9 minute read
YOUR DUES DOLLARS AT WORK
“BUSINESS AS USUAL” GETS FACELIFT
2022 OFF TO A BUSY START AS CHANGES TAKE PLACE IN SACRAMENTO
by CCA Vice President of Government Affairs Kirk Wilbur
Just one month into the year, 2022 has kept your CCA government affairs team on its toes. While the kickoff of the legislative session and the Governor’s budget reveal are annual traditions that are easily anticipated, a raft of other developments – from continued COVID complications to redistricting and its fallout – have kept Sacramento politics incredibly interesting in the new year.
Legislature Reconvenes
The California Legislature reconvened for the second year of its 2021-22 Legislative Session on January 3, after previously adjourning last September. As with the first year of session, high-profile matters likely to draw the attention of state legislators include homelessness and housing issues, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic (including mitigating its economic and educational impacts) and improving the state’s resilience to wildfire, drought and other severe climate and weather events.
In the opening weeks of session, your CCA government affairs team has been hard at work positioning the Association for another successful year in thel Legislature on the heels of a fruitful first year of session. Last year, CCA saw major legislative victories with the passage of two CCA-sponsored bills: AB 1103, which enables the development of county Livestock Pass programs to ensure ranchers’ access to livestock during wildfires and other emergencies, and SB 332, which reduces prescribed fire practitioners’ liability risk in order to incentivize application of prescribed fire. Both AB 1103 and SB 332 took effect on January 1.
What does CCA have cooking in the second year of the 2021-22 Legislative Session? You’ll have to stay tuned to California Cattleman and CCA’s other publications to learn details of this year’s CCA-sponsored legislation as soon as those bills are introduced in the legislature.
So far this year, most of the legislature’s attention has been on “two-year” bills – bills which were introduced in 2021 but were held back until the second year of session. Such bills were required to pass out of their house of origin by the end of January or be dead for the session.
One such two-year bill which recently reared its head was Assembly Bill 558 (Nazarian), which was resuscitated by its author on the first day of the legislative year. AB 558 would reimburse schools for including a “plant-based… food option” or “plant-based milk option” in school lunches. A similar initiative – AB 479, also authored by Assemblymember Nazarian – failed in 2019. While CCA did not take a formal position on the bill last year, we did communicate our concerns about the bill to key legislators, and the bill failed to receive a hearing in the Assembly Education Committee in 2021.
Unfortunately, the bill did receive an Education Committee hearing on January 12, passing out of the policy committee and being referred to the Assembly Appropriations Committee. This year of session, CCA is formally opposing the bill unless the plant-based meal incentives are stripped from the legislation, and we will continue to highlight the nutritional benefits of beef and milk as well as California ranchers’ leadership on GHG emission reductions as we seek to defeat the bill again in 2022.
Newsom Unveils Budget Framework
One week after the legislature reconvened, Governor Gavin Newsom released his proposed 2022-23 State Budget. Bolstered by a projected surplus of $45.7 billion, Newsom’s Proposed Budget – dubbed the “California Blueprint” – proposes allocating a record $286.4 billion in state funds, significantly more than last year’s record $262 billion budget.
The California Blueprint includes $1.2 billion in new funding for forest resilience and wildfire
prevention over two years, including $482 million to enhance wildfire resilience. During his press conference unveiling the proposed budget, Governor Newsom displayed a slide highlighting grazing’s role in forest health and fire resilience, and the proposed budget specifies that the wildfire resilience funding can be expended on a variety of CCA priorities such as “expanding grazing” and “utilizing prescribed fire.” The proposed budget also earmarks $382 million for strategic wildfire fuel breaks and $44 million for community hardening, among other funding priorities.
The California Blueprint also includes $750 million in assistance to communities impacted by the drought, building upon the $5.2 billion approved last August in the “budget bill junior” for drought resilience and water projects. Of particular interest to ranchers, $40 million is proposed to be allocated to the Multibenefit Land Repurposing Program, which seeks to reduce irrigated agricultural land’s reliance on groundwater and includes projects aimed at repurposing lands as rangelands. $20 million would be earmarked to improve on-farm water conservation through the State Water Efficiency and Enhancement Program (SWEEP) and $10 million is proposed for drought relief and technical assistance for small farmers and ranchers.
Governor Newsom also proposes allocating $417 million under the umbrella of “Climate Smart Agriculture,” including $150 million for the FARMER program, which helps fund the replacement of agricultural equipment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, $85 million for the Healthy Soils Program and $48 million in livestock methane emission reduction funding.
Newsom’s plan also proposed to pause the annual increase to California’s gas tax.
In addition to the above items – which fit within the Governor’s efforts to “Combat the Climate Crisis” – major provisions of the California Blueprint include $2.7 billion in additional investments to combat COVID-19 as well as substantial investments to confront homelessness, address rising costs of living and reduce crime rates.
The Governor’s budget framework is merely the opening volley in a monthslong negotiation with the state legislature. Governor Newsom will release his “May Revise” of the budget in a few months, and legislative budget committees and subcommittees will work in the coming weeks and months to refine Newsom’s proposals and shape their own priorities into legislative language. The legislature must pass a budget by no later than June 15, but as last year demonstrated, additional budget negotiations may continue well into the waning hours of the legislative session. Throughout this process, CCA will be pushing to fund the beef community’s priorities, chief among them being expanded grazing on state-owned lands.
COVID Continues to Shape Sacramento Policymaking
A few weeks into the legislative year, it appears that the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic will be less disruptive to state policymaking than it was in 2020 and 2021 despite the rapid spread of the highly-transmissible Omicron variant. That said, COVID has certainly continued to make its presence felt in the state’s capital.
State agencies can continue to hold their regulatory hearings virtually until at least March 31, after Governor Newsom issued an executive order in early January once again extending exemptions from the state’s Bagley-Keene Open Meeting Act (meanwhile, under a law passed last year, local agencies can continue holding remote meetings until Jan. 1, 2024).
Senate offices have also felt the impact of Omicron, with the Senate announcing on January 6 that “Due to the statewide surge in positive cases of COVID-19” Senators and Committees would be limited to one staff person per day in the office, with all other staff working remotely.
Senators and assemblymembers themselves have not escaped COVID’s impacts, either: Early in the year, Senators Scott Wilk (R-Santa Clarita) and Josh Becker (D-Menlo Park) tested positive for the virus. Becker tested positive after attending an event in honor of recentlyretired Assemblymember Lorena Gonzalez (D-San Diego), leading numerous legislators in attendance – including Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon (D-Lakewood) – to quarantine in the days after the exposure.
Legislative Landscape Begins to Shift
Gonzalez, who retired from the legislature to lead the powerful California Labor Federation, is just one of a rapidly-growing list of sitting California legislators who have announced they will not be seeking reelection in 2022.
As of press time, at least 18 incumbent assemblymembers and senators have announced that they will be retiring from their current positions at the end of the current term (or have resigned their seats early, as in the case of Gonzalez). Seven more are termed-out by California’s legislative term limits.
In other words, without a single vote being cast, onefifth of state legislative seats are guaranteed to turnover after the next election.
What’s driving the Legislature’s own “Great Resignation,” as some have termed it?
Perhaps the greatest driver is redistricting. On December 26, the California Citizens Redistricting Commission released new maps which reshape California’s Congressional districts and state Senate, Assembly and Board of Equalization boundaries based on the results of the 2020 Census. These new maps are electorally disadvantageous for a number of incumbents, convincing many to retire rather than fight losing election battles.
Some legislators are vacating their seats to seek higher office, while others are choosing to bow out early ahead of being termed out prior to the 2024 election.
Whatever the reasons behind them, these retirements are sure to shake up Sacramento politics. For a more thorough breakdown of redistricting, major retirements and other changes to Sacramento’s political landscape, stay tuned to for the March edition of California Cattleman and listen to recent and upcoming episodes of Sorting Pen.
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