A new face in the Capitol Bureau + No-bid contract accountability? + How Democratic is California?
Good morning and welcome to the A.M. Alert.
WELCOME, LINDSEY HOLDEN
We’d like to welcome reporter Lindsey Holden to the Capitol Bureau, where she will cover the Legislature and all that entails.
Holden comes to The Sacramento Bee by way of McClatchy sister paper The San Luis Obispo Tribune, where she most recently covered the county government as it underwent its redistricting process.
She is an experienced reporter who has written at length about housing issues, water, immigration and barriers to coastal development.
Holden also is a 2020 McClatchy President’s Award winner for her series “Substandard of Living,” a data-driven project on poor rental housing conditions in San Luis Obispo County. As part of that effort, Holden used audience engagement to improve her reporting, conducting focus groups and doing some old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting canvassing working-class neighborhoods.
Holden also is a recipient of several California Newspaper Publishers Association journalism awards for her enterprise, profile, government and agriculture reporting.
If you want to say hi, you can reach her on Twitter at @lindseymholden (give her a follow!) or you can send her an email at lholden@sacbee.com.
LAWMAKER SEEKS ACCOUNTABILITY FOR NO-BID CONTRACTS
Legislative Republicans have been critical of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s practice of awarding no-bid contracts. Now, Senate Republican Leader Scott Wilk, R-Santa Clarita, has introduced legislation to curb that practice.
“During the past two years, we have seen the unaccountable and frankly out-of-control Newsom Administration paying out billions of dollars in secretive no-bid contracts under the guise of curbing the impact of an ongoing global pandemic,” Wilk said in a statement. “Sub-par contracting decisions in critical areas such as COVID-19 test processing has led to massive waste, left the state vulnerable to fraud, and worse, has hamstrung our ability to effectively slow the spread of COVID-19.”
To that end, Wilk has introduced a pair of bills, Senate Constitutional Amendment 7 and Senate Bill 947.
SCA 7 would require that no-bid contracts of $25 million or more entered on or after Jan. 1, 2023, be subject to oversight of the Joint Legislative Budget Committee prior to renewal or extension of the contract.
SB 947 would empower employees of the no-bid contracts to blow the whistle on fraud, waste or abuse by granting them whistleblower protections already afforded to state workers.
It will be interesting to see how they fare in the Democratic-controlled Legislature.
“The Newsom Administration’s practice of renewing no-bid contracts without reviewing their merits is not only a waste of taxpayer money, but also a way to skirt the spirit of California’s contracting process. Californians would not be aware of the Valencia lab fiasco had brave whistleblowers not risked their livelihoods to expose the glaring deficiencies. They should be offered the same protections as other state workers who call attention to grievous problems at a state agency,” Wilk said.
HOW DEMOCRATIC IS CALIFORNIA, ANYWAY?
Via David Lightman...
California is the nation’s fourth most Democratic-friendly state, a new survey found.
Louis Jacobson, senior columnist for the nonpartisan political site Sabato’s Crystal Ball, used three factors he found are “increasingly linked with partisan voting” to determine his rankings:
– Percentage of a state’s residents 25 or older with at least a bachelor’s degree. California was 15th.
– Percentage of white residents. California was 49th.
– Urbanization. California was 48th.
“Put simply, Republican candidates now perform strongest among white voters without a college degree, especially if they live in rural areas,” Jacobson wrote. “And Democrats, conversely, are performing best among minority voters, those with at least an undergraduate degree, and those who live in or near urban areas.”
As a result, Maryland was the most Democratic state, even though Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican, is now in his second term. Next on the list were New Jersey, New York and then California.
The last time a Republican presidential candidate won California was in 1988, when President George H. W. Bush won 51% of the state’s vote. In 2020, President Joe Biden topped Republican President Donald Trump by 29 percentage points.
The most Republican states on the list were West Virginia, Wyoming, Kentucky and South Dakota.
Jacobson used data from the National Center for Education Statistics’ Digest of Education Statistics, the most recent racial data from the U.S. Census Bureau, and FiveThirtyEight’s urbanization index.
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“Any candidate who threatens that ‘if labor doesn’t support me, then I’ll just have to go to the dark side & become a mod so I can get support for my campaign’… is not someone I’m looking to fight for or fight along side. Heard variations of this twice recently.”
- Former Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, via Twitter.
Best of the Bee:
California Democrats on Friday proposed a new COVID-19 mandate for the workplace that would require eligible employees to show proof of vaccination to their employers, via Lara Korte.
The field to replace Assemblyman Jim Cooper now narrows to three Sacramento-area Democrats who want to represent the 10th Assembly District, which includes Elk Grove and parts of south Sacramento: Eric Guerra, Sacramento’s mayor pro tem, Stephanie Nguyen, an Elk Grove city council member, and Tecoy Porter, a Sacramento pastor, via Lara Korte.
This story was originally published February 14, 2022 at 4:55 AM.