Category: Sacramento Stupidity

  • Watering down the water story–no end in Site

    Credit the Comicle’s Kurtis Alexander, the water guy, with crafting a pretty complete story about the woes of building the hoped-for Sites reservoir 70 miles northwest of Sac. All of the actors in the delayed play are present–farmers, ranchers, salmon, tribes, and bureaucrats. And of course, the Gavinor is complaining about the delay as well, like he hasn’t been in charge for the last seven and a half years. But the journo buried the real story in paragraph 11.

    Seed money for the venture comes from the state’s 2014 water bond measure. The $7.5 billion Proposition 1 initially helped fund four large reservoirs, but Sites is the only one that hasn’t fallen through due to financing and other issues.

    He meant to write it “is the only one that hasn’t fallen through yet“. The state has been sitting on $7.5B of water monies for eleven years and hasn’t built a single thing. We are headed for an El Nino year so hopefully the legacy reservoirs will capture most of what we need, but one has to wonder what it takes to get some competent management that doesn’t make the high-speed rail team look like it’s making progress!

  • Neighborhoods see respite throughout the Peninsula

    Whoops. It’s July 1st, not April 1st. I am just wishfully rewriting the Daily Journal’s Monday headline that read “New housing sees decline throughout the Peninsula“. In the online edition, the angst gets turned up a notch with the headline “New housing on the Peninsula has plummeted“. Readers are treated to some data about completed unit numbers declining in San Mateo, Redwood City and South San Francisco. Same in Foster City and EPA. No mention of B’game probably because we keep building, building, building. Some pithy quotes follow:

    “No one wants to do ground-up multifamily right now,” said Stephen Couig, founder of Center Street Lending, which provides financing to projects throughout the country, including the Bay Area. “It’s pure economics. The cost to build has completely outrun what it will bear in rent and what it will bear in sales,” Mounir Kardosh, owner and founder of San Mateo-based Nazareth Enterprises, said.

    Between May 2025 to May 2026, countywide rents increased by 6% to $3,368 across all unit types, according to data from Zumper and Apartment List. That’s still not enough growth for lenders to underwrite loans for multiunit housing due to stubbornly high inflation, keeping interest rates and 10-year treasury yields elevated.

    A recent report from the San Francisco Controllers Office analyzed costs for different development scenarios. The findings showed that none of them would be financially feasible if they adhered to the city’s inclusionary zoning policies — rules requiring market-rate projects to have a certain amount of affordable units — which are also in place throughout the Peninsula. Each model was “significantly worse than the same models in the 2023 study,” the April 2026 report said.

    Well, “worse” is a value judgement, but more immediately perhaps this respite will lead to the realization that the premise is wrong and getting “wronger” each year. Trying to jam “stack and pack” housing as in-fill on super desirable, pricy land with the “inclusionary” handcuffs and insufficient parking on developers won’t fly. Oddly enough, the same DJ front page has a Calmatters piece about California Forever–the billionaire-funded shiny new city targeted for Suisun City. Going back to the Nazareth guy:

    “From the bank’s perspective, why would they lend to me?” Kardosh said. “They could lend to someone in Waco, Texas, instead. They’re not chasing for projects.”

    Or at least Suisun City. How about the Sacramento crowd green lights California Forever and retires the fake RHNA numbers that are at the root of the disconnect between economic reality, neighborhood security and planners trying to maintain some sense of a city or town’s character? That would be a fair deal.

  • Newsom: At least pay for your own lawyers

    We won’t get too far into the nitty gritty of the possible things that the FBI is investigating regarding the governor. The SF Comicle did its usual surface level piece when covering one of their favorites, but at least it landed on the front page and not A8. The words “behested payments” do not even make an appearance in the piece. Same goes for the Associated Press piece that the DJ ran above the fold yesterday. When a journalist spends five time more column inches on the denial and deflection than on the possible charges or what is publicly known about past dealings, it’s easy to invoke the “where there’s smoke, there’s fire” rule.

    What should get fellow California taxpayers’ goat is using government staff to handle personal legal issues. Here is one David Sapp, Legal Affairs Secretary in the governor’s office, shooting off a FOIA request on government letterhead and posted on a government website here.

    This is a request under the Freedom of Information Act (5 U.S.C. § 552). I request all documents and records including but not limited to memoranda, emails, text messages, and Signal messages, from, to, or copying (“cc’ing”) any member of the executive leadership of the U.S. Department of Justice, including but not limited to former Attorney General Pam Bondi, former acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove, and former Deputy Attorney General and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, that use the terms: “Gavin Newsom” or “Jennifer Siebel Newsom” or “Newsom” between January 20, 2025 and the present.

    Perhaps the “first partner” is a bit too much of a “first business partner”, but she’s not a government employee so she has even less claim to government staff time than the guv. Gemini provides some insight into who should be looking at this (besides the FBI).

    The California State Auditor investigates whistleblower allegations regarding the misuse of state resources, including employee time theft and the waste of state funds.

    For criminal matters involving public corruption, bribery, or misappropriation of public funds, the California Department of Justice (DOJ)—specifically its Special Investigations Team (SIT) and White Collar Investigation Teams—serves as the primary law enforcement investigative body.

    The whole thing reeks of backroom dealing and special treatment. We will tag this to the “Friends with benefits” and “Sacramento Stupidity” category, but it really should go to “Sacramento Shrewdness”.

  • Parking Ah-ha: It’s a necessity

    The Merc is highlighting a 23-story apartment building with less than one parking space for every three units. Guess what? It’s a problem

    The Fay apartment tower in downtown San Jose was built to draw residents back to the city, a sleek high-rise with rooftop views and luxury amenities. But two years later, the building is 60% vacant, and city officials say one key reason stands out: not enough parking. Two years after it opened with fewer than one parking spot for every three apartments, The Fay has plunged into foreclosure.

    The Fay’s parking problems provide an early test of a 2022 statewide law that erased parking requirements on housing developments within a half mile of a major public transit stop. But those policies are colliding with California’s deep-rooted car culture — and in pockets around the Bay Area, the signs of pushback are starting to show.

    I love it when they talk about our “car culture” like it’s some Happy Days muscle car cruise night memory or a low-rider meet up. Or drag racing up at Ocean Beach before they closed the formerly Great Highway. But cars are intrinsic to everyday life if you need things like groceries, trips to the vet, Home Depot, etc etc etc.

    Across the Bay Area, tenants living in housing projects with limited parking are finding themselves running up parking fines and doing battle with neighbors over street parking. At some affordable housing projects, where parking requirements were eased as early as 2015, the frustration is mounting. “I have 20 parking violations,” said Candy Sandoval, a custodian and single mother of four who lives at Quetzal Gardens low-income housing in East San Jose, “plus my car was vandalized because of parking on the street.”

    Her fellow tenants are so exasperated without enough parking — there are 42 spots to accommodate 70 apartments — some of them park in silent protest directly in front of the building, smack in the middle of a designated bus stop.

    I’ll bet you would stump Google and ChatGPT is you asked, “how does a single mother of four manage without a car?” This little charade is creeping into B’game as well. The latest example is a proposal at 2 Park Rd. where Crosby N Gray is located. While not nearly as bad as The Fay or Quetzal Gardens, it’s proposed to have 140 spaces for 144 “units”. One really needs to consider the number of bedrooms and the number of units to understand real parking needs. Will we have to rename it No Park Rd.?

  • High-cost rail – Part 168 Billions more

    The steady drumbeat of bad news just keeps getting worse. This week a new, worst-case number KTLA is reporting a possible hit of $231 billion! They report

    In a newly proposed business plan released this year, project leaders estimate the Los Angeles-to-San Francisco segment will cost about $126 billion, with service beginning around 2040. In the meantime, the state is focused on getting the Bakersfield-to-Merced section up and running earlier, with a target of no later than 2033. All of this falls under what officials are calling an “optimized plan,” which reduces the scope of the original proposal. Under the updated plan, some segments would share tracks with existing systems such as Metrolink, and the number of tunnels would be scaled back, at least for now. Project leaders say those changes could significantly reduce costs. Without them, officials estimate the full Los Angeles-to-San Francisco buildout could have cost as much as $231 billion.

    You would not be wrong to ask why, at this stage of the game, they are still tweaking the design? It’s the shockingly bad management we have some to expect along with the waste noted in Part 167. The latest circus act was reported in the Comicle this week involving Cesar Chavez of all people and his 187-acre monument. The headline read “Add a $1 billion detour for California high-speed rail to Cesar Chavez’s legacy”:

    Add one more twist to the complicated legacy of disgraced civil rights icon Cesar Chavez: A reroute around his grave site has inflated the cost of California’s high-speed rail project by nearly $1 billion. Ironically, Chavez’s monument already sits on a key rail corridor that carries about 36 freight trains each day through the rugged Tehachapi. A single track loops around the property, creating a constant rumble for anyone walking among the Mission-style buildings and courtyards where Chavez lived and organized grape-field workers. Through letters and stakeholder meetings, the Chavez Center and the Cesar Chavez Foundation successfully lobbied for a bespoke alignment called the “refined Cesar Chavez National Monument design option,” which moved the track about three-quarters of a mile away from the monument boundary.  Board directors for the High-Speed Rail Authority adopted the alternative design in 2021, as part of a final environmental impact report for the 80-mile Bakersfield to Palmdale (Los Angeles County) section. Now, some rail authority staff or board members might call for a do-over.

    Here’s the mindset on the Authority Board:

    “We are constantly reviewing decisions that we’ve made along that alignment,” said board director Henry Perea, pointing to other potential revisions, such as the relocation of a future train stop in Merced. Plans that are really lines and dots on draft paper are always subject to change, Perea noted, particularly if policymakers are seeking to save money, or trying to acknowledge a historical wrong.

    Will any gubernatorial candidate with a D after their name have the guts to say we should just cut bait on this monstrosity? We only have a month to go until the primary.

  • Tax Time: Doing our share, or more

    Just in time for Tax Day, all of the big papers like the SacBee and the California Post are reporting on our fine county’s wealth. It turns out that according to SmartAsset, we are number four in the nation and number one in California. The methodology is always the devil in the details, so here is theirs:

    To identify the wealthiest counties, we compared all U.S. counties across three metrics: investment income, property value, and median income. 

    We started the analysis by calculating the Investment Index for each county by evenly weighing the Ordinary Dividends, Qualified Dividends, and Net Capital Gains. From there we calculated the Median Home Value, and the Median Income for each county, and ranked them on all three metrics. 

    The SacBee reports

    According to SmartAsset, San Mateo County was the richest county in California in 2025 with a wealth index of 68.36 out of 100. Part of the San Francisco Bay Area, San Mateo County offers a “mix of unbeatable weather, charming seaside views and technical resiliency, Built In San Francisco said, making it a popular location for established tech companies and startups.

    About 17% of San Mateo County residents work in professional, scientific, technical or administrative jobs, according to the county’s employment data. County residents had a median income of $156,000, according to SmartAsset. That’s about $56,000 more than the statewide median household income of $99,122 a year, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

    There are a lot of reasons for the “top line” — wealth, but as usual at the Voice, we ask what about the denominator? In this case it’s the cost to live here. We know it’s high and for a lot of items, we know why. Since gas prices are top of mind at the moment, you should check out the absolute smack down the U.S. Oil and Gas Association is applying on X to our governor, Tom Steyer and Ro Khanna among others as they blame everyone but ourselves for $6-7.50 gas. It’s embarrassing (if you are them). As they say, “the fish rots from the head”.

  • When is a transit stop not a transit stop?

    The wise people in Sacramento have forced density rules on every city and town in the state. Thou shall build. And it shall be stack-and-pack. And it shall be even bigger next to major transit stops. Beginning July 1, 2026, Senate Bill 79 (SB 79) enacts a significant “upzoning” mandate in California, requiring local jurisdictions to permit high-density housing within a half-mile of “major transit stops”. This law focuses on “urban transit counties”—defined as having 15 or more passenger rail stations.

    But what happens when that transit stop either disappears or is so scaled-back that it barely serves anyone? The Daily Journal and the Comicle both rewrote the doomsday planning scenarios put out by BART and Caltrain:

    A little over a month after BART laid out its tentative plan to close 15 stations if it didn’t receive funding, Caltrain also warned it could close one-third of all stations and eventually shut down passenger service altogether. 

    The agencies are relying heavily on the passage of an upcoming November ballot measure in several Bay Area counties, including San Mateo, in which voters will decide whether to help eliminate major transit agencies’ deficits through a 14-year sales tax measure.

    Even if the ballot measure passes, both systems are deep in the red. And it’s highly questionable that San Mateo County would get its “fare share” as noted back in September here. So when a stop, or 15 stops, close and the developers have already stack-and-packed the half-mile radius around it, what do we do? Answer: suck it up. 

  • More Bumps in the Road: 49th overall

    The Reason Foundation dug into national road conditions and most of us aren’t surprised to see how poorly California rates. When I first travelled the highways and byways of California in 1981, they were beautifully smooth. Now, not so much.

    Alaska, California, Washington, New York, and Louisiana have the worst-performing and least cost-effective highway systems, the study finds. Alaska ranked last overall for the second consecutive report, posting the worst rural fatality rate in the nation. California ranked 49th, with the worst urban arterial pavement condition.

    California found a bright spot in the condition of its bridges, with its highest ranking of 25th in the nation in “structurally deficient bridges.” But the state ranked in the bottom-half or third in every other category including urban congestion, rural fatality rate, rural pavement conditions, and capital and bridge disbursements ratio.

    Californians pay for the most expensive gas in the country, mostly due to gas taxes. (Study author Baruch) Feigenbaum says California “should have a better road and highway system” given the billions in funds the state generates for transportation. California also ranked 49th in last year’s highway report.

    You have to wonder if this is another instance of California fraud somewhere in the river of money collected from gas taxes (61 or 71 cents per gallon depending on who you ask plus other costs that put us $1.70 above the national average), vehicle license fees, etc. And now there is a movement afoot in Sacramento to charge additional fees per mile driven. Tell me more about how much they care about “affordability”.

  • Comic relief on billionaire tax

    We occasionally need some comic relief here at the Voice. If it comes with a dose of common sense, so much the better. This week we were treated to an SF Comicle letter to the editor from one of those people who write (and get published) often. She is apparently with a group called the Richmond Progressive Alliance and wants to weigh in on the possible “billionaire tax” that we may have to vote on in November. That figures. It’s hilarious.

    Enact a billionaire tax

    Regarding “Progressives love him. Billionaires hate him. Can a Berkeley professor pass California’s wealth tax?” (California, SFChronicle.com, March 18): Any billionaires with a shred of wisdom and ethics will support the proposed tax. Why? 

    Because even after paying the one-time 5% tax, someone with $1 billion in assets would still have $995 million — sufficient to continue living in opulent luxury — while contributing to state revenues for needed services and enhancing the economy. 

    The billionaires who oppose this tax show their true colors of mean-spiritedness and greed. The only argument they can offer against it is threatening to leave the state in droves.

    Well, so be it. May they leave our beautiful state to those who value a more equitable use of resources that benefit all. The billionaire tax is a no-brainer. Don’t fall for the mean-spirited fear-mongering about it.

    Marilyn Langlois, Richmond

    OK, dear readers. Why is it hilarious? C’mon folks. 5% of $1 billion is $50 million, not $5 million. So the imaginary billionaire would be left with $950 million. Marilyn is only off by $45 million but expects us to take advice from her about taxes. Do you think the Comicle editors also failed 6th grade math? Or did they just publish it to see if anyone noticed? Matt Mahan is the only gubernatorial candidate with a D behind their name that has come out against the billionaire tax. He gets a gold star on his math quiz. Langlois gets an F. Same goes for her Econ 101 quiz.

  • The Many Flavors of California Fraud

    You have to take notes to keep track of all the flavors of fraud being uncovered in California. Not that you would read about even half of it in the SF Comicle or other establishment press. The drumbeat is loud elsewhere, and today’s drum majorettes are highlighting the “wildlife butterfly bridge” in LA to help mountain lions cross 101 in Agoura Hills. Scoped at $50 million in 2022, it’s now at $114M and counting since it’s not finished. Considering its short span (210 feet), it might rival high-cost rail or the state capitol annex on a percentage basis.

    It turns out the $31 billion with a “b” EDD fraud is just the tip of the fraud iceberg. There’s the homeless-industrial complex fraud, the drug treatment center fraud, Medicaid fraud, autism fraud, hospice fraud, Proposition signature gathering fraud, the community college financial aid fraud, the commercial driver’s license fraud, the non-profit fraud and the cap-and-trade sleight of hand.

    I’m sure there are more flavors, so we will just use this post as the “fraud bucket” to be continually filled. When you hear we need this bond measure or that tax rate increase or that new fee, remember how leaky the bucket is.

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