More than half of registered voters (54 percent) believe California is on the wrong track, compared to 36 percent who think the state is on the right track, according to a recent poll by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies sponsored by the Los Angeles Times. Two-thirds of the nearly 9,000 voters polled said Newsom is doing a “poor” or “very poor” job addressing homelessness, up 12 points from 2020. And a not-so-surprising 51 percent of voters said the governor was doing a poor job on crime and public safety, up 16 points from 2020.
With the epic spike in crime and homelessness across the state, it’s no wonder California’s two most notorious progressive prosecutors are facing not just recalls, but out and out mutiny.
On Saturday, San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin received resounding boos from attendees at the city’s Chinese New Year Parade. He’s facing a recall in June over soaring crime rates as car break-ins, flagrant shoplifting, dramatic robberies and violent crime have reached crisis levels. Boudin’s refusal to prosecute criminals and address rampant open drug use on the altar of woke politics has made San Franciscans feel desperately unsafe. After voters recalled three San Francisco school board members last week, Boudin should be worried.
District Attorney George Gascón, Boudin’s high-profile counterpart in Los Angeles, is also facing a recall. Gascsón made headlines this week when the Association of Deputy District Attorneys (ADDA) announced that 98 percent of their Los Angeles prosecutor members support Gascón’s ouster. Voter turnout exceeded all previous ADDA elections at 83.3 percent participation.
“Over a year ago, Gascón began a massive social experiment by redirecting prosecutorial resources away from enforcing the law while simultaneously ignoring large portions of the penal code,” said ADDA VP Eric Siddall. “The result is an emboldened criminal element that knows the DA will not hold criminals accountable. This experiment has to end.”
While Homeless Numbers Climb, the Politically Connected Cash In
Californian’s frustration with the homeless crisis is understandable as the growing number of homeless in the state continues to defy belief. Progressive politicians have exacerbated the problem by making housing unaffordable, refusing to prosecute crime, and encouraging vagrancy and drug addiction. The progressive solution — to build taxpayer-subsidized housing provided free with no conditions to any homeless person — is a special-interest scam, guaranteed to never solve the problem.
As CPC co-founder Edward Ring explains in a recent analysis, government bureaucrats, powerful progressive nonprofits, and politically-connected housing developers prefer the status quo that keeps billions of dollars pouring into a bona fide Homeless Industrial Complex. Consider the staggering costs for “supportive housing” around the state: San Francisco’s Proposition A funding housing at an estimated cost of $500,000 per unit; Los Angeles’s $1.2 billion in bonds to construct supportive housing at an estimated cost of $550,000 per unit; and, in Venice Beach, a plan to create 140 apartments for at least $1.1 million per unit has even the laid-back locals outraged.
But homelessness is primarily an issue of mental illness, drug addiction, and crime, not a housing problem. And until California’s politicians stop pretending otherwise, it’s only going to get worse.
A Dozen Large California Cities Flunk Budgeting 101
California’s cities are also getting failing grades for their fiscal performance. Truth in Accounting recently released its 2022 “Fiscal State of the Cities” report that examines the balance sheets of the 75 largest U.S. cities, including 15 in California. Only three of those California cities – Irvine, Fresno, and Long Beach – had a “taxpayer surplus.” The other dozen are drowning in billions of dollars in debt due to unfunded pension and retiree healthcare benefits.
According to the report, Sacramento, Santa Ana, Los Angeles, San Diego and Anaheim are in the hole between $4,300 and $6,600 per taxpayer. And it gets even worse. San Jose and Oakland have at least $10,000 or more in tax burden per taxpayer. But the grand champion of fiscal disaster in the Golden State is (surprise!) San Francisco. With $5.6 billion in unfunded pension benefits and $3.9 billion in unfunded retiree healthcare benefits, the city is underwater a whopping $19,000 per taxpayer.
The Problem of Government Unions
Indeed, the common denominator in these flailing – and failing – cities is the oversized role of government unions. Raising cash through member dues, union leaders finance the campaigns of candidates who, once in office, sign off on even the most outlandish pay and benefit packages. Union leaders punish officials who display any resistance.
Consider the instructive tale of Cecilia “Ceci” Iglesias, founder of CPC’s Parent Union — and until a May 2020 recall vote, a member of the Santa Ana City Council.
Iglesias’s crime: She said no to a pay hike for police.
In February 2019, Iglesias, a self-declared conservative, voted against the police union’s demand for a pay hike. “My reason was simple: We can’t pay what we don’t have,” she wrote in a local newspaper. “Looking at the city’s already high taxes and massive public debt (what the watchdog group Truth in Accounting called a financial ‘sinkhole’ and among the worst in California), I could do nothing else.” Echoing President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Farewell Address, she openly wondered how much longer the city could underfund essential services in order to pay its government employees — how long before it destroyed from within the public safety it was paying for with higher police salaries.
She was outvoted by her council colleagues, and the police got their raise.
But that wasn’t enough. Police union president Gerry Serrano immediately announced his union’s recall campaign. He deployed half a million dollars in a direct-mail and media campaign aimed at a pandemic-quarantined electorate. Iglesias was “anti-police,” the union told white voters anxious about crime. She was “pro-Trump” and “anti-immigrant,” the union told Latino voters.
Turnout was low, just 19 percent, but the result was almost inevitable: Santa Ana voters ordered her thrown out of office.
This week we learned the rest of the story – that Santa Ana taxpayers will pay for Serrano’s political work. When Santa Ana city officials refused to pay for the union chief’s politicking, Serrano went to California State Treasurer Fiona Ma for help. That’s when Senate Bill 278 suddenly appeared in the state legislature — a bill that allows government employees to count union work towards their pensionable income. An Orange County amateur investigative reporter discovered that drafts of the bill “circulated in emails between Serrano, Ma, CalPERS officials, and various California police association lobbyists.” While lobbying Ma, “Serrano’s police union in Santa Ana became a heavy contributor to Ma’s reelection campaign,” the investigator found.
That’s how politics works in California.
BUT DON’T DESPAIR
California Policy Center is the only state organization dedicated full time to eliminating the legalized corruption at the heart of California politics. Since 2019, we’ve raised and spent $4.2 million helping California’s government workers stop paying dues to the unions wrecking California. The return on investment: That $4.2 million has helped reduce government union membership in California to its lowest level since the late 1990s — and reduced by $236 million per year the money government union leaders like Gerry Serrano use to hijack government.
“It’s a quaint notion but I think stealing things should be treated as criminal conduct.” — Assemblyman Kevin Kiley (R-Rocklin) on his new bill to repeal Prop. 47
More from CPC
National Review’s Radio Free California Podcast: Insane in the Brain - CPC President Will Swaim and CPC board member David Bahnsen take on Gov. Newsom’s hypocrisy on gun rights and California’s need to criminalize crime. Plus, Will talks with Mari Barke, president of the Orange County Board of Education, about the board’s legal effort to end Newsom’s emergency authority.
The John Phillips Show: Will Swaim joins the show to discuss Gov. Newsom’s plan for the “endemic” and how teachers’ unions are using school mask mandates as a bargaining chip.
