BOARD LEGISLATIVE COMMITTEE Friday, December 14, 2018 12:30 p.m. EBRPD – Administrative Headquarters 2950 Peralta Oaks Court Oakland, California 94605
The following agenda items are listed for Committee consideration. In accordance with the Board Operating Guidelines, no official action of the Board will be taken at this meeting; rather, the Committee’s purpose shall be to review the listed items and to consider developing recommendations to the Board of Directors.
A copy of the background materials concerning these agenda items, including any material that may have been submitted less than 72 hours before the meeting, is available for inspection on the District’s website (www. ebparks.org), the Headquarters reception desk, and at the meeting.
Public Comment on Agenda Items If you wish to testify on an item on the agenda, please complete a speaker’s form and submit it to the recording secretary. Your name will be called when the item is announced for discussion.
Accommodations and Access District facilities and meetings comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act. If special accommodations are needed for you to participate, please contact the Clerk of the Board at 510-544-2020 as soon as possible, but preferably at least three working days prior to the meeting.
AGENDA
TIME ITEM STATUS STAFF 12:30 I. STATE LEGISLATION / OTHER MATTERS A. NEW LEGISLATION R Doyle/Pfuehler 1. AB 65 – Coastal Conservancy Climate Adaptation Funds (Petrie-Norris D-Laguna Beach) 2. SB 8 – State Park and Coastal Beaches Smoking Ban (Glazer D-Orinda) 3. SB 20 – Napa County Regional Park and Open Space District (Dodd D-Napa) 4. SB 45 – Wildfire, Drought and Flood Protection Bond Act of 2020 (Allen D-Santa Monica) 5. Other Items
B. OTHER STATE MATTERS I Doyle/Pfuehler 1. Wildfire Legislation 2. Retirement of Nonette Hanko 3. Other Items
II. FEDERAL LEGISLATION / OTHER MATTERS R Pfuehler/Baldinger A. NEW LEGISLATION 1. H.R. 7154 – Safe Drinking Water in Playgrounds and Parks (Meng D-NY) 2. S. 3499 – Outdoors for All Act (Harris D-CA) 3. S. 3515 – Wildfire-Resilient Communities (Merkley D-OR) 4. Other Items
B. OTHER FEDERAL MATTERS I Pfuehler/Baldinger 1. Land and Water Conservation Fund Update 2. Other Items
III. MEASURE FF AND ELECTION RESULTS I Pfuehler/Baldinger
IV. 2019 LEGISLATIVE PRIORITIES R Doyle/Pfuehler/ Baldinger V. ADVOCATE CONTRACTS R Doyle/Pfuehler A. Strategy Research Institute B. E2 Strategies, LLC
VI. ARTICLES
VII. OPEN FORUM PUBLIC COMMENT Individuals wishing to address the Committee on a topic not on the agenda may do so by completing a speaker’s form and submitting it to the recording secretary.
VIII. BOARD COMMENTS
(R) Recommendation for Future Board Consideration (I) Information (D) Discussion Legislative Committee Members Future Meetings: Dee Rosario (Chair); Dennis Waespi, Beverly Lane January 8 & 26 July 20 Colin Coffey, Alternate February – NO MTG August – NO MTG Erich Pfuehler, Government Affairs Manager *March 9 September 21 April 20 October 19 May 18 November – NO MTG June – NO MTG *December 14
TO: Board Legislative Committee (Chair Dee Rosario, Dennis Waespi, Beverly Lane, Alt. Colin Coffey)
FROM: Robert E. Doyle, General Manager Erich Pfuehler, Government Affairs Manager
SUBJECT: Board Legislative Committee Meeting WHEN: Friday, December 14, 2018 12:30 PM Lunch will be served
WHERE: Board Room, Peralta Oaks ______
Items to be discussed:
I. STATE LEGISLATION / OTHER MATTERS A. NEW LEGISLATION 1. AB 65 – Coastal Conservancy Climate Adaptation Funds (Petrie-Norris D-Laguna Beach) Proposition 68 authorizes $40 million to assist coastal communities in adapting to climate change. The language of SB 5 called for depositing the $40 million into the California Ocean Protection Trust Fund (OPTF). The OPTF was created by the California Ocean Protection Act and administered by the Ocean Protection Council. Of the $40 million, SB 5 called on 35% of this funding to be available for the San Francisco Bay Area Conservancy Program and 12% available to the State Coastal Conservancy to fund a conservation program at West Coyote Hills. The remaining 53% would have been held in the OPTF. AB 65 would distribute the full $40 million to be administered by the State Coastal Conservancy. AB 65 prioritizes projects which adapt to climate change. AB 65 does not specify the Bay Program continues to receive 35% of the $40 million. While the Coastal Conservancy would view San Francisco Bay Area projects as eligible for all $40 million, the District would have an interest in ensuring 35% remain allocated to the Bay Program.
Staff recommendation: Support
2. SB 8 – State Park and Coastal Beaches Smoking Ban (Glazer D-Orinda) Senator Glazer passed similar legislation in the last session year, SB 835 and SB 836. The bills would have prohibited smoking in state parks, on state beaches and at any picnic area on a state beach. They also required the Department of Parks and Recreation to post signs to notify the public about the smoking ban. Governor Jerry Brown vetoed these measures and similar measures in the previous two years. In his September 29th, 2018 veto message, Governor Brown stated: “Third time is not always a charm. My opinion on the matter has not changed. We have many rules telling us what we can't do and these are wide open spaces.” SB 8 would make it an infraction to smoke in a unit of the state park system punishable by a fine up to $25. This iteration, should it pass the legislature, will be before a new Governor which may increase its chances of becoming law. Groups supporting this legislation in the past include the Park District, California Park and Recreation Society, Mount Diablo Audubon Society, Save the Bay and the Trust for Public Land. Given the District has
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its own smoking ban under Ordinance 38, it would be consistent to continue to support this legislation by a member of the East Bay delegation.
Staff recommendation: Support
3. SB 20 – Napa County Regional Park and Open Space District (Dodd D-Napa) SB 20 would statutorily provide the Napa County Regional Park and Open Space District (NCRPOSD) the ability to acquire 850 acres of state surplus property. The property is presently controlled by the County of Napa as part of Skyline Wilderness Park. Currently, the State Department of General Services does not have the authority to sell or exchange the property. This legislation would allow the NCRPOSD or Napa County to acquire the surplus property. While this is specific legislation to Napa County, NCRPOSD would welcome the Park District’s support of SB 20.
Staff recommendation: Support
4. SB 45 – Wildfire, Drought and Flood Protection Bond Act (Allen D-Santa Monica) Senator Allen’s $4 billion bond legislation takes a fairly comprehensive look at the inter- relation between restoring fire damaged areas, reducing wildfire risk, creating healthy forest and watersheds, reducing climate impacts on urban areas and vulnerable populations, protecting water supply and water quality, reducing flood risk and protecting coastal lands. SB 45 does not assign dollar allocations to the various categories included in the outline. There is not currently an allocation category for parks or outdoor access. During the session, there will be significant discussions about the possible nature and categories for a resource related bond measure. The District should closely track this effort and work with the East Bay delegation to include the relationship between wildfire, drought, flooding, human health and natural resource management in whatever bond measure is considered.
Staff recommendation: Watch
5. Other Items
B. OTHER STATE MATTERS 1. Wildfire Legislation Please see the attached outline about possible issues of import to the District. The outline is intended to prompt discussion about our legislative advocacy throughout this session.
2. Retirement of Nonette Hanko In 1970, Nonette Hanoke played a key role in the passage of a two-county initiative to form the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District (MidPen). Ms. Hanko, a native of San Mateo and Burlingame, has served on the MidPen Board of Directors since 1972. During her tenure, MidPen has acquired and protected over 63,495 acres of land, including 6,800 acres of redwoods and creating more than 243 miles of trails. Over the last decade, Ms. Hanko has been recognized for her preservation efforts. She has been featured as one of the living visionaries of Bay Area open space in Galen Rowell’s book Bay Area Wild, received the World of Out of Doors Award from the Girl Scouts of Santa Clara County and received the prestigious “Creators of the Legacy” honor as part of the Palo Alto Centennial. In recognition of Nonette Hanko’s 46 years of consecutive public service on the Midpeninsula
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Regional Open Space District’s Board of Directors staff recommends a Resolution of Honor.
Staff recommendation: Support
3. Other Items
II. FEDERAL LEGISLATION / OTHER MATTERS A. NEW LEGISLATION 1. H.R. 7154 – Safe Drinking Water in Playgrounds and Parks (Meng D-NY) Representative Grace Ming from New York introduced this legislation to ensure drinking water fountains in playgrounds and parks are eligible for the “Reducing Lead in Drinking Water Grant Program.” Playgrounds and parks are not currently specified as eligible. The District would potentially be eligible for grants under this legislation when replacing water fountains in the parks.
Staff recommendation: Support
2. S. 3499 – Outdoors for All Act (Harris D-CA) This legislation is the Senate companion bill for H.R. 2943 on which the District previously has taken a support position. The Outdoors for All Act would codify a federal grant program that offers matching funds to state and local governments investing in much-needed outdoor outlets. The bill directs the Department of the Interior to establish an outdoor recreation legacy partnership grant program under which Interior may award grants to eligible entities – which specifically include “a special purpose district, including park districts” at the District’s request. Grant funds can be used to: (1) acquire land and water for parks and other outdoor recreation purposes, and (2) develop new or renovate existing outdoor recreation facilities. As a condition for receiving a grant, an eligible entity shall provide matching funds in cash or in kind equal to 100% of the amounts available under the grant. A grant recipient may use the grant to acquire land or water providing outdoor recreation opportunities to the public. A grant may also be used to develop or renovate outdoor recreational facilities, with priority given to projects that: • Create or significantly enhance access to park and recreational opportunities in an urban neighborhood or community; • Engage and empower underserved communities and youth; • Provide opportunities for youth employment or job training; • Establish or expand public-private partnerships; • Take advantage of coordination among various levels of government. Grant funds may not be used for specified costs, facilities and activities, including the acquisition of lands or interests which restrict access to particular persons.
Staff recommendation: Support
3. S. 3515 – Wildfire-Resilient Communities (Merkley D-OR) Senator Merkley’s legislation specifically calls on the Secretary of Agriculture to carryout hazardous fuels reduction projects on federal lands – including land administered by the Secretary of Interior such as units of the National Park Services and the National Wildlife Refuge System. “Hazardous fuels reduction” projects are defined as the removal or
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modification of flammable vegetation or woody debris through prescribed fire, thinning, brush removal, pruning, slash treatment or a combination of those methods on the condition the method is “ecologically appropriate.” Priority projects are those adjacent to at-risk communities and high-value watersheds or historically have very high wildfire hazard potential. The legislation also provides financial and technical assistance to at-risk communities adjacent to Federal land to plan and prepare for wildfire. The legislation authorizes $100 million annually for these purposes. While the legislation focuses on Federal lands, District staff and advocates will be in communication with Senator Merkley’s office, as well as Senators Feinstein and Harris, to see if state and regional agencies might be made eligible.
Staff recommendation: Support, and work to include regional agencies.
4. Other Items
B. OTHER FEDERAL MATTERS 1. Land and Water Conservation Fund Update The Senate and House of Representatives continue to negotiate several conservation bills that could pass this month. There is a tentative agreement on the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF) bill, which would permanently reauthorize the program. The funding formula would be 40% for stateside assistance, 40% for federal lands and the Appropriations Committee would determine that remain 20%. For years, stakeholders have advocated for LWCF permanent reauthorization and mandatory full funding. The funding piece could not be agreed on because Republicans insisted there be cuts to another part of the budget. The House Democrats are likely to make LWCF mandatory full funding a priority next year.
The LWCF agreement is tied to a larger package of 100 land bills. The Contra Costa Canal Transfer and the Golden Spike Transcontinental Railroad bills could be included in the package. Members continue to negotiate the details of each bill, but the entire effort could falter due to the lack of time. The situation is fluid and changes by the day. If time is short, Congress may move a small package of 20 lands bills (non-controversial) and LWCF. Congress is expected to complete their work sometime between December 21 and 24. LWCF expired on September 30, 2018.
2. Other Items
III. MEASURE FF AND ELECTION RESULTS Staff will provide a verbal update.
V. 2019 LEGISLATIVE PRIORITIES Staff will provide a power point to discuss priorities for 2019.
Federal • FEMA - Safe Healthy Forests / Wildfire Funding • Land and Water Conservation Fund • Concord Naval Weapons Station Transfer • Oakland Army Base Transfer
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• Infrastructure Package – Include Parks, Active Transportation • East Contra Costa County Habitat Conservancy • Alameda Point Park – Veterans Affairs • Tassajara Creek Trail – Army Camp Parks • Shoreline Protection – Water Resources Development Act
State • Legislative Budget Asks • Prop. 68 Implementation • Wildfire Legislation • Cap-and-Trade Investment Plan • Bay Area Delegation Engagement • State Parks Relationship • Blue – Green Algae Legislation • Telsa Legislation • Gateway Naming Legislation • Gun Range Clean Up Funding • Oakland Army Base – Department of Toxic Substances Control
Local • Park and Pubic Interest Survey • BNSF and Miller-Knox • Explore Feasibility of Revenue Zones Throughout the District • Building Relationships – Parks Commissioners, City Councils • San Francisco Bay Restoration Authority • Bay Area Toll Authority Regional Measure 3 implementation • Measure BB implementation • Possible Contra Costa County Transportation Measure
* Red indicates new priority for 2019
VI. ADVOCATE CONTRACTS A. Strategic Research Institute Strategy Research Institute (SRI), headed by Dr. G. Manross, has been under contract with the District to provide consulting services. The firm has developed research methodologies, managed surveys and provided expert interpretation of results that serve the District well in providing statistically accurate predictions of voter behavior, public interests, preferences and trends directly affecting this agency.
During 2018, the District, with the assistance of Dr. Manross, finalized two district-wide community voter surveys including for Measure FF, and an extensive trail user survey. Dr. Manross’ recommendation to move forward with Measure FF was indeed accurate as the Measure passed with 85.6% of the vote.
In 2019, staff intends to continue working on these matters, including two community surveys, data gathering and analysis and a study of “influentials” in the East Bay including social media engagement. SRI will also be tasked to work on data gathering and analysis to inform climate
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change policy and funding efforts, and expansion efforts for the Regional Parks Foundation. There are other significant planning efforts on the horizon for the District which could benefit from additional public research: Concord Naval Weapons Station transfer and financing, creation of Gateway Regional Shoreline, possible capital campaigns for environmental education / visitor centers, issues related to Dogs, Mountain Bikes, Integrated Pest Management and Park Planning, and other issues that may occur during the year. The assistance of Dr. Manross is an important element of these efforts. A copy of the proposed draft Board Material is attached.
B. E2 Strategies, LLC Over the past several years, the Park District has utilized the services of E2 Strategies LLC (Peter Umhofer – principal), to help promote the District’s profile in Washington D.C., including the facilitation of meetings with U.S. Senate staff, House of Representatives staff, and key decision makers at several Federal agencies and departments. Mr. Umhofer has been effective in advancing the District’s interests and significantly assisted the District in securing and protecting the $10.2 million Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) grant.
E2 Strategies LLC will represent District and provide services to Park District as follows: • Provide leadership on the Land and Water Conservation Fund reauthorization as well the District’s competitive grant application(s). • Work with the East Bay congressional delegation and appropriate committee members and staff regarding policy changes and funding opportunities that impact the District. • Work with Federal Agencies to ensure key projects move forward; such as the Concord Naval Weapons Station Transfer, Oakland Army Base Transfer, Alameda Point Park and the Veterans Administration, BNSF and Miller/Knox, and Tassajara Creek Trail and the Army. • Provide strategic advice on effective communication tools (letters, calls, office visits, op-eds, etc.) in support of the District’s legislative and policy priorities. • Work with the delegation to secure wetland restoration grants and legislation, including the Water Resources Development Act. • Update on key developments in the budget and appropriation bills. • Provide strategic advice on effective communication tools in support of national recognition of the District’s leadership in adaptive stewardship planning as a response to climate change and sea level rise.
In light of his effective, ongoing advocacy, the District would like to continue to retain the services of Mr. Umhofer and his consulting company E2 Strategies LLC. A copy of the proposed draft Board Material is attached.
VII. ARTICLES
VIII. OPEN FORUM PUBLIC COMMENT
IX. BOARD COMMENTS
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Summary of Fire Related Items Attachment I.B.1
Resource Protection • Managing for natural resources, endangered and threatened species presents challenges about where and when fire hazard reduction management can take place. • Took the Park District eight years to receive approval from regulatory agencies. Possible Action: Ease environmental restrictions for land management agencies with demonstrated effectiveness in stewardship. Land management agencies should be considered differently than developers, businesses, etc.
Prescribed Fires • The Park District has to apply to the Bay Area Air Quality Management District for prescribed fires. • CalFire has to burn 1000 acres in each unit. The District’s unit includes Alameda, Contra Costa, Santa Clara and San Joaquin and Stanislaus Counties. Possible Action: Ease environmental, air quality restrictions on modest prescribed burns. The air quality impacts of prescribed burns are minimal compared to the major fires we have seen in California over the past few years. The merits of prescribed fire outweigh potential carbon emission effects.
Grassland Management • Grazing is one of the most effective means of vegetation management for wildfire suppression. • Not enough goats – goats can cover territory and terrain which is difficult for mowers and even cattle to reach. • Cost is $3,000 to $5,000 per acre for goats. • More cistern water systems are needed for grazing. Possible Action: More state funding for goats and cisterns. More flexibility in prescribed burns for grasslands. Collaborative opportunities with California Rangeland Trust and ranchers.
Personal Responsibility • Most fires start where humans are – homeowners need to take responsibility for defensible space. • Fire Safe Councils can play a key role in educating the public. Possible Action: More state funding for Fire Safe Councils. Cobranding opportunities with elected officials on educational / informational materials for public distribution. A possible “Hardening Your Home” informational campaign.
Development • No residential development planning should be approved with only one ingress and egress. • This could be a conversation with the League of Cities, California State Association of Counties and insurance companies. Possible Action: In the midst of so much conversation about housing, ingress and egress evacuation issues should be considered by the legislature. Considering fire in the design, should be similar to earthquake retrofitting.
Board Legislative Committee Attachment VI December 14, 2018
Inside Facebook’s election War Room
By Sheera Frenkel and Mike Isaac Published 3:44 pm PDT, Friday, September 21, 2018
Photo: Photos By Jason Henry / New York Times IMAGE 1 OF 4 The War Room being built at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park is part of its initiative to prevent political disinformation and election interference. It involves more than 300 people across the company.
Sandwiched between Building 20 and Building 21 in the heart of Facebook’s Menlo Park campus, an approximately 25-foot-by-35-foot conference room is under construction. Thick cords of blue wiring hang from the ceiling, ready to be attached to window-size computer monitors on 16 desks. On one wall, a half dozen televisions will be tuned to CNN, MSNBC, Fox News and other major networks. A small paper sign with orange lettering taped to the glass door describes what’s being built: War Room.
Although it is not much to look at now, as of next week the space will be Facebook’s headquarters for safeguarding elections. More than 300 people across the company are working on the initiative, but the War Room will house a team of about 20 focused on rooting out disinformation, monitoring false news and deleting fake accounts that may be trying to influence voters before elections in the United States, Brazil and other countries. “We see this as probably the biggest company-wide reorientation since our shift from desktops to mobile phones,” said Samidh Chakrabarti, who leads Facebook’s elections and civic engagement team. The company, he added, “has mobilized to make this happen.” The misuse of Facebook by foreign influence campaigns has been rampant. In July and August, the company detailed previously undisclosed efforts by Iranians and Russians to mislead users of the social network through divisive ads and posts. Now, with the midterm elections in the United States seven weeks away, Facebook is in an all-out sprint to convince the world that it is ready to handle any new attempts at such meddling. It is under tremendous pressure to prevent a repeat of the foreign manipulation that unfolded during the 2016 presidential campaign. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has vowed to fix the problems, and he said this month that the company is “better prepared” to handle potential interference. But he has acknowledged that Facebook is in an “arms race” against those who are trying to manipulate the site. The company has taken steps to build defenses against spammers, hackers and foreign operatives — including hiring thousands of people to help moderate content and starting an archive to catalog all political ads — but the War Room’s half- finished state shows how nascent and hurried many of the efforts are. Already, foreign operatives have evolved their online influence campaigns to skirt the measures Facebook has put in place ahead of the midterms, said Priscilla Moriuchi, director of strategic threat development at the cybersecurity firm Recorded Future. “If you look at the way that foreign influence operations have changed these last two years, their focus isn’t really on propagating fake news anymore,” Moriuchi said. “It’s on augmenting stories already out there which speak to hyperpartisan audiences.” She added, “It’s going to be harder for companies like Facebook and Twitter, from my perspective, to find them now.” Facebook invited two New York Times reporters into the War Room before it opens next week to discuss the work of the elections team and some of the tools it has developed to try to prevent interference. The company limited the scope of what the Times could see and publish, out of a concern about revealing too much to adversaries who may be looking for vulnerabilities. The company said the War Room is modeled after operations used by political campaigns, which are typically set up in the final weeks before Election Day. The War Room is a way to build systems in anticipation of attacks, Greg Marra, a product manager working on Facebook’s News Feed, said in a conference call with reporters Wednesday. One of the tools is custom software that helps track information flowing live across the social network, said Chakrabarti, who joined Facebook about four years ago from Google. These dashboards resemble a set of line and bar graphs with statistics that provide a live view into how activity on the platform is changing. They allow employees to zero in on, say, a specific false news story in wide circulation or a spike in automated accounts being created in a particular geographic area. The dashboards were tested before the special Senate election in Alabama in December. Without specifying the dashboards, Zuckerberg has said that a new tool helped Facebook identify political interference more quickly in that election. Since then, Facebook has tested and redesigned the software during elections worldwide. This month, before Brazil’s presidential election, it will introduce the newest versions of the dashboards, Chakrabarti said. Facebook created what it calls its elections and civic engagement team in 2007 to work with governments and campaigns on how they could use the social network most effectively. For a long time, the team numbered just a few dozen people in Silicon Valley; it expanded in 2013 to include people in offices outside of the United States. After Facebook disclosed that agents linked to the Kremlin had manipulated the social network to spread inflammatory messages to American voters during the 2016 campaign, the company began to increase the team’s ranks. The group was also restructured to focus more on the security of elections. Since then, the team has mushroomed to its current size, augmented by other people at the company whose jobs involve some aspect of stopping election interference. Facebook has said each of its units — including Instagram and WhatsApp — has been told to make election security a top priority. Chakrabarti meets several times a month with Facebook’s top executives, engineers and product managers. The meetings often include Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer. Facebook decided this year to create a War Room so a core group of engineers, data scientists and executives could sit together in the same space before the midterms. They chose an empty conference room off the hallway that connects Building 20 and Building 21, a central point that is easy for employees to get to. Construction began a few months ago and the room, with its whiteboard walls and clusters of long tables, is set to open for operations Monday. It has been refitted with cables and internet boosters, and new wiring was installed for the monitors and other equipment. What happens in the War Room will be a “last line of defense” for Facebook engineers to quickly spot unforeseen problems on and near election days in different countries, Chakrabarti said. Many of the company’s other measures are meant to stop disinformation and other problems long before they show up in the War Room. Once a problem reaches the War Room, the dashboards will be set to spot and track unusual activity, while data scientists and security experts take a closer look. Chakrabarti said the team is particularly on guard for posts that manifested “real-world harm,” and plans to remove posts that try to disenfranchise voters by giving incorrect polling data or spreading hoaxes like encouraging people to vote by text message. “The best outcome for us is that nothing happens in the War Room,” he said. “Everything else we are doing is defenses we are putting down to stop this in the first place.” Sheera Frenkel and Mike Isaac are New York Times writers.
Board Legislative Committee Attachment VI December 14, 2018
US & WORLD // SCIENCE National parks bearing brunt of climate change, scientists find
Kurtis Alexander Sep. 24, 2018 Updated: Sep. 24, 2018 9:03 p.m.
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Drifting sand at Point Reyes National Seashore. Temperatures across 417 sites managed by the National Park Service have increased at twice the rate as the rest of the country, a recent study found.Photo: Scott Strazzante / The Chronicle
Disappearing glaciers were an early sign of trouble for the nation’s wildlands.
But the mark of global warming on the American landscape didn’t end there. Devastating wildfires have since ravaged Yosemite. Rising seas have encroached on the Point Reyes Peninsula. Vast stands of trees have died in and around Kings Canyon.
A study released Monday finds that the country’s national parks, which were designed to set aside and protect the most pristine and coveted spots in the United States, are being hit disproportionately by climate change. Temperatures across 417 sites managed by the National Park Service, from the Florida Everglades to Yellowstone to Alaska’s Mount Denali, have increased at twice the rate as the rest of the country, the study finds. The parks also have experienced greater declines in rainfall.
Such hotter, drier conditions are expected to persist in many of the parks, probably magnifying the harm that’s already begun to afflict mountains, forests and the coast as well as the plants and animals that live there.
The Trump administration’s unraveling of global warming policies and the National Park Service’s backsliding on climate programs under President Trump stand only to exacerbate the risk.
“Up until our research, the severity of climate change across the national parks was unknown,” said Patrick Gonzalez, a climate change scientist at UC Berkeley and lead author of the study. “Human-caused climate change exposes the national parks more severely than the rest of the United States.”
The reason for the disproportionate hit is relatively simple. National parks encompass the country’s most extreme environments where warming has generally been greater, the study notes. Many parks are at high elevations where the atmosphere is thinner and in the Arctic where the reflective snow cover has melted and more heat is being absorbed.
While the research, by scientists at UC Berkeley and the University of Wisconsin, does not detail the specific problems that national parks are facing, the study offers a first-of-its-kind analysis of the temperature and precipitation changes that are driving many of the problems. The findings are published in the journal Environmental Research Letters.
According to the study, temperatures across the national park system have increased a little more than 1 degree Celsius, or 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, between 1895 and 2010, about double the country’s average. While the increase may seem modest, scientists have warned that warming of more than 2 degrees Celsius is a threshold that comes with grave risk.
In California, 23 out of 27 park sites, including Golden Gate National Recreation Area, Death Valley and Joshua Tree, have seen temperatures rise since 1950, sometimes far more than 1 degree Celsius.
Rainfall changes in the parks have been more variable. While in most parts of the country, annual precipitation has increased from 1895 to 2010, rain totals decreased across 12 percent of parklands, according to the research. By comparison, just 3 percent of all U.S. lands has seen a decline.
Going forward, the researchers project the average temperature across national parks will rise about 5 to 7 degrees Celsius, or 9 to 13 degrees Fahrenheit, by 2100, roughly a half degree more than the rest of the country, under the study’s most extreme modeling scenario. If heat-trapping emissions are capped as called for in the Paris climate agreement, average temperature increases will be limited to about 1 to 3 degrees Celsius, or roughly 2 to 6 degrees Fahrenheit.
Regardless of which scenario plays out, according to the study, parks in Alaska are expected to see the most warming.
While the study’s precipitation models show wide variation in future rainfall, parks in Hawaii, the Virgin Islands and the American Southwest are projected to see the biggest declines.
Changes in temperature and rainfall, though, will probably have implications for most parks, in many cases well beyond what’s already occurring.
In Yosemite, earlier research shows that forests as well as small mammals have begun shifting upslope to cooler areas as temperatures have risen, threatening wholesale disruption if the warming continues.
In Joshua Tree, the park’s namesake tree is struggling amid intensifying heat, and researchers worry that much of the park could become unlivable for the tree if the trend persists.
In Point Reyes, oceans are washing farther up beaches as sea levels riseand the habitat of elephant seals may one day be at risk.
The National Park Service has long studied the impacts of climate change, with both federal scientists and independent researchers, and a commitment to conserving wildlands amid rising temperatures remains part of the agency’s mission.
But Jonathan Jarvis, former director of the Park Service and now executive director of UC Berkeley’s Institute for Parks, People and Biodiversity, said those in the Trump administration currently running the agency aren’t making climate change a priority.
“What concerns me is there’s no clear leadership on the issue,” said Jarvis, who recently wrote a book, “The Future of Conservation in America: A Chart for Rough Water,” on the challenges facing public lands. “The Park Service in the past has played a leadership role … and all of that is sort of lost at the moment,” he said.
Jarvis said park leaders during his tenure had begun to look beyond park borders at nationwide climate adaptation strategies, such as creating large-scale wildlife corridors for animals to move to more hospitable places. But those far-reaching efforts, he said, have ceased under Trump.
The National Park Service did not respond to requests for comment before this story was published. Officials at Yosemite National Park also did not comment.
At many parks, research and action on climate change continue despite a change in priorities in Washington.
In Sequoia and Kings Canyon, scientists are looking into ways to make sure the giant sequoias endure amid a hotter, drier future. In other parks, researchers are looking to restore the shade provided by forests so rivers are cool enough for fish to survive. Elsewhere, wetlands are being restored to protect against sea level rise.
John Dell’Osso, chief of interpretation and resource education at Point Reyes National Seashore, said the Marin County park is constantly being monitored to make sure wildlife, from marine mammals to seabirds, adapt to climate change.
“We’re contemplating many what-if scenarios,” he said. “We’re kind of looking at everything.”
Kurtis Alexander is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @kurtisalexander
Kurtis Alexander Follow Kurtis on: https://www.facebook.com/SFChronicle/kurtisalexander
Kurtis Alexander is a general assignment reporter for The San Francisco Chronicle, frequently writing about water, wildfire, climate and the American West. His recent work has focused on the impacts of drought, the widening rural-urban divide and state and federal environmental policy.
Before joining the Chronicle, Alexander worked as a freelance writer and as a staff reporter for several media organizations, including The Fresno Bee and Bay Area News Group, writing about government, politics and the environment.
Board Legislative Committee Attachment VI December 14, 2018
Gas-tax opponents file proposal to kill $77 billion high-speed train
Rachel Swan Sep. 25, 2018 Updated: Sep. 25, 2018 4:16 p.m.
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In this 2015 photo, a full-scale mock-up of a high-speed train is displayed at the Capitol in Sacramento. A group proposing to repeal a hike in the state's gas tax has proposed a ballot initiative for 2020 that would kill a planned high-speed train in California.Photo: Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press
Proponents of Proposition 6, the measure to repeal California’s gas tax hike, filed a new ballot measure Tuesday that would torpedo Gov. Brown’s high-speed rail project and prevent the state from spending gas tax funds on mass transit.
“We’re very pleased with the accountability this measure provides,” said Carl DeMaio, a talk radio host and chairman of the Prop 6 campaign. He has accused the state’s Democratic establishment of wasting taxpayer money and unfairly burdening motorists — particularly working-class people who have long car commutes. In addition to killing Brown’s $77 billion plan to send bullet trains zipping from Southern California to downtown San Francisco, the initiative that DeMaio and others submitted on Tuesday would mandate that all gas tax revenue go to roads. It would also dedicate the state’s sales tax on cars to all forms of transportation infrastructure including public transit, require annual audits on road projects and shift decision-making power on gas and car tax revenue from the state Capitol to city and county governments.
Supporters say these changes — which would go on the November ballot in 2020 — would boost California’s annual road coffers from $5.2 billion to $7.5 billion, and increase funding from general transit infrastructure from $1.8 billion to $7.4 billion a year. Opponents call the measure a repackaging of Prop 6, which strikes down the new 12-cent gasoline excise tax, vehicle fees and 20 cents-per-gallon tax on diesel fuel signed into law last year as SB1.
If it survives, SB1 is expected to raise $5.2 billion annually to pave potholed highways, repair aging bridges and boost public transit. None of the money goes to high-speed rail.
“This proposal by DeMaio is a deeply flawed attempt to distract voters from his destructive Proposition 6, which would eliminate $5 billion in funding and jeopardize more than 6,500 bridge, road and transportation safety projects already underway all over California,” said Michael Quigley, executive director of the California Alliance for Jobs. His trade and labor coalition is leading the effort to defeat Prop 6.
Quigley noted that the new ballot measure isn’t all that new — DeMaio cribbed the funding ideas from a proposal that Republican Assemblymembers introduced last year, intended as an alternative to SB1. Other lawmakers rejected the plan because it blocked gas tax money from flowing into the general fund, where it helps shore up schools, health care and public safety.
Republican Assemblyman Vince Fong of Bakersfield sponsored that ill-fated legislation. He’s now thrown support behind the new ballot measure.
“As the author of the alternative to the SB 1 gas tax increase, I said over and over again that we can fully fund our roads without any fee or tax increases,” Fong said. “We need to give voters an opportunity to tell Sacramento they need to prioritize our transportation infrastructure with the tax dollars motorists already pay.”
The gas tax battle has played along partisan lines — and it isn’t solely about taxes. Prop 6 is a rallying point to lure Republican voters out to the polls, in hope of bolstering gubernatorial candidate John Cox and GOP contestants in several key house races.
Ending high speed rail is a centerpiece of Cox’s political agenda as well. And it’s a popular issue among GOP voters, many of whom would rather see more roads and highways than new infrastructure projects that are innovative but monumentally expensive, said Thomas Holyoke, a professor of political science at Fresno State University.
That might explain the pivot, Holyoke said.
“Part of this is aimed at voter turnout — particularly among Republicans in the San Joaquin Valley who have never liked high-speed rail,” Holyoke said. “It’s a way to fire up and possibly expand the Republican party by showing that it’s part of resisting runaway spending and crazy taxes.” Cox echoed those sentiments in an interview with The Chronicle for an upcoming “It’s All Political” podcast episode.
“Let’s end the train to nowhere,” he said. “It’s going to be three hours. It was supposed to be two hours. It’s being built where nobody is going to ride it. It’s 30 year-old technology. It’s not even current technology. It’s an incredible waste of money.”
California voters approved the high speed rail plan in 2008. The San Francisco-Los Angeles line was then estimated to cost $32 billion. Now it is expected to cost $77 billion, with completion stretching into the 2030s.
DeMaio was upbeat about the new measure’s prospects, speaking to The Chronicle on Tuesday as he rode an Uber to the state Capitol. He said the campaign would gather voter signatures over the December holidays.
“I predict that in five to seven years people will be writing stories about a revolution in funding for California’s transportation infrastructure,” he said.
Rachel Swan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @rachelswan
Rachel Swan
Follow Rachel on: https://www.facebook.com/SFChronicle/rachelswan
Rachel Swan covers transportation for The Chronicle. She joined the paper in 2015 and has also reported on politics in Oakland and San Francisco.
Previously, Rachel held staff positions at the SF Weekly and the East Bay Express, where she covered technology, law and the arts. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in rhetoric from the University of California, Berkeley.
Board Legislative Committee Attachment VI December 14, 2018
LOCAL // POLITICS Trump: California has lots of water, so why are the lawns so brown?
Tal Kopan Oct. 23, 2018 Updated: Oct. 23, 2018 6:10 p.m.
President Trump doubled down Tuesday on his criticism of California policies that he says are responsible for wildfires and misdirecting water that could be used to keep people’s lawns from turning brown.Photo: Evan Vucci / Associated Press
WASHINGTON — President Trump doubled down Tuesday on his criticism of California policies that he says are responsible for wildfires and misdirecting water that could be used to keep people’s lawns from turning brown.
Speaking before a crowd of local officials at the White House that included dozens of officials from around California, Trump went into an extended riff about a state that he said he knows well. He included an ambiguous threat to cut off federal funding in the aftermath of a long summer of wildfires.
“California, get on the ball because we’re not going to hand you any more money,” Trump told the crowd. “It’s ridiculous.” Trump began criticizing water policies in California over the summer when fires were raging near Redding, in Lake County and elsewhere. He complained that water was being “foolishly being diverted into the Pacific Ocean,” although fire officials said they had no shortages of water and although California’s rivers naturally flow to the ocean.
Last week, Trump said California’s “incompetence” was preventing the logging of dead trees that make wildfires worse, although the federal government owns more than half the forested land in California.
Nevertheless, on Tuesday, Trump repeated those claims, blaming “environmentalists” and telling the local officials that “you wouldn’t have (wildfires) if they managed their forests properly.”
“The environmentalists are doing something very bad, they won’t let us take the logs, they won’t let us take the dead trees,” Trump said. “If a little spark hits it, they lose 200,000 acres.”
The president repeated a threat he first made last week to reduce unspecified federal funding to the state, saying, “We’re tired of giving California hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars all the time for their forest fires when you wouldn’t have them if they managed their forests properly. They don’t. They have lousy management.”
“It’s all a mess,” he said.
Trump also returned to the subject of water policy in California, something he has touched on twice in recent days. On Friday, he issued a presidential memo intended to speed up environmental review of water projects for California farms and reduce “regulatory burdens.” He signed the document in a public event with several Central Valley congressional Republicans who are locked in competitive re-election races.
“I hear it’s the finest land there is for growing things, but they took away the water,” Trump said. He recounted a visit to GOP Rep. Devin Nunes’ Fresno-area district and seeing “dry, horrible ... all dry land” on farms, with just a little green “spots.”
He pledged a federal commitment to easing regulatory burdens, but said, “I hope the state will do it” as well.
“I know California well,” Trump said. “And I see houses, beautiful houses, people are very proud of their houses. Their lawn is brown. It’s dead. It’s dying, it’s dead. And they end up taking it out and just have sand in front of their houses, and they have so much water they don’t know what to do with it.”
Asked about Trump’s remarks, Evan Westrup, a spokesman for Gov. Jerry Brown, said, “Trump and truth have long had a troubled relationship. And here in California, we remain big proponents of thinking before speaking.”
Tal Kopan is the San Francisco Chronicle’s Washington correspondent. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @TalKopan
Tal Kopan Follow Tal on: https://www.facebook.com/SFChronicle/TalKopan
Tal Kopan is the Washington Correspondent for The San Francisco Chronicle. Previously, she was a political reporter for CNN Politics, where she covered immigration, cybersecurity and other hot-button issues in Washington, including the 2016 presidential election.
Prior to joining the network, Kopan was a reporter for POLITICO in Washington, D.C., where she reported for their breaking news team and policy verticals. While covering policy, she was a reporter for POLITICO Pro Cybersecurity, where she covered cybersecurity policymaking on Capitol Hill and followed cyber-related issues in the Justice Department such as cybercrime.
Kopan also previously worked as a Web producer at Fox Chicago News and as a freelance Web producer at ABC 7 Chicago, where she spent time covering stories such as the trials of former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich and the election of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel.
Kopan was selected as a 2014-2015 National Press Foundation Paul Miller Fellow and a member of the 2015 class of Journalist Law School at Loyola Law School, Los Angeles. She was also the recipient of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, Midwest Chapter's Ephraim Family Scholarship.
Kopan graduated with honors from the University of Chicago with a bachelor's in law, letters and society.
Board Legislative Committee Attachment VI December 14, 2018
Change in California’s Prop. 13 makes 2020 ballot: Business would pay more
Melody Gutierrez Oct. 17, 2018 Updated: Oct. 17, 2018 3:13 p.m.
Howard Jarvis argues for property tax-cutting measure Proposition 13 in the 1970s. Jarvis died in 1986. Photo: Gary Fong / The Chronicle 1978
SACRAMENTO — A ballot measure that would overhaul the state’s tax-cutting Proposition 13 by charging companies in the state billions of dollars more in property taxes will go before voters in 2020.
The measure, which is backed by community groups, education advocates and unions, qualified for the November 2020 ballot on Tuesday when the secretary of state determined that the supporters had gathered more than the needed 585,407 valid signatures of registered voters. Proponents call it the first proposed change in commercial property taxes to qualify for the ballot since Prop. 13 passed in 1978.
“Californians now have the opportunity to reform a 40-year injustice,” said Helen Hutchison, president of the League of Women Voters of California, one of the groups supporting the measure. “After five years of planning and strategizing, we have qualified a split-roll initiative for the ballot — an achievement once thought impossible.”
Under Prop. 13, California property — both residential and commercial — is reassessed only when it is sold. Houses and condominiums tend to change hands every few years, but many large businesses stay put for decades. That means some businesses are paying property taxes based on assessments that date from as long ago as the 1970s.
The measure that qualified for the 2020 ballot would create a system to reassess large commercial businesses every three years, with the Legislature able to increase that frequency. Small businesses with 50 or fewer employees would be exempt, as would agricultural land.
Homes would continue to be reassessed only when sold.
Backers say the change would raise an extra $11 billion a year, the bulk of which would go to schools and local governments.
Anti-tax and business groups said they plan to fight the ballot measure, which they said lacks transparency on exactly how the new revenue would be spent.
“We have already established a strong and broad-based coalition to fight this assault on the most important taxpayer protection Californians have,” said Jon Coupal, president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association. Jarvis, who died in 1986, and fellow anti-tax advocate Paul Gann were the main backers of Prop. 13.
“A split-roll property tax is an $11 billion tax increase that will increase costs for everyone at a time when the high cost of living is already driving companies and residents out of the state,” Coupal said.
Melody Gutierrez is The San Francisco Chronicle’s Sacramento bureau chief. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @MelodyGutierrez
Melody Gutierrez Follow Melody on: https://www.facebook.com/SFChronicle/MelodyGutierrez
Melody Gutierrez joined the San Francisco Chronicle in 2013 to cover politics from the Sacramento bureau. Previously, she was a senior writer who covered politics, education and sports for The Sacramento Bee.
With an emphasis on watchdog reporting, she has written investigative stories on pension spiking, high school steroid use, troubles in a school police force and how the state failed to notify a school district that a teacher was barred from foster care parenting due to multiple molestation allegations.
She has also examined the state’s use of segregation cells for prisoners, detailed legislative and legal efforts to curtail "revenge porn" and chronicled the effects of the drought in California.
Board Legislative Committee Attachment VI December 14, 2018
Republicans find a Facebook workaround: their own apps
By Natasha Singer and Nicholas Confessore Updated 3:28 pm PDT, Sunday, October 28, 2018
Photo: Andre Chung / New York Times Thomas Peters (rear right), CEO of uCampaign, which develops apps for Republican candidates and conservative causes, meets with staff members in Washington. Imagine a society in which everyone more or less agrees with you. You wake up in the morning to online greetings from people who share your views on guns, religion and country. Your news feed contains only posts from like-minded politicians or articles from like- minded news outlets. You can safely post your own comments without fear of vitriol from trolls or challenges from naysayers. This is the insular world in which tens of thousands of Americans who use conservative political apps are experiencing the midterm election season. Amid a chorus of conservative complaints that Facebook and YouTube have become hostile to right- leaning views, a few Republican consultants have begun building a parallel digital universe where their political clients set the rules. One startup has built an app for the lobbying arm of the National Rifle Association that has been downloaded more than 150,000 times. Supporters of President Trump can download an app from Great America, a big-spending pro-Trump political action committee, or America First, Trump’s official 2016 campaign app, which has some features that remain active. Many backers of Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas use Cruz Crew, an app built for his re-election campaign. The apps deliver partisan news feeds on what are effectively private social media services, free from the strictures and content guidelines imposed by Bay Area giants. Many apps have video-game-like features where users can earn points for making campaign donations or contacting their legislators. Amass enough points and a supporter can attain increasing status levels — like “BigLeague” or “Patriot” — or even gain a spot on the app’s leaderboard. Proponents are positioning these apps as durable communities that offer conservatives viable alternatives to mainstream social networks. “People with center-right views feel like the big social platforms, Facebook and Twitter, are not sympathetic to their views,” said Thomas Peters, CEO of uCampaign, a startup in Washington that developed the NRA, Great America and Trump campaign apps. “It’s creating a safe space for people who share a viewpoint, who feel like the open social networks are not fun places for them.” Sheltered from the broader public, however, the services can intensify political polarization and social divisiveness, or circulate disinformation. Anyone in the United States may download uCampaign apps, Peters said, but they give a campaign the ability to bar interlopers who post messages challenging the campaign’s positions. The Great America app juxtaposes a mix of enthusiastic posts about Trump and photos of puppies with anti-immigrant memes like “Today’s illegals, tomorrow’s Democrats.” One recent post, with an image depicting nooses, read: “Noose flash: Treason still punishable by death.” “Is this the beginning of the political Balkanization of digital engagement technologies?” asked Michael Slaby, a communications strategist who oversaw technology for President Barack Obama’s national campaigns. “Given the tribalism of current American politics, it’s possible.” Dan Backer, general counsel for the Great America PAC, said the app is a place for like-minded Trump supporters to socialize and entertain themselves. It has also enabled the campaign to quickly and inexpensively engage supporters. Since 2017, the Great America PAC has paid uCampaign about $108,000 for development and monthly service fees. Backer added that the app’s user policy prohibits abusive comments and those that incite criminal activity. But, he said, “I don’t think we want to be in the business of trying to censor people’s political views.” Democratic candidates have also used consumer-facing apps to promote their political campaigns and advocacy. But the main election apps currently used on the left — such as MiniVAN, built by NGP VAN, a leading technology provider to Democrats — are geared more narrowly for campaign volunteers engaging in door-to-door canvassing. Many are not designed to create lasting social communities. Peters, a Catholic blogger and former web developer, said he hadn’t set out to become the go-to app maker for conservatives. In 2012, he was working as a conservative activist in Washington and grew frustrated with the success of the Obama campaign’s digital outreach efforts. The Obama campaign had a smartphone app that supporters could use to follow campaign news, volunteer, canvas voters and promote campaign messages on social media. Mitt Romney, the Republican challenger, had an app whose central feature was a photo filter allowing supporters to take selfies with the slogan “I’m with Mitt.” Peters was not impressed. “It did not do the one thing I wanted it to do,” he said, which was to “help win the election for Mitt Romney by asking me to donate money to them, to post things to social media, to invite my friends and family to register to vote — to do all of the things, basically, that the Obama app did.” In 2014, Peters started uCampaign with $150,000 in startup capital. The money came from Sean Fieler, president of hedge fund Equinox Partners and a well-known donor to conservative groups. Since then, uCampaign has developed dozens of campaign apps, including for Republicans like Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland, the Republican National Committee and organizations like the Family Research Council, a Christian group that opposes abortion and same-sex marriage. Campaigns pay the company a one-time fee to develop an app and then monthly service fees. In the United States, apps developed by uCampaign have been downloaded more than 500,000 times. A Republican polling company, WPA Intelligence, is behind Cruz’s campaign app. The NRA and Great America apps, which enable users to friend and message one another, have developed cultures with their own parlance and rituals. In their posts, users sometimes greet one another as “deplorables” or “fellow patriots” and refer to liberals as enemies, “libtards” or traitors. Conspiracy theories — including memes against financier George Soros — abound. “They all seem very patriotic to me,” Ken Kumerle, a car rental agent in South Carolina who has earned more than 366,000 points on the NRA app, said of other community members. “I go in every day and try to do something, post or send a tweet.” By tracking their users’ activities, political apps can collect a wealth of data about them. Apps from uCampaign and WPA Intelligence, for instance, ask users for their name, address, phone number and email address. Both uCampaign and WPA have ties to AggregateIQ, a political technology company in Canada. AggregateIQ is under investigation by the British government over its handling of voters’ personal data and connections to the parent company of Cambridge Analytica, a voter profiling company that improperly harvested the information of millions of Facebook users. In 2016, AggregateIQ paid uCampaign to create the campaign app for Vote Leave, the secessionist side of the British referendum on leaving the European Union. More recently, WPA hired the Canadian company to develop the underlying software used in the Cruz app. The Times tested several of the apps’ privacy practices and found that, when a user invited a friend to join uCampaign’s NRA app, the app did not send the friend’s information to itself or to other companies. But The Times found that a similar feature on WPA’s Cruz app sent a friend’s contact details to an AggregateIQ domain. Chris Wilson, CEO of WPA Intelligence, said his company, not AggregateIQ, received and controlled app users’ information. Some political apps, including from uCampaign, also ask users who want to send friends campaign messages to share their contacts. Peters turned some of those features, like inviting friends, into a way for users to collect points and gain status within the group. He began incorporating game-like features into his company’s apps in 2014 as a way to get supporters to participate in political activities. In July, for instance, the NRA app began offering users 100 points for tweeting a slogan urging their senators to support Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court. The messages have since been have tweeted more than 13,300 times. The Cruz app similarly awards points to users for tweeting campaign messages, volunteering and taking part in other activities. “The Obama campaign proved, and Democrats continue to prove, the value of continuously engaging supporters via an app like this,” said Wilson of WPA Intelligence, the company behind the Cruz app. “It is critical Republicans keep up with tools of our own.” Natasha Singer and Nicholas Confessore are New York Times writers.
Board Legislative Committee Attachment VI December 14, 2018
LOCAL // POLITICS These Millennials aren’t just voting: They want your vote
Holly Honderich Nov. 1, 2018 Updated: Nov. 1, 2018 4:59 p.m.
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Rigel Robinson, 22, endorsed by Run for Something in his Berkeley City Council bid, stumps in the Telegraph Avenue area.Photo: Paul Chinn / The Chronicle
Millennials and their relationship to the voting booth have been subject to incessant punditry in the run-up to the midterm elections: Will they vote? Can they sway the outcome?
Even 75-year-old Joe Biden has weighed in, telling Millennials they need to get off their backsides and “get involved.” But Amanda Litman, co-founder of Run for Something, doesn’t just want young people at the polls. She wants them on the ballot.
Litman, 28, was director of emails on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign — “the other emails,” she jokes. She was approached shortly after the election by a friend, angered by Donald Trump’s victory, who wanted to know how to get started in a run for office.
“I didn’t have a good answer,” Litman said. “And that felt like a problem that was a symptom of a whole bunch of problems in the Democratic Party.”
Those problems, she said, include a lack of “intentional candidate development” and “a weak, non-diverse, uninteresting bench for the future.”
The day Trump took office, Litman and Ross Morales Rocketto, a political consultant who is married to one of Litman’s friends, started Run for Something to “create a diverse talent pipeline.”
Several progressive groups were born around that time, but Run for Something stands out for its focus on developing Millennials to run as Democrats for public office. It helps only potential candidates under 40 who are looking to run for the first or second time.
The organization works exclusively with candidates running for office at the state level or below. The group seeks out diverse candidates, emphasizing women, people of color and LGBTQ recruits.
Rigel Robinson, a candidate running for the Berkeley City Council District 7 seat, knocks on doors while canvassing a neighborhood in Berkeley, Calif. on Saturday, Oct. 27, 2018. Photo: Paul Chinn / The Chronicle The organization’s 15 paid staffers are bolstered by more than 2,000 volunteers and about 115 mentors, consultants and workers from past campaigns — Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders and Clinton veterans included — who help guide the rookies on the Run for Something roster.
Initially, Litman and Rocketto expected around 100 candidates to sign up in the group’s first year, to take part in note-swapping sessions and local support networks. Instead, by March 2017, 8,000 people from around the country had contacted Run for Something. Now that total is up to 19,000 would-be candidates, with more than 400 endorsed candidates on the ballot for Tuesday’s elections.
Endorsed candidates benefit from greater attention and, in some cases, money. In the past two years, Run for Something has tapped more than 11,000 donors for money for about 150 candidates in 14 states. So far in 2018, the group says, it has collected $2 million.
In California, 35 candidates have received a Run for Something endorsement for next week’s elections. Among them: 22-year-old Rigel Robinson, running for Berkeley City Council; Alex Brown, 27, who is running for Chico City Council; and 31-year-old Sonia Aery, a candidate for Assembly in the northern Central Valley.
Rigel Robinson, a candidate running for the Berkeley City Council District 7 seat, canvasses a neighborhood in Berkeley, Calif. on Saturday, Oct. 27, 2018. Photo: Paul Chinn / The Chronicle Robinson began his campaign in April, just a few weeks before he graduated from UC Berkeley. He got in touch with Run for Something after meeting Rocketto at the College Democrats of America’s national convention.
“It’s a funny little kind of ragtag, misfits campaign we’ve got,” Robinson said. For his entirely student-run operation, Run for Something has provided an “incredible network ... advice and a sense of community,” he said.
For Aery, Run for Something has become an antidote to feeble local support in her campaign against Republican incumbent James Gallagher, who is running for a third two-year term in the Third District.
“It’s really hard to find the local resources,” Aery said. “My campaign manager works in Santa Monica, my social media manager lives in Wisconsin. Just having that community has been really helpful.”
Aery said she felt compelled to run after serving as emcee for the January 2018 Women’s March in Chico.
“I said something like, ‘All this marching isn’t going to mean anything unless we take action,’” Aery said. “That was the impetus ... being like, ‘Oh crap, I can do this, too. ... I could be a leader in this movement.’”
Aery needs all the help she can get. The district is solidly Republican, and Gallagher has run up lopsided victory margins in his last two elections. In the June primary, he finished 30 points ahead of Aery.
“It’s definitely a long shot,” Aery said. “I think people have resigned themselves to the fact that we’re just represented by Republicans and we’ll always be represented by Republicans.”
Gallagher, ironically, is a Millennial himself. At 37, he’s just six years older than Aery. He said he was unfamiliar with Run for Something, but he expressed frustration at groups “that have nothing to do with the north state” coming into the district “to ensure a blue wave.”
“I think that’s really the focus of those types of groups — it’s about progressive politics,” Gallagher said. “I don’t think it’s really about their age or that they’re young.”
Millennials — defined by the Pew Research Center as people born between 1981 and 1996 — make up barely 6 percent of all state legislators, according to a report from Run for Something and the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee.
The same goes at the national level. The average age of House members is almost 58. In the Senate, the average is just under 62 years old, making the current Congress one of the oldest in history.
Despite the built-in disadvantage of running first-time candidates against incumbents, Run for Something made a decent showing in 2017. Just under half the 72 candidates it endorsed that year won their races, the group said.
Litman says Run for Something’s value extends beyond electoral victories.
“We think simply running does a lot for the community,” she said. “As a party, how can we expect voters to show up if we don’t give them someone to vote for?” Litman added, “We know this from social science: You can’t be what you can’t see. In the future, it will be unacceptable to say that we can’t find a qualified non-white dude.”
For Aery, the daughter of Indian immigrants, this pursuit is personal.
“I never thought I would run for office growing up,” Aery said. “You don’t see yourself in those positions of leadership.
“Look, whatever happens, you’re showing a lot of young Indian girls that they can do this,” she said. “If we don’t win, absolutely this will have been worth it.”
Holly Honderich is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @hollyhonderich
Holly Honderich
Follow Holly on: https://www.facebook.com/SFChronicle/hollyhonderich
Holly Honderich is a reporting fellow with The Chronicle’s politics team. Originally from Toronto, Canada, Holly graduated from Queen’s University in political science and is completing her master’s in journalism from Northwestern University’s Medill School. Before joining The Chronicle, Holly wrote for the Toronto Star and, most recently, the BBC’s DC bureau, where she completed a reporting trip to the Mexico-US border to cover protests to US immigration policy. Her work has been featured in USA Today, Illinois Channel and UPI.
Board Legislative Committee Attachment VI December 14, 2018
Trump’s Misleading Claims About California’s Fire ‘Mismanagement’
On Twitter, the president claimed that the state’s wildfire woes are a result of poor forest management. The truth is more complicated.
Firefighters battling the Woolsey fire in Malibu, Calif., on Friday.CreditCreditRingo H.W. Chiu/Associated Press
By Kendra Pierre-Louis
As Californians were fleeing the huge wildfires that have left both ends of the state ablaze, President Trump took to Twitter over the weekend, blaming the infernos on forest management and threatening to withhold federal payments from the state.
His statements, which drew outrage from local leaders and firefighters, oversimplified the causes of California’s wildfires.
WHAT TRUMP SAID There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor.
This is misleading.
Mr. Trump is suggesting that forest management played a role, but California’s current wildfires aren’t forest fires.
“These fires aren’t even in forests,” said Max Moritz, a wildfire specialist at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Rather, the Camp and Woolsey fires, which are ripping through Northern and Southern California, began in areas known as the wildland-urban interface: places where communities are close to undeveloped areas, making it easier for fire to move from forests or grasslands into neighborhoods.
A 2015 report by the United States Department of Agriculture found that between 2000 and 2010 (the last year for which data was available), the number of people moving into the wildland-urban interface had increased by 5 percent. According to the report, 44 million houses, equivalent to one in every three houses in the country, are in the wildland-urban interface. The highest concentrations are in Florida, Texas and, yes, California.
It is true that California wildfires are getting larger and that most of the state’s largest wildfires have happened this century. The Mendocino Complex Fire, earlier this year, was the biggest California fire on record, as measured by acres burned. The Camp Fire is already the most destructive in state history, having razed more than 6,000 homes.
California Fires Map: Tracking the Spread Wildfires have burned in California near the Sierra Nevada foothills and the Los Angeles shoreline, engulfing nearly 250,000 acres. Nov. 11, 2018
The fires aren’t just getting bigger; they’re becoming more unpredictable, too. They are often burning hot through the night (when they used to cool), racing faster up hillsides and torching neighborhoods that were once relatively safe.
Researchers are attributing at least part of the difference to climate change, because in a warming world vegetation dries out faster and burns more easily.
And the most “deadly and costly” fires happen at the wildland-urban interface, because they damage houses, towns and lives. The Camp Fire has already matched the deadliest fire in state history, killing at least 29 people, and the death toll may rise.
“We have vulnerable housing stock already out there on the landscape. These are structures that were often built to building codes from earlier decades and they’re not as fire resistant as they could be,” Dr. Moritz said. “This issue of where and how we built our homes has left us very exposed to home losses and fatalities like these.”
Smoke rising above Malibu, Calif. The fire began at the wildland-urban interface, where communities are close to undeveloped areas.CreditBen Watkins, via Associated Press
WHAT TRUMP SAID Billions of dollars are given each year, with so many lives lost, all because of gross mismanagement of the forests. Remedy now, or no more Fed payments!
This is misleading.
The statement suggests that California’s forest-management problems are at fault. But the majority of California’s forests are federally held.
Of the state’s 33 million acres of forest, federal agencies, including the Forest Service and the Interior Department, own and manage 57 percent. Forty percent are owned by families, Native American tribes or companies, including industrial timber companies; just 3 percent are owned and managed by state and local agencies. ADVERTISEMENT
The president did not specify which federal payments might be withheld. But California itself allocated $256 million this year toward lowering wildfire risk.
In recent years the Forest Service has tried to rectify its past forest-management practices by conducting more prescribed or “controlled” burns to get rid of dead vegetation that could fuel future wildfires. But its budget has been overwhelmed by firefighting costs.
Congress passed a budget this year designed to fix some of those problems (and create a dedicated firefighting fund), but it will not take effect until next year. Mr. Trump may also be referencing a debate put forward by logging interests, which argue that selective cutting would reduce California’s wildfire problem. A century of fire suppression allowed flammable material — twigs and brush — to build up in forests nationwide.
As fires have gotten bigger and more destructive, the administration and Republicans in Congress have supported calls by the timber industry to clear out potential fuel by letting the land be logged.
In an opinion piece published this year in USA Today, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke blamed California’s wildfires on environmentalists who oppose logging. He wrote:
Every year we watch our forests burn, and every year there is a call for action. Yet, when action comes, and we try to thin forests of dead and dying timber, or we try to sustainably harvest timber from dense and fire-prone areas, we are attacked with frivolous litigation from radical environmentalists who would rather see forests and communities burn than see a logger in the woods.
It is true that California has a lot of dead timber — 129 million trees spread across 8.9 million acres, according to a Forest Service estimate.
But the dead trees themselves do not catch fire easily, because they are too big, said Chad T. Hanson, the principal ecologist at the John Muir Project of the nonprofit Earth Island Institute.
“It’s like starting a campfire,” he said. “You don’t put a big log on the fire and put a match to it and expect it to burn — it’s not going to happen. Fires are driven by kindle.”
Logging gets rid of trees, but it does not get rid of the kindling — brush, bushes and twigs. Logging does, however, enable the spread of cheatgrass, a highly combustible weed, which makes a forest more likely to burn.
In fact, the wooded land that abuts Paradise, Calif., the community so badly damaged by the Camp Fire, underwent the kind of post-fire logging that Mr. Trump’s tweet and Mr. Zinke’s article suggested. That was just under a decade ago, Dr. Hanson said, but the city is now in ashes.
For more news on climate and the environment, follow @NYTClimate on Twitter.
Kendra Pierre-Louis is a reporter on the climate team. Before joining The Times in 2017, she covered science and the environment for Popular Science. @kendrawrites
Board Legislative Committee Attachment VI December 14, 2018
OPINION // EDITORIALS On climate change, White House denies itself
San Francisco Chronicle Nov. 26, 2018
President Trump toured fire-ravaged Paradise with Gov. Jerry Brown and Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom on Nov. 17. Photo: Tom Brenner / New York Times
The Trump administration’s war on reality has entered a new phase of absolute and simultaneous self- contradiction. Having issued an extensive report on the depredations of climate change, the White House pretended it didn’t exist.
Concluding that unchecked climate change could diminish the economy by a tenth and cause 9,000 more temperature-related deaths a year by century’s end, the Fourth National Climate Assessment is backed by 13 federal agencies and more than 300 experts. Rather than contend with these formidable facts by argument, alteration or suppression, the White House simply released the document amid maximum national distraction — on the Friday after Thanksgiving — and proceeded as if it hadn’t.
Days earlier, the president had issued the functional opposite of the 1,656-page scientific treatment of the impact of climate change: a 14-word tweet presenting a local cold snap as evidence that the climate hasn’t changed. Asked about the report Monday, he replied, “I don’t believe it.” Such blind faithlessness is the last refuge of a president striving to enable the disaster his government documented.
For the same reason, Trump avoided acknowledging the climate’s role in California’s recent wildfires even as he toured the unprecedented devastation of Paradise, blaming forest management and other, more dubious factors. His administration’s report notes the problem of forest overgrowth — caused by a century of firefighting, not, as the president and his interior secretary have claimed, radical environmentalists. But it finds that climate change is responsible for about half the dramatic increase in Western wildfires over the past three decades.
From rising Bay Area sea levels to crops that the Central Valley can no longer grow, the report details a host of climate change consequences that are already taking shape in California and across the country. That the president doesn’t believe what he sees — or, more likely, doesn’t care — will only make his administration’s most dire predictions more likely.
This commentary is from The Chronicle’s editorial board. We invite you to express your views in a letter to the editor. Please submit your letter via our online form: SFChronicle.com/letters.
Board Legislative Committee Attachment VI December 14, 2018
LOCAL // POLITICS Rep. Barbara Lee narrowly defeated in bid for House Dem leadership job
Tal Kopan Nov. 28, 2018 Updated: Nov. 28, 2018 6:43 p.m.
Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Oakland, on Capitol Hill on Tuesday.Photo: J. Scott Applewhite / Associated Press
WASHINGTON — Oakland Rep. Barbara Lee was narrowly defeated Wednesday in her bid to break into House Democratic leadership, a loss she blamed on barriers for women of color.
Democratic incumbents and incoming members who were elected this month voted behind closed doors for New York Rep. Hakeem Jeffries over Lee for party caucus chair. The vote was 123 to 113.
The contest for the Democrats’ No. 5 job pitted the progressive Lee, who would have been the first African American woman elected to the House hierarchy of either party, against fellow Congressional Black Caucus member Jeffries, whose backers view him as a potential future speaker. Lee said afterward that “it’s important that we leave our caucus unified, because it’s Democrats who are going
But the 72-year-old Oakland Democrat also said she believes sexism and ageism played a role in her loss to Jeffries, 48. Lee said she faced “institutional barriers.”
“You heard and saw what took place (in the race). So I absolutely think that’s the case,” Lee said. “That’s something that women, especially women of color and African American women, have to face. ... That’s nothing new. It’s here, it’s everywhere. But I think we did a great job. ... We still have many glass ceilings to break.”
Asked to respond to Lee’s comments, Jeffries demurred.
“It was a friendly contest of ideas, and members of the House Democratic caucus worked their will,” he said.
Rep. Jackie Speier, D-San Mateo, said Lee’s whip count had shown her winning. She said members should have the “courage” to make their votes public.
“It was very disappointing to people like me, because I think Barbara Lee has shown extraordinary leadership in her career,” Speier said. “It’s about time that we have to say what we mean and mean what we say, which means rather than have secret ballots we should have public ballots. ... Because there’s this game that some of my colleagues play where they say one thing to one member and then say something to another member.”
Speier acknowledged that Jeffries’ supporters had other considerations, such as not wanting multiple California members in a party leadership topped by San Francisco Rep. Nancy Pelosi.
“It’s hard to dissect a defeat, because there’s so much that goes into it,” Speier said.
It’s the second time in two years that Lee has run for a leadership position and come up just short. She lost the race for vice chair to Rep. Linda Sanchez of Whittier (Los Angeles County) by two votes in 2016.
Rep. Eric Swalwell of Dublin said he had voted for Lee, and called her and Jeffries “two good choices.” He added, however, that Jeffries’ election means “the next generation of leadership is clearly coming to our caucus.”
Tal Kopan is The San Francisco Chronicle’s Washington correspondent. Email: [email protected]
Twitter: @talkopan
Tal Kopan
Follow Tal on: https://www.facebook.com/SFChronicle/TalKopan Tal Kopan is the Washington Correspondent for The San Francisco Chronicle. Previously, she was a political reporter for CNN Politics, where she covered immigration, cybersecurity and other hot-button issues in Washington, including the 2016 presidential election.
Prior to joining the network, Kopan was a reporter for POLITICO in Washington, D.C., where she reported for their breaking news team and policy verticals. While covering policy, she was a reporter for POLITICO Pro Cybersecurity, where she covered cybersecurity policymaking on Capitol Hill and followed cyber-related issues in the Justice Department such as cybercrime.
Kopan also previously worked as a Web producer at Fox Chicago News and as a freelance Web producer at ABC 7 Chicago, where she spent time covering stories such as the trials of former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich and the election of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel.
Kopan was selected as a 2014-2015 National Press Foundation Paul Miller Fellow and a member of the 2015 class of Journalist Law School at Loyola Law School, Los Angeles. She was also the recipient of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, Midwest Chapter's Ephraim Family Scholarship.
Kopan graduated with honors from the University of Chicago with a bachelor's in law, letters and society.
Board Legislative Committee Attachment VI December 14, 2018
LOCAL // POLITICS Nancy Pelosi has work to do to wrap up House speaker’s job
Tal Kopan Nov. 28, 2018 Updated: Nov. 28, 2018 7:42 p.m.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is joined by Reps. John Lewis of Georgia (left), Eric Swalwell of Dublin, Joyce Beatty of Ohio, Kathy Castor of Florida, Joe Kennedy of Massachusetts and Arizona’s Ann Kirkpatrick.Photo: Carolyn Kaster / Associated Press
WASHINGTON — House Democrats overwhelmingly selected San Francisco Rep. Nancy Pelosi as the party’s nominee for speaker Wednesday, but she still has work to do to lock in the votes to reclaim the position she lost eight years ago. Pelosi won the yes-or-no vote by a far greater margin than when she last prevailed in a party leadership election two years ago. However, the number of Democrats who voted against her Wednesday was far more than Pelosi can afford to lose when the full House elects a speaker Jan. 3.
Pelosi and her supporters said they were confident she can line up the support she needs over the next five weeks.
“I think we’re in pretty good shape,” Pelosi said. “We go forward with confidence and humility. ... Are there dissenters? Yes, but I expect to have a powerful vote as we go forward.”
The vote Wednesday was 203 to 32, with three blank ballots and one Democrat absent. The election was conducted in secret among members who will be in next year’s Congress and included delegates and territory representatives, who cannot vote next month.
The vote of the Democratic caucus was never in suspense, as Pelosi ran unopposed and with a clear majority of support of her colleagues. But it was the first opportunity to gauge exactly how many members she will need to win over to regain the speakership she lost when the Tea Party wave of 2010 gave Republicans the House.
Unlike all other leadership positions, the speakership requires a majority of the full House — 218 votes if all members cast ballots.
Democrats are on track to hold 235 seats, meaning Pelosi can afford to lose no more than 17 party members on the floor. She has said she will not accept Republican votes and they are not likely, although President Trump has offered to recruit some for her.
Although 32 Democrats voted against Pelosi on Wednesday, only 16 have signed a public letter pledging to oppose her in the House. Some of the signers continue to negotiate with Pelosi behind the scenes.
Also, members often vote against a nominee in caucus, but then support the winner on the floor. In 2016, Pelosi defeated Rep. Tim Ryan of Ohio by a vote of 134 to 63 in the caucus for the Democratic leader’s job. All but four Democrats then voted for her for speaker in the House.
Ryan is among the 16 Democrats publicly promising to vote against Pelosi this time. However, he and other dissident Democrats have failed to recruit anyone to run against her.
Ryan and two other opposition leaders — Reps. Seth Moulton of Massachusetts and Kathleen Rice of New York — met with Pelosi on Wednesday, but no deal was struck. A Democratic aide familiar with the meeting said Pelosi “listened closely to the trio’s concerns.”
Rice, however, said the meeting was “not terribly productive.”
Dissident Democrats primarily want the 78-year-old Pelosi to spell out a plan for eventually stepping aside. Pelosi and her allies have dismissed the idea that she would make herself a lame duck.
“I think there were no surprises inside today,” Rice said. “We knew that she was going to get the majority of votes. But what it also established very clearly is what we’ve been saying all along, which she does not have the ability to get 218 on the floor.” Pelosi cleared one obstacle from her path Wednesday in striking a deal with a group of Democratic and Republican lawmakers who call themselves the Problem Solvers Caucus. They had pushed for rules changes they say will make it easier for members to get bills moving in Congress without leadership backing.
And despite the opposition group’s confidence, other Democrats said their effort was sputtering.
Pelosi “got 85 percent of the vote. I think that’s pretty compelling,” said Rep. Jackie Speier of San Mateo. “You have to understand the mind of a politician. Even when they lose, they want to be able to identify their indignation, and that’s what you got (in) there. I would be very surprised if that number doesn’t dwindle to something that would be more like eight to 10.”
Illinois Rep. Jan Schakowsky said opposition was “crumbling by the minute.”
“How do you justify the fact that you would still try to bring down the woman who received 203 votes in the Democratic caucus?” Schakowsky said. “They would have to have demonstrated a great deal more support for their coup.”
Rep. Brian Higgins of New York, who signed the anti-Pelosi letter and then backed off after she cut a deal with him to push an infrastructure bill and try to increase Medicare eligibility, said now is the time for others to come around as well.
“I think 203 votes is a lot at this particular point,” Higgins said. “Others will see an opportunity to negotiate toward the goal of some larger public policy objectives and backtrack.”
Tal Kopan is The San Francisco Chronicle’s Washington correspondent. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @talkopan
Tal Kopan
Follow Tal on: https://www.facebook.com/SFChronicle/TalKopan
Tal Kopan is the Washington Correspondent for The San Francisco Chronicle. Previously, she was a political reporter for CNN Politics, where she covered immigration, cybersecurity and other hot-button issues in Washington, including the 2016 presidential election.
Prior to joining the network, Kopan was a reporter for POLITICO in Washington, D.C., where she reported for their breaking news team and policy verticals. While covering policy, she was a reporter for POLITICO Pro Cybersecurity, where she covered cybersecurity policymaking on Capitol Hill and followed cyber-related issues in the Justice Department such as cybercrime.
Kopan also previously worked as a Web producer at Fox Chicago News and as a freelance Web producer at ABC 7 Chicago, where she spent time covering stories such as the trials of former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich and the election of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel.
Kopan was selected as a 2014-2015 National Press Foundation Paul Miller Fellow and a member of the 2015 class of Journalist Law School at Loyola Law School, Los Angeles. She was also the recipient of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, Midwest Chapter's Ephraim Family Scholarship.
Kopan graduated with honors from the University of Chicago with a bachelor's in law, letters and society.
Board Legislative Committee Attachment VI December 14, 2018
CALIFORNIA WILDFIRES Camp Fire’s climate toll: Greenhouse gases equal about a week of California auto emissions
Kurtis Alexander Nov. 30, 2018 Updated: Nov. 30, 2018 4 a.m.
The Camp Fire in Paradise, Calif.. on Thursday, November 8, 2018.Photo: Scott Strazzante / The Chronicle
Butte County’s Camp Fire not only claimed a staggering amount of lives and property, it spewed out a whole lot of greenhouse gases - about as much as all of California’s cars and trucks produce in a week, according to new state estimates.
This blast of emissions contributes negligibly to the planet’s overall warming, but taken together with other wildfires, big blazes like the Camp Fire are posing an increasing threat to the climate, scientists say.
Last year, the cumulative amount of greenhouse gases released by California fires was equal to about 9 percent of the total generated by human activity statewide. And the problem doesn’t end there. These fires are burning down forests that, when healthy, absorb heat-trapping gas and help stabilize the Earth’s temperature. That absorption is being lost. Whether California’s forests are now taking in more greenhouse gases, or giving off more, remains in dispute. But climate scientists agree that the balance is heading in a bad direction.
“In general, there’s been an observed decline in carbon storage,” said Dick Cameron, director of science for land programs at the California chapter of the Nature Conservancy. “It’s kind of a double whammy. Fires are causing emissions in the short term and you’re losing sequestration over the long run.”
Cameron estimates that the storage capacity of forests and other natural lands in the state, including farms, could drop 10 percent by the end of the century if the situation doesn’t change.
The role of wildlands in regulating greenhouse gases, notably atmospheric carbon, has long been pivotal. As plants and trees grow, they take in carbon dioxide, resulting in the gas being expelled from the air and cached in the vegetation and soil.
A report last year by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection found that California’s forests soaked up more carbon than they gave off as recently as 2006 to 2015. But because of fires that are releasing more carbon dioxide, on top of rising tree mortality and pest infestation that reduce carbon absorption, the report warned that the state’s woodlands were teetering on becoming a carbon liability.
This month’s 153,000-acre Camp Fire is estimated to have discharged about 3.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide and equivalent greenhouse gases, according to the California Air Resources Board. Southern California’s recent 97,000-acre Woolsey Fire, meanwhile, generated an estimated 2 million metric tons of greenhouse gases.
By comparison, last year’s deadly wildfires in Napa and Sonoma countiesemitted about 4.1 million metric tons, while the 282,000-acre Thomas Fire in Santa Barbara and Ventura counties put out 5.9 million metric tons. The 257,000-acre Rim Fire in and around Yosemite in 2013 is believed to have produced more than 10 million tons of greenhouse gases.
The Air Resources Board calculates wildfire emissions by determining how hot a fire has burned and what vegetation was consumed. Lots of heat and old, thick stands of trees, both of which were present in the Rim Fire, generally result in more carbon dioxide.
Officials at the Air Resources Board acknowledge that measuring wildfire emissions is an imperfect science. Their calculations are not included in the agency’s annual inventory of greenhouse gases, a tally that helps the state track its contribution to global warming, though this could change.
“Wildfires have become very intense, more intense than they have been in the past,” said Dave Clegern, spokesman for the Air Resources Board. “As that intensity has grown, we have found ourselves needing to pay more attention to the impacts of these fires on greenhouse gases.”
California wildfires in 2017 generated a combined 37.1 million metric tons of carbon dioxide and equivalent heat-trapping gases, according to state estimates. It’s the most emissions of any year this century, except for 2008, which produced an estimated 39.4 million metric tons of emissions.
Such discharges amount to less than 10 percent of the state’s total human-generated greenhouse gases, which measured 429 million metric tons in 2016, the latest year recorded.
Still, the amount of carbon dioxide produced by wildfires is undermining the state’s hard-won greenhouse gas reductions. In 2016, owing largely to California’s ambitious climate regulations, the state slashed emissions by 12 million metric tons, according to the Air Resources Board. In the prior two years, 1.5 million metric tons and 3.3 million metric tons were cut.
While California has met its goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels, a lot more has to be done to hit the next target: an additional 40 percent cut by 2030.
A report this month by the Nature Conservancy and San Francisco nonprofit Next 10 suggests that substantial progress on emissions can be made with strategic land-use practices, including restoration of forests so that they take in more carbon.
The report urges more forest thinning and more prescribed burning, which may initially reduce carbon storage and boost greenhouse gas discharges but ultimately strengthens the wildlands and limits the devastating fires that pump out pollutants. As much as 181 million metric tons of carbon dioxide could be spared by the end of the century with such policies, the report says.
Severin Borenstein, an energy economist at UC Berkeley, said the amount of greenhouse gases released into the air by big blazes like the Camp Fire are not insignificant but hard to get too worked up about, considering the tragedy on the ground.
The Camp Fire, which ignited Nov. 8, killed at least 88 people and destroyed 14,500 homes and businesses, according to Cal Fire.
“The emissions are a big number,” Borenstein said. “But compared to the loss of buildings and the loss of lives, it’s pretty small.”
Kurtis Alexander is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @kurtisalexander
Kurtis Alexander
Follow Kurtis on: https://www.facebook.com/SFChronicle/kurtisalexander
Kurtis Alexander is a general assignment reporter for The San Francisco Chronicle, frequently writing about water, wildfire, climate and the American West. His recent work has focused on the impacts of drought, the widening rural-urban divide and state and federal environmental policy.
Before joining the Chronicle, Alexander worked as a freelance writer and as a staff reporter for several media organizations, including The Fresno Bee and Bay Area News Group, writing about government, politics and the environment.
Board Legislative Committee Attachment VI December 14, 2018
LOCAL // POLITICS California’s late votes broke big for Democrats. Here’s why GOP was surprised
John Wildermuth and Tal Kopan Nov. 30, 2018 Updated: Nov. 30, 2018 8:55 a.m.12
Paul Ryan called California’s election system “really bizarre.” Late “harvested” votes led to GOP losses around the state.Photo: Cliff Owen / Associated Press
California Democrats took advantage of seemingly minor changes in a 2016 law to score their stunningly successful midterm election results, providing a target for GOP unhappiness that is tinged with a bit of admiration.
Some Republicans have cast a skeptical eye on Democrats’ use of “ballot harvesting” to boost their support. The idea’s backers say it’s just one of several steps California has taken to enable more people to vote.
Few people noticed when Gov. Jerry Brown signed the changes in AB1921 into law two years ago. In the past, California allowed only relatives or people living in the same household to drop off mail ballots for another voter. The new law allowed anyone, even a paid political campaign worker, to collect and return ballots — “harvesting” them, in political slang.
The change was strictly a public service, said Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, D-San Diego, author of the bill. The old rules, she said, “simply provide yet another obstacle for individuals attempting to vote.”
Republicans didn’t agree, and the measure passed the Legislature on a largely party-line vote.
They felt the hit on Nov. 6 — and in the days after, as late-arriving Democratic votes were tabulated and one Republican candidate after another saw leads shrink and then evaporate. This week, a seventh GOP-held congressional seat flipped to the Democrats, leaving Republicans controlling a mere seven of California’s 53 House districts.
In Orange County alone, where every House seat went Democratic,“the number of Election Day vote-by-mail dropoffs was unprecedented — over 250,000,” Fred Whitaker, chairman of the county Republican Party, said in a note to supporters. “This is a direct result of ballot harvesting allowed under California law for the first time. That directly caused the switch from being ahead on election night to losing two weeks later.”
Some national Republicans expressed befuddlement with what was happening to their party in California. In an interview with the Washington Post, House Speaker Paul Ryan of Wisconsin called California’s election system “really bizarre” and said he couldn’t even begin to understand what ballot harvesting is.
“We were only down 26 seats (nationally) the night of the election and three weeks later, we lost basically every California race,” he said. “Point being, when you have candidates that win the absentee ballot vote, win the day of the vote, and then lose three weeks later because of provisionals, that’s really bizarre.”
However, this was no spur-of-the-moment effort by the Democrats, said Shawn Steel, the California GOP’s delegate to the Republican National Committee.
“This was not done at the last minute,” he said. “It started the day after Jerry signed” the bill.
Rep. Jeff Denham of Turlock (Stanislaus County), one of the House Republicans who saw victory slowly turn to defeat after election day, agreed with Ryan Thursday that California’s count should go more quickly. “Counting ballots two weeks after the vote is something that Californians shouldn’t have to put up with,” he said.
But in an earlier interview after it was clear he’d lost, Denham said the GOP had been slow to adapt to changes in California’s election system.
“One of the lessons that the GOP needs to learn out of this election cycle is how to work within all of the new rules, same-day voter registration, motor voters,” Denham said. “There have been a lot of changes in laws that I think have caught many in the Republican Party by surprise. You can’t just run a traditional campaign as you did before.”
He added, “If one party’s harvesting ballots, both parties need to do it.”
Across the state there were reports of groups collecting ballots and dropping them off at polling places and election offices. “We certainly had that going on here, with people dropping off maybe 100 or 200 ballots,” said Neal Kelley, Orange County’s registrar of voters. “We also had voters calling and asking if it was legitimate for someone to come to their door and ask if they could take their ballot” and deliver it to the polls.
For Democrats, the ballot harvesting was all part of a greater effort to get out the vote from their supporters, particularly from occasional voters.
“We beat Republicans on the ground, fair and square,” said Katie Merrill, a Democratic consultant deeply involved in November campaigns. “Many of the field plans included (ballot harvesting) as an option to deliver voters or their ballots” to the polls.
Those efforts involved identifying voters who might support Democratic candidates and ignoring those who wouldn’t.
In one Orange County household, for example, both the husband and wife were longtime Republicans, said Dale Neugebauer, a veteran Republican consultant. Democratic volunteers came by the house four times, each time asking to speak only with their 18-year-old daughter, a no-party-preference voter, and asking if she wanted them to pick up her signed and completed ballot.
That’s a perfect example of the “thorough and disciplined” ground game the Democrats used, said Merrill.
“We were not wasting time talking to people who weren’t going to vote for Democrats,” she said.
Many of those harvested ballots arrived in the waning days of the election, adding to the flood of votes that couldn’t be counted on election day. And those late ballots broke heavily for the Democrats.
“Absolutely, ballot harvesting played a very significant role,” said Neugebauer, who worked most recently for Orange County Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, another Republican who lost his seat. Democrats had “a huge advantage by executing a plan to gather ballots from voters.”
“I have a little bit of professional admiration for how well the Democrats executed their plan,” Neugebauer admitted.
While the late vote tally typically favors Democrats, the partisan advantage this year was staggering.
In the Central Valley’s 10th Congressional District, for example, Denham led Democrat Josh Harder by 1,287 votes the morning after the election. As of Thursday, with almost all of the late ballots counted, Harder was ahead by 7,416 votes.
In Orange County, Republican Rep. Mimi Walters of Irvine saw her 6,074-vote lead over Democrat Katie Porter turn into an 11,866-vote deficit.
Speaker Ryan was among the Republicans who couldn’t explain what happened.
“When you win the absentee ballots and you win the in-person vote, where I come from, you win the election,” Ryan said. “I’m not saying there’s anything nefarious about it, because I just don’t know, but we believed we were up about six seats in California the night of the election, now I think we lost just about every single one of those.”
For Democrats, Ryan’s comments were little more than sour grapes from a GOP leader who is retiring after his party was mauled in the midterms.
“Unlike other places in the country, in California we believe in actually counting every vote,” said Rep. Pete Aguilar, D-Redlands (San Bernardino County). “That is sometimes confounding to some of my colleagues, but I think that’s what’s at play here.”
Badly outnumbered in the Legislature, California Republicans have no hope of undoing the new rules. Instead, they’re going to have to adapt.
“The Democrats are creating a new, highly efficient tool to turn out voters,” said Neugebauer, the GOP consultant. “If Republicans can’t find a way to match it, we’re going to lose more elections all over the country.”
John Wildermuth is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer; Tal Kopan is The San Francisco Chronicle’s Washington correspondent. Email: [email protected], [email protected] Twitter: @jfwildermuth @TalKopan
Board Legislative Committee Attachment VI December 14, 2018
OPINION // EDITORIALS Editorial: Lessons for the future of California’s fire country Chronicle Editorial Board Nov. 30, 2018 Updated: Nov. 30, 2018 4:03 p.m.
Sheriffs yell to drivers to evacuate the area off of Pentz Road during the Camp Fire in Paradise, California, on Thursday, Nov. 8, 2018. Photo: Gabrielle Lurie / The Chronicle
Butte County officials have ended their recovery efforts for the devastating Camp Fire. The toll for the most destructive fire in California history has been steep: 88 people are dead, hundreds are still missing, 18,000 buildings have burned, and the final cost of recovery will be in the billions.
The recovery process for a fire as enormous as this one will take years, and climate change promises to bring more, not fewer, fires to California each season. So it’s incumbent on every California resident and every California leader to put the hard-won lessons of the Camp Fire into practice.
One of the obvious outstanding issues is a need for officials to improve the warning system for wildfires. Many Camp Fire survivors reported not receiving emergency alertsahead of the fire. These are the same complaints we heard from the survivors of last year’s Wine Country fires, and lack of alerts is inexcusable. An alert can mean the difference between life and death.
This fall, Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill, SB833, that will standardize statewide emergency alerts and give grant funding to counties that’s tied to compliance. That’s good news, even if the new system wasn’t operable in time for Camp Fire victims.
But many meteorologists believe that California may still have service gaps. The National Weather Service, for example, has satellites that can sense where fires will go. With the proper tools and agency coordination, California could alert residents and towns in a fire’s projected path. It’s an additional solution officials must consider.
However, all of the alerts in the world won’t increase fire safety without improved public safety practices for vegetation and property management.
While President Trump’s false claim that California could have avoided the Camp and Woolsey fires with Finnish-style forest management was rightly derided, ecosystem health does matter.
Many California communities are heavily planted with non-native and ornamental plants that negatively alter fire behavior. It’s also crucial — and sadly, rare — for local and regional officials to get full resident participation in basic prevention programs for private property, like thinning brush and cutting vegetation.
Finally, there’s the difficult matter of property management in a time of increased fire risks.
Like most California communities, Paradise wasn’t designed for a rapid evacuation.
It’s not realistic or desirable to force long-established cities like Paradise to completely remake their road designs and residential areas in the hope of preventing fire. There have been advances in fireproof technology for homes. It’s expensive, but there are roles for both Sacramento and home insurance companies to ensure these improvements are used in vulnerable communities.
Finally, higher housing costs have pushed more people further out of cities and into fire-prone areas. But as the Camp Fire showed, we all bear the costs of protecting property when devastation roars. Improved alert systems and better building technology will save lives, but so will building more housing in cities that aren’t at risk for wildfire.
This commentary is from The Chronicle’s editorial board. We invite you to express your views in a letter to the editor. Please submit your letter via our online form: SFChronicle.com/letters.
Board Legislative Committee Attachment VI December 14, 2018
Congress is so close to ensuring more people can enjoy the great outdoors
BY JERRY STRITZKE, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR — 12/01/18 06:00 PM EST 87 THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL
© Getty images “Timid souls neither know victory nor defeat.” It is fitting that Teddy Roosevelt shared these words in his 1910 “Man-in-the-Arena” speech. It is quoted often, but I never tire of the words. Roosevelt was a bold leader who advocated for a uniquely American approach to protecting and caring for our beautiful and wild places, which he loved deeply.
It takes courage to act in a bipartisan manner in today’s political environment. Over the last few months, without headlines or the political spotlight, Republicans and Democrats in both chambers have advanced a range of bills through committee, spanning many of the most pressing priorities for recreation on public lands. They’ve worked in a transparent and bipartisan way that has produced better, more effective and widely supported results. Now’s the time to seize victory.
The love for our wild outdoor places transcends the blue and red positioning that characterizes our current reality. And leadership, courage and opportunity exist in Congress today to pass a historic outdoor recreation legislation before this Congress ends.
We are close to a permanent authorization of the Land and Water Conservation Fund; a new and innovative solution to the maintenance backlog on public lands; and legislation to ensure more children have access to public lands. All three of these initiatives were passed by the House Natural Resources and Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committees. Several other bipartisan, bicameral bills are positioned to move, including the Recreation Not Red Tape Act and the Public Land Recreational Opportunities Act, both of which eliminate hurdles to getting more people to experience the outdoors.
It’s great that the work has advanced this far. Addressing these priorities hasn’t been easy. It’s required real negotiation, putting disagreements aside and finding common ground. In today’s climate, this is rare, but the outdoors has served as common ground for legislators before. After the 2016 election, Congress passed several bills important to outdoor recreation. These included the Outdoor Recreation Jobs and Economic Impact Act, which requires the government to study the outdoor recreation economy, and the National Park Service Centennial Act, which created mechanisms to provide more funding to our national parks.
Despite the bitterness the 2016 election brought, both parties came back to Congress and found common ground on legislation that connected Americans to the outdoors. They embodied the spirit of what we’ve come to call #UnitedOutside.
Today, they can do the same. If these bills are passed together in the coming weeks, this year could produce the most significant outdoor recreation package in recent history. Every victory in the interests of common sense, common ground and the common good will be appreciated by millions of Americans — Republican and Democrat — who love life outdoors.
ADVERTISEMENT Passing these bills will also help drive an economic engine that benefits everyone from big cities to small rural towns. The federal government recently determined that the outdoor industry makes up roughly 2.2 percent of the country’s gross domestic product and is responsible for 4.5 million jobs in urban and rural communities throughout the country.
This is work worth doing. The great outdoors provides an important venue for everyone — political party or background aside — to see past differences. As this pivotal moment approaches, I hope Congress, the White House, non-profits, and our industry will dig deep to create an end-of-year victory for outdoor recreation. Success would be impressive amid the dominant, too often stifling, national narrative that people in this country can no longer get along. Let’s step into the arena together and prove that story is wrong.
Jerry Stritzke is president and CEO of Recreational Equipment, Inc., commonly known as REI, an American specialty outdoor retailer and the nation’s largest cooperative.
Board Legislative Committee Attachment VI December 14, 2018
LOCAL // POLITICS Democrats rule California Legislature, but they may not be united Melody Gutierrez Dec. 2, 2018 Updated: Dec. 2, 2018 3:44 p.m.
Democrats have overwhelming majorities in both the state Assembly and Senate as they head into the next legislative session. Photo: Justin Sullivan / Getty Images
SACRAMENTO — There is not yet a word for the Democratic dominance in the state Assembly. It used to be supermajority, but Democrats eclipsed that two-thirds threshold during last month’s election.
What do you call the Democrats’ three-fourths majority that will be sworn in Monday in the 80-member Assembly? Ultra-super majority? Super-duper majority? Or as Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon suggested, giga-majority?
There is one word political insiders warn does not define the influx of Democrats: consensus. “We didn’t elect 60 Democrats from San Francisco — that’s a little different,” said Assemblyman Phil Ting, D- San Francisco. “You have Democrats from very purple, moderate districts, and they may be more liberal than their Republican predecessors. But I don’t see them radically shifting on many issues. They will continue to reflect their districts.”
That means liberals’ proposals for criminal justice reform, housing production, tenants rights and soaring rents could still face difficult votes during the two-year session that begins Jan. 7.
Moderate Democrats — an unofficial caucus commonly called “mods” in the state Capitol — often align with business interests and the handful of remaining Republicans to kill policies they say are too costly or too far to the left. Their voting bloc is most powerful in two-thirds votes reserved for taxes, but they have also been able to hold up bills needing a simple majority.
“Just because it’s a one-party state doesn’t mean it gets easier,” said Mike Madrid, a Republican political consultant. “In many ways it will be more difficult. Personal agendas and personalities will play a bigger role.”
The Assembly’s Democratic class is already guaranteed to be the largest since 1883. It could hit 61, depending on the outcome of an undecided race in San Diego.
In the Senate, Democrats hold 29 of the 40 seats, enough to give them a supermajority with two votes to spare.
Speaker Rendon, D-Paramount (Los Angeles County), said Democrats stand together on certain core issues such as worker protections and women’s rights.
“Will we have all Democrats going up on every bill? No,” Rendon said. “But we can get our progressive agenda passed. More Democrats makes it easier to get Democratic policies through.”
Among the areas where Democrats have been divided in the past is criminal justice reform.
That was true earlier this year with legislation to overturn the state’s murder accomplice rule, which held accomplices as culpable for felony murder as those who personally committed the crime. Moderate Democrats railed against the bill, calling it a risk to public safety, before joining Republicans in voting against it. The bill narrowly passed and was signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown.
Another bill that moderate Democrats and law enforcement officials opposed did not fare as well. That bill, to toughen the standard on when an officer can legally shoot a suspect, stalled in the Senate without a vote. Its sponsor, Assemblywoman Shirley Weber, D-San Diego, has said she plans to try again with a similar bill next year.
Law enforcement groups are already holding meetings in anticipation of fighting the legislation, according to the California Peace Officers Association.
Bills opposed by law enforcement are tough votes for Democrats from areas where the party has only recently displaced Republican officeholders.
“With the tent being so big right now, you are going to see different groups in the Democratic Party with different priorities,” said Robin Swanson, a Democratic political consultant. Housing legislation has also led to cleaving in the Democratic Party. Legislative leaders and Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom pledged to prioritize housing in 2019, with lawmakers saying they will take another run at bills that failed last year.
Bills to address rising rents and forced-out tenants have divided many Democrats, particularly legislation to reform the Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act, a 1995 state law that sharply limits rent controls that cities can impose. A ballot measure that would have scrapped the law was beaten badly in November.
Similar splintering among Democrats occurred in previous attempts to overhaul the Ellis Act, a state law intended to help property owners who no longer want to be in the rental business.
Assemblyman David Chiu, D-San Francisco, said he and other lawmakers are discussing tenants-rights bills for 2019, including proposals to prevent steep rent increases during housing crises and to strengthen just-cause eviction laws.
“These are issues that have not often garnered the support of all of our Democratic colleagues,” Chiu said. “Our hope is this year will be different as the plight of tenants has intensified across the state.”
Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, said he would try again to pass a bill to limit cities’ ability to block large apartment and condominium projects in residential neighborhoods near public transit.
His measure last year, SB827, which became one of the most hotly debated housing bills in the country, died in its first committee hearing — with moderate and liberal Democrats voting against it. Wiener has been working on changes in hopes of making it more palatable to lawmakers this year.
“It’s easy to think it will be easy to pass things, but I don’t think so,” said Kristin Olsen, a former Assembly Republican leader. “The political parties are very factioned, and therefore fractured when it comes to moving policies together. Leadership will have enormous challenges to bring those factions together.”
Melody Gutierrez is the San Francisco Chronicle’s Sacramento bureau chief. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @MelodyGutierrez
Melody Gutierrez
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Melody Gutierrez joined the San Francisco Chronicle in 2013 to cover politics from the Sacramento bureau. Previously, she was a senior writer who covered politics, education and sports for The Sacramento Bee.
With an emphasis on watchdog reporting, she has written investigative stories on pension spiking, high school steroid use, troubles in a school police force and how the state failed to notify a school district that a teacher was barred from foster care parenting due to multiple molestation allegations.
She has also examined the state’s use of segregation cells for prisoners, detailed legislative and legal efforts to curtail "revenge porn" and chronicled the effects of the drought in California.
Board Legislative Committee Attachment VI December 14, 2018
Politics House Democrats’ New Elected Leadership Team Is More Progressive and Diverse
On average, new leadership team is also younger in terms of age and length of service
Posted Dec 4, 2018 5:05 AM Lindsey McPherson @lindsemcpherson House Democrats to Wait ’Til Next Year in Term Limit DiscussionThis Bipartisan Holiday Party Was for the DogsWith Opponents Dug In, Pelosi Has Little Room to Negotiate on Speaker Votes
The newly elected House Democratic leadership team for the 116th Congress will be more progressive, diverse and younger in terms of both age and length of service compared to the current one.
That should generally please Democrats who called for changes in their leadership team, despite the top three long-reigning leaders remaining in charge.
House Democrats will have 14 elected leaders for the next Congress. The only position that remains unsettled is that of speaker. California’s Nancy Pelosi, who has served as the top Democratic leader since 2003, is the party’s nominee to get the gavel, but she currently lacks the votes she’ll need to win a Jan. 3 floor vote.
ICYMI: Pelosi Holds Victorious Briefing After Speakership Nod
The other 13 Democratic leaders the caucus selected during two days of intraparty elections last week were:
• Majority leader: Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland • Majority whip: James E. Clyburn of South Carolina • Assistant Democratic leader: Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico • Democratic Caucus chair: Hakeem Jeffries of New York • Democratic Caucus vice chair: Katherine M. Clark of Massachusetts • Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chair: Cheri Bustos of Illinois • Democratic Policy and Communications Committee chair: David Cicilline of Rhode Island • Democratic Policy and Communications Committee co- chairs: Ted Lieu of California, Debbie Dingell of Michigan and Matt Cartwright of Pennsylvania • Caucus representative for members serving five terms or fewer: Jamie Raskin of Maryland • Freshmen caucus representatives: Katie Hill of California and Joe Neguse of Colorado Although it will have two representatives to leadership, the freshman class is also requesting monthly meetings with the speaker, majority leader and majority whip on its legislative priorities, according to a letter 46 members-elect sent to Democratic leadership Monday.
Exactly half (seven) of the elected Democratic leadership team for the 116th Congress is part of the current 11-member elected leadership team. Besides gaining the position of speaker after taking back the chamber, Democrats added the position of DPCC chair to oversee the co- chairs as a landing spot for Cicilline and elected two freshman representatives instead of one.
Five of the 14 elected Democratic leaders next year will be women, one more than in the current Congress.
There will be one more black member serving in elected leadership next year with Neguse joining. With Jeffries moving up to the No. 5 post and Clyburn remaining in the No. 3 role, it will be the first time that two African-American members have served in the top tier of leadership at the same time.
Luján’s ascension to the No. 4 post will make him the highest-ranking Latino ever in the House, according to a Congressional Hispanic Caucus statement. (However, California Rep. Tony Coelho, a Portuguese-American, was a CHC member and served as majority whip, the No. 3 slot, from 1987 to 1989.)
Luján will be the only CHC member serving in leadership next year. The group had three leaders this year with Luján, who chaired the DCCC, and two Californians — Linda T. Sánchez as caucus vice chair and Tony Cárdenas as caucus representative for members serving five terms or less.
The Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus will still have one member in leadership with Lieu joining as Hawaii Rep. Colleen Hanabusa ends her term as the freshman representative. Hanabusa is not returning to Congress next year after an unsuccessful run for governor.
The absence of a woman of color on the new elected leadership team, and frustrations over California Rep. Barbara Lee’s close loss to Jeffries in the caucus chair race led Pelosi to appoint Lee as a co-chair of the Democratic Steering and Policy Committee. She will join current Steering co-chairs Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut and Eric Swalwell of California atop the panel that makes committee assignments. Although the Steering co-chairs are appointed, they are still considered part of the leadership team and participate in its weekly meetings. Comparison with GOP
House Republicans, meanwhile, will have an elected leadership team that is half of the size of the Democrats’ in the 116th Congress. But of those seven elected leaders only one, House Republican Conference Chairwoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming, is a woman and none are members of color.
Republicans do have a younger leadership team than Democrats. The GOP leaders have an average age of 52 and have served an average of three full terms in Congress.
The new Democratic leaders, meanwhile, have an average age of 56 and have served an average of five full terms in Congress. Comparatively, the outgoing Democratic leadership team, when they started the 115th Congress, had an average age of 59 and had served an average of 6.5 terms.
Geographically, there’s more diversity in House Democratic leadership with five members from the West, four from the Northeast, three from the South and two from the Midwest. That’s one more Midwesterner and one less from both the South and Northeast than the outgoing leadership team.
Republicans do not have any leaders from the Northeast but have three from the South and two each from the West and Midwest. Ideologically more progressive
Ideologically, the Democratic leadership team for the 116th Congress will be more progressive than the current one.
The Congressional Progressive Caucus will have nine members in the leadership ranks: Jeffries, Clark, Cicilline, Lieu, Dingell, Cartwright, Raskin, Hill and Neguse.
As the largest ideological caucus, the CPC had felt underrepresented this Congress with only three of its members, Jeffries, Cicilline and Sánchez, in elected leadership.
The New Democrat Coalition, meanwhile, will only have two members in leadership next year: Bustos and Hill. The coalition has three members — Bustos, Cárdenas and Hanabusa — on the outgoing leadership team. The Blue Dog Coalition remains without official representation in leadership, but the Problem Solvers Caucus gains a seat with Dingell joining.
Correction 2:19 p.m. | There are five women among the 14 Democratic leadership team positions and nine members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
Board Legislative Committee Attachment VI December 14, 2018
LOCAL // MATIER AND ROSS Some state Democrats want to spend from surplus — Ting, Newsom more cautious
Matier & Ross Dec. 9, 2018 Updated: Dec. 9, 2018 6:15 a.m.
California Assembly Member Phil Ting in 2017.Photo: Russell Yip / The Chronicle
Being flush with a nearly $15 billion budget surplus had some Democratic lawmakers in Sacramento already proposing tens of billions of dollars in new social and educational programs during the opening week of the new legislative session.
Proposals submitted by lawmakers in the first week ranged from more funding for schools to extending Medi- Cal eligibility to adults living in the country illegally. But just as fast as the spending is being proposed, key lawmakers are tapping the brakes.
“We have to watch the bottom line,” said Assembly Budget Committee Chairman Phil Ting, D-San Francisco.
“The California economy is strong, but we have been growing for eight years, and that is two years over the historic cycle for another recession,” Ting said. “We don’t want to start spending and then go through the dramatic cuts we had to in the last recession, which came to about $20 billion a year.”
Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom appears to agree.
“The Legislature laid out a wish list, with no one believing we can do everything at once,” Newsom said.
Instead, look for one-time spending on specific tasks, such as cleaning out the state’s fire-prone forests and brushlands, along with a string of “down payments” on new programs, including Newsom’s own pet project to increase universal preschool.
“Within our means and with historic reserves,” Newsom said, in what is likely to be the most heard statement of the budget battle.
San Francisco Chronicle columnists Phillip Matier and Andrew Ross appear Sundays, Mondays and Wednesdays. Matier can be seen on the KPIX-TV morning and evening news. He can also be heard on KCBS radio Monday through Friday at 7:50 a.m. and 5:50 p.m. Got a tip? Call 415-777-8815, or email [email protected]. Twitter: @matierandross
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Whether writing about politics or personalities, Phil Matier and Andy Ross have informed and entertained readers for more than two decades about the always fascinating Bay Area and beyond. Their blend of scoops, insights and investigative reporting can be found every Sunday, Monday and Wednesday in the San Francisco Chronicle.
Phil is also a regular on KPIX TV and KCBS radio.
Board Legislative Committee Attachment VI December 14, 2018
OPINION // EDITORIALS Editorial: Redevelopment costly, wasteful — and sorely missed? Chronicle editorial board Dec. 8, 2018 Updated: Dec. 8, 2018 11:06 p.m.
Sacramento’s Dive Bar, featuring a giant aquarium with “mermaids,” was part of a project that received redevleopment funds before the program was deep-sixed. Photo: Max Whittaker / Prime / Special to The Chronicle
As California policymakers have struggled to address the state’s housing void and its cruel consequences, many have loudly lamented Gov. Jerry Brown’s elimination of hundreds of local redevelopment agencies and, with them, their substantial contribution to affordable housing: about $1 billion a year. Less has been said about the other $4 billion.
Funded by property tax set-asides and enjoying broad powers to reshape neighborhoods deemed blighted, redevelopment agencies were required to devote just 20 percent of their spending to affordable housing. By 2012, when the agencies were decommissioned as part of Brown’s efforts to bridge a gaping post-recession budget deficit, they were spending some $5.7 billion a year, or 12 cents of every property tax dollar. What the agencies subsidized beyond housing, from a suburban football stadium to a monumental fish tank, was often less defensible.
Redevelopment, in short, was costly and wasteful. This lesson of recent California history has renewed relevance now that it could be repeated.
Brown, the author of redevelopment’s demise and a formidable obstacle to its resurrection, is on his way out. His successor, Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom, says he wants to bring back the program, citing the housing shortage. The Democrats’ new legislative mega-majority appears similarly inclined.
A bill to that end by Assemblyman David Chiu, D-San Francisco, was among those introduced on the first day of the new legislative session Tuesday. Described as a “massive funding increase for affordable housing and infrastructure,” it already has a dozen other legislators signed on as co-authors. State Sen. Jim Beall, D-San Jose, has introduced another version in the upper house.
Chiu’s legislation would increase the share of redevelopment spending devoted to building or fixing affordable housing to 30 percent. And in light of what his office acknowledged were “egregious and often bizarre abuses” by the dissolved agencies, it includes safeguards such as record-keeping requirements, regular audits and state oversight.
There is certainly reason for caution. Redevelopment agencies employed what’s known as tax increment financing, freezing property tax revenue in a targeted area and reserving most of the revenue growth for improvements within the district. This ultimately represented a substantial drain on a scarce and important resource: Property taxes fund schools, cities and counties and are capped by Proposition 13. It was also a growing burden for the state, which supplanted school districts’ share of the revenue reserved for redevelopment.
The program helped San Francisco revitalize its Mission Bay neighborhood and Oakland spur a downtown residential boom, among other successes. But a loose definition of blight, coupled with light oversight, also allowed redevelopment funds to subsidize the 49ers’ move to Santa Clara and downtown Sacramento’s Dive Bar, which features a 7,500-gallon aquarium frequented by “mermaids.” Even the money that was supposed to be going to good purposes sometimes went nowhere: The Los Angeles Times found that hundreds of millions of redevelopment dollars reserved for low-income housing were spent without producing a single unit.
Moreover, even when tax increment financing isn’t squandered, it tends to shift rather than increase growth. A 2011 Legislative Analyst’s Office report found no evidence that redevelopment adds to overall economic activity or employment.
Local officials are nonetheless clamoring for the return of a program that put much more money and power in their hands. They shouldn’t get it without major concessions — not only to prevent future abuses but also to curtail their ability to block standard residential development. That could take the form of a revamped bill by Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, to ease high-density, transit-friendly housing regardless of zoning, a version of which died last year amid staunch opposition from local governments. Lawmakers must not forget that California cities have been more likely to kill housing than create it.
Board Legislative Committee Attachment VI December 14, 2018
CA wildfires: Most sweeping forestry changes out of key bill, sources say Tal Kopan Dec. 6, 2018 Updated: Dec. 6, 2018 7:56 p.m.
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A charred landscape near Keswick Dam Road in the aftermath of the Carr Fire in Redding. Photo: Guy Wathen / The Chronicle
WASHINGTON — A typically noncontroversial part of Congress’ must-pass farm bill has become a flash point in the aftermath of California wildfires that President Trump blamed on neglected forests, prompting House and Senate leadership to intervene in negotiations over how to regulate federally owned woodlands.
Still, sources say it’s not clear whether the bill will result in many new tools to combat increasingly devastating fires. And lawmakers have largely resisted a push to include the most contested provisions sought by House Republicans and the Trump administration. The twice-a-decade farm bill authorizes money and sets policy for agriculture and food security, and must be passed by the end of the year to keep the nation’s food industry and safety net functioning. The bill also sets broad guidelines for managing federally owned forests, as the U.S. Forest Service is a division of the Department of Agriculture.
Congressional negotiators working to reconcile starkly different House and Senate versions of the bill say they have reached a deal in principle on legislation that will be sent back to both chambers for a vote. But congressional leaders are closely guarding details, and negotiators caution that some elements could change.
According to sources close to the negotiations, the compromise version will more closely resemble the bipartisan Senate bill than the House measure that narrowly passed with only Republican votes. It is expected to waive some environmental reviews for removal of trees and other growth that is insect-ridden, diseased or deemed to be a fire hazard.
However, the bill will allow such waivers over smaller tracts of land than what House Republicans had sought, the sources said. The House bill would have doubled the size of waivers to cover 6,000 acres of forest at a time.
The bill will also expand “good neighbor” provisions to allow county and tribal governments to help manage forests and watersheds on federal land. And it will boost programs intended to promote forest restoration and preservation between government and nongovernmental entities.
The forestry provisions are an unlikely attention-getter for the farm bill. Most of the public debate over the legislation has centered on House Republicans’ attempts to expand work requirements for food-stamp recipients, but that effort died after the GOP was routed in the House midterm elections.
After fires in Butte County and Southern California killed a combined 88 people last month, Trump and Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke began pushing the farm bill as a vehicle for possible fire prevention provisions. Trump falsely claimed that the farm bill would contain $500 million in wildfire relief and pressed for improved forest management in California over what he says are environmentalists standing in the way.
More than half of forestland in California is owned by the federal government, while state and local agencies own just 3 percent.
Touring the Camp Fire devastation in Butte County, Trump said the president of Finland had told him “they spend a lot of time on raking and cleaning and doing things and they don’t have any problem.” Finnish President Sauli Niinistö later denied ever discussing raking with Trump, and many forestry experts said Trump’s comments were a gross oversimplification of the issue.
Zinke authored an opinion piece pushing for the House version of the farm bill and more forest-clearing and logging, which he labeled “active management” of forests. He and Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue called for expanded rights to log on federal land and for waiving many environmental restrictions on tree cutting.
As Trump administration officials focused on the forestry provisions, congressional leaders took over negotiations on those measures from agriculture committee chairs. House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco was among those who became involved in the closed-door discussions, aides say.
Some lawmakers have chafed at the secrecy surrounding the bill, including Rep. Jared Huffman, D-San Rafael. He called the House-passed bill a “partisan monstrosity” and said he’s been communicating his concerns to Pelosi.
“We have just been kept completely in the dark,” Huffman said. “It’s just been incredibly closely held, so concerns have been expressed, and I’m certainly hopeful that we don’t see any overreach, but I’m watching carefully. ... I don’t trust the Republican majority in its final days to be thoughtful conservationists.”
Perdue conceded this week that the administration largely lost on the provisions it had wanted in the farm bill, according to Politico. He said the administration could try to push a stand-alone bill instead.
Rep. Jeff Denham, R-Turlock (Stanislaus County), said the compromise bill will “follow a timber harvesting plan that will keep our forests safer, cleaner, and a forest management plan that conserves our water.”
Environmental groups and Democrats say they’re not trying to stand in the way of reasonable forest management. But they argue that Republicans are disingenuously pushing for provisions that would vastly increase logging and circumvent input from communities and scientists. Environmental groups also argue that the administration is ignoring climate change as a driving factor in wildfires and is pushing for increased logging, when what’s needed are stronger building codes and landscape designs that create fire breaks between homes and woodlands.
“What the California fires have confirmed is that the best way to protect structures is by creating defensible space, and there’s a suite of things that can be done to give structures the best chance of surviving a wildfire,” said Randi Spivak of the Center for Biological Diversity. “Logging in the back country is not one of them.”
Democrats question why the administration is pushing for more authority to bypass environmental laws when Congress passed similar and less sweeping measures in March.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., pressed Perdue in October for information on what the government had done under those powers. He has not replied.
The top Democrat on the Senate Agriculture Committee said the administration needed to demonstrate how those new laws worked before asking for broader authority to log forests.
“To my knowledge, those haven’t been used yet,” Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow told The Chronicle. “So we’d love to have those used so we can see how it goes.”
Tal Kopan is The San Francisco Chronicle’s Washington correspondent. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @talkopan
Tal Kopan
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Tal Kopan is the Washington Correspondent for The San Francisco Chronicle. Previously, she was a political reporter for CNN Politics, where she covered immigration, cybersecurity and other hot-button issues in Washington, including the 2016 presidential election.
Prior to joining the network, Kopan was a reporter for POLITICO in Washington, D.C., where she reported for their breaking news team and policy verticals. While covering policy, she was a reporter for POLITICO Pro Cybersecurity, where she covered cybersecurity policymaking on Capitol Hill and followed cyber-related issues in the Justice Department such as cybercrime.
Kopan also previously worked as a Web producer at Fox Chicago News and as a freelance Web producer at ABC 7 Chicago, where she spent time covering stories such as the trials of former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich and the election of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel.
Kopan was selected as a 2014-2015 National Press Foundation Paul Miller Fellow and a member of the 2015 class of Journalist Law School at Loyola Law School, Los Angeles. She was also the recipient of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, Midwest Chapter's Ephraim Family Scholarship.
Kopan graduated with honors from the University of Chicago with a bachelor's in law, letters and society.
Board Legislative Committee Attachment VI December 14, 2018
US & WORLD // SCIENCE Fight against greenhouse gases stalls as emissions soar to new record Kurtis Alexander Dec. 5, 2018 Updated: Dec. 5, 2018 7:34 p.m.
Workers cycle past a coal-fired power plant on a tricycle cart in Changchun, in northeast China's Jilin province.Photo: / ASSOCIATED PRESS
Progress in the fight against global warming has taken a big step backward, according to research published Wednesday, which projects greenhouse-gas emissions from fossil fuels will hit a record high this year after a recent and promising lull.
And next year, emissions are expected to be even higher.
The research by the Global Carbon Project, with work out of Stanford University, blames the uptick on the explosive growth of the global economy. While many wealthy nations like the U.S. are turning to clean energy to spur the boom, they aren’t doing so quickly enough to make up for the dirty coal plants in India and China that continue to spew out pollution.
This year’s projected 2.7 percent emissions bump will mark a second year of rising greenhouse gases after three years of little or no growth. The change in direction casts doubt on whether nations will meet the climate goals laid out in the 2015 Paris accord and head off the fallout from global warming, which has already resulted in more wildfires, more drought and more flooding.
“We hoped that we had seen the peak in carbon emissions,” said Rob Jackson, professor of Earth system science at Stanford and one of the primary contributors to the Global Carbon Project. “We know now that this wasn’t the case.”
The emissions research, published in three scientific journals this week, comes as world leaders and environmental experts, including many from California, meet in Katowice, Poland, to flesh out a strategy for reducing greenhouse gases as prescribed in the Paris Agreement.
The challenge at the two-week summit could hardly be greater. The new emissions research is just the latest in a series of reports that show how dire the situation has become. Last month’s U.S. National Climate Assessment found that disruptions from heat-trapping gas are happening much faster than expected. These include the deadly fires and choking smoke in California.
The political environment, meanwhile, continues to sour on climate action. President Trump, on a recent cold day, again questioned the science of rising temperatures, tweeting, “Whatever happened to Global Warming?” His decision to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris deal has been followed by concern that other nations like Brazil and Australia are also losing interest.
“The Poland meeting really should be a series of mea culpas by a number of countries,” said Dan Kammen, professor of energy at UC Berkeley, who has attended many of the U.N.-sponsored climate summits, but is not attending this one. “We can remain hopeful that the countries that are part of the Paris accord will really double down.”
Kammen said another year of rising greenhouse-gas emissions does not bode well for meeting the Paris targets.
The accord calls for limiting greenhouse gases enough so that global temperatures don’t rise more than 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, by the end of the century. This is the point at which the atmosphere is expected to be too warm to prevent catastrophic and irreversible problems. Temperatures have already risen about 1 degree Celsius since the industrial revolution.
“We really need to see a reduction now,” Kammen said, noting that heat-trapping gases should drop nearly half by 2030 to stay on course.
The new emissions report estimates that the world’s discharge of fossil-fuel-generated carbon dioxide, the gas most responsible for rising temperatures, will be 37.1 billion tons in 2018. The mark represents a 2.7 percent increase over 2017, which follows a 1.6 percent increase over the prior year. Emissions between 2014 and 2016 were largely flat.
The biggest contributor to this year’s increase is China, according to the report. As the year comes to a close, emissions in the world’s most-polluting nation will have risen 4.7 percent as the country makes additional iron, steel, aluminum and cement to feed the expanding economy, according to the projections. More coal plants have opened to provide the necessary energy.
India, which produces about a third as much greenhouse gas as China, is expected to see a 6.3 percent increase in emissions this year. The spike is not only driven by economic growth but the need to simply furnish power for millions who don’t have it. The U.S., too, is projected to see a jump in greenhouse gases, about 2.5 percent. The world’s second-biggest polluter saw a dramatic drop in the use of coal in 2018, yet increases in oil and natural gas, which is considered a greener alternative to coal, are expected to offset the decrease. Energy demands grew in the U.S. largely because of air conditioning during an exceptionally hot summer and heating during a cold winter in the East, according to the report.
This year will mark the first uptick in emissions in the U.S. since 2014. Despite efforts by the Trump administration to roll back climate regulations, however, the country is expected to see declining greenhouse gases next year. Federal deregulation has been slow to take hold while market forces are likely to continue pushing out coal in favor of wind and solar energy.
Worldwide, though, global emissions are forecast to continue rising in 2019, based on current trends, according to the report. The authors did not speculate by how much.
The emissions research was published in the journals Environmental Research Letters, Nature and Earth System Science Data.
“For three years, we had decreases (in greenhouse gases) in wealthier countries that counterbalanced increases in places like India,” Jackson said, noting that the red-hot economy doesn’t have to be an impediment to emission reductions. “Countries can still grow while cutting fossil fuel use, but there just aren’t enough countries doing this.”
Attendees at the 24th annual U.N. climate conference in Poland hope to get more nations on board with alternative energy. Three years ago in Paris, nearly 200 countries committed to cleaning up their economies, though the details of their promises were left to be worked out at future summits. It’s also appearing that these pledges will fall well short of the targets.
Mary Nichols, chair of the California Air Resources Board who is representing California in Katowice, said the state is participating to encourage ambitious climate action.
“I think it’s important that we show, especially in a time when other countries and our country are behaving in an erratic way, our commitment,” she said, before boarding her flight to Europe. “California is a steadfast member of the international community.”
The White House has sent a national delegation to Poland, but it’s not expected to be active in discussions. The U.S. technically remains in the Paris Agreement until 2020, the first year it can officially withdraw.
Former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, one of the early speakers at the climate conference, told a cheering crowd in Katowice that many in the U.S. are still in the fight against global warming.
“America is more than just Washington or one leader,” he said, calling Trump “meshugge” for his decision to snub the Paris agreement. That’s Yiddish for “crazy.”
Kurtis Alexander is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @kurtisalexander
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Kurtis Alexander is a general assignment reporter for The San Francisco Chronicle, frequently writing about water, wildfire, climate and the American West. His recent work has focused on the impacts of drought, the widening rural-urban divide and state and federal environmental policy.
Before joining the Chronicle, Alexander worked as a freelance writer and as a staff reporter for several media organizations, including The Fresno Bee and Bay Area News Group, writing about government, politics and the environment.
Board Legislative Committee Attachment VI December 14, 2018
LOCAL // BAY AREA & STATE Oakland sued, again, over terminal project to ship coal
Kimberly Veklerov Dec. 4, 2018 Updated: Dec. 4, 2018 6:51 p.m.
Phil Tagami at the site of a development at the Oakland Army Base in Oakland, California, on Wednesday, Sept. 23, 2015. Photo: Connor Radnovich / The Chronicle
Lawyers for a planned marine terminal in Oakland that would ship coal and other materials overseas sued the city Tuesday, saying local officials are trying to thwart the project and failed to keep their side of the bargain.
It will be the second major legal fight over developer Phil Tagami’s Oakland Bulk and Oversized Terminal. In May, a federal judge ruled that the city could not ban the storage and handling of coal and then retroactively apply the prohibition to Tagami’s project. The city is appealing the decision.
Now, the 62-page lawsuit says, Oakland leaders are refusing to meet with the development team or turn the property over.
“The city repeatedly and consistently insists that it will not take any action to move the project forward unless and until OBOT agrees to construct a ‘ban compliant’ terminal,” said the lawsuit filed Tuesday in Alameda County Superior Court. “After losing its legal battle against the project, the city has resolved to engage in a bureaucratic attack on the project with the hope of causing its demise.”
Alex Katz, a spokesman for the city attorney’s office, said officials could not comment because they have not yet been served or had time to review the filing.
The suit is asking for unspecific damages and an injunction that would prohibit the city from interfering with the terminal project.
“We think it’s very unfortunate it came to this,” said David Smith, a lawyer for the project. “We reached out to the city over and over to resolve this and move the project forward.”
The lawsuit comes several weeks after city officials accused the developers of violating their lease agreement by repeatedly failing to meet deadlines and construction milestones. Lawyers for Tagami, a longtime friend of Gov. Jerry Brown, said any delays were the city’s fault.
The 66-year lease, signed in 2016, laid out plans to develop 34 acres known as the West Gateway at the former Oakland Army Base. It was billed as a state-of-the-art, rail-to-ship logistics center with access to a deep-water port that would bring jobs to West Oakland.
Environmental groups have cheered the city’s efforts to keep the proposal from moving forward. City leaders have said coal dust from the project would pollute the air and pose risks to workers and nearby residents.
Kimberly Veklerov is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @kveklerov
Kimberly Veklerov
Follow Kimberly on: https://www.facebook.com/SFChronicle/Kveklerov
Kimberly Veklerov covers Oakland and the greater East Bay for The San Francisco Chronicle. She joined The Chronicle in 2015 after graduating from UC Berkeley with a degree in economics. Previously, she served as the editor in chief and president of the Daily Californian, Berkeley’s student newspaper.
Board Legislative Committee Attachment VI December 14, 2018
LOCAL // BAY AREA & STATE Safety systems running late as railroads, including Caltrain, request extensions
Rachel Swan Dec. 5, 2018 Updated: Dec. 5, 2018 4 a.m.
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Train cars are jumbled together with vehicles below a railroad bridge at the scene of an Amtrak train crash onto Interstate 5 a day earlier Tuesday, Dec. 19, 2017, in DuPont, Wash. Federal investigators say they don't yet know why the Amtrak train was traveling 50 mph over the speed limit when it derailed Monday south of Seattle. (AP Photo: Elaine Thompson / AP
A new system designed to make train travel safer after a string of crashes is being delayed again as railroads across the country — including the Bay Area’s Caltrain — ask for extensions of up to two years.
“I think the majority of commuter and passenger railroads, and even some freights, will ask for an extension,” said Susan Fleming, director of physical infrastructure at Congress’ nonpartisan watchdog, the Government Accountability Office. Despite widespread support for positive train control — the automated brakes that would override human error and potentially save lives — smaller agencies are struggling to buy and set up the technology.
“That kicks the can down the road a bit,” Fleming said.
Among those commuter lines is Caltrain, which runs along the Peninsula. For months it has hovered on a federal watch list of railroads that were at risk of missing the Dec. 31 deadline and getting hit with fines of up to $28,000 a day. Caltrain had installed 98 percent of the positive train control hardware by the end of October, but officials plan to request a two-year extension so they can test it and train the engineers.
The San Joaquin Valley’s Altamont Corridor Express is also on the watch list. Yet after months of jostling, spokesman Chris Kay said the rail line put equipment in place last week and will test it by the end of the year.
ACE sped up the process by doing early trial runs on a partial system, using antennas that were recalled on the East Coast because they couldn’t withstand heavy rain and snow. It has since swapped those parts for the correct antennas, Kay said.
“Each railroad has its own story,” Fleming said. “For some the challenge was money. Others had a limited pool of expertise ... and needed to hire people to make this happen.” On top of that, she said, only a few vendors and suppliers make the software and do the testing.
Congress set the timeline for all freight and passenger trains to incorporate positive train control after years of catastrophic accidents, in which trains overshot platforms, collided with posts or other vehicles, or hurtled off the track, sending passengers to their deaths. The mandate became more urgent last year, when an Amtrak Cascades train plunged from an overpass near Tacoma, Wash., killing three people, injuring many others and crushing cars on Interstate 5.
But many railroads have struggled to build the intricate network of GPS monitors, wireless radio towers, track- side detectors and computers to automatically slow trains down when they approach curves or trundle into stations.
“Being a small but mighty rail line, we kind of get pushed to the back with these projects,” Kay said, explaining why ACE has scrambled to catch up.
Two big obstacles stood in the way, he said. First, only a few companies make this technology, and the competition to get it is stiff. Because ACE has only 13 passenger locomotives, it fell to the back of the line. Second, positive train control requires intense coordination. ACE runs on tracks owned by Union Pacific, which had to install the system before ACE could outfit its trains separately.
ACE trains will be able to meet the Dec. 31 timeline because the system is so small, a spokesman says. Photo: Paul Chinn / The Chronicle
Still, Kay said, there’s an advantage to being small: “We can install this equipment and get all the testing done quickly.”
Caltrain’s situation is even more complicated. The agency has folded positive train control into a huge modernization project that includes electrifying the rail cars. So officials have to test the new automated brakes at a time when workers are on the tracks, digging potholes and putting up wires for the new electric system. They expect to have positive train control fully operating along the Peninsula corridor by the end of next year.
Some safety advocates are tentatively optimistic. Others are impatient.
“We’ve been pressing for some form of positive train control for well over 40 years,” said Chris O’Neil, spokesman for the National Transportation Safety Board. “And they’ve rolled it back, rolled it back, rolled it back. And now we’re on the brink of X number of railroads getting extensions, and one more deadline.”
Members of the safety board started rallying for positive train control in 1969, when two Penn Central commuter trains crashed head-on near Darien, Conn., killing four people and injuring 43. But Congress was slow to react, even as technology improved and other deadly collisions showed the need to implement it.
In 2008, 25 people died when a Union Pacific freight train collided with a Metrolink commuter train in Chatsworth (Los Angeles County), jolting the nation. That year federal lawmakers enacted the Rail Safety Improvement Act to require positive train control by 2015, a date they later pushed back. In the meantime, the country’s railways saw dozens more accidents with a common theme: An engineer, distracted or fatigued, misinterpreted a signal or paused to look at a cell phone. Legislators grappled with whether to enforce strict engineering requirements or go easy on agencies that lacked the money or manpower to build a complex control system.
Officials at the Federal Railroad Administration set a hard line with the December deadline — then extended it to 2020 for agencies that qualify. Robert Hall, director of railroad pipeline and hazardous materials investigations for the NTSB, said he hopes this will be the last postponement.
Kay applauded the new train control system, which will speed up travel and allow trains to run more frequently, while improving safety.
But he warned that positive train control is not “an end-all, be-all safety feature.” It won’t help if someone runs across the track, for example, and wouldn’t have prevented a 2016 mudslide in Sunol that derailed two ACE train cars and sent nine people to the hospital.
Yet safety officials say it probably would have headed off last year’s deadly derailment in Washington. Amtrak officials said that train had positive train control, but the technology was not yet operating.
Rachel Swan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @rachelswan