The Burlingame Voice

Poll: 70% say Bay Area quality of life has declined

When I read headlines like 7 in 10 residents say the region’s quality of life is getting worse, I think about how bad the roads have become (looking at you, El Camino), how poorly many government agencies are being run, how much traffic there is, how we are losing control of our local voting and zoning, and public safety.  School quality, water security, utility costs---the list is long.  Having spent years in market research, I know a poll can be tweaked in any number of ways from who gets polled to how the questions and multiple-choice answers are phrased to who does the analysis of the results.  The Merc reported on the latest public sentiment here.  It notes

According to the poll, 70% of registered voters said the Bay Area’s quality of life has worsened over the past five years, while just 13% said it has improved. Seventeen percent said it’s stayed the same.

A whopping 46% of respondents said they were likely to leave the Bay Area in the next few years, with two-thirds of those citing high housing costs as the main reason to consider a move. During the pandemic, people fleeing the region contributed to a 3% population drop, though that exodus has since slowed.  When asked to select ways the region might best be improved, respondents’ top choice at 39% was building more affordable housing.

Of course, that means 61% chose something other than to jam more people into the Bay Area.  See how the reporting can spin the story?  If the other choices had overlap to split the responses, 39% starts to look big.

Homeowners in the poll (note, that percentage is not revealed) also said the state’s home insurance meltdown is hitting their finances. Fifty-two percent said their home insurance premiums have increased significantly, 22% said they have avoided using their home insurance policy out of fear of cancellation or rising rates, 12% said they’ve had a difficult time finding an insurer to write them a policy and 8% said an insurer had canceled a policy.

Insurance has been slipping down a slippery slope for years with no real solution from the state. And many renters don't realize their rent is tied to the insurance on their apartment.  Then there is this bit of Sacramental hand-waving following on the heels of even more restrictions on drilling.  When you leave the state the gas prices are almost unreal---unreal low.

To prevent spikes in gas prices, state lawmakers are now considering a plan from Gov. Gavin Newsom to force oil refiners to keep minimum fuel reserves, though doing so likely wouldn’t lower overall prices at the pump.

The piece finishes off by describing some people who think Silicon Valley giants are "villains" who have "lost their moral compass".  I can't understand where that is coming from or what it has to do with the quality of life in the Bay Area.  At least the piece noted huge support for Prop. 36 to get the organized theft back under control and remove the locked plastic doors protecting shampoo and deodorant.  The big question remains how many people we should jam into the Peninsula?  The RHNA requirements are nonsense, but they are driving down the quality of life for long-time residents who look at things like this on the north end and wonder "why"?  That's the B'game police building in the front.

Bonta: Recycling misdirection

Our Attorney General is really a piece of work.  His latest gambit to attack oil and gas companies is to sue ExxonMobil for deceptive recycling practices.  You heard right.  Apparently, we are all being deceived about recycling by ExxonMobil.  Oddly enough, I have never heard one thing from ExxonMobil about plastics or recycling, but per the Merc piece today:

California Attorney General Rob Bonta and a coalition of environmental nonprofits sued Exxon Mobil on Monday morning alleging the gas giant enacted a “decades-long campaign of deception” that fueled a global plastic pollution crisis.  The lawsuits will seek civil damages from ExxonMobil for environmental destruction, public health harms, and an end to its “deceptive practices” that they argue have led to plastic being found from the depths of the ocean to the peak of Mt. Everest.

The converging lawsuits against ExxonMobil will attempt to prove the corporation systematically led the public to believe that plastic waste is safely disposable through recycling and failed to share information about toxic “forever” chemicals and plastics’ lasting environmental harms. If successful, the lawsuits would compel ExxonMobil to end its “deceptive” practices and could secure hundreds of millions to support climate change solutions.

There is definitely some misinformation or deception going on in the recycling world.  We noted it in April 2021 here.  Recall from that post that "More than 90% of plastics generated in the U.S. each year winds up in landfills or incinerators, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.  Only about 9% is recycled."

We are paying a nickel or a dime extra for every container in CRV, but 9 out of 10 just go to the landfill.  If any organization is fooling people about recyling it's the state via the CRV mandate.  Maybe Bonta should be suing the State of California for deceptive practices and public theft?  Don't hold your breath.

"Newsom 2028" in progress

One has to wonder if our governor is all there all the time.  The weathervane swinging from hard left to sort of maybe right is a wonder to behold.  One can only think that his presidential campaign is underway for 2028.  The Comicle reports that 808,000 acres have burned this far this fire year--more than twice the area damaged in all of 2023.  Completely predictable...because it happens every year.

Dan Walters at Calmatters.org keep banging the budget gong

Initially Newsom proposed a $13.1 billion draw from reserves, but the final 2024-25 budget approved in June took just $5.1 billion from the rainy fund and envisions another $7.1 drawdown in 2025-26. It also largely drains two other reserves, including one for schools.  This year’s deficit resulted from a massive overestimate of revenues by Newsom’s administration in 2022, rather than an economic turndown, and some critics have complained that misusing reserves this year could leave them unable to cope with a recession.

Newsom, whose 2022 projection of a huge budget surplus from explosive revenue gains proved to be incredibly wrong, now wants the state to avoid spending estimates of windfall revenues until they are actually in the bank — a prudence that should have been adopted many years ago.

While Newsom flies around the country to swing states and any other state that would have him, his team finds time to issue this warning.  As if any sensible city with even modest resources wouldn't already be doing it.  He's gotta get this problem that he has ignored for decades under control before 2028.  B'game better go check the Eucs along the Caltrain tracks and some of the little nooks and crannies on the Bayfront.

 

Climate Observations: Google, CalFire and You

This is a placeholder post for when we get to the point where we cannot replace our gas stoves or gas water heaters or gas furnaces or gas barbeques.  Hopefully that day is still a few years away, but the smart bet is the climate fanatics will eventually get us.  When we complain about the costs (many hidden including the soft costs of your time), we will be told to suck it up.

In the meantime, two types of events are taking place.  There are 3,543 wildfires of more than 10 acres burning right now in California per the CalFire incident page.  Your barbeque is a problem, but Sacramento (looking at you, Newsom, even though I know you are busy thinking about a promotion) still hasn't addressed the real need for more manpower, equipment, forest surveillance, etc.  Year after year, same old story and the news media always acts surprised.  Massive amounts of smoke, emissions, and cancelled insurance policies that end up as a State (read us) liability via the FAIR program.

And then there are these two tidbits buried in the business news this week:

Google and Microsoft have vowed to slash emissions by the end of the decade, but new disclosures show their numbers are moving in the wrong direction.   Google’s overall emissions increased by 13.5% from 2022 to 2023, according to its annual sustainability report released Tuesday. They are up by nearly half since 2019. A recent disclosure from Microsoft told a similar story. Its total emissions were up by 29% between 2020 and 2023.

Big Tech's servers are using so much electricity that they are doing direct connections to power plants with "behind-the-meter" access.  Some observers are worried this will destabilize the grid and it certainly won't make it any cheaper.  Stay tuned so we can alert you when to start hoarding gas appliances. 

Graduation Requirement: Let's have the Legislature go first

Sometimes you have to laugh at the Sacramento hubris otherwise you will just cry.  Such was the state of affairs last week when the wise folks in Sac added "personal finance" to the required high school curriculum.  From the Merc:

Last week, California became the 26th state to require high school students to take a stand-alone, one-semester financial literacy course when Gov. Gavin Newsom approved Democratic Assemblymember Kevin McCarty’s bill, AB 2927.  The personal finance course will teach students a range of topics, including banking, budgeting, loans, insurance, investing and credit.

Schools will be required to offer the course by the 2027-28 school year, and the course will be a graduation requirement for the class of 2030-31.

“We need to help Californians prepare for their financial futures as early as possible,” Newsom said in a recent statement. “Saving for the future, making investments and spending wisely are lifelong skills that young adults need to learn before they start their careers, not after.”

I will add they especially need these skills if they want to start a career in politics.  Let's go back to February when two people who understand finance reiterated concerns about the mess called the state budget.  Studying "budgeting" and "credit"?  Let's let the Legislature take the course before the high school kids, please.

Prop. 47 Shenanigans around the ballot

You know things are getting bad in Sacramento when even the SF Comicle starts calling out the legislature as "shady".  An initiative to reverse Prop. 47, which was approved by our clueless electorate a decade ago to reduce the penalties on drug offenses and theft, is headed for the November ballot.  As we noted, the action on the ballot this Fall is in the initiatives.  The shady bits to stymie the initiative are slowing coming out as even Emily Hoeven at the Comicle has caught on:

Earlier this year, lawmakers unveiled a bipartisan package of bills that would, among other things, create a new crime for serial retail thieves, allow prosecutors to combine certain low-level thefts when charging offenders, permit courts to issue retail theft restraining orders and institute sentencing enhancements for those who steal, resell and destroy especially large amounts of property.  Thus far, the package has been smoothly chugging through the Legislature. 

But Democrats have now cooked up a scheme to kill most of their own bills if voters approve a ballot measure to reform Proposition 47 — the controversial 2014 initiative that reduced penalties for some drug and theft offenses — which formally qualified Tuesday for the November election.

Last week, news leaked that Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas and Senate President Pro Tem Mike McGuire planned to amend the Democratic public safety package to make it effective immediately upon Gov. Gavin Newsom’s signature, rather than the customary first day of the new year, and then repeal it if voters approved the Prop 47 reform measure. 

It was a crafty, if cynical, strategy that effectively left ballot measure supporters with a choice: Either they could support the package of bills, which were all but guaranteed to become law in a matter of weeks, or they could take their chances with the ballot measure, which voters might or might not approve and which would require millions of dollars in campaign funding.

Click through to the Comicle piece for all the dirty little moves, the virtue signaling about "mass incarceration", demonizing district attorneys and whatever else our betters in Sac who have the super majority can throw against the wall.  It really is appalling.

Election 2024: The action is in the initiatives

Dan Walters at Calmatters.org has distilled the upcoming election for us noting that the candidate-based voting is a forgone conclusion, but the numerous initiatives is where the action will take place.  I grew up in "Taxachusetts" but my home state has nothing on California.  Squeezing more blood from the middle-class stone is on-going and the question is will this be the election where the backlash arrives?  As Walters writes

The scale of the conflicts is most evident in an initiative, sponsored by the Business Roundtable and anti-tax groups, that would make state and local tax increases markedly more difficult to enact.  It hits Democrats and their allied public employee unions where they live and they have mounted a two-pronged effort to block passage: a lawsuit, now pending in the state Supreme Court, to strike the measure from the ballot, and a competing proposition that would impose a higher and potentially prohibitive vote threshold on the tax measure.

On crime, he notes the ballot will include an "initiative that would modify Proposition 47, a 2014 ballot measure that reduced penalties for many crimes."  I think of it as the "Walgreen's initiative" after hearing multiple instances of people walking out of the store on B'way with a garbage bag full of stuff.  You want shampoo?  Call a clerk to unlock it.  Today's Comicle has a piece about some Safeway taking out the self-check kiosks and it ain't because they want to hire more checkers.  Walters expects the backlash initiative to qualify.  Further down the ballot:

Other high-profile measures either qualified or likely to qualify include a business-sponsored initiative that would repeal the Private Attorneys General Act, a two-decade-old union-sponsored law that makes class action lawsuits against employers relatively easy to file. Others include a third effort to make it easier for local governments to enact rent control, a boost in income taxes on high-income Californians to finance pandemic prevention, and an increase in the state’s minimum wage.

Talk about dumb and dumber.  Let's mess up the rental market, the entry-level job market and kill the Golden Goose all in one fell swoop.  There are five months to go.  We shall see if the voters have had enough or if we get more of the same.  Stay tuned.

UC Berkeley: "Cluster hires". What could go wrong?

Let's do one more education-related post to keep the streak running.  The Sunday SF Comicle section titled "Insight" provided a rare sliver of insight this week.  I enjoy watching new words being created and this piece brought wider notice to the term "Pretendianism" to describe the act of faking your ethnic background to take advantage of ethnicity-driven hiring programs.  The piece titled "Pretendianism too common in academia" asks the question: How do so many people with no Native ties get away with using a false heritage to infiltrate some of the most rarefied academic spaces in America?

I'll skip over the details of one Associate professor Elizabeth Hoover's gaming of the system because the article leaked an even more egregious practice at UC Berkeley that probably exists elsewhere in publicly funded academia.  It's hardly news and it's quite profitable as the Other Elizabeth has been proving for more than a decade.

But deep in the article, this tidbit is revealed

Contrary to some reports, Hoover was not a “cluster hire,” the faculty member said, which is when several new faculty members identified as members of a minority or historically disadvantaged groups are brought aboard simultaneously — a method has been championed at UC Berkeley to make “an immediate and substantial impact far greater than a few isolated hires.” 

Yikes!  Is this a "cheaper by the dozen" approach?  Let's not spend time and effort examining individuals' skill sets.  We'll just hire a handful all at once that look the right way.  One wonders if that tactic would survive the "shoe on the other foot" test?  Is it any wonder that campuses are a mess?  California taxpayers are not getting their money's worth, and the faculty lounge is the first place where the shades should be lifted and sunlight should shine.  "Rarefied spaces" indeed.

Bay Area Population: More shrinkage, significant shrinkage

Peeling back the headline that statewide population rose 0.17% for the first time in years, yields the news that the Bay Area continues to shrink.  Are you wondering why we need to tax the people who remain, to the tune of a $20 billion bond, for "affordable" housing in the Bay Area?  Me too.  The original news reports put it at $10 billion, but a few billion more here and a few there and voilà--it's $20 billion per the MTC news release.  As we noted here, the ink isn't even dry on the measly $6 billion bond that Newsom just rammed through.

Let's go to the tale of the tape:

A net of about 114,000 people immigrated legally into the state from abroad during 2023, up from a net 90,000 people in 2022 and near pre-pandemic levels. 

So, trying to outbuild the global desire to move here is a fool's errand most likely to harm those that are still here

Net domestic migration was still negative, with the state losing an estimated 92,000 people last year from internal migration, but that was far less than the approximate 356,000 net loss in 2021.

And the local story was one of shrinkage with slight growth in the "outskirts" of the Bay Area where there is room for projects like California Forever that would be privately funded and developed.

           Alameda County                -0.5% 

San Mateo County             -0.5%

Marin County                    -0.4%

Sonoma County                 -0.3%

Santa Clara County            flat

Napa County                     +0.4%

Contra Costa County         +0.1%

Solano County                   +0.2%

San Francisco                    +0.1%

Let's put additional big bonds for "affordable" housing on the back burner, nay back in the fridge, until we see how the regulatory clubs like SB9, builders' remedies, buying up hotels and motels for subsidized housing and Newsom's six bill work out.   As Jerry Seinfeld said to George regarding the shrinkage, "I think they know".

California Budget Woes....Woe is Us

There are two highly capable people outside of the state government that act as watchdogs on where our tax dollars are going.  One is David Crane from Govern For California.  The other is Dan Walters at Calmatters.org.  They are both yelling from the mountain top about the fiscal pit they see below.  Here is a bit of Walters' piece from last week:

While Gov. Gavin Newsom gallivants around the country as a campaign surrogate for President Joe Biden – and to burnish his own national image – the state budget he proposed just six weeks ago is falling apart at the seams.  Last week, his Department of Finance indirectly acknowledged the budget’s problems, reporting that through January revenues were running $5.9 billion behind the new budget’s assumption for the current fiscal year.  On Tuesday, the Legislative Analyst’s Office, which advises the Legislature, increased its estimate of the budget’s deficit, which Newsom had originally pegged at $38 billion, to an eye-popping $73 billion after toting up Newsom’s proposals and decreasing its revenue estimate.

When he unveiled his 2024-25 budget in January, Newsom proposed a series of fiscal maneuvers to close the gap, very few of which were actual spending reductions.  He tapped the state’s emergency reserve and dug deeply into the bag of tools that the state has historically used to paper over deficits, including spending deferrals, loans from special funds and accounting tricks, such as a maneuver involving school aid.

The other watchdog, David Crane, quoted Joe Mathews from Zocala Public Square who zeroed in on the last maneuver a couple weeks ago saying:

These $10 billion-plus in deferrals don’t include education, which Newsom and legislative Democrats have claimed their budget doesn’t cut. But here, the administration is playing a more deceptive game. The state’s non-partisan Legislative Analyst’s Office found that California is actually reducing spending on schools and community colleges by $15.2 billion, relative to the budget enacted in June 2023.

The way the state does this is too long and complicated to fully explain here—it involves the convoluted three-part Prop. 98 funding formula. But the short version is that Newsom is charging $9 billion in reductions to the 2022-23 school year and redefining these cuts as a reset of the funding baseline. There are several more billion in school cuts that appear in the budget without any explanation of how they might be achieved.

That's sort of like backdating a check and asking the recipient to still not cash it for a month while simultaneously saying you didn't really owe the money in the first place.  Except it's a really big check and it really was money owed.  You really have to wonder about Newsom's priorities.  David Crane can probably talk for an hour on the things we are spending Big Money on that don't involve legal California residents getting services.  Or services that are so poorly managed as to be embarrassing.  Mathews and Crane have been having this debate for a long time:

Why is the budget so out of whack? For years, I’ve conducted a long-distance argument about this topic with David Crane, a former UC regent and state teachers pension fund board member who has founded a political organization, Govern for California, to elect more state lawmakers willing to make tough, public-spirited decisions. Sometimes our debate takes place through former state legislator Ted Lempert’s UC Berkeley class on California government, where we both have been guest lecturers.

Crane argues that California governance fails because we need people in government who have the courage to take on the state’s powerful labor and corporate lobbies. 

I argue the problem is structural—that California’s misbegotten governing system and broken state constitution keep pushing the budget out of balance.

But in this particular budget season, I must concede that Crane has the better side of the argument. California is not in a recession. The governor and the state legislature’s Democratic supermajority have the money and the power to make hard choices now. By deferring so much, they will make it even harder to balance the budget in the future, and push more costs onto the next generation of Californians.

That's Mathews taking the long view, but I tend to believe we will not have to wait for the next generation to feel the pain.  Rocky (Sly Stallone) was this week's new ex-California resident having bought a big house in Florida.  He's not going to be the last .1 percenter to jump ship.  Happy Election Day!