Rohnert Park has three new city council members. The wins also mean there will be more diversity on what was formerly an all-white council. One of the newcomers is Jackie Elward who won against long-time council member Jake Mackenzie. KRCB News Director Adia White recently spoke with Elward first asking why she decided to run for election. 

 

 

 

 

By Anne Wernikoff

November 8, 2020

In the corner of California where Vice President-elect Kamala Harris grew up and launched her political career, residents cheered, danced, honked horns, donned American flags and popped champagne to celebrate the Democratic ticket’s victory over President Donald Trump.

As the news broke early Saturday morning, revelers took to the streets wearing bathrobes, banging pots and pans and sharing mimosas with fellow celebrators. “We were awakened by the sound of screaming and we were like, ‘Yes!’” said Oakland resident Ru-Huey Yen.

("She's from Oakland!” shouts Jackson Taylor, 69, as he carries a Biden-Harris sign along Grand Ave near Oakland's Lake Merritt on Nov. 7, 2020. Photo by Anne Wernikoff for CalMatters)

For many in the Bay Area, the win was not only a relief but a great source of pride. “She’s from Oakland! A hometown girl!” said longtime Oakland resident Jackson Taylor of Harris as he carried a Biden Harris sign along Grand Avenue.

Harris was born in Oakland, went to school in Berkeley and was San Francisco’s district attorney before her election as California’s attorney general, U.S. senator, and now, to the highest office a woman has ever held in U.S. history.

Celebrations of President-elect Joe Biden and Harris continued throughout the day and into the evening with hundreds gathering at Lake Merritt in Oakland and the Castro neighborhood in San Francisco.

“This is what freedom looks like,” said Taylor.

By James Bikales  

November 5, 2020 

As this year’s historic wildfire season winds down, Californians living in fire-prone territory got temporary relief from another threat: they can’t lose their homeowners’ insurance policies for another year.

Premiums and nonrenewal rates have skyrocketed in California’s fire-prone regions since 2015 as companies are loath to pay for damages wreaked by the state’s increasingly devastating fires. This year, more than four million acres have burned, twice the state’s previous modern-day record. The moratorium, enacted by Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara, will give 2.1 million homeowners in the vicinity of those blazes — 18 percent of all policyholders in the state — another year to find a new insurance company or take steps to mitigate fire risk on their property and convince their insurer to extend coverage. 

In 2019, insurers dropped 235,274 policies in California, a 61% increase from 2018, according to data Lara’s office released in December. Sixty-five percent of those came in areas of moderate to high fire risk, and the state’s 10 most fire-prone counties saw a 203% increase in nonrenewals. 

Many of those customers have turned to the state’s last resort: the California FAIR Plan, a state-run pool that provides bare-bones fire coverage to customers who can’t find another insurer. Enrollments in the FAIR Plan jumped 225% last year. 

In 2018, Lara, then a state senator, crafted a law that insurers must wait one year before dropping a policyholder in an area scorched by fire, and two years if the policyholder’s home was destroyed.

Last December, he used that law to impose a one-year moratorium against nonrenewals in 180 zip codes identified by state fire officials as having been directly impacted by fires in 2019. The new moratorium will cover 477 zip codes, more than twice as many as the previous one. 

“Even though there hasn’t been a wildfire in the Oakland Hills since ’91, I think it remains on the list of areas that some insurers are disinclined to serve.”

Amy Bach, United Policyholders

The 2019 moratorium, which covered more than one million Californians, will expire Dec. 5, though 364,000 of those residents live in areas that overlap with the new moratorium announced Thursday. 

There won’t be a sudden, massive number of people getting dropped from their policies on Dec. 6, said Michael Soller, a spokesperson for Lara’s office. Insurers covering homeowners protected by the previous moratorium but not the new one can drop those policies on the date they started. So if you got a policy in March 2018, the insurer can’t opt out on Dec. 6, they have to wait until March 2021, for example. 

The new moratorium aligns with Gov. Gavin Newsom’s emergency declarations of Aug. 18, Sept. 6, Sept. 10, and Sept. 28, protecting homeowners within the zip codes affected by those fires for a year from that date. 

Amy Bach, who founded the national consumer advocacy group United Policyholders in 1991, said in an interview last month that the current conditions for buying homeowners’ insurance in California may be the worst she’s ever seen. 

Some Californians in fire-prone areas who haven’t been dropped are paying three to four times the premiums they did before 2015, she said. Bach said the one-year moratoriums are helpful, but said long-term solutions are needed to protect homeowners in areas that haven’t burned in the previous year or two.

No matter the work they do to mitigate fire risk on their property, many residents in those regions are now seeing cancellations because they’re considered too high-risk given how far California’s fires have spread. One example is Santa Barbara, the site of the 2017 Thomas Fire, Bach said.

“That’s the kind of place that I would expect insurers to have really pulled back because even though there hasn’t been a fire there in a couple years, I think they have concerns that there could be another one,” she said. “Even though there hasn’t been a wildfire in the Oakland Hills since ’91, I think it remains on the list of areas that some insurers are disinclined to serve.”

Insurers say the market in some fire-prone regions simply isn’t sustainable and they’re facing their own challenges paying up to reinsurers, the companies that insure the insurance companies. 

In 2017, homeowners insurers paid out $2.01 in claims for every $1 in premiums they collected, according to state data. In 2018, they paid $1.70 for every $1 in premiums. That added up: claims from those two seasons alone totaled $24 billion, although Pacific Gas and Electric assumed responsibility for roughly $11 billion of those losses. 

The 2017 fires “almost completely wiped out” the industry’s profits in California from 2001 to 2016, according to a RAND Corporation report last year. 

The insurance department and consumer advocates like Bach both say the ultimate solution lies in insurance companies incentivizing homeowners to “harden” their homes against wildfires by making improvements like installing a metal roof or cutting back brush to leave space around the home. 

Bach and Lara backed a bill this year, AB 2367, that would have required insurers to renew policies for homeowners that met state-standards for home hardening, but it died in committee after strong opposition from insurers.  

Insurance industry representatives said they agree fire mitigation measures are key to solving the issue in the long term, but argued that they need more science to better gauge how much specific mitigation measures reduce risk, as well as more flexibility in rate regulation, before they are able to partner in the home hardening measures.

The 2017 fires “almost completely wiped out” the industry’s profits in California from 2001 to 2016, according to a RAND Corporation. 

“We are, of course, as interested in mitigation as anyone because we do see homes saved by having done mitigation,” said Janet Ruiz, communications director at the Insurance Information Institute, a trade group. “The science is just getting to the point where they’re identifying what things really make a difference.”

In the meantime, customers like Jaimi Jansen, who lives in Bonny Doon, will likely continue to face rising premiums and the risk of nonrenewal. 

When Jansen moved to the area north of Santa Cruz two years ago, her home’s previous insurer refused to extend coverage, and the company she went to afterward dropped her in March. 

Now on her third insurance company, she’s paying 70 percent more than she did last year. Bonny Doon is covered by the 2020 moratorium, but the cost has left Jansen wondering whether it’s worth staying in California at all. 

“It’s going to cause people like me to leave the state,” she said. “If we can’t afford to live here because if our house burns down we can’t rebuild, what are we doing then?”

 

 By Ben Christopher, CalMatters

Updated: Nov. 2, 2020

Amid the torrent of laminated campaign ads churning through the postal system this season, the slate mailer stands out as a perennial — and many say unseemly — California political tradition that dates back to at least the 1950s.

Though new restrictions may be on the way.

You’ve seen these before: A group, often with an inoffensive or non-descript name, places a phalanx of candidates and proposition positions on the same glossy postcard and implores voters to support the “slate.” 

(Image: Californians are finding slate mailers in their mail advising them how to vote. Photo by Ben Christopher for CalMatters.)

The catch: While some of these mailers reflect the earnest political values of the organizations that put them together, many are pay-to-play money-makers that blur the line between endorsement, paid advertisement and extortion.

• In San Francisco, a “Feel the Bern, Progressive Voter Guide” is urging voters to support Proposition 22, prompting the mailer’s namesake, Sen. Bernie Sanders to remind his followers on Twitter that he is absolutely not “feeling” Prop. 22 — in fact, he actively opposes the Uber and Lyft-backed measure. 
• The “Committee to Protect the Political Rights of Minorities,” a committee run by California NAACP leader Alice Huffman, received payments to tell voters to oppose rent control, a property tax increase and the end of cash bail.
• After receiving a $300,000 payment from the “No on 20” campaign, the COPS Voter Guide — which is not managed by a police organization, but by political consultant Kelley Moran — encourages voters to oppose that proposition. That’s much to the chagrin of the law enforcement groups supporting it.
• A group calling itself the “Voter Education Coalition” endorsed San Diego Democrat Lorena Gonzalez for her Assembly seat, along with a “Yes” vote on Prop. 22. Careful observers of California politics will note that Gonzalez is the author of state law that Prop. 22 would punch a hole in. 

There’s nothing illegal about selling endorsement space on a postcard. California law requires that mailers include a “notice to voters,” specifying that the mailer group is “NOT AN OFFICIAL POLITICAL PARTY” (yes, in all caps). 

Another required disclosure: Candidates and causes that paid for their mailer spot must be listed with an asterisk. 

What isn’t required: revealing the funders behind the mailer “committee.”

Gonzalez wants to change that. 

She didn’t pay to appear on the Voter Education Coalition endorsement — although an ideologically mixed bag of San Diego politicians did, including Democratic mayoral candidate Barbara Bry, city attorney candidate Cory Briggs, and San Diego County Board of Supervisors contenders state Sen. Ben Hueso (a Democrat) and Poway Mayor Steve Vaus (a Republican). 

Over the last few months, the “coalition” has also received payments from property manager Richard Snyder earmarked in support of Bry, Dale Briggs in support of his son, and a company called La Playa LLC supporting both Hueso and Vaus.

According to a sparse campaign finance record filed with the state, the organization is managed by a Barrett Gonzalez in San Diego. Though no address or business was provided, a man by that name works for the San Diego Group, a political consulting firm. 

Reached by phone, Gonzalez at the San Diego Group denied that he was the Barrett Gonzalez of San Diego involved with the slate mailer. “Must be a different one,” he said. John Wainio, the president of the San Diego Group, did not respond to an email inquiry.

Assemblymember Gonzalez said she was probably included in the mailer because she is “a well known progressive Democrat” whose presence on the mailer gives the rest of the endorsements “credibility.” 

When the Legislature convenes in December, Gonzalez said she wants to introduce a bill that would require each slate mailer endorsement to come with a label describing who paid for it. She would also like to force slate mailer “committees” to list how many people belong to their organization.

“You have ‘Senior Citizens for a Clean Environment’ — I’m just making this up — and you look it up and it’s like, ‘that’s not an organization,’” she said. “If someone just created a group by which they’re trying to sell endorsements, we should know these things.”

Via the Post It, CalMatters political reporter Ben Christopher shares frequent updates from the (socially distanced) 2020 campaign trail.