As California Governor Gavin Newsom continues his Not-Running-for-President campaign, voters at home seem to be more than a little irritated with him.
The latest poll from the UC Berkeley Institute of Government Studies and the Los Angeles Times found Newsom’s approval rating to be an abysmal 44%, worse than the previous low he achieved at the French Laundry. Forty-nine percent of registered California voters said they disapproved of the job he was doing as governor, including 25% of Democrats.
Maybe Californians have grown tired of being props on the national stage, watching the back of the governor’s head as he talks to cameras on the east coast. Everybody can see what’s happening. Even Pennsylvania’s U.S. Senator John Fetterman called Newsom out for running a campaign for president without having “the guts to announce it.”
One thing a potential presidential candidate needs on his resume is a big achievement, and Newsom’s record is pretty much a trackless field, showing not even a footprint toward a genuine accomplishment. Here’s how bleak it is: On Thursday, Newsom’s office put out a news release bragging that the governor attended a ribbon-cutting ceremony because the state government cleared litter from a vacant lot in San Francisco and turned it into a tree nursery. Cost to taxpayers: $3.5 million, not counting the ribbon.
One day you may see the tree nursery clip in a campaign commercial. It won’t fill 30 seconds, so there will be time to show Newsom thundering in support of a never-going-to-happen constitutional convention to rewrite the Second Amendment. There would even be time to show him signing the law that requires income-based electricity charges, except that there were no pictures allowed.
About his COVID response, the less said the better (see “French Laundry,” above).
Maybe at one time Newsom imagined that he’d cut the ribbon on the nation’s first high-speed rail line and brag to “Morning Joe” that it was funded with a hidden greenhouse gas tax run by air quality regulators. That didn’t work out. At last check, the San Francisco-to-L.A. route was inexplicably under construction between Merced and Bakersfield, the hidden tax was raising the price of gasoline and electricity, and the nation’s first bullet train was running between Miami and Orlando.
So what’s the legacy? What’s the big accomplishment that can be on TV screens as trumpets play triumphantly?
Did you guess? He’s going to solve homelessness!
Never mind that Gov. Newsom has been “solving” homelessness since he was mayor of San Francisco, or that the crisis is worse than ever, or that the state has already spent an estimated $20 billion on utterly failed policies.
A policy may be a complete failure, but you can still throw other people’s money at it. All that’s needed is voter approval to take on $6.38 billion of debt, plus voter approval to permanently redirect tax revenue that was supposed to pay for county mental health services. Who needs county mental health services, especially when a chunk of that money can be diverted to homeless-housing donors, er, developers?
That, in a nutshell, is Proposition 1 on the March statewide primary ballot.
“Governor Newsom Puts Historic Mental Health Transformation on March 2024 Ballot,” headlined the press release from Newsom’s office on October 12. Newsom signed two bills, Senate Bill 326 and Assembly Bill 531, that together would allow voters to “transform the state’s mental health system” by “modernizing the Mental Health Services Act” and by saddling Californians with $6.38 billion in new bond debt to build “new behavioral health housing and treatment settings.”
The Mental Health Services Act was Proposition 63 in 2004. It placed a 1% tax on incomes above $1 million, dedicating the revenue to new, additional mental health services in the state’s 58 counties. It was supposed to improve outcomes, including reducing homelessness and involvement with the criminal justice system. It was also supposed to reduce hospitalizations for serious mental health conditions.
Gov. Newsom has decided that the money can be better spent by removing discretion from the counties, imposing “best practices” determined by the state, and diverting about 30% of the money to build housing.
Is that better? Not everybody thinks so.
The other part of Proposition 1 is a huge increase in debt: $6.38 billion in bonds for, according to the governor’s press release, “more than 11,150 new behavioral health beds and housing and 26,700 outpatient treatment slots.” If that sounds like a very high price tag for not all that much, it’s even worse than it sounds. With interest, $6.38 billion in bonds will end up costing taxpayers over $10 billion.
Proposition 1 provides no money to build temporary housing or emergency shelters to help homeless individuals get off the streets immediately. It funds the inadequate “community” mental health system, in which no facility may have more than 16 beds, instead of building high-quality mental health hospitals with more beds and staffing to provide appropriate care to more people. Although federal law prevents the federal government from providing matching funds for the cost of care in a mental health facility with more than 16 beds, states can request waivers from this restriction. Gov. Newsom has chosen not to do so.
All the taxpayer-funded housing built under Proposition 1 will be subject to the rules of “Housing First,” including the rule that no one can be compelled to receive treatment for substance use disorder as a condition of receiving the housing.
That means you’ll be paying for “behavioral health beds” while the people in them can continue to use drugs.
No one yet knows what this whole program will cost. However, the Secretary of State estimated that one part of Proposition 1 will add 54 pages to the Voter Information Guide and the other part will add 11 more, and that will cost $123,359 per page.
All registered voters will receive ballots in the mail in early February. Don’t forget to vote.
Write [email protected] and follow her on Twitter @Susan_Shelley