California carnage: Why does Placer County Assemblyman Kevin Kiley hate his own state?

According to Trump-endorsed congressional candidate Kevin Kiley, who is running in the Placer County-based 3rd District, California is a lousy place to live. In fact, it’s “the state everyone cannot wait to leave behind.” Maybe he should decamp for somewhere more to his liking.

Kiley’s recent speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference about the horrors of his home state was essentially former President Donald Trump’s “American carnage” speech revised to portray California’s carnage.

Trump’s dark view of our country, as expressed in his 2017 inaugural address, described an unrelieved hellscape. The land of opportunity, he said, had turned into a wasteland filled with “mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories, scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system flush with cash but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge; and the crime and the gangs and the drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential. This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.”

Kiley offered a similarly bleak view of our state in his speech in Dallas Saturday: “We used to be the state where anyone could get ahead — the California Dream. Now we’re the state everyone can’t wait to leave behind. That’s the California tragedy. And if Gavin Newsom has his way, it will be the American tragedy.” Thanks to Newsom, he said, Californians “walk down streets that double as restrooms and injection sites.”

It is true, as Kiley says, that homelessness is a major problem in our state, and that with climate-related wildfires becoming a bigger worry all the time, many Californians “live in fear” that our “community will burn down.”

In November, Kiley, a state assemblyman from Placer County, will face Democrat Kermit Jones, a doctor and Navy veteran. If elected, what would Kiley be doing differently on the key issues of homelessness and climate?

On the first matter, in a debate a year ago, when he was running for governor, he suggested we should just build enough shelter space — as if that were an easy matter.

“You actually can tell them to move along from the streets if there’s a shelter for them to go to,” Kiley said. “Which is why it’s important that you do have a roof available for every person to go to ... so that we don’t have people who are living and dying and languishing on our streets.”

So simple. It’s incredible that no one else thought of this.

The problem with building shelters — or any facility to house and treat previously homeless folks — is, of course, widespread community opposition. Even a local hospice for homeless people has faced a fight. And that’s why even programs proven to have worked well, such as tiny homes, are so hard to scale. The public wants the problem solved, or at least hidden from view, but without much recognition of what that would require of the rest of us.

Last year, Kiley voted against a bill requiring state and local governments to develop plans to reduce homelessness; he voted against rent stabilization and protections for mobile homeowners; and he voted against extending the eviction moratorium and rent assistance during COVID.

This year, he also voted against energy relief. In 2021, he received a grade of 0 from California Environmental Voters.

It takes no imagination to repeat the talking point that California has failed. But where are the bold new plans that would make our state more livable? His answer to virtually all problems is more freedom, but on the most vexing issues here and elsewhere, that’s no answer at all.