Journal of No. 118

essentialsaltes guide to election 2024

As I’ve said before, I think proposition writers are getting craftier and craftier and making things more and more confusing, with good provisions used to mask bad provisions they really want (and I don’t). I find it a hard rule to follow myself, but if you don’t quite understand it, just vote no.

I'm certainly not guaranteed to be right -- feel free to leave comments.

Additional help

LA Times endorsements

LA Bar judicial evaluations (for the primary, but still useful for the runoff/final election)

Another set of opinions on the props

This is the order on my ballot in my little chunk of unincorporated LA County.

LAUSD District 1: Sherlett Newbill

LACC Board: LA Times recommends the incumbents and I agree. Many (but not all) of the other candidates appear to be perennial candidates for various offices.

Assembly: Isaac Bryan

Congress: Kamlager-Dove (though I give a shout out to Juan Rey who managed to get 2nd place in the primary with no party preference. He actually reps the Working Class Party, which honors the Wobblies as antecedents.)

Measure LL: calls for redistricting of LAUSD every 10 years. Sure, why not? No opponents put their names up.

Measure US: $9B in bonds for LAUSD construction/improvements

Not how we should do things, but maintenance and repair is way behind. I don’t like that new construction is included, and there’s no breakdown in how funds will be spent. Reluctant yes. If Prop 2 passes, they could stack well (as would the tax burden).

Measure E: YES. LA County emergency response — a little inside baseball, but LA City and some other cities have their own fire systems; this addresses other parts of the county (like where we live). Although mostly touted as something to help replace antiquated 911 communication technology, the tax is permanent until repealed by voters. I feel a little bait and switched, but the voters are somewhat to blame. According to the LA Times, the county fire district lost the ability to impose taxes on its own. And it gets no funds from the General Fund. So if you think fire and emergency response costs are generally rising, this is our chance to address it responsibly. A similar measure failed because it needed a 2/3 vote. This version was voter-initiated and can pass with a majority. 

District Attorney: Nathan Hochman. I know I know. He’s a Republican (or at least he was 2 years ago). And not everything bad that has happened in LA County is Gascon’s fault. But a lot of things Gascon has said and done have just rubbed me the wrong way.

Judges

My picks either align with the LA Bar recommendations, or when there’s a tie between equally qualified candidates, I find a tie breaker

39: Turner. Morningside valedictorian and UCLA summa cum laude & ΦΒΚ. Go Bruins!

48: Rose

97: Ransom

135: Yee Mac. Clearer vision and website than opponent.

137: Blount

Measure G: expanding the county board from 5 to 9 makes sense. Adding an elected executive ‘mayor’, I’m not so keen on. We’re distributing power, and then centralizing it. Yes?

Measure A: Sales taxes are inherently regressive. This would double the expiring sales tax devoted to homelessness. I think there are other, better props on the ballot for addressing housing and homelessness. No.

Prop 2: $10B in bonds for repairing schools. It also reduces slightly the amount poorer schools need to come up with to get matching state funds. This is how it plays well with Measure US.

Bonds aren’t a great way to fund things the government should just be doing. And I don’t like that it sets aside funds specifically for charter schools (fuck them). On the bright side, CA’s overall debt obligation has been declining.  By no means is the credit card paid off, but for important things we can charge it. Yes.

Prop 3: Obvious Yes. Removes the unenforceable language that bans SSM. Costs nothing, right thing to do.

Prop 4: $10B in bonds for wildfire/environmental/drinking water oriented projects. The same stuff for Prop 2 about bonds goes for this one. I think I’m a stronger Yes on Prop 4. If and when CA gets another budget surplus, CA already requires a lot of spending on education and schools. I think it’s more likely lawmakers will be able to address the problems Prop 2 fixes than the ones Prop 4 hopes to fix.

Prop 5: Lowers the vote threshold for local bond measures from two-thirds to 55% if the bonds are for housing/infrastructure. Here’s one of those ways to address housing/homelessness. Bonds are still in the voters’ hands, but the 2/3 threshold is often insurmountable.

Prop 6: Eliminates forced prison labor. Yes.

Prop 32: Raises minimum wage from the current $16 to $18/hr, effectively doubling it from $9 ten years ago. I feel we’ve ramped it up so rapidly, we need time to absorb and assess. We all passed a prop to put it where it is now. Inflation pinches of course, but we’ve already done a lot (especially compared to the pathetic national minimum wage unchanged since 2009). No (for now).

Prop 33: This again? Voters have rejected it twice, and I think they should again. Why is the rent too damn high? There is not enough housing. How do We The People get more housing? We can tax ourselves and do it ourselves (see Prop 5). And we can make it more inviting for private builders to build it on their own dime. LA has done a lot in the past few years along those lines with zoning changes, incentives for low-income housing, and reducing building costs for locations near public transit, etc. 

But in the end, those private builders want to make money, and rent control puts limits on their return on investment. So Prop 33 might offer some benefits to people who already have housing, but the very real housing crisis will be made worse.

If, on the other hand, we encourage building even more housing, increasing that supply to better match demand -- that could also lead to lower rents.

The Costa-Hawkins law is now old enough that I certainly support moving the 1995 date for what counts as ‘newly built’ (and immune to grandfathered rent control laws on the books in many cities) forward. Developers have gotten their money back over those 30 years, and older buildings can slip into rent control where applicable.

But for this, once again NO.

Prop 34: Correctly called the Revenge Initiative against the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, for giving us Prop 33 three times. And I can feel my own desire for revenge. Prop 34 is aimed at 

Healthcare organizations…

that get certain federal benefits…

and spent $100 million on things other than healthcare (like promoting prop 33)…

and are slumlords with at least 500 high severity housing violations.

The AIDS Healthcare Foundation is likely the unique entity that qualifies. It is a slumlord that doesn’t want housing competition to be built. And will spend $100 million to defend its turf by discouraging new construction (prop 33).

That said, though I feel that desire for revenge, that’s a bad reason to pass a law, so also NO on this one.

Prop 35: I agree with the LA Times on this one. It’s framed as a feel-good measure, but this is one of those too complicated to understand issues, and should be left to the legislature. NO.

Major healthcare providers want it, because it would increase Medi-Cal reimbursement rates. But this comes at the cost of $12 billion near-term and an unknown amount long-term that is unfunded. Prop 35 is opposed by “Gov. Gavin Newsom, the League of Women Voters, the California Budget & Policy Center and community health organizations that were left off the list of service providers guaranteed higher funding in Proposition 35.” Uh, and me.

Prop 36: No. Police are already doing a better job of using existing laws to go after smash and grab robberies — with one big help being the use of Jan 6th style video identification. Prop 36 may feel attractive, but it will increase the prison population without providing any means of funding. Likewise the drug intervention has no funding, and waitlists for those programs are already long. 

Meanwhile Prop 47 funds that we saved when we reduced prison populations  were dedicated to homelessness and drug treatment, so another effect of 36 would be to essentially transfer money from those programs back to prisons.

For better or worse, Prop 36 looks like it’s sailing to victory. So much so that the Yes on 36 campaign gave $1 million to the California Republican Party.

Prop 1 Abortion - Kinda Reluctant Yes

Certainly I support abortion rights, but this could have been better written. It bothered me as I read it that the plain language seems to suggest the state has no power to regulate abortion at all. I mean, that can’t be quite right, because I’m sure the state can still require that qualified doctors perform them, and so on. KQED spells out the issue: 

“Californians will vote on the amendment in the form of Proposition 1 come November, but as the election approaches, lawmakers still do not agree whether the measure would merely enshrine abortion rights as they are currently articulated in state law, which allows abortion up to 24 weeks, or whether it would expand abortion rights, so as to permit abortions at any point in pregnancy, for any reason. 

The polls indicate voters are not inclined to nitpick right now. Ziegler predicts that they’ll accept the ambiguity in Proposition 1 and let the courts sort out the details later.”

I guess I’m in the same boat. I figure that if it passes, and if it expands the right to abortion, abortion will still be ‘regulated’ by the medical ethics of the doctors who perform them. In some ways, this is what we aim for. The decision in the hands of the woman in consultation with a doctor (and any other personal advisors she cares to involve).

And if there does happen to be a slippery slope, well… I guess we just fix it next time.

Prop 26 Gambling - No

I don’t think gambling needs to be expanded in California. If you do, then I think this is the better of the two props on the ballot. It keeps things within the boundaries of entities (tribal casinos and racetracks) that we’ve already designated for gambling in the state.

Prop 27 Gambling - No

Opens up gambling to mobile and online gambling everywhere, likely run by out of state operations.

The guff about ending homelessness is just a shell game. We’ve seen it a thousand times in California. If a dedicated revenue stream for X is created by a prop, the legislature just lowers the appropriation for X by the same amount, so that nothing really changes.

Prop 28 Arts funding in schools - Reluctant Yes

I just got through saying I don’t like props that earmark money for a particular thing. But schools seem to have become focused on math and english test scores, and the arts have been neglected, so maybe this can bend the needle back. No argument against was submitted. Not even Howard Jarvis.

Prop 29 Diabetes - No

This is the same union-backed things we’ve seen several times in a bid to create more union jobs. If there were actual health risks involved, they should be able to point to the negative conditions the prop is intended to fight. But they’ve never shown us there’s a problem. So there’s no need for this solution. Usually I’d lean toward the union if the alternative was giant for-profit companies, but this is just needless.

Prop 30 Soak the Rich for the Environment - Reluctant No

This is a tough one. I support progressive tax rates, but again, setting this new bonus tax aside all for a few specific environmental purposes is not a great way to budget things. California is already aggressively pushing electric vehicles.

Prop 31 Confirms Ban on Flavored Tobacco - Yes

Anything that makes smoking less attractive to anybody is probably a good thing.