Why Newsom’s return-to-office order is right for Sacramento and California | Opinion
It seemed as if Gov. Gavin Newsom was going to waffle forever on whether 95,000 state workers should work from their offices four days a week instead of two. His 2025 mandate to double office time was stymied when unions quickly negotiated for their members to stay home. Newsom, so it seemed, had set up a never-ending cycle of bargaining.
But the governor in his final year in office, less beholden to Sacramento interests, decided to stop negotiating away his authority and start acting like a chief executive. Technically, that mandate issued last year took effect Wednesday. Thanks to the Fourth of July and floating holidays for state workers, the new routine for many begins Monday.
This decision doesn’t feel temporary. For state government and downtown Sacramento in particular, a new normal is taking effect. And in the end, this outcome makes sense for state government and the urban core of the state capital.
Running California's government as a remote enterprise wasn’t workable in the long run. It was a necessity during COVID but, that was then and this is now. Public agencies doing the public’s business is best carried out in public offices.
Besides, rarely used government office space is a waste and an economic drag to downtown Sacramento.
There is no way the vast state bureaucracies in their various downtown Sacramento offices could ever have agreed on how to share less space together as part of a permanent work-from-home strategy. And when the state has abandoned downtown buildings, such as the three near the Capitol envisioned by Sacramento State as an expansion of its downtown footprint, the Legislature hasn’t appropriated funding to turn the desire of university leaders into a reality.
While some state unions are still battling the governor’s decision, their search for a regulatory flaw in Newsom’s action has so far come up empty.
In a classically California tactic, one union lawsuit alleged that Newsom’s back-to-office mandate had not complied with the state’s premier environmental law. It was a legal theory advanced in court by, of all unions, the one representing the attorneys who work for the state.
Newsom could not issue this executive order, according to the attorneys, without first conducting an exhaustive analysis of its impacts under the California Environmental Quality Act. Commutes generate traffic and emissions. All this should have been calculated, according to the California Attorneys, Administrative Law Judges and Hearing Officers in State Employment.
But in Alameda County Superior Court, Judge Rebekah Evanson disagreed. The directive to return to the office is a policy, not some project. Even in California, when a governor states a new policy, it does not trigger an environmental review.
“While the Court acknowledges that the return-to-office policies will likely inconvenience some employees, the Executive Order grants agencies and departments flexibility to address and ameliorate those impacts, so the extent of any inconvenience is uncertain,” Evanson wrote.
By all accounts, what Newsom is doing is highly debatable. But it is legal.
It is called work for a reason, after all.
And it’s doubtful that this work-from-home crusade will get much support from the new governor, Sacramentan Xavier Becerra. He has been commuting to one state or another for much of his adult life. To his great credit, Newsom has settled this issue for his successor.
Going forward, the unions can better serve their members by making the return-to-work order as workable as possible rather than fighting it. Hopefully there remains plenty of room for flexibility and humanity for hard-working state employees looking for a little leeway.
There was a time, not that long ago, when getting the okay to work from home a day a week was a huge victory. Yes, the world has changed since then. But to this day, it is not too much to ask of downtown’s largest employer, funded by taxpayers, to have workers on the state payroll show up most of the time.