2024 Legislative interviews

Thursday, January 19, 2024

LWVSF: During the recent pandemic, California's open meeting laws were modified to comply with the public health regulations in order to protect the health of the public as well as that of our public officials. This shutdown period had unexpected side benefits. Electronic access to meetings enhanced accessibility for both the public and the officials, and it also increased public participation. However, at the same time, the move to online meetings reduced transparency and accountability by allowing public officials to avoid being present at a physical location where the public can directly engage.

So our question is, what changes would you like to see to our public meeting laws? And what process should California use to review these laws to ensure that we have a thoughtful and coordinated set of reforms that reflect both interest of the public and government? And, how do we maintain increased accessibility, and increased public participation, but without diminishing transparency and accountability.

Senator Wiener: I know we've had a lot of different bills moving through the legislature on this. It's been a little bit ad hoc, as different communities try to address different issues. So I am of the view that in-person public meetings tend to be the most effective in many ways in terms of face-to-face interactions with people. I just think it's more effective. I also understand that having remote options does increase participation in positive ways, with people who may not be able to be somewhere physically, but can be remotely, sometimes in negative ways. And we've seen situations where the anonymity of remote participation can really create some very toxic situations. So I do have concerns with public officials participating remotely.

I think there should be some potential exceptions for that in extraordinary situations. So I'm not categorically opposed to it. But I think it's problematic when public officials are not physically present. So that’s my general take on it, and I don't pretend to have all the solutions, and I suspect that it's going to take us probably a few years to iron things out.

LWVSF: Do you have any recommendations on the process that we should go through to determine the reforms that should be made, if any?

Senator Wiener: I think it would be good if the local governments were to try to speak with more of one voice, right now, it's very ad hoc, and it would be great for the cities and the special districts and school boards to go through their own process and make joint recommendations. But you know, I don't know if that would work.

LWVSF: What kinds of legislation would you bring or support to mitigate health effects of climate change, particularly air pollution and extreme heat events? 

Senator Wiener: The fundamental solution is to move away from fossil fuels and cut the problem off at its source. But, of course, while we fight to move in that direction we have these various impacts on health and other areas that we have to help mitigate. We know that these health impacts disproportionately affect low-income communities and communities of color. We have to especially focus on these most impacted communities and that means it's a variety of things. We wanna make sure that, for example, people can have air filtration systems in their homes to try to deal with some of the particulate matter in the air pollution. We need to continue to move towards mitigations on vehicles. We need to make sure that we are identifying some of these health problems, for example in schools where there are too few resources to evaluate these kids so that we can get them the care that they need quickly.

Also, we need to be more mindful, as we permit things, when communities are being negatively  impacted with health consequences because of not just climate, but pollution in general, that we are not focusing so much pollution on these communities. Ultimately, we have to cut it off at the source.

LWVSF: Housing underproduction has been identified as one of the most significant problems facing California today. How do we make substantial progress to increase housing and decrease homelessness?

Senator Wiener: I have a lot of opinions there. Obviously, it's been a real focus of my work. Yeah, we have a profound housing shortage, and we make it too hard to build new homes in a variety of ways. We historically have not zoned for enough new homes, particularly through very broad-based, single-family home zoning, meaning that you can only build a single-family home. We've worked to change that by enacting zoning legislation directly at the state level. But also by requiring cities to zone locally for enough housing, and that is happening through the housing element process.

We also make it take way too long to get a permit for new housing, even if the zoning allows for it. You could propose a project that applies with all of the zoning and other rules, and it can still take years to actually get the permit. And so, we have been moving towards ministerial approval, which means that if you comply with all the rules, check all the boxes, no discretion. You just get your permit quickly, and that is both good government and a way to accelerate the permitting of new homes.

We also have a problem with the cost of new housing, with the cost of construction and permitting, etc. Shortening the permit timeline will save money. There are also cities that impose very hefty impact fees on new homes, which can really increase the cost. That is something we've been looking at. It's a touchy subject to cities that rely on these fees for revenue. I do have a bill this year given the current economic circumstances with high costs, and in particular, with high interest rates. A bill that will allow developers to pay their local fees at the end of the project instead of the beginning, which will have a meaningful impact in terms of allowing projects to move forward. The cities will still get the fees, but it'll just be later. The bill will also extend the duration of the permits by 18 months.

LWVSF: I just wanted to see if there are other major issues you think the Legislature should deal with in 2024, and also want to go back to your last comment about housing. It looks like you introduced legislation about refining the role of the Coastal Commission.

Senator Wiener: The Coastal Commission plays a really important role in California and protecting coastal resources, the beaches, bluffs and wetlands, and all of the beautiful things on the coast that are so important. However, the Coastal Commission also plays a role in housing and approving coastal zones, and interacting with local governments. The Coastal Commission is not a housing agency, yet it has taken on this role and has put roadblocks in front of housing that has really no impact on coastal resources. We just saw recently in a Santa Monica project that had broad local support from the city council and environmental groups and labor groups and State legislators, and the Commission insisted on putting all sorts of additional costs on the project.

So it's a problem. Last year, for the first time in SB 423, which is a law I authored that extends the streamlining law, we removed the blanket exemption for the coastal zone and allowed the law to apply in the coastal zone. San Francisco has been experiencing significant challenges with the Coastal Commission, and frankly, the Commission is meddling in some housing decisions in San Francisco that have nothing to do with the environment or coastal resources. So the bill will redraw the boundary of the coastal zone to exclude parts of the Sunset and the Richmond that should just not be in the coastal zone. It will also make clear that if a city has an approved housing element, the city is, of course, required to then, within a certain amount of time, and either one or a few years, rezone and conform with the housing element. But right now, if you’re part of the city is in the coastal zone, the Coastal Commission can take as long as it wants to sign off on that rezoning. We're gonna put the same deadline on the Coastal Commission that the city has to do the rezoning. So there are a few things like that. And, again, I support the Coastal Commission’s excellent work around preserving coastal resources. The Commission has been delving way too much into housing issues that have nothing to do with coastal resources.

LWVSF: What about your personal priorities?

Senator Wiener: We're going to be doing a big AI Safety bill this year that we've been working on. Also, last year the Governor vetoed my psychedelics decriminalization bill, but said that he would be open to supporting a psychedelics bill focused on therapeutics, so we're working on a bill to enable that. Also, I'll be carrying the legislation to authorize a Bay Area regional public transportation funding measure for 2026 to shore up the finances of our transit systems. And then we have some other great bills, too, but those are some of the big ones.

LWVSF: Can you elaborate on the AI Safety Bill? Who are the constituents? Who are the people who have a stake in this that are helping you?

Senator Wiener: We're working with a huge number of people in the industry and academia and advocacy. You know, everyone has a stake in it, because AI has such a huge promise to benefit humanity. But, there are risks as well. And yes, there are the apocalyptic risks, but also other risks as well. And so we want to make sure that as people are developing large language models, that they are assessing the safety risks and then mitigating any risks that they determine exist.

LWVSF: Does the State have any particular commission or committee overseeing AI?

Senator Wiener: Not now. Right now the agency that handles data privacy is doing some AI work around data privacy. And the governor has issued an executive order around a few things. We’re just now getting into AI regulation. There's been some over the years around deep fakes. But now we're gonna see a number of bills this year going broader.

LWVSF: You are probably familiar with the redistricting process that happened in San Francisco and some of the pros and cons of it. I'd really like to understand how you feel about it now that we're two or three years later, about how that redistricting process went and how we could improve it for the future. I know a 10 year thing synced up with the census. But if you want to make change sometimes you have to do it a little bit in advance, right of the change.

Senator Wiener: So we can criticize San Francisco's redistricting process and how the Commissioners were appointed, etc. My objection to some of the critiques of the most recent one is that it was really no different then the process in 2011 or 2001 or in the 1990s. They were all politicized. Every single one of them. And I felt like some of the groups, coalitions that were harshly criticizing how this played out, were doing it because they disagreed with the result, because the more left faction in San Francisco politics had always got in its way in the three previous ones, and they weren't getting their way in this one. And so they decided to criticize the process, which was exactly the same as all of the other ones. So I have no problem with people saying, hey, we should have a different process or elected officials shouldn't appoint registry commissioners, or whatever the case may be. It's always appropriate to step back. But I know there was a bill that I know the League was involved in, the Isaac Brian bill in the Legislature, which I ultimately voted for with some qualms because there were some additional changes that I wanted to see. The Governor ultimately vetoed it. Well, I think it was Common Cause that was really aggressively comparing San Francisco's process to what happened in Los Angeles, which I thought was totally inappropriate. What happened in Los Angeles went well beyond process issues. It was just horrific in terms of blatant racism. What happened in San Francisco was the process worked the way it was designed, and people can love that process or hate that process. And so I had concerns, and my colleague, Mr. Brian acknowledged that, and really worked hard to stop lumping the two together.

So what I expressed during the State legislative process about how it should work and how it should work in San Francisco is to me (that) it's fine not to have elected officials appointing the commissioners. I'm totally fine with that. There needs to be more than one appointing body. I like having multiple appointing bodies so that you never have a situation where you have one appointing body that is aligned with one faction and that ends up tainting the whole process. So, having three, they can be retired judges, or the ethics commissioner, or the controller, or whatever the case may be. But having multiple is good. There were some very severe restrictions in the bill in terms of who was qualified to serve. I thought those went a little too far, and they all made sense in isolation, but they were so harsh that they would exclude an enormous number of qualified people from serving. And so there were a few things like that, which to me are details, right? I'm okay with doing a reform. I'm sure there will be a reform. I hope it's done in a collaborative way. We have time to do it. I agree it's better to do it early. So that's my general take on the situation.

So hopefully next time we can have a system, a tight system designed that doesn't advantage or disadvantage anyone. And I agree doing it years in advance is great, because then you’re doing it before you even know what the political dynamics are gonna be. That's a good idea.

Tuesday, January 23, 2024

LWVSF: During the recent pandemic, California's open meeting laws were modified to comply with the public health regulations in order to protect the health of the public as well as that of our public officials. This shutdown period had unexpected side benefits. Electronic access to meetings enhanced accessibility for both the public and the officials, and it also increased public participation. However, at the same time, the move to online meetings reduced transparency and accountability by allowing public officials to avoid being present at a physical location where the public can directly engage.

So our question is, what changes would you like to see to our public meeting laws? And what process should California use to review these laws to ensure that we have a thoughtful and coordinated set of reforms that reflect both interest of the public and government? And how do we maintain increased accessibility, and increased public participation, but without diminishing transparency and accountability.

Assemblymember Ting: I think it's a great question. I think that now that we have gotten through COVID I think all the public meetings should be held in a public location for us in the legislature. We never deviated, at least in the Assembly, from holding our meetings in the Capitol in a public location for a while. We had limited public access to them physically. And then, eventually, we reopened our doors and the public could come back in. But they were also broadcast on our Internet channel. And as well, we allow people to give testimony over the phone. So I think what you wanna do is continue to allow the public to give their opinion by phone or by Zoom, but I think it's very important that the public officials that are in the meeting are actually physically in a public building, a publicly accessible space, unless there is some sort of extenuating circumstance, such as a natural disaster like an earthquake, or maybe there's some sort of military incursion or something, but it's really only under those circumstances that they should not be back in city hall or their school boardrooms conducting business as usual.

LWVSF: So you would support an ongoing sort of hybrid type meeting environment?

Assemblymember Ting: Hybrid is a pretty broad term. So I believe that public officials should be having meetings in their designated chambers that are accessible to the public. The public can come, view them or participate. And I like the fact that people can call in or they can Zoom in and give their input for those people who can't physically be there, which is probably a lot of people.

LWVSF: What kinds of legislation would you bring or support to mitigate the health effects of climate change, particularly air pollution and extreme heat events?

Assemblymember Ting: I've been a champion around climate change. In particular, a couple of different issues: one around clean transportation and trying to get the state to move toward clean cars. As you all know, transportation accounts for about 40 percent of our greenhouse gas emissions. So given that 80 percent of those emissions are from people driving passenger cars; I think most people assume they're from buses or UPS trucks or semis. They’re on the freeway. But no, they're really from you and me driving to work, driving our kids to school, running errands in our neighborhood or commuting to work. So I've been a champion to really create incentives to make it easier to charge, to look at charging infrastructure and build that out so that we can really embrace a clean car revolution.

I've also been a champion around recycling, and compost, in particular. As you know, these resources are finite. Too often we look at our resources as they're infinite, and we think of things as disposable when we should think of things as reusable. And I've really been a champion around recycling, and particularly around beverage bottles. We passed and signed into law the highest recycling content in the world to make sure that beverage bottles will eventually have 50 recycled materials in all the different containers that they have.

Also, I've been making sure that people do not accidentally contaminate compost. I think compost is one of the great things, so much of our own waste around food and so many edible items are compostable. And it's probably the largest chunk of our waste every single week when we're taking off the trash.

LWVSF: What are you encouraging or recommending for the grid?

Assemblymember Ting: You know there has to be greater grid resiliency. I think we need to figure out how to make a grid more of a 21st century grid. One way would be allowing electric cars to put energy back into the grid. Unfortunately, right now, we don't have a lot of bi-directional cars in terms of being able to put energy back in. And also the infrastructure is really not there for a lot of people's homes, a lot of places.

There are major challenges in so many different areas to talk about all the undergrounding that people are doing so that we don't have to do these power shut offs on occasion. You look at a number of issues in terms of making sure that we're adding energy and building more transmission and making sure that we're looking at different renewable options. I think that we haven't fully realized that. So, there's definitely got to be more supply in terms of energy, clean energy. And I think there also has to be a greater utilization of new technology so that we can put energy into the grid, like I mentioned.

LWVSF: Housing underproduction has been identified as one of the most significant problems facing California today. How do we make substantial progress to increase housing and decrease homelessness?

Assemblymember Ting: This is a huge issue not just in the Bay Area but really all over the state. Not only do we need to build more housing  everywhere, we have to make sure that we're building more housing where the jobs are. It doesn't help to build housing 100 miles away from the jobs. Then you're adding to the greenhouse gas impact. You're making people drive two or three hours from their work into the job centers. So I think we definitely need to build more affordable housing, especially in our more urbanized areas. One of the scariest stats that I've heard the last couple of years is that the fastest segment of homelessness are people over 50. That's not who most people think of as homeless. That's not who people think of as the most vulnerable. You talk about the people who have mental health issues or substance abuse issues. But, yet, this is the fastest growing segment of homeless people in California, and the reason is because all you need is one issue, in terms of someone losing a job, getting divorced, or maybe a spouse passing away, to really fall into a very tough financial situation.

What can we do? What have I done? I've really worked on a number of pieces of legislation to ensure that we can make it easier to build accessory dwelling units because it's only one or two units in someone's backyard or on the first floor of their unit or in their garage. I've also worked to make the California Housing Accountability Act better, so that local governments can stop frivolous development from happening in their cities. I had that happen with a development at the Nordstrom’s garage site in San Francisco. Lastly, we have surplus land. Almost every public agency or quasi-public agency has surplus land, and oftentimes they use it for something else other than housing. Well, the laws have been on the books for decades. Affordable housing has the first right of refusal on surplus lands, and most people have circumvented it or gone around it. I did two bills to tighten it, and it's finally working. So now we're really seeing a lot more affordable housing options being built on that surplus land. Lastly, I would say that if we don't advocate for more housing in our neighborhoods, in our own individual neighborhoods, we are forcing the state to take away local authority, and we are starting to do that already, little by little.

Now we would prefer that cities and locales end up developing their own housing and really maintain that zoning. But if cities continue to not be able to keep up with their area goals and be able to build enough housing as well as affordable housing, they're really forcing the states hand to deregulate, and also to create more statewide streamlining regulations to bypass local zoning and local orders.

LWVSF: What are your personal priorities and what are you going to champion in the upcoming year?

Assemblymember Ting: One thing that I've been championing has been criminal justice reform, primarily in two areas. One is people who legally have the right to have their records expunged get a streamlined approach to expungement. Traditionally, they would have to go through about a hundred different steps to expunge their records. These are people who have been arrested and then haven’t been convicted. So those should automatically get expunged. And then people who have served their time and are serving their time for, say, a nonviolent offense. And that's not a sex offense. Then they are eligible for the record expungement. We've streamlined that and the reason that's so important is that oftentimes people do not rent housing to people who have records, and oftentimes there's a bias for employment against people who have records. You see this if someone doesn't have housing, if someone doesn't have employment. How can you expect them not to return to their criminal background if you give them no real choice. So, again, our philosophy is that we give people access to housing, get people access to jobs. It's really up to them from that point forward on what they do with their life. And we continue to hope they keep choosing to do the right things.

One of my personal priorities that I've been a big champion of is closing more prisons. Our prison population has dropped over 50% in the last number of years. We have 168 prisons that started to close or have closed and also yards within individual facilities. But even given that , we have 10–14,000 empty beds on any particular given night in California. And just to give you a sense, that number is the equivalent of about three to five empty prisons every day. The prison budgets have gone up from about $10 billion to about over $15 billion since I've been in the legislature. I think most people would rather see that money being spent on education, on housing, on health care, on food, on any number of different items. Or even people would like to see maybe better rehabilitation so that we don't see as many repeat offenders. So that's one of the things I'll continue to focus on: closing additional prisons, trying to save more money in our corrections budget, and making sure that we are being very thoughtful. One of the only ways to reduce our corrections budget is to close facilities. There are a lot of costs just keeping a facility up and running, staffing, maintenance and things like that.

And part of the reason I’m so passionate about it from a fiscal point of view is that we also have billions of dollars of deferred maintenance. So if we actually close some of these facilities we’ll save billions of dollars in deferred maintenance, and we'll have to fix those prisons the longer we keep people in those prisons. Then we'll have to not only fix them up and maintain and operate them. It's a huge cost to the state and money that I think most people would rather see spent on education, on childcare, on healthcare, on the environment, on housing. So a whole host of other issues that are bigger.

LWVSF: One small followup question: When you're closing down prisons, it probably means that the prison is farther away from inmates’ family members, and people who could support them in reintegrating into society. Do you have a plan for how that might be able to happen?

Assemblymember Ting: You're absolutely right. The closer you are to families, the better the results. Unfortunately, if you look at almost all of our prisons, they are all in remote locations. There are almost no prisons really near population centers. There's San Quentin in Marin County; there's Norco and Riverside. I think there's the women's prison, I think, outside of LA County and maybe one or two more. But almost all of them are in remote locations, like three to five hours from a population center to get there. And so you're absolutely right that that should be part of the prioritization, the remoteness of the prisons, because part of the challenge is not only that they are hard for families to get to; it's also hard to hire people. When I say people, I’m not talking just about the prison guards, but maybe it's like a third of the staff: our medical professionals — doctors, psychiatrists, nurses and so on. You know you can't hire those folks in those regions. The other piece is that they don't have access to services. One of the reasons San Quentin has so many services is because they're in the Bay Area. So they have college professors. They have advocates who live in the area where there are resources that serve that facility. That's why it's so hard to get services into the other prisons.

I was visiting a prison in Corcoran. I talked to some inmates and they talked about how they used to have a weekly class taught by a faculty member from the community college. Then that just stopped because the person retired. And it’s been two years, and no one's been back since. I don’t think it's because the prison didn't want people. It's just a lack of resources. So I think you know your question is excellent, but unfortunately most of our facilities are far away, so they're already pretty inconvenient.

LWVSF: I have a final question around the redistricting process that happened in San Francisco. I'm sure that you are aware that it was a little controversial, but maybe not any more controversial than any other redistricting processes. Are there recommendations that you would have for local processes, either in San Francisco or San Mateo, that you think should be incorporated into the redistricting process going forward?

Assemblymember Ting: Obviously the process in San Francisco was extraordinarily contentious. This is the third time we've done this process, and the last two times were nowhere near as contentious. And I think it's more a reflection of the people in the process itself. I think it's a reflection of the anger and frustration within the communities right now, and I think that's very unfortunate that we can't address this civilly. And this is not just around redistricting. It's across the board, and all of our public discourse, regardless of what issues. So I would say I would have to study it further. I don't know that the process needs to be reformed. This is the third time that we had the same process, and they worked fine the first two times. It really was the people who were involved, and when I say the people, I don't mean just the commissioners, I mean all the stakeholders surrounding that process as well.