While California, with its vast housing market, suffered grievously during the Great Recession, its economy – and that of its Northern California tech heartland – has largely boomed in recent years. Compared to the overall sub-5 percent state unemployment rate, the San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont area currently boasts a 2.4 percent unemployment rate.

When asked if they felt “things in the Bay Area are going the right direction,” only a quarter said yes. This figure represents a stark decline from previous years: 42 percent and 57 percent agreed with the statement in 2017 and 2014, respectively.

Skyrocketing housing costs were largely to blame for this dented confidence, with 42 percent citing it as the biggest regional challenge. In comparison, in 2015, only 18 percent held the view and 28 percent last year.

Eye-popping statistics bare these fears. In San Francisco, home values have risen 10 percent in the last year alone, with the median home price being nearly $1.2 million, according to Zillow. Renters aren’t any better off, as the median rent is currently $4,500.

Whether or not these problems are enough to cause demographic changes remains to be seen. A plurality, 46 percent, see themselves moving away in the next few years, a moderate increase from last year; 42 percent expect to stay, a moderate decrease.

Should people start leaving, however, it could be a loss for the state as a whole. A little less than a quarter would stay in the Golden State, while 64 percent would look elsewhere in the country.

Finally, those hoping these attitudes would translate into a paradigm shift at the ballot box may be disappointed. The majority polled look toward public entities and the government to solve problems such as housing costs and traffic – not the business community, tech industry or other private actors.

It’s just the latest piece of evidence on the state’s housing crisis, as residents confront a shrinking supply of homes and rising costs, leading many to wonder if they’d be better off elsewhere.

“When you then ask them where they would relocate, they’re often throwing up their hands,” poll director Mark DiCamillo said, according to the LA Weekly. “Millennials seem to be the most likely to say they’d consider leaving.”

The uneasiness about the market appears most dramatically in the Bay Area, where 65 percent of those polled said they’re facing an “extremely serious” housing affordability problem.

But even in Los Angeles and San Diego, 59 percent and 51 percent, respectively, have considered re-locating over housing affordability issues.

The IGS poll sampled 1,200 registered California voters from late August through early September.

In Los Angeles specifically, a recent analysis found that a person needs to earn over $109,000 per year to afford a two-bedroom apartment in the city, with the assumption that renters are spending 30 percent or less of their income on housing.

Across the entire state, the median rent for a one-bedroom apartment is $1,750 and a two-bedroom averages $2,110.

“These are very dramatic findings,” DiCamillo added, according to the Mercury News. “In every region of California, the rising cost of housing has crept into the consciousness of voters.”

The median price of a single-family home rose around 7 percent year-over-year to $565,330 in California this past August – and in Santa Clara County, the heart of Silicon Valley, the median price jumped a shocking 17.9 percent year-over-year to $1,150,000. 

The state Legislature is taking notice, passing 15 bills this month relating to housing affordability, seeking to increase the pace at which housing construction takes place.

For example, Senate Bill 2 and Senate Bill 3 provide new funding for low-income housing, while SB35 attempts to streamline the approval process for construction in municipalities that fall behind Sacramento’s housing goals.

While California boasts some of the highest earners, it also has the nation’s highest poverty rate when housing costs are factored in, resulting in a heightened sense of urgency in a state that has some of the biggest regulatory hurdles for new home building.

At City Hall Monday, referendum backers turned in an estimated 34,000 signatures calling for repeal, well above the 19,000 signatures the measure needed to qualify for the ballot. The city clerk has 30 days to verify signatures. If backers meet the threshold, supervisors will decide whether to repeal the law; schedule a special election; or hold an election in June 2018, the date of the next regularly scheduled vote. The latter course is most likely.

Although backed by the tobacco industry, the repeal effort focuses primarily on issues of tobacco “harm reduction.” That’s the idea that health officials ought to promote policies designed to reduce the harmful effects of tobacco and other addictions, rather than insist on a more idealistic, yet less potentially successful, abstinence-based approach. In other words, it might help people if they switch from dangerous behaviors to less-dangerous ones, even if the less-dangerous ones aren’t totally safe.

There’s no debate about the dangers of traditional cigarette smoking and, perhaps to a lesser extent, other combustible tobacco products such as cigarillos and cigars. But the wide-ranging city ban also defines electronic cigarettes as tobacco. Vaping liquids are not actually a tobacco product, but most contain nicotine. All of these liquids are flavored.

Under the new ordinance, retailers will no longer be allowed to sell vaping liquids, which will make it more difficult for cigarette smokers to switch to them. Public Health England, Great Britain’s main public-health agency, deems vaping to be 95 percent safer than smoking. For that reason, the vaping industry, well represented at a Monday news conference on the City Hall steps, depicted the city’s ban as a threat to the public’s health.

As they explain it, under the new law, cigarettes (although not menthol ones, or fruity cigars) can still be sold legally in the city. But less harmful tobacco-related products such as snus (spitless Swedish-style tobacco that is placed under one’s upper lip) and vaping will be outlawed. Those addicted to nicotine will find it easier to just grab a pack of traditional cigarettes, given that these safer alternatives will be off store shelves.

During the debate, city officials rebuffed such harm-reduction arguments. “We’re focusing on flavored products because they are widely considered to be a starter product for future smokers,” said Supervisor Malia Cohen, who introduced the unanimously passed ordinance. She argued that tobacco companies target poor, young and minority communities with flavored products to hook them on a lifetime of nicotine additions.

Ordinance backers depicted vaping as another tool in Big Tobacco’s arsenal. Yet a news story this week from San Francisco’s public-radio station KQED seemed to confirm at least some of the points the vaping supporters were making. “Electronic cigarettes may be a helpful tool for those who are looking to quit smoking, according to a recent study,” noted the report by Anna Kusmer. “This complicates the public health narrative around this new tobacco product, which have grown in popularity in the U.S. over the past decade.” Complicate, it does indeed.

And a new survey from Chris Russell and Neil McKeganey from the Centre for Substance Use Research in Glasgow, Scotland has rebutted the idea of vaping as a gateway to traditional cigarette smoking. The researchers found that: “More than 75 percent of American adult frequent (electronic vaping product, or EVP) users surveyed were cigarette smokers when they began using e-cigarettes and have now successfully quit smoking.” Yet less than “5 percent of current EVP users were non-smokers before beginning e-cigarette use.”

Referendum supporters also pointed to the economic impact of shutting down such a large portion of the city’s convenience-store industry. For instance, possession and use of menthol cigarettes and vaping products will still be legal in San Francisco, but consumers will have to travel to other localities or order the products online. The city’s Office of Small Business opposed the ban because, in part, of the ease of buying products other places.

CNN also reported on some recent data: The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that tobacco use among high-school and middle-school students remained unchanged from 2011 to 2016, but that from 2015 to 2016, there were decreases in use of any tobacco product, e-cigarettes and hookahs among high school students. For middle-schoolers, rates of e-cigarette use dropped slightly as well. E-cigarette advocates say that’s evidence vaping is not becoming the teen epidemic that its proponents suggest.

However, California’s Tobacco Education and Research Oversight Committee, which oversees spending from the state’s recently enacted $2 a pack cigarette-tax increase, seems to view vaping as just another form of smoking. That’s a prevalent view among state and local health officials, who focus on vaping’s potential health concerns, rather than on the lower risks it creates in comparison to traditional cigarette smoking. They promote the use of medically approved tobacco-cessation devices instead, despite their low rates of success.

The new law’s backers also point to studies that suggest potentially bad health effects from the use of e-cigarettes. But referendum supporters note the irony that San Francisco, a city that has long pioneered harm-reduction policies when it comes to sexual behavior and drug use (safe sex programs and needle exchanges for heroin users), is instead taking a Prohibition-oriented approach when it comes to tobacco products, especially as the state legalizes the once-prohibited marijuana.

The scientific and public-policy debates aren’t going away. But this much is certain. The coming San Francisco referendum will show whether vaping’s supporters will be able to halt the wave of flavored-tobacco bans. If they don’t succeed, there will be little to stop Bay Area and other California localities from moving forward with similar bans.

Steven Greenhut is Western region director for the R Street Institute. Write to him at sgreenhut@rstreet.org.

TBEC Review / flickr

Restrictive new anti-tobacco ordinances are spreading across the San Francisco Bay Area like a cigarette-sparked wildfire. Northern California cities already have some of the toughest anti-smoking laws in the nation, but a raft of new laws and proposals take aim at “flavored” tobacco products such as menthol cigarettes and fruity mini-cigars.

Health officials argue that these flavored products are particularly appealing to teens, and that their bans are designed to keep young people from picking up an unquestionably dangerous habit. They also argue that the purveyors of menthol cigarettes, for example, target minority communities, and lead to ongoing health problems there.

The ordinances, however, share one trait that has advocates for tobacco “harm reduction” concerned. They make no distinction between combustible tobacco products – i.e., cigarettes, cigarillos, pipe tobacco and cigars – and smokeless products such as e-cigarettes and snus (Swedish-style spit-less tobacco that one places on one’s upper lip).

Tobacco “harm reduction” is a public health strategy designed to reduce the harmful effects of cigarette smoking by encouraging smokers to switch to far-less dangerous – not safe, but less dangerous – types of tobacco-related products. For instance, Public Health England, the United Kingdom’s main public-health agency, argues that vaping is 95 percent safer than cigarette smoking and therefore is a potentially beneficial alternative to smoking.

“About 40 percent of former and current adult smokers predict that removing their ability to choose flavors would make them less likely to remain abstinent or attempt to quit,” wrote Carrie Wade, the R Street Institute’s director of harm-reduction policy, in a recent Washington Examiner column. “While the vast majority of quit attempts are of the ‘cold turkey’ variety, e-cigarettes beat out both nicotine replacement therapies like the patch or nicotine gum and prescribed drugs like Chantix and Zyban.”

Vape liquids are not actually tobacco but mostly contain nicotine. They almost always are flavored. Many adult e-cigarette users prefer vaping with flavored liquids than vaping with those that have a tobacco flavor. These local bans on flavors, by the way, follow a recent statewide law that taxes vaping liquids at the same rate as cigarettes. The California Board of Equalization is currently working out the details of that taxation edict.

Wade described the essence of tobacco harm-reduction policy: make it easier for smokers to switch to smoking alternatives that cause fewer health-related problems. It might be ideal, health-wise if every smoker simply went “cold turkey,” but that’s not likely to happen, so harm-reduction advocates see vaping as a reasonable alternative. They see efforts to limit access to liquids and to boost taxes on them as policies that work against this harm-reduction approach.

Even California’s official Tobacco Education and Research Oversight Committee explained, in a public meeting earlier this year, that insufficient numbers of smokers participate in medically approved nicotine-replacement therapies. The committee, however, made no effort to distinguish between degrees of harm, and one member depicted vaping as just another form of smoking. In Bay Area cities and elsewhere, public-health officials argue that vaping is still dangerous – and they argue (despite contrary evidence) that it serves as a gateway for teens to actual smoking.

As a result of the new rules, it will become increasingly difficult for nicotine-addicted northern Californians to purchase and use vaping products. That’s particularly true as neighboring counties and cities embrace similar bans. Supporters of these bans admit that it is one of their goals to have such ordinances spread from one community to another, thus making it more difficult for people to simply go to a neighboring city to grab some vape juice.

Some proposals have become law, such as one in the Marin County city of Novato. Others are under consideration. The Contra Costa County Board of Supervisors is now considering a ban after one of its committees recently approved a new proposal. Likewise, officials in San Francisco and Oakland have also introduced flavor bans.

San Francisco Supervisor Malia Cohen’s public statements focus on the sale of mentholated tobacco products. She explains that 80 percent of African-American smokers use menthol products. Nevertheless, her proposal includes all flavored tobacco, which includes vaping liquids. Oakland Councilmember Annie Campbell Washington, who led a 2016 campaign to increase soda taxes in the city, has introduced a similar measure that includes vapor products in the flavoring ban.

Novato’s ordinance, which goes into effect January 2018, requires that all residential leases in the city include a clause calling it a “material breach of the agreement for tenant or any other person subject to the control of the tenant … to violate any law regulating smoking while anywhere on the property.” In other words, tenants can be evicted from their apartments not only if caught smoking – but if they or their guests are caught vaping.

The Contra Costa County health department justifies its proposal by stating that e-cigarettes contain nicotine, which is addictive, and includes various chemicals known to cause cancer and lung problems. But harm-reduction advocates don’t claim that vaping is totally safe, only that it is far safer than cigarette smoking.

Given the political bent of Bay Area cities and counties, it seems likely that most if not all of these proposals will eventually become law. The question remains whether in their zeal to improve the public’s health, these officials are embracing policies that will make actual smoking-related health improvements that much harder to attain.

Steven Greenhut is Western region director for the R Street Institute. Write to him at sgreenhut@rstreet.org.

Air quality regulator fees fund fancy trips as consumer costs increase

Good morning. Happy Hump Day!

Ready for the final presidential debate tonight? Don’t worry, it’ll all be over soon. Before we get to things to watch for tonight, we swing by the Bay Area, where fee increases by the local air quality regulator get passed on to consumers — and the directors enjoy the surplus funds.

Not even a month after sending two dozen people on a pricey trip to New Orleans, a member of the board of directors of the Bay Area’s air quality regulator boasted that the agency was “flush” with cash.

In July, the Bay Area Air Quality Management District was considering whether to hire additional staffers to assist with administering a new regulation when board member Shirlee Zane boasted “this air board, quite frankly, is flush.”

“We can more than afford to hire … extra help to do the assessment,” said Zane, a Sonoma County supervisor.

“We have plenty of money,” Zane added — a sentiment echoed by Katie Rice, a board member and Marin County supervisor.

While the rosy perception of the district’s finances may have been isolated to just a few board members, the willingness to spend on additional staff and a lavish New Orleans trip coincided with what’s become a routine increase in fees charged to those local businesses considered stationary sources of air pollution — costs which experts say are then passed onto consumers. 

CalWatchdog has more. 

In other news:

• Capital Public Radio gives four things to watch in the debate tonight. 

• “In a scathing sentencing position filed late Tuesday with the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, federal prosecutors requested five years’ imprisonment in their corruption case against former state Sen. Ron Calderon,” reports The Sacramento Bee. 

• The Orange County Register give four ways the county can “help its homeless.”

• “A California-based tribe’s recent loss at the National Labor Relations Board could reignite interest in controversial legislation affecting Indian casinos and union workers nationwide,” reports The Sacramento Bee. 

Legislature:

• Gone till December.

Gov. Brown:

• No public events announced.

Tips: matt@calwatchdog.com

Follow us: @calwatchdog @mflemingterp

New follower: @PaulParmley

Reason’s 22^nd Annual Highway Report ranked California 42nd. While this is still in the lowest category, the ranking has steadily improved over the years, moving up from a low of 46th. Because of data-collection delays, the rankings only go through 2013.

The study measures a number of important factors: Road conditions on freeways and primary commercial highways, the state of each state’s bridges, fatality rates and various costs per mile – administrative, maintenance, capital costs and expenditures.

California has done particularly poorly on the spending side of the equation. It ranked 44th in total disbursements per mile; 43rd in maintenance disbursements per mile; 40th in capital and bridge disbursements per mile; and 47th in administrative disbursements. That reinforces a California state auditor study from last summer showing that Caltrans may have as many as 3,500 unnecessary job positions.

The state’s overall per-mile capital and bridges cost totaled nearly $170,000 – far costlier than highest-ranked South Carolina, at nearly $21,000, or middle-ranked Utah, at nearly $78,000. But California wasn’t nearly the worst. Worst-ranked New Jersey spends $839,000 per mile; Florida spends more than $380,000; and Illinois spends nearly $202,000. On administrative costs, California spends more than $47,000 per mile, compared to $1,107 per mile in top-ranked Kentucky and $3,762 in 10th ranked Texas.

On the bad side, California had one of the highest proportions of rural interstate mileage in poor condition, at 6.52 percent. Its urban interstate mileage in poor condition was even worse, at 13.32 percent, which isn’t a surprise to anyone who regularly navigates the Los Angeles, San Diego or Bay Area highway systems. The survey only looks at state-owned highway systems, not at the myriad local and regional systems that are in various conditions.

“The good news is that California reported the lowest percentage of deficient bridges of any state in the nation,” according to Reason Vice President Adrian Moore, writing in the Orange County Register. California also ranked 10th in highway fatalities with a rate of 0.9 per 100 million vehicle miles. The best performance was in Massachusetts, with 0.58 fatalities per 100 million miles and the worst was Montana, with 1.9 fatalities per 100 million miles. Those rates, however, have been dropping nationwide.

One of the survey’s authors, Reason Senior Fellow David T. Hartgen, told me Caltrans didn’t do anything dramatic between 2012 and 2013 to explain the rating improvement – but it did improve a significant number of bridges and roadways.

“A widening performance gap seems to be emerging between most states that are making progress and a few states that are finding it difficult to improve,” according to the report’s authors. “There is also increasing evidence that higher-level road systems (Interstates, other freeways and principal arterials) are in better shape than lower-level road systems, particularly local roads.”

The good news: California is among those states that are improving. The bad news: It has an extremely long way to go to reduce congestion and bring state and local roads up to snuff. On a controversial note, California’s recently released transportation plan seems to downplay the importance of expanding the state’s highway and road infrastructure.

The “California Transportation Plan 2040” focuses more on battling climate change than on expanding the state’s already clogged network of highways. “By 2040, California will have completed an integrated rail system linking every major region in the state, with seamless one-ticket transfers to local transit,” wrote Transportation Secretary Brian Kelly.

“Responding to the desires of millennials and aging baby boomers alike, we will further invest in complete, safe pedestrian and bicycle networks,” Kelly added. He also promised a new approach toward lowering maintenance costs on roads and bridges. But the state’s blueprint relies heavily on alternative transportation sources, rather than on freeways and road construction, given the “transportation system must do its part to reduce these threats (climate change) to our environment and health.”

Other reports paint a mostly gloomy picture of California’s transportation situation. Last year, the Senate Transportation and Infrastructure Development Committee – during a special session designed to come up with additional funding for transportation programs – reported that “54 of California’s 58 counties have an average pavement rating of ‘poor’ or ‘at risk,’ with much of this deterioration occurring over the past six years.”

Reason found California to top the national charts on bridge condition, but the state Senate pointed to 3,000 “structurally deficient bridges.” The committee pointed to an expected doubling of freight moved on California’s freeways (from 2002 to 2035), to suggest that the state’s infrastructure will face an accelerated level of deterioration.

The session failed to come up with a long-term funding solution, but that will no doubt be a top item for the Legislature next year.

Steven Greenhut is Western region director for the R Street Institute. He is based in Sacramento. Write to him at sgreenhut@rstreet.org.

Enter San Francisco, where officials often don’t play by the normal economic rules. No metropolitan area is more closely identified with the burgeoning high-tech economy than the Bay Area. Yet in June, three of the city’s 11 supervisors proposed a 1.5-percent payroll tax that would be imposed specifically on technology companies that earn $1 million in gross receipts.

This “tech tax” was designed to raise money to battle the city’s homeless problem. But the economic rationale was epitomized in a statement by the bill’s author, Supervisor Eric Mar: “The rapid tech boom in our city and region threatens our city’s ability to thrive and prosper,” he said, in a Guardian report. “Five years after the boom, it’s time for San Francisco to ask the tech companies to pay their fair share.”

Earlier this month, the measure that would have placed the tax proposal on a citywide ballot was defeated in committee. Enough San Francisco legislators apparently understand an idea that goes back to Aesop’s day: Strangling a golden goose is a quick route to poverty. But this won’t be the last San Franciscans will hear about such a tax increase, nor is it the only example of increasing hostility by city officials and local activists to the tech industry.

“Corporate buses that Google and other tech companies (use) to ferry their workers from the city to Silicon Valley, 30 or 40 miles to the south, are being targeted by an increasingly assertive guerrilla campaign of disruption,” according to a 2014 Guardian article. Protesters have blocked buses. A window was busted on one of them. As the article put it, protesters complain that “the tech sector has pushed up housing prices in the city and made it all but unaffordable for anyone without a six-figure salary.” The Google buses make it easier for tech workers to live in beautiful San Francisco, rather than in the more mundane San Jose area.

Likewise, San Francisco supervisors recently passed a law that legalizes short-term rentals in the city, but imposes restrictions on them. Property owners can only rent out their entire house 90 days a year. It must be their primary residency. They must pay hotel taxes. They must follow the city’s rent-control laws. The most controversial element: Hosting sites, such as Airbnb and HomeAway, would be responsible for making sure hosts – i.e., the people who post their homes for rent on company sites – are registered with the city. Airbnb filed a lawsuit arguing the law violates the First Amendment and Communications Decency Act. The latter is a 1996 federal law that protects websites from being held accountable for what individuals post on them.

Advocates for the short-term rental law use a similar argument as those who defend the “tech tax” proposal. They blame these rentals for depleting the city’s housing stock and driving up the cost of apartments. “It is ultimately about corporate responsibility,” according to Supervisor David Campos, quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle. “About an industry that has made and continues to make tens of millions of dollars in this line of work taking responsibility for the negative impact that they are having on the housing stock.”

Once again, many San Francisco officials see thriving tech companies as a problem. They blame their success for driving up housings costs. Apparently, the best way to drive down housing costs is to drive businesses – and residents – out of the city. It’s the kind of zero-sum rationale that’s fashionable in San Francisco. Yes, demand drives up costs if – and it’s a big if – supply remains the same. Thanks to strict building restrictions and growth controls throughout the Bay Area, the supply of housing is largely capped.

Within the city of San Francisco, rent control is a staunch disincentive for property owners to rent out their apartments or to invest in the construction of new ones. In essence, a tenant can stay for many years in apartments at below-market rates. Rent increases are capped. Evictions are difficult, thanks to the city’s notoriously pro-tenant rent laws. Over the years, the city has only built a tiny portion of the units needed to keep up with the population growth. The permit process for building anything is costly and cumbersome. Even some state legislators from the Bay Area recognize the need to build more supply, but most proposals are modest or focus on building more subsidized units.

“(O)ver the long run, setting an artificially low price on a product (in this case, apartments) guarantees that the supply of that product will diminish,” explained Peter Byrne in a prescient 2000 San Francisco Weekly article. “Among other things, when people are unable to move – due to excessively high rents – they tend to stay in one place, that is, to hoard their apartments, effectively removing these units from the market.”

Property owners become afraid to rent out their apartments. It’s one thing to rent out an apartment for market-based rents. You can always raise the rent after the lease is up or give tenants notice and move into the building. But in San Francisco, such reasonable behaviors are restricted. As a result, “thousands of units are simply being kept off the market,” according to a 2014 report by KALW. “Some estimate up to 10,000 of these units exist. Many sit unrented because tenants are proving too risky an investment for some property owners.” Tenants can get free attorneys and even tie up legitimate evictions (for nonpayment) in a costly legal process.

By contrast, in the booming city of Tokyo, home prices have been steady for 20 years, according to a new article by Alex Tabarrok for the Foundation for Economic Education. That’s because the city “has a laissez-faire approach to land use.” In 2014, it issued more than 142,000 building permits – far more than the entire number of permits in all of California that year. Yes, even a densely populated city with virtually no vacant land can build its way out of its housing crunch. Keeping supply up also makes it easier to deal with the homeless issue.

The proposed “tech tax” is counterproductive for any number of reasons. “It’s solving a housing crisis by hurting an economy,” said Mark Pincus, founder of Zynga. As Forbes’ Travis Brown reported, “The same innovative individuals who would be paying this 1.5 percent payroll tax already pay 13.3 percent on their earned income (the highest rate in the nation).” San Francisco is a great city, but there are other great cities competing with it for these jobs.

The tax is dead for now, but the same illogical reasoning – and fundamental problem – is alive and well. Why, yes, it might be possible to at least marginally reduce housing prices by chasing jobs and taxpayers away. But is that a road the city wants to travel? Isn’t it far better to try something sensible and create new incentives to create rental properties?

Steven Greenhut is the Western region director for the R Street Institute. He is the founding editor of CalWatchdog. Write to him at sgreenhut@rstreet.org.

• Bay Area court stops suspending driver licenses over unpaid fines
• SF to look at its sanctuary city policies
• Bernie and Hillary come to SoCal
• State Senate votes to ban private communications with Coastal Commission

Under pressure from civil liberties groups, Contra Costa County Superior Court announced last week a moratorium on the practice of suspending driver licenses over unpaid fines.

Civil liberties groups have urged courts and the California Judicial Council — the policy-making board of the California court system — to take action for months now, arguing that suspending licenses for unpaid fines disproportionately affects lower-income drivers.

CalWatchdog has more. 

In other news:

• According to the AP/SF Gate, San Francisco officials plan to look at the city’s “sanctuary city” protections for undocumented immigrants, a policy that led to national criticism last year following the death of Kate Steinle, who was killed allegedly by a Mexican man living in the country illegally. 
• Events on Tuesday by Sen. Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, two Democratic candidates for president, are putting Riverside and San Bernardino on the political map, writes the San Bernardino County Sun.
• Meanwhile, Sanders, who is a longshot in the race, is scrambling for votes in the Golden State, writes CalWatchdog. And the OC Weekly compares a Sanders rally to a “very tame Woodstock.” 
• The state Senate on Monday approved legislation “that would prohibit developers, environmentalists and others from having private, off-the-record communications with members of the California Coastal Commission that could influence decision-making,” writes the Los Angeles Times.

Assembly:

• Full slate of hearings. 

Senate:

• Joint hearing on marijuana legalization. 

Gov. Brown:

• No public events scheduled.

Tips: matt@calwatchdog.com

Follow us: @calwatchdog @mflemingterp

New followers: @StephenSchatz @TimAnaya

“The state rail authority is studying an alternative to build the first segment in the Bay Area, running trains from San Jose to Bakersfield,” the Los Angeles Times reported. “If the plan does change, it would be a significant reversal that carries big financial, technical and political impacts, especially in Southern California.” Local officials and residents have argued that the area’s transportation needs and challenges far outweigh those in the San Francisco Bay Area, where public transportation is dense and plentiful.

Moving the goal posts

The controversial, last-minute shift hinted at pessimistic calculations within the state’s High Speed Rail Authority as to how best to mitigate cost pressure and environmental constraints faced in the south, where any rail line will have to navigate — and penetrate — the area’s rugged natural terrain. “This new interest in building from the north first comes just one week after announcing an $800,000 effort to find a suitable starting location in Burbank, near L.A.,” Business Insider noted. “The hope is that the north-first plan would be less risky, making it more likely that construction can begin before the project becomes politically nonviable.”

In addition to changing the project’s starting line, the new plan also shifted its destination — another concession to the dramatic obstacles posed by a scheme routed directly into the L.A. basin. “The alternative being examined would run from Silicon Valley to Bakersfield and be less costly than the current proposal to connect the Central Valley with Burbank because it wouldn’t entail expensive tunneling costs,” as the San Jose Mercury News observed. “The outcome of the new evaluation will be known in the coming weeks, when the state unveils its 2016 business plan. The document will be the most comprehensive update for the $68 billion project in four years.”

At the same time, however, local officials in Bakersfield have yet to warm to the new proposal. “Connecting California high-speed rail between Kern and the Bay Area before building south toward Los Angeles would not resolve the touchier issues surrounding the project’s local impacts, but it would provide more time for planning the route south from Bakersfield,” they have informed the Bakersfield Californian. “There have been contentious discussions about different proposed alignments through Kern and how they would affect local homes, businesses, schools and churches, as well as Kern’s prospects for landing a maintenance facility that would bring more than 1,500 good jobs.”

Feet to the fire

The changes have come hot on the heels of a sharp escalation in lawmakers’ displeasure toward rail authority officials. Since October of last year, when the Los Angeles Times broke news of the authority’s secrecy over anticipated cost overruns, the project’s fortunes have fallen under increasing scrutiny in Sacramento. In the story, the paper recalled, it “found that the years remaining before the deadline were not enough to construct 300 miles of track, bore 36 miles of mountain tunnels, build six train stations, erect high-voltage electrical systems and construct a heavy maintenance facility. The story was based on comments by tunnel engineers, construction experts and geologists.”

“The story also reported that the agency’s primary consultant, Parsons Brinckerhoff, had submitted a cost estimate in October 2013 that projected a 31 percent increase in the cost of the initial construction segment and a 5 percent increase in the cost of the full 500-mile system. The estimate, which was the culmination of a two-year effort by a team of engineers, was not used when the state issued its 2014 business plan several months later.”

At a recent hearing called to address that and other issues, lawmakers were told that the Times had made a mistake about the ballooning cost of construction.

“Rail Authority CEO Jeff Morales said that’s not accurate,” KQED reported. “There was no 31 percent increase in the cost of the program,” according to Morales. “We did not withhold information about a cost increase in the program because there was no increase in the program.”

That rate has held steady in subsequent Census Bureau reports. But now the high cost of housing is beginning to have a corrosive effect on government services in some of the most expensive areas. This report is from the San Jose Mercury-News:

Facing an acute shortage of substitute teachers, classroom aides, custodians, bus drivers and other vital employees, Bay Area schools are scrambling to find creative ways to fill the void. … San Jose’s Alum Rock Union School District is so short of substitute teachers that Superintendent Hilaria Bauer and two of her deputies recently spent a day in the classroom teaching. “It’s harder and harder to find people,” said Kevin Skelly, superintendent of the San Mateo district. “This job market is incredibly tight and it’s expensive to live here.”

 

Low unemployment, high housing costs, retiring Baby Boomers and an education hiring binge are fueling the Bay Area’s shortage of school workers. So it’s forced districts like San Mateo to hire a headhunter and the Santa Clara County Office of Education to host its first ever job fair for school support staff. Twenty-one school districts and one community college district will be recruiting. Oakland Unified held a job fair earlier this month, and made 122 offers of employment.

The single most difficult jobs to keep filled are for school bus drivers, which have starting pay of $37,000. Bus drivers are in relatively high demand in the Bay Area because so many tech firms have bus fleets to bring their workers to and from tech clusters and residential communities, and school officials say drivers much prefer ferrying adults rather than school kids.

$100K job with great perks, no qualified applicants

But it’s not just jobs requiring relatively modest jobs skills that are going unfilled. The Mercury-News notes that the San Mateo Union High School District has been unable to fill an environmental oversight job that pays more than $100,000 and campus facilities maintenance manager positions that pay up to $95,900 — even though they have outstanding perks that include 21 vacation days, 15 holidays, up to 12 days of paid medical leave as well as pensions and fully paid health care. That’s because the skill sets these jobs require are in heavy demand in booming Silicon Valley.

Meanwhile, the city of Los Angeles is also having trouble filling police positions and relatively low-paying jobs, according to KPCC, the National Public Radio affiliate based in Pasadena. Here’s some of its account:

Several Los Angeles city departments report they are on track to end the fiscal year with millions of dollars in surpluses because they are unable to fill hundreds of employee vacancies fast enough to keep up with retirements and attrition of the city’s aging workforce.

As of the end of August, L.A. had nearly 4,000 job vacancies, according to a report by City Administrative Officer Miguel Santana to the City Council.

 

The Recreation and Parks Department is looking for 100 new full-time workers by December. The Bureau of Street Services has 165 openings; Public Works has 89. The LAPD has 103 vacancies and expects 325 more by June, yet fewer than 100 are in the training pipeline in new classes.

 

L.A. is on track to spend about $62 million more than it takes in this fiscal year, according to a new city financial progress report, so many departments will have to reallocate expenses to end the year in balance. Some may come from the savings of departments that are unable to fill positions.