A survey of 2,800 U.S. colleges prepared by the Institute of International Education and the U.S. State Department underscores once again how much the budget of the University of California relies on high tuition and fees paid by foreign students.

The survey showed California had far and away the most international students with 161,693. Some 42 percent of the students are from China and 13 percent are from India. Five UC campuses had at least 8,000 international students: UCLA (11,942), UC San Diego (10,652), UC Berkeley (10,063), UC Irvine (8,064) and UC Davis (8,048).

The numbers illustrate that for all the criticism leveled at UC President Janet Napolitano in a 2016 report by state Auditor Elaine Howle, the UC system’s most important fiscal strategy relies on attracting foreign students. They pay about $44,000 annually, triple what in-state students pay.

The audit showed that in 2008 – at the beginning of the Great Recession – about 5 percent of students in the UC system were international students or from other U.S. states. By 2016, the number was 15.3 percent. The large increase was linked by UC leaders to the sharp long-term decline in state financial support. Critics, however, said UC had refused to do any of the belt-tightening done in the rest of the state government in response to a 20 percent decline in state revenue a decade ago.

Howle’s most explosive allegation was that standards had been lowered so much for non-California applicants that qualified in-state students couldn’t get into to any UC. 

Napolitano rejected nearly all of Howle’s allegations but didn’t challenge her point that a huge change in UC admissions policies had been made with scant explanation to the public or to then-Gov. Jerry Brown and the Legislature. Under heavy pressure, she agreed to major increases in California student admissions – but not to stop relying on foreign students as cash cows. The main concession on that front from UC regents who strongly backed Napolitano: a 2017 decision to have a maximum of 18 percent of non-California students in the UC system. This has had little if any effect on how many are admitted because UC now enrolls far more total students – about 280,000 – then it did four years ago (248,000).

Californians enrolled in UC system set record this year

In June, UC announced that new records had been set in the number of Californians admitted as freshmen (71,655) and transfer students (28,752) at the system’s nine undergraduate campuses.

Meanwhile, it appears that tension related to the U.S.-China trade war has ended the years of annual increases in Chinese students at UC. According to recent reports, their enrollment is flat or slightly down at several campuses. UC San Diego Chancellor Pradeep Khosla lamented the development in an interview with the Los Angeles Times last month – not on fiscal grounds but because of the quality of the students, especially those in science majors.

But another factor besides tension between Washington and Beijing could be that colleges across the United States have reached the same conclusion that UC leaders did in 2008 and are now going after the same pool of high-paying international students as UC.

In August, USA Today reported that its analysis of federal data showed that “more than 240 public universities across the country admitted fewer in-state students in 2017 than they did five years earlier, and for 46 of those, the share of in-state students is down by at least 10 percent.”

Gov. Gavin Newsom and fellow Democratic lawmakers have expressed no contrition for their failed attempt to force President Donald Trump to release five years of tax returns to gain access to the California ballot in the 2020 general election.

The California Supreme Court recently ruled unanimously that Senate Bill 27, signed by Newsom in July, violated the state Constitution. The opinion by Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye at times had an incredulous tone, noting that advocates appeared unaware of SB27’s obvious conflict with Proposition 4. That’s a 1972 amendment to the California Constitution easily passed by state voters that requires presidential primaries must be open to all “recognized” candidates.

Further reflecting the state high court’s view that the law was frivolous, the unanimous verdict was delivered just 15 days after justices heard testimony in the case. Court watchers said that was highly unusual.

A federal judge had already ruled the law violated the U.S. Constitution in September. That decision was appealed by Secretary of State Alex Padilla, but the appeal was dropped after the state Supreme Court’s ruling.

Nevertheless, a spokesman for Newsom continued to depict the now-void law as well-intentioned.

Jesse Melgar told the San Francisco Chronicle that the governor “would continue to urge all candidates to voluntarily release their tax returns. … Congress and other states can and should take action to require presidential candidates to disclose their tax returns.”

Padilla issued a statement expressing disappointment with the state high court’s decision but also declaring “the movement for greater transparency will endure. The history of our democracy is on the side of more transparency, not less.”

‘Ridiculous’ bill said to reflect ‘arrogance and hypocrisy’

Defenses of the law were scoffed at by opinion writers.

The Sacramento Bee editorial board – which had ripped SB27 as “silly and destructive” when Newsom signed it into law – wrote that the measure  “was so ridiculous and flawed that even California’s justices could barely conceal their disdain.” 

The Southern California Newspaper Group’s editorial noted that the state high court “quoted former Gov. Jerry Brown’s veto of a similar bill in 2017: ‘Today we require tax returns, but what would be next? Five years of health records? A certified birth certificate? High school report cards?’

“Democratic lawmakers and a new governor refused to learn from that message. They tried again and embarrassed themselves. They richly deserved the court’s smackdown.”

The Los Angeles Times editorial board wrote that the tax-returns law “accomplished only one thing: giving Trump more ammunition against the state he loves to mock.”

Times columnist George Skelton was the harshest critic of all, noting that many of the Democrats who claimed the moral high ground in backing the tax-returns requirement were not transparent about their own finances.

“This is not about whether Trump should release his federal tax returns,” he wrote. “Rather, it’s about Democrats enacting a blatantly unconstitutional law with a straight face for purely political reasons. It’s about arrogance and hypocrisy.”

Part of SB27 that was reportedly included at Newsom’s behest remains intact. It’s the requirement that gubernatorial candidates provide five years of tax returns to qualify for the ballot beginning with the 2022 election.

The bill was introduced by Sen. Mike McGuire, D-Healdsburg, and Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco. It passed in Senate on a 29-10 vote and in the Assembly on a 57-17 vote in early July.

Gov. Gavin Newsom has announced an immediate suspension of permits allowing new hydraulic fracturing and steam-injected oil drilling – the latest in a series of moves in the past week underscoring California’s determination to be seen as a leader in climate change efforts.

“These are necessary steps to strengthen oversight of oil and gas extraction as we phase out our dependence on fossil fuels and focus on clean energy sources,” Newsom said in a statement released by his office.

While Newsom’s predecessor, Jerry Brown, also used his job to promote the Golden State as a leader in the effort to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions believed to be a primary cause of global warming, he opposed a fracking moratorium. Brown’s aides noted the economic benefits of being the third-largest oil-producing state – home to 72,000 wells and 350,000-plus good-paying oil-related jobs. Brown may also have been intrigued by disputed reports in 2013 that the Golden State was sitting on massive oil reserves larger than those of Saudi Arabia.

Catherine Reheis-Boyd, president of the Western States Petroleum Association, pushed back hard at Newsom’s assertion that California had no choice but to crack down on unsafe drilling practices.

“Multiple state agencies already validate our protection of health, safety and the environment during production,” she said in a statement. Reheis-Boyd joined several Republican officials in warning of severe economic consequences of what they depicted as an end to new oil drilling.

State may require buffer zones around many oil wells

But the obstacles Newsom plans to add to gas and oil exploration don’t stop with a ban on the two extraction techniques. The Los Angeles Times reported that he “plans to study the possible adoption of buffer zones around oil wells in or near residential neighborhoods, schools, hospitals and other facilities that could be exposed to hazardous fumes” – a move with the potential to sharply add to regulatory burdens of owners of the wells.

Other moves that Newsom has announced in the last week include:

• The state will no longer purchase gas-powered sedans. Law-enforcement agencies are exempted.

• The state will only buy vehicles from automakers that agreed to follow California’s vehicle-emission rules rather than the weaker rules backed by the Trump administration. So far, Ford, Honda, Volkswagen and BMW have sided with California. General Motors, Toyota, Nissan, Mazda, Subaru, Hyundai, Kia and Fiat Chrysler last month said they would follow the weaker federal standards.

• The Newsom administration has formally asked the California Public Utilities Commission to permanently close the Aliso Canyon natural gas storage facility in Porter Ranch as soon as feasible. The facility has been the target of intense protests by its neighbors and environmentalists since a 2015 disaster resulted in among the largest releases of methane gas in world history – an immense leak that took nearly four months to stop and forced the evacuation of nearly 3,000 households.

Environmental groups hailed Newsom’s series of moves – especially what they depicted as the beginning of the end of fracking in the state.

Livermore lab experts must OK new fracking permits

But the governor’s announcement left open the possibility that new fracking permits could be – if independent experts from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory attested to their safety.

That’s not necessarily a long shot. Even as greens spent years depicting hydraulic fracturing as dangerous and destructive, several Cabinet members in the Obama administration said it was akin to other heavy industries – mostly safe if properly regulated.

In 2015, U.S. Interior Secretary Sally Jewell told KQED, the Northern California PBS channel, that local moratoriums on fracking approved by several cities in the state were the “wrong way to go.”

“There is a lot of misinformation about fracking,” she said. “I think that localized efforts or statewide efforts in many cases don’t understand the science behind it and I think there needs to be more science.”

But Newsom said he didn’t agree with this benign view of fracking while campaigning for governor in 2018 and promised a crackdown if elected.

After keeping quiet for more than a year about the investigation, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra confirmed last week that California is suing Facebook after a state probe found it had allegedly violated privacy laws.

In documents filed with the Superior Court in San Francisco, Becerra’s office said the probe began in June 2018 in response to the scandal involving the Cambridge Analytica political consulting firm, which had been given access to the online activities of 87 million Facebook users without their knowledge. The most prominent client of the firm, which closed last year, was the Trump presidential campaign in 2015-16.

“What initially began as an inquiry into the Cambridge Analytica scandal expanded over time to become an investigation into whether Facebook has violated California law by, among other things, deceiving users and ignoring its own policies,” the court filing noted.

The possibility that California was pursuing its own probe was detailed in an Oct. 31 story in the New York Times about Becerra’s absence from a meeting of state attorneys general in September in Washington in which they discussed a coordinated probe of Facebook and Google. Becerra continues to decline to answer if his office is investigating Google.

And the attorney general said the Facebook probe would still be unrevealed if it wasn’t for the fact that the Menlo Park-based company had stopped cooperating when given subpoenas. “If Facebook had complied with our legitimate investigative requests, we would not be making this announcement today. But we must move our investigation forward,” he said at a news conference.

The state’s complaints about Facebook not following its own policies and stonewalling investigations echoed those made by officials of the Obama and Trump administrations. These practices were cited in July when the Federal Trade Commission announced it had fined the social media giant $5 billion for privacy violations.

Probe seen as foreshadowing new state online privacy law

Becerra’s announcement was followed closely on tech websites not just because it ended the mystery about what his office was doing about Facebook when so many other states were pursuing the company. It’s also because the Golden State’s lawsuit is seen as a harbinger of how aggressively Becerra will act when the state’s landmark online privacy law – the California Consumer Privacy Act – takes effect on Jan. 1, 2020. The law was signed into law by then-Gov. Jerry Brown in summer 2018.

The state law is similar to a measure adopted by the European Union that took effect earlier in 2018. The EU law says consumers can opt out from having information collected about them. If they don’t opt out, consumers must be told upon request what information has been harvested from their online browsing.

Data companies are deeply worried that California’s standards will become the model for a future federal online privacy law and for measures adopted in other states. But many other firms are worried as well.

This summer, as CalWatchdog reported, the California Chamber of Commerce and the state chapter of the National Federation of Independent Business launched a long-shot bid to get lawmakers to change their minds and either repeal or revise the state online privacy law.

Among the business groups’ complaints: The law is written so broadly that it may prevent businesses from using basic information gathered from repeat customers; and the law is so poorly crafted that it appears to bar businesses from using vast swaths of anonymized data showing online trends from a macro level. Such information is considered a crucial marketing tool.

Lawmakers passed on making any changes.

The Trump administration’s efforts to bend California to its will on a variety of fronts have been mixed at best. Last week, for example, a panel of judges from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed yet again that federal funding to state law enforcement agencies couldn’t be linked to their assistance in deporting illegal immigrants. Judges have ruled for the state and against the federal government in cases involving other immigration issues and environmental policies.

But the White House can claim a substantial win on vehicle emissions. Last week, many of the largest automakers in the world sided with President Donald Trump in his view that it’s not good for the U.S. economy for the nation’s largest state to have tougher rules on vehicle emissions and miles per gallon than those set by the federal government.

General Motors, Toyota, Nissan, Mazda, Subaru, Hyundai, Kia and Fiat Chrysler are backing Trump’s attempt to end the waiver that California has had for more than 50 years allowing it to set tougher standards on emissions for vehicles sold in the state. Twelve other states – Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington – have adopted the Golden State’s rules.

The fight was triggered by the Trump administration’s decision to scrap rules set by President Barack Obama that required automakers to have their vehicles average 55 miles per gallon by 2025. This led California Gov. Gavin Newsom to reach out to automakers to seek their voluntary compliance with tougher standards, winning support in July from Ford, Honda, Volkswagen and BMW for a plan under which their fleets would average 50 miles per gallon by 2026 – weaker than what Obama wanted but much tougher than Trump’s rules, which would set 37 miles per gallon as the industry standard.

Newsom said then that he was “very confident” other automakers would accept California’s standards. Instead, the largest automakers in the U.S., Japan and South Korea have sided with Trump in filing arguments with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, which is considering a lawsuit from California and 22 other states seeking to uphold the Obama administration’s fuel-efficiency rules.

The automakers and the National Automobile Dealers Association said that they needed “the certainty that states cannot interfere with federal fuel economy standards.”

Newsom, Brown decry Trump’s global warming skepticism

Obama, Newsom and most climate scientists see requiring higher gas mileage standards as the easiest way to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that build up in the atmosphere and cause global warming. Vehicle emissions in recent years have passed power plant emissions as the single biggest generator of greenhouse gases.

Trump rejects the conventional wisdom about greenhouse gases. As the New York Times reported Saturday, he has “directed the Environmental Protection Agency to roll back nearly every federal policy designed to curb the heat-trapping fossil-fuel pollution that is the chief cause of global warming.”

In the report, Newsom told the Times that the state’s recent history of devastating wildfires was directly related to climate change.

“We’re waging war against the most destructive fires in our state’s history, and Trump is conducting a full-on assault against the antidote,” Newsom said.

Newsom’s predecessor, Jerry Brown, framed the issue even more dramatically in testimony to Congress last week.

“The seas are rising, diseases are spreading, fires are burning, hundreds of thousands of people are leaving their homes,” he said. “California is burning while the deniers fight the standards that can help us all. This is life-and-death stuff.”

California High-Speed Rail Authority CEO Brian Kelly worked over the summer to reassure anxious state lawmakers that a new management team could revive the troubled bullet-train project. He also proceeded to push out key officials overseeing contract and property decisions.

Yet the changes haven’t stopped a new wave of bad news in September for the project, which was once envisioned as a statewide network of high-speed rail but has been downsized to a 119-mile link between Bakersfield and Merced expected to cost in the range of $20 billion. 

A Los Angeles Times report outlined the huge problems still facing the rail authority’s land-acquisition efforts after seven years in the Central Valley. Not only does the agency need to buy about 300 more properties to be able to build the train, the Times reported that consultants believe at least an additional 488 parcels will need to be bought to deal with complex issues related to easements on sites with infrastructure owned by Pacific Gas & Electric and other utilities as well as AT&T, railroads and irrigation districts.

This adds new doubts about the rail authority’s projection it could finish construction of the Central Valley route by 2026.

One project manager, after warning of severe delays, told the Times that “I am going to ride this train, but I am afraid it is going to be my ashes in an urn. I told my kids to take my ashes on the bullet train.”

The Times also noted that the rail authority had been forced to buy larger lots than it needed to accommodate the rail route to such an extent that it now owns hundreds of properties – including “toxic waste sites, vacant lots and rental homes” – that it must manage. The list includes at least 466 acres of cultivated agriculture fields.

San Jose area critics push for costly elevated lanes

There was also bad news for the project from Northern California. At a rail authority board meeting held in San Jose, trustees voted unanimously to approve a route connecting the San Joaquin Valley with San Jose after the Central Valley initial segment is built. Yet testimony at the hearing showed the intensity of opposition to building any new rail route that didn’t minimize disruptions to the neighborhoods and communities it traveled through.

According to a Fresno Bee report, speakers complained to the rail board that early promises that elevated rail lines would be built had given way to plans for regular, surface rail lines. But since elevated rail costs two to four times more per mile, choosing it would make project costs explode – and Gov. Gavin Newsom has already said there’s not nearly enough funding likely to be available to complete the $78 billion statewide project advocated by his predecessor, Jerry Brown.

That argument didn’t move San Jose resident Danny Garza. According to the Bee, he said that not building elevated tracks in his neighborhood was “a bait-and-switch” given past guarantees of minimal impacts. “Please don’t use our neighborhood to balance your budget,” he told the board.

San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo told trustees that his city could drop its support for the project if the rail authority didn’t use “best practices”  to “provide our community with the safety it deserves.”

The section of the proposed route in the San Joaquin Valley also drew complaints, according to the Bee. Rick Ortega, general manager of the Grassland Water and Resource Conservation Districts, said the staff report “contains no design detail on how the authority intends to mitigate impacts through the ecological area.” The Grassland Environmental Area is a 160,000-acre site mostly in Merced County that the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service has repeatedly said must be preserved because of the crucial ecological importance of its wetlands.

Ortega also said elevated tracks were necessary – or that the rail authority should change its planned route.

Board members said the staff would consider the complaints, but offered no promises about the nature of possible mitigation efforts, according to the Bee.

California’s already-troubled recycling system took another blow this month with the closure of Ontario-based rePlanet, which operated 284 recycling centers, the most of any recycling company in the state.

But despite complaints from environmentalists about 2 million recyclable containers a day being thrown away in the Golden State and from consumer advocates upset that state residents are losing $25 million in deposits a month, no fix is on the horizon. That’s even though there is general agreement on what would revive recycling: increasing the reimbursement rates that the California Department of Resources Recycling (CalRecycle) pays recycling centers that take in single-use glass, plastic and metal bottles. Legislation to increase rates appears stalled in Sacramento.

Another proposed solution is to increase the 5-cent deposit per small plastic or glass bottle to 10 cents, as Oregon and Michigan have done. Those states have 90 percent recycling rates, far better than the 75 percent rate reported in California before rePlanet shut down operations.

Fallout from China’s decision to stop buying recyclables

About 1,000 centers have closed since the state lowered reimbursement rates in 2016. Recycling in California and across America took a giant hit in late 2017 when China – by far the world’s biggest market for recyclables – stopped its program, concluding that processing other nations’ waste was not a good use of resources.

Given California’s history as a pioneering environmental state, green groups like Californians Against Waste are incredulous that state leaders like Gov. Gavin Newsom and predecessor Jerry Brown see fixing recycling as a low priority.

But China is far from the only player in the recycling debate which is rethinking recycling. Brown opposed increasing reimbursements on the grounds that it was time for the state to develop a “modern” version of recycling. 

In a policy debate with echoes of the present flap over whether dockless electric scooters actually help the environment, a growing number of economists are skeptical about whether recycling makes sense. They say the resources needed to process separate streams of waste use up considerable energy, especially because the industry has never been able to address the problem that most non-deposit plastic products placed in recycling bins aren’t recyclable. And with improvements in landfill liners and design, previous views of dumps as toxic sites have lost ground.

Another claim heard in the late 1980s when California and many other states launched recycling programs – that landfills were running out of room – no longer has many believers. 

The Los Angeles Times reported last week that since 2010, one landfill had been built and 36 landfills had been expanded in the state.

New York Times economics columnist John Tierney wrote in 2015 that “all the trash generated by Americans for the next 1,000 years would fit on one-tenth of 1 percent of the land available for grazing.” 

Environmentalists see single-use plastic as huge problem

But this view of recycling as inefficient, expensive and not particularly helpful to the environment is rejected by greens and by many Democrats who have taken on a new goal of ending all single-use plastics. They see plastic – which can last hundreds of years – as a huge pollution problem. That plastics are made from fossil fuels is also considered a major shortcoming. This view drives environmentalists’ goal of ending all single-use plastics – not just straws and utensils but consumer packaging. 

Senate Bill 54 – the California Circular Economy and Plastic Pollution Reduction Act – would commit California to a 75 percent reduction in single-use plastics by 2030. With 12 co-authors, the bill passed the Senate in May and won initial support from the Assembly Natural Resources Committee on generally party-line votes.

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio wants to go even farther. He has promised to eliminate the “ludicrous” and “outdated” practice of sending garbage to landfills.

Appointed to replace newly elected U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris in 2016, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra ran for his own four-year term in 2018 as a supporter of then-Gov. Jerry Brown’s law enforcement and judicial reforms. “California’s Department of Justice has modernized its police force, sponsored state legislation to require an assessment of 2015 and 2016 data related to officer-involved shootings and has explored options for bail reform,” his campaign web page declared. After winning, Becerra made similar claims in a speech at Stanford University.

But to the surprise of many Democrats, the former 12-term congressman has also emerged this year as a persistent, unexpected obstacle to a reform measure that Brown signed before he left office.

Senate Bill 1421, by Sen. Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley, requires law enforcement agencies to release discipline records related to officers’ excessive use of force, sexual misconduct and dishonest actions. It replaced a previous collection of state laws and court rulings that made it close to impossible for the public to learn about sustained allegations against peace officers.

But even before it took effect on Jan. 1, dozens of police agencies attempted to undercut the law by saying it didn’t apply to misconduct before Jan. 1. Skinner and the legislative record showed that it was her clear intent to make all discipline records that departments had to legally retain available through public record requests.

CHP has produced no records on 7,000-plus officers

Becerra never supported this interpretation of SB 1421. But he initially declined to issue discipline records of state Department of Justice employees on the grounds that the question of the law’s effective date was being reviewed by state courts. Other law enforcement agencies began releasing their own records months before Becerra’s agency starting doing so following a May court ruling by San Francisco Superior Court Judge Richard Ulmer.

Meanwhile, by far the largest state police agency – the California Highway Patrol, which has more than 7,300 sworn officers – had released no records as of June 30, according to the Los Angeles Times. This prompted a complaint from Skinner. “If the state agencies themselves are acting like they’re above the law, that’s absolutely the wrong model and the wrong example to set for the rest of the local government agencies up and down the state,” she told the Times.

Becerra is also appealing part of Ulmer’s May ruling requiring his agency to hand over discipline records it has involving local officers. He wants to limit the parameters of SB 1421 so it only covers the discipline records of officers possessed by their employers. Becerra’s position is that this could lead to the undermining of agencies investigating their officers and potentially lead to the release of incorrect information. 

His department also says the language in Skinner’s bill “focused on an employer’s records about its employees” – not such records in the possession of another agency. But Ulmer didn’t go along with this interpretation. 

Last Friday, an appellate court sided with the judge’s decision and rejected Becerra’s challenge on a preliminary basis. But it set a hearing on July 18 to hear further testimony in the case.

The belief that California has a profound housing crisis took hold in the state’s media and political establishments in recent years after Census Bureau statistics showed the Golden State had the highest effective rate of poverty once cost of living was included.

The view was amplified by stories about four-hour commutes forced by housing costs and about shocking numbers of poor college students who struggled to pay for food.

That’s why the decision last week by state Senate Appropriations Chairman Anthony Portantino, D-La Cañada Flintridge, to kill Senate Bill 50 – the latest attempt to spur housing construction by limiting local control of approvals
– came as a surprise to many. That included the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco. His push to ease rules to allow four-to-five-story apartment buildings near public transit centers and to allow construction of such units in many zones previously reserved for single-family homes had won support from not just developers but construction labor unions, several large-city Democratic mayors and some activist groups. Many were skeptics of Wiener’s and Gov. Jerry Brown’s previous attempts to limit local control.

Stories about Portantino’s decision focused on the fact that leaders of cities in his district, starting with Pasadena, had been vociferous opponents of Senate Bill 50. Reports also focused on the formidable influence of environmental groups, which prefer strict zoning rules to give them more clout to block development.

These arguments are common. In August 2016, when Brown’s attempt to sharply streamline the approval process for housing projects died in the Legislature, Shamus Roller, executive director of Housing California, blasted “the political gamesmanship of powerful interests.”

Californians ‘must be convinced of benefits’ of adding housing

But another view is that then-state Legislative Analyst Mac Taylor knew what he was talking about in March 2017 when he issued a report on the failure of local governments to meet housing mandates that said major change was unlikely “unless Californians are convinced of the benefits of more home building.” Instead of seeing the failure of housing reforms as a result of special-interest machinations, Taylor argued that elected leaders who backed such measures hadn’t cultivated the public support necessary to enact major changes.

Taylor’s thesis was supported by a USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll of Californians released in October that found little belief that the housing crisis was due to a lack of building. It was the sixth-most cited reason, falling far behind the top two: the lack of rent control in much of the state and inadequate “affordable housing” programs. Two-thirds of those surveyed supported local control of housing approvals even if cities or counties weren’t meeting state mandates for new housing construction.

Still, Wiener said he wasn’t daunted by Portantino’s decision. He said he would bring another housing reform measure to the state Senate in 2020. The former San Francisco supervisor, a Harvard law graduate, also said he thought Senate Bill 50 had a chance of being resurrected this summer, even though appropriation chairs of the Senate and Assembly have a long history of making their decisions stick.

“We’re either serious about solving this crisis, or we aren’t,” he told reporters in Sacramento last week. “At some point, we will need to make the hard political choices necessary for California to have a bright housing future.”

In his final weeks on the job, Ma’s predecessor as treasurer – John Chiang
– announced that he no longer believed the Cannabis Banking Working Group that he chaired for two years could come up with a solution to a basic problem: Most banks do not want to provide services to marijuana growers, delivery services and shop owners until federal regulators or Congress and President Donald Trump approved changes in federal policy. Though more than 30 states have legalized the medicinal and recreational use of cannabis, under federal law, it remains a Schedule 1 – meaning very serious – illegal drug.

“[The federal government] must either remove cannabis from its official list of banned narcotics or approve safe harbor legislation that protects banks serving cannabis businesses from prosecution,” Chiang said at a Dec. 27 public meeting of the Cannabis Banking Working Group.

But with the recreational marijuana industry off to a much-slower start than expected since 2016’s Proposition 64 began allowing recreational sales on Jan. 1, 2018, state elected officials are under pressure to help the industry. While other lawmakers have focused on reducing taxes and regulations and making it easier to get permits, Hertzberg and Ma see providing basic financial services as crucial to normalizing legal recreational cannabis and to limiting the corruption and employee safety risk of having a multi-billion-dollar cash-only industry.

That’s why Hertzberg introduced Senate Bill 51, which would let individuals or companies in the private sector seek state charters that would allow them to create credit unions and banks of limited scope specifically for the cannabis industry. The special banks could provide checking services allowing marijuana companies to “open and use checking accounts, make or receive electronic payments, or accept credit or debit cards.”

Oversight of the new banks would be assigned to the newly created Cannabis Limited Charter Bank and Credit Union Advisory Board, whose board would include the state treasurer and controller.

Last year, Hertzberg offered Senate Bill 930, a similar measure that easily passed the state Senate and two Assembly committees before dying in murky circumstances in the Assembly Appropriations Committee. Ma co-sponsored that measure while still serving as a state senator.

In a recent Capitol Weekly story, Hertzberg’s spokeswoman suggested that SB 930 failed because of then-Gov. Jerry Brown’s tacit opposition.

“The bill itself this year is probably going to be extremely similar to last year, but a few outside aspects have changed,” said Katie Hanzlik. “We guessed that there wasn’t quite as much of an appetite in the previous administration, so the good thing on that front is that we have a new administration, and it’s our understanding that Gov. Newsom is really open to this whole field of cannabis and making this industry work in the state.”

While lieutenant governor, Newsom was perhaps the highest-profile supporter of Proposition 64.

The first legislative hearing on SB 51 has not yet been scheduled.