Now there’s a fresh sign that environmentalists’ clout may be on the wane. De Leon has stunned green groups by endorsing a moderate incumbent — Assemblywoman Cheryl Brown, D-San Bernardino — who opposed the push for a sharp cut in gasoline use over another prominent Inland Empire Democrat, attorney Eloise Gomez Reyes. As Calwatchdog reported earlier this year, Brown was indirectly blasted by one of de Leon’s leadership team, Sen. Connie Leyva, D-Chino, who said she was backing Brown’s opponent because “she was a principled human being.”

In a strange twist, the document making the rounds in media circles showing de Leon’s endorsement of Brown contends that Leyva and all his fellow Senate Democratic leaders agree with him.

“I support Eloise Reyes. Period. Somehow the pro tem must have misunderstood my position, although I thought I was quite clear,” Leyva told The Los Angeles Times.

Whatever the logistical problems with de Leon’s endorsement, it amounts to a striking rejection of environmentalists’ argument that they know Brown’s district better than she does. This view was voiced again this week by one of Reyes’ consultants, Leo Briones, who told the Times, “Cheryl Brown can have every special interest and every Sacramento politician … but she still is a legislator that does not represent progressive values or her district when it comes to issues of working families, of consumers, of guns and public safety and the environment.”

Green official: Brown a ‘nice person,’ bad lawmaker

This argument was offered by a high-profile environmentalist in a January Sacramento Bee story that rubbed some minority lawmakers the wrong way:

“There’s no doubt Ms. Brown, who’s a very nice person, has not been representing her constituents when it comes to environmental issues, particularly clean-air issues,” Sierra Club California director Kathryn Phillips told the Bee. “She’s collected too much money from the oil industry and let that guide too many of her votes.”

As Calwatchdog reported then …

Phillips, who works out of Sacramento, is a white UC Berkeley graduate who used to work for the Environmental Defense Fund. Brown, who turns 72 next week, has been a fixture in the Inland Empire African-American political establishment for more than three decades. She co-founded a weekly publication that focuses on black issues in 1980 and has worked on a wide variety of African-American causes in western San Bernardino County.

Assemblyman Sebastian Ridley-Thomas, D-Los Angeles, told the Bee he didn’t care for how environmentalists were treating his fellow African-American lawmaker. “I think it’s a tone-deaf approach. … The environmental community, and the broader environmental coalition, needs to figure out whether or not it’s going to be a collaborator and … work with black California on policy, and shared political goals, or if it will be an adversary.”

Ridley-Thomas is a vocal supporter of de Leon’s efforts to have a Superfund-type cleanup of the Exide battery plant in Vernon.

Henry T. Perea’s decision to leave office early cost Fresno County at least a half million dollars.

Henry T. Perea’s decision to vacate his Assembly seat early cost Fresno County a half-million dollars — enough to pay for four sheriff deputies — and has reignited a discussion on the cost of special elections.

The Fresno Democrat announced last year that he’d be leaving the Assembly to pursue a position with the pharmaceutical industry.

In fact, counties are saddled with the cost of special elections regularly. And while they have become less frequent, at least temporarily, a CalWatchdog review of expenses shows that since 2013 counties (and one city) have spent $21.7 million on special elections to replace state lawmakers.

Few would decry a legislator stepping down if the officeholder or his or her family member fell ill. And of course sometimes scandals create a vacancy. But most of the time these seats are vacated by politicians looking to cash in with a high-paying lobbying position, trade up for higher office (perhaps to avoid being forced from office by term limits), which then creates a mad dash to fill the gaps behind them.

For example: In 2013, Curren Price created a vacancy in the state Senate when he won a seat on the Los Angeles City Council, which are elected in odd-numbered years. Holly Mitchell then won Price’s seat in a special election, leaving a vacancy in the Assembly. That vacancy was filled by the current occupant, Asm. Sebastian Ridley-Thomas.

That game of musical chairs cost Los Angeles County $2.4 million. And had Ridley-Thomas and Mitchell not one outright in their respective primaries, forcing a run-off, the cost for the overall costs for the special election would have approximately doubled.

Nonpartisan

Price, Ridley-Thomas and Mitchell are all Democrats, but Republicans do it too. In 2014, Mimi Walters won a seat in Congress in an open Orange County district after former Rep. John Campbell retired.

After winning, she vacated her state Senate seat, which was filled by now-Sen. John Moorlach, costing the county $1.24 million.

One approach

On Wednesday, an Assembly panel will consider a proposal from Asm. Jim Patterson, R-Fresno, which would require that legislators use leftover campaign funds to pay down the cost of the special election they’ve caused, leaving exceptions for health and family reasons.

Perea still has more than $800,000 according to the campaign finance filings from the end of 2015. Instead of giving money to Fresno County, which is allowable under state law, Perea made some political contributions and paid for a few holiday parties.

Other ideas

A measure by Sen. Andy Vidak, R-Hanford, was approved by one panel earlier this month. The bill would require the state to reimburse for the entire cost of the special election for vacancies of state lawmakers. The state used to contribute to the cost of special elections, but has since ceased the practice.

“Fresno County was forced to hold a special election today to fill a vacant Assembly seat, which is costing the county more than a half- million dollars,” Vidak said in a statement last week following the election to replace Perea. “That’s money that could have been used for police, fire, health, education and other vital services.”

Others have suggested the governor appoint a replacement to serve until the next scheduled election. But critics claim that gives the unfair advantage of incumbency to a replacement if he or she decides to run for another term, and gives the governor too much political power.

“Sure, it’s a tradeoff,” said Raphael Sonenshein, the executive director of the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at California State University Los Angeles, noting that if the seat is held only until the next scheduled election then no one would hold the seat for more than two years. “Special elections have very low turnout. It’s at least arguably a budget savings and one less election.”

Turnout

Voter turnout is a persistent issue in California. Some argue that the abundance of special elections contributes to the problem. Most of the special elections have even lower turnout.

In 2013 in Los Angeles, 23 percent of voters turned out for the regularly-scheduled city elections when Price was elected. Later that year, only 5.55 percent of voters turned out to elect Mitchell to the state Senate and then 8.47 percent turned out to elect Ridley-Thomas to the Assembly.

In 2014, the regularly-scheduled gubernatorial election that sent Mimi Walters to Congress drew about 43 percent of voters, while John Moorlach was elected to the state Senate only a few months later with only a 15.42 percent turnout.

Kathay Feng, the executive director of the left-leaning good government group California Common Cause, suggests moving all local elections to the normal presidential and midterm/gubernatorial voting schedule — and during the vacancy, until a successor is elected, the seat could either stay unoccupied or a “caretaker” could be appointed.

“Will a group of people be unrepresented for a short period of time? Potentially.” Feng told CalWatchdog. “But this is insane to elect people by five or six percent of the population and still call it a democracy.”

Cost

The money that is spent on special elections goes to things like: printing ballots, hiring poll workers, securing locations, paying for postage and producing vote by mail ballots. 

Many special elections are unbudgeted and all are unplanned and sometimes they overlap. According to Dean Logan, the Los Angeles County registrar-recorder/county clerk, it can be particularly taxing on the county registrar and confusing for voters who could be receiving election packets from the city they live in and then the county a few weeks later, like Los Angeles residents in 2013.

Logan did not advocate a particular path forward, as it’s not his role as registrar. However, he has at least raised questions over the current process and the drain on resources since at least 2010.

“And we already have a crisis of participation even in our regular election cycles, but the turnout in these special vacancy elections is extremely low,” Logan told CalWatchdog.

Term-limits

Some argue that the 2012 modification of term limits, which allowed legislators to spend more time in each chamber, may reduce the number of special elections. While the change hasn’t been around long enough to say for sure, there has been a reduction in special elections since it was passed.

There were 12 special elections (including primary and general/run-off) in 2013, two in 2014, four in 2015 and only one so far this year.

Photo credit: Breitbart.com

Assemblywoman Cheryl Brown, a moderate African-American Democrat from San Bernardino seeking her third term, has brushed back the first challenge to her re-election by Eloise Reyes, a Colton attorney strongly backed by environmental groups. Brown easily won her local party chapter’s “pre-endorsement,” getting 70 percent of an informal vote at a recent Democratic Party gathering in San Bernardino — undercutting greens’ claims she was out of touch with her constituents.

In comments to the Riverside Press-Enterprise after her triumph, Brown appeared to directly respond to the notion she didn’t know her district:

“I’ve always believed that the Democratic Party is the party of inclusion that seeks to represent all voices in the community,” Brown said. “I’ve listened closely to the community, voted on legislation with my conscience, and understand the awesome responsibility that has been given to me to represent the Inland Empire as an assembly member.”

The Brown-Reyes fight threatens to open up a rift between African-American lawmakers and environmental groups. Sierra Club California director Kathryn Phillips’ comments to the Sacramento Bee in a Jan. 12 story about Brown were seen as condescending in some quarters.

“There’s no doubt Ms. Brown, who’s a very nice person, has not been representing her constituents when it comes to environmental issues, particularly clean-air issues,” Phillips told the Bee. “She’s collected too much money from the oil industry and let that guide too many of her votes.”

Black icon defended against Sierra Club gripes

Phillips, who works out of Sacramento, is a white UC Berkeley graduate who used to work for the Environmental Defense Fund. Brown, who turns 72 next week, has been a fixture in the Inland Empire African-American political establishment for more than three decades. She co-founded a weekly publication that focuses on black issues in 1980 and has worked on a wide variety of African-American causes in western San Bernardino County.

Assemblyman Sebastian Ridley-Thomas, D-Los Angeles, responded to green criticism of Brown most sharply:

“I think it’s a tone-deaf approach,” Ridley-Thomas said, accusing the groups of using “wedge politics.”

 

“The environmental community, and the broader environmental coalition, needs to figure out whether or not it’s going to be a collaborator and … work with black California on policy, and shared political goals, or if it will be an adversary.”

That’s also from reporting by the Bee.

One unexpected twist in this political rumble is the harshness of the indirect, unusually personal potshot taken at Brown by a fellow Inland Empire elected Democrat. In a statement released by the Reyes campaign, state Sen. Connie Leyva, D-Chino, said she supported Brown’s opponent because “she was a principled human being.”

Leyva’s Senate district has considerable overlap with Brown’s Assembly district.

However, the Legislative Analyst’s Office surveyed 50 school districts around the state, including the 11 largest, and warned in a January report that not one had proper safeguards to prevent diversion of funds. In Los Angeles Unified, among other districts, the local teachers’ union last summer pointed specifically to new, incoming LCFF dollars as a kitty to tap for pay raises.

In coming months, this issue is likely to emerge as a point of contention in Sacramento because of concerns raised by the California Legislative Black Caucus about State Board of Education rules governing how LCFF funds are used. Here are three of the caucus’ main points:

— Any authority for the use of supplemental or concentration grants to schoolwide and districtwide expenditures must clearly link the services to demonstrated effectiveness in increasing student achievement and closing achievement gaps, and demonstrate that the expenditures are proven effective for “concentrations” of unduplicated children in schools in the district where concentrations exist.

— The terms “most effective” or “effective” should be defined, and at a minimum be tied to demonstrated effectiveness in meeting the “student achievement” goal and closing any persistent achievement gaps or deficiencies as it relates to the unduplicated students, and not just a generic reference to the state priority areas.

— The proposed regulations also do not provide the Board or county superintendents clear standards by which districts must explicitly demonstrate or explain, at a minimum, how expenditures of supplement and concentration grant funds will support services that will actually improve the academic achievement of unduplicated students or close persistent academic achievement gaps.

These concerns are from Assemblywoman Shirley Weber’s remarks to the State Board of Education at its Jan. 16 meeting on behalf of the Black Caucus.

Dan Walters wrote a Feb. 26 column in the Sacramento Bee noting that a “broad coalition of civil rights and education reform groups” had expressed worry about the LCFF not being implemented according to the goals cited in 2013 upon its passage. But this effort seems likely to be much stronger with the aid of state lawmakers.

The Black Caucus has 12 members — Weber, Reginald Byron Jones-Sawyer Sr., Sebastian Ridley-Thomas, Cheryl R. Brown, Autumn Burke, Jim Cooper, Mike Gipson, Christopher Holden, Kevin McCarty and Tony Thurmond in the Assembly, and Isadore Hall III and Holly J. Mitchell in the Senate.

It seems Los Angeles County is testing the old philosophical question: What if they gave an election and nobody came? The most populous county in the state had the lowest percentage turnout in last November’s election.

While 42 percent of state voters turned out for the general election, Los Angeles County turnout was only 31 percent. The last mayoral city election in Los Angeles saw a turnout of a mere 23 percent.

The California Senate and Assembly election committees are chaired, respectively, by Sen. Ben Allen, D-Santa Monica, and Assemblyman Sebastian Ridley-Thomas, D-Culver City. The chairs called a joint oversight committee hearing on Feb. 20 to look for the reasons and solutions of the extremely low turnout in Los Angeles County. YouTube here.

The answer just might be a feeling of powerlessness among voters.

Loyola Law professor Jessica Levinson told the committee the low turnout in Los Angeles elections could be a case of voter apathy. Los Angeles is not a political town, she said. Everyone knows when the Super Bowl and the Oscars occur, but they don’t know when an election happens.

Many suggestions were made at the hearing on why there was a low voter turnout:

• Voters believe their vote doesn’t matter;
• The size of the county takes away the personalization of politics;
• Lack of civic education in the schools;
• Frequency of elections;
• Lack of an interesting ballot;
• Demographics in which the large minority populations which make up much of Los Angeles County’s potential voters have a history of not voting.

Major obstacles

All those items contribute to the low voter turnout. But are there really major obstacles to prevent voters from coming out if they cared to?

Some of those testifying to the committee seemed to think so. Common Cause’s Kathay Feng said the progressives who set up the rules for stand-alone local elections not only wanted a focus on local government, but they were also racist. They didn’t want certain people to vote and they were successful by setting up elections in off years.

Feng, who serves on the committee to move the Los Angeles city elections to coincide with national elections, a measure which will appear on the city ballot in March, said the convenience to the voters of combining elections will bump up the voting totals by as much as a third.

Still, Raphael Sonenshein, executive director of the Pat Brown Institute at Cal State, Los Angeles, may have touched on the reason citizens don’t engage in local elections. He argued that people believe the only election that really leads to change is the presidential election.

If that is so, then many of the suggestions made to increase the vote will probably only do so on the margins.

Change agents

Even if voting is made as convenient as possible — as Jessica Levinson suggested the time might come when everyone can simply vote by pressing some button on their iPhone — an important question remains: Do voters think those votes for local candidates create change?

Do citizens think they have the power through their votes to alter the direction of government? Or do they believe the institutions are so controlled and manipulated by insiders that voting is pointless?

There were higher turnouts in the past when it was arguably more inconvenient to vote.

The key to bringing voters to the polls, rather than constantly devising new systems to make it easier to vote, is for the voters to see themselves as important participants in governing.