Evan Meyer welcomes Senator Brian Dahle to this edition of Meyerside Chats. Interested in any of the civic topics below? Please tune in to Meyerside Chats on the Santa Monica Daily Press.
California State Senator and Republican gubernatorial nominee Brian Dahle talks about the need for government leaders to go beyond the sound bites and work on common sense solutions to make things better for the people of California. He also talks about some of the issues that he is advocating as a governor-hopeful for the state.
Meyerside Chats is an attempt to destroy the “us and them” narrative through virtuous community leadership, praising those who lead by example, starting right here in Santa Monica.
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Meyerside Chats: Evan Meyer & Senator Brian Dahle – Bringing Balanced Leadership And Common Sense To Californian Government
Brian, how are you?
I’m good. How are you? Thanks so much for having me. I appreciate it.
It’s my pleasure. It is great to see you. I want to start by saying the purpose of this show is to do a lot of the stuff that you seem to speak about, which is common sense approaches to things, bringing people together to find common solutions, working through that and figuring out what needs to be done to make that happen. It is destroying this us-and-them agenda and recognizing that lots of perspectives can help drive better solutions. That’s why we’re here. One of the things I’ve heard you say before is people and their spouses don’t always agree. That’s the norm. Jump into that.
I’m sure you’re aware that I ran for the state assembly and took office in 2012. I served six and a half years in the state assembly. My senator, which was Senator Gaines, went to the Board of Equalization. There was a special election and I won the special election in the Senate. We had done a lot of work, both Megan and I, my wife, in having senators and assembly members to our farm and district.
When most people think of Northern California, they think of San Francisco and Sacramento. We’re four and a half hours North of Sacramento. We decided that we would bring legislators out to our district and explain to them our way of life. The one-size-fits-all legislation didn’t work so we hosted 127 legislators. Those were separate legislators. Many of them came more than once after they loved our area and liked our hospitality.
Megan knew a lot of the legislators. When I went to the state senate, we were like, “Who’s going to take my place in the state assembly?” Megan had served on a school board for years. I’m like, “Maybe you should do it. You know all these members well. You know the issues of our district.” We decided that she would run. It’s pretty awesome that she won. We both serve. She took my place in the assembly. She’s an assemblywoman representing the first assembly district. I represent the first senate district.
She’s done very well. I know that you’re going to ask this question so I’m going to say it anyway. We do not always vote the same. Quite frankly, it’s amazing. The 1st year was maybe 3 or 4 votes but in 2021, it might have been over 10 votes that we were on the opposite side of the piece of legislation. Reporters ask us, “How does that work?” I say, “We’ve been married for 23 years. We’ve had plenty of disputes about how we should raise our children or do our business but we have a common goal. In the case of legislation, it’s a better California.” We don’t always have to agree and we need more of that.
It works in our marriage. We’re happily married. We have three children. We have two sons. Our oldest one is at home running our business. Our middle son is here in Sacramento. He took some time off from college to help with the campaign. We have a daughter who goes to school in Sacramento. We rent a house here in Sacramento. We still have our farm for many years.
The Dahles have been farming in California. It’s why I’m running for governor. I don’t want to leave California. It’s been a struggle for our business, our communities and Californians. We seem to be able to get through the processes of voting against each other and still have a goal for a better California. We need that.
Between Democrats and Republicans, we have had one side in California for many years. The legislature’s been controlled by the Democrats and the governorship for the last two and a half terms. Here we are and we have lots of issues in California that need some balance. That’s what we’re about. We love California. We’re not leaving. That’s why I’m running for governor.
The idea that you and your wife vote differently says something about the possibility that people can think differently and still love each other. If you don’t love each other, you can at least live respectfully towards one another and appreciate where they come from, what they’re valuing at this moment or their approach to something. That’s a sign that it is possible that we all can get along.
The goal, at least from what I’ve found in the years I’ve been in the legislature and local government, is that let’s find the things that we agree on. I’m going to give you an example. Reggie Jones-Sawyer represents USC Compton. I don’t know what his new district is like but that’s what his district was like. I put out an email to all legislators when I first came. I was like, “If you’ll come to my district, I’ll pay your way. If you’ll invite me to your district, I’ll pay my way to your district.” I would do that.
Anthony Rendon took me up on it. I went to his district. I went to Reggie Jones-Sawyer. When I got to Reggie Jones-Sawyer’s district, we went to USC, saw the space shuttle and went to the campus there. It was beautiful. We went down to Florence and Normandie where the Rodney King riots were. It is in his small district, which he can get across in twenty minutes. It takes six hours to get across my district but I had him up to my district.
The thing we have in common is we both have boys and men of color who are struggling. In my district, it is Native Americans. The highest suicide rate for young men is Native Americans ages 18 to 25. In his district, it is young Black men. We work together on that issue that he and I can come together. We disagree on policies of how we should do law enforcement and a lot of things but that one thing, we can agree on. We work on that one thing.
My goal is to find the things that we can work on. With the things that we can’t work on, I want to educate more. I’m like, “Why do I think the way I think? Why is it that I think we should do it a different way?” Big pieces of legislation that have been passed don’t have my name on them but I was able to insert my philosophy and was able to change those pieces of legislation for the better because I have those relationships and respect in Sacramento. That’s what I will bring as governor. I will have every single member in my office.
They’re like, “This governor can’t say that because there are democrats that haven’t been in his office.” I, fortunately, have had a few conversations with him in his office on legislation that I was passionate about. We got passed. That’s what we need more of. We need more of working together. I learned it as a county supervisor when we had a lot of environmental issues in our districts over what we were going to do in the forest.
[bctt tweet=”We need more of working together in government. Let’s find the things we agree on.” via=”no”]
If you recall back in the day, it was very controversial about how we were going to treat our forest. The Unabomber killed a California Forestry Association member, Gil Murray. There’s a tree dedicated to him here at the Capitol. There was a lot of strain. We sat down in Quincy, California in the library. It’s called the Quincy Library Group. We sat down with environmentalists, supervisors, teachers and the forest service. We ended up doing a piece of legislation at the national level with Dianne Feinstein as an author and Wally Herger who was our Congressman. They’re Republican and Democrat. We got 429 yes votes in the house representatives. It’s amazing that even can happen. It was more votes than when they declared war on Japan after they bombed Pearl Harbor.
We got hung up in the Senate. We eventually got it out of the Senate. That’s why I learned to work with people on different issues, be able to listen and then articulate. If you can’t speak to each other and you’re working in soundbites and extremes, the people lose. Most people are in the middle. That has been my goal as a legislator here in California. I have been very effective at it. I have a lot of great relationships across the aisle.
A FOX 11 news anchor asked me who my favorite legislator is. I said Susan Eggman. She’s a senator from Stockton. We came in together in assembly. We have a lot of things we are not on the same page but she is a very good, decent and awesome friend of mine. We were both from farming backgrounds. Her dad was a beekeeper. She was the Chair of Agriculture when I was the Vice Chair of the assembly. We built a relationship. We’re close friends. I know her family. She knows mine. She texts me all the time back and forth. We disagree a lot but we love each other. That’s what we need more of. We need people who can sit down and work together in California.
What’s preventing that if you had to drill down into is what is creating this. It feels like it is on most issues. A lot of it is because we focus on that stuff. It gets lots of media attention. It gets plenty of engagement and social media clicks. Controversy seems to perform well in news and media, which is a separate topic. What is preventing us from focusing on the good stuff? There are values and aspirations that so many of us have. I’m going to go with 90% are all the same values and aspirations. Where are we getting blocked in your opinion from making this civil?
We’re in a society where we have so much information. I got my cell phone right here. You scroll through it. You get a couple of seconds and you’re seeing so much information. It’s not like it used to be when we used to get a daily paper or we had nightly news. We have information at our fingertips. People are polarized and they tend to get in their camp and not listen. We don’t take time to listen and communicate in a way where details matter.
Policy soundbites are what drive people. It drives emotion. At the end of the day, there’s a lot more to it than emotion and soundbites. A policy has to be implemented and it has to work. Unfortunately, not only in California but across our nation, we’ve become polarized in those soundbites. We don’t take time because we’re not programmed to take time and listen to it all. A lot of it is about how many people you get to like your stuff or how big your platform is.
At the end of the day, the guy that’s talking about policy or the boring stuff that needs to happen doesn’t have a very big platform. I fall victim to that because I’m somebody who likes to get in the weeds. I like policy a lot more than politics. Politics are about, to be honest with you, what you say you do and not what you do. People never look in to see what happens. Unfortunately, people say things that don’t happen and there’s no real good policy behind it. I prefer to talk about policy, implement that and give an outcome for my constituents. That’s where I’ve been able to do that by educating a minority in California.
One thing I can add to that is this idea of balance. I’ve been using this word around our local elections here in Santa Monica. When you start using it, you start to see it everywhere. I’m seeing balance everywhere. If you are realizing something is too far one way, people say the word balance. I know you use it in your campaign.
I believe in balance. I know what balance looks like in my head. Is it different for everyone? Is there a real balance here? How do we get people to realize what balance looks like and approach it in a way that people feel good about? They can see both sides of the triple beam balance and say, “This is what balance looks like. It is a little bit of giving and taking.”
The main thing is that you have to look at what the outcome is. After you’ve determined whatever the soundbite is of the day or whichever side, what’s the result of that? In my opinion, the pendulum swings back and forth. When it does, it shifts very fast because what they’ve been told is going to happen doesn’t always happen.
For me, I listen to all sides. That’s my goal. The benefit for me in Sacramento is I talk to Democrats all day long. I don’t just talk to my people. I talk to Democrats more than I talk to Republicans because I want to know what they’re thinking. I have my opinion and then I can weigh in, take some of their information and explain why it is going to or not going to work or maybe there’s a better way to do it. The outcomes are what matters.
I’m in California. It’s been a blue state for a long time. People talk about our party. Our party has not been in control for a long time. If you’re not happy, then maybe you should look at who’s been doing what because don’t have a lot of say in what happens in our legislature and the policy that comes out of here. That’s been my take. If you like what you’re getting, then stick with it. If you’re not happy, maybe you got to dig in, find out why and then maybe look at some other options. I do that on my farm every day.
Every year is a new year. You plant your crop. Mother Nature is the dictator, normally, of how your crop’s going to come out. Whether you get a frost or you have a bug infestation or you didn’t water or heat it right, those are not things that we worry about on our farm. We worry about the regulatory environment. We’re competing in a national market where if our costs are higher, we can’t compete. That is how we look at it. That’s the same thing in the legislature. Every bill’s a different bill. Every year’s a different year. We have to be able to adjust to the things that are happening politically and try to navigate those as we do on our farm so we can put out a product and survive as a business.
One of the things I’ve noticed is that when we even think about, “This is a democratic thing or Republican thing,” it depends on where you are in your context where that definition even holds its definition. In Santa Monica, for example, it’s far left verse moderate left. We’re 20% or 30% Republican. In California, that’s generally representative in California.
When I think about what Republican means versus Democrat in California and the difference as it relates to other states, Republicans and Democrats in Mississippi may be different. Collectively, at a federal level, it could be different as well. Do you feel like the way that people think about Republicans and Democrats in California is the same as the way they think about it at the federal level? Should they or should they not think that way?
It’s a reality. California is a very progressive state. If you’re a Republican in California, you’re probably a moderate Republican somewhere. If you’re in Idaho or Texas, maybe you’re not the same. This is because we have a different environment. To answer your question about Santa Monica and the differences, it’s more of your environment. If you’re raised in an affluent environment that has wealth, then you don’t understand what it’s like to be in an area where there’s no wealth and there is poverty.
Let’s take, for example, Santa Monica versus the Central Valley where you have way different income levels and different types of life. We could also take North, where I live and Southern California. I live 75 miles away from Walmart and 110 miles away from Costco. Public transportation is non-existent. If you’re in Santa Monica or Los Angeles, public transportation is available. You might not like it but it’s available. It’s a perspective of what your surroundings are, what your income level is and what you expect.
In California, it’s so diverse between all these different jurisdictions. The difference between Orange County and Los Angeles is different. Trust me. It’s all Southern California to somebody from the North but it’s not all Southern California to people in Southern California, whether you’re in San Diego, Orange County, Inland Empire or San Bernardino.
Recognize that California is the fifth largest economy in the world. We’re so diverse in so many different ways. It’s not like we’re known for just our agriculture, tech or film industry. We are known for almost everything. We are a leader in the world so we have to balance those things out. We have our conflicts in our state between regions. That’s the difference between knowing how to balance out California. We see it when there’s voting. We see blue areas and red areas even in our state, quite frankly, because there’s a difference of opinion in California because of your geographic location and income level.
We are more similar than we even think but we are very diverse.
Nevada is nothing like California when it comes to our economies, the people that live here and our tax structures. A Republican in California is going to be way different from a Republican in Nevada. A Democrat in Nevada is going to be different from a Democrat in California. That’s what I’m trying to explain. It’s because California is an amazing, diverse and awesome state that has a lot of different moving pieces.
I know you’re all about things as a Republican that Democrats would say are great for the environment.
One thing is when we talk about the environment, I’ve taken my colleagues to educate them on how I look at the environment. I’m a farmer. We’ve been farming the same ground for a long time. We do not want to damage it in any way. We do certified organic. We are stewards of the land. That’s how I look at California.
We should talk about the environment for a minute. We produce the fifth largest economy in the world. It produces 1% of global emissions. There are still global emissions. That’s what we’re talking about with the environment for the globe. When we offshore our products that the fifth largest economy in the country or the world uses to other countries like China where they’re building coal-fired power plants to provide us with cement or things we use in California fertilizer, then what are we talking about? We’re not helping the environment.
We can do it in California with the best technology and more environmentally friendly ways. We can make Californians reduce carbon. Those are the things I talk to my legislators about on the other side of the aisle. I’m like, “Why are you pushing those jobs to other countries? Why don’t we keep those jobs here, which we can reduce the emissions, show the world how to do it and provide the products that we all need to live a lifestyle that we expect in a developed country?”
There’s one more thing I’ve heard you mention too. It’s that the black carbon from forest fires is not even counted for the emissions for the state. Can you explain a little bit about that? Why don’t we count that? How come that’s not known?
That’s one of my biggest frustrations. Sixty percent of California’s water comes from my district. It’s a lot of water. I have the Shasta Reservoir or Shasta Dam, Oroville and Folsom all in my district. There are not just those reservoirs but there’s a watershed above that. We had the Dixie Fire in 2021. It was 980,000 acres. It’s crazy that we are burning up that much of our watershed.
I thought we counted carbon from forest fires but we don’t. A dead forest that has burned emits carbon and methane when it decomposes both adding to the climate. We don’t count that in California’s carbon emissions. I did a bill. They wanted me to amend the bill. I said, “No. I want to simply force the California Air Resources Board to count the carbon. They are emissions and we don’t count those.”
My bill didn’t get out of the first committee for its environmental quality, which I’m on the committee. Many of the members didn’t debate me. They didn’t want to do it because it means we have to pay attention to it and do something more than we were doing. My logic behind that is that we have impaired the forest.
We’ve had almost 100 years of fire suppression, which is not natural. Fires burned in California. Lightning would strike and they would burn for months until the fall rains came. About every ten years, our forest would burn. When it burned, it thinned out the forest. It left these beautiful ponderosa pines and sequoias, which are big trees. The smaller trees died in the process of the fire. That means that our spacing between trees was wider. We’ve suppressed fire with the Smokey Bear campaign and putting out fires.
Where we used to have 200 windbreaks of trees, we have maybe 1,000 windbreaks of trees. They’re all sucking water out of the ground and using up the supply of snowpack and water that’s there. We do get into drought. They get stressed. Bark beetles come in and the bark beetle lays its eggs under the bark. When it’s doing that when the tree is healthy and has plenty of water, the tree produces sap or pitch and pushes that bark beetle back out. It doesn’t allow those eggs to hatch.
When you don’t have water, they die. The bark beetles come in and kill the trees. We lost millions of trees to the bark beetle, lightning strikes or human-caused fires. We see these catastrophic fires because there’s so much fuel. The trees are so close together that it’s burning from tree to tree, not on the ground like they would if it was spread out.
I’ve had all these members out. I show them where we thin the forest mechanically and then where it wasn’t thin. We still have a forest that’s alive after the fire comes through because the fire comes from the top of the trees down to the bottom, goes across the ground and leaves the trees alive. A tree can sequester carbon. That’s a carbon sink. Remember in fifth grade when they told you, “When we breathe out, the trees breathe in.” It still works if that tree is alive in the forest.
I’ve been critical of our policies around forestry because we don’t count it. It’s the cheapest place to do it. We can get more bang for our buck other than building a train to nowhere. We spent $4.5 billion in 2022 on a train. If we would’ve put that into thinning out our forest, can you imagine what it’s like when a fire comes in? We still have a live forest. We have a healthy watershed. We have wildlife that’s there. Nature’s back to normal. Those are the things that I promote as an environmentalist in California. I am an environmentalist. I do everything on our farm to try to reduce my impact but still, at the same time, provide a product that Californians have to have daily.
Do you think that we didn’t count it for a reason or is it an oversight? Is it drastically higher that it makes California look like the worst emitter anywhere ever by 1 million times?
It’s easy to go out and get that sound bite saying, “I’m leading the way because we’re going to go electric cars,” when you’re not leading. In the conversation about my bill, they were like, “We would have to spend money on that. Our whole process would have to be upended.” I’m like, “Admitting that we are not doing it right is the first step. The second step is then funding the things that we should do to correct the problem.”
[bctt tweet=”Admitting that we are not doing it right is the first step. The second step is then funding the things that we should do to correct the problem.” via=”no”]
It was the same year I ran the bill that they did the regulating of your lawn mower, weed eater and generator. By 2024, you’re not going to be able to buy those in California. Imagine the power goes out and you can’t put gas in your generator. There was smoke in the air. They were like, “Look at all this climate change.” It’s happening from the fire. It had nothing to do with the lawnmower, weed or generator. That’s the hypocrisy that needs to be expanded on and talked about.
I did a speech on the floor because I was very animated and frustrated. They’re passing this bill to regulate chainsaws which is something I need to go thin the forest. They centered it. They took it down off of Facebook. They said, “This is a speech on the Senate floor.” That’s unfortunate that we’ve come to a place where our speech has been somewhat squashed.
Did Facebook remove it?
Yeah. I got throttled. It got taken down.
Did they delete it? Did they remove it from public view too? Was it called misinformation? Is that why would they do that?
They took it down. They don’t explain a lot. It backfired because we put up censored and then emailed it out. We got more traction probably than we would have if they would have left it up. The point is that it’s a common sense approach. Nobody stood up and said I was wrong on the floor. They voted their bill out and moved on. Those are the things that are frustrating for me as somebody who wants to make a difference in the environment.
I almost see this at all levels of politics where once you start an initiative, work hard, invest, raise money, do tons of rhetoric and talk about it in all the different media publications. It’s three years later and the policy goes through. It has to work or else your reputation is at stake. I’m wondering about the psychology around this or maybe it’s sociology in this case. Is there an escalated commitment to putting something forth, having to be right about it and not having the humility to say, “It was good but there are surely some things we can make adjustments on. There’s learning here. Not all of it was bad or maybe it was all bad.” What do you feel?
I’ll give you a perfect example. I’ve been very critical of the high-speed train in the valley. I sit on the budget committee and speak about it. Every three years, we get a new administrator. Since I’ve been there for 10 years, there have been 3 new administrators. Every three years, it fails and then we get a new administrator. He or she comes in and says, “We are getting a fresh start,” and we keep dumping money into it.
I ask the same questions every single time. I’m like, “We’ve spent almost $10 billion and we haven’t laid 1 foot of track. We were supposed to have it done by 2020.” They’re talking about 2030, which it won’t be done in 2030. It’s going to cost $105 billion. I don’t want to spend that money. I’d rather build a reservoir and create more water in California than waste it on a train.
I got up on the floor and said, “I’m going to put this in farmer terms so you maybe can understand where I’m coming from here. As a farmer sometimes, you plant your field and you don’t get a good stand. Your germination wasn’t right. Maybe you planted your seed too deep or something happened. You’re looking at your field. You got a crop that you put all your money into it but it’s probably not going to yield enough to pay you back. Do you fertilize it some more, water it some more or plow the field down and start over? We need to plow down this train because we’re going nowhere and spending a lot of money. What’s the result going to be?”
They’re talking about it only to be not a high-speed train with 2 tracks but 1 track and a diesel engine at this point to get something done. I’m like, “Are you kidding me with the billions of dollars going out there?” I was critical of that. I look at it in a common sense approach. The minute we made a mistake, it’s okay but don’t continue to dump good money after bad. When we could use those resources which are limited in a place like building sites reservoir where we have an off-stream storage facility that environmentalists, farmers, cities and fish like. Let’s go build that and do something for California that’s positive and is going to drop the cost of food, help fish in our environment and help Californians be able to take a shower.
Those are the things I look at every day. I do it in my business. It’s no different from my business. I’ve made thousands of mistakes. I learn from them and I don’t do them again. When I’m into something and it doesn’t work, I change because my competitor is going to be right there doing the same thing. I have to compete. The unfortunate thing about government is we have no competition. When you fail in government, you throw more money at it, get a new administrator and keep going. That’s wrong. We need to recognize that, say it and be upfront with the people about it. We need to say, “There was a mistake made. Let’s move on.” I will do that as your governor. I will have those conversations.
You then have to get it through the legislature but at least have the conversation and say, “This is what you’re up against. If you want to finish this project, it’s not going to be $105 billion. It may be $150 billion and it may be a slow train to nowhere, which nobody’s going to use.” Let’s talk about those things and be honest with Californians because they know something’s not right. Their food’s going higher. Their gas is going higher. Their schools aren’t working. Our forest is burning down. We don’t have water. We have homeless people everywhere. At the end of the day, I believe my friends across the aisle want better things but we have to be transparent.
The other thing that you should know is that there are a lot of power brokers in Sacramento and they don’t care. They care about one thing and it is the people they represent. I was in the operating engineers union when I was younger. I ran bulldozers and did blasting and quarry work. Their goal here in Sacramento is to make sure that their people work. It doesn’t matter if they’re building a pipeline, a reservoir or a train to nowhere if their people are working. That’s unfortunate because they’re very powerful. We need to put them on projects that we know are going to get a return for Californians and work. On these projects that don’t work, we scrap them and move forward.
Isn’t planning fallacy almost a law when it comes to these large projects at this point? It’s generally understood that on any project, we tend to underestimate how long it takes and how expensive it will be even at a personal management level. We’re event planning like, “It’s only going to take 1 hour.” They’re like, “That’s probably going to take 2 or 3.” That’s classic. This is psychology stuff.
At an organizational level, I know this as well. I’m a software entrepreneur. I built enough things to know and had enough projects to see and manage where it’s like, “It was supposed to take this long.” I started accounting for the planning fallacy. It’s very easy to do. Why don’t we account for the planning fallacy? Why isn’t that obvious? Why is that not in the contract when we’re working with people?
We had this on the 405. I’m sure you know this very well. The 405 was supposed to be $1 billion and take 1 year or 2. It was $1.5 billion and took more than that. I forgot the exact numbers but it was longer and more expensive. It was obvious. People are like, “It’s going to be a billion and a half?” You’re like, “Yeah. That’s how it works.”
We’ve seen that time and time again. That’s not always the estimator’s issue. Inflation plays a big role in that too. We saw the Bay Bridge was billions over when they built it. We see that a lot of time. We see it on the private side. I worked in construction. We tried to figure out what inflation was going to be. For example, when diesel fuel and gasoline go up $0.80 in a week, if you’re an estimator, you can’t figure that out. That drives the cost of everything else, which is what happened in California. Our energy costs are skyrocketing, which means a loaf of bread or a gallon of milk is going to go up.
We have a trucking business. One time, it is $200 a day per truck for diesel. That’s $1,000 a week and $4,000 a month that we have to up our price to move anything that we move. I drove down I-5. I was on it and there were hundreds of thousands of trucks in California moving the things we need to live, eat, use for building and all those things. That’s inflation. It’s going to go up.
If you’re an hourly wage earner or a retiree who’s on a fixed income, you’re getting crushed. The fastest way for inflation to go down is to drive down the cost of energy in California. That’s the number one way to drive down inflation. If you can drive down a gallon of diesel by 50%, everybody’s going to save across the board no matter what because the cost of everything that you need to live every day will go down.
The question is how do you do that significantly enough that things start becoming cheaper? What changes need to be made? Execution is everything. We can say it but what do we need to do to make that happen?
There are policies like taxing the income of a corporation. The biggest driver of our cost per gallon over other states is our taxes. I don’t know if you know what the breakdown per gallon and per dollar is in California but I can tell you what it is.
Tell everyone what it is because even if I know, I’m sure a lot of people don’t.
Let’s take $7 a gallon. Let’s take that number. There’s $0.22 per gallon. That’s not per dollar but per gallon that goes to the California Air Resources Board. That’s paid off the top. You have $0.75 per dollar, which is our sales tax. There’s another $0.35 in sales tax that you have on a gallon of gas at $7. You then have $0.54 for the highway improvement fund, which is what we use to build our roads, our bridges and that part of it. On top of that, you have a federal tax, which is $0.18.
When you get all those added up, you’re at about $1.28. You can’t bring fuel from Texas in because we have a special blend that we have to make in California for our air quality process. That’s what’s happening. We have a special blend and we only refine it in California. Our refineries are short because they’re maintenance.
Do they charge us more for the special blend?
Yes, they charge you more because it’s a special blend. They cost more to make. It’s like me when I have two different varieties to seed and they want me to blend them. I have to put them together so they can grow together in the field. I have to charge more for that. It’s the same thing. It’s a blend. Those are all reasons why Californians pay more taxes.
I’m sorry that my friend, Gavin Newsom, is talking about taxing them again. The state is the biggest tax. If you drop that tax at $0.54, which we asked to do, it’s about $1,600 a year per family. You’re going to get a couple of hundred dollars here in a week or so or maybe $1,000 from Gavin Newsom if you meet a certain income right here before we get the vote.
At the end of the day, we have the money in the budget. We have $101 billion to backfill the $8 or $9 billion that the tax would’ve collected naturally. We could have backfilled it to take care of our roads and it would’ve dropped the costs across the board. That’s not what the legislature chose to do. The legislature chose to give you a check with Gavin Newsom’s signature on it so that maybe he can get reelected. I’m not sure but I’m pretty sure that’s why.
That’s a pattern of how politics works in general, isn’t it?
That’s unfortunate because Californians are suffering. We can do a better job of giving them a break across the board. If you’re very wealthy, you don’t see it. If you’re poor, you see it. There’s no middle class in California. The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poor. Those of us in the middle class is getting squeezed out too.
[bctt tweet=”There’s no middle class in California. The richer are getting richer and the poor are definitely getting poorer.” via=”no”]
I have a friend that’s a farmer. He sold his land, took his cattle and equipment and moved to Texas. He bought a farm in Texas. I couldn’t believe it but it was happening in the valley. Lots of the farmers are walking away from their farms or putting conservationists on them and going to Chile or other places. They’re growing the same products that we need to be shipping into California. It’s not good for California.
The irony is that California has so much land. It is a huge state with a ton of open space. Most of California is open space. Is there an opportunity to think about the open space land in a different way as it relates to energy and housing? When we say people are leaving California because everything’s managed under this umbrella, is there an opportunity to rethink how we’re using some of this space?
There’s been lots of legislation over the years. I’m a big proponent of what they call the Williamson Act. It was a legislator that passed the law that gives a tax break to farmers to keep their open space and not develop it. That’s gone by the wayside. They don’t do that anymore. They don’t fund it, quite frankly. I hate to see good farmland in California developed and put houses on. It happens right here in Sacramento. It kills me. This is some of the greatest fertile soil in the world. We should develop in areas where we don’t see such high-dollar valued land. When you talk about open space, I was in Los Angeles. It is pretty crowded down there.
I’m not even talking about it in the cities. You have to go outside of the cities.
Think about it. The people who want to protect everything are wanting to protect the stuff in my area where we have open space because they don’t have it in their backyard. It is back to that perspective of where you’re from. We rent a house in Sacramento. There’s a park right down the street from our house and it’s packed every night with little kids in that little park. I’m thinking we own a farm with lots of acres. It’s wide open. I’m used to our kids running everywhere. Camping is something we do even out where we’re at.
If you’re in the inner city or even Sacramento, you’re confined to your area. There’s a different perspective. When they say protecting open space, they want to protect everything. It’s because of their perspective. There’s a balance that needs to be had. We need more parks in the inner city. We need to develop in places where it’s not high-dollar land and where we still have the resources to do public transit. We need residential. There’s been an attack on residential homes in California. There have been all kinds of legislation that you can build up but you can’t build out. That’s unfortunate because most Californians want a backyard and a place to raise their family.
They also want to not be far from their family. Some of this comes down to when we say, “Let’s build something on the outskirts of Los Angeles. There’s plenty of space,” but you have to travel to work. It’s harder to see your family. People don’t want to leave their communities. Sometimes, you think there’s a balance there between what we are willing to keep and expand on.
The biggest challenge for California when you want to be free to be able to work is access to infrastructure like the internet. We passed lots of legislation. People would love to live in my district, be able to do coding for a company in San Francisco and not have to drive into San Francisco. Unfortunately, I don’t have the bandwidth in my community to allow that. Technology is changing. We see Elon Musk with his internet, which I know my neighbors have. They love it. It works great.
Maybe we’ll see some opportunities for people to live further away from their work and not be so confined. They won’t have to change their lifestyle and not be so much in traffic every day, which would be awesome. Those are things I work on every day in the Capitol. The inner-city poor kids have the same internet problems as poor kids in Lassen County where I live.
People are willing to leave the state for this stuff. Isn’t there an opportunity somewhere farther deep in the state to keep them?
I work at it every day to make sure that Californians are leveling the playing field. It’s a diverse state and there’s a cost to it all. You have to have the ability to pay it back and not put the burden on the taxpayers as much. People will pay for services if they can get them for a better quality of life. That’s for sure. Everybody makes those decisions.
You choose areas to buy your home based on what kind of education system is set up in that place because you want your kids to have a better education than maybe some other places. Those are always choices that we have to make. As the government, we should try to do the best we can to make sure that everybody has an opportunity. Choice in that area needs to be available.
I saw that we’re ranking pretty low on education so that’s not keeping people here either.
50,000 students didn’t show up to LA Unified School District in 2021. There were 27,000 in 2020 that checked out. It used to be the largest school district in the nation. Why is that? All of us do it. I’m a parent. I want my kids to have a better life and better opportunities than I did. You’ll go to great lengths to do that and parents are seeing that. It’s unfortunate that we spend a lot of money in California but we don’t get very good results.
[bctt tweet=”It’s unfortunate that we spend a lot of money on education in California but we don’t get very good results.” via=”no”]
We have a few minutes left so I’m going to segue that into a different question. I don’t know if we’re going to be able to be concise but we could try. Let’s talk about bureaucracy.
There are plenty of them.
In general, all government feels like a spaghetti code. That is what we call it in software. It feels like a bowl of spaghetti. I started using this where in order to change one thing, you have to pull the spaghetti out from all the other pieces of spaghetti. It has to untangle itself a million times. What’s going on here? We can’t get things done. You mentioned there was a civil policy for schools to show their curriculum that took two years to get done. Is that right?
I never got it out. I wanted to post sex education so parents knew but it got killed. Let’s talk about bureaucracy for a minute because I can sum it up pretty easily for you. This is one thing I worked on for years as county supervisor. I put the unemployment department in our county next to the job workforce department. Can you imagine that? They were on opposite ends of the town and you put them next to each other. If somebody comes in for unemployment, they go, “People are looking for work right here.” That’s an example of getting things done. I did that at the local level.
It is common sense again. You don’t have to be that smart to figure that one out. We should have an app for our DMV. They’re doing a lot of stuff online but at the end of the day, we need to make it so the government works and there’s a product. We’ve had tens of thousands of phone calls over the years of people trying to get an EDD check, get through the DMV or get some paperwork from the Board of Equalization signed. I have a stack of people who thanked me because we connected them to the right people. We have to make the government more streamlined and user-friendly. Unfortunately, our systems are antiquated. We’re in the tech capital of the world, supposedly but our state doesn’t run like it.
What’s the bottleneck there? Is it unions? Is it the ability of people to adapt? I see basic stuff, especially with the DMV. I’m like, “This could so easily cost them zero.” What’s going on?
Some unions don’t want to lose any more members. They’re in the business of growing their membership. The more members you have, the more money you raise and the more power you get. That’s a fact for all unions. Mainly public unions are that way. Private unions, like the trade with the guys I worked for, have to compete and bid. They’re not in that boat as much but public unions are.
If you streamline the process at the DMV, that means fewer bodies. It means it drives down the cost of everything but then, you got a union opposing you. There are opportunities though. In 2008, we did it in our county. Everybody was laying people off. It will happen again when the stock market goes down in California or plummets. People will be getting laid off. The way to do it is to not lay anybody off. As people retire, let them retire and then don’t fill that position. That’s a great way to not harm anybody that’s got a job. Reduce that, streamline the agency and make it work for Californians. That’s my plan to make California work again.
With the EED, the California Air Resource Board and the Board of Equalization, all those things that businesses have to deal with every day need to be streamlined so they can get it done. We’re a small business. We have to hire an accountant and a bookkeeper to keep in line with the law. Those are all things that drive down the productivity of Californians and up the costs. That’s why people leave. Those are things I’ll be working on when I become governor. It is common sense.
It does sound like a balanced thought that you don’t have to rehire for that same position and let it expire.
You don’t want anybody to lose their job. How it works when you have cutbacks is the last in is the first out. That is usually your younger employee with a family that has bought a house. The person towards retirement usually owns a house and their family has grown. They’re out and those are the people that stayed. It’s unfortunate because the person that’s starting out is starting out in life. We should retire those people and not hire them. Keep those other ones in there and not lay them off. That’s what we did.
During the 2008 shutdown, our county took a 1.2% decrease in benefits and salary. We never have laid off a person. Counties all around us were laying off 35%. As people retired, we shuffled them around and everybody was happy. That’s what leaders do. That’s common sense. That’s what I would do in my business with my employees. I’d sit down with them and say, “Here’s where we’re at. Here’s how we’re going to get through this. Do you want to be on my team?” They usually do because they want a job and they’re part of our team. We need these people in government. I don’t have anything against them but we can do it more efficiently.
There’s a guy or a girl that I call The Stamper. I won’t throw the person or the government under the bus who did this but I filled out a form online. I saw that it was posted online but it had an old-school stamp that says, “Filed.” They had me do the online process, then they printed it out so they could put the stamp on it. They stamped it and scanned it back online. I didn’t even know what to say. I swallowed and tried not to get too frustrated. That’s the taxpayer dollars where I’m like, “Why would you run through that?” I’m sure there’s a good reason why each one of these people is stuck. It’s a bowl of spaghetti is my theory. Sometimes, it’s not a priority to get out of that particular bowl of spaghetti but I hope we could do something.
You got to pull one noodle out at a time. Pretty soon, you have no noodles left in your bowl and you can do it. That is what we do every day in business. If you can save a few bucks here or do it faster there, at the end of the day, it’s more profit for your employees and yourself. That’s what we do. There is also more competition so you can stay in business. A guy down the street is doing the same thing. You have to be competitive.
This was a wonderful hour together. Thank you for taking the time.
Thank you.
I enjoyed this conversation. Congratulations on even getting your hat in the ring to get some other candidates out there so people can have a choice. I respect everyone who makes that hard decision. It’s a lot of time, energy and work, especially when people care so much about it like yourself. I know how important it is to you. Thank you.
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to share a little bit more about my policies and the things I care about. I appreciate it. I’d love to have your vote. You don’t have to answer me.
I had a feeling you were going to ask me that. Thank you.
Go to BrianDahle.com. I know you’ve been there but check it out.
I sure have. Go to BrianDahle.com and learn more about him.
Go out and vote. We need people to vote. There’s a very low turnout. I hope people will go vote. That’s something we need.
Thank you.
Thank you. It is good to meet you. Take care.
You too.