The U.S. Supreme Court will weigh in on whether cities can legally ban or limit unhoused people camping in public spaces — a case that could grant California officials more power to sweep homeless camps.

The case, originating from the Oregon city of Grants Pass, could overturn or narrow a five-year-old precedent from a federal appeals court that limited how much cities in Western states could criminalize those who sleep on the streets when there aren’t enough shelter spaces available.

In the older case — Martin v. Boise — the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 2018 that it’s cruel and unusual punishment to criminalize camping on public property when the people in question have nowhere else they can legally sleep. The ruling was binding on West Coast cities, where rising rates of unsheltered homelessness that later spiked during the pandemic were driving local politicians to pass public camping prohibitions. In 2019 the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal of that case.

Since then, California cities have often been subject to federal lawsuits after passing restrictions on when and where the unhoused can set up camps. Relying on the ruling in the Boise case, judges have delayed or outright halted camping bans from being enforced in cities including San Francisco, Sacramento, Chico and San Rafael, finding that the cities had failed to provide adequate alternate shelter options for the residents they were about to sweep from their encampments.

The situation has led city officials —and Gov. Gavin Newsom — have complained that the Boise ruling has tied their hands from addressing the state’s sprawling encampments, arguing they need to sweep camps both for health and safety reasons and for the well-being of encampment residents. It’s led liberal officials into the unusual position of asking a majority-conservative court for more power to penalize the homeless for sleeping outside. In a high-profile case that has particularly drawn Newsom’s ire, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals this month backed a judge’s 2022 ruling restricting San Francisco’s enforcement of certain bans on sleeping on sidewalks and in parks, because the city hadn’t shown there were other locations that were “realistically available” to unhoused residents before a city sweep.

“California’s elected officials who seek in good faith to improve what often appears to be an intractable crisis have found themselves without options, forced to abandon efforts to make the spaces occupied by unhoused people safer for those within and near them,” Newsom’s administration wrote to the Supreme Court in September.

The case is being closely watched by officials across California and could widely affect how they respond to encampments. Newsom’s statement was part of an amicus curiae brief the administration filed in the case. Amicus briefs are legal briefs submitted by parties not directly involved in a given case, but who typically take one side or the other in a case. The majority of the amicus briefs filed in the case were from California entities and, though more than a dozen mostly-Republican-led state governments also filed a brief, Newsom was the only governor to weigh in.

In addition to Newsom’s, other filings include the California State Association of Counties, the California State Sheriffs’ Association, district attorneys for Sacramento and San Diego counties, the cities of Los Angeles and San Francisco, the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce, the Bay Area Council, and even the Brentwood Community Council.

“The Boise case is being abused by activists, and some cities have used it as an excuse for their complete failure to solve the homelessness crisis and clean up our streets,” Assemblyman James Gallagher (R-Yuba City) said in a statement Friday. “Removing that excuse will allow us to begin holding politicians accountable for their inaction and incompetence.

“I am confident the Supreme Court will agree there is no right to vagrancy and to fill our parks and sidewalks with trash, needles and human waste.”

But advocates for the unhoused say the Boise ruling is clear. They point out that most cities have hardly enough shelter beds to accommodate their homeless populations and that shelters are often near-full on any given night, and say banning public camping or restricting it does more harm than good by pushing homeless people from location to location.

“All you need to do to be compliant with (the Boise case) is stop using our criminal system as the stick here to solve this problem,” said Will Knight, decriminalization director at the National Homelessness Law Center, last year.

In particular, the court rulings have led to a patchwork of interpretations across the state on what qualifies as the “adequate shelter” cities must provide before sweeping homeless camps. The Oregon case that the Supreme Court agreed to hear could provide some clarity — or so California officials hope.

While the Boise ruling said the government can’t broadly ban any public camping without giving people alternative places to stay, Newsom and city officials across California said in briefs filed before the Supreme Court that they want to know whether they can set restrictions on times or locations where camping is allowed.

Other questions include whether cities can criminalize public camping for those whom they call “voluntarily” homeless — people who refuse offers of shelter. And California cities have asked the court to rule on whether, in order to ban camping, they need to have a suitable shelter space available for every individual unhoused person no matter their circumstances, or simply have general shelter beds open the day they sweep a camp.

But U.C. Berkeley law professor Jeffrey Selbin, who has studied statewide responses to homelessness, said claims from both sides are overblown.

Selbin said the existing cases neither fully tie cities’ hands, as some politicians say, nor provide a broad right to sleep outside, as some advocates say. He defended the status quo in which cities sometimes must seek guidance from federal judges to know whether their local rules are constitutional under the Boise decision.

In Chico, for example, a federal district judge in 2021 ruled that sending unhoused residents to camp on an unshaded airport tarmac on the outskirts of town was not “adequate” enough shelter to justify banning encampments in town. In response, the city settled the case by setting up a site of tiny homes where it can offer encampment residents a room before proceeding to sweep their camp.

That case, Selbin said, provided direction to other cities, showing that the court cases have “required local jurisdictions to take seriously what it means to provide basic shelter and options.”

The Supreme Court is unlikely to provide that kind of “micromanaging,” Selbin said, predicting instead that the justices will simply overturn the 2018 precedent set by the Boise case and allow cities to broadly criminalize encampments.

“It’s just going to return California to the whack-a-mole of prioritizing punishment over services,” he said.

The Enterprise-Record contributed to this report.

BY ALEJANDRO LAZO | CalMatters

As a historic 10-day heat wave threatened brownouts across California last summer, a small San Diego County school district did its part to help: It captured excess power from its electric school buses and sent it back to the state’s overwhelmed grid.

The eight school buses provided enough power for 452 homes each day of the heat wave, and the buses were recharged only during off hours when the grid was not strained.

California energy officials have high hopes that this new power source, called bidirectional charging, will boost California’s power supply as it ramps up its ambitious agenda of electrifying its cars, trucks and buses while switching to 100% clean energy.

Gov. Gavin Newsom called two-way charging technology a “game changer,” saying “this is the future” during a speech last September, about a week after the heat wave ended.

This year, a bill already approved by the state Senate in a 29-9 vote would require all new electric cars sold in California to be equipped with bidirectional technology by 2030. In the Assembly, two committees approved the bill earlier this month and it is now under consideration by a third.

This two-way charging has big potential — but also faces big obstacles. By 2035, California expects to have 12.5 million electric cars on the road, but it’s an open question how much California can rely on them to feed the grid. Automakers say the technology would add thousands of dollars to the cost of an electric car, and California’s utilities are still sorting out how to pay ratepayers for selling them the kilowatt hours.

The ability to use electric cars, trucks and buses to feed energy back into the grid would be especially helpful during peak times for energy use, such as heatwaves. But relying on vehicles as a year-round power source may not be practical — at least not yet.

“It’s a great idea conceptually…but we haven’t had the time to flesh out the details of what needs to happen for California to be able to power itself on electric vehicles,” said Orville Thomas, state policy director for CALSTART, a sustainable energy nonprofit.

“It should be on the menu of options that California has. Is it going to be the number one option? Definitely not.”

So far, its use has been limited in California. Pacific Gas and Electric has a pilot program — the first in the nation — that lets up to 1,000 residential customers with bidirectional chargers sell power back to the utility. Some school districts also are experimenting with it.

Only about half a dozen electric car models currently are equipped with bidirectional capabilities, including the Hyundai Ioniq 5, Nissan Leaf and Ford F-150 Lightning. Tesla announced recently that all its models will have it by 2025.

Electric vehicles convert one type of energy, alternating current electricity, into another, direct current, which is stored in a battery. Bidirectional charging means that an electric vehicle can convert the energy it has stored in its battery and send it to other sources, such as home appliances or back to the grid.

Willett M. Kempton, a University of Delaware professor who has studied bidirectional charging for more than two decades, said the vast majority of the time a vehicle is parked and not using electricity.

“Five percent of the time you’re using the car and you want to have enough energy — electricity or gasoline — to get to where you’re going and back. But most of the time, it’s just sitting there and some other use could be made of it,” he said.

Kempton said these vehicles, properly managed, could be sources of reserve energy, supplanting backup sources that burn fossil fuels.

Gregory Poilasne, co-founder and CEO of Nuvve Holding Corp., which sells electric fleet charging services, said a big challenge is that cars are unreliable energy assets. “At any time, somebody might come in and unplug the car,” he said. But he added, as the technology becomes more reliable and affordable, bidirectional cars and fleets should increase.

The cost: $3,700 per car

In Denmark, bidirectional charging earns electric vehicle fleet owners who sell power to the grid $3,000 per vehicle a year, Poilasne said, adding that this reduces the average total cost of electric car ownership by about 40%.

But citing the high cost, automakers oppose the Senate bill that would mandate the chargers for all new cars sold in California by 2030. It would increase the average cost of an electric car by $3,700, according to an opposition letter written by Curt Augustine of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, which represents General Motors, Ford and other major auto companies.

About $3,000 of that cost would be adding battery capacity to meet warranty requirements, while other costs are for hardware and software.

“This technology is a competitive matter between vehicle manufacturers and should remain that way,” Augustine wrote. “Not all customers will see an advantage of bidirectional charging, and therefore, should not have to pay more for a technology that they will not use.”

Thomas of CALSTART agreed, saying it should be optional.

“There might be a situation where there are people that want to do it and will pay a little extra for a car that is bidirectional, but there will also be people that just want to use a vehicle for driving,” he said. “Do we raise the price of electric vehicles for everybody?”

But Sen. Nancy Skinner, a Democrat from Oakland who authored SB 233, said she wants to ensure that automakers don’t reserve the technology for only their higher-end models. She said since the relatively affordable Nissan Leaf has it, it can be widely available.

Skinner said all consumers would benefit from the technology by selling energy to the grid or using the energy in emergencies. But she said another important reason is that it could end reliance on diesel generators during power emergencies like during wildfires.

“If you have an EV you don’t need that diesel generator,” Skinner said. “Why would we want to encourage diesel generators? They’re extremely polluting.”

ffrey Lu, an air pollution specialist with the California Energy Commission’s vehicle-grid integration unit, said the state is working with owners to identify the best times to charge — called smart charging — to protect the grid. Bidirectional charging takes the concept a step further, he said.

The Energy Commission is not yet ready to say how reliant California will be on bidirectional charging to provide sufficient power and meet the state’s 2045 mandate for carbon-free electricity.

“We’re fairly early in this process. California is very committed to load flexibility broadly, but where that load flexibility specifically comes from, how many megawatts or gigawatts are coming from any particular kind of resource? We’re working on that,” he said.

California’s utilities are running pilot projects and studying how bidirectional charging might work and how electric car owners could be compensated for selling energy to the grid.

The California Public Utilities Commission has studied the issue for more than a decade, said spokesperson Terrie D. Prosper, including funding pilot projects and establishing two working groups.

Last year many utilities signed a “Vehicle to Everything” memorandum of understanding with car manufacturers, state agencies, the federal government and others seeking to accelerate all aspects of bidirectional charging.

Southern California Edison, which serves about 5 million businesses and residences, wants to go beyond using bidirectional charging as just an emergency backup.

Chanel Parson, Edison’s director of electrification, said the utility is working on a rate program that would allow customers to sell their power back to the grid every day of the year.

“By selling it back to the grid when our rates are more expensive, then that actually helps reduce customers’ energy bills. And it could be so economically attractive that they’re actually making money,” she said.

Pacific Gas and Electric, which serves 5.5 million electric customers in Northern California, said it is aggressively looking to build what it calls a robust vehicle-to-grid-integration. It has partnerships with BMW of North America, Ford Motor Company and General Motors exploring bidirectional charging.

The utility last year launched the nation’s first bidirectional charging pilot available to residential customers, offering up to 1,000 customers $2,500 for enrolling and up to an additional $2,175, depending on their participation.

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power also is conducting a pilot project using a small fleet of its Nissan Leafs. The utility hopes the technology will eventually provide power during peak load times.

“Five years is definitely within reach,” said José María Paz, the utility’s project manager for vehicle-to-grid integration. “Technology is advancing quite fast.”

School buses are a test case

The electric school buses at the Cajon Valley Union School District in San Diego County are among a number of school district pilot projects in California. Experts see school buses as a good option for two-way charging because they have set routes and are often parked during peak load times between 4 p.m. and 9 p.m.

Nationally, Nuvve has about 350 school buses connected to its platform.

At the Cajon Valley district, eight electric buses sent 767 kilowatt hours of power back to the grid during the heat wave between Aug. 17 and Sept. 9, according to Nuvve.

Working with Nuvve, the buses power up when energy is less expensive, said Tysen Brodwolf, the district’s transportation director. Brodwolf said there are still several quirks, including the chargers not communicating properly with the grid or someone improperly plugging in a bus.

“But we’re getting there every day,” Brodwolf said. “We’re working through all those bumps and obviously, when you take on a pilot project, you have to take that into consideration that things aren’t necessarily going to go smoothly.”

What are the big takeaways from Gov. Gavin Newsom’s updated 2023-24 budget proposal, the so-called May revise?

The impact of climate change. Fiscal restraint with a looming recession. And almost certainly, no tax increases to cover the growing budget deficit.

The spending plan Newsom unveiled Friday anticipates a $31.5 billion deficit, up from $22.5 billion projected in his January proposal. He calls for spending $306 billion, which is just 1% less than the record $308 billion budgeted for this year, and he seeks to protect the state’s continued investments in some programs, such as in housing and health care, while stopping short of adding any costly new initiatives.

• Newsom: “We have a $31.5 billion challenge, which is well within the margin of expectation and well within our capacity to address…. Right now, we’re able to submit a budget that we think is prudent and it’s balanced.”

For more details about Newsom’s spending plan, get the full analysis from the CalMatters’ team. Here’s a quick rundown on some of the budget’s biggest winners and losers:

Winners

Dyslexia screening backers: As someone who struggles with dyslexia himself, Newsom added $1 million for teacher training and a requirement for dyslexia screening, despite pushback from the California Teachers Association. Sen. Anthony Portantino, a Glendale Democrat who authored the bill to screen for dyslexia and also has dyslexia, celebrated the news.

• Portantino, to EdSource: “This is a great day for kids in California. The governor had it right. He and I both understand the urgency of this issue.”

Foster youth advocates: Newsom restored $20 million to the Court Appointed Special Advocates program, which advocates for foster youth and supports about 16% of Californai’s foster population.

Flood protection supporters: An additional $290 million to the flood control budget brings the total that Newsom proposes to invest in flood protection to $492 million.

Public health agencies: Newsom restored $50 million for public health workforce training programs that were cut in his January proposal.

Losers

Climate programs: In January, Newsom slashed $6 billion from the $54 billion five-year climate package. His May proposal put another $1.1 billion for climate resilience programs in jeopardy if a “climate bond” isn’t approved.

• Sen. Josh Becker, a Menlo Park Democrat, in a statement: “I am worried about the state’s ability to meet its climate targets with the current levels of investment.”

Child care providers: On top of delaying funds for 20,000 of next year’s new child care slots, which Newsom proposed in January, his May revise provides only an 8% cost-of-living raise, compared to providers’ requests for a 25% increase in reimbursement rates.

Public transit systems: Despite pleas from local agencies, Newsom unveiled no aid as they face a dire “fiscal cliff.”

School arts programs: Newsom slashed proposed grants for arts, music and instructional materials from $2.3 billion in his January proposal to $1.8 billion.

Prison towns residents: Newsom cut the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation budget by more than $100 million and he’s moving forward with closing correctional facilities in Blythe and California City by 2025.

Struggling hospitals: Hospitals did not get the $1.5 billion in immediate relief they had been seeking. But Newsom did allocate $150 million to establish a loan program for distressed hospitals.

Keep in mind the governor’s proposal isn’t the end. Rather, it kicks off nearly a month-long negotiation with the Legislature, which has until June 15 to pass the budget in order to get paid.

Friday’s snow measurements aren’t quite so bleak, but they remain devastatingly low. The snowpack — which provides a third of California’s water supply — is 38% of average statewide. And at the same bone-dry spot where Brown stood in 2015, at Phillips Station south of Lake Tahoe, state engineers found a shrinking patch of snow that contained only 4% of the location’s average water content.

After the Sierra Nevada’s driest January, February and March for more than a century, the scene painted a picture of a deepening drought.

“Today is actually very evocative of 2015,” Karla Nemeth, director of the California Department of Water Resources said Friday against a backdrop of brown grass at Phillips Station.

“You need no more evidence than standing here on this very dry landscape to understand some of the challenges we’re facing here in California,” Nemeth said.

Worse than last year, worse even than last month, this year’s snowpack is the worst it’s been in seven years and the sixth lowest April measurement in state history. It’s not as bad as the last drought, however: The snowpack contains about eight times more water than in 2015.

The amount of snow in April is considered critical because it indicates how much water will be available through the summer. The snow, historically at its deepest in April, melts and flows into rivers, streams and reservoirs that serve much of the state.

Sean de Guzman, manager of the state’s snow surveys and water supply forecasting section, held his hand at roughly shoulder height on a survey instrument. “On an average year, our feet should be right here where my hand is,” he said.

As California’s water officials discovered last year, climate change is upending their forecasts for how much melting snow the thirsty state can truly expect to refill its dwindling stores.

It’s a dismal end to a water year that began with great promise, with early storms in October and December. By Jan. 1, the plush snowpack was 160% of average for that date statewide, and already a little over half the seasonal total.

“Our great snowpack — the water tower of the West and the world — was looking good. We had real high hopes,” Benjamin Hatchett, an assistant research professor with the Western Regional Climate Center and Desert Research Institute, said in a recent drought presentation.

Typically, the snowpack would continue to build until April.  But a record-dry January, February and March followed by unseasonably warm and dry conditions in March sapped the frozen stores, which by the end of the month were already melting at levels that would be expected in April or May.

Now, “we would consider this to be deep into snow drought,” Hatchett said.

Reservoir storage statewide is about 70% of average — around half of total capacity, de Guzman said Friday.

Though state officials reported that early snowmelt has started to refill foothill reservoirs, the water level in massive Lake Shasta, critical to federal supplies for farms, people and endangered salmon, sits at less than half the average for this date. Lake Oroville is only slightly better, at 67% of its historic average.

From Andrew Schwartz’s vantage point north of Lake Tahoe at the University of California, Berkeley’s Central Sierra Snow Lab, it still looks wintry, with about three feet of snow, “plus or minus six inches,” he said.

It’s a far cry from the grassy field further south in the Sierra Nevada, where Brown stood for the survey seven years ago and where state officials found just traces of snow Friday.

“It’s been a false sense of security when you come up here” to the snow lab, Schwartz said “Statewide as a whole, it’s not looking great.”

There could be a number of consequences to the early snowmelt, Schwartz said. It could result in more water loss as early snowmelt evaporates in reservoirs, disrupting the balance of mountain ecosystems and speeding the start of fire season.

“Without the snow, once things dry out, it’s just going to be catastrophic again,” Schwartz said.

Early snowmelt can also complicate reservoir operations if managers need to release water to preserve flood control space, said Nathan Patrick, a hydrologist with the federal California Nevada River Forecast Center.

California’s water supply will be determined by how much snowmelt continues to flow into major reservoirs versus how much will seep into the soil or disappear into the air. Climate change is already transforming this pattern as the weather swings between extremes, and warmer temperatures suck moisture from the soil and melt snow earlier in the year.

“The next few weeks are really that critical period to actually watch how much of that runoff will actually make it down into those lakes,” de Guzman said.

California’s Department of Water Resources is working to overhaul its runoff forecast calculations, an effort that has grown increasingly urgent. Last year, the state’s projections for runoff from the Sierra Nevada overshot reality by so much that water regulators were left scrambling to protect drinking water supplies and preserve enough water in storage.

Assemblyman Adam Gray (D-Merced) has called for a state audit of the calculations. “Has the state learned anything from this disaster?” he asked in a CalMatters op-ed.

This year, de Guzman and Patrick expect more of the snow to reach reservoirs.

The soils, for one thing, are wetter — the result of powerful October storms that soaked the state. That means more of the snowmelt may flow into rivers and streams. Generally, Patrick said, “We expect it to be better this year.”

Still, increased runoff can’t make up for a paltry snowpack — particularly in the northern Sierra.  The snowpack there is the lowest in the state, just 28% the seasonal average, compared to 42% and 43% in the central and southern Sierra.

Patrick sees a trend emerging in the runoff and streamflow measurements over the past three years. “One after another have been below normal,” he said.

“You can deal with one or two bad years, but when you start to get these compounding, three bad years … it’s hard to recover.”

LESSONS LEARNED: DROUGHT THEN AND NOW

A CalMatters series investigates what’s improved and what’s worsened since the last drought — and vividly portrays the impacts on California’s places and people.

The report to the California Legislature found that the new Office of Energy Infrastructure Safety approved utility companies’ wildfire prevention plans even when they were “seriously deficient.” Included were plans by Pacific Gas & Electric, California’s largest utility, which was held responsible for sparking the state’s deadliest wildfire, the Camp Fire that killed 85 people in 2018.

While power companies are working to make their equipment more fire-resistant, neither the energy office nor the Public Utilities Commission has done enough to ensure that the companies prioritized upgrades where they are most needed — in high fire-risk areas, according to the 91-page report.

Since 2015, power lines have caused six of California’s 20 most-destructive wildfires, according to the report. Uninsulated lines and older transformers and other equipment are dangerous during high winds, when falling trees or flying debris can strike them and spark flames.

The energy office, which was part of the PUC until it was moved last summer to the Natural Resources Agency, has a broad charge to monitor the risk of utility-caused fires and issue safety certificates to power companies. The report cited instances when the office approved plans that it knew to be inadequate or vague.

Caroline Thomas Jacobs, who directs the new energy safety office, said in a statement:  “While we have some differences of opinion with the auditor, we welcome their input and are committed to continuously improving our operations. We stand behind the comprehensive and extensive evaluation of the wildfire mitigation plans conducted by our team of more than 25 engineers, scientists, firefighters, and utility experts.”

PG&E spokesperson Lynsey Paulo said the company was still reviewing the audit report but said its latest wildfire mitigation plan significantly accelerates “the undergrounding of powerlines in high fire-risk areas in 2020 and beyond.”

The company said it has installed more than 1,300 weather stations in high risk areas since 2019, as well as 153 high-definition cameras.

In recent years, consumer and ratepayer groups have regularly criticized efforts by the state’s largest investor-owned utilities — PG&E, San Diego Gas and Electric and Southern California Edison — to upgrade their equipment, and complained that the state’s utility regulator is not a vigorous monitor of the industry.

“Given the nightmarish wildfires that have become part of normal life in recent years, California taxpayers would be right to ask if they’re paying for utility watchdogs or lap dogs at the CPUC,” said Ken Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group, an environmental research advocacy organization that tracks wildfire issues.

The State Auditor’s Office criticized the PUC for not conducting thorough audits of work that companies said they performed. The PUC “does not use its authority to penalize utilities when its audits uncover violations,” the report said. Among its range of duties, the commission regulates privately-owned utilities and is supposed to ensure the safe operation of the state’s electric grid.

PUC officials said they agreed with most of the report’s recommendations. The commission will “establish a plan and timelines toward implementing the recommendations identified in the California State Auditor’s report,” according to a statement by spokesperson Terrie Prosper.

In a letter accompanying the report, Acting State Auditor Michael S. Tilden raised concerns about the increasing numbers of so-called public safety power shutoffs, when companies cut power during times of high fire risk. Tilden noted that between 2013 through 2021, the state’s largest utilities shut off power to more than 3.6 million customers during 67 power curtailments. There were some 600 unplanned power outages in 2020 alone, the report said.

Authorities are not doing enough to ensure that the companies prioritize equipment upgrades in high-risk areas, the report found.

In 2020, utilities reported they had replaced or upgraded equipment on 1,540 miles of lines. But as of last summer, there were 40,000 miles of bare power lines in high fire-risk areas, the report found.

“Even if all of the improvements they completed in 2020 consisted of replacing bare power lines in high fire-threat areas with covered or underground lines, they would have addressed only 4 percent of such lines,” Tilden wrote.

State law requires utilities to begin identifying sections of line that are regularly affected by power shutoffs. The report suggested the Legislature could strengthen this law by requiring utilities to identify what is necessary to prevent future power shutoffs.

In written responses included in the report, the agencies in some instances challenged factual assertions and in others noted that many of the suggested changes require legislative action.

The audit carries no authority other than to inform the Legislature. The process does include a status update, beginning in 60 days, to record responses and note any actions taken regarding the auditor’s recommendations.

Traces of hexavalent chromium are widely found in the drinking water of millions of Californians, with some of the contamination naturally occurring and some from industries that work with the heavy metal.

The proposed standard is a major step in a decades-long effort to curtail the water contaminant made infamous by the movie Erin Brockovich, based on residents of rural Hinkley, California who won more than $300 million from Pacific Gas & Electric for contamination of their drinking water.

Once finalized, the standard would be a first in the nation to specifically target hexavalent chromium.

Several hundred drinking water wells throughout the state exceed the State Water Resources Control Board’s proposed standard of 10 parts per billion. The highest levels were reported in parts of Ventura, Los Angeles, Yolo, Merced and Riverside counties. Residents of the low-income, mostly Latino city of Los Banos, for instance, are drinking water that contains three times more than the proposed standard would allow.

Water suppliers say the proposed standard will lead to substantially higher monthly rates for many residents, while public health experts and environmental advocates criticize it as not protective enough of people’s health.

“It’s not terrible, but it’s not acceptable,” Max Costa, professor and chair of environmental medicine at NYU School of Medicine, said of California’s proposal. Costa was an expert witness for residents in the Erin Brockovich case. When it comes to hexavalent chromium in drinking water, he said, “The most acceptable level is none.”

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Under the water board’s proposal, 10 parts per billion would be the maximum allowable amount in drinking water. It’s a minute amount, equivalent to about 10 drops of water in an Olympic-sized swimming pool. But it’s also 500 times greater than the amount California’s scientists deem a negligible cancer risk over a lifetime.

Under state law, the state must balance the health risk and the financial cost when setting drinking water standards.

Still not a negligible cancer risk

Today’s proposal is a draft, released to solicit public comment before officially starting the regulatory process, which could begin by late summer. An official drinking water standard is expected to be finalized in early 2024.

Until recently, the science was mixed on whether hexavalent chromium causes cancer when ingested, rather than inhaled. (Inhaling it has been a well-documented cause of lung cancer for workers for several decades.)

But in 2008, National Toxicology Program studies showed rats and mice that drank high doses of hexavalent chromium for two years developed oral and intestinal cancers. In addition, California state scientists who analyzed the scientific literature reported increased stomach cancer risk among people who work with hexavalent chromium.

Chemical industry representatives have criticized the studies, saying the rodents were drinking levels much higher than people are exposed to. Mice and rats are routinely given large doses to extrapolate the cancer risk to a larger human population that lives longer.

In 2011, California scientists set a non-enforceable public health goal for hexavalent chromium that is much more stringent than today’s proposal — 0.02 parts per billion. The amount was chosen because it poses a negligible, one-in-a-million lifetime cancer risk that is generally considered acceptable for environmental contaminants.

The water board’s proposal would pose a much higher risk — one cancer among every 2,000 people over a lifetime, according to the state’s risk assessment.

“I think we would all much prefer to be at a better protective level than one in 2,000 cancer cases,” said Darrin Polhemus, deputy director of the division of drinking water with the State Water Resources Control Board. “But the costs do impose a really high burden at the lower (standard) levels, and just couldn’t strike that balance there. So, I wish there was a different scenario to paint.”

The limit is likely to be tested in court. It’s happened before: In 2014, California set a short-lived standard of 10 parts per billion. But in 2017, a judge overturned it, ruling that state regulators had failed to consider whether the rule would be economically feasible.

“Water systems have had over twenty years to invest in appropriate treatment while communities have faced tragedy and the health cost burdens because of this chemical,” Brockovich, an activist who was instrumental in the PG&E settlement, said in a statement today. “That makes it all the more disgraceful that the State Water Board is proposing a drinking water standard that will not protect the California public.  This is nothing more than regulatory lip service.”

Hexavalent chromium, also known as chromium-6, is used in industrial processes such as metal-plating, stainless steel production and wood preservation. It also naturally occurs in certain California rocks and soil.

State data shows that 129 community drinking water systems serving more than 4.1 million people have reported hexavalent chromium levels above the proposed standard. In addition, 51 systems serving institutions and businesses — including 11 schools — and three water wholesalers exceed the proposed limit. (Some wells may no longer be supplying water to residents.)

The highest level reported by the state is in Ventura County, where one drinking water well was reported with 173 parts per billion  — more than 17 times higher than the proposed standard.

Some contamination, such as in the Coachella Valley, is naturally occurring. Some, like in the San Fernando Valley, is linked to industrial contamination. And some may be a combination of both.

Latino communities and those with larger populations of other people of color are more likely to have drinking water with average levels of hexavalent chromium above 5 parts per billion, according to Lara Cushing, a UCLA assistant professor of environmental health who conducted a recent study.

Current federal and California drinking water standards combine hexavalent chromium and its more benign alter ego, trivalent chromium, which is considered an essential nutrient. Federal drinking water standards cap total chromium at 100 parts per billion, and California at 50 parts per billion.

Higher rates for customers

Once a standard is finalized, water suppliers must remove the chemical from drinking water to below 10 parts per billion or face penalties that could include fines of up to $1,000 a day.

They can treat the water at plants or at household taps through reverse osmosis or another technology, blend it with clean water, take contaminated wells offline or pipe water from another system.

The proposal gives water providers some time to comply, Polhemus said — two to four years after the rule’s adoption, depending on their size. In the interim, water providers that detect hexavalent chromium will be required to submit their plans and timeline for attaining the standard.

Domestic well owners — like those in the San Bernardino County town of Hinkley portrayed in the movie — are not covered by drinking water standards. Private well owners are generally responsible for testing and treating their own water.

The cost of treatment is likely to increase customer rates, although some water agencies might opt for a cheaper option, such as blending their water with cleaner sources.

Rates for the smallest water systems — fewer than 100 connections — could increase by around $38 per month if suppliers install treatment in households. Systems with between 100 and 200 connections may see hikes as high as $44 to $167 per month, based on installing reverse osmosis or other costly treatment systems, according to state estimates. The largest water providers, which can buffer the costs across all customers, could have monthly increases between 75 cents and $45.

State regulators couldn’t predict what funding will be available when a standard is eventually finalized, but said in general, state and federal programs help communities clean up their drinking water.

Some larger water providers are looking forward to the end of a drawn-out regulatory process.

“I’ve been hoping for it to be re-finalized for some time,” said Tarrah Henrie, manager of water quality for California Water Service, the third largest regulated water utility in the country. “It just gives us certainty.”

Willows well

The utility has nearly 500 active wells around the state. Of them, 20 wells tested above 10 parts per billion hexavalent chromium. The wells are located in the Solano County town of Dixon, the Glenn County town of Willows and in two small water systems near Salinas.

Ten of the wells are being treated — in Willows, with the help of a state grant. Though rates increased slightly in Dixon, Henrie said, the company has been able to prevent customer rates from spiking by subsidizing residents there. Without the subsidy, customer rates in Willows and Dixon would have increased by 18% to 28%.

Los Banos in Merced County is bracing for the financial hit.

Rates could increase “exponentially,” said the city’s outside counsel, Mary Lynn Coffee. Costs to treat water from 13 wells could run from $41.6 to $92.3 million, with annual costs running between $1.7 and $5.1 million, Coffee said, based on a 2015 assessment. The city’s water budget has averaged around $4.7 million for the last four years.

The 13 wells that serve the largely Latino city of around 45,000 people have average hexavalent chromium levels of around 29.8 parts per billion, three times higher than the proposed standard would allow. Los Banos residents earn on average about 60% of the state average, and California has categorized the city as disadvantaged.

Since all signs point to the hexavalent chromium being naturally occurring, “there is no polluter that would help contribute to the cost of cleanup,” Coffee said. “Disadvantaged communities are really in desperate need of state funding assistance if they’re going to meet a new (limit) around the 10 parts per billion mark.”

Good evening everybody. Good evening everybody. good evening. Thank you everybody. Thank you.

Well, Madam Lieutenant Governor, it’s nice to be able to say this on International Womens day, it’s great to be able to say, thank you Madam Lieutenant Governor for that introduction.

Speaker Rendon and Pro Tem Atkins, thank you as always for being here.

And to members of the Legislature and other state officials, thank you for joining us this evening.

And of course to my remarkable wife, Jennifer, the First Partner of the State of California. Thank you for not only being the heart of our family, and for everything you do for the people of California.

It goes without saying, given the state of our world, I don’t imagine there are many people outside these walls waiting on the words that will be said here tonight.

Interesting oratorical approach to emphasize how unimportant your speech is.— Ben Christopher

But it’s important, as the rabbi said, for us to come together, nonetheless.

Not just to mark how far we’ve come in the fight against COVID, but also to reaffirm our commitment to democratic institutions.

If you want to relive the last two years of California’s fight against COVID, check out CalMatters’ timeline. — Richard Procter

As the people of Ukraine continue to come under assault, 2 million by the way, 2 million people already displaced from their homes, we take strength from their contagious courage as well as their willingness to fight for their freedom.

So tonight is a moment, a moment to reflect not just on what’s happening overseas but it’s a moment to reflect on what it means to live in a society where elected leaders still settle our disagreements by and large with civility and compromise.

And how we derive strength from a government that reflects the people we represent. Just think about it.

Our Speaker, son of working-class parents and grandson of Mexican immigrants, worked his way through California’s public education system, earning a Ph.D. from UC Riverside. Now, committed to ensuring every child has access to early learning.

Our Pro Tem, born in poverty in Virginia, she came to California and became a champion for housing and equal rights for all. The first openly-gay woman to lead both the Assembly and the state Senate.

Our Chief Justice, public school graduate, descendant of migrant farmworkers, speaking out consistently against income inequality and tackling the cost of justice for people in poverty.

And take our constitutional officers here tonight — think about this — they include the daughter of an Arkansas sharecropper, an immigrant from the Philippines, the daughter of parents born in China and Greece, one raised by a teacher from Panama, and the proud son of undocumented Mexican immigrants.

Newsom has made the elevation of under-represented Californians to positions of power and influence a hallmark of his governorship. Sen. Alex Padilla, Secretary of State Shirley Weber, Attorney General Rob Bonta and State Supreme Court Justice Martin Jenkins are all demographic firsts and Newsom appointees. — Ben Christopher

 Thank you all for your remarkable service to our state.

California does democracy like nowhere else in the world. No other place offers opportunity to so many from so many different backgrounds. But we can’t take our democracy for granted.

Authoritarian and illiberal impulses aren’t just rising overseas. They’ve been echoing here at home for some time. We might not have strongmen quite literally waging war in our country, we are plagued by agents of a national anger machine, fueling division, weaponizing grievance.

Newsom ran to an easy victory in both 2018 and during last year’s recall by presenting himself as the antidote to Donald Trump and “Trumpism.” He doesn’t say the “T” word in this speech, but it’s still a contrast he’s only too happy to invoke. — Ben Christopher

Powerful forces and loud voices — stoking fear and seeking to divide us, weakening the institutions of our democracy.

Counting on complacency to erode voting rights, scapegoating vulnerable minorities.

Conjuring conspiracies and promoting otherness.

Actively exploiting the “anger of the anxious.”

Anger, by the way, that finds a home when people feel understandably disconnected from each other and our collective future — when that future doesn’t look as bright as the past — making them more susceptible to the siren calls of those trying to tear us apart.

Foundationally, this is a threat we must all face, together, and prove there’s a better way — a California Way — forward.

The California Way.

The California Way means rejecting old binaries and finding new solutions to big problems.

Touting climate action — and gas money

Take for example, the speaker was talking about, climate policy. California has no peers.

Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon might disagree with that statement: “I don’t at all feel that we are leading the world anymore” on climate, he said in November.— Emily Hoeven

For years, we’ve set the rules, and others have followed. But over time, we’ve learned we can’t solve big problems like climate change situationally, with short-term thinking.

One of the state’s landmark programs may not be working that well. Experts warned lawmakers that the market-based cap-and-trade program is unlikely to achieve 2030 greenhouse gas targets. — Rachel Becker

The University of California is a research juggernaut, including in climate change. Newsom is seeking an additional $185 million in climate change research, technology development and workforce development for the UC.— Mikhail Zinshteyn

Look, no one’s naive about the moment we’re living in with high gas prices. And the geopolitical uncertainty that’s fueling them.

California continues to post the highest gas prices in the nation, a political liability for Democrats who increased the state gas tax in 2017. — Emily Hoeven

In January, we proposed a pause to the gas tax increase.

The state gas tax has been inching up every year since 2017 when the Legislature passed a $5 billion per year transportation funding bill. Republicans and low tax advocates put a repeal on the ballot the following year, but voters overwhelmingly shot it down. — Ben Christopher

The governor’s January proposal was very modest: it amounts to the prevention of a 3 cent tax increase on gas suppliers for one year. — Grace Gedye

But now, it’s clear we have to go farther.

And that’s why — working with legislative leadership — I’ll be submitting a proposal to put money back in the pockets of Californians to address rising gas prices.

Details are still sparse on this proposal — the only fresh one in tonight’s speech. What we know so far: This will be a general tax rebate, not tied to a person’s gas spending, but targeted at car owners. — Ben Christopher

But I want to make this clear. At a time when we’ve been heating and burning up, one thing we cannot do is repeat the mistakes of the past. By embracing polluters. Drilling even more oil, which only leads to even more extreme weather, more extreme drought, and more wildfire.

Record-setting drought continues to grip California, and shows little hope of abating as the snowpack dwindles. — Rachel Becker

What more evidence, what more evidence do you need than our own state?

Just think about this. In the past few years, we’ve seen whole communities nearly wiped off the map.

Greenville. Paradise. Grizzly Flats.

How many more are we willing to sacrifice?

We need to be fighting polluters, not bolstering them. And in the process of doing so, freeing us once and for all from the grasp of petro-dictators.

New oil and gas well development near schools, hospitals and homes would be banned under a draft state rule. Newsom also called for an end to new oil fracking permits by 2024. — Rachel Becker

But this conversation can’t just be about supply, can’t just be about oil supply. Daily life still demands too much fossil fuel.

That too has to change.

Underscoring the importance of accelerating California’s leadership in clean technology, this is not just a national security and an environmental justice imperative — clean energy is this generation’s greatest economic opportunity.

This speaks to an increasingly tender sore point within the California Democratic Party between environmentalists and labor. Exhibit A: This weekend’s party convention. — Ben Christopher

A perfect example by the way, a perfect example of that is our dominance in electric vehicle sales and manufacturing.

It was, by the way, California policies that created this market.

California has been a leader for decades in requiring low-emission and zero-emission cars and other vehicles, and it is now developing regulations to ban all new gas-powered cars by 2035. — Rachel Becker

Now, we have the opportunity to extend this leadership, to secure a critical component of the supply chain for batteries, by tapping one of the world’s largest lithium reserves – right here in California. In Imperial Valley. And you consider this, our nation-leading climate investments  — some $38 billion — will ensure that other innovations will surely follow not by re-creating the 20th century, by extracting more oil, but by extracting new ideas, drilling for new talent by running our economy on a carbon-free engine.

The California Energy Commission doled out $16 million in grants in 2020 to a handful of companies to determine if it’s feasible to extract lithium from brine in the Salton Sea area. — Rachel Becker

That’s the California Way.

Touting the economy, dissing Texas and Florida

Now, when it comes to the economy, California’s unmatched.

We dominate. We dominate in research, innovation, entrepreneurialism, venture capital – and remain the world’s fifth largest economy. Our GDP growth, our GDP growth has consistently outpaced not only the rest of the nation – but most other large, western democracies. Think about this. In December alone, 25 percent of America’s jobs were created right here in California. A million new jobs just in the last 12 months. More new business starts during the worst of the pandemic than Texas and Florida combined.

When it comes to getting employment back to pre-pandemic levels, California was still lagging the nation in December, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics — and has one of the highest unemployment rates in the country.  — Grace Gedye

But you know what makes us so different from those states — besides the freedom of a woman’s right to choose?

With abortion rights hanging by a thread in nearly two dozen states, Newsom and top Democratic lawmakers want to make California a “sanctuary” for reproductive rights and the 1.4 million women within driving distance of the state. — Kristen Hwang

What makes us different is as our businesses grow, we don’t leave our workers behind.

When lawmakers exempted small businesses from additional COVID sick leave in February, at least 1 in 4 California workers were left behind. — Grace Gedye

Just consider what we did last year for the middle class here in our state, we sent $12 billion back — the largest state tax rebate in American history. 

We didn’t stop there.  We didn’t stop there.

We raised the minimum wage.

We increased paid sick leave.

We provided more paid family leave.

In 2019 Newsom expanded Paid Family Leave from six to eight weeks for California workers. But last year, he vetoed a bill that would have raised the wage replacement amount to help more low-wage workers take the benefit, as my colleague Sameea Kamal wrote. A California Budget & Policy Center study found that many workers can’t take advantage of the benefit because the payments are too low to cover their expenses. — Elizabeth Aguilera

We expanded child care to help working parents.

Newsom signed legislation last year to add 200,000 new child care slots for working families by the 2025-26 school year. The state promised that by 2022-23 more than half of those subsidized slots, about 145,000, will come online.  — Elizabeth Aguilera

And this year, with your support, we will do something no other state in America has done – provide Health For All, regardless of immigration status.

Close to 1 million undocumented people could benefit from the state’s plans to expand Medi-Cal. But hundreds of thousands of others who earn above the Medi-Cal income limit may still be locked out of coverage. — Ana B. Ibarra

That’s the California Way.

Single-payer health care, which would have eliminated out-of-pocket medical costs for all Californians by levying higher taxes, died without a vote earlier this year. Newsom distanced himself from this campaign promise, instead focusing on expanding Medi-Cal. — Kristen Hwang

Touting health; from pandemic to endemic?

And speaking of not leaving people behind, no state, no state took bolder steps to protect public health and human life over the last two years.

Our lockdowns, distressing as they were, saved lives. Our mask mandates, our mask mandates saved lives. Your choices saved lives. California experienced far lower COVID death rates than any other large state. Fewer than Texas, Ohio. Fewer than Florida — 35 percent fewer, to be exact.

COVID-19’s death toll has been felt unequally, with communities of color bearing the largest share. Pacific Islanders have experienced the highest mortality rates while Black Californians make up a growing share of deaths. — Kristen Hwang

But mindful, even with three quarters of Californians being fully vaccinated, we’re mindful that we cannot let our guard down.

More than 83% of Californians are fully or partially vaccinated against COVID-19, but booster shot uptake has lagged far behind. In some counties, fewer than 25% of those eligible have been boosted. — Kristen Hwang

Key Democrats in the Legislature are pushing further with a slate of vaccine-related bills that mandate the shots for all kids and workers in the state and aim to crack down on misinformation about the vaccine online and among doctors. – Elizabeth Aguilera

That’s why just last month, we put out our SMARTER Plan – the nation’s first blueprint to stay ahead of future variants, and seasonal surges.

The state’s new endemic plan sets goals like stockpiling 75 million masks, bringing in 30 million over-the-counter tests and increasing the state’s health workforce by at least another 3,000 if there’s another surge. — Ana B. Ibarra

And I just want to thank you. I want to take a moment to thank all of you. To thank members of this Legislature for all you did these past two years to help keep us safe.

This could be an attempt to appease lawmakers who have sometimes chafed under Newsom’s COVID emergency powers — and who could vote next week on a proposal to end California’s pandemic state of emergency. — Emily Hoeven

Touting remedies to homelessness

But there’s another crisis all too familiar, referenced just a moment ago. And that’s the crisis of homelessness, which we know has worsened over the last decade, not only here in California, but across the nation.

The last time California tallied its homeless population in 2020, it found at least 161,000 people without a roof over their heads on any given night. That count was recently repeated for the first time since COVID-19, and is expected to yield higher numbers. — Manuela Tobias

Just a few years ago, California lacked any comprehensive strategy. No accountability, and no meaningful state resources to solve the problem. But that’s all changed.

Affordable housing and homelessness have suffered from decades of disinvestment, leaving lawmakers scrambling to catch up. Coordination remains an issue, though. The State Auditor’s office blasted the state for its slow distribution of federal COVID-19 homelessness dollars as recently as August. — Manuela Tobias

In just the past three years, we not only have a comprehensive plan, we’re also requiring new accountability, and providing unprecedented investments for cities and counties on the front lines.

As the homelessness crisis worsens, state officials are struggling to pinpoint where billions in state spending have made an impact. The governor and Legislature appropriated $12 billion dollars to address homelessness last summer – but results may take years to materialize. — Manuela Tobias

And while we’ve moved a record 58,000 people off the streets, 58,000, off the streets, since the beginning of the pandemic, we recognize, we all recognize, we have more work to do — particularly to address what’s happening on our sidewalks, reaching people who need help the most.

The actual number of people out of the streets and in housing via the governor’s signature Project Homekey thus far is about 8,000, although the program — which turned dilapidated hotels and motels across the state into permanent housing with wraparound services — is expanding to bring on another 12,000 units in the coming years using $2.75 billion in last year’s budget. His emergency Project Roomkey program, which sheltered tens of thousands more people, has been winding down in many cities.  — Manuela Tobias

Those with schizophrenia spectrum and psychosis disorders, many self-medicating with drugs or alcohol addictions.

Interesting that the focus on mental health in this speech is limited to this discussion of homelessness. A much broader mental health crisis is brewing, especially among young people. — Jocelyn Wiener

And that’s precisely what our encampment resolution grants, and our new Care Court, seek to address.

The governor last week unveiled a proposal that would compel people with serious mental illnesses and substance use disorders into treatment. Newsom’s ambitious proposal would still require legislative approval — and hefty state spending to meet the needs identified by experts on the ground.  — Manuela Tobias

Getting people off the streets, out of tents and into housing and treatment is essential, clearly essential, to making our streets safe for everyone.

Civil rights groups are already raising some concerns about the Care Court proposal, saying people in need of mental health treatment often can’t get it. — Jocelyn Wiener

But public safety certainly isn’t just about homelessness.

Crime: What was said and left unsaid

Bobby Kennedy, just six weeks before he was killed by an assassin’s bullet, reminded us that the health of a society depends on the ability of people to walk their own streets, in safety. Not to be frightened into isolation.

Newsom recently denied parole for Kennedy’s killer, Sirhan Sirhan, reversing the Board of Parole Hearings’ decision. — Byrhonda Lyons

“A nation,” he said, “which surrenders to crime — whether by indifference or heavy-handed repression, is a society which has resigned itself to failure.”

Our approach is to be neither indifferent to the realities of the present day, nor revert to heavy-handed policies that have marked the failures of the past.

We’re funding local law enforcement and prosecutors to investigate and solve more crimes. We’re bolstering the Attorney General’s Office, prosecuting organized theft rings, and getting illegal guns off our streets.

Newsom’s budget proposal seeks $179 million to reduce crime, particularly organized retail thefts. The Legislative Analyst’s Office recently said Newsom’s crime plan lacked clear objectives.  — Byrhonda Lyons

But we’re also, we’re also investing hundreds of millions of dollars in new programs to tackle the root causes of crime, doubling down on proven violence prevention programs.

Recent polling from UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies shows that most Californians are concerned about crime. But the governor mentions the word three times in his state address — a contrast from last year, when he boasted of leading on “criminal justice reform.” — Byrhonda Lyons

That is the California Way.

That’s all on criminal justice issues? It’s worth noting that Newsom is taking a completely different approach than President Joe Biden took during last week’s State of the Union. Biden doubled down on funding the police. Newsom hasn’t mentioned police. — Byrhonda Lyons

Touting more school for more students

Of course, to tackle any root cause, we need to talk about education.

And I’m not talking about that version of education “reform,” being promoted in some states where they’re banning, quite literally, you can’t make this up, where they’re banning books, where you can sue your history teacher, for teaching history and where you can’t even say the word “gay.”

This is Newsom’s third unfavorable reference to to Florida in this speech. On Tuesday, the Florida Senate passed a law restricting the ability of schools to teach students about sexual orientation and gender — what critics have dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay bill.” — Ben Christopher

I’m talking about a real transformation of our public education system, like we’re doing right here in the state California.

By creating choices — real choices — for parents and unprecedented support for their kids.

Newsom’s main contenders in the failed 2021 recall supported “school choice” measures like tuition vouchers. Months before the start of the pandemic, Newsom signed into law a controversial bill that would restrict charter schools. — Joe Hong

A whole new grade — transitional kindergarten for all, nine hours, nine hours of enrichment a day with true universal before- and after-school programs. Expanded summer school. Universal, nutritious meals, millions of new child savings account and free community college.

​Newsom’s January budget proposal continues a previous commitment to expanding Transitional Kindergarten for all 4-year-olds over the next four years, allocating $1 billion to expand the program and to add educators to lower the student-teacher ratio. — Elizabeth Aguilera

The 2021-22 state budget included $1.8 billion for summer school and before and after-school programs. A record number of students enrolled in summer school in 2021, but school administrators have struggled to staff before and after-school programs due to teacher shortages. — Joe Hong

That’s the California Way.

Look, I think all of us here can at least here agree to this, people have always looked to California for inspiration.

And now, in the midst of so much turmoil with stacking of stresses and dramatic social and economic change, California is doing what we have done for generations, lighting out the territory ahead of the rest, expanding the horizon of what’s possible.

We know that government cannot be the entire solution, but we also know that government has always been part of the solution.

By creating a platform for people, and the private sector, to thrive.

And as Friedman said — we have a formula, a formula for success setting rules for risk-taking, not recklessness.

Infrastructure, research and development, investing in our conveyor belt for talent – the finest system of higher education anywhere in the world, our CSUs, UCs and community colleges. And ensuring society provides a hand up when people need help, maintaining , maintaining our pro-immigrant policies and welcoming refugees from around the world.

Last year Newsom and state lawmakers approved $47.1 billion in higher-education spending, a banner year for college and financial aid funding — including a down payment on needed student housing. Newsom’s budget this year seeks to make good on some of last year’s unfunded promises, including creating more slots for Californians at the UC and CSU while also expanding the state’s financial aid offerings. — Mikhail Zinshteyn

Those are all California values.

Embracing diversity, but also seeking common ground. Pursuing greater connectedness.

Not exploiting division, with performative politics, and memes of the moment but by unifying towards common purpose.

Inviting more people with diverse perspectives, from different backgrounds —  “to strive, to seek, to find, to not yield” — all into the fight for a better California.

​An Alfred Tennyson quote, which I definitely didn’t need to Google. — Ben Christopher

Thank you all very, very much. Thank you for the privilege of your time tonight.

A whopping 98% of small business owners in the Golden State say that difficulty hiring is affecting their bottom line, according to a survey released this morning by Goldman Sachs’ 10,000 Small Business Voices. That’s far more than the 81% who pinpoint inflation, the 77% who cite supply chain issues and the 70% who identify the surge in COVID-19 cases as drags on their revenue.

The news comes as California’s economy shows glimmers of improvement: The unemployment rate fell to 6.5% in December from a revised rate of 7% in November as employers added 50,700 jobs, the state Employment Development Department reported Friday. That accounts for more than a quarter of the nation’s overall job gains that month, prompting Gov. Gavin Newsom to issue a statement praising California’s “outsized” role in job creation.

But the figures obscure what Michael Bernick, a former EDD director and attorney for law firm Duane Morris, calls a “major storyline” in California: “the disappearing workforce.”

Bernick: “The number of Californians listed as employed — in payroll jobs or as independent contractors — did increase over the month by 116,900 persons. However, it remains 919,800 workers below the number of workers employed in California in January 2020, just before the pandemic.”

The state seems aware that workers are disappearing. Newsom’s recent budget blueprint proposes new workforce development programs on top of the more than 20 approved in last year’s budget. But the state Legislature’s nonpartisan fiscal analyst raised questions about that approach in a presentation last week to the Senate budget committee: “Can so many efforts be effectively launched at once? What are the specific problems the state aims to solve with all these efforts?”

Meanwhile, omicron continues to wreak havoc on California’s workforce. Some long-term care facilities, which house some of the state’s most vulnerable residents, are so short-staffed that they’re relying on COVID-positive employees to care for patients, CalMatters’ Kristen Hwang reports. Although COVID has exacerbated nursing homes’ staffing shortages, it didn’t create them.

Claire Enright, a workforce specialist at the California Association of Health Facilities: “I’ve been a nurse in long-term care for over 25 years, and there’s never been a time where we haven’t had a ‘help wanted’ sign out in some form.”

The problem is so acute that the federal government on Friday devoted $103 million to improving retention of health care workers through programs that combat burnout and promote wellness and mental health. Four California providers will receive a combined $8.7 million.

“I’d have to sit down at least 10 minutes because I just get tired, and I’m still tired honestly,” said Celine, who asked not to be fully identified because she fears losing her job.

Severe worker shortages — worsened by the omicron surge — have forced some of California’s long-term care facilities to rely on COVID-positive staff for patient care. According to state data, 11,500 long-term care center workers are currently infected with COVID — even though 93% are fully vaccinated. Although only 8% of the workforce is infected today, it’s 48 times more than at the beginning of December, when omicron appeared.

The California Department of Public Health earlier this month quietly issued controversial emergency guidelines allowing infected health care employees with no symptoms to continue working. And at facilities with the most severe staffing shortages, symptomatic staff are allowed to work with COVID patients.

Since the emergence of omicron, Celine said she’s worked more overtime and cared for more patients than usual at the Pines at Placerville Healthcare Center.

“There really wasn’t a lot of staff at the beginning to work the COVID unit, so that’s why I continue to work,” she said. “It’s really hard to get staff in the building because a lot of people are afraid. If (workers) did not feel well enough, they didn’t force anybody to work.”

So many workers are sick that the company installed a portable potty in the parking lot for them to use away from the nursing home’s residents, she said. Water pumped in for handwashing freezes at night and some colleagues go home or to a nearby McDonalds to use the restroom, she said.

The Pines at Placerville did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

At another facility in Mountain View, a certified nursing assistant said she was asked to return to work five days after contracting COVID-19. State and federal health guidelines have okayed five-day quarantines or shorter at facilities with critical staffing shortages, but her lingering cough and body aches convinced her to say no.

Now, three weeks later, she is back at work, surrounded by colleagues who tell her they are COVID-19-positive, she said.

Health workers who test positive for COVID-19 are required to wear N95 masks, but the infection is still sweeping through staff and residents at the Grant Cuesta Sub-Acute and Rehabilitation Center in Mountain View.

“It’s been like one coworker after another, after another, everyone getting sick,” said the certified nursing assistant, who asked to remain unidentified to protect her job.

Nine residents also have the virus, and the facility has set up an isolation ward.

“No matter how much you protect yourself, we’re still eating in the same dining room. You know, we’re still sharing the same restroom. So what’s the whole point?” she said. “It’s almost like they don’t care about us getting sick.”

Grant Cuesta did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

California’s 1,200 residential care and skilled nursing facilities, home to more than 400,000 people, have been the epicenter of COVID-19 outbreaks since the beginning of the pandemic. Their residents and workers accounted for nearly 70% of outbreaks among all health care settings in the state last year.

While vaccination and testing requirements have helped bring those numbers down, the omicron surge is now hampering facilities’ ability to prevent infection from spreading through their often elderly and vulnerable residents.

“For me, I think this wave was a shocker only because it swept through boosted and vaccinated people,” said Christina Lockyer-White, a certified nursing assistant at Kingston Healthcare Center in Bakersfield.

Staff members there are required to wear full protective equipment including face shields, gowns, gloves and N95 masks throughout the facility, but several have tested positive regardless, Lockyer-White said.

“We didn’t think we’d be in this position, and here we are,” Lockyer-White said. “It’s like reliving a nightmare.”

‘Help wanted’: Long-term shortage of workers

Workplace shortages have plagued nursing homes, memory care and assisted living centers for years, driven by an aging population, stagnant wages and dwindling training programs.

“I’ve been a nurse in long-term care for over 25 years, and there’s never been a time where we haven’t had a ‘help wanted’ sign out in some form,” said Claire Enright, workforce specialist at the California Association of Health Facilities, which represents skilled nursing facilities.

“Five to six years ago, there were over 600 training programs for (certified nursing assistants) in the state. We’re down to around 300,” Enright said.

Skilled nursing facilities provide 24-hour medical care for sick residents who require constant monitoring or rehabilitation. Other long-term care facilities, such as assisted living, memory care and some retirement homes, are for residents who need help with some daily activities.

Most long-term care facilities struggle to hire enough staff like certified nursing assistants and registered nurses, and the pandemic has brought these chronic issues to a breaking point. Nationwide nursing homes and assisted living facilities have lost approximately 259,000 workers since 2019, more than any other health care sector, according to the American Health Care Association/National Center for Assisted Living.

State officials do not track data on workforce losses in long-term health care, Enright said, but nursing homes are operating at lower capacity than usual, in part because there isn’t enough staff to open more beds. Before the pandemic, most nursing homes operated at about 88% capacity. Now that’s down to 70 to 75%.

Enright said the association has heard of some long-term care facilities relying on COVID-19-positive employees during this surge, but she said there’s no way of telling how many of the 11,500 sick workers are caring for patients.

Families worry more about staff shortages than sick workers

Omicron has been a nightmare for families of residents, too.

Two weeks ago, Miriam Raftery’s 91-year-old mother Mary contracted COVID-19 in her La Mesa memory care facility. She’s in an isolation room by herself, and Raftery said she isn’t allowed to visit.

“It is scary. They say dry cough, but who knows. At 91, she’s very frail. It’s frightening,” Raftery said.

What frightens Raftery even more, however, is Mary being left alone in isolation. During last winter’s surge, most long-term care facilities implemented strict lockdown measures.

“When she was in that first place, she would just cry. They’d let me have window visits. She couldn’t really hear me very well, but she would just cry and plead with me to take her home. She didn’t understand what was happening,” Raftery said.

Now, with Mary in the isolation room, Raftery is concerned she will get depressed again or fall if left unattended.

Raftery said Mary has dementia and is a high-fall risk — she forgets that she can’t walk unassisted. Without constant supervision of her mother in the isolation room, Raftery was so concerned about her falling that she hired a private caregiver to sit with her for eight hours a day.

“I felt like I had no choice,” Raftery said. “It’s costing me $5,500 to do this for her, but given her history of serious falls and winding up in hospital multiple times from falling out of bed at these other places, you know, when she was left unattended during the day.”

Raftery said Mary already has experienced the consequences of understaffed facilities. She’s been in four homes in the San Diego area since February, moving each time Raftery discovered possible signs of neglect. When Raftery questioned the places about why no one was monitoring her mother, she said she was told there wasn’t enough staff.

“The facilities she’s been in, they were all losing people because certain people didn’t want to get vaccinated or they were just fed up,” Raftery said.

Families and advocates say staffing shortages caused by the omicron wave are a Catch-22: Sick workers risk spreading the disease to elderly and vulnerable residents but understaffing leads to neglect and inadequate care.

“I get why (the state health department) has opened the doors to asymptomatic workers, but it’s still highly transmissible, whether we’re asymptomatic or not, whether we’re vaccinated or not, right? So it’s a scary proposition,” said Maitely Weismann, co-founder of the Essential Caregivers Coalition.

Weismann’s 79-year-old mother Celia lives in an assisted living facility in the Los Angeles area. There was an outbreak in her facility last year that her mother narrowly avoided during an unrelated hospital stay. Now she’s worried Celia will catch COVID this time around.

Even though her mother is vaccinated and boosted, Weismann said she hears about people with similar conditions and disabilities dying from COVID-19.

The state health department has come under fire for insufficient oversight of nursing homes where families allege residents died of COVID-19 after sick staff were forced to work.

But for some, having reliable, COVID-positive staff available to care for their relatives is better than no one at all.

“Personally, if someone’s positive and comes in, I’m OK with that because I would rather my mom have the care that she needs than have her be neglected,” said San Diego resident Angela Trivonovich. “I’ve seen the results of neglect and not a lot of care in a nursing home. I would rather her not get severe diaper rash. I’d rather her not get a bed sore.”

At the nursing home where her 84-year old mother Rae lives, patients’ families were notified that 22 workers have tested positive in two weeks, Trivonovich said.

“If people feel good and they come in positive, I don’t know if that’s going to spread it any more than it does already. And I think the residents need all the care they can get,” she said. “They’re desperate.”

CalMatters reporter Alejandro Lazo contributed to this report. 

Entering at age 39, Fisher had been partially paralyzed when bone spurs severed tendons in his spine. After a few years of rehabilitation, Fisher said, he could have lived at home with proper care.

“You don’t need to be here,” Fisher remembers a certified nursing assistant telling him around 2005, seven years in, as he sat in his wheelchair in the facility’s cafeteria. “You got all your faculties.”

“Yeah,” Fisher replied, “but I don’t know how to get out.”

While elder care advocates sound the alarm about patient “dumping” by some California nursing homes – kicking out their mentally ill or bereft patients who need stable housing and care – a parallel dilemma is also threatening vulnerable residents: how to get out of a nursing home.

The vast majority of people admitted to California skilled nursing facilities stay for less than three months to rehabilitate a broken limb or recover from a stroke or other ailment, according to the California Association of Health Facilities, an industry trade group.

After these short-term stays, residents typically return home.

But for thousands of poor nursing home residents, like Fisher, a temporary stay can become indefinite. Saddled with hefty Medicare copayments that can reach $5,000 a month – and later stripped of Social Security income, diverted to pay ongoing nursing home costs – they are often unable to hang onto their former housing. They become effectively stranded, with Medi-Cal and Social Security paying for housing and daily living in the facility.

COVID has only intensified the urgency some residents feel to leave their nursing homes, where more than 73,000 have been infected and 9,522 have died as of Jan. 17, according to the California Department of Public Health. The department and Gov. Gavin Newsom have faced criticism of the state’s nursing home oversight as the public health crisis deepened and the death count climbed.

“Everybody wants out right now,” said Karen Stuckey, who has been transitioning residents out of nursing homes and into the community for 11 years with the nonprofit Choice in Aging. “They’re just there because they have no place to go.”

Over 9% of California nursing home residents, an estimated 37,000, have low-level care needs and could potentially live in the community, according to a 2017 estimate by the American Association of Retired Persons. In the organization’s 2020 long-term services scorecard, which analyzed the quality of life, living options and nursing home transitions in every state, California ranked 35th in “effective transitions.”

Federal regulations require nursing home staff to ask residents four times a year about their health and welfare – including whether they would like to speak to someone about leaving the facility. The requirement was adopted in 2010 by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, which regulates nursing homes that receive federal money. At the state level, the California Department of Public Health is tasked with ensuring that homes meet both federal and state rules.

If residents answer “yes” to the question of leaving – or ask to leave without any prompting – they are supposed to be referred to a program that can fund and organize their moves back into the community.

But thousands of residents’ appeals for help moving out have gone unanswered.

In 2020, California nursing home residents made nearly 14,500 requests to learn about moving back into the community, according to data from Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Only a third of those requests were fulfilled, the federal data show.

And, CalMatters found, there are few consequences for nursing homes who fail to ensure residents’ requests are granted. The California Department of Public Health does not penalize facilities that fail to follow through on residents’ requests.

Nicole Howell investigates nursing home complaints as the Contra Costa County ombudsman, part of a statewide program that assists residents in long-term care facilities.

“You would be shocked by the number of residents who could live in a much less institutional level of care,” she said. “Unless an ombudsman comes across it and knows to ask, people just end up languishing there.”

The California Department of Public Health declined CalMatters’ request for an interview. In an unsigned email response, the department wrote:

“Our goal is to ensure that any nursing home resident that wishes to return to the community has the ability to do so. This is not always possible to achieve.”

The department said it enforces all applicable regulatory requirements and ensures residents’ rights are protected.

Deborah Pacyna, spokeswoman for the California Association of Health Facilities, said the issue “is not on our radar.

“There are so many more important issues surrounding life and death matters, especially more recently,” she said of the devastation caused by the pandemic. “We need to be doing a better job, I mean, that’s the bottom line.”

The association represents some 900 of the state’s 1,223 nursing homes, which care for about 400,000 residents a year.

After CalMatters’ interview with Pacyna, the association sent a letter to its 7,000 members reminding them of the transitions program. “Eligible individuals of all ages with physical and mental disabilities have an opportunity to participate in (the transition program),” the association said in the June 10 letter.

Transitions deemed a civil right

The idea that nursing home residents should be able to transition back home – and get help in doing so – isn’t just on somebody’s wish list.

It’s a civil right.

In 1999, a U.S. Supreme Court decision gave people with disabilities living in nursing homes the civil right to live in the community, if they are able and want to do so.

The court’s reasoning was that “unnecessary institutional segregation… severely diminishes individuals’ everyday life activities,” wrote then-Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

After the ruling, the federal government founded Money Follows the Person in 2008, a program that helps pay for residents to leave facilities and find housing. (In California, the federal program is called California Community Transitions.)

California has 18 transition programs charged with finding affordable housing; paying for a resident’s deposit, first month’s rent and furnishings; and organizing in-home care.

Nationally, the program has moved nearly 100,000 nursing home residents back into the community since 2008, including some 4,000 in California. Though an average of $8,000 is needed to transition one resident, that person’s Medi-Cal costs drop from $85,000 a year to $18,000 on average, once outside the nursing home, according to the state Department of Health Care Services, which manages the program in California.

“Nobody gets up in the morning and goes, ‘Bucket list, I hope I break my hip today and go to a nursing home for the rest of my life,’” said Karen Jones, ombudsman in San Luis Obispo County, “and yet we have a huge expense to make people have that bucket list item.”

Those seniors who do make it out report a higher quality of life and are estimated to have saved California taxpayers hundreds of millions in Medi-Cal costs, according to a 2017 report to congress.

The program is some clients’ only hope for life in the community again, said Stuckey, who has had clients burst into tears on their first steps out of the facility.

But in California and elsewhere, the number of residents whose requests are being neglected is most likely a “gross underestimate,” said Kelly Bagby, vice president at the AARP Foundation Litigation Team. Bagby’s team is suing states for failing to protect residents’ right to live outside a facility.

“When a state knows that it’s not working, that only a small fraction of people are even aware that they have this right,” she said, “then the state has failed.”

Stuck in the ‘poverty pipeline’

In 2019, Virgil Steele was walking in Oxnard when he tweaked his neck and his right arm went limp – “like rubber,” he said.

Ever since a camper shell dropped on Steele’s neck two decades earlier, small neck injuries required surgery and rehabilitation.

At the time, the 62-year-old disabled mechanic was living out of his Volkswagen Bug, parked at the shop where he helped repair motorcycles from his wheelchair. Now he needed hospitalization.

On that day, Steele entered what elder care advocate Karen Stuckey calls the “poverty pipeline.”

As she describes it, this is a common scenario where people are injured, then shunted from the hospital to a nursing home where copays and required shared costs drain their coffers.

After a week in the hospital, Steele was discharged to an area nursing home.

There, Medicare covered Steele’s bill — but only for the first 20 days. After that, Medicare reduced its payment to 80% and Steele, like all nursing home residents, was responsible for the remainder – which can reach $5,000 a month.

Already short on funds, Steele qualified for Medi-Cal, the state’s low-income insurance, which picked up the 20% copayment. After three months of rehabilitation, a patient’s status becomes long-term care and Medicare stops paying altogether; now Medi-Cal foots the entire bill.

But Medi-Cal, the ostensibly free insurance, has a price. Once in long-term care, every cent of a nursing home resident’s Social Security Income, save for a $35 monthly allowance, is taken to help pay for the daily costs of living in the nursing home, such as food, housing and utilities.

Steele couldn’t pay rent for space to park his car on $35 a month. Eventually, his Volkswagen was towed, along with all his belongings, to pay off the rental debt.

“I lost everything,” he said.

Failure to pay rent is the leading reason nursing home residents lose their housing, according to several transition organizations.

By July 2020, the nursing home’s social worker linked Steele with a transition program called LIFE Incorporated in Camarillo, north of Los Angeles. But as preparations began to move him, medical dividers were raised in the facility’s hallways, staff donned PPE suits, and bodies were carried past him in blue bags.

“I was tempted to run,” Steele said. “I was trapped there and the COVID was coming to get me.”

Just before that Christmas of 2020, he was infected with the virus. On Christmas Day, his adult children called, but he couldn’t bring himself to tell them his diagnosis. That evening, the staff gave him peppermints and a Christmas card.

Steele, now 64, survived and was moved to an apartment in Oxnard a few months later. Though he’s thankful to be outside the facility, his life’s belongings are gone.

“When I left the (facility) I didn’t have anything anymore,” he said, “I don’t have anything now.”

No penalty for transition failures

In California, the Department of Public Health does not regulate how quickly a facility should refer a resident to a transition program. And it doesn’t cite or fine a home for failing to refer.

In 2020, two-thirds of California residents’ requests weren’t referred at all, according to federal data.

“The obligation to make the referral is explicit,” said Bagby, referring to the mandatory survey. But without a state regulation spelling out a timetable, she said, “the state can’t sanction facilities that don’t make the referral.”

Representatives of several California transition programs said the lack of consequences leaves residents at the whim of nursing homes.

A 2016 report by the U.S. Health and Human Services’ Office of Civil Rights found that most nursing homes “never ask, or nearly never ask” residents the question about their rights and living options. The federal investigation concluded that nursing staff weren’t properly trained and misinterpreted the quarterly survey’s instructions.

The agency recommended that nursing homes invite California Community Transition programs to present to residents and staff every six months.

Representatives of eight transition programs in California, which cover more than 700 nursing homes, told CalMatters that only three facilities had ever requested a presentation.

DeAnn Walters, a former nursing home administrator who is now at the California Association of Health Facilities, said she doesn’t recall the federal report and recommendations.

The California Department of Public Health, which routinely issues “All Facilities Letters” about new requirements or regulatory changes, did not address the report’s findings and recommendations.

In its unsigned email response to CalMatters, the department wrote: “Recommendations by any entity do not mandate the issuing of an All Facility Letter.”

Advocates worry it can be a conflict of interest for nursing homes to be responsible for referring residents out of their facilities.

A Medicare resident brings a facility substantially more in federal money than the state provides through its Medi-Cal program for low-income Californians.  To even be eligible for transition services, a resident must qualify for Medi-Cal.

Once nursing homes understand that California Community Transitions won’t likely move their more lucrative Medicare patients, said Stuckey, “They love what we do, and they want to refer.”

Jules Boddie, a 69-year-old retired state clerk who entered a Sacramento nursing home in 2018, said he lost his housing while awaiting transition help.

“It’s just like being put in a box and forgotten,” he said.

Boddie said he repeatedly asked for help returning home but waited more than a year and a half before getting any assistance.

The facility’s former director of nursing told CalMatters that, to her knowledge, Boddie never relayed such requests to staff. She produced quarterly assessments showing that Boddie had declined offers to receive help moving out.

Boddie, who is on Medi-Cal, said he has no memory of this.

But help eventually came. In the fall of 2020, he said, a new social worker came on board and quickly referred him to Choice in Aging, which placed him on a waitlist for affordable housing.

One week before Boddie moved into temporary housing, he was infected with COVID-19. As he gasped for air in the hospital, his new room was given to the next person on the waitlist.

He said he cautioned other residents: “You have a life outside the nursing home. Don’t give up on it.”

He was moved out of the facility and into shared housing in Sacramento on July 30.

‘The most peaceful I’ve ever been’

Even with the urgency of a pandemic, transitioning just one resident takes seven months on average, the Department of Health Care Services told CalMatters. Transition program workers say they face a gantlet of state regulations, reams of paperwork and affordable housing waitlists that can stretch five years.

“It’s such a process,” said Stuckey, “that unless they already have housing, we really have no control over it.”

The U.S. Supreme Court determined that, for patients hoping to transition, states must provide enough affordable housing so the waiting lists move at a “reasonable” pace.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development recommends states keep wait times below two years, but in California, the average wait time is more than 2½  years.

The governor’s Master Plan for Aging, released in January 2021, includes initiatives to expand affordable housing for seniors with $250 million in proposed funding. That could shorten waitlists for nursing home residents who’ve lost their housing.

Funding for Money Follows the Person ended in 2018, and Congress has passed five short-term extensions. The latest will keep the program running until 2027.

With funding shaky, nationwide transitions between 2018 and 2019 plummeted to 5,000, dropping below 10,000 for the first time since 2012. California reduced its transitions to under half of its 2014-2016 transitions, according to a 2020 report by the Community Living Policy Center.

Last year, the California Department of Health Care Services received a $5 million federal grant to help identify nursing home residents eligible to transition, like Bradley Fisher.

Over Fisher’s 14 years in the Bay Area facility, staff never asked him if he wanted to move out, he said, and did not inform him of his civil right to do so. The facility’s administrator told CalMatters in an email that records of Fisher’s quarterly surveys aren’t available.

Fisher said he began taking antidepressants while inside the home.

“I felt like I was stuck,” he said. “I even thought that playing bingo would get me out of this funk, but it never did. Nothing would.”

In 2012, a fellow resident told Fisher about a woman named Karen Stuckey, who was organizing that resident’s move out of the nursing home.

“She can get you out, too,” Fisher remembers him saying.

Months later, Fisher was moved to a shared apartment in Antioch. Initially rocked by anxiety after leaving his home of 14 years – and hospitalized twice with panic attacks — Fisher stuck it out.

“It’s the most peaceful I’ve ever been,” he said. ”I feel like a knot in my gut has been removed.”

This story originated with the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley, with SCAN Foundation funding.