‘A steady diet isn’t going to do much – we need liposuction to fix this’

According to a new report released by the Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) on Friday, California will likely face a budget deficit of $58 billion over the next few years, with massive spending cuts likely to come because of less than expected tax revenue coming in.

California’s state budget has fluctuated wildly in the past several years. During the COVID-19 pandemic, California saw the largest surpluses in state history, including an unprecedented $31 billion surplus in 2022-2023. However a weakening economy, a massive loss of the state population and companies moving out of state, delayed tax changes and numerous other factors led to a severe deficit the next year. An initial deficit of $25 billion, which was later changed in May to $31.5 billion, rocked the state. While the state managed to continue on with a reduced budget, experts warned that the situation would likely grow worse with continued tax shortcomings.

In a LAO report on Friday, a new projected budget deficit 0f $58 billion over the next few years was announced. According to the report, the biggest factor to blame were delayed state taxes caused by the massive winter storms from the beginning of the year. While California eventually received those taxes, they fell below a whopping $26 billion than expected. Higher borrowing costs and reduced investment in the state also factored in state losses in the years to come.

“This decline is similar to those seen during the Great Recession and dot-com bust,” the report said. “While the slowdown of investment in California companies and corresponding broader economic weakness likely was a primary driver of this decline, another important factor was financial market distress in 2022. Whether the recent weakness will continue is difficult to say. However, the odds do not appear to be in the state’s favor. Past downturns similar to this recent episode have tended to be followed by additional weakness.”

$58 billion projected deficit

Democrats in the state legislature largely brushed off the report on Friday, noting that the state is prepared to deal with budget issues.

“While this latest update to the revenue forecast is not welcome news, California is more prepared than ever to withstand budget challenges and our economy overall is stronger than projected,” said State Senate Pro Tem Toni Atkins (D-San Diego). “We will have a clearer picture of our situation as we approach the budget deadline next June. But with our record reserves and other budgeting tools, we, along with our partners in the Assembly and the Administration, will work through these challenges while protecting middle class taxpayers and our progress on core programs that help all Californians.”

Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas (D-Hollister) was also optimistic, adding that “California is more prepared than ever to navigate this latest challenge, given the state’s record reserves of $37.8 billion. When the next budget is due in June 2024, there will be a more crystallized understanding of our revenues and overall economic landscape.

“I remain committed to working with my Assembly, Senate and administration colleagues on a 2024 budget that protects classroom funding and prioritizes support for core health care, safety net and public safety programs.”

However, Republican and some Democrats countered that the deficit should not be taken lightly and that less spending is needed rather than tapping into the state’s emergency reserves.

“Hopefully, the majority will see it is time for a more realistic budget strategy, instead of throwing money at a laundry list of projects that sounds nice on the national television debate stage,” said Senator Roger Niello (R-Fair Oaks).

While the $58 billion figure is by no means definite, past projects by the LAO have been somewhat conservative, indicating that the figure could grow later next year as the situation becomes more clear.

“In 2020 we had a big $54 billion deficit,” explained accountant Lee Greenman, a California-based accountant who helps city and other regional entities fix budget problems, to the Globe on Friday. “We seemed to have forgotten that as there were two good years of surplus afterwards. But then, last year, right back to the deficit. And now, it looks like another few years like that ahead.”

Click here to read the full article in the California Globe

California’s elected Democrats are blinded by their cult-like Marxist ideology over any sense of public service to the people, or desire to govern

The Globe just reported Friday on California Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas’ (D-Hollister) orchestrated a shakeup of the leadership lineup in the California Assembly, following the departure of former Speaker Anthony Rendon.

Rivas named Majority Leader Assemblywoman Cecilia Aguiar-Curry (D-Winters) as the replacement to Assemblyman Isaac Bryan (D-Los Angeles). Her replacement as the former Speaker Pro Tempore is Assemblyman Jim Wood (D-Healdsburg).

The powerful Assembly Appropriations chair Assemblyman Chris Holden (D-Pasadena) was also removed and replaced by a very curious choice – Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks (D-Oakland). Wicks is the lawmaker who pushed so hard for infanticide legalization in California. Not sure how much that will forward appropriations bills….

The all-important Assembly Budget Committee chairman Assemblyman Phil Ting (D-San Francisco) was replaced with Assemblyman Jesse Gabriel (D-Woodland Hills).

What does all of this mean to the average California voter? And really, who are these people we’ve elected to do the people’s business?

Speaker Robert Rivas’ is a classic California melting pot story: Rivas was raised in Paicines, California, where his grandfather was a farmworker at Almaden Vineyards. Rivas and his brother grew up in farmworker housing, cared for by their single mother and beloved grandparents, who emigrated from Mexico in the 1960s in search of the California Dream, his Assembly biography says.

It’s the other items of import Rivas chose to include in his biography that tell us what is important to him:

• affordable housing
• workplace health and safety protections
• created the Golden State Teacher Grant Program
• the first-in-the-nation COVID-19 Farmworker Relief Package, which included critical efforts related to access to PPE and testing, temporary housing, and health care
• A long-time champion of the environment
• led the effort to accelerate the construction of renewable energy
• ensure the state explores all options to use public lands and oceans to effectively sequester carbon

No surprises there. Rivas is a progressive Democrat.

Assemblywoman Cecilia Aguiar-Curry (D-Winters) comes the closest to business friendly in the Democrat leadership. However, while she may have been effective in Winters California as town Mayor, she recently sponsored ACA 13 with the backing of Speaker Rivas – a devious attack on California’s Proposition 13 – the Constitutional Amendment passed by voters in 1978 to protect property owners from outrageous property taxes.

As Jon Coupal, President of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association explains:

“…radical progressives in the California Legislature launched the most brazen sneak attack on California’s iconic Proposition 13 in its 45-year history. Assemblyman Christopher Ward, backed by the new Speaker of the Assembly, Robert Rivas, introduced Assembly Constitutional Amendment 13 (ACA 13). It would amend the constitution to make it easier to raise taxes, by making it harder to pass citizens’ initiatives that seek to enforce Proposition 13’s two-thirds vote requirement for local special tax increases.

The specific target of ACA 13 is a citizens’ initiative backed both by taxpayer organizations and the business community. The Taxpayer Protection and Government Accountability Act (TPA) has already qualified for the November 2024 ballot, and polling shows it to be popular with voters. The TPA closes several loopholes created by the courts that have allowed special interests to work with local governments to raise taxes with a simple majority vote instead of the two-thirds vote required by Proposition 13.”

Nuff said. You get it. Her bio makes her sound reasonable, but ACA 13 tells us who she really is… and it’s surprising as the co-owner of an 80-acre walnut orchard with her brothers.

As we mentioned, Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks, a Democrat from Oakland, who has never held a real job outside of “championing the rights of women and working families, protecting consumers, and reducing gun violence in our communities,” and her work as “a lifelong community organizer,” is the new chairwoman of the Assembly Appropriations Committee.

The purpose of the Assembly Appropriations Committee:

The committee reviews all bills with any fiscal impact after passage by a policy committee. The committee hears more bills than any committee in the Legislature. In the 2009-10 and 2011-12 sessions combined, the committee heard about 4,600 bills. For contrast, the Business, Professions and Consumer Protection and Public Safety Committees each referred about 400 bills over the course of these two sessions.

The goal of the committee is sound, responsible, affordable fiscal policy.

How comforting that a lifelong community organizer “championing the rights of women and working families, protecting consumers, and reducing gun violence in our communities” is heading the committee responsible for sound, affordable fiscal policy.

And Assemblyman Jesse Gabriel (D-Woodland Hills), who at least is “an attorney, civic leader, and lawmaker fighting to advance justice and defend California’s most vulnerable residents,” according to his bio, is “a creative thinker with a proven record of bringing together diverse communities.” Whew. I was concerned that we didn’t have any creative thinkers in the new Assembly leadership. But “Jesse is consistently ranked as one of the Legislature’s most committed environmentalists.” Thank goodness, because we will need an Assembly Budget Committee chairman fighting to advance justice and bring his commitment to environmentalism to the committee.

How is Buffy Wicks, career community organizer, going to “center on fiscal implications” in the Assembly Appropriations Committee?

Buffy Wicks, most notably known for authoring and defending Assembly Bill 2223, California’s “infanticide” legislation, which removed all penalties from anyone violating any abortion health and safety standards when performing an abortion on a woman through all nine months of pregnancy. Her barbaric bill was eventually amended to narrow very slightly the meaning of “perinatal death,” but AB 2223 will still prohibit prosecution of a mother or someone assisting her for causing the death of her born or unborn child if the child died because of injuries sustained while in the womb. That would include injuries caused by a botched abortion, illegal drugs such as meth or heroin. The bill also hampers law enforcement’s ability to investigate and prosecute infanticide. Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks said the bill is about “reproductive justice, pregnancy criminalization, reproductive freedom, and pregnancy loss.”

She’s a ghoul.

Jesse Gabriel is a lawyer who from 2008 to 2010, served as legal counsel to then-U.S. Senator Evan Bayh. He went on to join a large law firm and in 2017, filed two lawsuits against the Trump Administration on behalf of illegal immigrant “Dreamers,” under the DACA program.

Jesse Gabriel is now in charge of the Assembly Budget Committee.

The California Assembly has become a clown show. The Democrats in charge don’t even try anymore to pretend that they are responsible for a $330 billion budget, and the committees designated to administer state police for 39 million residents and millions of businesses.

When Governor Jerry Brown was elected in 2011, the state budget was $98 billion and the state’s population was a little over 38 million people. Brown doubled the budget up to $199.3 billion – with no measurable increase in population. Gov. Newsom inherited Brown’s $199.3 billion budget, and has grown it to $330 billion in 5 years – while losing population.

Where is all of that new spending going?

The new leadership choices in the Assembly feel more like Speaker Rivas is rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic rather than focusing on any strategic policy planning.

Click here to read the full article in the California Globe

SACRAMENTO —  In his tan suit and gold tie, Jarad Nava blends in easily at the California Capitol, as though he’s always belonged to its mahogany and rose-hued halls.

But underneath the button-down shirt — unseen and unimaginable to those who don’t know his story — tattoos evoke his former life: on his arms, the name of a park his gang claimed as territory, rolling dice and an inked-over “P” that had represented Pomona; on his chest, flames licking up the base of his neck.

Just a few years ago, Nava was serving a 162-year sentence for a crime he committed when he was 17.

Now 28, the young man who once thought he’d never see the outside of a prison works as an assistant for the state Senate Public Safety Committee, an influential panel of lawmakers who review legislation related to the criminal justice system.

The irony is not lost on Nava, who eventually won his freedom by learning to atone and accept, truly accept, responsibility for what he had done. It required disciplined work, a newfound faith and, as Nava put it, serious reflection on what “led to me shooting at a car with four people in it.”

An uneasy childhood

As recounted by Nava and in legal documents, he was born to a struggling 19-year-old mom and absent dad in the summer of 1995 in Battle Creek, Mich. When he was a toddler, his mom uprooted them to Washington state, where she joined the Navy and met his stepfather, who became the boy’s role model.

The family relocated to Pomona and grew to include three younger sisters. But given financial and other pressures, they never stayed anywhere for long, pingponging around Southern California and back to Michigan.

Nava said he liked school, at first, and excelled in math. But the transfers to a dozen or so schools between kindergarten and fifth grade made academics difficult.

“It felt like there was no stability,” Nava said.

The one place he felt indomitable was playing center field and catcherin Little League. Baseball, he said, “was like my identity.” On the field he earned the praise and validation he craved at home, where his family was slowly falling apart.

His world collapsed when, at 11, his parents said they couldn’t sign him up for another season. Nava figured the family would work it out, as they always had, but the season came and went without him.

“Now reflecting back I can see, oh, they just couldn’t afford it,” he said.

His sense of security continued unraveling alongside his parents’ marriage.

He remembers waking up one evening when he was around 13 to yelling coming from the garage, where he found his mom screaming as his stepdad attempted suicide by taking a knife to his stomach.

The family never talked about it, but Nava remembers that night as the moment he lost faith in his hero and stopped being a kid.

His parents divorced before he reached high school, and Nava split his time between them — again hopping from home to home.

With little interest in school, but with a work ethic he’d later come to be known for in the Capitol, Nava took after-school jobs selling newspaper subscriptions and random stuff — gummy bears, jumper cables, candles. He graduated to selling coupon books, making up to $200 a day, and later started his own clothing company.

At one point, Nava moved into a friend’s house and rented a room for $500. He dropped out of high school, then moved back in with his mom at 16 and enrolled in a continuation school to get his diploma. But their relationship was strained, and the living situation was rocky.

“I didn’t know how to be a kid, basically,” he said. “I felt like I didn’t really have family or anything.”

So he reconnected with some old friends.

Joining the gang

It started with petty crimes, breaking into cars, vandalizing buildings and getting into fights.

At a time when “so much in life felt so powerless,” Nava said, the Pomona Don’t Care Krew, or DCK, felt like a real family.

DCK was a “tagging” crew, or a fledgling gang of younger members who typically go on to join a more established and violent group. Nava was “jumped in” to DCK at 16, feeling as though he had recovered that “purpose and identity” he last experienced on the baseball field.

As Nava became more determined to prove himself, his criminal behavior escalated. He started drinking, smoking weed, carrying a gun.

“The more violent you were, the more you felt like you were respected or feared,” Nava recalled. “In order to protect myself, I felt like the more I perpetrated violence on others, the safer I would be.”

The more violent you were, the more you felt like you were respected, or feared.

— Jarad Nava

The evening of Sept. 29, 2012, in Pomona was a violent one.

A monthlong dispute between DCK and its former allies in the Cherrieville gang had intensified, and gunfire broke out at least four times. One shooting happened near Nava’s apartment complex, where he lived with his mom and little sisters.

The last incident, just before 11 p.m., occurred at the intersection of Glen and Orange Grove avenues.

Nava said he doesn’t remember much of what happened when the white truck he was riding in swerved into the opposite lane and pulled alongside a Lexus sedan carrying what he thought were his enemies.

In the car were Yesenia Castro, 16; her sister Marlene Castro, 15; Jessila Suarez, 25; and Marlyn Reyes, who was 17 and nine months pregnant.

The Castro sisters had an older brother in Cherrieville, and Suarez and Reyes were dating two brothers in the gang.

Nava was high and drunk. He doesn’t remember telling the four, according to court records, they were “gonna die today” before he fired multiple rounds into the car.

Suarez threw herself over Reyes to protect the baby. A bullet grazed Marlene’s left leg. Yesenia was shot in the back. As they raced toward the hospital, Yesenia wasn’t breathing.

“Her eyes were rolling back” and she was bleeding, Reyes testified. Marlene had thrown her shirt over her sister to soak up the blood.

The bullet severed her spinal cord, paralyzing her from the waist down. With Yesenia still in intensive care, the Castro sisters picked Nava out of a six-pack of photos detectives showed them.

Nava said that his memory of the days after the shooting is foggy, but that he had nightmares and was paranoid about someone breaking into his apartment, about getting shot.

He was home with friends when, six days after the shooting, police surrounded the apartment, calling his name over loudspeakers. He stepped outside to surrender.

Before hauling him off to the station, Nava said, officers told him to enjoy his final touch of grass.

During an interrogation, Nava confessed and asked what would happen next.

“Probably going to get charged with attempted murder,” a detective said.

“Attempted murder? That’s life?” Nava asked. “How much time do you think I could get?”

Attempted murder? That’s life? How much time do you think I could get?

— Jarad Nava, to a detective.

It was a juvenile case, the detective said. Prison time could vary. “I’ve seen everything from 10, 15, 20 years to life,” he said.

Nava was charged with four counts of attempted murder, one count of shooting at an occupied motor vehicle and, after detectives found a gun in his apartment, possession of a short-barreled shotgun.

He declined a plea deal of a 30-year prison term and stood trial as an adult, which California allows for 16- and 17-year-olds as a way to keep those convicted as older teenagers in custody beyond the age cap of 25.

“I didn’t take the plea deal at the time because I was still not taking responsibility for what I had done,” he said recently. Also, for a teenager, three decades behind bars “felt like life.”

“So it was like, how much worse could it get?” he said. “Obviously, it got a lot worse.”

Standing trial

The trial began in January 2014 in Pomona.

The young women recounted the gunshots and frantic rush to the hospital.

Nava was found guilty on Feb. 7 and, three months later, sentenced to 162 years in prison: 40 years to life for each attempted murder charge, plus two years for the shotgun possession.

At the sentencing hearing was Alex Sandoval, who drove the car the night of the shooting. Unlike Nava, Sandoval took a plea deal and received 30 years for similar charges.

After Nava was sentenced and taken into custody, Sandoval had his own chance to apologize to the victims. He also begged for leniency for his younger friend.

“I don’t really think that Nava should — you should have mercy on Nava,” Sandoval told the judge. “He’s young, really intelligent. I don’t believe he should have life.”

The judge noted that Sandoval, with his guilty plea, had taken responsibility for his actions. “I think that is why you are going to have a life after state prison, unlike your friend, Mr. Nava.”

After Nava was convicted, his victims addressed the court. One after the other, each offered forgiveness.

“They changed my whole life. It’s a struggle now. But, yeah, I forgive them,” Yesenia Castro said of her assailants, adding that she had since givenbirth to a daughter. “But all I got to say is I hope everything goes good for them. I don’t have nothing against them.”

Marlene Castro, Reyes and Suarez did not respond to requests for comment. Yesenia Castro, speaking through her screened front door in her wheelchair, declined to be interviewed.

Headed to prison

By late 2014, Nava had been sent to Ironwood State Prison in Blythe.

He was 19 and at a crossroads.

“It was just kind of like a realization, you’re never going home,” he said. “At that point, that’s when I was faced with the question of what I was going to do with the rest of my life.”

Some months earlier Nava had read a self-help book and undertook an exercise to write down the names of everyone he had harmed. It was a long list. He dredged up memories of fistfights, teasing classmates and stealing someone’s scooter. He wrote an apology for every offense.

Then he wrote the names of everyone who had caused him harm, a list almost as long as the first. And he forgave them all.

“After doing that whole process, there was just an immense sense of peace that overwhelmed me,” he said. “Running from it was exhausting. … To face it within myself was just extremely impactful.”

Nava enrolled in college courses and joined every program he thought could propel his life forward: Narcotics Anonymous, Alternatives to Violence, emotional intelligence courses, a writer’s workshop and a class called Criminal and Gang Members Anonymous. He joined the Prison Walk-A-Thon to raise money for cancer, worked as a peer educator and learned Braille to translate college textbooks for the blind. He earned his GED diploma, then an associate’s degree in business and technology.

He also reflected on how his victims had forgiven him at his sentencing. “As I got older and I really understood the gravity of what I had done … I’ll say that it was extremely humbling that somebody who had experienced such a wrongdoing could find it in their hearts to forgive me in that moment.

“The best way to describe it is I feel undeserving of that,” he said.

Nava did not have a religious upbringing, but in prison, he said, he gave his life to Jesus. He found comfort in church services, where he’d worship alongside the mentors and friends he made in prison. Once more, he’d found what started to feel like family.

“It was a lot of love,” he said.

He saw the work to improve himself as restitution, a way to make spiritual amends for a crime that left Yesenia Castro dependent on a wheelchair.

But his efforts gave something he never expected.

A chance for freedom

In 2018, lawyers at the Juvenile Innocence and Fair Sentencing Clinic — encouraged by film producer Scott Budnick — took interest in Nava’s case.

While in juvenile hall, Nava had met Budnick — a producer of the “Hangover” films and founder of the nonprofit Anti-Recidivism Coalition — who was teaching a creative writing class.

Budnick also helped produce “They Call Us Monsters,” a documentary that featured Nava and two other teenagers in a film-writing class who were being tried as adults.

“He was dynamic, personable, challenging, a handful, just like a little bit of a wild kid,” Budnick said.

“But you know when you see that spark, and you know when someone is remorseful, and you know when they have some of those core qualities that can make them very successful? I saw all of that in him,” Budnick said.

Christopher Hawthorne, director of the clinic at Loyola Law School, saw the documentary and believed Nava had been poorly represented at trial. But Hawthorne wasn’t shocked by the long sentence.

“We were still in the middle of the super predator panic,” Hawthorne said. “There was a sense that Pomona in particular was awash in gang activity.”

(The documentary includes Yesenia Castro, who, despite her comments of forgiveness in court, said she wished Nava would serve a long sentence.)

Hawthorne figured that Nava had matured since his time in juvenile hall.

“I was confident that when I met Jarad, he would be different. And he really was,” Hawthorne said. “He was well-spoken, thoughtful. He understood what he had done.”

Hawthorne and others at the clinic put together a clemency application that demonstrated Nava’s rehabilitative work in prison. They gathered support letters and cited legal cases on juvenile brain development.

They also laid out his life story: He was born to a teen mom and had already been exposed to gang culture in the neighborhood and witnessed gun violence by age 6. He witnessed his stepfather’s suicide attempt and was bounced from household to household. As a lonely kid, he joined a gang to “escape the turmoil of his life at home.”

At the end of 2018, the clinic shipped Nava’s application off to then-Gov. Jerry Brown. Nava went through an initial interview, the start of the process toward a Board of Parole Hearings session. And then he waited.

The clinic had asked that his sentence be modified to 15 years to life. In March 2020, the new governor, Gavin Newsom, commuted Nava’s sentence to 10 years to life.

“This act of clemency for Mr. Nava does not minimize or forgive his conduct or the harm it caused,” Newsom wrote. “It does recognize the work he has done since to transform himself.”

Six months later, Nava went before the Board of Parole Hearings — a panel of attorneys, psychologists and former corrections officers and wardens — and recounted how he’d used his time in prison to work on his “character defects.”

Recalling the 17-year-old who opened fire with a gun, he told the board, “I felt at that time that I didn’t have any friends. I didn’t have nobody to, uh — I, I didn’t feel like I had any family.”

If released, he said, his plan was to enroll at Sacramento State to study computer coding. But backup options were getting into electrical work, applying to Caltrans or an Amazon warehouse, or if all else failed, making hamburgers at Carl’s Jr. because the restaurant chain hires those with felony records.

Click here to read the full article in the LA Times