On several fronts, California Democrats have used the tail end of this political season to push for advances on their health care agenda — with mixed results. 

In Sacramento, they succeeded in passing legislation targeting health care cost sticker-shock after several recent misfires. “The unexpected charges come when patients are treated by an out-of-network provider at an in-network facility,” NPR explained. “After several failed attempts in recent years, the California legislature last week passed Assembly Bill 72, which aims to protect patients’ pocketbooks when they’re hit by these surprise bills. Gov. Jerry Brown has until the end of September to sign or veto the legislation. He is expected to sign it into law.”

“A 2015 Consumers Union survey suggests the surprise bill phenomenon is fairly common,” the station added. “It found nearly 1 in 4 Californians who’d had hospital visits or surgery in the prior two years reported receiving an unexpected bill from an out-of-network provider.”

Waiver wanted

In Washington, D.C., meanwhile, a who’s who of members of Congress hailing from California tried to flex their muscle around California’s unlikely request that the federal government allow unlawful and undocumented immigrants in state to access health benefits under Obamacare. “In a letter announced Wednesday, 37 members of California’s congressional delegation asked Treasury Secretary Jack Lew and Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell to accept California’s request for a waiver that would allow the state to offer health care to an estimated 50,000 undocumented immigrants,” TPM reported. 

“The letter is just the latest in the fight to expand health care coverage to California’s undocumented population. In June, California Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill passed by the state’s Legislature that allowed California’s undocumented population to buy their own health insurance on the state’s exchange, Covered California. However, a special federal waiver — a 1332 waiver — is needed before the state is allowed to enact its law.”

It hasn’t been clear whether President Obama could be moved to take action before the end of his term in office. He has already wound up under immense personal pressure to convince insurers to remain committed to the Affordable Care Act’s health care exchanges, despite a growing sense in industry that doing so will be harmful.

Unaffordable care

“With no lifeline coming from the divided Congress, Obama and his administration are redoubling their pleas for insurers to shore up the federal health care law and pushing uninsured Americans — especially younger ones — to sign up for coverage,” Politico observed. “The administration is nervously preparing for its final Obamacare open-enrollment season just a week before Election Day, amid a cascade of headlines about rising premiums, fleeing insurers and narrowing insurance options.”

“But six years after passage of Obama’s signature domestic achievement, the litany of woes afflicting the Obamacare marketplaces is formidable. Enrollment has plateaued at half of what was projected. Three major insurers have largely quit, citing big losses. Double-digit rate hikes are the norm for plans across the country. And roughly one in five Americans may find just one insurer selling plans in their area when they shop for 2017 coverage.”

At the same time, although California’s exchange program has been one of the biggest relative success stories for the ACA, the state’s health cost burden has continued to rise over time. A new study released by the University of California Los Angeles Center for Health Policy Research revealed that “spending is projected to total more than $367.5 billion in 2016, with about 71 percent covered by public funds when additional resources such as the Affordable Care Act subsidies and county spending are included,” according to U-T San Diego.

Indeed, California Democrats pushing the White House used the problem as ammunition for their own waiver goal, arguing before the press “that denying undocumented immigrants health care was only driving up the long-term costs of health care,” as TPM recalled. “Without insurance coverage, many immigrants have been forced to depend on emergency services to be treated.”

“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.”

The Kaiser Family Foundation poll, taken in December of last year, added another piece of discouraging data to an increasingly daunting pile. “Forty-four percent of exchange policyholders surveyed said it’s somewhat or very difficult to afford their premiums,” the Los Angeles Times reported, “compared with 25 percent of adults who had employer-based or other private health insurance.”

Analysts paid close attention to the figures for two reasons. First, they contributed to the growing perception that Covered California — one of the nation’s biggest, most important and most successful exchanges — is now on a path toward underperformance.

Second, as the Times noted, the numbers will foster an intensified debate between the exchange and the insurance companies on premium rates for the new year. “Many analysts are predicting bigger premium increases for 2016 in California and across the country. Insurers have more details on the medical costs of enrollees, and some federal programs that help protect health plans from unpredictable claims will be winding down.”

Calling audibles

As California’s struggles have reflected the even greater challenges faced by other failed or failing exchanges, policymakers and regulators have turned to consider how to sidestep disaster. One notion that has attracted attention — possibly in Gov. Jerry Brown’s office — is an exchange merger.

“The idea is still only in the infancy stage,” reported The Hill. “It’s unclear whether a California-Oregon or New York-Connecticut health exchange is on the horizon. But a shared marketplace — an option buried in a little-known clause of the Affordable Care Act — has become an increasingly attractive option for states desperate to slash costs. If state exchanges are not financially self-sufficient by 2016, they will be forced to join the federal system, HealthCare.gov.”

The idea would be that a state with a failed marketplace could offer a surge of enrollees and revenue to a state with a struggling marketplace. Intuitively, the arrangement would tend to cluster smaller states around larger ones, effectively extending the insurance regimes of the former to the latter.

In part, The Hill observed, states have turned to the merger idea because federal law requires their exchanges to be financially self-sustaining if they wish to avoid joining the federal exchange. But states have also been pressured by the King v. Burwell case currently pending at the Supreme Court, where the legality of federal subsidies for states without their own exchanges is on the line.

“Most Republican state leaders have avoided talking about how they would respond to a decision against the use of subsidies on the federal exchange,” according to The Hill. “Behind the scenes, however, many are anxiously contacting states that run their own exchanges.”

Expanding coverage

Perhaps paradoxically, legislators in Sacramento have responded to the climate of uncertainty surrounding California’s exchange and the broader exchange system by pushing for expanded coverage, including to unlawful immigrants.

Under the terms of a new bill, SB4, successfully advanced through committee by state Sen. Ricardo Lara, D-Bell Gardens, “the undocumented will be able to buy health insurance on the Covered California exchange, always providing that the federal government authorizes it, but they will not automatically benefit from Medi-Cal, the state medical subsidy, however low their annual incomes,” according to Fox News Latino.

Questioning assessment

As the policy shifts play out, at least some news analysts have raised a key side issue: just how experts and lay readers are supposed to confidently assess just how well or poorly Covered California is doing.

In a recent essay, Trudy Lieberman at the Columbia Journalism Review noted that the exchange has frequently put forth different measures and metrics by which its success might be judged. Sometimes, the standard has been total enrollees or new yearly enrollees. Sometimes, it has been the renewal rate, the number of Californians covered through the exchange itself, or, “simply, the overall rate of uninsured adults across the state[.]”

Coverage of the exchange’s fortunes, Lieberman observed, “has largely followed the lead set by the exchange. The result is coverage that has too often been reactive, short on enterprise, and with missed opportunities to ask some necessary questions. Covered California may ultimately have a success story to tell — but it will need to face some sharper skepticism before we can be sure.”

“The number of young adults admitted to California hospital emergency rooms with heroin poisoning increased sixfold over the past decade, the state said, the latest evidence of growing abuse of the highly addictive drug,” according to Reuters. “According to the California Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development, emergency rooms across the state saw 1,300 heroin poisoning cases involving young adults between the ages of 20 and 29 in 2014, compared to 200 in 2005,” Circa reported.

The news has driven home challenges policymakers face in reckoning with legal pot’s effect on broader drug markets and the broader battle against illicit substances.

Shifting markets

Experts have not established the relationship between more accessible marijuana and increased heroin use. One recent study published by JAMA Internal Medicine reported, with regard to states that had legalized marijuana for medical use, there was “about a 25 percent decrease in the projected amount of people expected to overdose in those states in 2010. This means that about 1,700 less people died than were expected to in states with medical marijuana.”

But some analysts have warned that the uptick in heroin use can be at least indirectly attributed to the creeping legalization of marijuana. “Made-in-the-USA marijuana is quickly displacing the cheap, seedy, hard-packed version harvested by the bushel in Mexico’s Sierra Madre mountains,” the Washington Post reported from San Ysidro, CA. “That has prompted Mexican drug farmers to plant more opium poppies, and the sticky brown and black ‘tar’ heroin they produce is channeled by traffickers into the U.S. communities hit hardest by prescription painkiller abuse, offering addicts a $10 alternative to $80-a-pill oxycodone.”

California hasn’t been ranked atop the list of states where oxycodone abuse runs highest. But OxyContin peddling had become so pervasive and lucrative in the San Francisco Bay Area that it earned an SF Weekly cover story three years ago. Since then, the Golden State’s place on the front lines of Mexican drug smuggling has remained unchanged. Raul Benitez-Manaut, who researches the drug war at the National Autonomous University in Mexico, told the Post that pot decriminalization “has given U.S. consumers access to high-quality marijuana, with genetically improved strains, grown in greenhouses. That’s why the Mexican cartels are switching to heroin and meth.”

A string of busts

In Santa Cruz County, heroin busts have tracked with the increase in use seen statewide, according to Mario Sulay, commander of the county’s anti-crime force. “The seizure of the half-pound of heroin in Navarro’s three residences increased the amount of the drug seized so far by the team in the county this year to nearly 4 kilos, more than it has confiscated over the past five years combined,” reported Patch from Gilroy. Sulay “attributed the large amount to an uptick in the heroin being trafficked through the U.S. border from Mexico, which has grown by 300 percent over previous years[.]”

Californians have also recently been caught up in the heroin trade across state lines. In New Mexico, Darmarvis Marquel Lee of San Bernardino pled guilty this month to trafficking almost 3 kilograms of heroin. The charges ensured he could face up to two decades in federal prison.

In a stunning sign of the scope of California’s heroin problem, the Fresno police force was sent reeling in March by a multi-agency federal bust of a drug ring allegedly led by Deputy Police Chief Keith Foster. Along with five others, Foster was charged with conspiracy to distribute heroin and oxycodone, in addition to marijuana:

“The arrests, which were announced at a news conference Thursday afternoon at the FBI office in northwest Fresno, stemmed from an ‘intensive’ ongoing, year-long joint investigation by the FBI and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives that involved ‘considerable’ surveillance and wiretaps, said U.S. Attorney Benjamin Wagner, the region’s top federal law-enforcement official.”

Although the two did not directly trade barbs, Harris and Sanchez faced their first high-profile matchup at the convention, where their differing styles and rival camps were put on plain display. But it was featured speaker Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Ma., who gave a powerful edge to Harris.

Setting the tone

“When discussing unjust home foreclosures by banks, Warren made clear where her loyalties lie,” the Los Angeles Times observed. “‘That woman was fearless’ in helping combat unscrupulous lending and foreclosure practices in California, Warren said of Harris, whom she endorsed for the Senate seat earlier this year.”

Warren’s praise for Harris struck a special blow against Sanchez, who has sought to frame Harris as too cautious and calculated to stay ahead of the curve on important political issues — including housing. At her campaign kickoff event, the Sacramento Bee reported, Sanchez asserted “that she was working on the housing crisis long before Harris secured large financial settlements with lenders. Without uttering her name, Sanchez suggested Harris was the hand-picked favorite of the party establishment, and that she has been unwilling to answer questions and too cautious in sharing her positions.”

In the wake of Warren’s pointed opposition to President Obama on the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade treaty, Harris stood to strengthen her defense against Sanchez’s line of attack. Warren’s unquestioned ideological credentials with liberal Democrats have made her into a potentially powerful king- or queenmaker. Harris, who can benefit from the strong support of any anti-establishment Democrat, could not do much better than securing Warren’s.

Economic consensus

Warren’s significance, however, may already have been limited by her willingness to lead the left on economic issues. Neither Harris nor Sanchez have appeared willing to depart from establishment Democratic orthodoxy.

At the convention, Sanchez struck a familiar note for Democrats: “I have got to tell you,” she said, according to KQED, “there are a still a lot of people who have lost their homes, who are troubled, who are underemployed, and so we are going to show how we work with the business community to get those good paying jobs into California.”

Harris’s language was remarkably similar. “I’ll tell you, when we were growing up, we talked about opportunity as a ladder, and that ladder of opportunity described America as a place where anyone could lift themselves up, anyone could reach higher, and everyone has a right to the American dream,” she said.

Cultural controversy

With little apparent daylight between the two candidates on economic issues, identity politics quickly asserted itself as a dominant dividing line. From the beginning, Latino Democrats, especially in the Southland, refused to line up behind Harris, giving Sanchez the opening she needed to step into the race. But at the convention itself, Sanchez made national news by letting slip the kind of gaffe guaranteed to ruffle Democrats’ cultural feathers.

Joking around with the state party’s Indian American caucus, Sanchez “let out about two seconds” of what CNN called “a stereotypical Native American ‘war cry.'”

“‘I’m going to his office, thinkin’ that I’m gonna go meet with woo-woo-woo-woo, right? ‘Cause he said “Indian American,”‘ she said, using the gesture to try to discern between Indian Americans — with ancestry from India’s subcontinent — and Native Americans.”

Proponents of the new push hoped to capitalize on the bad publicity hitting the bottled water industry, where several suppliers have come under scrutiny for drawing their water from California. This month, “Starbucks announced that it would begin a process to move the bottling operations for its Ethos water brand to Pennsylvania,” NBC News reported. Nestle, meanwhile, refused to stop sourcing its water from public lands in the Golden State, although its pumping permit expired decades ago, and activists have petitioned the California Water Resources Control Board to halt the practice.

“The attention on Nestlé’s permit bumped it to the front of the pile for renewal review. The process will take at least 18 months, Heil said. Meanwhile, Nestlé can continue to operate in the forest as long as the company continues to pay the annual fee of $524 on the expired permit and operate under its provisions.”

Feeling the heat, Nestle Waters North America’s Tim Brown took to the San Bernardino Sun to vouch that California bottling operations should not be considered water-wasting culprits. “Our latest conservation measures include a waste-water recovery project expected to save annually 25 million gallons of water,” he wrote. “We supported the recent water bond to improve infrastructure and protect and restore watersheds and ecosystems and we believe that California’s new groundwater management legislation is a step in the right direction.”

Public skepticism

Yet, “despite the extensive science that goes into cleansing recycled water down to its molecular construction, in a recent study, 13 percent of adults said they would point-blank refuse to try it,” according to The Week. “Similar efforts in the past to jumpstart the recycled water trend in the state have failed.”

California’s long history with recycled water projects has lent credence to those who expect the pattern to continue. “Enticing people to drink recycled water […] requires getting past what experts call the ‘yuck’ factor,” as the New York Times observed. “Efforts in the 1990s to develop water reuse in San Diego and Los Angeles were beaten back by activists who denounced what they called, devastatingly, ‘toilet to tap.’ Los Angeles built a $55 million purification plant in the 1990s, but never used it to produce drinking water; the water goes to irrigation instead.”

Orange County officials, however, have brightened hopes for the recycled water movement. As Southern California Public Radio suggested, the O.C.’s successful recycling program has underscored why “calling it ‘toilet to tap’ isn’t fair.”

“The recycled sewage water makes quite a journey on its path to purification before it comes out of faucets at home. About 2.4 million Orange County residents get their water from a massive underground aquifer, which, since 2008, has been steadily recharged with billions of gallons of purified wastewater.”

According to SCPR, Orange County Water District officials overcame the yuck factor “with a massive public relations campaign that involved more than 2,000 community presentations.”

In Santa Clara County, where recycled water has been steadily employed for non-drinking uses, San Jose’s public figures have kicked off a similar effort. San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo, Santa Clara Mayor Jamie Matthews, and others held a recent press conference around their own consumption of recycled water, the Contra Costa Times reported. “‘Delicious,’ said Liccardo, as cameras clicked. ‘Good stuff!’ said Matthews, as video rolled.”

Nudging state law

At the statewide level, fans of recycled water had a bit more news to cheer as well. In Sacramento, the author of a string of recycled water-use bills stretching across the several years, Assemblyman Mike Gatto, D-Glendale, recently secured committee support for Assembly Bill 1463, another proposal pushing the approach to conservation. “Gatto’s legislation to help reduce the barriers for onsite-water recycling and allow more Californians to participate in safe and sustainable recycled-water practices was approved by the Assembly’s Water, Parks and Wildlife Committee on a 15-0 vote,” according to California Newswire.

Introduced last year, Senate Bill 11, the first, has begun to gather steam as lawmakers have fleshed out the legislation with more specific provisions. The bill would mandate a basic training course on how to recognize and de-escalate conflict involving “persons with mental illness or intellectual disability who are in crisis,” upping substantially the hours of education required for cops.

“The bill would require that this evidence-based behavioral health classroom training course be 20 hours long and be in addition to the basic training course’s current hour requirement,” according to the language of SB11, which would also require ongoing updates to the course as part of so-called “perishable skills training.”

SB11 has taken on a new relevance as the Senate Select Committee on Mental Health held a special hearing in L.A.’s Exposition park. As the Sacramento Bee reported, lawmakers called on “current and former law enforcement officers from the CHP, the San Diego Police Department and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, as well as representatives of Disability Rights California and the National Alliance on Mental Illness.” State Sen. Holly Mitchell, D-Los Angeles, took the opportunity to voice her support for SB11, along with SB29, a similar bill initially introduced, like SB11, by state Sen. Jim Beall, D-San Jose.

A pattern of shootings

After a brutal CHP beating of a mentally ill 51-year-old woman this July, advocates have been up in arms against what they identify as a pattern of police abuse. Those tensions spilled over as, over the past two months, L.A. saw cops shoot dead two homeless men. Both Charly Keunang of Skid Row and Brendon Glenn of Venice were “combative, but not armed,” NBC Los Angeles reported. “Keunang had been diagnosed with mental illness while in prison. Glenn suffered from alcohol abuse, according to those who knew him. Both cases remain under investigation.”

A contentious town hall meeting in L.A.’s Venice neighborhood that focused on Glenn’s death drew a powerful wave of criticism as Police Chief Charlie Beck and Mayor Eric Garcetti both opted not to attend. “Several people who attended Thursday night’s meeting faulted Beck and Mayor Garcetti for not being there,” the Los Angeles Times reported. “Beck rebuffed the criticism of the mayor, saying it was ‘unfair’ because previous mayors hadn’t attended similar events in the past.”

Although California police face thousands upon thousands of situations involving the mentally ill, only a relative handful have recently culminated in police shootings. Nevertheless, the pattern of outcomes that has emerged this year put the California Highway Patrol and the Los Angeles Police Department on the defensive.

“Every year, the Los Angeles Police Department responds to some 14,000 calls for service involving mentally disturbed individuals,” LAPD Lieutenant Brian Bixler, officer in charge of the Crisis Response Support Section, told NBC Los Angeles. The share of ensuing events involving police violence and mental health problems has been massive, the network reported.

“Encounters with the mentally ill, or those affected by substance abuse, account for a disproportionate number of the uses of force by the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department” — around 40 percent, as Sheriff Jim McDonnell told the Select Committee.

A statewide challenge

Observers have warned that law enforcement troubles with mentally ill individuals have arisen in part because of California’s failure to adequately house them. According to the Marin Independent Journal, in 1960, “California had a population of 15 million and 37,000 mental hospital beds; by 2010, the state’s population had grown to 37 million and there were only 4,000 mental hospital beds.”

Despite a resurgence in California’s fiscal fortunes, including tax receipts some $2 billion in excess of estimates, “analysts are warning that California could be headed for more fiscal headaches as soon as next year,” the Wall Street Journal observed. “The state is constitutionally required to spend more on public education as revenue increases. This year’s revenue will establish a spending base for next year, meaning it could be harder for the state to balance its budget if the state’s income declines.”

Brown has made his reputation as governor holding the line on spending against steady pressure from his left. But Brown’s own favorite projects, including California’s high-speed rail plan, received his unwavering support, even drawing money away from expenditures favored by activists.

A selective windfall

Now, Brown has chosen to walk the budget tightrope in a way that will encourage his more profligate allies. Beneficiaries of Brown’s revised budget were set to include poorer Californians, unlawful immigrants and college students, as the San Jose Mercury News reported:

“With billions in better-than-expected revenue, Brown unveiled a $115.3 billion general fund spending plan that creates the state’s first-ever ‘earned income tax credit’ and would pay for Medi-Cal for some immigrants living in the state illegally.”

Brown’s revision also slipped in the results of a long-belabored deal with UC President Janet Napolitano, “who had demanded tens of millions of dollars more for her system to stave off 5 percent tuition hikes in each of the next five years,” as the Mercury News recalled.

But the revised budget plan went well beyond those measures, touching policy areas that have bedeviled Brown throughout much of his time in office.

Prison reform

Brown, for instance, used the revision to forge ahead with reforms to California’s prison system, which has been a virtual albatross around his neck since the Supreme Court ordered the state to reduce its crowded incarcerated population.

As the Los Angeles Times reported, the new budget revision “calls for shrinking the number of inmates housed outside California in the next year by 4,000 — reducing related state spending by $73 million. As of this week, the state had a little more than 8,000 inmates in private prisons in Arizona, Mississippi and Oklahoma, and another 6,250 prisoners in contracted lockups within the state.”

According to the Times, the cuts became possible because of the impact of Proposition 47, which thinned prisons’ ranks largely by slashing penalties and jail time for drug-related offenses. As CalWatchdog previously reported, although relatively few donors fueled the measure, Prop. 47 won the support of a substantial majority of voters in November.

Mixed reactions

In what has become a hallmark of his tenure in office, reactions to Brown’s adjusted numbers mixed praise with criticism. “We applaud the governor for putting money back into the pockets of those who work hard every day and pay their taxes – it’s the right move,” remarked Assembly Republican Leader Kristin Olsen, R-Riverbank, according to the Sacramento Bee. But, she added, Brown’s tax credit “will not end widespread poverty. That’s why Assembly Republicans have offered straightforward solutions to reform education and support the modern economy so every Californian can boost their earnings and quality of life.”

“Four of the nearly 50 self-driving cars now rolling around California have gotten into accidents since September, when the state began issuing permits for companies to test them on public roads. Two accidents happened while the cars were in control; in the other two, the person who still must be behind the wheel was driving, a person familiar with the accident reports told The Associated Press.”

Setting standards

The relatively minor news provoked outsized attention, especially in California, because of the way self-driving cars heighten the tension between public issues of safety and transparency. “The fact that neither the companies nor the state have revealed the accidents,” noted the AP, “troubles some who say the public should have information to monitor the rollout of technology that its own developers acknowledge is imperfect.”

On the other hand, the layer of secrecy involved in the incidents came courtesy of California’s own pro-privacy regulations. “In half of the fender benders,” Endgaget reported, “the cars were in control when the accident occurred, and all of them happened at speeds of under 10 MPH.” None resulted in injuries; because of “the state’s privacy laws, the report doesn’t indicate any further details — like if they happened while backing out of a parking space, for example.”

The head of Google’s automated car program, Chris Urmson, emphasized that Google’s cars encountered just 11 accidents over 6 years and nearly 1 million miles on the road. Ironically, he suggested, the real lack of transparency that should concern drivers is the uncertainty surrounding the nature of unreported accidents with little damage and no injuries: “according to National Highway Traffic Safety Administration data, these incidents account for 55 percent of all crashes. It’s hard to know what’s really going on out on the streets unless you’re doing miles and miles of driving every day.”

Self-driving trucks

Meanwhile, across the border in Nevada, Daimler Trucks North America became the first to license a self-driving big rig this week in Nevada, as USA Today reported:

“Four of the experimental Freightliner trucks — Freightliner is a Daimler unit — drove around Nevada for a total of 10,000 miles over six months, says Steve Nadig, the chief engineer on the project.”

In addition to a test track in Germany, Daimler sent out two trucks on “quiet public roads in Nevada,” according to Wired. “To earn the autonomous vehicle license plate from Nevada, Daimler needed to prove the system could safely cover 10,000 miles on its own.”

In a Las Vegas press conference, Daimler board member Wolfgang Bernhard depicted the trucks as a step ahead of self-driving cars in safety, desirability and economic impact. But Bernhard conceded that the trucks wouldn’t hit commercial viability until “enough U.S. states allow them on their roads to make inter-state commerce viable,” as Reuters summarized his remarks.

Despite the regulatory challenges and red tape involved in licensing self-driving trucks, said Bernhard, California — along with nearby Arizona and auto-centric Michigan — “had shown an interest in self-driving trucks, but more states would need to get on board before the federal government took up the issue.”

Analysts did quickly flag one big economic difference between self-driving cars and trucks: jobs. Whereas switching to automated cars wouldn’t necessary eliminate jobs, automated trucks would eventually render truckers increasingly obsolete. “The trucking industry constantly struggles to find enough drivers, even when unemployment is high,” noted Vox. “And the cost of a machine operating a vehicle will be dramatically cheaper than the cost of a human.”

As CalWatchdog.com reported last month, “the 4^th District Court of Appeal struck down San Juan Capistrano’s tiered water fee plan because it violated Prop. 218’s restriction that any fee must be for the cost of service and no more. The court found that by creating a 4-tier fee plan that charged $2.47 per unit for first tier water usage up to $9.05 a unit for greater usage the plan was not based on the cost of the water service.”

That has Golden State water agencies struggling to figure out their next steps. “The vast majority of urban water agencies in California use some form of tiered rates, which are seen as a key conservation tool as communities work to comply with Gov. Jerry Brown’s order to slash water use by 25 percent over the next year,” the Los Angeles Times observed.

“Long-time rate consultant Sanjay Gaur said aggressively increasing rates — especially those that charge more than $10 per unit — could raise red flags. He estimated that at least a third of the state’s water suppliers would need to ‘do a better job explaining their tiered rates and the rationality behind them.'”

Early this month, regulators had moved to adopt dramatic new tiered rates meant to reflect Gov. Jerry Brown’s order to slash municipal consumption. The State Water Resources Control Board decided to require “up to 36 percent reductions from the biggest water users,” as BuzzFeed reported. “The cities in the highest tier were singled out after failing to make significant cuts over the previous year.”

Uneven impact

Not all water agencies with tiered pricing found themselves in a crisis situation, however. The court’s ruling only applied to punitive tiered pricing. Tiers based around the relative cost and availability of providing water, by contrast, were allowed to continue.

Regional reputations

In a Field Poll conducted this February, the Sacramento Bee noted, “pluralities of voters in every region in California said the state should be allowed to bypass environmental regulations protecting fish in the San Francisco Bay and Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta — except one. In the San Francisco Bay Area, nearly two-thirds of voters disagreed.”

Visions have persisted in Northern Californians of luxury, vanity and water waste in the Southland. But despite the frequent stories of outsized consumption by celebrities and golf courses, recent data has painted a different picture. “Southern California has made huge strides in conservation,” according to the Bee. “Regional water agencies have invested in storage and water recycling. Total water consumption in the region has remained flat over the past 15 years, despite population growth.”

Celeste Cantú, former director of the State Water Resources Control Board, said that “Southern California really did get the message. We’ve added millions of people, and our potable water is the same.”