Mandating corporate diversity + EDD 24/7 + Jobs for inmate firefighters + CEQA solidarity
Good morning! As another week draws to a close, take a moment to catch up on the latest news.
FIRST UP: Would a $100,000 penalty persuade a corporation to appoint a person of color to its board of directors?
That’s the fine Assemblyman Chris Holden, D-Pasadena, is proposing in a bill that aims to compel California-based corporations to embrace diversity.
His AB 979 mirrors a law former Gov. Jerry Brown signed two years ago directing California-based companies to appoint more women to their boards of directors. So far, that law has held up in court.
The new bill would require a corporation to have one director from an under-represented group for companies with less than four members on their board of directors. Corporations with more than four directors, but fewer than nine, would have a minimum of two under-represented directors. A corporation with nine or more directors would require at least three directors from an under-represented community.
The bill’s current language defines under-represented groups as African American, Hispanic and Native American.
The bill is expected to be updated next week, according to Holden’s office, to include under-presented groups that self-identify as Asian, Pacific-Islander, Native Hawaiian and Alaska Native.
Check out Kim Bojórquez’s story for more on the bill and why Holden is carrying it.
BIPARTISAN CALL TO EXTEND EDD HOURS
If you’ve been following The Sacramento Bee’s David Lightman, you know about the myriad struggles that unemployed Californians have encountered in trying to get their claims processed.
Now, two California lawmakers are calling for Gov. Gavin Newsom to issue an executive order keeping the Employment Development Department phone lines staffed and operated 24 hours a day, seven days a week until the unemployment backlog is dealt with.
Sens. Scott Wilk, R-Santa Clarita, and Melissa Hurtado, D-Sanger, want to see the delay in unemployment claims processing dealt with.
In a letter to Newsom, the two lawmakers called the backlog a “monumental failure of government when Californians need it most.”
“While Californians struggle to make ends meet, the very least government can do is put in the man hours necessary to straighten this out. This is frankly not the time to sit back and wait for EDD to catch up. This is the time for decisive action and leadership,” they wrote.
FIREFIGHTING OPPORTUNITIES FOR EX-INMATES
When he was 17, Fernando Herrera saw a bleak future for himself. A life of gangs, violence, arrests and confinement trailed behind him.
He wanted something more. While in prison, the Yuba County teen joined a program that would put him on a firefighting inmate crew at the Pine Grove Youth Conservation Camp in Amador County. As an inmate, he helped fight the Thomas Fire that destroyed more than 1,000 buildings in Southern California in 2017.
The backbreaking, dangerous work for the public did little to set him on a path of becoming a firefighter when he was released. He had been sentenced as an adult for his crimes, and his record dogged him. When Herrera got out, he said he was turned away when he tried to volunteer at his local fire department.
“I didn’t even want to get paid,” Herrera, now 20, said. “But I couldn’t do it because of my record. It was honestly heartbreaking. … I was obviously entrusted to be on a fire crew when I was in jail. Why can’t I do it when I come home?”
Herrera is among the more than 2,000 inmate firefighters assigned to the state’s wildfires each year who are usually barred from getting firefighting jobs after they’re released due to their record of convictions and state licensing rules.
Social justice activists and others say it’s a troubling incongruity in a state that has otherwise embraced reforming the justice system to encourage rehabilitation. They’re demanding a change in the rules to make it easier for those like Herrera who risk their lives fighting fires in prison to be able to land a well-paying firefighting job after they’ve earned their freedom.
Firefighters at many agencies earn six-figure salaries and have excellent benefits.
A bill this year, AB 2147 by Assemblywoman Eloise Gómez Reyes, D-San Bernardino, would allow inmate firefighters to have an easier path at having their records expunged. The bill has passed the Assembly and is pending in the State Senate.
But it faces resistance from a coalition of firefighters and police unions and state prosecutors leery of allowing potentially dangerous felons an easier shot at a clean background check. They note there’s already a process in place that allows some former inmates to expunge their convictions.
Herrera, the former youth inmate, said he’s since landed a job at the California Conservation Corps that allows him to put to use the firefighting skills he learned while in prison. But he wishes the choices he made a kid weren’t such a barrier to his former dream of becoming a fireman.
“I was a kid when I made those mistakes,” he said. “I want to help change the world, you know? But I can’t because I’m bound by my past.”
GROUPS OPPOSE BILL CHANGING CEQA
More than 100 groups fixed their names to a letter to Sen. Ben Allen, D-Santa Monica, chair of the Senate Environmental Quality Committee, registering their opposition to AB 3279, a bill which they argue “would significantly undermine environmental, environmental justice, and other public interest petitioners’ access to the courts and therefore access to justice,” by weakening the California Environmental Quality Act.
Supporters of AB 3279 argue the bill would “authorize courts to hear CEQA appeals sooner, reduce the time parties take to file petitions, expedite the preparation of the administrative record, and authorize courts to issue interlocutory remand orders instead of setting aside project approvals and forcing applicants to start the process all over again,” according to an Assembly floor analysis of the bill.
Among the groups signing the letter, which can be read here, are the ACLU of Northern California, the Center for Biological Diversity, Sierra Club California, the Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment and the Coalition for Clean Air.
In the letter, advocates argue that CEQA is not, as some critics have said, an obstacle to new housing in California.
“California’s housing crisis,which disproportionately and most deeply impacts lower-income communities and communities of color, stems primarily from insufficient investment in the preservation and development of affordable housing, a lack of policy safeguards to prevent displacement and protect housing affordability and supply, and non-CEQA regulatory barriers imposed by local governments (such as failure to zone adequate sites for multi-family housing),” the letter reads in part.
The letter addresses three complaints about the bill:
- The bill deprives the public of its day in court, and would allow CEQA non-compliance to occur with no accountability.
- The bill removes the public’s ability to bring CEQA challenges.
- The bill shortens the briefing schedule, which in turn undermines the public’s access to courts.
AB 3279 would effectively remove the power to enforce CEQA by vulnerable communities who want to enforce the law and protect their health,” said Chelsea Tu, senior attorney at the Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment. “CEQA is one of the few avenues available to low-income communities and communities of color to ensure new development addresses the need for quality housing and a healthy neighborhood. CEQA is a complement, not a hindrance, to effective affordable housing policy.”
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“A number of legislators in both parties have publicly and privately shared my dismay over the collapse of checks and balances in California. This is the furthest thing in the world from a partisan matter.”
- Assemblyman Kevin Kiley, R-Rocklin, via Twitter.
Best of the Bee:
The best way the government can help the millions of people out of work right away? Keep giving them that extra $600 a week, or at least some emergency payment, as unemployment benefits. That’s the loose consensus of economists and many Washington lawmakers contacted by McClatchy, as President Donald Trump and Congress engage in tense closed-door negotiations on the next federal economic relief package, via David Lightman.
A California state worker union says a poorly organized coronavirus outreach effort forced hundreds of employees to work mandatory overtime with little notice on a holiday weekend and delivered questionable results, via Andrew Sheeler.
Members of Black Zebra Productions faced violence from federal agents in Portland, Oregon, on Tuesday night while covering the protests, a video shows, via Molly Burke.