As revenues flattened, particularly all-important personal income taxes, the gap between income and outgo could no longer be ignored. In January, Newsom pegged the deficit at $38 billion as he proposed a 2024-25 budget.

The Legislature’s budget analyst, Gabe Petek, calculated that the real deficit over the remainder of the current fiscal year and through 2024-25 is many billions of dollars higher, perhaps as much as $70 billion, and warned legislators that the state faces annual deficits in the $30 billion range for the remaining three years of Newsom’s governorship.

“The state faces significant operating deficits in the coming years, which are the result of lower revenue estimates, as well as increased cost pressures,” Petek said in his analysis of Newsom’s budget. “These deficits are somewhat compounded by the governor’s budget proposals to delay spending to future years and add billions in new discretionary proposals. State revenues in the out-years would need to exceed the administration’s forecast by roughly $50 billion per year in order to sustain the spending proposed by the governor’s budget.”

So far, Newsom and legislative leaders are ignoring Petek’s advice and are using wishful thinking, accounting gimmicks and borrowed money to fashion a budget they will portray as balanced, but would, as Petek says, make the state’s fiscal predicament even worse in future years.

The duplicity begins with assuming that the deficit is billions of dollars smaller than Petek’s estimate. It continues with an agreement to enact “budget solutions worth $12 to $18 billion to address the shortfall” this spring.

Those “solutions” are laid out in Newsom’s budget and a “Shrink the Shortfall” proposal from state Senate leaders. They consist largely of temporarily suspending some of the appropriations in the 2023-24 budget that was adopted last June, shifting some spending from the general fund into special funds, borrowing from various pots of money and tapping into reserves.

Newsom termed it “a balanced approach that will take a significant chunk out of the projected shortfall.”

They are the sort of things that California’s politicians have embraced during previous budget crises to avoid either concrete reductions of spending or new taxes, akin to financially stressed families running up their credit cards, stiffing some creditors and tapping relatives for loans.

Were California experiencing only as temporary gap due to recession, a case could be made for a jerry-rigged budget to minimize impacts on those who depend on money flowing from Sacramento. However, the state faces what budget mavens call a “structural deficit,” meaning there is a fundamental imbalance disconnected from the state’s overall economy.

The deficit is born of Newsom’s 2022 declaration that the state was enjoying a $97.5 billion surplus, thanks largely to a $54.8 billion projected uptick in revenues. “No other state in American history has ever experienced a surplus as large as this,” Newsom bragged.

The surplus never materialized. It was an illusion stemming from an overly enthusiastic response to tens of billions of one-time dollars pumped into the state’s economy by federal pandemic relief programs. The bubble quickly burst but politicians had already spent many of the phantom dollars.

The deficit is a gut-check for Newsom and legislators. They could summon the political courage to deal with it as a serious fiscal crisis, or they could – and probably will – pretend to close the gap on paper and kick the can down the road.

Dan Walters can be reached at dan@calmatters.org

Among other things, the Legislature established the offices of a state superintendent of schools and a superintendent for each county, assuming that counties would operate schools within their borders.

Eventually, however, school districts were formed as the state’s population grew. Except for a few small counties, those districts, each with its own elected school board and an appointed superintendent, became the operating entities.

The separately elected county superintendents continued, however, and their duties evolved from direct school administration to oversight of local districts, particularly of their finances, along with a few specialized education services.

In the 1950s, the Legislature added another layer of complexity by decreeing that counties also would have elected boards of education. They would have some independent functions and share others with the elected superintendent, but the latter also retained sole authority in some aspects.

The boundaries between their turf, however, were a little fuzzy. In essence, it was assumed that both had the best interests of public school students in mind and would cooperate.

Over the years, that assumption has proved true in most counties most of the time, but public education has – unfortunately – evolved into a front for culture wars between adults. A years-long feud between Orange County’s elected superintendent and its elected school board is a case in point.

Al Mijares was appointed as Orange County’s superintendent in 2012 and was easily elected to a full term in 2014 and re-elected in 2018.

In 2020, however, Mijares clashed publicly with the Republican-dominated school board as the latter endorsed reopening schools, without mandatory masking, that had been closed due to COVID-19. It was the local version of a statewide debate over school closures that persisted in California long after other states had reopened schools.

Mijares won re-election again in 2022, but had to defeat a challenger endorsed by members of the school board. Meanwhile, he had appointed a committee, dominated by union-friendly members, to draw new boundaries for county school board districts.

The committee rejected the school board’s own plan and adopted one that would make re-election of Mijares’ rivals on the board more difficult. His critics labeled it a power grab by the superintendent. Nevertheless, conservatives have continued to dominate the board, although three of its five seats are up in this week’s primary election.

School closures are not the only point of conflict. Another has been the board’s willingness to approve new charter schools, drawing sharp opposition from the school unions which have generally sided with Mijares.

At one point, the board threatened to cut Mijares’ salary which, with added benefits, totals almost a half-million dollars a year. Ever since the 2022 elections, Mijares has refused to attend even a single board meeting, sending a deputy instead.

A new wrinkle in the feud emerged this year when state Sen. Josh Newman, a Democrat whose district straddles the border between Orange County and Los Angeles County, introduced Senate Bill 907.

The measure, scheduled for its first committee hearing later this month, would enlarge the Orange County school board from five to seven members, bypassing a state law that requires voter approval to change the size of county school boards. SB 907 also would require school board elections to be merged with statewide elections every two years.

If enacted, it would give pro-Mijares groups a new pathway for changing the board’s ideological makeup. Newman says he wants to make the board more reflective of the county’s population while opponents see it as another power grab.

Dan Walters has been a journalist for more than 60 years. He can be reached at dan@calmatters.org.

Explorer and soldier John Fremont, one of the state’s first two senators, is one of the few historic notables, as are newspaper publisher George Hearst, railroad baron Leland Stanford, political reformer Hiram Johnson and newspaper publisher William Knowland.

Just one California senator, Richard Nixon, made it to the presidency only to resign in disgrace, while Dianne Feinstein became the state’s first woman to represent the state in 1992 and served for a record 31 years before her death last year.

A curious tendency of California’s senators emerged in the 1960s. At any given moment, one of the two current senators would, for various reasons, generate a lot of notoriety in news media while the other would be the worker bee, quietly representing the state’s interests and working on serious national issues.

The gap in personal proclivities of those occupying Senate seats was very obvious during the many years when Feinstein, an uber-serious lawmaker, and Barbara Boxer, who fancied herself a political warrior, were California’s two senators.

One senator, Democrat Alan Cranston, played both roles during his 24 years in the Senate, from 1969 to 1993. At first he was a policy wonk while the other seat was held by two short-termers, John Tunney and S.I. Hayakawa. In the 1980s, however, Cranston became enmeshed in a messy savings and loan scandal and made a very unsuccessful run for the White House while Republican Pete Wilson quietly represented the state.

When Feinstein died, Gov. Gavin Newsom appointed Laphonza Butler to serve as a brief replacement, having earlier named Alex Padilla, California’s former secretary of state, after Kamala Harris gave up her Senate seat to become vice president.

The March 5 primary election pretty much guaranteed that Adam Schiff, a Democratic congressman from Los Angeles, will occupy what had been Feinstein’s Senate seat. He and Republican Steve Garvey, a former baseball star, were the two top finishers in a field of 27 candidates, each garnering about a third of the votes. They will face each other in November.

The other two potentially viable Democratic candidates, Orange County Congresswoman Katie Porter and Oakland Congresswoman Barbara Lee, were distant finishers behind Schiff and Garvey.

The outcome was exactly what Schiff had hoped it would be when he spent heavily on reverse psychology advertising to boost Garvey’s standing among Republican voters by portraying him as a dangerous Republican.

Porter-backer Adam Green was bitter about Schiff’s ploy, telling Politico, “Adam Schiff put his own selfishness above democracy by lifting up Republican Steve Garvey, who will now turn out Trump voters in key House races that could determine control of Congress.”

Had Porter finished second instead of third, as seemed possible months earlier before Garvey entered the race, she would have presented a serious challenge to Schiff from his left flank, given her image as a progressive reformer. But now, with the Democrats enjoying a massive advantage in voter registration vis-à-vis Republicans, Schiff should be able to easily coast to a win in November.

When Schiff, as expected, joins Padilla in the Senate, it means a return to California having two male senators after more than three decades with at least one female senator. It may also end the trend of having one flashy senator and one diligent worker since neither Padilla nor Schiff has a magnetic personality or burning causes to pursue. Both are political journeymen who have patiently climbed the political ladder rung-by-rung.

Dan Walters has been a journalist for more than 60 years. He can be reached at dan@calmatters.org.

California has made very little progress, if any, on narrowing its shortage of housing, its levels of homelessness and poverty remain among the nation’s highest, and its population is declining as hundreds of thousands of Californians decamp for other states.

The Legislature’s budget analyst has calculated that California faces a $68 billion gap between revenue and already programmed spending over a three-year period that began in 2022. Annual deficits in the $30 billion range thereafter.

Next week, Gov. Gavin Newsom will quantify his version of the yawning gap and how he proposes to close it, touching off six months of negotiations with the Legislature on a 2024-25 budget.

It will dominate election-year discourse in California and complicate Newsom’s simultaneous efforts to expand his national political image by portraying California as a model of compassionate and effective governance that should be emulated elsewhere.

Newsom and other statewide officials – Democrats all – will not be on the ballot this year, and it’s certain that Democrats will continue to enjoy supermajorities in both legislative houses. California’s only electoral uncertainties are which of three Democrats will fill the late Dianne Feinstein’s seat in the U.S. Senate and outcomes in as many as 10 congressional districts that could determine which party controls the House of Representatives.

The big election year action will be on a spate of high-dollar ballot measures, particularly those that would affect how Californians are taxed. While it’s coincidental that tax issues are arising just as the state experiences one of its periodic budget deficits, the juxtaposition does give the campaigns for and against them an added flavor.

The most prominent tax measure, sponsored by the California Business Roundtable and other corporate groups, would make raising state and local taxes more difficult. If passed, it would require voter approval of any state tax increases and increase voting thresholds for local taxes.

Democrats and their allies, especially public employee unions, despise the measure, and the Legislature seeks to undermine it with a constitutional amendment – also on the November ballot – that would increase the required voting margin for measures that increase margins for taxes.

In addition to those dueling propositions, a third measure, also placed on the November ballot by the Legislature, would lower the voting threshold for local taxes and bonds for infrastructure improvements. Having competing ballot measures on the same issue has become something of a trend in recent elections.

Those, however, are just three of the propositions that will, or could be, placed before voters this year.

Three other biggies are: a business-backed initiative to repeal the Private Attorney General Act, a unique California law that allows private citizens to file class-action lawsuits against corporations; an oil industry referendum that would repeal the Legislature’s imposition of a 3,200-foot buffer between oil wells and “sensitive receptors” such as schools and homes; and the latest of many attempts to make it easier to enact rent control laws.

All in all, voters will decide one measure on the March primary ballot – Newsom’s mental health bond – and at least a dozen others in November. Competing interests could easily spend a quarter-billion dollars to persuade voters.

Interestingly – and perhaps sadly – none of them will materially affect the aforementioned existential issues that have come to define California in the 21st century. The chances are quite strong that when Californians look back on 2024 a year hence, those issues will be as depressing as ever.

Dan Walters can be reached at dan@calmatters.org.

It’s become a cultural icon and, as Wikipedia notes, “is often used colloquially to a situation characterized by a series of futile, Sisyphean tasks, where the successful completion of one just yields another popping up elsewhere.”

For years, California’s state government has been playing whack-a-mole to persuade – or compel – local officials to become more receptive to housing development needed to close an immense gap between supply and demand that drives up living costs and contributes to the state’s very high poverty and homelessness rates.

The game has become especially intense during Gavin Newsom’s governorship. His housing agency, sometimes in league with the attorney general’s office, has been forcing cities to rezone land to meet quotas and eliminate impediments to development, such as overly prescriptive design criteria.

The Legislature has contributed to the effort by passing dozens of new carrot-and-stick laws that give state officials more power to counteract the often stubborn reluctance of local officials to comply with mandates.

As the state cracks down, local officials who oppose new housing that they see as disrupting the ambiance of their communities conjure up new strategies to minimize compliance. Hence, it’s a game of political and legal whack-a-mole.

Three recent events illustrate the syndrome.

One occurred in San Francisco, the city that Newsom once governed as mayor. Over the years, it has earned a reputation for making housing developers go through bureaucratic and political hoops that can take years to navigate, add millions of dollars to costs and often make projects untenable.

The city has a quota of developing 82,000 new housing units over eight years, more than half of which are to be “affordable” to low- and moderate-income families. However the city’s Board of Supervisors had rebuffed Mayor London Breed’s efforts to overhaul housing regulation.

The state ramped up pressure, threatening to strip the city of control over housing permits, finally forcing the board to act. Last week the state gave its blessing to the overhaul.

As state officials were whacking one mole in San Francisco, another popped up a few miles to the south in San Mateo. The San Mateo Heritage Alliance applied to the state Office of Historic Preservation to designate Baywood, a San Mateo neighborhood of upscale single-family homes, as an historic district.

It was the latest effort by local neighborhoods around the state to take advantage of a loophole in Senate Bill 9, one of the many new laws aimed at compelling cities to accept multi-family housing projects. The legislation, signed in 2021, in essence outlaws exclusive single-family zoning, but doesn’t apply to neighborhoods designated as historic.

Attorney General Rob Bonta has interceded when some historic designation petitions were obvious attempts to block new housing, but it remains a new front in the ongoing conflict between state and local officials.

Nearly 400 miles further south, Bonta and the Newsom administration are trying to whack another mole in La Cañada Flintridge, a bucolic suburb of Los Angeles which has stubbornly resisted state pressure to build more housing.

Bonta sued the city, seeking to reverse its denial of an 80-unit affordable housing project and also declare the city to be out of compliance with state housing laws, thus subjecting it to the “builder’s remedy,” meaning it would lose virtually all authority over housing projects.

The “builder’s remedy” is, in effect, the state’s most powerful hammer with which to whack resistant municipal moles.

You can reach Dan Walters at dan@calmatters.org.

Newsom insists he has “sub-zero interest” in running for president and couches his naked effort to create a national image as an effort to jolt his Democratic Party into a more aggressive attitude and help Joe Biden win a second lease on the White House next year.

However, his highly orchestrated squabbles with the governors of Texas and Florida, his obvious efforts to peddle himself to national media and his much-ballyhooed trip to China are exactly what he would be doing if, indeed, he has presidential ambitions — either next year if Biden drops out over poor approval ratings, or in 2028.

Newsom’s campaign-like efforts, which will probably shift to an even higher gear in 2024, make it difficult to take his declared lack of interest in the presidency seriously. It seems highly unlikely that Newsom would simply call it quits and go back to peddling wine after having spent half of his 56 years climbing the political ladder.

Just for fun, therefore, let’s assume that Newsom does have Potomac fever and speculate on whether he could emulate Ronald Reagan and run successfully for president after finishing his time in Sacramento.

First, he would have to win the Democratic nomination by running the gauntlet of primary elections, which means raising tens of millions of dollars, building a national political campaign apparatus and spending every waking hour hopping from state to state trying to connect with very different voter bases.

It’s a process that has humbled countless politicians of both parties, including Vice President Kamala Harris, who flamed out rather quickly in 2020, only to have her career extended by Biden. Harris is just one of the likely Democratic hopefuls that Newsom would have to overcome in 2028.

Assuming Newsom bucks the odds and wins the nomination, what then?

His chances of emerging triumphant would depend on many factors large and small, but the two most important would be the identity of his Republican rival and how well he could market himself to voters in about a half-dozen swing states.

Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016 because he captured the electoral votes in some states that Democrats had taken for granted in previous elections. He lost to Joe Biden in 2020 because those states largely rejoined the Democratic column, but the combined margin of Biden’s victory in those states was around 150,000 votes.

Newsom occupies a place on the ideological scale to the left of Biden and to the right of Bernie Sanders. For the past year he has quietly moved drifted rightward in governing California, annoying the progressives who had hoped he would embrace their ambitious agenda to remake California.

Opposition researchers would have a field day with Newsom. GOP campaign operatives would use images of a dystopian California – such as homeless encampments and smash-and-grab robberies – to suggest that a President Newsom would infect the rest of the country.

It’s already begun, with Republicans gleefully citing new data about increasing homelessness in the state Newsom governs and pointing out that 2024 is the 20th anniversary of Newsom’s pledge, as mayor of San Francisco, to end homelessness in that city in 10 years.

Could Newsom overcome all of those hurdles and claim the White House? Perhaps. Trump proved that nothing is impossible. But the odds certainly are against it.

You can reach Dan Walters at dan@calmatters.org.

Many years later, after the 40-hour work week became standard, California’s Industrial Welfare Commission decreed that farmworkers could work up to 10 hours a day or six days a week before overtime pay kicked in.

In 2016, however, years of lobbying by unions and other groups finally paid off when the Legislature decreed that the eight-hour day and 40-hour work week for agricultural labor would be phased in. Then-Gov. Jerry Brown signed the legislation, Assembly Bill 1066, despite warnings from farm groups that it would disrupt their industry.

Recently, the University of California’s Cooperative Extension branch, which researches agricultural issues, released a study indicating that having a 40-hour work week has not been as beneficial to farmworkers as its sponsors promised.

Alexandra Hill, an assistant professor at UC Berkeley, concluded that many workers who had hoped for a cornucopia of overtime pay saw their incomes reduced when employers limited them to 40 hours a week. Her study found that many workers experienced reductions in the $100-$200 range each week because farmers could not automatically pass on overtime costs to their customers.

“It’s really important to think carefully about how we can best implement policies that really benefit the people that we’re trying to (help),” Hill told The Sacramento Bee.

Hill’s research exemplifies the phenomenon of unanticipated consequences that often afflicts political actions. Legislators may have thought they could help farmworkers by giving them a 40-hour workweek but failed to consider the potential downsides when applied in the real world.

In recent years, the Legislature has been particularly prone to passing laws affecting workplace conditions – not surprisingly, given the close relationship between the Capitol’s dominant Democrats and labor unions, which seek benefits they are unable to achieve in unionization drives or negotiations with employers.

The most spectacular example was 2019 legislation that severely limited employers’ ability to use contractors, in effect converting several million workers to payroll employees.

Hill’s study was released just months after the Legislature had set new minimum wages for the fast food and medical care industries, $20 per hour for the former and $25 for the latter, to dampen threats of ballot-box wars.

As with the 2016 law on farm labor, unions and other advocates of the new minimum wages said they would lift workers in the affected industries out of poverty.

“Today California is putting a stop to the hemorrhaging of our care workforce by ensuring health care workers can do the work they love and pay their bills – a huge win for workers and patients seeking care,” Tia Orr, executive director of SEIU California, told CalMatters.

However, there will be real world impacts.

Fast food franchisees will adjust by hiring fewer workers, raising prices or adopting more technology, such as the self-serve kiosks now common at McDonald’s.

One effect of the health care wage bill has already surfaced. When it was passed, legislators were not given any estimates of the financial impact, but after Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the measure, his administration said it would cost the state budget, which has a $68 billion projected deficit, about $4 billion a year split 50-50 between state and federal taxpayers. And that doesn’t include the multibillion-dollar impact on private health care providers and insurers.

On one level, it’s perfectly understandable why politicians would like to raise wages for some of the state lowest paid workers. But they shouldn’t ignore the potentially negative effects of their actions.

You can reach Dan Walters at dan@calmatters.org.

Education reform and civil rights groups applauded the effort but worried aloud about Brown’s unwillingness to provide accountability for whether the extra spending would, in fact, narrow the gap. He said he trusted local school officials to do the right thing.

The education establishment liked Brown’s hands-off attitude but the criticism continued. Several years later, the state school board responded with a “dashboard.”  Schools and school districts would receive color-coded grades on a variety of factors, of which proficiency in language arts, math and other academic skills would have parity with other less important areas.

Critics remained skeptical – with good reason.

“Under this system, districts can escape notice or attention simply by shining in categories that are less than academic and whose outcomes they control,” said Chad Aldeman, whose Boston-based nonprofit Bellwether cited the dashboard’s shortcomings after the first one published six years ago.

CalMatters analyzed the results, and reported that “dozens of California school systems with some of the state’s worst test scores and biggest academic achievement gaps won’t get any extra help this year” because positive scores in non-academic factors outweighed poor academic results.

“If extremely low, declining performance on math and reading exams alone were enough to trigger state support, the number of California districts that could expect it would almost double from 228 to more than 400,” then-K-12 reporter Jessica Calefati wrote at the time.

“The analysis also revealed that well over 100,000 students across the state belong to key demographic subgroups that scored poorly on the test but won’t get help. The disparity for students in the Latino subgroup with poor test results is especially stark: More than 95% are missing out on extra state support.”

The dashboard postings were suspended during the COVID-19 pandemic, but last week a new version was released with upbeat comments from state education officials. They cited improved absenteeism and high school graduation rates but scarcely mentioned that overall academic scores remain subpar, and the achievement gap is fundamentally as wide as ever despite billions of dollars in extra aid.

“This is encouraging news – and our work is not complete,” said state schools Superintendent Tony Thurmond. “We have made an unprecedented investment in services that address the needs of the whole child. We can see that those efforts are paying off, but this is only the beginning. We need to continue providing students with the tools they need to excel, especially now that we are successfully reengaging our students and families, so we can close gaps in achievement in the same way that we have begun to close the equity gaps in attendance and absenteeism.”

Analysts outside the establishment were less sanguine.

Heather Hough, executive director of PACE, a Stanford-based education research organization, told EdSource that the dashboard’s emphasis on one year’s changes can be misleading.

“That can mask the concern that we should still be having: A lot of students are far behind where they have been, and large portions of students are not attending school,” Hough said.

A more useful dashboard would make academics at least 50% of overall scoring, since improving them is the declared goal of the many billions of dollars that have been spent over the last decade. If kids can’t read, write and do math, the other stuff means nothing.

You can reach Dan Walters at dan@calmatters.org.

“Funds appropriated in this item shall be for the Port of Oakland for improvements that facilitate enhanced freight and passenger access and to promote the efficient and safe movement of goods and people,” the budget declared.

Seemingly, the Legislature was responding to numerous pleas from the shipping industry for upgrades to maintain the port’s viability in the face of intense competition for international trade.

However, when the port commission recently approved a list of specific projects the money would finance, its long-suspected true purpose became clear. The money would not be spent to improve cargo-handling, but rather to subsidize development of a new stadium for the Oakland A’s baseball team on a disused container site known as Howard Terminal near Jack London Square.

The money would pay for facilities to make it easier for baseball fans to access the new stadium. They apparently would be the “passengers” the appropriation cited.

The commission acted shortly after the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission officially removed Howard Terminal’s designation as a cargo site.

For years, A’s owners, citing inadequacies of the Oakland Coliseum, have yearned for a new stadium while threatening to move the team if its demands were not met. At one point, the team tried to move to San Jose, but that city was part of the San Francisco Giants’ designated territory and the Giants refused to relinquish it.

Oakland officialdom, having lost the Raiders football team to Las Vegas and the Warriors basketball team to San Francisco, is desperate to keep the A’s in Oakland and a number of potential stadium sites have been explored.

Finally, the city and A’s owner John Fisher, a scion of the family that owns clothier Gap, settled on the 55-acre Howard Terminal site, not only for a new baseball stadium but a $12 billion residential and commercial complex.

The decision didn’t sit well with the shipping industry, which saw it as an intrusion on cargo-handling operations.

As Fisher was negotiating with city officials over the project last year, state Sen. Nancy Skinner, a Democrat who represents Oakland and chairs the Senate Budget Committee, slipped the $279.5 million appropriation into the budget bill and it eventually was approved by the full Legislature and Newsom.

It’s just a tiny fraction of a 2021-22 state budget that approached $300 billion but would have been enough to build affordable housing for more than 500 low- and moderate-income families.

Moreover, it represents two common but unseemly practices in the state Capitol.

The first is using the state budget, which is largely drafted in secret with little opportunity for the media and the public to peruse its details, as a vehicle to deliver goodies to those with political pull.

After the budget and its attendant “trailer bills” are enacted each year, we learn — too late — exactly who has received special attention, either in the form of money or some beneficial change of law.

The second is the slavish attention that California politicians devote to the welfare of professional sports teams and their wealthy owners. Every major sports arena project in recent years has received some sort of help from the Capitol, mostly exemptions from the environmental red tape that other big projects must navigate.

The $279.5 million may not technically be a gift of public funds to a private developer, but it certainly smells like one.

Dan Walters is a CalMatters columnist.

A long-dominant geriatric quintet from the San Francisco Bay Area – Gov. Jerry Brown, Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi and state Democratic chairman John Burton – has been slowly ceding power to younger political strivers.

Moreover, Newsom is succeeding someone who could be considered his quasi-uncle since his inauguration continues the decades-long saga of four San Francisco families intertwined by blood, by marriage, by money, by culture and, of course, by politics – the Browns, the Newsoms, the Pelosis and the Gettys.

The connections date back at least 80 years, to when Jerry Brown’s father, Pat Brown, ran for San Francisco district attorney, losing in 1939 but winning in 1943, with the help of his close friend and Gavin Newsom’s grandfather, businessman William Newsom.

Fast forward two decades. Gov. Pat Brown’s administration developed Squaw Valley for the 1960s winter Olympics and afterward awarded a concession to operate it to William Newsom and his partner, John Pelosi.

One of the Pelosi’s sons, Paul, married Nancy D’Alesandro, who went into politics and has now reclaimed the speakership of the House of Representatives. Another Pelosi son married William Newsom’s daughter, Barbara. Until they divorced, that made Nancy Pelosi something like an aunt by marriage to Gavin Newsom (Nancy Pelosi’s brother-in-law was Gavin Newsom’s uncle).

The Squaw Valley concession was controversial at the time and created something of a rupture between the two old friends.

William Newsom wanted to make significant improvements to the ski complex, including a convention center, but Brown’s Department of Parks and Recreation balked. Newsom and his son, an attorney also named William, held a series of contentious meetings with officials over the issue.

An eight-page memo about those 1966 meetings from the department’s director, Fred Jones, buried in the Pat Brown archives, describes the Newsoms as being embittered and the senior Newsom threatening to “hurt the governor politically” as Brown ran for a third term that year against Ronald Reagan.

Pat Brown’s bid for a third term failed, and the Reagan administration later bought out the Newsom concession. But the Brown-Newsom connection continued as Brown’s son, Jerry, reclaimed the governorship in 1974. He appointed the younger William Newsom, a personal friend and Gavin’s father, to a Placer County judgeship in 1975 and three years later to the state Court of Appeal.

Judge Newsom, who died a few weeks ago, had been an attorney for oil magnate J. Paul Getty, most famously delivering $3 million to Italian kidnapers of Getty’s grandson in 1973. While serving on the appellate bench in the 1980s, he helped Getty’s son, Gordon, secure a change in state trust law that allowed him to claim his share of a multi-heir trust.

After Newsom retired from the bench in 1995, he became administrator of Gordon Getty’s own trust, telling one interviewer, “I make my living working for Gordon Getty.” The trust provided seed money for the Plumpjack chain of restaurants and wine shops that Newson’s son, Gavin, and Gordon Getty’s son, Billy, developed, the first being in a Squaw Valley hotel.

Gavin Newsom had been informally adopted by the Gettys after his parents divorced, returning a similar favor that the Newsom family had done for a young Gordon Getty many years earlier. Newsom’s Plumpjack business (named for an opera that Gordon Getty wrote) led to a career in San Francisco politics, a stint as mayor, the lieutenant governorship and now to the governorship, succeeding his father’s old friend.

He’s keeping it all in the extended family.