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ByBen Christopher, CalMatters

Ever since the end of the Great Recession, Rancho Cucamonga has been on a tear.

New retailers and restaurants have sprung up to serve the residents of its gated ‘burbs. The city’s population has swelled with Angelenos in search of cheaper housing. And at last count, its unemployment rate sat at just 4%. The city earned an upgraded credit rating earlier this year.

But now that shopping and dining have been deemed non-essential activities, the good times are gone, said Rancho Mayor Dennis Michael.

“Since we recovered from the Great Recession, we generated about $9 million in new sales tax revenue,” he said. “We’ve lost all of that gain. We’re basically starting from square one.”

For local governments still sporting the budgetary scars of the last “once in a generation” recession, this downturn is at once familiar — forcing elected leaders to cut, furlough and delay — and entirely new. Never before in state history has so much economic activity ground to a halt so quickly.

(Image: Tobias Rochlitz / Public domain)

“When we came through the Great Recession we were able to use reserves to have a softer landing over a period of years,” said Michael. “This is worse than the Great Recession because everything happened all at once.”

Rancho has it better than most cities. It has healthy reserves, low debts and a relatively wealthy population. 

In San Pablo, a city just north of Richmond in the Bay Area with a median income a little over half of Rancho Cucamonga’s, City Manager Matt Rodriguez “is bracing for a ‘Worse Case Budget Scenario,’” he said in an email.

San Pablo relies on the local casino run by the Lytton Band of Pomo Indians for 60% of its discretionary funds. Since state and county officials declared shelter-in-place orders in mid-March, the city has been hemorrhaging $2.3 million every month, said Rodriguez. That’s about 5% of the city’s annual general fund every 30 days.

City managers aren’t known for their colorful language, but municipal leaders across the state are now facing economic conditions that seem to define hyperbole.

“Staff estimates that the Covid-19 pandemic will devastate the City’s General Fund,” wrote Monterey’s City Manager Hans Uslar last month. The city then voted to axe up to 84 jobs.

Down the coast in Anaheim, home to Disneyland, Mayor Harry Sidhu offered a sober reminder to his colleagues on the council last month: The Magic Kingdom and its ancillary hotels and shops provide half of the city’s jobs and half of the city government’s revenue. 

“As to when Disneyland Resort will open, I don’t know. I don’t believe anyone knows,” he said.

And in Yountville, the town of roughly 3,000 in the heart of the Napa Valley wine country, the decline in hotel and sales tax revenue has resulted “in about a 74 percent loss in revenue,” said Mayor John Dunbar, who is also president of the League of California Cities, in a live-streamed discussion with CalMatters.

That’s 3 out of 4 of the city’s expected tax dollars now gone.

“Yes, unfortunately you heard me correctly,” he added. 

Cities without much fiscal wiggle room heading into the pandemic will do particularly poorly, said Bill Statler, a municipal finance consultant who spent decades working for the city of San Luis Obispo. 

“The roots of fiscal trouble are in the good times,” he said. “If you have strong revenues during the good times, build reserves, pay down unfunded liabilities, invest in capital projects, then when the inevitable bad times come, you’ll have more resilience and flexibility.”

Still, in ways that highlight just how unusual the current economic downturn is, there are clear exceptions. 

With a strong tourism and hospitality sector, “I would have used Santa Monica as a poster child for how some cities have really good financial DNA,” said Statler.

Last month, Santa Monica’s city manager was pushed out of his job after his proposed budget cuts elicited massive public outcry. Now the city is considering laying off 337 workers.

If there is any type of California city best suited to weather the current recession, it’s bedroom communities.

“Those cities that are highly reliant on property taxes and not sales — it’s not to say that they won’t suffer, but their treasuries won’t get depleted immediately,” said Michael Pagano, dean of the College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs at the University of Illinois at Chicago. 

That’s because while sales taxes and tourism-dependent revenue sources like hotel taxes are paid into local coffers with each transaction, property taxes are paid twice a year. Property tax revenues tend to be stable from year to year too, because California law assesses residential or commercial buildings based on purchase price rather than current market value. 

“For cities that rely on sales,” said Pagano, “it’s not like a downturn that we’ve ever experienced before. This is just an immediate shutting off of the spigot.”

The divide between municipalities that rely heavily on property values versus those that do not is a Tale of Two Cities. According to a CalMatters analysis of municipal tax revenue data from 2018, the cities that rely most on property taxes are Mountain View, Pleasanton, Newport Beach and San Clemente — all wealthy.

Cities that are dependent on sales and hotel taxes are more of a mixed bag, with some well-to-do tourism destinations, but also many working- and middle-class towns with below-average incomes or cooler housing markets: South Gate, Hemet, Merced, Redding.

And for cities hoping for a helping hand, very few have been extended.

The state, for one, has its own financial troubles. Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Finance Department is now projecting a $54.3 billion deficit for the coming fiscal year. That’s twice the size of the state’s “rainy day” reserve fund. 

“I’m going to do everything I can to work with these cities and counties,” Newsom said at a press conference last week before the deficit projection was announced. “But I can assure you this: We are not going to be in a position, even as the nation’s fifth-largest economy, to provide for the needs of all the cities and the counties without federal support.”

The federal government has already directed $150 billion to cash-strapped state and local governments through the CARES Act, the financial relief bill signed into law last month. About $9.5 billion of that went directly to the state government, with another $5.8 billion for cities or counties — though only to those with populations of more than 500,000. 

Even for the lucky six California cities that qualify for the help, the funding comes with strings attached, said San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer, who was also in the CalMatters live-streamed conversation. 

“It has to be COVID-related, it’s not supposed to be used for revenue replacement,” he said. It’s not entirely clear how those guidelines will be enforced, but the intent is clear: the funding is not to be used to plug budgetary holes. While city leaders “try to get clarity” from the federal government, said Faulconer, San Diego is projecting a $300 million deficit.

Though Democrats in Washington are clamoring for more federal assistance to state and local governments, Republicans remain divided. Last month, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky likened providing additional aid to a “bail out” for state and local governments and their underfunded pension systems. McConnell has since softened his rhetoric.

Another possible benefactor for desperate cities: the voters. 

The California constitution generally requires cities, counties and school districts to receive voter approval to raise taxes or borrow. And while the state electorate has historically been inclined to back most revenue-raisers, it may be feeling less generous this year.

In the March 3 primary, only 40% of local fiscal measures — bonds and taxes — were approved by voters, according to an analysis by Michael Coleman, who maintains the California Local Government Finance Almanac. That’s compared to a 77% passage rate in 2018 and 81% in 2016. 

There were many more measures on the ballot this year overall — including a record-breaking $15 billion school construction bond — which may have given voters sticker shock. A recent change in state law governing how ballot measures are described could have also turned some voters off. The coronavirus pandemic was only beginning to register as a national concern on Election Day, but that too could have diminished the public’s appetite for new costs.

Whatever the reasons, said Coleman, it does not bode well for cities hoping to patch up their budgets via the ballot box this November.

“I think we’re going to continue to have this malaise about what’s going on in the economy, about job security, about how the world is changing. That’s the sort of psyche that causes people to wonder if this is the right time for a tax increase,” he said.

Many in local government — and the campaign staff they hire — are hoping that local budget cuts will have the opposite effect.

In a conference call this morning, San Francisco Mayor London Breed championed a statewide ballot measure by framing it as a conflict between necessary government services during a pandemic and commercial property owners. 

“Any local official will have a tough time explaining to their constituents why in the midst of this crisis they didn’t support closing corporate tax loopholes,” she said. 

Sometimes known as the “split roll” initiative, the measure would change the way that many commercial properties are assessed, resulting in much higher property taxes on some businesses and much higher tax revenue for cities, counties and school districts.

Industry groups and low tax advocates argue — and will likely continue to argue until November — that now is precisely the wrong time to raise taxes on businesses.

Jared Boigon of TBWB Strategies, a consulting firm that helps to pass local bond and tax measures in California, said he’s optimistic that “most voters don’t want to see their community services be completely gutted.” Despite the economic climate, if a local government is thinking of going to voters for money this November, “they shouldn’t just automatically rule it out,” he said.

Not many have yet, said Curtis Below, a partner at the Oakland polling outfit FM3 Research.

“There have been a few more clients who said they want to sit out the cycle, but the vast majority still want to explore this year,” he said. “A lot of our clients are going full steam ahead.”

But both Dunbar of Yountville and Faulconer of San Diego are skeptical that the funds that could be raised at the ballot box would be even remotely enough to fit the pandemic’s fiscal bill.

“We’re not going to be able to tax our way out of this recession,” said Faulconer.

CalMatters.org is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media venture explaining California policies and politics.

“None of us has the unfettered right to do what we want,” Fielding said. “People are saying, ‘Our president’s not doing this, why do I have to?’ That’s one of the roots of this problem — the radicalization of views on individual rights.” 

A full-page ad published in the San Jose Mercury News blasted Santa Clara County health officer Dr. Sara Cody, who ordered the nation’s first local shelter-in-place lockdown. It accused Cody of “cratering our economy” and asked her to permanently donate her salary and pension to “those you are impoverishing.”  

On social media, people circulated a doctored photo of Los Angeles county health officer Dr. Barbara Ferrer that made her appear very ill, with pale skin and deep circles under her eyes. A tweet calling Ferrer “the most unhealthy looking person I’ve ever seen” was retweeted 29,000 times and “liked” by more than 89,000 people.   

In a sign of just how tense things have become, Santa Cruz County supervisors in late May briefly shut down a public meeting about reopening when a pizzeria owner approaching a microphone veered away and started walking toward the county’s health officer. He told the supervisors he was just trying to read her name, the Santa Cruz Sentinel reported, but they weren’t taking chances.  

We are deeply concerned that politics may be trumping public interest in some of these cases, and that the public’s health may be compromised as a result,” California Medical Association president Dr. Peter Bretan Jr. said in a statement.  

Nearly nine in 10 Californians agree that shelter-in-place orders are necessary to protect public health, according to California Health Care Foundation polling. But about 38% of Californians agree that the COVID-19 regulations “go too far,” the poll shows.  

Former Santa Barbara County health officer Dr. Charity Dean, who had become second-in-command at the state Department of Public Health, submitted her resignation June 4, as first reported by CNBC. A few days later, she tweeted her encouragement to other health officers: 

By Camille Escovedo

The last time this many people filed for unemployment in the U.S. — over 26 million as of April 27 — was during the Great Depression, experts say. Over a million Californians have filed for unemployment in March, and the layoffs have not let up. 

“It’s something I wouldn’t have thought of that I’d be doing, so yeah, it’s a little weird when your employer says, ‘OK, yeah, you should file for unemployment,’” said Josephine, who is — or, was — a kitchen manager and teaching assistant at a preschool in Santa Rosa. 

She asked us not to use her real name. The school shuttered, she’s been furloughed, and now she emails with managers and coworkers to talk about payroll and how they’re doing.

“But it doesn’t actually feel like I’m not employed,” she said. “It's just we’re in this big waiting game and if I need money to support myself during this time, and unemployment’s going to be the way to get it…”

Josephine said staff were told paid sick and vacation hours could be used to stand in for a paycheck. And to mark themselves as “temporarily unemployed” if they filed a claim. 

“I tried filing for unemployment, but the online process is a bit confusing,” she said. “I keep trying to find the button to like, OK, file a claim, and then it takes you to another page that’s like, OK, here’s how to file a claim, but I haven’t found the actual document that I’m supposed to fill out.”

Josephine may not be the most representative of laid-off workers. She’s got bills, but no monthly rent. But local organizations are working to reach those struggling during COVID-19. Mara Ventura, executive director of North Bay Jobs with Justice, focuses on those falling through the cracks.

“The first thing we did was ensure that folks could call us to get information about how or what they might be eligible for and walk them through the paperwork if they needed that. And we provide that in Spanish and in English,” she said. 

Their website lists info about new qualifications for unemployment benefits, including reduced hours due to the outbreak. There are also resources on state disability insurance, the Family and Medical Leave Act and paid sick leave.

“... Because people should not be having to worry about medical debt at a time like this and deciding between going into a hospital or clinic to get care and not, because at this point, that’s not just about the workers, it’s about a huge public health risk,” Ventura said. 

North Bay Jobs with Justice recently co-founded Sonoma County United in Crisis, a coalition that calls on local governments to adopt policies to protect tenants, immigrants, seniors, homeless people and workers during the pandemic. 

“But they also need to know that they’re not going to be evicted and they’re not going to come out of the COVID crisis owing thousands of dollars to their landlords,” Ventura said. “And they also need to know that their sheriff isn’t going to turn them over to ICE.” 

North Bay Jobs with Justice helped launch UndocuFund in 2017 during the Tubbs Fire, to aid immigrants who, if undocumented, were ineligible for assistance through the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA. 

UndocuFund reactivated in the wake of coronavirus to provide disaster relief funds for undocumented people in Sonoma County who won’t receive federal stimulus checks through the CARES Act. 

“They’re going through the same thing that many other millions of workers are in terms of losing work, but they will not be eligible for so many of the programs that other workers will be able to get a hold of,” Ventura said. 

Coping with the coronavirus pandemic is a communal experience, but job loss means different things for different people. So many applied for aid that UndocuFund has closed its waitlist for now. Meanwhile, other groups rise to meet the county’s needs. 

More information about Sonoma County COVID-19 resources can be found at norcalpublicmedia.org. 

For people experiencing domestic violence, stay-at-home orders may be trapping them with their abusers.

California Assemblymember Jim Wood (D-Santa Rosa) is asking the public to raise awareness about these dangers as directives to shelter-in-place to slow the spread of COVID-19 continue throughout the state. 

“The recent passing of a woman from Mendocino County, allegedly from an attack by her husband who had been arrested numerous times for domestic abuse, is a grim reminder of the tragedy of domestic abuse and sexual assault,” Wood said in a press release. “We are now asking people to isolate and shelter in place in their homes, which should be a place we rely on to be safe.”

According to the release, the National Domestic Violence Hotline says they’ve seen an increase in the number of callers reporting that their abusers are using COVID-19 to increase their isolation from friends and family. In a statement on the hotline website, they say, “In a time where companies may be encouraging that their employees work remotely, and the CDC is encouraging social distancing, an abuser may take advantage of an already stressful situation to gain more control.”

According to Legal Aid of Sonoma County, the courts are still filing temporary restraining orders online during this time. Temporary restraining orders that are set to expire will be automatically renewed. Visit Legal Aid of Sonoma County's website for more help filing a restraining order.  

“Every county in the district I represent – Del Norte, Humboldt, Trinity, Mendocino, and Sonoma – has resources to help both victims and the public,” Wood said. “I have put many of them here on my website, along with other COVID-19 resources, and would ask that if you know of someone or see someone experiencing or vulnerable to this abuse or assault, please seek advice about how you can help.”

General resources and advice:

• Interactive map of California resources: https://www.cpedv.org/domestic-violence-organizations-california
• National Domestic Violence Hotline: 800-799-7233 or TTY 800-787-3224 or text LOVEIS to 22-522
• Tips for talking to a friend: https://www.domesticviolenceinfo.ca/tips-for-helping-a-friend/
• In emergencies, call 911

ByElizabeth Aguilera, CalMatters

Even the littlest Californians have not been spared in the governor’s big proposal to cut a budget decimated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s ambitious plans to expand free preschool for low-income children and increase state support for child care now are on the chopping block. He also has proposed cuts to existing, early childhood funding that advocates worry could force child care providers to reduce the number of kids they serve, or even close their businesses.

The child-friendly budget Newsom announced in January was amended last week, revealing cuts and takeaways totaling more than $1 billion for early childhood programs. The revisions, if passed, would sink plans to create 20,000 new preschool slots and offer more child care subsidies to low-income working families. 

The proposals are a blow to many Californians, who believed that they had found a champion for early childhood education in Newsom, also known as “Governor Dad.” With four young children himself, Newsom created optimism by making it clear, early on, that he had an interest in and a heart for little kids. 

“There’s an understanding of how bad this budget is, but early childhood and kids need to be the least impacted,” said Ted Lempert, president of Children Now, an Oakland-based nonprofit focused on youth-related policy.

The cuts would be “devastating to families,” he said, and potentially harm many providers.

“What makes me optimistic is that the governor gets these issues and leading legislators get it, and now we need to put the pressure on,” he said. “As difficult as the budget is, we need to prioritize kids.”

California began providing state-funded preschool in 1965 to foster children and at-risk kids. Eventually, eligibility widened to include all children from low-income families. State-subsidized child care operates in much the same way, launched in 1997 for kids from low-income working families who otherwise could not afford quality care. 

But only a small percentage of the California kids who are eligible actually benefit. For instance, only 1 in 9 children eligible for subsidized child care and preschool were enrolled in 2017 because of inadequate state and federal funding, according to research by the California Budget and Policy Center, which focuses on how state finances affect lower-income residents.

Newsom vowed to try to close the gap. Then came the pandemic.

Now, nearly all his new initiatives – like the $160 million expansion of preschool  – have been pulled, and current expenditures will be decreased if the slimmed budget is approved. The budget does continue to route federal funding into child care for essential workers and other COVID-19 support, as part of the CARES Act.

Proposed cuts also include a 10% reduction in the daily rate paid for preschool and a 10% cut to funding for subsidized child care. It also eliminates a plan to provide more child care for low-income parents receiving cash aid from the state through the CalWORKs social services program. These three areas account for a $421 million savings, according to the new budget proposal.

Even Newsom’s big plan to create a Department of Early Childhood Development to oversee all learning and child care programs has been put on hold. Instead of spending $8.5 million for the new agency, the revised budget includes $2 million to move these programs to the Department of Social Services.

“We have been making historic investments in the last many years in California,” Newsom said May 14 when publicly announcing the revised budget. “And now being forced back into a position where we have to make cuts breaks my heart, because behind every category is a person and a dream.”

Advocates say they understand the need to cut but argue the long-term ramifications are not worth it, especially because child care and preschool start from an already weakened position

“Before COVID, far too many kids had no access to child care and we were well behind where we needed to be for preschool,” said Lempert. “That is why these cuts are disproportionate because they need the most help.”

This isn’t just about immediate money savings, it’s about a critical stage of development for children that lays the foundation for the rest of their lives, said  Steven Barnett, founder and senior co-director of the National Institute for Early Education Research.

“It’s the long-term consequences that don’t seem to get taken into account, that children will start school less well prepared, that our achievement gaps will widen, that our adults will be less productive,” Barnett said.

Child care is not just about having a place for children to go while parents work, said Patricia Lozano, executive director of Early Edge California, a Los Angeles-based policy and advocacy organization focused on early learning for children.

“For little kids this is a chance to reduce the achievement gap,” she said. “Education can change your life, and now we are saying we are going to cut it.”

The cuts proposed by Newsom in the new $203 billion state budget are considered “trigger,” meaning they only happen if the federal government does not provide budget aid.

While the revised budget proposal keeps the number of existing subsidized child care slots in place, advocates worry about a domino effect. If child care operators or preschools cannot stay afloat, or must downsize, the impact could be felt by families currently enrolled.

Providers already operate on very thin margins, with little room for rate cuts, said Mary Ignatius, statewide organizer for Parent Voices, a California parent organization that focuses on more subsidized child care for families.

 “If a parent has a subsidy or a voucher,  and now the value is cut 10 percent, providers may decide they can’t afford to stay open,” she said. “So a parent has to find a new provider in a world where there is already a shortage of providers.

“You don’t just drop off your kids at the next place that is open.”

Many child care centers and homes are currently closed, in response to the pandemic, and some providers who are open say they haven’t seen kids in weeks. Providers said they have furloughed or laid off employees and are looking hard at the bottom line, especially with new social distancing and disinfection regulations.

For Miren Algorri, who runs Little Blossoms Child Care in Chula Vista, the 10% pay cut would hurt the business she has run for more than two decades out of her home. She regularly cares for about 12 kids, from infants to elementary-school age – all paid for by the state through subsidy programs. The last three weeks, though, she has had zero attendance because parents are keeping kids at home or parents have been laid off.

Algorri said she will mostly likely limit the number of children she cares for and lay off her one full-time staff member.

“I haven’t slept, I have dark circles around my eyes because these cuts mean that most likely the person who has been my right hand for the last 20 years is not going to be my assistant any longer,” she said. “I won’t be able to pay an assistant to help me bring the best quality education to the children who are already underprivileged.”

In the San Diego region, the state pays $220.87 per week for the full-time care of kids ages 2 to 5, Algorri said. That is well below market rate, where parents who pay out of pocket often pay double or more per week.

To slash an already low rate throws providers and parents over the edge, Algorri said. The families she serves are low-income, mainly working in the service industry in restaurants.

“Child care helps the workforce make it to work,” she said. “We really need support and we really need for this new budget to really focus on what matters and what matters the most is the children.”

Some advocates, providers and parent groups say they intend to push back, at least to keep what is already being paid and supported.

For some parents, the cuts could affect their ability to continue working and keep child care in place.

Oakland parent Noni Galloway is working from home as a human resources specialist while caring for her 4-year-old son. His child care home closed the same week Galloway’s office shut down, and she set up her laptop at home.

She pays out of pocket, $50 a day, but has been on the state’s subsidy waitlist for several years. If providers lose funding, the cost for private-pay parents like her might rise – or kids like her son could lose their spots because of downsizing or complete closure, said Galloway, a member of Parent Voices.

Galloway said it took her a full year to find a child care provider she feels safe leaving her child with and that her child adores – a connection she views as vital.

“Quality professional reliable child care that fits our schedules is most important,” she said. “A child care is not like an automotive shop where you drop your car off. This is my baby, my life.

“If we don’t take care of the providers we are going to have a serious problem going back to work or reopening the economy.”

CalMatters.org is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media venture explaining California policies and politics.

ByMikhail Zinshteyn, CalMatters

California’s 115 community colleges will likely remain an online system of higher education in the fall, its chancellor Eloy Ortiz Oakley said Monday.

“As we transition to the fall, many of our colleges have already announced that they’re going fully online in the fall,” Oakley said. “I encourage them to continue to do so. I fully believe that that will be the most relevant way for us to continue to reach our students and to do it in a way that commits to maintaining equity for our students.”

The remarks further highlight the massive change confronting California’s public higher-education students due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It also underscores how higher education’s emergency measures to address the health risk are becoming longer-term solutions to ensure public safety.

(Image: Eloy Ortiz Oakley, chancellor of the state community college system, has been a supporter of the new online community college. But faculty unions feel it duplicates work they already do. Photo by Anne Wernikoff for CalMatters)

Last week California State University Chancellor Tim White said most of the instruction will remain online in the fall. “Consequently, our planning approach will result in CSU courses primarily being delivered virtually for the fall 2020 term, with limited exceptions for in person activities that cannot be delivered virtually,” the leader of the 23-campus system said.

The University of California expects to decide about its fall plans next month.

Oakley’s remarks began the meeting of California Community Colleges Board of Governors meeting, the body that oversees the system of 2.1 million students.

Commenting on the system’s transition to online instruction in March, Oakley admitted that “there have been lots of bumps on the road to this transition” but that “by and large faculty have made an amazing transition, our colleges have made amazing effort to continue to engage our students.”

The Board of Governors meeting is the first of the three public higher-education segments in California — the CCC, CSU and University of California — to gather following the release of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s revised budget for next year. The revised budget proposal detailed across-the-board cuts of about 10 percent to state programs, including state support for the three public higher-education systems. While the systems were told to expect nearly $2 billion less than it was promised back in January, financial aid to keep tuition free for hundreds of thousands of students remained largely intact.

Oakley cautioned against advocates who want to pull money from one community college program to support others. The chancellor didn’t name any school specifically, but it’s likely he was referring to an ongoing campaign to cut funding to Calbright. The state’s new online community college received $100 million in one-time funding two years ago and $20 million of ongoing funding.

The Faculty Association of California Community Colleges, an influential faculty membership organization, called for the college to be eliminated last week. The association is part of a constellation of faculty groups and lawmakers who oppose the creation of the college.  

The president of the faculty union representing the system’s instructors said that proposed budget cuts to community colleges make in-person learning in the fall a non-starter. 

“We would need more money to continue the services in-person during this period of time, to provide it safely,” said Jeff Freitas, president of the California Federation of Teachers. “With less money, there’s no other option than online.”

He cites money needed to teach smaller classes, cleaning demands, personal protection gear, and that the same classroom is used by multiple classes during a week.

He stressed that if colleges do remain online, which is a decision that should be made with local officials and administrators, then students must have the Wi-Fi connectivity and laptops they need to continue their learning. “We have to be dealing with equity for our students,” he said.

Oakley stressed unity in his remarks.

“It’s increasingly important that we stay together in our advocacy in this budget year, not to pick one college or one part of the budget and try to use that to mitigate cuts, but to protect all of our colleges to protect all parts of our budget,” Oakley said.

“This is not the time to pull back” on improving student outcomes, Oakley said later in the meeting. “This is a time to double our efforts, because otherwise we’re going to be in the same position we always find ourselves in in California and in the country: We make strides to improving equity, we hit a crisis, and we use that as an excuse to say we can’t continue.”

“We can’t let that happen this time,” he added.

The Board of Governors will continue to meet Tuesday morning. The University of California Board of Regents also starts its three-day meeting Tuesday.  

Get the latest on coronavirus in California with our frequently asked questions, dashboard tracking the numbers and our latest updates.

CalMatters.org is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media venture explaining California policies and politics.

ByJudy Lin, CalMatters

California finance officials revealed a $54.3 billion deficit Thursday in the first economic assessment of the coronavirus pandemic’s devastating blow to the fifth-largest economy in the world.

That figure is higher than the deficit during the Great Recession and obliterates the state’s once-healthy reserves.

Without sugar-coating how hard the prolonged shutdown of businesses and job losses will hit the state, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration released bleak projections on key statewide indicators: 18% unemployment rate for the year, 21% drop in new housing permits and nearly 9% decline in California personal income. 

(Image: In this file photo, Gov. Gavin Newsom presents the 2020-21 state budget at a press conference at the California Capitol on Jan. 10, 2020. Photo by Anne Wernikoff for CalMatters)

The California numbers signal a financial tsunami and cuts to schools, health care and safety-net programs, as state and local governments turn to the federal government for additional stimulus support. In one example, California’s public school system, including K-12 and community colleges, will lose $18 billion in the state’s minimum-funding guarantee, setting back years of striving to reach adequate education funding. 

Newsom Thursday stressed once again that California had balanced its budget and headed into this year with a huge surplus — all undone by the pandemic. He said the state is resilient and can rebound, with a caveat.

“My optimism is conditioned on this — more federal support. We’re seeing economic numbers, unemployment numbers, more acute than anything we’ve seen in modern times,” he said. “We need the federal government to recognize this. We really need the federal government to do more.”

Lawmakers began to prioritize the programs they hope to protect. The Legislature will take up the budget after Newsom releases his proposal on May 14. Lawmakers will then have until June 15 to pass a balanced spending plan.

“I want to keep education as whole as possible,” Sen. Jerry Hill, a Democrat from San Mateo. Referring to deep cuts made during the last recession, he added, “we cannot abandon another generation of children.”

The governor had warned that the budget figures would be “jaw-dropping” and sought to brace the public for a prolonged recovery. Newsom struck a positive note: The state was in a better position to withstand the crisis because it paid down debt and built up reserves in good years.

Still, the deficit is three and a half times the state’s $16 billion rainy day fund and nearly 37% of the state’s general fund.

Officials from Los Angeles, San Francisco and Stockton wasted no time campaigning for a statewide tax increase. The Schools and Communities First campaign, led by labor and education groups, is pushing a November ballot measure to overhaul Proposition 13, California’s landmark property tax cap, to help prevent steeper cuts to local governments and public schools.

“I urge strongly everyone to endorse this measure because, again, we’re going to need revenue,” said Stockton Mayor Michael Tubbs.

It remains unclear how a recession will affect voters’ mood for a tax measure. Business and anti-tax groups have vowed vigorously to oppose the measure, saying it harms businesses.

The governor’s budget update projects California’s economic losses will fall disproportionately hard on low- and middle-income Californians, which will only exacerbate income inequality. At the same time, low-income households and people of color are at greater risk of contracting and dying from the virus as the number of confirmed cases reaches 60,000. 

Since mid-March, Californians have filed more than 4.2 million unemployment claims.

“This is particularly concerning because the average income did not return to pre-Great Recession levels until 2018,” wrote the Department of Finance in its fiscal update Thursday. 

It’s an about-face for a state that began the year with ambitions of expanding child care for working parents and health care for undocumented seniors. Compared to the budget Newsom released in January, the state’s three main revenue sources in the general fund are now projecting a 25.5% drop in personal income taxes, 27.2% drop in sales taxes and 22.7% drop in corporate taxes

The $54.3 billion deficit is driven by three factors: $41 billion in revenue loss, $7 billion increase in health and human services programs, mainly Medi-Cal, the state’s health program for the poor, and about $6 billion in additional spending, mainly driven by the state’s response to COVID-19. The Newsom administration’s response has come under scrutiny as lawmakers demand oversight of multi-million dollar contracts and federal investigators look into supply deals gone awry.

Now anti-poverty advocates are bracing for a deja vu. 

The Great Recession led to deep, painful cuts to California’s social safety net — such as CalWorks, California’s welfare program for families with children, Supplemental Security Income for elderly and disabled people, and subsidized child care — even as unemployment and poverty spiked. Many social safety net programs are still less generous than they were in 2007.

“It’s devastating because at a time when people need government the most — which is any recession — it’s also the time when we have limited ability to help,” said Assemblyman Phil Ting, a San Francisco Democrat and chair of the budget committee. 

Here’s how the deficit may impact major programs:  

Housing and homelessness

Before the pandemic struck, California’s twin housing affordability and homelessness crises were at the top of Newsom’s 2020 agenda. The self-proclaimed setter of “big, hairy, audacious goals” devoted his entire State of the State to housing the more than 150,000 Californians living outside or in shelters, and vowed to enact a signature bill to ease the state’s housing shortage. 

California will have to scale back those ambitions, including:

• A proposal from big city mayors for $2 billion a year in ongoing homelessness funding may be able to draw on federal dollars in the short term, but backers will have a difficult time answering where that money should come from in future years. 
• An emergency rental assistance proposal backed by California landlords, which could request around $2 billion in an emergency appropriation, will run up against fiscal reality unless federal funding materializes. 
• State funding for subsidized, low-income housing developments could also be in jeopardy, while housing dollars pegged for more moderate income Californians could be redirected towards emergency help for those at the lowest-end of the income spectrum. 

Proposals to ease rules and regulations on homebuilding are also in danger. A slew of bills to reduce the fees cities can charge developers for new housing will run up against local governments’ desperate need for revenue. And legislative efforts to get cities to build denser housing may fail without new dollars for infrastructure and low-income housing. 

K-12 schools 

Despite record increases in school funding over the last decades, the state’s school districts never seemed to fully recover from the devastating cuts made during the Great Recession. The state increased school spending by about $24 billion since 2013 through the Local Control Funding Formula at same time as schools saw significant increases in fixed costs, such as special education, healthcare and employee pension obligations. 

For many schools, those rising costs offset the increases in state funding. 

The state’s projected $18 billion decrease in minimum funding guaranteed for K-12 schools and community colleges come at a time when school officials are asking for more state and federal support to help cover emergency spending, such as buying computers to facilitate distance learning and distributing food to students in need.

The California School Boards Association estimates districts have spent roughly $400 per student, or $2.4 billion, responding to the coronavirus pandemic.

Higher education

Already the COVID-19 pandemic has led to hundreds of millions of dollars in losses for the University of California and the California State University. 

Through March, the UC reported losses and higher costs of $310 million because of the pandemic. The CSU says it has $337 million in revenue losses and new expenses for its spring semester because of COVID-19. The federal government did dole out stimulus to help out colleges, but the money isn’t enough to shore up the losses in California, say legislative analysts.

Community colleges will likely have a shortfall of $2 billion in state support based on projections from California finance officials. 

The last recession gives clues to the hit on colleges. Staff reductions and class cuts had imperiled students’ chances of earning certificates and degrees.

Whether students will face tuition increases is an open question. While tuition and fees were already rising before the last recession, the trend only accelerated at the UC and CSU, where tuition effectively doubled between 2008 and 2012. And while state funding for the two public university systems has risen since the recession, they’re still well below per-student levels before 2008. 

Health care

Medi-Cal, the state’s Medicaid program, covers almost 13 million, or nearly one in three, Californians. But the pandemic is expected to drive that number up to 15 million. 

Just this January, California restored several benefits that were cut during the Great Recession. The state brought back audiology, optical services, podiatry, incontinence supplies and speech therapy. 

Since eyeglasses and hearing aids are not required by the federal government, they are most likely the first benefits to be cut by the state, said Linda Nguy with the Western Center on Law and Poverty. 

Health advocates sought to expand Medi-Cal to undocumented seniors, but the proposal will be a tough sell in the current environment. “I think this is a message to temper our expectations,” Nguy said. 

California also recently started offering subsidies through the state’s health insurance exchange, Covered California. It’s just one of many health programs now at risk.

“We can’t afford to go back in the middle of a pandemic when so many people have lost employer-based coverage and need that help,” said Anthony Wright, executive director of Health Access, a statewide health advocacy group.

Earned income tax credit and safety-net programs

Immigrant advocates had hoped to extend California’s Earned Income Tax Credit to undocumented workers who file taxes. Now, they say it’s even more crucial. Undocumented and mixed-status families have missed out on unemployment insurance and the federal stimulus check, yet work in some of the hardest-hit industries. But at a price tag between $117 million and $167 million, it may be cost prohibitive.

Other safety-net expansions that now seem like pipedreams:

• A $10 million plan to create a California consumer financial protection bureau, which Newsom said would go after debt collectors and payday lenders for unfair and deceptive practices. 
• A proposal for $93 million to reduce fines and fees associated with traffic courts and the criminal justice system for low-income people.

Prisons

Newsom had contemplated closing a state prison at the start of the year as the prison population fell from 165,000 in 2010 to 112,000 as of this month. A pre-pandemic budget proposal from the Legislative Analyst’s Office recommended closing two prisons. 

Yet while the proposed prison population is shrinking, the budget for the budget for courts, probation and parole is growing. 

The criminal justice system was forecast to spend $19.4 billion on courts, prisons, probation and parole, up $341 million from the last year, the vast majority of which — $13 billion — goes to prisons, parole and probation. 

The analyst’s office recommended expanding pretrial diversion services to include misdemeanor convictions in an effort to reduce the number of people sent to prison.

The analyst also recommended against reducing the time individuals spend on probation, a proposal the office predicts would lead to longer — and therefore, more expensive — prison and jail sentences.

Environment

While California’s green intentions seem baked into the DNA of state policy, key environmental programs could nevertheless be put on a starvation diet in the upcoming budget. 

Funding for transit, clean car rebates and urban forestry have all seen cuts during past recessions, according to a report from the University of California, Los Angeles that could foreshadow decisions to come. 

Newsom signaled that California would prioritize the fight against climate change, outlining $12 billion-worth of climate programs in his January budget proposal. But continued funding for clean-car rebates and charging stations, some wildfire prevention programs, and funding to support response to immediate climate impacts could be reduced. 

Some of those programs were contained in the governor’s nearly $5 billion climate resiliency bond, which would have allocated 60% of the funds for water-related projects, a particular interest of the governor.

In jeopardy, too, is the $20 million set aside to establish the first new state park in a decade.

Early childhood

Newsom’s initial budget was hailed by early childhood advocates for increasing child care, preschool and other efforts to support working parents. His proposal had

included $10 million to start a training program for adverse childhood experiences and raise public awareness on childhood trauma, not to mention an additional $31 million to create 10,000 more preschool slots.

Now those initiatives will likely be shelved. 

“Child care took the brunt of the cuts during the last recession and we will fight hard against that same outcome,” said Keisha Nzewi, director of public policy for the California Child Care Resource & Referral Network. “It will be up to the governor and the Legislature to figure out how to keep child care functioning, because without it, Californians can’t go back to work.”

CalMatters staff writers Elizabeth Aguilera, Rachel Becker, Jackie Botts, Ricardo Cano, Julie Cart, Elizabeth Castillo, Nigel Duara, Matt Levin, Mikhail Zinshteyn and contributing writer Barbara Feder Ostrov contributed to this report.

CalMatters.org is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media venture explaining California policies and politics.

ByLaurel Rosenhall, CalMatters

California health care workers may qualify for discounted hotel rooms under a new arrangement Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Thursday as part of the state’s ongoing effort to limit the spread of coronavirus.

More than 150 hotels around California have agreed to provide discounted rooms to help “a workforce that is deeply stressed out,” the governor said — health care workers treating COVID-19 patients who are worried that sleeping at home could expose their families to the virus.

“Some of the nicest and finest hotel chains in the world are participating in this program, providing deep discounts to the state of California, and we will extend those deep discounts directly to our caregivers,” Newsom said.

“They can stay closer to the needs in their communities.”

(Image: Health care workers at a Kaiser hospital in San Francisco on April 9, 2020. Today, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced that the state would make hotel rooms available to care providers in regions with high rates of COVID-19 infections who need to self-isolate. Photo by Anne Wernikoff for CalMatters)

The announcement follows a similar move in New York City, and comes after reports surfaced of a Bay Area nurse spending $2,000 a month to stay in a hotel and an Orange County doctor sleeping in a tent in his garage — both attempting to avoid exposing their families to the virus they may have picked up on the job.

Newsom did not identify the participating hotels or give many details on the cost of discounted hotel rooms. He described a sliding scale that would provide discounts for workers with higher incomes and full reimbursements for lower-wage workers, and said more information will soon be available at this website.

The priority is providing hotel rooms in areas of the state that have dense populations or large numbers of people with COVID-19, including Los Angeles, Santa Clara, Riverside, San Bernardino, Orange, Alameda, Contra Costa, San Francisco, San Diego and Fresno counties. 

Health care workers who have been frustrated by a shortage of protective gear said the discounted hotel rooms amount to “a nice gesture” but fall short of what they want from their employers.

“The bottom line is that health facilities should be providing proper personal protective equipment and infection control practices and policies in the first place so that nurses and other health care workers should not be resorting to living in their cars or camping out in their garages to avoid exposing their loved ones to the COVID-19 virus,” said a statement from National Nurses United spokeswoman Lucia Hwang.

The union, she said, wants employers or the government to cover the full cost of hotel rooms, adding that discounted rooms “do not adequately support nurses who are risking their lives daily to fight on the front lines of this COVID pandemic.”

The cost for the hotel rooms is being shared by the state and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Newsom said, adding that the new stock of rooms for health care workers will not impact a separate effort to house homeless people in hotel rooms. About 2,000 people who were sleeping on the street or in shelters have moved into hotel rooms since the state began a relocation effort last month in response to the pandemic.

Providing discounted hotel rooms for healthcare workers is also a help to the hotel industry, which has been battered by the coronavirus pandemic and government orders for people to stay at home. Occupancy rates are dropping and many hotels are planning to furlough workers or close.

Airlines are also jumping in to help health care workers, Newsom said. United Airlines will provide free flights for medical professionals who sign up for California’s Health Corps, a program to expand the health care workforce, the governor said, and the state is negotiating with other airlines to provide a similar service.

CalMatters.org is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media venture explaining California policies and politics.

ByRachel Becker, CalMatters

The Newsom administration has teamed with two universities to train more than 3,000 employees per week to become coronavirus detectives tracing the spread of the disease throughout California.

Starting Wednesday, the University of California, Los Angeles and the University of California, San Francisco will provide 20 hours of online and in-person training to state employees selected for the program.

The new “training academy,” as Gov. Gavin Newsom called it, is part of an effort to build an army of 20,000 people to test, trace and isolate people who may have been infected.

In addition, a new statewide database will help local health departments trace infected people and their contacts as they travel through the state. 

“I’m very excited about that innovation,” said Madera County public health director Sara Bosse. “It is something that we have needed for a decade in California, because we often have cases in which contacts cross counties for any disease.” 

The process of tracking the virus as it spreads from person to person is called contact tracing. And experts agree that it is critical to quashing new outbreaks of the novel coronavirus before they start — particularly as efforts to reopen the state provide more opportunities for infection.

“As people move more, we increase the risk for people to get sick,” Sonia Angell, California Department of Public Health director and State Health Officer, said in a live stream. “If people get sick, we want to identify those individuals very early, and then make sure that all of their contacts are also identified.” 

Right now, 23 of California’s 61 local health departments are actively tracking exposed contacts as the coronavirus spreads from person to person, according to Newsom. Nearly 3,000 investigators interview people who test positive, identify the people they’ve interacted with and notify them that they need to isolate or quarantine.

But the National Association of County and City Health Officials estimate that the nation will need 30 contact tracers for every 100,000 Americans to handle the pandemic. Which means that California’s 2,845 contact tracers fall far short of the 12,000 needed to track the virus through California’s population of nearly 40 million. 

To that end, Newsom announced plans to redeploy state employees with “the right kind of background cultural sensitivity, cultural competency, different language skills, a health mindset.”

Madera County’s Bosse said she hasn’t yet seen the training modules. But she said that training resources have been a real need across the state, although her county has adjusted. 

“Our contact-tracing resources, as you know, on a regular day, are quite small,” Bosse said — which means few people are generally available to help with training. “At this point, we now have a collection of folks that have significant skills and could easily do shadowing and on-the-job training.” 

The new online training program could help standardize contact-tracing state-wide, she said. “It’s comforting to know that people would at least have a similar approach.”

Newsom and Angell did not say how they would provide in-person instruction, given public health recommendations for physical distancing.  

They also did not say when the new contact tracers would be deployed. But when they are, local health authorities can request staffing help from the state,  according to Angell.

The new contact-tracing platform the state announced Monday will sync up with California’s existing digital disease surveillance platform, and contact tracers can use it to check in on people’s symptoms through texts, chat, emails, and phone automation, according to Angell. Angell emphasized that the database will focus on health information and will be kept confidential. 

Bosse hopes the new digital database will help streamline contact-tracing for cases and contacts that cross county borders. 

Still, there’s one major caveat to the state’s efforts to bolster contact-tracing, she said: people must be willing to cooperate, particularly if cooperating means missing work and wages — and potentially putting friends, family, and coworkers out of work for two weeks, too. 

“With so many people who are unemployed or underemployed at this point, once they have the ability to be employed, are they going to be willing to be tested?” Bosse asks. 

“Wage replacement, so ability to be paid sick leave, is going to be super important — or people are not going to agree to be tested, and then our contact tracing efforts will be really limited.”

CalMatters.org is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media venture explaining California policies and politics.

ByRicardo Cano, CalMatters

Their schools sit just five miles apart on opposite ends of Southern California’s notoriously busy Interstate 405, but the gap between their students’ distance learning experiences so far has been vast.

In Redondo Beach off the South Bay coast, Karen Cull’s three sons began engaging with their teachers online March 18, three school days after their district physically closed campuses to combat the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. On Monday, Redondo Beach will begin “Phase 2” of distance learning, in which teachers and students will be expected to cover new content.

In Hawthorne, an inland working-class community, Raul Torres spends five hours a day with his second-grade daughter and fourth-grade son completing paper packets. He’s heard little from their teachers in the four weeks after schools physically closed and the district doesn’t plan to roll out its distance learning program until April 21.

“It’s been challenging because, obviously, I’m not a teacher,” Torres said.

(Image: Melina, 8, and her brother Adrian, 9, play minecraft before bed. With limited classwork provided by their district the Torres kids have plenty of time for video games when their homework is finished. Photo courtesy of Raul Torres)

Across California, school districts are each frantically tackling the same challenge — how to keep students learning remotely — with varying degrees of preparedness. Conversations with parents across the state reflect existing disparities: Wealthier districts appear more likely to weather the transition with greater ease.

While school systems like Redondo Beach have been able to transition toward online learning without skipping a beat, parents in many districts have said they’ve gone weeks before hearing much about their schools’ academic plans.

A limiting factor in schools’ transitions has been access to Internet and technology and whether schools had the finances and infrastructure to provide families these resources. Across California’s 1,000 school districts, there have been longstanding inequities in the amount of funding districts have been able to locally raise for needs like student technology.

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond said this week that the state is working to secure 150,000 devices for students who don’t have one so they can do online learning. Recent hotspot and Chromebook donations from Google have helped make a dent, but not enough, Thurmond said Tuesday. He asked for //calmatters.org/education/2020/04/california-schools-parents-coronavirus-remote-learning/This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.">public donations to secure computers for students.

“We have had a digital divide in this state and in this country for many years, and It’s an embarrassment, and we must change that,” Thurmond said.

State officials have said they expect that most California districts will have formally launched distance learning programs by the end of April, though scenarios such as in California’s South Bay underscore the wide variance in how schools are shifting toward it.

About 9 in 10 students in the Hawthorne district are socioeconomically disadvantaged, according to state data, but academics have praised the district for narrowing achievement gaps for its black and Latino students. More than one-third of the district’s students are English-language learners.

Before the pandemic, Torres said his 8-year-old daughter was learning a lot, challenged by a rigorous curriculum.

“She was learning things that I never learned until I was in high school,” Torres said.

(Image: Melina, 8, does homework in her parents’ bedroom. Photo courtesy of Raul Torres)

Since his children’s schools physically closed, Torres, an electrician, has dedicated afternoons and evenings to working through two weeks’ worth of paper review packets with his kids. Torres’ autistic son has not received any special education services, he said, so he relies on the parenting classes he took to help the fourth-grader.

Torres sees the difference in distance learning as he travels to job sites across Los Angeles. Customers in Torrance and Manhattan Beach, for instance, trade notes on how far along their schools are in making the transitions.

“They already have the means to do it,” Torres said. “We don’t (in Hawthorne), not yet.”

A survey by The Education Trust-West, an advocacy group focused on closing student achievement gaps, showed widespread concerns from parents about student regression.

The poll of 1,200 California parents found that while 8 in 10 gave their schools positive marks in handling the aftermath of school closures, just 45% of respondents said that their schools were providing them with regular contact or access to their child’s teachers.

Nineteen percent of parents — including 1 in 5 Latino respondents — said they’ve received little to no academic information from their schools. Most black and Latino parents said they’re worried they don’t have the resources to keep their students from regressing.

“Long before this pandemic came, California faced an epidemic of educational inequality,” said Elisha Smith Arrillaga, executive director of The EdTrust-West, adding that school closures “will only exacerbate those gaps.”

“There is simply no way to close schools for a month without gaps in student learning,” she said. “Now is the time to accelerate planning to ensure that teachers and school leaders have the resources they need to stop those gaps in their tracks.”

In Redondo Beach, Cull praised the district’s rapid and “fantastic” response in shifting toward online. The district closed schools March 13, a Friday. By the following Wednesday, Cull’s students were taking part in online lessons covering prior materials. Special educators were quick to prepare a plan for her son with Down Syndrome, she said.

Each teacher has had different approaches to online learning, Cull said. One of her oldest son’s high school science teachers set up a class meeting using Flipgrid, where students could see each other and interact in a virtual lesson — a helpful exercise in social interaction.

“He got such a kick out of seeing the videos that the other kids have posted and just seeing other 15-year-old kids in their bedroom messing about,” she said.

About 16.5% of Redondo Beach students are socioeconomically disadvantaged, according to state data, and about 4% of students are English learners. Like Torres, Cull also trades notes with other parents. She says she and her sons are in “a very lucky place right now.”

“What this is doing is exacerbating the existing differences, the existing inequalities,” Cull said. “This situation has emphasized (inequalities) because the districts like Manhattan Beach and Redondo Beach have had existing technology structures already there.”

CalMatters.org is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media venture explaining California policies and politics.

By Kristen Hwang for CalMatters

In a matter of weeks, Dr. William Goral, a private practice ear, nose and throat specialist in San Bernardino County, will be out of business.

His small, solo clinic, which has served patients throughout the Inland Empire for 30 years, postponed about 80% of patient visits due to coronavirus restrictions. That’s not enough revenue to pay rent, utilities or staff. 

“We are going into the red even having laid off two-thirds of my employees,” Goral said.

At private practices and small clinics across the state, independent physicians are worried their businesses won’t survive the current crisis, forcing them to either close their doors or sell their practices, which could lead to higher patient costs. In either case, experts worry that will leave the health care system vastly diminished at a time when the state is facing skyrocketing costs and a shortage of doctors.

(Image: Dr. George Scott in one of several examination rooms in his Manteca clinic. Scott’s private OB/GYN practice is moving to a smaller clinic space in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic due to a rent increase. Photo by Anne Wernikoff for CalMatters)

About one in three Californians get care from private practice physicians and specialists, according to the California Medical Association, which represents roughly 50,000 doctors across the state. In a recent survey, nearly 76% of members reported being extremely worried or very worried about finances.

Empty clinics triggered a cash crunch for doctors after Gov. Gavin Newsom issued a shelter-in-place order last month. That’s because the statewide lockdown forced a majority of medical procedures, from hip replacements to annual check ups, to be canceled or delayed unless they are deemed an emergency.

A catastrophe for private practices

On Wednesday, the governor announced plans to resume some delayed medical care such as heart valve replacements, angioplasty and and tumor removals, but he warned the state remains far from reopening.

And though the federal government is providing aid, most say it’s not nearly enough.

“The whole situation is catastrophic for the entire profession in terms of economics,” said Dr. Thomas LaGrelius, a family medicine doctor in Torrance, Calif. and president of the American College of Private Physicians.

LaGrelius currently is only able to conduct about three in-person patient consults per day and has tried to switch as many appointments as possible to online video conferences. Unlike other doctors who received emergency grants this week from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, LaGrelius’ clinic has yet to get any relief from the federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act, or CARES Act.

The federal department, which is doling out $100 billion to doctors based on the amount of patients they serve who are on Medicare, gave him a test deposit of $0 and told him a grant would come later.

And while grants are certainly welcome, they’re a “drop in the bucket,” said Debbie Rood, business manager for her husband’s obstetrics and gynecology practice in Manteca. Rood’s husband Dr. George Scott said they received about $2,000 since most women over the age of 65 don’t see a gynecologist regularly. 

His private practice’s finances are complicated by the fact that insurance companies won’t reimburse him until after patients give birth, leaving him and his staff performing unpaid labor for months. At the same time, their rent tripled, forcing them to downsize to a smaller clinic.

Taking out a second mortgage

Scott and Rood are determined to keep the business running but they may need to take a second mortgage on their home. They are also concerned about the long-term implications the economic crisis will have on access to care. 

“If you lose all of your primary care doctors and your (obstetricians) because you can’t make a living,” Rood said, “where are patients going to go?”

It’s a question with a complicated answer, said James Robinson, professor of health economics at UC Berkeley. The economic fallout of the pandemic will lead to the closure of many private practices, but the implications are less clear.

Consolidating practices

Increasingly, in the past decade, independent doctors and private community hospitals have been swallowed by sprawling health care delivery systems through mergers and buyouts. Nearly 60% of Californians received care from an integrated healthcare system in 2018, which organizes doctors, hospitals, and sometimes insurance companies into one coordinated system, according to Let’s Get Healthy California, a state task force that monitors key health indicators including access to care.

Because small businesses like independent physicians typically don’t have the financial reserves to ride out severe economic downturns, the current pandemic will hasten the consolidation of healthcare, Robinson said.

“I think that it’s going to drive them into the arms of health plan places like Kaiser,” Robinson said.

The loss of private practices isn’t necessarily a bad thing, experts say. Consolidated health care can lead to better communication between doctors, more efficient use of testing and scans, and more cost-effective treatment, he added.

(Image: Debbie Rood and Dr. George Scott in their Manteca clinic. Rood says making sure Scott stays healthy during the coronavirus pandemic is a priority. Photo by Anne Wernikoff for CalMatters)

The problem is many of California’s rural counties, which often face provider shortages to begin with, still rely on private physicians and community health clinics. Forty of the state’s 58 counties had below-average access to consolidated health care in 2018, with as little as 10% of the population in Del Norte enrolled in a managed health care plan. 

Mergers raise costs on patients

A large body of evidence shows that hospital mergers and physician buyouts have increased insurance prices throughout the state. 

In areas with high hospital consolidation and high proportions of hospital-owned physician practices, health insurance premiums cost up to 12% more than in areas with average levels of consolidation, according to research published in Health Affairs, a peer-reviewed health policy journal.

“There was an uptick in merger activity right after 2008,” said Daniel Arnold, co-author of the paper and research director at the Nicholas C. Petris Center on Health Care Markets and Consumer Welfare at UC Berkeley. “I think you will see something similar here.”

Rood said she’s scared to death of what will happen to patients should her husband, Scott, become ill from coronavirus or should their private practice be forced out of business. Already, with only five obstetricians and gynecologists in their area and one planning to leave in June, Scott said there aren’t enough OB-GYNs to take emergency calls at the local hospital.

Like many other doctors and business owners, Rood and Scott applied to the Small Business Administration’s Paycheck Protection Program, a $350 billion emergency fund created by Congress to avert business closures and layoffs during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Last hope hangs on second relief package

Their bank, however, took 11 days to send the application to the first-come, first-serve relief program. The day after they submitted, the Small Business Administration announced it had run out of money.

Now, with Congress approving a second $484-billion relief package with $75 billion set aside for physicians and hospitals, independent physicians like Scott and Goral are hoping to save their life’s work.

Goral, the ear, nose and throat specialist, was unsuccessful in obtaining help in the first round of federal funding, but he hopes the second round of funding will buy time until patients return. Still, his position is precarious. Each passing day pushes his business further into debt and he fears he’ll close before ever seeing any money.

“If we have to shut our doors and we don’t have a practice anymore, then the opportunity has been missed,” Goral said.

Kristen Hwang is a freelance reporter pursuing joint master’s degrees in public health and journalism at UC Berkeley.

CalMatters.org is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media venture explaining California policies and politics.

Food is top of mind for many during the COVID-19 pandemic — how to keep your family fed amid layoffs, concerns about grocery outings and food transmission, all while trying to maintain social distance.

If you’re struggling to put food on the table, have questions about food safety or need help safely getting groceries, here are some resources to help.

(Image: Pexels / Vicki Moore)

Looking for these resources in Spanish? Click here.

Help getting food

SoCoEmergency.org: Sonoma County says food assistance is available, but because of the increased demand on local organizations, your first resource should be family, friends, neighbors and/or caregivers who can assist you. 

If you still need help, visit their food assistance web page to learn more about local services for able-bodied individuals, seniors, children and more.

Redwood Empire Food Bank: The Redwood Empire food bank is operating. See their website for information on how they are responding to the pandemic, including where to get food.

Catholic Charities: Catholic Charities is providing food distribution and other resources. See a map of where to get food here.

CalFresh: Monthly food benefits are available for low-income individuals and families. Find information about how to apply here. The Sonoma County Human Services Department can also help connect you to these public benefits.

211Sonoma Search for Food Pantries: Search for food pantries near you in Sonoma County.

SF Chronicle Searchable Database for Grocery Delivery: Search through a directory to help you order produce, meat and pantry goods during shelter in place.

SF Chronicle Searchable Database of Restaurants Delivering:Find Bay Area restaurants that are offering delivery during the pandemic.

Food Safety

Consumer Reports: How to Protect Yourself While Shopping

FDA: Food Safety and the Coronavirus

USDA Coronavirus Resources

NPR: No, You Don’t Need To Disinfect Your Groceries. But Here’s How To Shop Safely

NPR: How Safe Is It To Eat Takeout?

Local Stores 

A list of Sonoma County grocery stores offering delivery, pick-up or senior hours can be found on the county website.

Oliver's: Actions We're Taking on Coronavirus

Safeway: Answers to Your Covid-19 Questions

Lucky: Covid-19 Updates

Helping Others with Food and Donations

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ByBarbara Feder Ostrov, CalMatters

They dressed in scrubs. They sounded scientific. And last week’s message from two Bakersfield doctors was exactly what many stuck-at-home Americans wanted to hear: COVID-19 is no worse than influenza, its death rates are low and we should all go back to work and school. 

Drs. Dan Erickson and Artin Massihi, who own urgent care centers in the region, had called a press conference to release their conclusions about the results of 5,213 COVID-19 tests they had conducted at their centers and testing site. They claimed the results showed that the virus had spread further in the area, undetected, and thus wasn’t all that dangerous.

But public health experts were quick to debunk the doctors’ findings as misguided and riddled with statistical errors — and an example of the kind of misleading information they are forced to waste precious time disputing.

The doctors should never have assumed that the patients they tested — who came for walk-in COVID-19 tests or who sought urgent care for symptoms they experienced in the middle of a pandemic — are representative of the general population, said Dr. Carl Bergstrom, a University of Washington biologist who specializes in infectious disease modeling. He likened their extrapolations to “estimating the average height of Americans from the players on an NBA court.” And most credible studies of COVID-19 death rates in reality are far higher than the ones the doctors presented. 

“They’ve used methods that are ludicrous to get results that are completely implausible,” Bergstrom said. 

Still, the early media coverage went viral. A local television report on the Bakersfield doctors’ press conference garnered more than 4.3 million views on YouTube. Elon Musk, the Tesla founder who wants to reopen his Fremont manufacturing plant this week, praised the doctors to his 33 million-plus Twitter followers. Tonight, the doctors are to get a conservative national audience for their views on Fox News, appearing on Laura Ingraham’s show.

In a rare statement late Monday, the American College of Emergency Physicians and the American Academy of Emergency Medicine declared they “emphatically condemn the recent opinions released by Dr. Daniel Erickson and Dr. Artin Messihi. These reckless and untested musings do not speak for medical societies and are inconsistent with current science and epidemiology regarding COVID-19. As owners of local urgent care clinics, it appears these two individuals are releasing biased, non-peer reviewed data to advance their personal financial interests without regard for the public’s health.”

The doctors had set up Bakersfield’s only private walk-in COVID-19 testing site and performed about half of all tests conducted in the area. They did not respond to a CalMatters request for comment Monday.

Misinformation thrives in a pandemic, and public health officials in California and elsewhere just can’t keep up.

“This pandemic has been so severely politicized in this country that evidence, no matter how poor, gets amplified enormously if it benefits one side or another,” said Bergstrom, who also was one of the first experts to critique the doctors’ study on Twitter. “We always hoped this crisis wouldn’t come, but that if it did we’d all be in this together. That’s been a huge surprise for all of us doing infectious disease epidemiology. It’s amazing to have to deal with this misinformation that’s being spread around for political purposes and the ways that interferes with adequate public health response.”

California Democratic state Sen. Richard Pan, a pediatrician who chairs the Senate Health Committee, said lawmakers who favor reopening the state had not yet cited the Bakersfield doctors’ conclusions as a justification to do so. But if they did, they’d “be on pretty weak ground,” he said. 

The doctors “basically hyped a bunch of data and weren’t transparent about their methods. And they really played on the fact that they’re physicians. I think it’s quite disingenuous of them.” Pan said. “Then we have to push back on any media that promotes this information. They’re really doing this as a way to fish for attention.” 

A Kern County public health spokeswoman told reporters that officials did not support the doctors’ call to reopen the region. Other epidemiologists echoed that sentiment.

But already the Bakersfield doctors  — who tout their support of President Donald Trump and refuse to wear masks in public — had become heroes on social platforms and conservative media outlets, with some commenters calling them “brave.” Others who support continuing to shelter-in-place described the doctors as self-promoters whose chain of urgent care centers would benefit from reopening. Non-COVID medical visits have plummeted during the pandemic, endangering the practices of many doctors.

“As struggling business owners, their economic frustration is understandable. But it can’t be mistaken for science. People trust doctors,” Michigan emergency room doctor Rob Davidson wrote on Twitter. “When they tell Fox viewers to ignore recommendations from real experts, many will believe them…The impact of rejecting science-proven recommendations in exchange for these erroneous ideas would overwhelm health systems and cost lives. While re-opening the economy might be good for their Urgent Care Centers (sic), it would kill medical personnel on the actual front lines.”

Other highly-publicized studies of antibody test results by Stanford and USC researchers were similarly criticized for sampling bias and for the poor reliability of the tests it used. Researchers had suggested that COVID-19’s true spread in the community was much higher than expected and resulting death rates were low. But again, politicians and media who favor reopening states right away cited them as supporting evidence. 

CalMatters.org is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media venture explaining California policies and politics.

By Kate Cimini, The Salinas Californian

The Trump administration is considering cutting the pay of guest visa farmworkers during the coronavirus pandemic to help the farm industry. But California growers aren’t thrilled: They say it won’t help them much with their financial crisis. And they worry that it might even hurt them by creating uncertainty for their essential employees, prompting them to look elsewhere for work once the pandemic ends.

Unions and other worker advocates also worry that reducing farmworkers’ wages would cause hardships for people already living on the edge of poverty, and may end up lowering the pay of domestic farmworkers, too.

Hugo Marcos has an H-2A visa, which allows growers to temporarily employ guest workers from other countries when there is a shortage of U.S. workers willing to take the jobs. He spends his days cutting hearts of romaine lettuce for Foothill Packing, Inc., and returns around 6 p.m. to the motel where he will stay for months. 

Marcos just arrived in Salinas, but this is his fourth year working U.S. fields on an H-2A visa. He has earned enough to build a two-bedroom home in the Mexican state of Michoacan, and take care of his wife and two children.

(Image: Norcal harvesting fieldworkers pick strawberries early morning on March 31, 2020. Photo by David Rodriguez, The Salinas Californian)

“Trabajar de campo es complicado y especializado,” he said. In English: “farmwork is complicated and specialized.” 

It took Marcos a long time to learn the skills he has: cutting the lettuce in a perfectly flat swipe to maintain a uniform look and size, then removing excess leaves and handing the heart off to be packaged right there in the field. 

More than 257,000 people worked in the U.S. on an H-2A visa in 2017. These workers have been deemed essential during the coronavirus pandemic by county, state and federal government regulations. 

In California, H-2A workers earn $14.77 an hour this year, or about $118.16 for an eight-hour day, one of the highest in the country for these workers. The average wage of an H-2A farmworker, known as the  “adverse effect wage rate,” or AEWR, is based on a survey of growers and farm labor contractors, and the AEWR varies state to state. 

For the same labor in Mexico, Marcos said, he would earn 70 pesos an hour, something like $23.28 a day. A drop in pay would reduce his children’s quality of life, he said. “Reduciría en nivel de vida que les damos,” he said.

Yet the Trump administration’s Department of Agriculture is exploring cutting H-2A worker pay, according to an NPR report. NPR found that “new White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows is working with Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue to see how to reduce wage rates for foreign guest workers on American farms.”

The USDA declined comment on whether it is considering such a change, or how it would be accomplished. The administration could announce a temporary rule change, order a new rulemaking or issue an executive order. 

“During these difficult times, President Trump and Secretary Perdue are doing everything to ensure farmers have the tools to carry out the vital work of feeding the American people,” a USDA spokesman told The Californian.

By cutting worker pay, the administration hopes to keep farmers afloat through the pandemic.

Without the wage cut, researchers expect to see up to a $688.7 million decline in sales, leading to a payroll decline of up to $103.3 million between March and May of 2020.  

The pandemic has shut down restaurants, schools, cafes and other regular buyers of wholesale goods, leaving farmers hauling larger loads to food banks when they can afford to, and letting food rot in fields when they can’t.

As the administration contemplates cutting pay to workers on the frontlines, farmers also may be on the verge of receiving a $16 billion bailout to keep their operations going.

But agricultural industry representatives and workers’ advocates alike say the move to cut worker pay won’t solve the food-supply-chain crisis.

“To see wages being depressed would be reason for concern and evaluation,” said Chris Valadez, president of the Grower-Shipper Association of Central California, which represents more than 300 companies. “We are one of the few industries still essential, still open for business.

“Longer term, it should cause us to reevaluate the AEWR system and what goes into it, but right now, I just think it would create more uncertainty in the mind of the employees,” Valadez said.

Union officials say a pay cut for the temporary visa workers may reduce the pay of domestic workers, too, because the H-2A pay rate is considered the average pay for all farmworkers.

“To reduce their wages at any time would be of deep concern, given that many farmworkers are struggling to feed their own families,” said Gieve Kashkooli, the political and legislative director with the United Farm Workers, a union that serves domestic and foreign farm laborers. “It would be an even deeper concern to do that during this COVID crisis while the federal government has declared farmworkers essential. And it’s a total insult to them.”

Workers already underpaid, report says

According to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a nonpartisan think tank, H-2A workers are already underpaid compared to other workers.

“In 2019, the average wage of all nonsupervisory farmworkers was $13.99 per hour, according to USDA, while the average wage for all workers in 2019 was $26.53 per hour, meaning the farmworker wage was just 53% of the average for all workers,” read an EPI post. “And the average wage for production and nonsupervisory nonfarm workers—the most logical cohort for workers outside of agriculture to compare with farmworkers—was $23.51.

“In other words, farmworkers earned 60%—just three-fifths—of what production and nonsupervisory workers outside of agriculture earned.”

Anne Lopez, director of the Center for Farmworker Families, called it “un-American” to consider cutting wages during a health and economic crisis.

“They’re already impoverished,” said Lopez. “They live on the edge of survival, they have no guarantees. Right now they’re going through one of the worst periods I’ve ever seen…and to make things worse for them by cutting their pay? It’s obvious our president doesn’t consider these people as human beings. 

“I think a lot of it’s racist, it’s classist, it’s to keep them where they’re at so they can’t progress. That’s why I say it’s un-American.”

Casey Creamer, president of the California Citrus Mutual, which represents 2,500 family citrus growers, said that although he had not seen a proposal from either the USDA or the Trump administration to cut H-2A wages, his group does not support cutting salaries of pickers.

(Image: Farmworkers Juan Manuel Virgen, left, and Daniel Lopez Avilez, middle, wear bandanas to protect them from then coronavirus and dust while they work in the fields of Salinas. Photo by David Rodriquez/Salinas Californian)

“It’s not a political reality, it’s not supportive of our employees that we have in place. It’s just not a thing that we do,” he said. 

‘Not the most significant tool’

Some industry representatives say the move to cut wages is detracting from the ultimate problem: a sudden drop in demand.

In the Ventura-Santa Barbara area, citrus growers are leaving lemons on trees, Creamer said. Unlike other produce, which can be disked straight back into the ground and used to fertilize the soil, citrus must be harvested or it will endanger next years’ crop. 

“We can hold for a little bit longer and hope that restaurants open back up,” said Creamer. “Growers will have to pay to come back in and harvest to drop food back to the ground. We’re buying some time right now but it can’t go on much longer.”

Valadez said that if the administration wants to help growers, it should “put enough money in the system so employers can pay workers.”

“I know if the food service market is down, it’s down, and there’s nothing we can magically do to change that,” he said. “However, where federal stimulus is focusing on direct payments, we also need to focus on purchasing power to get that food into the hands of people that need it.

“Lowering the AEWR is a tool but I don’t think it’s the most significant tool right now,” he said.

Valadez suggested an injection of funds into purchasers still buying food, particularly ones seeing a real upswing in customers, such as food banks.

Hunger is a problem across California, and Monterey County has one of the highest rates of food insecurity in the state. A 2016 report by the Monterey County Health Department placed the percentage of food-insecure people in the county at 34%.  

At the Monterey County Food Bank, which typically serves 20% of the county’s adult population and 25% of its children, the number of people standing in line at the food bank has basically doubled, said the nonprofit’s executive director, Melissa Kendrick. 

Many of those who take advantage of food banks are farmworkers themselves.

A food crisis

Some industry experts say without significant intervention, the farming landscape will be forever changed.

“We’re in a different world right now,” said Valadez. “As we move forward we might see a lower demand. That is extremely impactful to the industry and to the backbone of the industry: the workers.”

“Does going back to AEWR save the day?” asked Valadez. “I don’t know. Before COVID, I probably had an interesting quip to give you, but during this crisis I think there are other things that are more in-demand in the moment. Businesses need buyers for their product.

“We have to keep the system moving. Afterwards, we can have our debates and our cuts. But we have to keep the system moving.”

Some H-2A workers said they would still participate in the program even if wages went down, as they would make far more in the U.S. program than they would doing the same work in Mexico. Still, they said, it would be a blow to their finances and their plans.

Marcos has worked cutting romaine hearts for two years for Salinas-based Taylor Farms and two for Castroville-based Ocean Mist.

As Marcos washed up for dinner at a plastic washstand in the motel parking lot, pumping the water in bursts with his foot and lathering up with industrial green handsoap, he talked about his sons, the oldest, 8 years old, named for him. 

They’re getting older, he said in Spanish, and he and his wife want to add a bedroom onto their blue-and-white home in Mexico so they could have their own rooms. 

If his salary were to drop, Marcos said, it would hit his family hard. They would have to put construction plans on hold, probably for years.

“Suerte, pues, gracias a dios nos da la oportunidad venir por acá y lo aprovechamos después,” said Marcos. 

“It was luck. Thank God I had the opportunity to come here. I made the most of it.”

Kate Cimini is a journalist for The Salinas Californian. This article is part of The California Divide, a collaboration among newsrooms examining income inequity and economic survival in California.

By Jacqueline García, La Opinión

California’s undocumented immigrants can begin applying Monday for disaster relief payments of up to $1,000 per household under Gov. Gavin Newsom’s coronavirus emergency assistance plan.

In April, Newsom announced a one-time, $75-million fund for undocumented adults who are not eligible for other forms of government assistance, such an unemployment benefits and federal stimulus checks. A qualifying undocumented adult can receive $500, with a maximum of $1,000 per household.

Since the announcement was made, many undocumented immigrants have been waiting for information to apply as soon as the application period opened.

California has more than two million undocumented immigrants. Nearly one in ten workers is undocumented.

With the funds spread among so many people, most families will not receive the funding. Applications are approved on a first-come, first-served basis, until the money runs out.

“In the best case scenario, these funds would reach one in 10 people,” said Unai Montes-Irueste, director of communications with United Ways of California.

Magdalena, 47, an undocumented essential worker who up until recently worked making face masks in a sewing factory, hopes to receive the assistance.

“I haven’t worked for about a week because my 74-year-old mother became ill and we don’t know if she has the coronavirus,” said Magdalena, who preferred not to give her last name because of her undocumented status.

Magdalena said if she receives help from the state government, she could close the gap on her lack of income, which affects her family of four.

“This money would help me pay the rent,” she said.

Another possible beneficiary is Julio Peralta, 45, a single father of a 16-year-old son and a 12-year-old daughter with spina bifida.

Peralta said that none of them has a legal status in the country since they arrived in Los Angeles from Guatemala five years ago in hopes of obtaining a cure for his daughter.

“But right now with the pandemic, I already fell behind on my rent payments for April and May,” said Peralta, who is not working.

Peralta said if he receives the financial aid from the government, he would use the money to find a place to live in Los Angeles since his daughter is receiving treatment at the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles

“But I don’t know how it is applied,” he said.

The process of applying

Montes-Irueste of United Ways of California — which has helped undocumented immigrants without bank accounts during the pandemic — said it is important for people to know where to get help and avoid being scammed.

Called the Disaster Relief Assistance for Immigrants Project, the $75 million in state funding will be distributed to 12 organizations throughout California.

Additionally, the governor said $50 million would be available from philanthropy groups to be supervised through the organization Grantmakers Concerned with Immigrants and Refugees (GCIR). However, as of Thursday, only $13 million had been collected from philanthropy through immigrantfundca.org.

The organizations were selected from among Immigration Services Financing contractors who have existing agreements with the state. The state Department of Social Services also selected nonprofits that have the ability to provide a high volume of application assistance services to undocumented populations in specific geographic locations.

Applications will be available until funds for each region are exhausted.

Eligibility

An applicant must be undocumented, over 18 years of age, ineligible for federal assistance related to COVID-19 such as the stimulus check or unemployment benefits, and able to demonstrate that they have faced financial difficulties as a result of the pandemic.

Organizations will verify the applicant’s documents to ensure they match the information provided and will make the final decisions.

To apply, undocumented immigrants should contact the group representing their area:

Northern California:
California Human Development Corporation
(707) 228-1338 www.californiahumandevelopment.org/
Covering Alpine, Amador, Butte, Calaveras, Colusa, Del Norte, El Dorado, Glenn, Humboldt, Lake, Lassen, Mendocino, Modoc, Napa, Nevada, Pleasure, Plumas, Shasta, Sierra, Siskiyou, Solano, Sonoma Tehama, Trinity

Bay Area:
Catholic Charities of California
Alameda and Contra Costa: www.cceb.org
Marin, San Francisco, San Mateo: www.catholiccharitiessf.org/
Santa Clara: www.catholiccharitiesscc.org/

Central Coast:
Mixteco / Indígena Community Organizing Project (MICOP)
www.mixteco.org/drai/3
Santa Barbara: (805) 519-7776
Ventura: (805) 519-7774

Community Action Board Santa Cruz
(800) 228-6820 www.cabinc.org/
Covering Monterey, San Benito, San Luis Obispo, Santa Cruz

Central Valley:
United Farm Workers Foundation (UFWF)
(877) 527-6660 www.ufwfoundation.org
Covering Ash, Kern, Kings, Wood, Merced, Tulare and Mono

California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation (CRLAF)
(877) 557-0521 www.crlaf.org/drai
Covering Mariposa, Sacramento, San Joaquin, Stanislaus, Sutter, Tuolumne Yolo and Yuba

Los Angeles and Orange County:
Asian Americans Advancing Justice
(213) 241-8880 www.advancingjustice-la.org
Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA)
(213) 201-8700 www.chirla.org
Los Angeles Central American Resource Center (CARECEN)
(213) 315-2659 www.carecen-la.org/

Inland Empire:
San Bernardino Community Service Center
(888) 444-0170, (909) 521-7535 www.sbcscinc.org
Covering Inyo, Riverside, San Bernardino

TODEC Legal Center Perris
(888) 863-3291 www.TODEC.org
Covering Inyo, Riverside, San Bernardino

San Diego and Imperial County
Jewish Family Service of San Diego
Imperial County: 760-206-3242
San Diego County: 858-206-8281

Jacqueline García is a reporter with La Opinión. This article is part of  The California Divide, a collaboration among newsrooms examining income inequity and economic survival in California.

By Elizabeth Aguilera, Cal Matters

Updated June 22, 2020

Sisters Maria and Jennifer Salvador start their days before the sun. The Southern California teenagers report to work at an Oxnard strawberry farm with one goal: To harvest as many bright red strawberries as they can.

Each 20-pound box of stemless strawberries they collect brings in $3. 

In the evenings when school was still in session, albeit remotely – and after chores at home were done — Maria and Jennifer turned to their school work. The two relied primarily on their father’s cell phone because the school district’s hot spot didn’t work in their Oxnard neighborhood.  

“It has gone badly for me,” said 16-year-old Jennifer about remote learning. “It’s not the same because it’s difficult to know how to do the work that the teachers send. You can’t ask questions. It’s like being all alone.”

(Image: Sisters Maria (left) and Jennifer Salvador of Oxnard are two of the many California teenagers who worked in the farm fields to help support their family when their high school closed during the pandemic. In the evening, the sisters tried to do homework online and via email without the benefit of any direct instruction that took place digitally during the day. Elizabeth Aguilera for CalMatters.)

Like many students in California’s agricultural communities, the Salvador sisters’ personal and educational lives have been upended by the coronavirus pandemic  When the health crisis interrupted education across the state, closing schools in March and moving learning online, many of these students went to work in the vast green fields that feed much of the country. Jennifer and her 19-year-old sister, for instance, missed out on live digital meetings with their teachers and small group meetings that took place while they were curved over strawberry plants, sifting for the ripest berries.

This poses a challenge for California schools whose migrant students fell behind this spring. As fall approaches, administrators and teachers are scrambling to figure out how school will look amid the ongoing pandemic  — and how to help these students return to classes and catch up. Advocates worry some students could decide to continue working instead of going back to school if they feel they have lost their educational footing.

In Oxnard, where Maria and Jennifer are students, school district officials knew the fields would beckon students whose families already live on the economic edge.

 “We absolutely saw this as an outcome of the school closure,” said Tom McCoy, assistant superintendent of educational services at Oxnard Union High School District. “We are working to make sure they have a chance to make up those classes and help them do that once we get set up again. It’s really about being as flexible as we can be to keep the kids connected with their schooling.” 

McCoy said a committee is studying options, including making school viable for students who may need to work. The district is planning to extend office hours, and to require that digital meetings be recorded for later viewing. Shifting to a quarter system is also on the table, he said. Quarters allow students to take more classes overall but focus on three to four classes each quarter instead of six or seven throughout a semester. 

Classes on weekends and evenings also may be offered, McCoy said. 

So far, state-issued guidance for returning to schools focuses mostly on pandemic safety – social distancing and taking temperatures, for instance — rather than offering recommendations for how to support students who have fallen behind. The state Department of Education guidance outlines three possible models for bringing students back that include distance learning, in-class small group instruction and a hybrid of the two. 

Advocates worry the virtual or hybrid models could keep students in the fields and affect their education long-term. 

Statistics on how many students worked in the fields because of pandemic-related school closures are non-existent.  

Federal regulations allow kids as young as 12 to work in agriculture as long as school is not in session. Those who are at least 16 and not enrolled in school can work any time. 

A U.S. Government Accountability Office report, released in 2018, found there were nearly half a million youth in the U.S. under 18 working in agriculture in 2016, including on their own family farms. California is home to the largest share of minors working as hired crop hands.

Concerns about children working in agriculture during school is part of a larger issue. For decades, efforts have been made to raise the age limit because of the perils of pesticides, back-breaking work and dangerous equipment that has maimed or killed children.

 “The law says students can’t work during school hours, but there are no hours going on right now so many of them are working,” said Kendra Moesle of the Association of Farmworker Opportunity Programs and Children in the Fields Campaign. “It’s really going to impact education because they are not focusing on school work and, secondly, there is the physical danger.”

(The Salvador sisters earned $3 for each 20-pound box of strawberries they picked. Photo by Elizabeth Aguilera for CalMatters)

The dilemma is playing out in agricultural communities from Imperial County on the southern border to Monterey on the Central Coast to Butte County in Northern California.

Students went to work because their parents’ jobs were lost or reduced or because parents got sick, said Yvette Irving, superintendent of the Gonzales Unified School District, in the Salinas Valley.

“Our migrant students don’t sit idle in the summer,” she said. “So this just expedited things and did not allow them to finish the semester of their high school program.”

Irving said her district’s priority is bringing the students back to in-person instruction, but it will provide distance learning for those who need it.

“We are concerned about getting them back on track in a traditional classroom setting with daily teacher-to-student interaction and making sure they have all the prerequisites they need to go on to college or a different aspect of the workforce,” Irving said.

The Gonzales Unified School District is in Monterey County, where a federally funded program for migrant students went into overdrive this year to reach migrant students when remote learning began, said Summer Prather-Smith, senior director of the Migrant Education Program Office.

Monterey County is home to the largest share of migrant students enrolled in the program in California, with more than 11,000 youths ages 3 to 21. But the program only supports students whose families move for work every three years. Many of the teens also work.

Since March, counselors and case workers met with students, set up learning plans and provided late-night support. The program gave all students access to an online tutoring program and hired extra teachers to teach math in the evenings. Toward the end, like most students, the kids dropped off but the outreach will continue into summer and the new school year, said Prather-Smith.  

She said she is even more focused on how to lure students back to school and wants the district to offer quiet spaces for students to use for remote learning, much like a traditional study hall with social distancing. 

(Carla Diaz, 16, works in the raspberry orchards in Oxnard with her mother. She went to work in the fields when schools closed and she did her schoolwork in the evenings to try to stay caught up. Photo by Elizabeth Aguilera for CalMatters)

“The longer they are disengaged from it the harder it is to ask them to go back,” she said. “We have to be more enticing than the money they are going to make.”

As an added challenge, a growing number of California’s farmworkers have come from indigenous communities, mostly in Mexico, who speak dialects including Mixteco. This can make it more difficult for families to engage with schools, said Arcenio Lopez, executive director of the Mixteco/Indigena Community Organization Project, an organization founded to help the indigenous farmworkers.

“Our students are not feeling like they will be able to enter the university or college and we are seeing a lot of emotions and stress and mental health issues,” said Lopez. “They are very stressed.”

Carla Diaz, 16, is from one of these families. 

For her, schooling began once she returned home from the raspberry orchards in Oxnard where she toiled alongside her mother. 

A couple of classes scheduled virtual meetings after 5 p.m. but mostly she communicated only by email — a wearisome task, as Mixteco is her first language, Spanish her second and she is learning English. But she did it, keeping an eye on her A average.

“I miss my teachers, I miss the extra counseling,” said Carla, who is the fifth of 10 children. 

Her parents have little education, she said, and while they want her to have success they can’t help her with homeschooling.

“My mom says I have to work for a better future, because she doesn’t want us to suffer like they have,” said Carla. “They didn’t go to school and that’s why they work in the fields.”

Carla and the sisters are members of a youth group called Tequio, focused on getting kids from the fields to college and is run by the Mixteco/Indigena Community Organization Project.

The Salvador sisters vow to return to school but for now, they are the sole earners for their family of nine.  Their mother had a baby just weeks ago and their father is caring for them.

With only their eyes showing above a bandana and below a baseball hat, they focus only on the strawberries, swooping their hands into plants to cut the berries with sharp metal tubes wrapped around their thumbs.

Older sister Maria can turn in 50,  20-pound tubs of strawberries a day; Jennifer aims for 30. 

“I haven’t learned anything during this time, it’s very sad,” said Maria Salvador, who graduated from Hueneme High School on June 12. “It’s very hard to work in the fields. I want a better future.”

 She hopes to enroll at Oxnard College in the fall.

ByMikhail Zinshteyn, CalMatters

In the third week of April, Shannon Hill approved the donation of some $35,000 in emergency aid to 40 students at Cuesta College in San Luis Obispo.

Hill, the executive director of the Cuesta College Foundation, the nonprofit arm of the  community college, said that in a normal school year the foundation doles out $90,000 to $100,000 in aid. But given the economic toll the pandemic has taken on students, especially the many community college students who work part-time, the foundation is aiming to distribute closer to $250,000 this year.

It’s joining other local community college foundations that have been raising money or redirecting existing funds to help plug the gap that remains after state and federal aid.

At Cuesta, that means prioritizing undocumented students and others who were barred from receiving a portion of the federal stimulus money colleges and universities are set to receive through the federal CARES Act for pandemic relief that Congress approved in March. The stimulus dedicated $14 billion to higher education in the U.S. Of that, California’s higher-education sector is supposed to get at least $1.7 billion.

(Image: A student walks back to her car after picking up eggs, milk, produce and dried goods from the weekly drive-thru food pantry at Santa Monica College. Photo by Mikhail Zinshteyn for CalMatters)

“We do anticipate that more of our emergency grants will likely go to students who are not getting the CARES money, because we’ll be helping to fill that gap for our students,” Hill said in an interview late April, whose foundation is giving out grants of $1,000 to students and another $500 for students needing a second installment.

Money with strings

The country’s higher-education community cried foul when the U.S. Department of Education said in late April that the roughly $6.3 billion meant for direct student aid was off-limits to certain students, such as  those who had defaulted on past federal loans, had below a C average, have certain drug convictions and are undocumented. One estimate is that there are 454,000 undocumented college students in the U.S., and a fifth live in California.

Democrats in the House and Senate wrote separate letters to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos saying that restrictions imposed by her department went against the spirit of the legislation. 

And all that federal money isn’t enough to replenish the college budgets hampered by the pandemic or the aid students need. The Legislative Analyst’s Office warned in an April report that “initial data suggest that the federal relief funding provided under the CARES Act likely will be insufficient to address the full effects of the outbreak.”

Local philanthropy can help to close the gap. The vast majority of California community colleges have an associated foundation, like the one at Cuesta. Several foundation directors say they’re using their available dollars to support undocumented students, along with other students in need. The faucet of foundation cash turned on just as destabilization wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic became more apparent. The foundations responded to a wide range of student needs, such as food distribution, laptops or other mobile learning tools and emergency grants to cover rent. These efforts indirectly support students who wouldn’t qualify for CARES Act funding, foundation heads say.

“We have many, many students who would not receive any support from the CARES Act but will receive our scholarship funds,” said Lizzy Moore, president of the Santa Monica College Foundation. It raised $780,000 in scholarships to mete out to students, a banner year, Moore said.

The foundation also partnered with Los Angeles-based meal-delivery company EveryTable to send seven free meals weekly to 1,000 students, which works out to $44 spent per student a week, Moore said. By late April, she had raised $1.25 million in five weeks for the meal program, enough to keep it running through early September while feeding 1,500 students. It’s a service the foundation created toward the end of March after realizing students who relied on the college’s food pantries would be cut off from food as shelter-in-place orders closed campuses and pushed college instruction online. Anywhere from 100 to 200 students used the school’s pantries before the pandemic. Students are eligible for the meal-delivery program if they’re referred to the program by faculty or staff. In a nod to safeguard student privacy, recipients of the meal program don’t have to put down their actual names to receive the meals, Moore said. They could also request to send the meals to another address and pick up the shipment there.

Food for thought

The foundation also began running a weekly drive-thru food pantry to help students through the pandemic. On Wednesday, the pantry fed 289 students, who received a bag of fresh produce and shelf-stable food along with 18 eggs and milk. For eligibility, students just need to show they’re currently enrolled at the college.

“I don’t have to … risk to go out and buy food and second of all I don’t even have that money, so getting the food from school has been a blessing for me and my child,” said a student of the college who’s undocumented and requested anonymity. Through the foundation, she’s received the meal delivery plan and food from the pantry. The food alone saves her $150 to $200 a month, she said. 

The immigrant from Cameroon works part-time as a homecare assistant. It’s just enough to cover her rent, but her priority is attending school full-time. Between her own school work, classes and assisting her daughter with her own lessons, “it’s heavy,” she said. Sometimes she brings her laptop, provided by the college, to work. When a patient sleeps, she opens her computer to keep up with classes.

And though she’s ineligible for federal financial aid, California’s financial aid programs are open to undocumented student residents. Her tuition is waived and she receives several state grants, including about $3,000 a semester for being a student with a child and $649 for attending school full-time. 

“I just have no words, to be honest,” she said. “I just feel like I’ve been surrounded with good people.”

International students gain from the foundation’s efforts as well. Skander Zmerli came from Tunisia and studies at the college, where he’s a member of the student government. He receives free meals through the foundation’s EveryTable program. The college, he said, is compensating for “the fact that the federal government isn’t giving any financial support to international students.” 

College foundations are limited in how much of their assets can go directly to students’ emergency aid. Because donor money has to be spent how donors want, foundations don’t have as much flexibility to change money allocation on the fly. At Chaffey College Foundation, which supports the Inland Empire community college, 93 percent of the foundation’s funds are restricted to scholarships and program support, said its executive director, Lisa Nashua. 

(Image: Bags of produce sit moments before Santa Monica College’s weekly drive-thru food pantry opens up to students. Photo by Mikhail Zinshteyn for CalMatters)

Almost all of the Foothill-De Anza Foundation’s $40 million in assets are restricted. Still, the foundation, which supports the Bay Area colleges Foothill College and De Anza College, freed up more around $350,000 in discretionary funds for the colleges to use in response to the pandemic, said Dennis Cima, executive director of the foundation. It’s using the money as a stop gap until federal CARES Act money reaches students and for students who wouldn’t be eligible for the federal relief anyway. 

The foundation has about $1.25 million in discretionary funds remaining, but it won’t use it all this school year. Cima said the foundation needs to anticipate the emergency aid support of students in the next school, especially if the economy continues to slide and more workers unable to find jobs head to community college to acquire new skills and request extra financial help.

In past years the foundation spent $25,000 to $50,000 from its discretionary pot, typically paying for end-of-year college events, student scholarships, supporting abroad studies trips, food pantries and other expenses. With shelter-in-place orders, those activities are unlikely to happen soon anyway.

By spending more now, the foundation will have less on hand once it’s safe for students to head back to campus. Cima will attempt to fund-raise more to refill the discretionary pool, but drawing down the money now to address an unprecedented need is the foundation’s role. “I am comfortable allocating these discretionary funds knowing the immediate need that our colleges and students have,” Cima said.

Formula mismatch

California community colleges enroll nearly 60 percent of the state’s college students but will only receive a third of the main federal funding made available to the state’s institutions of higher learning, according to the April report by the Legislative Analyst’s Office. Nationally, community colleges received less funding per student than did all other types of colleges, including public universities and for-profit colleges, according to a report by The Century Foundation.

The reason for the mismatch is because the CARES Act counted the number of “full-time equivalent” students instead of the number of enrolled students, a formula which “absolutely disadvantaged community colleges where significant shares of students are part-time,” said Debbie Cochrane, executive vice president at The Institute for College Access & Success. “For community college students, it really adds insult to injury.”

Community college students often can’t afford to attend classes full-time and need to work as well. As a result, using course units to determine relief money has different real life impacts for part-time students. One way to visualize this, Cochrane said, is to imagine two part-time students who now need laptops at home because classes moved online In that scenario, the logic of full-time equivalency falls apart. “Two part-time students can’t share one laptop. Two part-time students need two laptops,” Cochrane said.

All funds on deck

Beyond foundations, community colleges could access state funds to support students facing financial emergencies, including ones ineligible for federal financial aid. A state law passed last year allows community colleges to tap into a nearly $500 million annual pot originally intended for student advising and other academic support to also be used for student emergency aid. 

Because the state law went into effect this year, it’s unclear how many colleges are using the funds — the Student Equity and Achievement Program — for emergency aid purposes. Assemblyman David Chiu, a San Francisco Democrat and author of the law allowing the money to go to student emergency aid, said in a statement that the emergency aid dollars could offer relief where the federal government does not.

“I hope that emergency grants will be a useful tool to support our community college students at a time when so many are struggling,” said Chiu. “Given that Secretary DeVos is using the COVID-19 crisis to play politics at the expense of our undocumented students, state-based emergency grants may give us an opportunity to step in and help these students.”

Despite the dire state fiscal situation, there are still ongoing efforts to send more money to students most affected by the escalating recession. The state community college system and the agency that oversees the main financial aid program is asking Gov. Gavin Newsom to send $500 in the upcoming school year to 82,000 low-income students, including nearly 12,000 undocumented students. 

(Image: Santa Monica College student Skander Zmerli. He benefits from the college foundation’s free meal program. Photo by Mikhail Zinshteyn for CalMatters)

The University of California and California State University pledged to use internal resources to offer emergency aid support for undocumented students. A UC spokesperson did note that “the aid an undocumented student receives will be equivalent to the amount that an equally needy student who qualifies for CARES Act funding would receive.” The dollars come from flexibility the state has been giving the UC since 2013 to provide financial aid to undocumented students. A spokesperson for the CSU said its emergency aid for undocumented students at individual campuses “could come from a variety of sources including institutional funds, privately raised dollars, and foundation grants,” among others. 

Fundraising during the pandemic is hard, some community college foundation directors said. Not only are benefactors being asked to support multiple nonprofits, but the shelter-in-place orders undermine the interpersonal touch that’s useful in highlighting to a potential donor a college program in need of philanthropic support. 

“It’s hard to have a relationship with somebody that you can’t bring on the campus, you can’t visit them, you can’t have them see a program in action,” said Cima.

CalMatters.org is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media venture explaining California policies and politics.

Updated Tuesday, 10:15 a.m.

The Sonoma County Sheriff's Office says it will enforce county health orders, reversing an earlier decision to stop enforcing the county shelter-in-place rules. 

The change was announced in a joint press release Monday from Board of Supervisors Chair Susan Gorin and Sheriff Mark Essick. It says the county will “convene a Sonoma County Economic Recovery Taskforce focused on shifting our County from a broad, stay-at-home model that is based on essential/non-essential activity, to a risk-based model that weighs all available data.”

Essick had advocated for a “less restrictive, risk-based system” to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus in a previous statement explaining his decision to stop enforcement of the health order.

County Health Officer Dr. Sundari Mase said Monday on a call with the media that the county has always used a risk-based approach and sees no difference.

Mase last week said an increase in local COVID-19 cases merited caution as the county moves through the phases of reopening at its own pace. 

The joint release from Gorin and Essick indicates that the county and sheriff’s office have turned a new leaf, and will move forward together in unison.

“We look forward to working together to achieve transparent decision-making processes; data-driven directives; thoughtful enforcement; and collaborative, cross-sector leadership,” it reads.

Original story:

Beginning Monday, June 1, the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Department will not be enforcing the county’s COVID-19 health order.

Sheriff Mark Essick in a Facebook post last week attributed the decision to a lack of information and transparency from the county about why it has not moved to a “a less restrictive, risk based system” to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus.

“As your elected Sheriff, I can no longer in good conscience continue to enforce Sonoma County Public Health Orders, without explanation, that criminalize otherwise lawful business and personal behavior,” he wrote.

Sonoma County District Attorney Jill Ravitch said Essick’s decision is at odds with other local law enforcement agencies and adds to fear and confusion around the pandemic. 

“Yes, it is difficult to enforce and at times may seem arbitrary,” she said. “That said, the Sheriff and I both know our role is not to make policy but to enforce the rules.”

Ravitch said the decision to file criminal charges lies ultimately with the District Attorney's Office.

Essick met with county officials on Friday, including Board of Supervisors Chair Susan Gorin, Supervisor Lynda Hopkins, Director of Public Health Barbie Robinson and Sonoma County Public Health Officer Dr. Sundari Mase, to discuss enforcement of the health order.

Essick said in another Facebook post that while the discussion was “positive and productive in addressing the Sheriff’s concerns,” his decision to stop enforcement still stands. 

He said the Sheriff’s Office will continue to educate the community and collaborate with the county.

By Lauren Hepler, CalMatters

Beaches and bars were just the beginning. California Gov. Gavin Newsom today ordered indoor portions of restaurants, entertainment centers, museums and other businesses in counties with growing coronavirus outbreaks to shut down for at least three weeks.

As the Fourth of July weekend approaches, the indoor facilities must close in 19 “watch list” counties that are home to 72% of the state’s population.

Under the state order, restaurants, wineries, tasting rooms, movie theaters, family entertainment centers, zoos, museums and card rooms in those counties must close indoor facilities. Bars in those counties must close all operations, and many state beach parking lots also will be shut down this weekend, Newsom said.

“We have specifically targeted our operations to close indoor operations,” Newsom said during a press briefing today. “This doesn’t mean restaurants shut down.”

The impacted counties are Contra Costa, Fresno, Glenn, Imperial, Kern, Kings, Los Angeles, Merced, Orange, Riverside, Sacramento, San Bernardino, San Joaquin, Santa Barbara, Santa Clara, Solano, Stanislaus, Tulare and Ventura.

(Image: A sign outside of the Stanford Theatre announced its temporary closure in downtown Palo Alto on March 4, 2020. Photo by Nhat V. Meyer, Bay Area News Group)

Counties are added to the watch list when they exceed metrics that indicate that they have rising numbers of infections and hospitalizations. All counties under the new restrictions had been on the state list for at least three days.

On Tuesday, the state recorded 5,898 new cases, and California’s positive test rate has surged to 6.4% in the last week, up from 4.4 in mid-June.

In addition to the new closures, Newsom said seven state agencies are convening new “strike teams” as part of stepped-up enforcement efforts for businesses operating in violation of health orders. 

“When people just thumb their nose, turn their back and put your life at risk, put their workers’ lives at risk, that’s why we have rules,” Newsom said. Of individuals who wear face masks as mandated by the state, he said, “It’s a sign of someone who gives a damn.”

The announcements follow several days of warnings about more aggressive state action to curb record numbers of COVID-19 infections in the past week, which have pushed the state past 6,000 deaths and more than 23,000 cases. On Sunday, the governor began “toggling back” some local reopenings by ordering bars to close in seven counties, including Los Angeles, and recommending that others on a growing state watch list do the same.

Local governments around the state have responded with a patchwork of closures during what is usually the summer’s busiest weekend. 

Many residents are confused by the patchwork. In Los Angeles County, beaches will be closed from Friday through Monday. Next door, in Orange County, which previously attracted the governor’s ire for beach crowding and has emerged as a hotbed for backlash against health officials, most beaches are open, including popular Huntington Beach and Newport Beach. However, the city of Laguna Beach cancelled July 4 fireworks and closed its beaches, albeit only for the holiday on Saturday. San Diego is so far keeping beaches open but has implemented some restrictions on parking and indoor structures at area parks.

The new order means that no indoor dining rooms are open in Southern California for the next three weeks except in San Diego County.

Testing is also an ongoing area of concern, after Newsom reported a drop to 87,000 COVID-19 tests on Tuesday from some 105,00 tests on both Sunday and Monday. The state is also “pausing” a multi-million dollar test expansion effort in under-served rural towns and inner-city neighborhoods, the Los Angeles Times reported Wednesday, due to the program’s high costs.

The new closures illustrate growing geographic divides in the pandemic’s California toll. Hospitalization rates are growing quickly in southern counties, including Imperial, San Bernardino and Los Angeles, the latter of which now accounts for nearly half of all cases statewide. Rural Central Valley counties with limited health infrastructure, including King, Stanislaus and San Joaquin, are also among those with the highest per-capita hospitalization rates and suspected new cases, a CalMatters analysis of state data shows. 

In Northern California, where hospitalizations are still rising but at a slower pace, beaches have largely reopened in Santa Cruz and Marin counties, so long as visitors keep their distance. Some jurisdictions have voluntarily slowed or “paused” reopening plans, including more densely populated San Francisco, Alameda and Sacramento counties. Bars in the state capital were also ordered closed on Monday, and of particular concern in the Bay Area is a spiraling outbreak at San Quentin State Prison, where more than 1,000 cases have overwhelmed the health system.

 (Image: Cleverson Davis, a waiter at Palermo Italian Restaurant in San Jose, tends to customers on June 5, 2020. Outdoor parts of restaurants can remain open in the state’s 19 “watch list” counties. Photo by Dai Sugano, Bay Area News Group)

“None of this should surprise any of us,” Newsom said. “As we reopen our economy, as more people mix, we’re going to see an increase in spread.”

Before Newsom announced the new restrictions today, he also extended some programs to ease the harsh economic toll of the virus, though largely keeping with a strategy to leave it up to local officials to decide what to ultimately implement. 

Among the new authorizations in the executive order signed Tuesday night are the option for local governments to halt evictions for renters impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic through Sept. 30 — a move that housing advocates say is necessary to prevent a wave of mass displacement in high-cost areas. The measure also extends remote marriage and drivers license options, waives some Medi-Cal eligibility reviews and lengthens the window for confirmation of some state appointees. 

Some 16 million Californians — more than half of all adults in the state — have seen their income fall since shelter-in-place orders in mid-March, according to a Census Bureau survey last month, which has strained state safety-net programs for housing, food and unemployment benefits. 

A union agreement with Kaiser Permanente will ease the burdens of about 80,000 health care workers on the frontlines of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Under the agreement, members of the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions will receive assistance with child care and temporary shelter, and extra leave if they are tested for or diagnosed with COVID-19. The agreement applies to full-time, part-time and per-diem employees.

The agreement focuses on three key areas:

Child-care assistance: With schools closed, many health care employees are having difficulty finding affordable child care. Under the agreement, Kaiser employees who work 32 hours a week or more in a KP facility will be eligible for a grant of $300 per week to pay for child care for children 14 or younger (and disabled, dependent children). It can be used to pay for their own caregiver (as long as they are not a spouse or domestic partner) or to find child care outside of the home.

The stipend will last until May 31, 2020, and will be pro-rated for employees who work between 20 and 32 hours (including per-diem employees) with a minimum of $210 a week.

Temporary shelter: Kaiser will work with several hotel chains to provide alternative shelter for employees who:

• Test positive for COVID-19;
• Work a double shift;
• Work multiple 12-hour shifts;
• Have fewer than 8 hours between shifts; or
• Have a household member who either has COVID-19 or is in a CDC-defined vulnerable group.

Eligibility applies to all employees working at least 20 hours per week (including per-diem employees) at a KP facility between April 13 and May 31, 2020.

Eighty additional hours of leave for employees who test positive for COVID-19: Employees working at a KP facility more than 20 hours a week (including per-diem employees) who test positive for COVID-19 will receive up to 80 hours of administrative leave. This is above and beyond regularly accrued leave. Employees who are sent home from Kaiser and are awaiting a test result will also be covered.

“As healthcare workers in the middle of this pandemic, we know our duty is to our patients and the community, and we take that duty very seriously. But we can only give our best if we know our own lives and our families are protected as well,” said Juanita Kamhoot, who works in surgical services at Kaiser Sunnyside Medical Center in Clackamas, Oregon. “This agreement will make a real difference at a time when we need every healthcare worker on the job and focused on taking care of COVID-19 patients.”

ByLaurel Rosenhall, CalMatters

California lawmakers plan to probe why state officials wired half a billion dollars for masks to a medical supply company that had existed for just three days, and want to know what’s changed in the state’s vetting process since the deal collapsed.

“We really need to ensure that there are appropriate controls in place and that we are spending California’s tax dollars efficiently and responsibly,” said Assemblywoman Cottie Petrie-Norris, a Laguna Beach Democrat.

The accountability and administrative review committee she chairs plans to hold a hearing this month to examine the bizarre transaction that CalMatters revealed earlier this week in which California wired $456.9 million on March 26 to Blue Flame Medical LLC – then scrambled to get the money back hours later. The company was incorporated on March 23 by two Republican operatives, Mike Gula and John Thomas, with no track record in the medical supplies field.

(Image: California lawmakers are demanding details about the state's vetting of Blue Flame Medical and other sellers of supplies to combat the novel coronavirus. Photo by Anne Wernikoff for CalMatters)

Republican lawmakers also are seeking an audit of all the state’s spending on protective masks, including the rescinded payment to Blue Flame and a $1 billion contract the state subsequently reached with a Chinese company called BYD. 

“We are concerned about the details of a rushed, half-billion contract to a company only days old and a price-per-mask contract with BYD that could be nearly 40% higher than what is available on the market,” nine GOP lawmakers wrote in a letter to the Legislature’s Democratic leaders Thursday.

“Rather than learning of these issues from the Administration… we are getting delayed and incomplete reports from news stories.”

The state decided to cancel the deal with Blue Flame for 100 million N95 masks after bankers involved in the wire transfer alerted California Treasurer Fiona Ma that they were suspicious of it, Ma told the Sacramento Bee. Ma declined an interview request from CalMatters.

The account she gave The Bee portrays a deal that was about to close until two bankers called her to raise alarms. One bank executive was not comfortable completing the transaction because the Blue Flame Medical account had been opened just the day before, according to The Bee’s report, and another banker involved in the wire transfer thought the transaction might be fraudulent and planned to call the FBI.

“That’s when I called the governor’s office and said, ‘this is fishy,’” Ma told The Bee. “‘We got the money back, but you need to vet these people better and go through the proper protocol.”

Newsom insisted Thursday that his administration has improved its vetting process since the Blue Flame deal fizzled in the initial weeks of California’s coronavirus crisis. 

“We were in the Wild, Wild West period in the early part of this pandemic,” he said. “Those dollars were protected and protocols were put into place that are much more strengthened after that specific incident.”

Newsom’s director of Emergency Services said the vetting process now includes a team of experts in health, logistics and foreign commodities as well as federal emergency management and law enforcement officials. But he acknowledged that decision making during an emergency is rushed, and that state officials were deluged with offers from people purporting to have the coveted medical supplies.

“There were thousands and thousands of individuals and organizations reaching out to us that required all of these aspects to be vetted,” Mark Ghilarducci said.

“And through that vetting process we actually were only able to get through a small percentage of legitimate organizations and companies that could provide the commodities we needed.”

Because Newsom declared the pandemic an official emergency, the state has waived many of the normal rules for procuring supplies and services. Vendors can land lucrative contracts with the state without going through the usual bidding process.

One key lawmaker lauded Newsom’s handling of the pandemic and said he trusts the state’s leadership.

“There has been no pattern ever in this administration or these departments of recklessness that would make me want to suggest that there was anything improper,” said Sen. Bill Dodd, a Democrat from Napa, who chairs a committee overseeing disaster response.

It’s still not clear why Newsom administration officials decided to make the deal with Blue Flame in the first place, given how new the firm is to the medical supply business. The state’s Department of General Services, which placed the order with Blue Flame, did not respond to several inquiries from CalMatters over the last week and a half.

“I  think it would be very productive both for the Legislature and also for the public at large to understand what happened,” said Assemblywoman Petrie-Norris.

At the upcoming hearing, she said she intends to ask Newsom’s aides: “What we have learned, what controls and protocols are now in place, are there still issues and gaps, and if so how are we working to close them?”

CalMatters.org is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media venture explaining California policies and politics.

ByRicardo Cano, CalMatters

State lawmakers are one step closer to plugging a technical loophole that has allowed California school districts to divert funds intended for needy kids to other purposes.

A legislative panel unanimously advanced a proposal that would strengthen oversight of how the state’s school districts spend money designated for needy students, making it one of the few surviving bills as the coronavirus pandemic has upended the state’s education agenda.

Assembly 1835 by Democratic Assemblywoman Shirley Weber of San Diego stems from a years-long effort to bolster transparency of the state’s landmark 2013 school finance law, the Local Control Funding Formula.

Advocates of the proposal have long argued that the law, intended to close gaps in student achievement, has lacked the necessary teeth to ensure districts appropriately spend additional funding meant for disadvantaged students.

But the proposal encountered new opposition from a group of school officials who argued that school districts need as much flexibility as possible to navigate looming steep budget cuts induced by the coronavirus pandemic. Experts and state lawmakers have warned schools of potential cuts in state funding greater than those during the Great Recession that resulted in mass teacher layoffs and years of painful cuts for schools.

(Image: Assemblymember Shirley Weber advocated for the Local Control Funding Formula in 2013, and now wants to close a loophole in the system. Photo by Anne Wernikoff for CalMatters)

Weber and supporters of AB 1835 said at a Wednesday morning hearing at the Capitol that the budgetary landscape only adds urgency for passing the proposal. Schools with high percentages of disadvantaged students, they said, experienced the brunt of last decade’s cuts, and they stand to be in a similarly vulnerable position without the legislation.

Weber, who lobbied legislators to pass the Local Control Funding Formula seven years ago, said she empathized with schools’ financial concerns, but said that the proposed changes remain long overdue.

“Even in good times for the last seven years, these kids have not benefited from these dollars because we have not held the districts accountable for using the money as it should have been spent,” Weber said. “We could not afford to once again fail these kids. Even in this pandemic, they are suffering the most.”

Signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown in 2013, the formula overhauled how school districts in California receive funding. It replaced a system that was criticized for being inflexible and imposing strings for how schools could spend money.

The Local Control Funding Formula, which remains popular among school officials and education advocates, gave districts greater control in determining school spending while giving extra funding to districts with higher concentrations of students who are English learners, economically disadvantaged or foster youth.

Under the new formula, each school district receives a flat, per-student base grant. Districts with higher proportions of needy students receive additional funds with the expectation that schools direct those dollars toward disadvantaged students.

But the November state audit found that the law hasn’t done enough to ensure that districts are appropriately spending that money. The state audit, which renewed the effort to boost the law’s transparency, highlighted that unspent supplemental and concentration funds lose their designation after one year, essentially allowing districts to use those rollover funds for across-the-board expenses, such as teacher pay.

Wednesday marked the first time the Assembly Education Committee gathered since Gov. Gavin Newsom issued statewide stay at home orders on March 19. The legislative panel took up only a fraction of the bills it had been slated to consider this session as legislators shift their focus toward a budgetary landscape significantly different than the one the governor presented earlier in the year.

Prior to the pandemic, the state was on rosy economic footing, boasting a $21 billion surplus with plans to invest a record $84 billion for K-12 schools and community colleges. A revised budget later this month is expected to show a completely different picture, and school officials have warned that programs and services across the board will likely be affected by cuts.

Jeff Vaca, chief governmental relations officer for the Riverside County Office of Education, told lawmakers Wednesday that the county’s districts were not planning to oppose the bill. But, with tough financial decisions on the horizon, “we regretfully must oppose the bill because we believe it will make it more difficult to achieve our pledge and mission.”

“We will do everything humanly possible to prioritize and preserve programs for disadvantaged and at-risk students, and to mitigate the loss of learning that the crisis has already caused,” Vaca said before lawmakers advanced the bill. “But it is a certainty that all programs and services will be significantly impacted by the forthcoming recession.”

AB 1835 is among a handful of education proposals that will advance this session. The Assembly Education Committee had been scheduled to hear more than 140 proposals this session, though the panel took up only 13 bills in its sole scheduled hearing before a May 29 deadline.

CalMatters.org is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media venture explaining California policies and politics.

Sonoma County’s Superintendent of Schools says the state’s landmark budget shortfall brought on by the coronavirus pandemic will pose “incredible financial challenges” for local schools in the coming year.

Superintendent Steve Herrington’s remarks come a day after Gov. Gavin Newsom shared his revised budget proposal, which features significant cuts to California’s K-12 schools and community colleges.

Herrington said the county Office of Education and local school districts run many programs, including CTE, workforce development, teacher development and special education preschool initiatives, that could see significant cuts as a result of certain grants or funding categories being scaled back. He also noted that all school districts will see a 10 percent cut in the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) funding that makes up the bulk of their budgets.

“These cuts will pose tremendous challenges at a time when districts are already underfunded and being asked to undertake costly social distancing measures in the fall, while also contending with declining enrollment,” he said.

Herrington said he strongly supports the governor’s call for federal aid to compensate for the state’s $54 billion deficit caused by record job losses. The Heroes Act proposal unveiled by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi asks the federal government for nearly $1 trillion for local and state governments.

Herrington said the county will be working closely with school districts to balance budgets, provide core student services and ensure student and staff safety.

“While these challenges are considerable, I have confidence that local school leaders will do everything they can do to ensure that all students receive the best education possible in the year ahead,” he said. “Now more than ever, our public schools are a critical component of the fabric of our society. Until school campuses reopen, our workforce cannot return and the economy cannot begin to rebound.” 

Additional businesses can reopen in Sonoma County, including car washes, pet groomers and outdoor museums, under an amended shelter-in-place order that went into effect Friday.

The local changes follow Gov. Gavin Newsom’s statewide announcement Tuesday that more businesses could operate with health safety modifications as the fight against COVID-19 continues.

Under the amended order, the following businesses are allowed to operate and people are permitted to leave home and travel to work in or patronize them:

• car washes
• pet groomers
• dog walking services
• residential and janitorial cleaning services
• outdoor museums
• open air galleries
• botanical gardens
• and other outdoor exhibition spaces

The amended order also allows people to go back to work if telecommuting is not possible, and allows childcare facilities to open to those outside the essential workforce, following strict health protocols.

The order specifically lists businesses that must remain closed, which are: outdoor restaurants, cafes, or bars, zoos, amusement parks, indoor gallery and museum spaces, and personal care services that have close customer contact, including hair salons, barbershops, nail salons, massage parlors, aestheticians and cosmetology, ear piercing salons and tattoo parlors.

All storefront and indoor mall access remains closed to the public, though curbside pick-up, delivery and shipping are allowed.

The Sonoma County Economic Development Board has a new website offering resources for businesses on how to safely and successfully reopen. Industry-specific guidance from the governor’s office on reopening can be found here.

ByElizabeth Aguilera, CalMatters

Gov. Gavin Newsom promised that the state’s new child care website would give essential workers all the information they need to choose a provider for their kids.

It isn’t quite working out that way.

The portal Newsom announced a week ago, based on state licensing data, lacks key information. In many instances, hours of operation and available spots are missing. The site doesn’t indicate whether providers accept subsidies or what they charge.

The number of complaints about a provider initially was listed, but the state removed that information within days of the portal’s debut. Citations also are absent. To find that crucial information, a user would need to locate and then click on the license number — which then links to the state’s main licensing database.

(Image: Amanda Simoni, owner of Heritage School of Discovery in Oakdale, laughs while students play in the school yard mud pit. A new California child care website aims to connect essential workers with available options. Photo by Anne Wernikoff for CalMatters)

Across California, 72% of child care is provided by licensed private businesses — large centers and small and large family home care sites, accounting for nearly 1 million child care slots. Of those, 35% have a state or federal contract, such as Head Start. The rest get paid directly by parents or via vouchers.

Newsom said the portal was created to help working parents track down child care during the COVID-19 pandemic. The state’s shelter-in-place order never required private child care and preschool centers to close, but many have shut down for safety reasons or falling enrollment. Relatives who may have provided care or been backup babysitters are now in isolation, and schools are out for the foreseeable future.

But the portal is not proving to be a one-stop shop, said Nina Buthee, executive director of EveryChild California, a statewide organization supporting early childhood education programs with 1,500 members. 

“Any parent would still need to make quite a few phone calls and reach out to a number of different places,” Buthee said.  

Instead, she called the new California child care website a “really good start for finding out where facilities are.”

The new portal allows a user to enter an address or zip code to see a map of nearby centers as well as a list of providers. From there a parent can choose a provider and access whatever information is available. The portal lists 41,000 sites and 464 new pop-up child care locations. 

The state Department of Social Services already had a licensing database that is searchable, but it is more complex and doesn’t provide availability information.

“The purpose of the portal is to provide child care options that are convenient and reliable for their families located near their work, home or preferred location,” department spokesman Scott Murray said in an email. 

About the missing information, Murray said the department is contacting providers regularly through an automated system to get updates regarding availability. If a center does not respond to text, email or phone calls the site indicates “availability unknown.”

Originally the new portal included the number of complaints a child care provider has received but the state removed that information within three days. Murray said that element was cut because the page has a link to the original licensing site, where users can explore complaints, citations and facility inspection reports. 

Buthee said if the goal was to create the informative, user-friendly site that Newsom promised, it should include a list of recent citations and complaints with the date, reason and resolution. Or instead, the site should explicitly explain what parents can find if they follow the link to the licensing data.

Ironically, there is a more in-depth child care database in the works. In July, a long-awaited multi-million dollar website will launch that includes in-depth information and resources for families. This project was created in response to the requirements of a Child Care Development Block Grant the state received in 2014.

The website was fully funded in last year’s budget, according to Keisha Nzewi, director of public policy for the California Child Care Resource and Referral Network, which holds the contract and is building the site.

“It’s good to have something up,” said Nzewi about the state portal. “I wish people could see how beautiful and user friendly this site is going to be. I wish COVID had held off or we had enough money to do this sooner.”

For now, the referral network is working with the state to infuse the portal with some of the features from the new site, like a more robust database of providers and availability.  

The current California child care website has disappointed some parents and providers alike.

“It’s really bad,” said San Francisco mom Maria Jandres. “That portal doesn’t give you any information. It doesn’t say where they are, how many spaces. For a new parent it has nothing. It leaves you more lost and with even more questions.”

Jandres said her 4-year-old son’s regular child care site closed in March, around the time her work as a Realtor and court translator was coming to a slow stop. She stayed home with him for three weeks before signing up as a food delivery driver for various apps. She now juggles his care with her partner when he is not working. 

“We have to figure out our child care because we don’t have anyone else,” she said.  “Without child care neither my partner or I would be able to survive.”

At the same time, she said she is afraid to send her child to a provider she doesn’t already know, even if there are slots for essential workers. She’d rather ask around in her community for a personal recommendation.

This comes as no surprise to preschool owner Amanda Simoni, who went from having 54 kids every day to the 10 she is taking care of now at Heritage School of Discovery in Oakdale. She said she has laid off half of her staff and hopes to bring them back as soon as more kids return.

Simoni said California’s new child care website “came too late and it does not give enough information.”

She reached out to her local nonprofit child care agency after perusing the site and finding her phone number was wrong. It also included three complaints against her program, all of which were three or more years old and had been resolved, she said.

Simoni said parents should have all the information, but it should be listed in a comprehensive way.  As is, she said, the portal is “just not giving accurate information, it’s not giving parents the opportunity to make a good decision.”

For parents seeking child care sites that are much smaller than Heritage School, and are operated out of a provider’s home, this portal is going to require some additional hoops.

These so-called “small family homes,” where providers care for up to eight kids, are listed without the official name of the business, address or contact information.  Department spokesman Murray said that the contact information is not listed for privacy reasons because these are individual homes. So in order to reach these providers, parents would have to call their local nonprofit referral agency that oversees child care.

Those extra steps could thwart a connection between a family and a small child care provider.

“They need to have as much of an advantage as anyone else,” Buthee said.

Child care advocates hope to resolve all of these concerns with the new site. 

Eventually, any searches will direct web traffic to the new site, Nzewi said. She said she expects the need to find child care to continue to grow into the summer, as some centers reduce enrollment to meet social distancing guidelines — or close altogether.

“It’s going to become even more important for parents and providers,” she said. “Parents will have to seek out new care.”

CalMatters.org is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media venture explaining California policies and politics.

ByLaurel Rosenhall andJackie Botts, CalMatters

How does a liberal, blue-state governor take on the unappealing task of slashing the budget? By shifting a lot of the pressure to the federal government.

In revising California’s budget down to $203 billion Thursday, Gov. Gavin Newsom charted a plan to fill a huge deficit by tying many cuts to additional federal aid. If the feds come through with $1 trillion for state and local governments that Newsom and other Democratic governors have requested, California would not reduce funding to schools, colleges, parks, child care, health care and other programs.

“The President of the United States, with a stroke of the pen, could provide support for Nancy Pelosi’s new HEROES Act and these cuts could be eliminated,” Newsom said, as he presented his proposal to close a $54 billion deficit brought on by record job losses during the coronavirus pandemic.

It’s a strategic, if risky, course as Newsom heads into a sprint of budget negotiations with state lawmakers over the next four weeks. 

(Image: File photo by Anne Wernikoff for CalMatters)

On the one hand: Newsom’s proposed cuts will likely unleash an outpouring of advocacy from sympathetic constituencies including teachers, firefighters and police that could influence decisions in the nation’s capital. Newsom enjoys longstanding ties to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a fellow San Francisco Democrat whose father-in-law was business partners with Newsom’s grandfather. And despite feuds with Donald Trump that defined much of Newsom’s first year in office, he has developed a working relationship with the president. They have been publicly praising each other since the pandemic began. 

On the other: GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell has already rejected Pelosi’s latest aid package and previously said he wouldn’t support any “blue state bailouts.” Federal aid at the level Newsom would like — not to mention passage before cuts to the state budget would take effect on July 1 — is hardly a sure thing.

“We do need to have a Plan B,” said Assemblyman Phil Ting, a San Francisco Democrat who chairs the Assembly budget committee.

“I don’t think we should only rely on the federal government… If the federal money doesn’t come through, we should think about other options before we go to cuts.”

Ting’s counterpart in the state Senate sounded more optimistic that Congress would come through and that Newsom’s proposed cuts would not come to pass. 

“The programs that he’s attached to the trigger hopefully will create a wonderful advocacy opportunity for beneficiaries of those programs to reach out to our congressional representatives to make sure that the state gets the resources they need so we don’t have to cut those areas,” said state Sen. Holly Mitchell, a Los Angeles Democrat.

Indeed, within hours of Newsom’s announcement, the California Teachers Association began asking Californians to call their members of Congress and urge passage of Pelosi’s aid package.  

Lawmakers will now sift through Newsom’s proposal before they must pass a budget on June 15. GOP Sen. Jim Nielsen of Tehama quickly rejected Newsom’s approach, saying “relying on federal bailouts is not a budget solution.” 

But Republicans make up just a quarter of the Legislature, not a large enough bloc to be influential in budget negotiations.

Most Democrats in the Legislature Thursday were elected since the last recession and now face their first bleak budget. Up until the coronavirus outbreak, California had enjoyed the longest economic recovery since the Great Recession. After raising taxes in 2012, the state managed its finances prudently in good years, paying off a $35 billion “wall of debt” from internal borrowing schemes and building up significant reserves — all of which helped improve the state’s credit rating.

Still, public employee pensions have since reported record losses. That has local officials fearful of service cuts, layoffs and even bankruptcy because state and local governments are obligated to contribute more — even when they have less. CalPERS, for example, shed $69 billion as the global financial market recoiled from the pandemic.  

And former Gov. Jerry Brown, a doomsayer who paddled right of many legislative Democrats in seeking fiscal restraint throughout his second tenure, warned in his final state budget that the good times wouldn’t last forever.

“What’s out there is darkness, uncertainty, decline and recession,” Brown said in 2018. “So good luck, baby!”

The Newsom administration projects 24.5% unemployment, a 21% decline in new housing permits and a nearly 9% drop in California personal income for the fiscal year starting July 1. It’s a stark turnaround from January, when the governor laid out an ambitious agenda featuring a $5.6 billion surplus.

Newsom acknowledged all of that has disappeared “in a blink of an eye” as he walked back many of his January proposals. The governor dropped a plan to extend Medi-Cal health coverage to low-income undocumented seniors over 65 — a move that could cause friction with legislative Democrats hoping to support a community more vulnerable to the virus. 

“Immigrants are the backbone of our state and have been serving as essential workers throughout this crisis,” Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, a San Diego Democrat, said in a statement. “We are disappointed, but not surprised by the Governor’s actions to go backward on health for all.”

The crisis, however, may present opportunities for Newsom. He had proposed closing one prison in the next five years. Now he wants to close two prisons, one in 2021 and another in 2022. That will likely put him in conflict with the prison guards union that has traditionally wielded clout at the Capitol, but if Newsom is successful he would burnish his progressive bona fides in any future political campaign.

Broadly, the governor called for bridging the deficit by canceling non-essential spending, tapping reserves and borrowing. Among his proposals:

• Canceling $6.1 billion in program expansions and spending increases, including  stopping a $2.4 billion extra payment to the California Public Employees’ Retirement System. 
• Drawing down $16.2 billion from the state’s main rainy day fund over three years, and tapping a safety net reserve to offset increased costs in health and human services programs over the next two years.
• Moving $4.1 billion between accounts to help balance the budget, on paper at least.
• Temporarily suspending and capping tax credits used by businesses and wealthy taxpayers. Specifically, suspend net operating losses and limit to $5 million the amount a taxpayer can claim in credits in any given tax year. The move would generate $4.4 billion in 2020-21 to increase funding for schools and community colleges and maintain other core services. 

California could look to its taxpayers in other ways as well, though it’s unclear whether voters will be in a mood to help. Labor and education groups are pushing a November ballot measure to overhaul Proposition 13, California’s landmark property tax cap, to help prevent steeper cuts to local governments and public schools. The Schools and Communities First campaign estimates the initiative could bring in $12 billion a year by raising commercial property taxes.

Newsom has not endorsed the proposal, which business interests vehemently oppose, but said he hasn’t ruled out asking voters for some kind of tax increase.

“We are considering other approaches, including other revenue strategies,” he said.  “We will  pursue conversations with the Legislature, with leaders all up and down the state and we hope we can help guide some consensus about what is most appropriate to put forward to the voters.”

In the meantime, about 26% of Newsom’s budget solutions rely on cuts he said would be eliminated if enough federal aid comes through. 

“We are doing our best to help support people in need, but we now need the federal government to support not only the state of California, but other states across this country,” Newsom said. “If they do, if they meet this moment, we will be able to significantly reduce the stress and anxiety many are feeling.”

In other words: Washington, the ball’s in your court. 

CalMatters.org is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media venture explaining California policies and politics.

ByBen Christopher, CalMatters

California provides.

That’s the message that Gov. Gavin Newsom has been sending to the rest of the country over the last week. For those short on ventilators, the Golden State will share its mechanical bounty, sending hundreds to New York, New Jersey and Illinois, ferried by California’s uniformed National Guard. 

For those who lack protective masks, California — as per an announcement he made on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow show Tuesday night — will be amassing 200 million per month. Enough to meet the state’s needs. And maybe your state’s too. 

“We need to coordinate and organize our nation-state status as we can, only in California with our procurement capacity that is quite literally second only to the United States,” the governor told reporters this afternoon. California would act as “a catalyst to increase supply” not only for the state’s health care workers, but for those in other states and perhaps other countries “across the globe.” 

“That’s how we perceive our role.”

(Image: California Gov. Gavin Newsom / File photo by Anne Wernikoff for CalMatters)

Newsom’s offer to share California’s public health resources surely makes for good public health policy. No doubt, sharing extra health equipment during a pandemic is also good karma. 

But it’s also good politics. Unsurprisingly Newsom, widely believed to harbor national political ambitions, refuses to characterize it in those terms.

“This is not political, this is not in any way, shape or form usurping or undermining, this is all in the spirit of all of us stepping into this moment and doing what we can,” he said in response to a question from CalMatters. “California is just uniquely resourced.”

In another crisis or under a different president, that’s a role one might expect of the White House. After spending the first weeks after the novel coronavirus made landfall in the United States downplaying its severity, President Donald Trump has since taken a rather hands-off approach when it comes to providing necessary supplies, coordinating purchases of protective equipment or using national emergency powers to force manufacturers to produce more of it.  

Federalism or Darwinism?

“Try getting it yourselves,” the president advised state governors in a conference call in mid-March, a decentralized approach that former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley described as “a Darwinian approach to federalism.”

With the federal government receding, governors’ offices have attained a new kind of prominence, said California political analyst Sherry Bebitch Jeffe.

“We’re returning to the Articles of Confederation where the federal government is just there for war and printing money,” she said. “It’s the local and state governments — the governors — that are moving into the vacuum and creating the leadership and exercising the power in this crisis.”

For at least a decade, political focus and news coverage has been increasingly nationalized, with governorships, once a predictable stepping stone to the White House, fading from public view, she said. No longer.

On daytime television, “they are interrupting even the soap operas at noon to carry Newsom live,” she said. “I’ve never seen that!”

In that respect, Newsom still can’t compete with the star power of New York Gov.  Andrew Cuomo. Chief executive of the state that has been hardest hit by the pandemic — and which is home to some of the country’s most prominent television and print news — Cuomo’s widely televised daily briefings have earned him a degree of national trust that seems to rival the president’s.

According to a Monmouth University poll conducted in the first week of April, 23% of respondents named Cuomo as the public official they trust most to deal with the pandemic. 20% put their trust in Trump. Only 3% named Newsom.

That may change now that Newsom is suggesting he could come to the rescue of some other states if California has spares from its equipment bounty. It’s yet another way that California’s governor has distinguished himself from his counterparts in other states. Newsom was the first to call for a statewide shelter-in-place order, issuing the edict days before Washington, New York and Louisiana and weeks before Arizona and Florida. In the weeks since, there are faint signs that California may escape the worst ravages of the virus — though it’s still too early to say whether Newsom and local leaders can take credit.

“Showing the world what makes our state great”

Another contrast in leadership styles: Amid a coronavirus outbreak aboard the Grand Princess cruise ship, Newsom coordinated with Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf and the Trump administration to offload and quarantine the passengers in the Bay Area. He praised Schaaf and other local elected leaders for “showing the world what makes our state great — coming to the rescue of thousands of people trapped aboard this ship and helping tackle a national emergency.”

In Florida, where cruise ships loaded with sick passengers await disembarkation, Gov. Rob DeSantis said the state would only accept the Floridians. 

In announcing his new plan this afternoon, Newsom evoked his Jesuit education.

“The Bible teaches us we are many parts, but one body,” he said. “Father Coz was my econ teacher at Santa Clara University and he began every single lecture by reminding us of our web of mutuality.”

Not everyone has applauded Newsom’s generosity. With hundreds of California ventilators lent out to other states in need, Riverside County Supervisor Kevin Jeffries, a former Republican legislator, told The Los Angeles Times that he worried whether regional hospitals would “be able to get the assistance that we’re going to need in a week or two weeks out.”

For now, plans to produce hundreds of millions of new masks and potentially provide them to other states remains a hypothetical.

Newsom said that a number of governors had welcomed his plan to mass-purchase equipment and share California’s excess “because they understand we are helping increase supply, we are not taking away a limited number of supplies.” 

Newsom’s office has not yet responded to the question of which other states he was referring to.

Tara Lee, a spokesperson for Washington Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee, said in a statement that “Governor Newsom has expressed his hope that the California procurement system will soon be in a sufficiently strong position that they could share some of the opportunities with other states, and Gov. Inslee looks forward to discussing that.”

New Jersey Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy already has welcomed California’s ventilators:

ByMatt Levin, CalMatters

As California scrambles to protect more than 150,000 homeless residents from contracting and spreading novel coronavirus, Gov. Gavin Newsom had some harsh words Saturday for cities he accused of blocking the conversion of hotels and motels for emergency housing. 

After touting the 10,974 vacant hotel rooms the state has acquired so far in a partnership with the federal government — roughly 4,200 of which are now occupied with homeless residents — Newsom charged some municipalities that have resisted the initiative with letting “not-in-my-backyard” politics interfere with a public health imperative. 

(Image: A row of hotels and motels near Oakland airport on March 25. Gov. Gavin Newsom is encouraging cities to convert hotels into emergency housing to protect the homeless from COVID-19. Photo by Anne Wernikoff for CalMatters)

“I just want to encourage those cities that are blocking efforts like this to consider themselves in the context of others…to consider their actions in the context and annals of history,” said Newsom, speaking outside a Motel 6 in Silicon Valley that will be repurposed for the homeless. “They’ll judge themselves, not just be judged by others, by the extent they help the least among us.” 

While Newsom declined to name specific problematic cities and praised others he said were eager to participate, his remarks suggest that the state’s unprecedented effort to convert hotel rooms to homeless housing has run up against a barrier beyond even the massive logistical hurdles of acquiring and staffing the hotels: political and legal challenges from local elected officials reluctant to allow COVID-19 positive and symptomatic homeless to be housed in their communities. 

Resistance to the hotel initiative has surfaced most publicly in Southern California. The cities of Laguna Woods and Laguna Hills in Orange County, and Lawndale and Bell Gardens in Los Angeles County, have mounted legal challenges to hotels that inked emergency deals with county governments. 

State, county and local governments across California have long fought over where homeless housing should be located, with few neighborhoods volunteering to devote land and resources to a population many residents associate with crime, mental illness and declining property values. 

As the state prioritizes hotel rooms for the homeless who have tested positive for the virus or are symptomatic, a potent cocktail of fear is developing in some neighborhoods, say homelessness advocates. 

“What is at stake right now takes this outside the realm of a conversation about NIMBYism,” said Shayla Myers, attorney for the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles. “I think Gavin Newsom made the moral argument.” 

A spokesman for the League of California Cities, which represents municipal interests in the Capitol, declined to comment on Newsom’s remarks. 

Myers says that while she applauds Newsom’s rhetoric, homelessness advocates wish the governor would exercise more of the emergency powers granted to him during the pandemic to commandeer hotels or override zoning rules and other state and local laws cities use to mount legal challenges. 

“The governor of the state of California has extraordinary authority in this moment of time to take concrete steps to address this emergency,” Myers said. “He is not using that authority to protect unhoused residents of this state.” 

Beyond the admonishments to reluctant cities, Newsom on Saturday announced a partnership with Motel 6 that could include 5,000 more rooms in 47 motels across the state. While the state has negotiated a lease template with Motel 6, counties will ultimately determine whether to utilize the rooms. 

Our most vulnerable unsheltered neighbors need protection from #COVID19.

Today Governor @GavinNewsom announced a partnership with Motel 6 & secured up to 5k+ more rooms for Project Roomkey. #StayHomeSaveLives https://t.co/WQQ2trCN5B

— Office of the Governor of California (@CAgovernor) April 18, 2020

The agreement with Motel 6 includes language that Newsom said will allow local governments to convert the sites into permanent homeless housing once the pandemic subsides. 

Speaking with Newsom, San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo said he hopes new rounds of federal funding will allow cash-strapped cities to avoid sending people who are homeless back to the streets. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has agreed to pay 75% of the cost of the motels during the pandemic, but funding after the emergency order is lifted is uncertain. 

“We don’t want these rooms simply open for a few weeks or a few months; let’s give counties and cities the dollars they need to purchase motels so we can really aggressively address the homelessness crisis that will be here well beyond the time this pandemic passes,” Liccardo said. 

In another sign that the pandemic is still not close to passing, Newsom reported that an additional 87 people had died as a result of COVID-19 in the past 24 hours, taking the state’s total death toll from the pandemic past 1,000, and that hospitalizations for the disease had ticked up 1.3%. The number being treated in intensive care units was little changed.

CalMatters.org is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media venture explaining California policies and politics.

By Erica Hellerstein, The Mercury News

Community health clinics that serve some of the region’s most vulnerable residents are struggling with how to keep their doors open while patient visits plummet during the coronavirus shelter-in-place mandate.

Statewide, patient visits are down by roughly half across California’s network of community clinics and health centers, leading to tens of millions in lost revenue each week.

Many local health clinics that primarily serve low-income residents and rely on Medicaid reimbursements to make up a large portion of their income. So the dramatic reductions in patient visits threaten their ability to stay open and care for the kinds of patients who are at a heightened risk of contracting the virus.

Experts say the Bay Area, which has been in lockdown longer than anywhere else in the nation, has been particularly affected, with some already instituting furloughs or layoffs.

“The Bay Area clinics are hard-hit,’ says Carmela Castellano-Garcia, president and chief executive officer of the California Primary Care Association.

There are about 1,300 community clinics and health centers (CCHCs) across California serving more than 7 million patients annually — nearly one-sixth of the state’s population. Many provide care to residents particularly at-risk of contracting the virus or uniquely vulnerable to it. Community health centers serve roughly 1 in every 3 MediCal recipients, and in 2019 worked with 486,628 migrant workers and 246,268 homeless residents, according to CPCA.

With patient visits down, Castellano-Garcia says California’s community clinics are collectively losing about $90 million a week. Up to 77 health centers statewide may not be able to make payroll within 90 days if the current trends persist.

“It is not sustainable,” she says.

In the South Bay, patient visits at Gardner Health Services, which works in Santa Clara and San Mateo Counties, have dropped nearly 60%, says Chief Operating Officer Efrain Coria, prompting financial losses of about $1 million a month. Gardner has reduced its workforce by about 22%, Coria says, and laid off 135 staff members, though he emphasizes he hopes to re-hire many of them in the coming months when and if things calm down.

In the East Bay, La Clínica de La Raza, which serves about 90,000 patients annually in clinics throughout Contra Costa, Alameda and Solano Counties, has seen in-person visits drop about 30% since the start of the pandemic, says chief executive officer Jane Garcia, resulting in financial losses of about $3 million over the past month. About 300 employees have been furloughed.

However, La Clinica’s health centers have seen some gains since the state eased some restrictions for telehealth services, allowing patients to connect with health providers electronically. Those visits are also billable to Medicaid.

“If that option had not been authorized, it would have shut us down,” Garcia says. “And you would have seen [our patients] in emergency rooms and hospitals, or they wouldn’t have gone in at all.”

Marc Gannon, chief operating officer of Fremont’s Tri-City Health Center, which serves about 26,000 patients in Fremont, Hayward, Union City, Newark, and San Leandro — 37 % of whom are on MediCal or uninsured and the majority of whom live below 200% of the federal poverty level — says the organization changed its business model “essentially overnight” from in-person visits to telehealth appointments.

But the clinic is still suffering declines in revenue. In-patient visits have decreased by about 35% since the start of the pandemic and Gannon says they are considering reducing staffing to manage the financial hit.

“This is financially a very difficult time, there is no way of sugarcoating this,” says Gannon. “We are analyzing sustainability on a day to day basis.”

Amid the financial challenges, Tri-City health care workers are still trying to check in with patients by phone, providing resources from MediCal and other safety net services that they may be eligible for or with behavioral health services for people struggling with isolation and loneliness due to shelter-in-place orders. Last week, they reached 3,000 of the network’s 26,000 patients.

The federal government recently granted the nation’s federally funded community health centers a reprieve, awarding $1.32 billion to health centers nationwide. But many say that’s not enough to cover their losses. The $1.3 million the South Bay’s Gardner Health Services expects to receive, which is supposed to cover a 12-month period, would last between five and six weeks, Coria says.

Still, Bay Area community health centers want to make sure that people know their doors — virtually and physically — are still open to people who need care.

“Community health centers are adaptive, resilient, and have been around for a very long time,” says Gannon. “We are going to survive this.”

Erica Hellerstein is a journalist with the Mercury News. This article is part of The California Divide, a collaboration among newsrooms examining income inequity and economic survival in California.

ByBen Christopher, CalMatters

This coming November, every one of California’s more than 20 million registered voters may receive a ballot in the mail — whether they ask for one or not. In fact, many election administrators and advocates say it’s inevitable.

“It’s not a question of ‘if,’ said Kim Alexander, the president of the California Voter Foundation. “But ‘how.’”

California is already ahead of the curve when it comes to voting from home. In the March primary election, 75% of voters got a ballot in their mailbox. But the exigencies of social distancing are putting pressure on state lawmakers to round that up to 100%, ensuring that every registered voter has the option to cast a ballot without having to physically crowd into a polling place.    

A bill from Palo Alto Democratic Assemblyman Marc Berman would ensure just that. But with most state legislators sheltering in place until at least early May, all eyes are on the governor who, with an executive order, could make the upcoming election an all-mail affair. 

Earlier this month, Joe Holland, president of the California Association of Clerks and Election Officials and top election official in Santa Barbara County, sent Gov. Gavin Newsom a letter requesting that he ink a new edict, declaring the November contest an “all-mail ballot election.” 

Even if mass gatherings are permitted in November — something Newsom says is unlikely — county election officials say time is of the essence. Ballots have to be ordered, voter rolls assembled, polling places secured. 

“The consensus for November 2020 is that California is going to go all vote-by-mail — and we should. We don’t want to have a Wisconsin debacle,” Holland said, referring to the April 7 presidential primary where some voters reported waiting in line for five hours. Since then at least three dozen voters and polling workers in Wisconsin have tested positive for COVID-19.

(Image: Sean Freese / Flickr)

The governor’s press office has not responded to a request for comment about prospects for a California all vote-by-mail election. 

Even an “all-mail” election in California isn’t quite what it sounds like — it wouldn’t really be without a brick-and-mortar option. For those who need some extra help exercising their right to vote, state law requires counties to set up a certain number of in-person polling places.

Through Holland, the association also asked Newsom to grant them the authority to radically scale back that requirement. And therein lies the current rub.

Some advocates warn that an insufficient number of drop-off sites and vote centers could leave many voters — particularly those from underrepresented demographic groups — either unable to vote or stuck in long lines at the few remaining in-person locations.

“Waiving the state’s in-person voting standards will potentially disenfranchise tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of California voters,” union president Bob Schoonover, whose chapter of the Service Employees International Union represents tens of thousands of public sector workers across Southern California, wrote in a letter to Secretary of State Alex Padilla earlier this month.

Like so many debates of the COVID-era, it’s a disagreement that pits constitutional rights once thought to be non-negotiable against the prescriptions of public health. 

“We’re trying to find the right balance of response that gives voters as much choice as possible, but also keeps them safe, and frankly, which is also implementable in the short number of months that the counties have to gear up,” said California Common Cause interim director Kathay Feng.

The coronavirus pandemic has injected new urgency into the national conversation about voting by mail, with some states now making it easier for voters to cast their ballots while self-isolating at home — and others not, and getting sued for it. 

Despite evidence that making it easier to vote remotely does not benefit one party over another, the debate has taken on a partisan bent. 

Weighing in earlier this month, President Trump urged Republicans to fight “very hard” against the expansion of vote-by-mail opportunities, claiming without evidence that such a system has “tremendous potential for voter fraud” and that “for whatever reason” such systems don’t “work out well for Republicans.” 

The president’s views notwithstanding, recent polling has found strong majorities of Americans believe voters ought to be able to cast their ballots by mail without an excuse — though results are split on whether a majority of Republicans feel the same way. 

But in California, there is little debate in policy-making circles about the merits of vote-by-mail elections.

Throughout April, Secretary of State Padilla — the administrator in chief of the state election system and, like Gov. Newsom, a Democrat — convened roughly 80 election officials, experts and advocates. They met, remotely, of course, in daily conference calls to game out how California might hold a statewide election during a full-blown pandemic.

Subgroups splintered off to hammer out every last logistical detail. Would registration deadlines be changed? How will each voter’s language preference be determined? Self-adhering envelopes that risk gumming up ballot-counting machines versus those sealed by pathogen-packed spit — how should counties decide?

Jonathan Stein, a program manager for the Asian Law Caucus’ voting rights program, was part of that task force. He said there was unanimity on at least one issue.

“There seemed to be almost universal agreement that we need to send every single voter a vote-by-mail ballot,” he said.

The question is, what other options will be available too?

Election rights advocates say in-person polling places offer a vital service to voters who don’t speak English, who experience some kind of disability, who don’t have a fixed address, who recently moved or who simply don’t feel comfortable with or do not understand the vote-by-mail process. 

“There are a lot of communities that depend on polling places and polling centers,” said Mike Young, political director at the California League of Conservation Voters. In California, in-person voters skew poorer, younger and less white than the average voter. 

An insufficient number of polling places could jeopardize public health even further, Young added. Like Holland, he pointed to Wisconsin as a cautionary tale. “People are anticipating that this is going to be an insanely high-turnout election.”

California voting rights advocates seem to have at least the tacit support of the state’s top election official.

“I think people who need or prefer an in-person option deserve it,” Padilla told KQED earlier this month. “And so we’re going to have to work really hard with counties to ensure we maintain as much in-person voting as we can.”

But county registrars argue that such requirements may put voters and poll workers at unnecessary risk. 

“Quite frankly if we had an election tomorrow I wouldn’t be within a hundred feet of a polling place,” said Holland in Santa Barbara.

There are also practical questions about space and staffing, both of which are severely limited by the pandemic. Polling places are often hosted in schools, senior centers, and the garages of private homes —  most of which are likely off the table now. The typical poll worker is a retiree, a cohort particularly at risk of severe COVID-19 complications. 

Santa Barbara County is preparing to reduce the number of in-person locations from the 86 that were open in March to around five. Holland’s office may use the registrar’s three offices and then try to secure a handful of additional sites and the necessary poll workers.

“I don’t know if I can find three other facilities,” he said. “I have 15 staff and that’s when they’re here and healthy and right now three or four are out sick.”

Assemblyman Berman’s bill said his bill does not yet address in-person polling site requirements, but that the “first move shouldn’t be to weaken existing in-person voting requirements.” He urged state and county officials to be “creative” in finding locations and staff. 

In the meantime, he said, some additional guidance from the governor could be helpful.

Newsom has already issued an executive order mandating that all voters in two upcoming special elections receive ballots in the mail. Though the order “encouraged” counties “to make in-person voting opportunities available,” they were given the freedom to do so “in a manner consistent with public health and safety.”

The two elections, a Senate race in Riverside County and a congressional contest north of Los Angeles, is showcasing how counties may differ in how they administer elections during a pandemic. In the congressional race, split between Los Angeles and Ventura counties, there will be at least a dozen locations where voters can drop off ballots in-person. 

In Riverside County, home to the special Senate district, there will be only two physical drop-off points and no polling places or vote centers where voters can have their questions answered or their errors corrected. 

“That’s a perfect illustration of what will happen if we give election officials full discretion,” said Stein.

CalMatters.org is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media venture explaining California policies and politics.

ByElizabeth Aguilera, CalMatters

More than a month since officials closed schools due to the COVID-19 pandemic, California officials said a two-week blitz led by First Partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom has brought in 70,000 computers and other devices that will be distributed to needy students this week.

Gov. Gavin Newsom has stressed the importance of distance learning and education multiple times during the past month — even talking about helping his own children with school work. Monday he focused attention on his administration’s efforts to secure donations from tech giants such as Google and Apple, garnering tens of thousands of computers and internet connections to children in need.

“For class to be in session, it is imperative that California addresses the inequities in access to computers, technology tools and connectivity to ensure that online learning can in fact reach all of California’s children,” Newsom said. 

In addition, in Sacramento, the city is converting seven transit buses into super hotspots. Google is to begin establishing the first of 100,000 previously pledged hotspots during the first week of May. Already, Apple has distributed 10,000 IPads to 800 school districts and Google has given out 4,000 laptops.

Yet, even with all of  the new devices going out in the coming weeks, it’s unclear if all of these efforts will really make a dent in the gap — highlighted by the pandemic — between those who have digital access and those who do not. 

Siebel Newsom said one in five California children does not have connectivity or a device to access remote learning. Based on 2018-19 enrollment data, that means roughly 1.2 million children in California lack access. 

“We all know that education is fundamental to opportunity and our mission will not end until every child has what they need to continue learning,” she said.

Previously, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond said that the state is trying to get 150,000 devices in the hands of students who don’t have one.

This is especially critical for low-income students and students of color, Siebel Newsom said, referring to a recent study that showed 50% of low-income parents and 42% of parents of color “are worried about distance learning because they don’t have a personal device at home.”

Newsom also indicated the state will spend $30 million to connect more households that need it.  Most of those funds, $25 million, will come from the California Teleconnect Fund and will be prioritized for rural, small and medium-sized districts.  

The state Public Utilities Commission will also prioritize $5 million of the $30 million for computers for low-income communities.

The state Transportation Agency is teaming up with the city of Sacramento to convert the seven city buses into rolling super hotspots and get them going by May 1. These buses will provide connectivity within at least a 500-foot radius. Locations for the buses haven’t been announced. This is a pilot program that may be rolled out in other cities if it proves successful, according to Newsom’s office.

Since California began to track cases of coronavirus in the state, there have been 1,208 deaths, including 42 over the past weekend. Newsom said he will reveal a more detailed plan for opening up the state on Wednesday. 

“We are not seeing the downward trend we need to see to provide more clarity on the roadmap to recovery,” he said.

CalMatters.org is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media venture explaining California policies and politics.

By Jacqueline García, La Opinión

Families with children who qualify for free or reduced-price meals at their schools — regardless of immigration status — may notice something in the mail to help them buy groceries. 

California is issuing one-time food stamps with credits of up to $365 per child to help qualifying families get through the coronavirus outbreak. The Pandemic-Electronic Benefit Transfer card, or P-EBT, from the Department of Social Services is an emergency disaster benefit that can be used to buy food and groceries, including online at Walmart and Amazon.

The first cards arrived last week for families receiving CalFresh, Medi-Cal or foster care benefits as a supplement to their EBT card. The second phase, which starts Friday, requires low-income families to apply at https://ca.p-ebt.org/.

(Image: California is sending pandemic food cards to qualifying students. In this file photo, Antionette Martinez and her son Caden, 5, who receive CalFresh, do their weekly grocery shop at FoodMaxx on July 26, 2019. Photo by Anne Wernikoff for CalMatters)

The deadline to apply is June 30.

The timing of this extra boost comes as many families struggle to provide nutritious meals for their children while schools are closed in response to the novel coronavirus.

Betzabe Castillo, who has a 9-year-old son at a public school in Stockton, California, was among the first to receive the P-EBT cards. She welcomes the help since her husband is the only one bringing in an income. Their rent is nearly $2,000 a month.

“It is very difficult because rent does not wait, the bills do not either,” Castillo said. “We are surviving day to day.”

Berenice Burgos, who has two children, ages 9 and 4, also received a P-EBT card last week. She wasn’t aware of the extra help but was grateful when it arrived in the mail.

“Right now I am not working and my husband, who is a mechanic, got his hours cut,” said Burgos, who lives in Concord, in Northern California. “It is very good help, especially for my children – to buy their milk, cereal and fruit because they want to eat all day.”

Much needed help while schools are closed

Jason Montiel, a spokesman for the social services department, said the state is offering additional assistance to children who are eligible for free or reduced price meals while school is closed.

The cards are distributed in two phases. The first batch of about 2 million went to families who enrolled in CalFresh, Medi-Cal, or foster care.

“For this phase, the beneficiaries do not have to do anything and the card will be mailed to them,” Montiel said.

The second phase requires residents to apply. The state projects an additional 1.8 million more children are eligible. 

State officials say the card is available to eligible families regardless of a student’s immigration status or their parents’ status. It also doesn’t impact whether children are picking up grab-and-go meals from schools.

The food card isn’t considered a public charge by the Department of Homeland Security. However, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services may consider several factors under its public charge test. Those who have questions should seek legal advice.

State officials also want recipients to be on alert for scams. Since the P-EBT cards began arriving in the mail, some recipients have received calls from people posing as social service representatives seeking personal information.

“The Department of Social Services will not contact clients or ask for personal information,” said Montiel. “We will not request a Social Security Number or any document that is shared with us.”

How do I learn more?

For more information about the P-EBT card visit:

https://ca.p-ebt.org/en/info 

Those interested should apply between May 22 and June 30: 

https://ca.p-ebt.org/

If you have questions regarding public charge, visit: https://covid19.ca.gov/img/wp/listos_covid_19_immigrant_guidance_en_daf.pdf

Jacqueline García is a reporter with La Opinión. This article is part of  The California Divide, a collaboration among newsrooms examining income inequity and economic survival in California.