2020 legislative interviews

Do you support ​ACA 6 (McCarty)​, the Free the Vote Act, which would place an initiative on the November 2020 ballot to amend the California Constitution to restore voting rights to people on parole?

I support ACA 6 because it's important that we have as many people voting as possible. When someone has paid their debt and served their time and are being reintegrated into society, they should have all their rights restored and one of those is voting. It makes no sense to preclude people who are on parole from voting. It disproportionately excludes communities of color from voting and that distorts the Democratic process. We would be happy to participate in any public events, including the League of Women Voters of San Francisco) in supporting ACA 6.

Housing, transportation, and emissions reductions to fight climate change are closely linked. California’s sprawling suburbs and car commuting culture have been expanding for decades. In order to find affordable, decent housing, many urban workers are forced to endure longer and longer commutes. Two serious consequences are huge carbon emissions from automobiles and the continued loss of arable land to development. We need to preserve arable lands, forests, grasslands and other lands necessary for both carbon sequestration and food security, and to maintain biodiversity, and yet build more housing to accommodate our growing population. Given this urgent need, what legislative steps would you take to help us move away from our current transportation and development trends?  How do you propose to engage communities to build up not out, and at least develop - if not implement - a public transportation plan?

Thank you to the League for supporting SB50. This is exactly what SB50 was all about. We are short millions of homes. When we have restrictive legislation and city zoning in urban centers and job centers and by transit stations, all we do is either make sure that we do not have enough homes, or the homes we do build will be sprawled covering up farmlands, building up wildfire zones, destroying open space, clogging up our freeways, increasing carbon emissions, forcing people into multi-hour commutes which is unhealthy for individuals and for families and bad when people show up tired at work. It is terrible in all respects. SP50 was designed to help alleviate this. Unfortunately, SB 50 almost passed the Senate floor but failed. We are working on some other legislation and so hopefully soon we'll be able to make some changes, although I cannot guarantee it. In terms of transit we need to dramatically increase our investment in transit. We passed AB51 a few years ago that puts almost a billion dollars a year of new funding into transit. We've had various regional measures that we've passed, but we also saw a few measures fail on Tuesday. We have to find ways to move the dial in terms of transit funding because we're not doing nearly enough.  I'm hoping we can put a major regional measure on the ballot In November. It is being worked on now. I’m not 100% confident it will get on the ballot in November, but I hope it will because we really need the investment.

For the Smart Train there were weird politics around it in Marin and Sonoma, and there was a campaign against it, and it needed 2/3 vote. So that was very difficult.  The Contra Costa one I'm not entirely sure, I know that the Service Employees International Union came out against it and put money against it. The money for transit funding has to be generated somewhere. Whether it's at the state, regional, or local level. We're just not doing enough. 

To look at the positive side this was a bill that five years ago would have been dead the minute it was introduced. It would have been laughed out of the building because it was too radical. In a period of a few years we were able to build a coalition and create the political space such that there were twenty senators who either voted for it or were willing to vote for it. There were eighteen who voted for it and there were two more who were willing to vote for it if we had that twenty-first vote. One of our co- authors resigned from the Senate in the fall and another one was on the East Coast. We were hobbled by two of our votes and yet we still had twenty votes. We made extraordinary progress. That we even got to the point where we are on the floor, let alone on the verge of passing it is tremendous progress. The way I look at it is even though it was disappointing to lose a bill, especially when you have things like resignations and people out of town, things beyond your control, it is positive in many ways. Our biggest challenge with that bill was the County of Los Angeles. LA County is a huge problem around statewide housing policy. The nimbyism in LA is much worse than the Bay Area. The infatuation with mandating only single-family homes and the opposition to density is absolutely rampant. The politics of LA and housing are really, really hard. There are ten senators from LA. They make up a quarter of the Senate and we’ve got one. So, when you take a quarter of the body off the table and we still almost did it, that is progress. With the resignation, someone on the East Coast, and nine out of ten of the LA senators against us, we still came within one vote of passing it. So that just goes to show you the strength of the politics in favor of this kind of legislation.

I introduced a bill yesterday and we have another one on Monday I'm introducing but I can't just reintroduce SP50. I have to rely on the leadership of the Senate to work on passing housing legislation. I don't know what that will end up being. I have to rely on leadership to produce a good bill. 

[In response to the question asking what the League can do to help support this effort.]
The LA County League needs to be very vocal. The Senate members down there need to hear more from people who support pro-housing legislation because they are certainly hearing from the opponents.

 As a legislative matter, what can be done to both support those who are trying to build housing, especially housing which is categorized as deed-restricted affordable or permanent supportive, and encourage or incentivize those still resisting? Where do you stand on SB 50, a bill supported by the League of Women Voters of California?

I often disagree with the majority of the Board of Supervisors on housing, but the Mayor is strong and our entire delegation here is unanimous. We do not have a problem with our State delegation here.

We have a lot of religious institutions, churches, and nonprofit hospitals that have excess land they would like to turn into affordable housing. This land is often not zoned for housing or for multi-unit housing. In order to develop this land, you have to go through a whole process of approval that becomes hard or impossible. It is hard enough to put the funding together for these projects and then you have to go through years of a process for rezoning and CEQA issues. This is a big problem. This bill will take care of all that. It rezones the land and grants the owners ministerial buy rights as a right of approval, so they don't have to go through the approval process. This is for 100% affordable housing. The nonprofit affordable housing developers from Northern and Southern California who partner with the churches to develop projects came to us. We've since been engaged with the religious community and they are very supportive. The development will mostly take place in parking lots. Most churches and hospitals don't want to demolish their structures unless they are auxiliary buildings no longer in use. Nonprofit charitable hospitals are also interested. They often have very large parking lots they would like to develop into affordable housing. 

What other major issues do you think the legislature must deal with in 2020?  What are your personal priorities? 

I always prioritize criminal justice reform. We have two bills this year. We would like to expand the jury pool beyond DMV and voter registration rolls to include the tax rolls, so we have a more diverse jury pool. And then we're doing legislation to make sure that expert witnesses are relying on actual scientific testimony and not junk. And then we are doing a bunch of PG&E blackout related legislation and solar energy legislation. PG&E and the wildfires will be a big topic in general this year. And I have several different LGBTQ civil rights pieces of legislation.  

Do you support ​ACA 6 (McCarty), the Free the Vote Act, which would place an initiative on the November 2020 ballot to amend the California Constitution to restore voting rights to people on parole?

I’m proud to support ACA6. I’m a strong believer that once people have served their time and paid their debt to society; the debt has been paid. They should be able to function as an adult in society. I want an expungement bill to clear up peoples’ records, so that they can get housing and a job. Quite often if people have any kind of criminal record, even twenty or thirty years ago, they find it very difficult to get housing. They can’t get a job, and if they can’t get a job it’s very hard to be a successful person in this community. So again, I was very proud to vote for ACA6.

Housing, transportation, and emissions reductions to fight climate change are closely linked. California’s sprawling suburbs and car commuting culture have been expanding for decades. Given the urgent need to preserve arable land, forests, and grasslands, what legislative steps would you take to help us move away from our current transportation and development trends? How do you propose to engage communities to build up not out, and at least develop - if not implement - a public transportation plan? 

Let’s just talk about transportation. We need more housing around public transit. We have built a significant amount of public transit. We have six great public transit agencies here in the Bay Area, but our mistake was not building housing near each one of those transit stops. You get to the transit stop, but it’s surrounded by single-family homes. That just doesn’t make sense, and doesn’t really utilize that investment. 

I support expanding our public transit infrastructure. We helped put RM3 on the ballot, which was to increase tolls in order to fix our bridges, but also there was a significant amount of resources given for Caltrans and for the BART extension to San Jose—really expanding and building out that infrastructure for public transit. So that's the first issue.

Second, we know that not everybody can take public transit. In San Francisco we’re very lucky that we have a significant amount of public transit. In fact, it’s more convenient to take transit or walk or bike than it is to drive. But in the other eight counties in the Bay Area, and many other parts of the state, people drive in cars. So, if they’re going to drive a car, we really want them to be driving clean cars, and I’ve been working very hard to change our incentive structure to get more people into clean cars. I’ve been pushing for a deadline to get out of dirty cars and into clean cars. We think eventually the automakers will finally start catching up and building more clean cars, different types of clean cars. That is a very important piece of the equation. 

The other piece that we haven’t been able to figure out is the increased need for housing required by the increased jobs. Right now, we have jobs growing in areas, in communities, but the communities won’t accept the additional housing needed to support the workers. A great example is Cupertino where they allowed Apple to build this incredibly wonderful and beautiful campus, and then they denied all the housing permits for new developments. We can’t increase jobs and decrease housing, or not add housing at all. We’re at the point of talking to different employers headquartered here and committed to stay here. They’ve decided they’re going to stop growing their workforce or limit their growth, because the people have nowhere to live, and they can’t in good conscience hire knowing of the limited housing. This is going to have the largest impact on the middle class. The new Facebook building in Burlingame, with 3,400 new jobs is great, but they need to do what Google is doing, building housing at Moffett Field. So where are those 3,400 people going to live?  Will their commute further clog our transportation systems? 

This is not just an issue for our region. It’s really an issue for our entire state. This issue is occurring in Los Angeles, in Orange County, in San Diego. There is no part of urban coastal California that is not impacted by these issues. Those are some of things we’re working on. 

And then in the Bay Area we’re looking at working with many of the community leaders and business leaders on a much larger tax proposal to raise $100 billion for transportation— not just for maintenance— dollars that would exclusively be going to expanding infrastructure for public transit, expanding BART, expanding Caltrans, and making sure the express lanes are all linked. Right now, express lanes don’t work - they start, and they stop. So, they’re great for the one minute you’re on them, but eventually they stop and clog the traffic. We want to draw the express lanes to go all around the Bay and for people can use them.  

As a legislative matter, what can be done to both support those who are trying to build housing, especially housing which is categorized as deed-restricted affordable or permanent supportive, and encourage or incentivize those still resisting? Where do you stand on SB 50, a bill supported by the League of Women Voters of California? Update: SB 50 failed early in the 2020 session. However, we expect another housing production bill this cycle. Please ask your representatives their thoughts about SB 50 and to describe the contours of a bill that they would support.

I was one of the few proud co-authors of SB50. And I’ve been in support of increasing density around transit. I think it’s one of the most critical things we must do. I also was proud to author two bills last year that were signed into law. One was AB68, which helped streamline the construction of Accessory Dwelling Units or in-law units. We think this will be a major game-changer. 

We’re starting to see companies form to specifically build ADUs. We’re starting to see investors invest in specifically building ADUs. We believe, based on modeling from some of our community organizations, that this could help create upwards of 50,000 units a year in California. So, I’m proud of AB68. I also worked with our affordable housing developers on AN1486 to follow up on my 2014 legislation to tighten up the loopholes around our Surplus Land Act. Our Surplus Land Act asks all the different government agencies and public agencies if they have surplus land, the first right of refusal goes to affordable housing developers. We unfortunately have a lot of vacant land that’s being held by government entities that could be used for housing. They’re somewhat hoarding this very valuable land, and we’re trying to encourage them to not just hold it—that we have communities that need this valuable land for housing, and they need to free it up. 

I’m also proud as Chairman of the Assembly Budget Committee to be champion of more funding for affordable housing and homelessness. Last year we funded over $2 billion in housing and homelessness alone. The previous year was over a billion. Those were the two largest state investments in housing and homelessness in a very, very long time. So, I’m proud that we are not only streamlining the process, but we’re also putting our money where our mouth is, and really trying to get cities, counties and different non-profits the resources they need to get this housing.

One of the big challenges right now with both affordable and market rate housing is that our construction industry got decimated during the Great Recession. We have lost a huge percentage of people in that workforce. So, if you can imagine from 2008 to 2012 when there really wasn’t much construction, all those employees found other careers, found other professions. So even if we streamline, even as we’ve given money for resources, there’s a huge lack of workforce. And all those wildfires didn’t help the housing situation either. So not only are we not keeping pace, but we’ve lost thousands of housing stock that we haven’t replaced. So, we are working to make it significantly more attractive and easier to build in California in hopes that the industry will come back and recover.

What other major issues do you think the legislature must deal with in 2020? What are your personal priorities?

We’ve already talked about several of them: housing, homelessness and transportation. This year I’ll be introducing legislation around housing to help provide some tax relief for moderate-income housing. We, even though we’re lagging on affordable housing, have almost nothing built for people who make between 80% - 120% of the area’s median income. The market rate housing—it’s getting some housing stock. The affordable housing folks get a little bit at the low-income level, but the people in the middle get nothing. They’re getting squeezed out. And just so you know, all these great commercial corridors that we love, whether we’re in San Francisco or San Mateo County, whether you’re talking about Burlingame Avenue, or about downtown San Mateo—these wonderful commercial quarters filled with small businesses—if you talk to every single one of these businesses you’ll learn they can’t find people to work in those stores, because most can’t afford to live there. It’s great to drive five minutes to go to work. It’s not great to drive two hours to go to a low-income job. So, if they must work at a small business, they might as well work in the community they live in, rather than do that huge commute. So, we’re trying to help with “the missing middle”. They don’t get any help. They don’t get state help either. So it’s a big challenge. 

Last year I worked on recycling. We’re going to continue that; we have a recycling system that is broken. Right now, the recycling that we put in our blue bins is not getting recycled. Much of the plastic is going to landfill. About two years ago China stopped taking our plastic; today there’s no market for most of our used plastic. And so, I’ve been looking to create a recycling market here in California, trying to encourage a higher recycle content in beverage bottles like bottled water, bottled soft drinks. I’m trying to make sure we have manufacturers here that will take that recycling, will make it recycled plastic, and sell it to manufacturers. But there’s not enough of a market, so we’re trying to do some mandates—to mandate that there is a certain percentage of recycling in those beverage bottles. That bill was unfortunately vetoed by the governor. We’re working with the administration to make some amendments, and hopefully we’ll get it signed.  

Another area I’ve been working very closely on is criminal justice reform. I had mentioned, that we spend upwards of $13 billion on our corrections systems for approximately 130,000 inmates. So, if you do simple division, it’s $100,000 a year per inmate. It would cost about the same to stay at the Ritz Carleton. But they don’t get treated like they’re staying at the Ritz Carleton. They don’t get that kind of service. Everything that we’ve been doing we need to significantly reform. One of the ways is to reduce recidivism. If we could stop them from going back that’s a huge help. That’s why I passed AD1076 last year, which expunged their records. But again, these are low-level offenders. These are not murderers or high-level, violent felonies. These are for non-violent felonies that already had the ability to be expunged. However, their records weren’t cleared because we didn’t have the funding to do so. But, we worked with the Attorney General. They’re going to develop a database that will help clear up peoples’ records. And the hope is that with cleaner records they’ll get housing and the ability to work. The whole cycle will hopefully keep them out of the corrections system.  It’s much too large, and we’re spending almost as much on those 130,000 inmates as we’re spending on the hundreds of thousands of college students going into community college, UC and CSU, which is absurd. So that’s an area that’s a major priority of mine. 

Also, I’m working to streamline some of our entitlement programs around CalFresh. It can be very hard to get CalFresh support, and it’s so easy to get dropped even though eligible. We hear of families who are food insecure; they don’t have enough food, but find themselves not eligible for these programs. Significant dollars for those programs come from the Federal Government. It’s not even California paying for it. The government bureaucracy makes difficult to participate. Individuals are treated like criminals when asking for help. Oftentimes, to get on to one of these government programs you must hire a lawyer. What’s interesting is that if you have the money to hire a lawyer you wouldn’t need help from a government program. It’s completely ridiculous. Again, these are some of the major priorities that we’re going to be working on this year. Obviously, chairing the Budget Committee I’ll be working very closely with the Governor’s office and the State Senate making sure that our budget priorities remain strong. I’m very proud that we continue to have a high reserve. We’ve been very disciplined with spending and saving, and also planning for that “rainy day”. We’re proud of being much more prudent, and to have gotten help from the voters of California to preserve the rainy-day fund. 

I’m also very supportive of Schools and Communities First.