it cleared a key hurdle to open the central California coast to offshore wind farms, part of President Biden’s aggressive plan to expand renewable energy and shift the nation away from fossil fuels.The state has already had 900 more wildfires than at this point in 2020, which was a record-breaking year for fires, The Associated Press reports.State lawmakers are considering cutting the share of out-of-state students at University of California campuses to make room for more local residents, The Los Angeles Times reports.President Biden is coming under increasing pressure to abandon a Trump-era immigration rule known as Title 42, which allows border agents to turn away migrants without giving them a chance to apply for protections.OptumServe, a company that was paid $221 million to operate dozens of vaccination sites around the state, has helped administer only about 1 percent of shots given in California, CalMatters reports.The president of California’s largest state employee union was ousted after 13 years in the role, The Associated Press reports.The Los Angeles Times reports that Joe Hedges, the chief operating officer of the California High-Speed Rail Authority, has left his job after an investigation by the agency.An audit found that Caltrans overpaid thousands of workers $1.5 million, and failed to recoup the money, The Sacramento Bee reports.A subway train at Union Station in Los Angeles in January.Philip Cheung for The New York TimesLos Angeles transit officials have pushed subway and rail projects forward during the pandemic, but The Los Angeles Times asks, “Will the riders return?”The central California town of Corcoran is sinking, a situation caused primarily not by nature, but agriculture.A proposed affordable housing project next to a luxury housing complex in Livermore, in the Bay Area, is dividing residents who are accusing one another of racism and elitism, The San Francisco Chronicle reports.A student-led resolution calling on the University of California, Santa Barbara, to divest from companies that supply Israel with military equipment has heightened tensions on the campus, where the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has long been a source of discord, Reuters reports.Paleontologists are excavating a recently discovered trove of fossils from the Miocene era — including mastodons, camels and fossilized trees — in the Sierra Nevada foothills, Gizmodo reports.In response to a wave of pandemic pet adoptions, veterinary offices are offering upscale care to meet demand.A photographer for Yale Climate Connections captured life in California’s underwater kelp forests, which are under siege from a population of voracious purple sea urchins.Subscriber event: Join the comedian Sarah Silverman and The Times’s Kevin Roose, Sheera Frenkel and Davey Alba as they discuss how disinformation spreads, and how we can fight back. [Today at 4 p.m. Pacific.]California Today goes live at 6:30 a.m. Pacific time weekdays. Tell us what you want to see: CAtoday@nytimes.com. Were you forwarded this email? Sign up for California Today here and read every edition online here. More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      California Budget: Recovery, Recall and Record Revenue Drive Newsom Plan

      by

      Tuesday: Gov. Gavin Newsom’s $267.8 billion budget proposal reflects the wish list of a state “just flush with cash.”Prekindergarten students at West Orange Elementary School in Orange, Calif., in March. Jae C. Hong/Associated PressGood morning.Six-hundred-dollar checks. Universal prekindergarten. Forgiveness for back rent, traffic tickets, utility bills. Big investments in the electrical grid, broadband, wildfire prevention, drought mitigation. Tax breaks for small business and Hollywood.Flush with a huge surplus and threatened by a campaign to recall him from office, Gov. Gavin Newsom last week proposed a state budget that was the government equivalent of that time everyone in the studio audience got a Pontiac on Oprah. This week, state legislators took up the $267.8 billion plan.With a mid-June budget deadline and Newsom’s fellow Democrats dominating the Legislature, the broad priorities are unlikely to change much. Still, like all those free cars, it’s a lot to process. Here are a few things to know:This budget is about both the recovery and the recall.Newsom has been in campaign mode for months, since it became clear that the Republican-led recall effort would most likely lead to a special election. Polls show that an increasing majority of voters disapprove of the recall. But he’s still in a vulnerable position with lawmakers and lobbyists.Last week’s budget rollout was a cavalcade of photo ops for big-ticket line items: Rebate checks of up to $1,100 on Monday for middle-income Californians; historic spending on homelessness on Tuesday; an expansion of preschool to all 4-year-olds on Wednesday; a major small-business grant program on Thursday.For the teachers’ unions that helped elect him, the governor proposed a record $14,000 in per-pupil school funding. For parents furious that more than half of the state’s public school students remain learning remotely, that funding was contingent on an in-person return to classrooms.Progressives who get out the vote for Democrats in California elections got repayment of billions of dollars in back rent and utility bills for low-income renters, funding for pilot universal-basic-income programs, and forgiveness of some $300 million worth of traffic tickets for low-income drivers. Newsom also proposed extending Medi-Cal to undocumented workers over 60 and significantly expanding housing for homeless Californians.Businesses have already received a $6.2 billion tax cut. But the governor also proposed hundreds of millions of dollars in incentives for companies to relocate to California, for tourism marketing and for tax credits to lure filming back from, he said, “places like Georgia whose values don’t always align with the production crews.”Bicyclists ride past a homeless encampment at the Venice Beach Boardwalk.Jessica Pons for The New York TimesIt is also about record revenue.State officials expected the virus to be devastating. But they overestimated the economic damage to skilled workers and underestimated the flood of money that would arise from the booming stock market. Now the state’s progressive tax system, which relies heavily on the well-off, has delivered about $100 billion more than had been projected. The Biden administration’s stimulus plan also channeled some $27 billion in federal aid to the state.All but about $38 billion of that revenue, by law, must go to public schools, various budget reserves and other obligations. Some, too, must be rebated to taxpayers by mid-2023. The governor’s proposal included some $11 billion to pay down the state’s long-term liability for public employee pensions. And he took some heat from an independent state analyst on Monday for holding onto about $8 billion he had pulled from cash reserves last year, instead of repaying it.Still, the situation is a far cry from 2003, when the dot-com bust and tight state budgets fueled the recall of Gov. Gray Davis, said Rob Stutzman, a Republican political consultant.“Politicians rarely lose when they’re handing out money,” Stutzman said. “And the state is just flush with cash.”It also may reflect a new resolve about government spending.Raphael Sonenshein, the executive director of the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at California State University, Los Angeles, regards Newsom’s proposal as part of a new embrace of government largess in the Democratic Party. Gone, he said, is the split-the-difference frugality of, say, Gov. Jerry Brown.“Partly it’s the country coming out of the pandemic, and partly it’s what is coming out of Washington, D.C.,” he said. “But states — and not just California — are in a position not to just repair but to even reverse the decline in the social safety net. And that’s a big deal.”President Biden’s New Deal-inspired plans to help the nation recover from the pandemic have paved the way for sweeping state-level proposals such as Newsom’s, Sonenshein said. So has the sense among financial experts that government could and should have intervened more aggressively to head off the Great Recession in 2008.“I think the hold of austerity politics has been so strong for so long that people didn’t question a lot of the orthodoxy. But that has changed,” he said.Here’s what else to know todayPier 39 in San Francisco in March soon after the state reopened from a strict lockdown.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesCalifornia will wait until next month to adopt the new C.D.C. guidance that fully vaccinated people can drop their masks in most settings. State health officials said on Monday they wanted to give Californians more time to get vaccinated and prepare for the change, The Los Angeles Times reports.The Palisades fire in western Los Angeles was 23 percent contained on Monday. Experts called it a warning that California faces an unusually early fire season this summer as a severe drought takes hold.After an extraordinary 14-month hiatus caused by the pandemic, Robert Durst’s murder trial was set to resume this week in Los Angeles.Governor Newsom and his wife saw their income rise in 2019 during his first year in office. The couple made $1.7 million, much of it from Newsom’s winery and restaurant businesses that he put in a blind trust when he became governor, The Associated Press reports.Rob Bonta, California’s first Filipino-American attorney general, keeps a photo in his office of a sign hung in a Stockton hotel lobby in 1920: “Positively no Filipinos allowed.” In an interview with The Los Angeles Times, Bonta said he was called racist names as a child in the Sacramento area, and he described the recent anti-Asian attacks as a “full-on state emergency.”Relatives of George Floyd and their lawyer Ben Crump attended a rally at Pasadena City Hall on Monday, calling for the firing of the police officer who shot and killed Anthony McClain, a Black man whose death last year has angered Black Lives Matter activists. KTLA reports that more than 100 people rallied outside City Hall, and officials reacted by shutting the building and canceling a scheduled City Council meeting.The California lumber town of Weed was named for a 19th-century timber baron, Abner Weed. For years, Weed the town refused to embrace that other more famous weed. But no longer. The town had a change of heart, opened the door to the pot industry and now leverages the cosmic humor of its name.Relations have soured between John Cox, the Republican recall candidate, and conservative recall organizers. Cox pledged to make a $100,000 donation to the campaign to recall the governor, but has given only half of the money, The San Francisco Chronicle reports.The demand for Covid-19 vaccine shots for adults has declined in Ventura County, where officials announced that two of the county’s largest vaccination sites will cut back their hours and be open three days a week instead of six, The Ventura County Star reports.California Today goes live at 6:30 a.m. Pacific time weekdays. Tell us what you want to see: CAtoday@nytimes.com. Were you forwarded this email? Sign up for California Today here and read every edition online here. More