Support for rural counties + Ballot initiative signatures submitted + Racial equity summit
Good morning, and thanks for reading!
LAWMAKERS SEEK HELP FOR RURAL COUNTIES
Two California lawmakers have submitted a letter to Gov. Gavin Newsom, asking for the state to step in and help rural counties that were too small to benefit from federal COVID-19 assistance programs.
Assemblyman Jim Wood, D-Santa Rosa, and Sen. Mike McGuire, D-Healdsburg, submitted the letter, which has signatures from 50 legislators, Republican and Democrat. They included letters from local governments, detailing the costs they have incurred since the COVID-19 emergency began.
The rural counties represented by Wood and McGuire did not qualify for federal assistance because they have fewer than 500,000 people.
California is eligible for $15.3 billion in federal funding from the CARES Act, the lawmakers said, but rural counties won’t see any of that money.
“Before the wildfires in 2017, Sonoma County’s population met the 500,000 population threshold for funding, but today it falls just under that threshold, making it ineligible for current federal assistance,” Wood said in a statement. “And after what this county has experienced in the past several years with wildfires and floods, that’s just a huge kick in the gut.”
“This virus doesn’t discriminate based off of population size,” McGuire said. “Smaller cities and rural counties need just as much help responding to the crushing needs of the coronavirus and digging out of its financial impacts. 500,000 is a completely arbitrary number and we need to find a way to assist communities in every corner of the Golden State, not just metropolitan centers.”
STEM CELL INITIATIVE FINISHES COLLECTING SIGNATURES
The campaign for a ballot initiative that would allocate $5.5 billion in general obligation bond funding for stem cell research announced Tuesday that it has finished collecting signatures.
The group has submitted approximately 925,000 signatures, according to a statement, while the California Constitution requires a minimum of 623,212, according to the Secretary of State’s Office.
Campaign advocates described how the COVID-19 emergency, which shuttered some ballot initiative campaigns, led to “an aggressive patient advocacy-driven signature gathering effort” by Californians for Stem Cell Research, Treatments and Cures.
“Submitting signatures in time to qualify for the general election would not have been possible without our coalition of patient advocates, who banded together to help us overcome the unprecedented challenge of signature gathering during a global pandemic – the effort is emblematic of our movement that has been widely supported and driven by patients and their families from the beginning,” said group chairman Bob Klein.
Proposition 71, passed by voters in 2004, established the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, funded to the tune of $3 billion to conduct research on diseases and conditions including heart disease, cancer, diabetes and, most recently, COVID-19.
BONTA CO-HEADLINES RACIAL EQUITY EVENT
Democratic Assemblyman Rob Bonta of Oakland is set to appear at a The Greenlining Institute’s annual economic summit, where the theme will be “We the future.”
Bonta will join Ibram X. Kendi, author and founding director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University; Alicia Garza, founder of Black Futures Lab, San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, john a. powell, director of the Othering and Belonging Institute at the University of California, Berkeley; Rhiana Gunn Wright, director of climate policy at The Roosevelt Institute and Manuel Pastor, a professor of sociology and American studies and ethnicity at University of Southern California.
The summit, on May 21, will feature conversations on the intersection of health and racial equity in the age of COVID-19, what history teaches about times of crisis and how to build an anti-racist society, as well as “cyber networking,” according to the institute.
More information about the event, including ticket prices, can be seen here.
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“You may be young and healthy, and you run up and give grandma a big hug, and all of a sudden five or six days later, grandma’s in the ICU.”
- Gov. Gavin Newsom, with a dire warning about the coronavirus at his Tuesday press conference.
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