Joe Grcar for Assembly District 20

Ashland – Castro Valley – Cherryland – west Dublin – Fairview – Hayward – west Pleasanton – San Leandro – San Lorenzo – Union City

Joe Grcar for Assembly District 20 Hello! I ask your help to represent Assembly District 20 in Sacramento: • $1,200 fee just to file as a candidate • $9,300 fee for ballot statement Email me at realJosephGrcar@gmail.com I am a long time resident of District 20 and a retired scientist from the US Department of Energy laboratories in Alameda County.

Rather than just doing what was done before, science trains people to question assumptions, and to build new solutions from basic principles.

If we are going to build back better, then we must do things differently.

Here are some of my ideas; I welcome your thoughts and input.

1. Use infrastructure money for schools not freeways Children have to be our number one priority, but there is never enough money. Here is a new idea: use President Biden’s infrastructure money to build new schools. Old thinking says, infrastructure is roads, but I say, infrastructure is school buildings. Because we are the center of the Bay Area, our highways become parking lots as soon as they are built, and most of the cars come from outside the District. Why spend our money on them? Instead, use our infrastructure money to build new schools.

See my website at https://JoeGrcarForAD20.godaddysites.com/ Follow me at https://www.gettr.com/user/JoeGrcarForAD20

California State Assembly

2. Build toll tunnels California requires new cars to be electric by 2035, and many cars are electric already, thanks to the Tesla company. These cars go through tunnels quickly and safely, without exhaust fumes, which makes tunnels smaller and cheaper. We can hire Elon Musk’s “Boring” Company* to dig a toll tunnel from West Dublin, under Hayward, to the San Mateo Bridge. This tunnel will take non-resident traffic off our highways and cost us nothing.

Where else can we put a tunnel?

Assembly District 20 with Toll Tunnel *https://www.boringcompany.com/products

SHA-512: cd7652453d5eb0db4fe0c6e51f77275b5f2eb01c2f7eec565eed8b22e279a19df7120d3a071dae046009535e1e8feab936992ff62a1fde53320

3. No new taxes for Alameda County residents The state should curb new taxes in counties where surrounding counties are richer.

Our sales taxes are highest in the state, in part because local politicians raised our taxes to build highways here—an example of old thinking. We pay 10 !⁄" percent in many of our cities, compared to 8 #⁄$ in San Francisco. Yet, our county has the lowest average income per person in the Bay Area. If California needs more money for anything, let it raise taxes in San Francisco and Silicon Valley.

4. Count votes on line I am tired of hearing that elections are rigged. But, do you know our votes are not counted? Instead, ballots are scanned, and the electronic images are counted. On many election nights I was the only citizen observing the scanning in downtown Oakland. I have learned that the Registrar of Voters cannot answer the simplest questions. He said to me, “I do not know, and if I did know, I do not know that I can tell you.” We need a state law to put the scans on line, to put live video everywhere, and to enable the Registrar to answer anybody’s questions.

5. Local control for acceptable growth Developers want to build expensive, “market rate” homes on open space, while they want to shoehorn “multi unit” homes (a.k.a. small apartment buildings) into existing neighborhoods. Recent laws enable city councils to pass-the-buck by claiming ”the state tells us to do it”, and the laws even nullify environmental protections. The state is taking over local zoning and thwarting the rights of citizens to object. We need to repeal those bad laws so that city councils are again answerable to residents.

6. A state park We do not have enough parks. They are all pretty much what we had 50 years ago, and they are mostly on the Oakland side of the District. Yet, Alameda County grows by 150,000 people every census, and that growth is in the south. The East Bay Parks and the Municipal Parks are great but they need some help. Most of the Bay shoreline is publicly owned, and all of it should be made into a state park. The state park system is best equipped and financed for such an undertaking. The only state park presently in Alameda County is a little used urban park on the Oakland waterfront. It is high time we had a state park, and a big one, for the Eden Area.

7. Reform Alameda County government for jobs Two years ago in March, Alameda County shut down for a whole month the only factory in the United States that made electric cars, the Tesla factory in Fremont. As a result, the Tesla company figured Alameda County was too risky for business, and all the new Tesla factories are outside Alameda County.

These factories have lots of good jobs. For example, the new Tesla factory in Austin, Texas recruits high school seniors, and it donates buildings and equipment to teach robotics at local colleges. We have nothing like that here, directly as a result of what the Alameda County government did.

In fact, the whole Bay Area became rich from high tech companies, except Alameda County. Why? Something is wrong with the Alameda County government that is holding us back.

8. End the pandemic emergency powers COVID-19 is named for 2019 but this is 2022. According to the New York Times, only 1,607 people died of COVID-19 in Alameda County over two years, while according to the Alameda County health department, 11,472 people died of cancer in four years before the pandemic. That means we are three and a half times more likely to die from cancer than from COVID-19. It is time to end the pandemic emergency powers and to get back to normal life.

9. Stop San Francisco’s climate swindle San Francisco Bay has tidal flats. They are mud at sea level which receives sediment and nutrients at high tide. This is a natural solution to sea level rise because tidal flats build up automatically. The East Bay protected its tidal flats in nature preserves from San Leandro down to the county line.

On the other hand, San Francisco dumped land fill on its tidal flats to make the city bigger. The city quickly found the mud seeps out and the land fill sinks. A hundred years ago San Francisco built a sea wall around itself to keep the mud in. The Embarcadero Sea Wall runs under the street from Pier 39, past the Ferry Building, Giants Stadium and Warriors Arena.

Now San Francisco is desperate because the old sea wall is sinking. This has nothing to do with climate change; instead, it is all about mistakes made a hundred years ago.

San Francisco is crying “climate emergency” to fix their problems with our money. If elected I will not allow that.

10. Abolish the Public Utilities Commission (PUC) The PUC wants to make installing solar panels on our homes much less affordable. I say, putting solar panels on my house does not make my house into a public utility.

The Governor should simply tell the PUC to back off (he appoints them). Better yet, abolish the PUC. It is a huge source of patronage for state politicians. Taking the gravy train away would make the pigs squeal!

11. Require donations to come from constituents My opponents are funded: either by people who do not live here (yellow in the bar chart below), or by political action committees (PACs) associated with huge unions that co-mingle money from throughout the state (orange in the chart). This data is from CA SOS FPPC reports through 12/31/2021.

People in these cities donated

San Francisco $38,294

Oakland $28,983 Berkeley …

People in San Francisco and Oakland, and union leaders in Los Angeles and Sacramento, surely expect something in return for giving so much money to our Francisco Assembly San candidates.

What is for sale here? I will propose a law that donors to candidates must live inside the district, including donors to PACs.

12. Turn off the San Francisco homeless magnet Oakland

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10498607

“I get paid to be homeless in San Francisco, $620 a month plus $200 food stamps plus money from kids to buy them drugs, and the police are like neighbors. I have Amazon Prime and Netflix,’’ says James who came from Texas. Homelessness is a tough problem because it has many causes, and we have to tackle each one, but this one looks easy. The state should hold cities like San Francisco responsible when their policies contribute to the problem. Read about James in the Daily Mail online.