Silicon Valley is the epicenter of the state’s housing crisis, with even run-down older homes routinely selling for nearly $1 million and with apartment rent averaging over $3,400 in communities within a 10-mile radius of Mountain View. With some exceptions, local leaders generally say the right things about the urgent need to add more housing units.

But a new report about the region’s largest city, San Jose, shows the city has made little progress on its goal of adding 10,000 affordable housing units by 2022. According to a new report issued by city housing officials, 64 units were completed in the 2017-18 fiscal year. While 594 units are now being built and 270 are approved for construction, even if these units are counted, that means the city is on track to achieve less than 10 percent of its target by mid-2019.

Adding to this bad news is a recent San Jose Mercury-News report in which city officials expressed frustration on several fronts. Among the complaints:

• While Mayor Sam Liccardo has been consistent in pushing affordable housing, the head of the city’s housing department – Jacky Morales-Ferrand – sees an overall lack of focus at City Hall (pictured). One week, City Council members are touting rent-control ordinances, then they push the “tiny homes” concept, then it’s on to other issues.
• Morales-Ferrand also expressed disappointment that the state government has never provided cities with a new tool and new funding source to replace redevelopment, which Gov. Jerry Brown convinced the Legislature to gut in 2011.
• Councilman Johnny Khamis also has a complaint. He believes that the series of crime-reform initiatives touted by Brown and state lawmakers have complicated San Jose’s efforts to address housing and homeless issues. “I feel that the state just dumped a whole mess of people out of our prison system, and now we’re just having to deal with them,” he said.

Congress ‘0 for 115’ in approving helpful housing bills

Frustration with a lack of progress locally and in the state Legislature has led the influential, well-funded Silicon Valley Leadership Group to look for relief in a new place: Congress. While CEO Carl Guardino said the Silicon Valley and Bay Area congressional delegation had been helpful on major regional issues such as electrifying CalTrain and expanding the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system to San Jose, he told the Mercury-News that there had been little help on housing from Washington.

Housing experts say ultimately, local and state land-use policies, fees, taxes and regulations are most crucial in whether new units can be built. But federal agencies regulate mortgages, enforce fair-housing laws and have provided billions of dollars over the years to develop housing projects and to subsidize low-income housing.

According to the Apartment List group, in its current session, which began in January 2017, Congress is “roughly batting 0 for 115” in approving housing legislation introduced by federal lawmakers. Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Oakland, has by herself introduced 11 bills that focus on creating affordable housing. In a March speech, Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Santa Clara, said, “I don’t want to live in the Silicon Valley that only has Facebook or Google engineers able to live here.”

But the Trump administration and the Republicans who control the House and Senate have shown little enthusiasm not only for bold new plans but for continuing policies that have led to 3 million affordable homes being built since the late 1980s. The Affordable Housing Credit Improvement Act, which would provide developers of low-income housing with a substantial tax credit, has languished in House and Senate committees since it was introduced in March 2017.

Voters choose to speed up death penalty cases

Good morning! You may not have noticed it last week, but a measure to speed up executions in California is now projected to pass. 

Proposition 66, which aims to cap death-sentence appeals at five years, stands at 51.1 percent of the vote. While such a slim margin of victory would usually suggest the electorate is divided, a competing measure to end the death penalty altogether was rejected by 53.4 percent of voters (ballots are still being counted, so totals may change).

“California voters not only want to keep the death penalty intact but they want it to work as intended,” said Anne Marie Schubert, Sacramento County district attorney, who called Prop. 66’s lead “insurmountable.”

Prop. 66 speeds up the appeals process by expanding the number of courts and attorneys able to hear and try death penalty appeals to meet a five-year cap on the appeals process that currently takes decades. A court order could be sought when cases drag on. 

CalWatchdog has more.

In other news:

• “2011 pension fixes in L.A., S.F. not working,” writes CalWatchdog. 

• “7 myths about homelessness in Los Angeles,” by LA Weekly. 

• “Rep. Barbara Lee, a Democrat from Oakland who met with Fidel Castro on numerous occasions, says she will continue to push for normalizing relations between Cuba and the U.S. in the aftermath of Castro’s death,” reports Politico.

• “Donald Trump alleges widespread voter fraud in California. There’s no evidence to back it up,” reports the Los Angeles Times. 

Legislature:

• Gone till December, but the Senate Banking and Financial Institutions Committee will hold a hearing on Wells Fargo’s sales and management practices at 9:30 a.m.

Gov. Brown:

• Hosting the 85th Annual Capitol Christmas Tree Lighting Ceremony today at 4:30 p.m. on the west steps of the Capitol.

Story ideas: matt@calwatchdog.com

Follow us: @calwatchdog @mflemingterp

New followers: @MaxChina3

Already, state officials have begun their search for the right candidate to head the new Bureau of Medical Marijuana Regulation. In a development that will have pot advocates divided on the balance between increased freedom and increased bureaucracy, the position will combine “the drudgery of administering — say setting up IT systems for the bureau and crafting the minutiae of regulation policy” — with the kinds of perks and powers that are the envy of career policymakers, as the San Francisco Chronicle suggested:

“The chosen candidate will get a rare chance in Sacramento — the opportunity to create a brand new wing of the bureaucracy. The weed czar will hire perhaps 40 to 50 people, whose salary would be paid for with the waves of new cannabis licensing fees created by California’s recently passed medical marijuana law.”

Growing independence

The job has opened up at a time when elected officials have ratcheted up their support for decriminalization. Members of California’s Congressional delegation have kept up a testy exchange with federal prosecutors cracking down on high-profile dispensaries. Last week, Reps. Barbara Lee and Dana Rohrabacher implored Attorney General Loretta Lynch “to reconsider enforcement actions against California’s medical cannabis dispensaries following comprehensive, stringent and enforceable industry regulations recently signed into law,” as The Weed Blog noted.

“We are concerned that the Department of Justice continues to threaten individuals and businesses acting within the scope of state law on the medicinal use of marijuana despite formal guidance on exercising prosecutorial discretion and recent changes to federal law. It is counterproductive and economically prohibitive to continue a path of hostility toward dispensaries,” wrote Lee and Rohrabacher.

Coming to grips

But new regulations out of Sacramento have been put in place that would tighten the screws on the state’s longstanding laxity on prescriptions for pot. As ABC News reported, although California “has disciplined only eight doctors in 20 years for improper marijuana recommendations,” the “laid-back approach may change. The state recently enacted legislation to require the Medical Board to crack down on doctors who write recommendations without a proper patient exam or valid medical reason.”

Nationwide, California’s status quo had inspired other states grappling with marijuana regulation to take an even tougher approach. “Lawmakers in Illinois, New Jersey and other states have tried to avoid California’s drop-in, instant exams by attempting to define in legislation a legitimate doctor-patient relationship,” added the network. “Laws commonly call for a ‘bona fide’ relationship with a physical exam and review of medical records. New Jersey doctors must register in a publicly viewable database and take courses in addiction medicine and pain management.”

Changing labor

Among the wrinkles in the marijuana economy that regulators have yet to iron out, the influx of so-called “trimmigrants” has drawn increased attention. Annual migrants who flood into California pot country to cash in on the crop preparation season have crystallized California’s love-hate relationship with gray-market labor. “The migrant workers contribute to the economy, but many effectively are homeless,” the Press-Democrat reported. “Though the growers who employ them typically provide housing or a place to camp, when not working, they camp illegally in parks, alleys and along railroad tracks and rivers. Some can’t find jobs and turn to panhandling and frequenting food banks.”

On the other hand, native Californians have proven unwilling to compete for the jobs. Wheres trimmers “previously tended to be local residents and people who followed the music festival circuit, then stayed on the North Coast at the end of the festival season to process pot,” the new outside migrants “tend to be educated, hard workers who also cook and clean. Some marijuana farmers prefer them over locals, some of whom act as though they’re entitled to high pay and free meals,” the founder of one of the area’s premier festival pot contests told the paper.

City councils are apt to worry about different kinds of drug crime than Congress. But the new attention from both ends of the political pecking order comes from a single source: the legal and regulatory uncertainty surrounding the burgeoning marijuana economy.

City power struggles

It’s a phenomenon playing out conspicuously in the county of San Luis Obispo. There, cities have moved to keep out pot dispensaries. Arroyo Grande, which passed its ban in 2008, added a supplementary ban four years later on so-called “mobile dispensaries,” the door-to-door marijuana delivery services that frequently, but not always, operate in compliance with California’s medical marijuana rules.

Mobile dispensaries are undeterred, however, provoking a fresh pot controversy in nearby Paso Robles. The Paso Robles City Council deadlocked, killing a plan to ratchet up from brick-and-mortal prohibitions on dispensaries to a ban like Arroyo Grande’s.

Proponents of the measure invoked a staff report to argue that delivery services posed a “current and immediate threat” to the health and safety of city residents on account of violent crimes seen linked to medical marijuana, according to the San Luis Obispo Tribune.

Angry residents, however, lambasted the City Council for what they characterized as the summary and one-sided nature of the report. At least one resident found it bitterly ironic that the mobile dispensary ban arose from the city’s surprise when a delivery operator sought to apply for a business license.

The ordeal marks the second time the City Council attempted to stamp out pot delivery, with Paso Robles Mayor Duane Picanco citing the federal illegality of marijuana as the reason for his support.

Federal changes also playing out

Yet marijuana law is also plagued by uncertainty, confusion and concern at the federal level. While California localities struggle to agree on mobile dispensaries, an influential California legislator is pushing forward on rules meant to reduce drug crime in a different way.

Earlier this year, the Treasury and Justice Departments issued guidelines meant to calm bank fears of criminal prosecution for working with marijuana-related businesses legalized by state law. But, as the Wall Street Journal reported, the quasi-regulatory guidance left lenders even more uncertain; banks worried the federal government didn’t really guarantee legal safety instead adding “burdensome new requirements that they screen customers for marijuana ties.” As a result, the Journal concluded, “banks have become even more uneasy about accepting marijuana money, pushing state-licensed pot businesses deeper into a financial netherworld.”

Into that bureaucratic morass stepped Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, the Huntington Beach Republican with a strong libertarian streak on drugs and other civil liberties issues. Just last month, Rohrabacher led enough Republicans to help pass a House bill that would bar federal pot prosecutions in excess of state law. This month, the congressman advanced a new piece of legislation — an amendment devised to defund any action by Treasury to penalize banks serving state-legal marijuana businesses.

On July 16, Rorhabacher helped muster enough votes to pass that bill, too. He was joined in sponsoring the legislation by Representatives Barbara Lee, an Oakland Demcrat; Denny Heck, D-Wash.; and Ed Perlmutter, D-Colo.

Bipartisan push to protect state pot laws

The vote is not just a landmark in federal drug legislation. It also confirms the instrumental role of bipartisan California legislators in successfully driving bipartisan votes on marijuana law.

Despite the dramatic changes, the Senate must still adopt a similar approach to drug reform in order for Rohrabacher and Lee’s agenda to advance. Bipartisan efforts along those lines are afoot, but wrangling behind closed doors has sidelined one proposed bill. Last month, Senators Rand Paul, R-Ky., and Cory Booker, D-N.J., introduced an amendment that would block the Department of Justice and the Drug Enforcement Administration from investigating Americans complying with their state’s marijuana laws.

That’s still pretty low for this expensive state. So Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., is proposing $26 an hour.

That still seems pretty chintsy. Members of Congress make $174,000 a year. Assuming a 40 hour work week (not including schmoozing at parties, campaigning, calling donors for cash, etc.), that’s $181 an hour.

A local burger flipper adds more to the economy than any member of Congress — especially the “small government” Republicans who keep increasing government.

So let’s boost the minimum wage to $181 an hour.