Your conversations but I do want to make some time
to introduce and give some time for our speaker today.
I'm glad to be talking here about public policy,
particularly in the context of what we've seen,
although we'll be talking about the State of California,
many of you of course have been following the headlines
about health care, now about tax, and you've seen
that a little bit of policy expertise can go a long way
and when we're thinking about how to craft policy
these days in the policy ecosystem we look to think tanks.
We look to think tanks to give us advice
based on empirical research, to give us some grounding
and understanding, people who have time who are
outside of the political foray who may have some
disconnection from having political pressures on them
in terms of where they're fundraising from.
Giving them time, space, to actually research
and think through problems that we're all facing.
It's really nice to have that resource,
however as we can see Washington and Sacramento
are very different places than a think tank.
There's many different pressures, there's a certainly
public opinion to be thought about,
which changes on a daily basis.
There's the sort of inscrutable calculus of politics
that happens in the legislative process
where interests and members are constantly vined
in an ever changing strategy towards hopefully
what looks like the public good.
And sometimes bringing those two worlds together
can be a challenge.
In fact, you'd be surprised in terms of how many people
exist in both worlds, very few.
The academic world of a think tank versus sort of
the hurly burly of the legislature.
But today I'm very happy to introduce someone
who has lived in both environments and is succeeding in both
in trying to help bring that evidence based research
that more sort of academic approach to policy,
helping to bring that approach
into the policy making process.
So, today I am very pleased to introduce Deborah Gonzalez
who's here today to talk about the intersection
between policy research and political challenges.
This is co-sponsored by the Dry Around Table
and the Rose Institute for State and Local Government.
Deborah Gonzalez is currently
the Director of Governed Affairs
at the Public Policy Institute of California.
She and her staff worked connect PPIC research
with policy makers and community leaders.
But before she was at PPIC, she worked in the state
legislature for over 25 years.
She worked both in the Assembly and the State Senate,
she worked as Policy Director to five different
Republican leaders, she represented legislative Republicans
in negotiations involving the state budget
as well as welfare, education, health care,
prison and tax reform,
a variety of different complex issues.
So, she's going to come here today to talk to us
who probably have maybe some of you have some experience
working on Capital Hill or Sacramento,
maybe some of you are learning here at Claremont McKenna
and approach to public policy research.
She's going to talk to how to bring
those two worlds together.
I'm also happy to say that she is a graduate
of Claremont McKenna College along with her husband
Tony who's joining us here today.
So, please join me in welcoming Deborah Gonzalez.
(applause)
(footsteps)
Well, thank you for that introduction.
It's clear from my resume that I have an adult ADD
and I like a lot of topics.
So, the Capital was a great place for me.
I really appreciate the opportunity to be here.
I am an alum, Tony and I graduated in 1985
and we spent some really formative years here
in the Athenaeum, I actually worked here
and part of me wants to keep talking long enough
to get an ath bar at T, but I promise not to do that.
But really, this institution the Athenaeum is such
a unique institution.
I learned about mini bagels here, I learned about a lot
of great public policy ideas here and I heard voices
across the spectrum and that's such an important thing
to do and it made me a better policy maker,
it made me a better negotiator because I heard from people
with different perspectives.
So, I really appreciate the mission here.
I started talking to Professor Korser at the new student
party in Sacramento I think it was only 118 that day,
it is Sacramento, that's why the Capital is there.
I had just left the legislature last year
after 27 years there sadly, a little more than 25.
Tony got me into this, he actually had worked there
a few years before I had gone to work for Macy's
right out of college.
I sold more pillows than any other department chair
in the nation and yet Tony came back with this really
dynamic discussion about people he had met
and things he had done and I took a pay cut
and went to work to the California legislature.
I went to work for the number one Target in the legislature,
he probably lost his reelection so I had to go find
a new member but over the years I actually had that blessing
to work for some tremendous members.
So, I had this experience in the legislature,
I am a Republican, I have to confess.
I was a negotiator so I did significant negotiation,
I was the major big five negotiator
which was the four legislative leaders and the governor
over through '90s, through the great recession
and those things.
I also was the Chief of Staff to two caucuses.
So that really gave me a really breadth of experience.
So when Mark brought the (mumbles) with PPIC
came and approached me about coming to PPIC,
the governor affairs director, I was like
I don't know that this makes sense for you
but I knew PPIC because we do polling
and they brought polling into my members
and I used polling even as a policy maker because members
are elected in elections and polls matter if they're right
and they actually care about them.
And so I would bring polling and questions to my members
and that's what I knew about PPIC.
But it turned out PPIC had all these other researchers
and I as the number one policy director
for the Republican caucus in California didn't really
have much of a relationship with them,
and that indicated to me that there was opportunity
for growth, that's awesome for somebody going
into a new job, but really a problem with the think tank
kind of mentality.
To a certain extent they weren't reaching out
to a broad enough audience.
And then something on their webpage caught my eye.
It said, we are dedicated to informing and improving
public policy in California through independent, objective,
non partisan research.
We report findings and recommendations that are based
on unbiased empirical evidence.
Oh my gosh, this is awesome, right.
They want to bring evidence based research
to the California legislature, I got really excited,
I wrote my cover letter, I sent it to my daughter.
I have another confession, Tony and I have a daughter,
we have two but one daughter is an alum of CNC,
she graduated in 2014 with both a Molecular Biology Degree
and an English Degree.
She worked at the writing center,
now as Tony would say, we didn't have that when I was there.
It happens all the time with us, we didn't have that gym
when I was there, what happened.
So, I sent my cover letter out to her,
it said I want to bring evidence based research
to the legislature and she said,
"Mom, weren't you using it before?"
This is a scientist, this is like I have said
the craziest thing to her and I had to hang my head down
and say, "Yeah, not so much."
And it wasn't because we didn't want it,
it's just there was so many obstacles to getting it.
So, I'm gonna walk through some of those with you
and this is a little bit of therapy for me
'cause I'm only a year and a half into this job,
I was there at the legislature for 27 years
and working with researchers, connecting them up
with people I know in the legislature,
it really is a learning curve for me.
All right, so do members want it?
Yes, there are members who want it.
There are members who crave it.
There are members who actually are capable of using it,
that's a real key.
There are staffers who want it,
there are staffers who are capable of using it,
but there are obstacles to getting there.
I worked with members who are inherently political,
again everybody is elected, in elections so they actually
have to be political, but they are open enough
and capable enough to understanding.
But I also have to say, no there's some members
who don't want it.
There's some staffers who don't want it,
they are particularly political.
Their districts don't mind them being political,
that's just their nature.
So, you just have to be able to identify
those kind of things and then there's this third category
is maybe, and it might depend on the issue.
So, I'm going to give you three examples of issues
that we would encounter that are political
and kind of obstacles for bringing those issues,
or bringing common sense to those issues.
The first is just a political issue,
in the 2000s we actually had a bill on violent video games,
prohibiting it, because people were really upset
about violence and they were attributing video games
to the reason we had so much violence.
I'm a lawyer, this is a blatantly unconstitutional bill.
Tony was the staff director to the caucus.
They wrote the analysis, they indicated this is
a blatantly unconstitutional bill.
Almost every member voted for it, the governor signed it,
it was challenged in court, we ended up spending
$1.5 million to pay the attorneys when we lost the case.
$1.5 million that could have gone to feed kids,
provide health care, do real things, we did it,
it was political, there was nothing we could have brought
to the members at that point in time that would
have changed their mind on that bill.
That's an example of just a political issue.
Then there's these forces as the Governor has said to me
before, this Governor, before I left I was a negotiate
on transportation, I did not pass the largest tax increase
in transportation history, I did the largest tax increase
before that, doesn't make you popular as a Republican.
But this Governor, we were negotiating
on transportation taxes and in exchange for Republicans
who were very interested in roads and improving
transportation infrastructure, but we were concerned
about the cost of delivering these infrastructure.
It takes four times as much money in California
to build a lane mile of road than it does anywhere else
in the nation and we're talking to the Governor
and the Governor says, "There's these forces,
and they've been around a long time,
and so these forces," he meant the labor unions in this case
and they won't let us make these changes
to speed up the cost of construction.
And so there was a lot of back and forth and we at that time
did not end up doing it,
it was a year later they did the tax.
The forces actually reared their head recently
in the housing crisis.
So, as you know, we all have a housing crisis,
we have a housing shortage that's causing housing prices
to go up, the CMC's you know that, supply demand,
makes it very expensive, I love that about you.
We need a housing, we have a housing start problem
about 100,000 housing starts a year short
and so the legislature, you know it's a big issue,
120 bills were introduced.
That's a lot of bills on one topic,
the legislature passed a package of 13 bills.
Half of those bills were focused
on low income houses and subsidies.
We passed about a $3 billion package on low income housing
subsidies, that sounds like a lot of money, $3 billion,
it's just crazy right?
That's one subsidized housing per city, per year,
that's it in California.
That will not solve our housing crisis.
It's pretty expensive.
So, you need to go after the private sector
and get more housing starts done and so the legislature
rightfully identify that one of the problems is
is that we have regulatory burdens and that time is money
in housing and so people aren't building because of
CEQA and other issues.
And so they passed a CEQA streamlining bill.
Yay, they got it right, right.
Until in that bill is a poison pill that requires
private sector builders building private homes
to pay prevailing wage,
which raises the cost of housing by about 30%.
So, this didn't seem logical, right.
You want more housing, lower cost housing,
but you put this language in.
When I asked the builders why aren't you making
a fuss about this, why is this still being hailed
as this great reform?
Their point was it didn't change anything,
we still have the old way we can deal with it,
it didn't cause any harm to us.
If we want to streamline it, it pencils out we'll do it,
but we won't.
So it really didn't change anything,
so they didn't make a fuss and that's a shame.
And that's an example of a public interest group
coming in and weighing in and doing something
stopping real reform.
Third example I want to give you is your constituents
and you being ahead of your constituents and I think
this is a really important thing, again,
members are elected in their districts.
So, this year we had a whole discussion on climate change.
PPIC does this polling that is pretty interesting.
One of the polling findings, we do a July survey
that's mostly environmental polls and we ask the question
do you believe that there's climate change happening?
Even over 50% of California Republicans, I want to say
California Republicans think that climate change
is happening, we don't ask the follow up question
why do you think it's happening.
Then we ask the question do you support cap and trade?
And we describe it a little bit in cap and trade
and I want to say for transparency sake,
all our polling is online, all our questions are online,
our cross tabs are online and so I recommend them to you
if you have interests in some of our poll questions.
And so the Republican leader of the assembly, Chad Mays
sees this polling, he starts doing his own polling,
he's actually from the end of the empire,
and he and a number of his members decide they're
going to vote for the cap and trade proposal
which has an element of raising gas taxes.
He would argue you're reducing gas taxes 'cause command,
it stops command and control.
But he doesn't really win this argument
with his constituents
and gets way ahead of his constituents.
And this is unfortunate because Chad Mays loses
his Republican leadership.
The seven members, he is one of them who voted for it,
most of them have primary challengers
that they didn't have before and so while there is
movement of your constituencies on a very difficult issue,
it really, he might have been moving too fast,
or he might have not worked his constituency in them
or he might have not, there's any number of ways
you do it and again as a staffer who negotiated
the tax increase in the great recession,
it was a very difficult issue for Republicans to do
and the Senate Republican leader lost his leadership
over it the night of the budget vote.
It was very melodramatic,
it's very exciting in the legislature,
particularly at 2:30 in the morning.
So, but my member did not lose his election,
he did not lose his leadership because he worked his caucus,
he worked his district, and he was able to work
through some of these issues and that's an example
of constituency problems that
maybe this leader didn't do it.
So, it's a yes, it's a no, and it's a maybe.
But I believe that it's really important for us
to provide evidence based research to the legislature.
So, I'm going to give you an example of something
that we're doing at PPIC.
PPIC, has anybody heard about PPIC,
you can't raise your hand, because you've been
to one of my lunches in San Francisco, or Sacramento, so.
And does anybody use it for their papers or research?
And if you haven't you should,
there's a couple people back there.
It's great we do evidence based research,
everything is peer reviewed.
I'm actually as the only lawyer in the group,
I am the data guru so I enter into contracts,
I help the organization enter the contracts to get data.
We run regressions, it's exciting.
They're actually going to do a class, a special class for me
because it's been a long time since I ran a regression.
I have been a legislative staffer and I have been
a policy, a lawyer, none of which run regressions.
So, they're going to do a class for me which is cute.
We actually are studying remedial education
at the community college level.
California's community colleges has served 2.1 million
residents, 80% of those students go into remedial education.
My researchers call it developmental education,
so I'll talk about that in a second.
We have been trying to do research and we get
evidence based research.
It's one of those issues that isn't hard ideology.
So, you don't have a interest group as strong as
the labor unions or the teacher's association who oppose it.
And so we're trying to build interest and consensus
on an issue that's kind of difficult but important
'cause it's 2.1 million people affected by it
and it's very costly for us in the state to have these
students never take a college level class.
They never actually get out of remedial education
and get a college level class.
And so we started to search for people in the legislature
who could be champions of this issue,
who are open to evidence based research.
And so we do essentially what I call a match.com
of public policy and research and we actually search out
people in the legislature who would be interested in.
We searched low level staffers, mid level staffers,
back bench members, committee chairs, leadership staffers,
we do it all 'cause you never know what staffer,
what member is going to take that issue
across the finish line.
And so my staff literally does pictures
of everybody who serves on the committees
that cover this issue.
Everybody who's introduced a bill on the topic,
every Governor staffer who's involved in it,
every LAO staffer, the legislative analyst office
which is the fiscal arm of the state,
we do it all, we invite them to our lovely lunches
which are free quinoa for all,
we're a think tank for God sake.
We only serve quinoa and salads.
God, give me a burger, it's been working on that.
So, we do this and it's great and we find these people
and they become our champions and then the election comes.
In 2018 we're going to have dramatic change
in the Governor's office.
That means everybody is potentially no longer there
who was there before.
We're going to go from a four term Governor,
to somebody who hasn't run for Governor before.
And they don't always keep their staff,
they allot key staffers that are related to them
and this is gonna create a challenge for my match.com.
I mean, it's kind of like match.com, now i gotta go out
and look again, gotta find another person
to meet, it's great.
We spend a lot of time building relationships to identify
these people 'cause they have to do some serious lifting
on these very kind of nuanced issues.
In the legislature, all 80 assembly members
are up for reelection.
Interestingly, only one is termed out this next term.
That's amazing and in a couple years 40% of our turned out,
so that's a level of stability we haven't seen
in a long time.
Two of the other members are running for state white office,
but that's going to be a level of stability.
In the Senate it's going to be a small change over
but it's not going to be significant.
But even with stability I just heard on Friday,
three Senate staffers, 30 Senate staffs were wiped out.
They actually fired all their staff, they're bringing
all new people in.
My staff has to go back in, we have to go back in
and figure out who is the person interested in this topic,
what kind of gravitas do they have with their member
and can they help pull it across the line?
And we'll do that, that's just, that's why we have
a Governor Affairs office in FPPIC.
So, let's say we identify this person who's great at it.
What's the timing and this actually, I think the tax plan
that we're seeing right now is a really good example
of where timing is really hard to get in public policy
and research, and I'm gonna talk a little bit
about researchers and their timing skills,
but I'll do that later.
But policy in my view and particularly big difficult issues
don't happen every year at that legislature.
The legislature doesn't take up the really tough issue
every year, there's kind of themes that happen
year after year and so I consider it kind of a wave theory
of policy, 'cause we're in Southern California, it's waves.
I hear you're having a surfer tonight, physicist come,
so we'll do the wave theory.
So, the wave theory is it starts to trickle,
members start to introduce bills, this issue starts
to gather steam, you start to see the public talk
about an issue, housing's a good example,
tax reform is a good example.
And then the wave comes and the members desperately
look around for ideas to pull into that issue
and then it's done.
In tax policy, it's every 30 years we look at a tax policy
in the United States.
Education reform, 20 years.
I mean we really don't see these things happening
all the time, so you need as a researcher to be prepared
to see when the ripples are coming, doing your research
and now you've got this problem because you're trying
to get data and it's hard to get data.
You've got to run your aggressions, that takes time,
all these things happen and then it may end
before you get that down and so timing's a really critical
issue for making the connection between the two of them
and that's something I'm working on quite a bit
with my researchers.
I'm gonna touch a little bit on working with academics
and again I think I've mentioned that I am not a PHD,
I do not have a PHD, I do not have a Master's Degree,
I do have a law degree which seems to give me some cache
with my researchers and no offense to the academics here
'cause I adore you, I love working with you
and I love working with my academics.
They have self selected to come to an organization
that intends to be influential with public policy.
But you lived in academia a long time
and you speak a totally different language than politicians
and policy makers.
Your schedule is very different.
The fact that you want evidence based research is awesome,
but I say to my researchers all the time,
they say when do you want this?
And I'm like, like last year.
And they're like aw sorry, you know I've got to do this
and I've got this conference, I've got this academic paper.
And they're right those are all things that are really
important and which give us gravitas so that when we
go into the building that our stuff is really done right.
So you can't cut corners on that.
It's just frustrating as a policy maker,
seeing the wave coming and knowing it's gonna crash
and it may be a while.
And academics get frustrated too, right.
They've had this idea, nobody's biting on it,
it's still rippling, they go open a coffee shop somewhere,
decide not to be an academic anymore,
because nobody paid attention.
And the wave comes, and it's done, right.
And it's really frustrating from that perspective.
So, I understand timing's, and my researcher,
I actually had a researcher say to me on Friday,
he said, "It just seems accidental that we're able
to influence the legislature."
And I'm like, "No, no no, we're here,
they introduce this bill because we did this."
And, "Yeah, no it seems much more accidental."
And I'm like ugh, you're driving me crazy,
so I'm not letting him talk to my other academics anymore.
So, it's working out well.
I don't want to talk too long
'cause you might have questions but you might not.
But I want to talk a little bit about products
and so what I found out about PPIC, we do K through 12,
higher education, we do correction reform
which is just so needed in this state,
I'm very excited even as a Conservative Republican
I recognize there's much better ways
to handle our correction system.
We have a water center that does amazing work.
We have the survey which gets me in almost anybody's door
because people are excited about it.
Even when I go to Washington and we do California based
policy, I get to go in to see the leaders
of both the parties and the Senate,
most of our delegation, it's hard to see them all,
there's a lot of them.
Because we do this polling so it's amazing.
I've got these kind of tools that other think tanks
don't have, but I also have a significant amount
of my staff at PPIC are translators of researchers.
They're public affairs folks.
They're not government relations folks,
they're the editors of researchers.
So, when PPIC started, it started in 1994
with a gift from Packard of Hewlett Packard,
no Hewlett instead of Packard and they used to publish
these books and they're really great books,
I mean they're chalked full of information, they're great.
But if I got this book as a policy maker
and I'm a CM seer so I would love this book.
I would take this book, I would put it on my shelf.
I promise myself I would read it and I would never have time
because I have 4,000 bills that are running
through the legislature at any one time.
I have caucus member issues to deal with,
I have constituent issues to deal with,
I'd never have time to look at this book.
And so PPIC figured that out after a while,
I think it was about ten years ago and we started
to do something called, they're shorter versions
of the reports and they're like 20 pages,
they're very glossy, we actually hold public events
where you can come have quinoas and beer bread
which is the most popular thing, 'cause if we actually
do this event and we don't have beer bread,
I get the worst criticisms of the event,
it's not about the research apparently.
But so we do 28 pages and we do an appendix
which has all the regressions, all the methodologies,
because all our stuff is peer reviewed
and it's really important for us to be peer reviewed.
And so that's there, then we realized that might be too much
so we go down to the two pager, right.
'Cause if we're trying to get their attention,
we're not reducing the amount of research that we're doing,
we're trying to pull people in where they can get it,
how they can feel it.
So, then yeah, we do the one pager.
Well, it's really two pages but it looks like a one pager.
We do a lot of those, we do just the facts.
All of these things, my husband's joke this morning
was next week we're doing Twitter.
I hope not, I don't think we do a lot of Twitter.
But the reality is you need to be able to provide
people who are very busy information that comes to them
in a way and at a time that they can handle it.
And spending time and thinking about that feels funny
if you're an academic and you've been working on this issue
and you got the regression and you know how important
this issue is, it feels kind of cheap,
but it's what's drawing people to your research
and it gives them a way to talk about it.
And repackaging your research is something my researchers
don't like to do, repackaging it, makes a lot of sense.
'Cause you did that research, pivotal research
three years ago and the wave's coming, if you could just
update it a little bit, do it.
It means something, repetitiveness helps a lot.
You want to be on people's minds when these things happen.
The other thing I wanted to say about academics,
I love them dearly but they also get validation
from their publications that I'm sure their tenure committee
doesn't care how often they're quoted in committee
or referenced in a bill.
We actually are going through an evaluation process
to try to evaluate how effective we are,
it's very difficult to do.
We can't legally take positions on bills
because we're a non-profit.
We don't write legislation, so we're kind of in that world
where we hand them this beautiful piece of information
and then go, good luck.
And they're like well couldn't you write
us this legislation?
And we're like no, we actually can't.
And then the worst case scenario and I haven't
seen this yet 'cause I've only been there a year and a half
is they accept your thesis, they know that what you've said
is true, they've passed legislation that is fatally flawed
because nobody helped them write it,
Tony help them write it.
He's the lobbyist, he can help them write it.
And then we're back to square one because the system's
been changed, but it's been changed in just the wrong way
with all the best intentions and it's not happened.
So, it's complex, the thing I want to say to you
it's important, we're going to have a lot of problems
in the state of California.
I'm still struggling through this therapy as you can see
with my researchers.
I was just talking to one of them today,
he's actually getting some pushback on our develop--
oh, I'm going to say one thing about language
and that actually, the developmental education language
versus the remedial education language is a huge fight
we had internally.
Researchers call remedial education developmental education.
Policy makers call it remedial education.
I was in remedial education when I went to scripts.
I started at scripts and transferred.
I was in remedial education, a professor sat down
and worked with me one on one every week
and made me write an extra paper,
that was remedial education.
I can write today because somebody took the time to do that,
it's amazing.
My researchers when the communications office called me
and asked me what do we call this?
I don't understand this developmental education.
I said well policy makers, I actually called
around the Capital
and they said oh we call it remedial education.
And my researchers were so upset, my funders were very upset
because they think it's a derogatory term.
However if we put out information to policy makers
they don't understand.
They don't understand what the term is, it doesn't really
have the grab, it doesn't pull them in
the way we need it to.
So you'll see in our report we call it remedial education,
developmental education in different places
and kind of try to pull it together 'cause language matters
both to the researcher but also to the policy community
in terms of being accessible.
So, it's important, I think people who have some experience
in the legislature or in public policy
are very important for researchers to engage with.
I think there should be cross pollination,
I think I'm a better government affairs person
for PPIC, I'm being asked by a lot of think tanks
to come in to talk to them about this
because we are one of the few think tanks
that has a government affairs program that is
as robust as it is in terms and has somebody
with my experience, 'cause I'm old,
but it's great that they've seen this as a valuable thing
and I think will hopefully be more successful.
If not, I'm going to retire again, thank you.
(applause)
We'll now be opening it up for the question
and answer, please raise your hand if you have a question
and Malea and I will come to you with the microphone.
(man in audience speaking faintly)
Foundation and I was wondering
given your experience in the California state legislator
and the forces you mentioned and the different dynamics
that play with trying to be in the political policy world,
do you think that those forces are similar to the forces
in other states and the work is similar,
or do you think that there are certain things
that are unique about California and maybe there's
a perspective there about being a Republican in California
versus in Texas but I'm interested to hear your thoughts
on if you think that there are any special dynamics
in California versus the other states
where they have state based think tanks
like the Illinois Policy Institute,
Texas Political Policy Institute and other ones
in California too, thank you.
Yeah, I would suspect there isn't much of a difference.
I think you have forces everywhere, right.
Politics involves people who gather together
with like ideas and try to encourage those ideas
to be adopted in a positive and sometimes
not so positive ways.
I think that happens everywhere.
I think what's unique about California is our size
and the fact that we have a full time legislature
compared to some states.
The fact that we're the sixth largest,
we always go back and forth about this,
this is actually one of my favorite parts
of floor debate is somebody says six, somebody says five,
we used to be seven, I don't know.
But we're the sixth largest economy in the world.
If something starts here it goes other places
and so to the extent that you're in California
I think it's a higher stake gain
and so what's happened on the labor union front,
I think is a little bit a function of the lack
of labor union status in other parts of the state.
The fact that there's this Supreme Court ruling
that's going to come down, the labor union's really
felt their oats this year.
They really much more aggressive than ever before.
So, I think that just it's so important
to get it right in California if you're an interest group
compared to other states just because people
follow our example.
But I'd love to go to see some of those other think tanks
and hear from them 'cause I think that's something
we don't do, we talk a lot to national think tanks.
We spend a lot of time with Pew and other think tanks
and it's been interesting.
Everybody's grappling with the Federal issues
that are happening now.
It's almost like the big eye in Lord of the Rings
has turned towards the Feds.
It's not something we spent a lot of time with
because we have made it our mission
to be California specific.
You can't ignore the Federal government,
so much of what's happening whether it's this administration
or another administration, but this one seems to be
more dramatic in terms of what might happen today
or what might not happen tomorrow and a lot of people
haven't thought about some of these things.
We're grappling with what's going to be happening
at the Federal level 'cause of the significant impacts
here in California, but I think there's a lot of talk
out there about what think tanks should be doing,
how we should do them better, what role we have to play,
it's a fascinating time, isn't it?
No? (chuckles)
Thank you for your talk.
I'm just curious, I know you've only been on the job
for a year and a half but I have a question
about strategies that you might use to interest
legislators in problems that have very long time horizons.
So, I'm thinking specifically of something like
unfunded liabilities for public pensions,
something where the time horizon for that is beyond
two sets of term limits for politicians.
It seems like evidence based research could be a really
powerful tool in convincing people to take out things
that are politically difficult now but are only
going to have ramifications far down the line.
Do you think that that's kind of a valuable tool
for pushing legislators into action on some of these
more difficult topics?
Yeah, so actually I was a Republic negotiator
for our pension reform package that was passed
when Gerry Brown was first elected.
Pensions are particularly difficult, I think there's been
really good research done on the pension crisis.
The pending pension crisis and it's less of a state issue
because as I say, the state can't actually go bankrupt
in California, only local municipalities can.
So, and the state's workforce is relatively small,
relative the amount of money that comes in and out of state
and those types of things.
The legislature even with evidence based research
on pensions probably we'll never be able to
in my view handle what needs to be done.
If anything happens on pensions, it will probably
happen because of local municipalities going bankrupt.
And this is unfortunate, it's just those forces
are so strong in the California legislature
as Gerry Brown said.
And we did some significant reforms but there's this
little Supreme Court ruling on not being able to pair
existing pensions and what that means
and all these types of things that are really very difficult
and it's easy for legislators to punt
when it's not on their time horizon,
and they're gonna punt 'cause they have a constituency
who is very politically active, who's a big donor,
versus this crisis some time in the future,
I don't suspect it will happen.
But I think they still should do those,
I think think tanks need to do those work.
We actually don't do pension and I would advocate
we shouldn't, that's just selfish on my part
'cause it really hurts your ability to talk to members
when that happens.
We have done, 'cause if they're not gonna act on it,
the information's already out there,
there's a robust think tank who's doing the work
and hope it continues to do the work.
I don't know that we add anymore to that debate.
But it's really important to do, cities are in this next
year we were talking to the head of the lega cities
and she thinks there's a number of cities this year
who will go bankrupt, or at least threaten
to go bankrupt and that will start
to get people's attention.
[Woman In Audience] Hi, thank you so much for your talk.
I just had a question on kind of maintaining the integrity
of kind of the non partisan non special interest focused
research piece, I know in recent months there's been
a lot of controversy over a lot of think tanks
potentially being influenced by special interests
or having controversy over the type of research
they're conducting.
And I was wondering what your thoughts were
on how PPIC strive to maintain the non partisan
very fact based research mission that you guys have
in opposition to a lot of what else is going on.
Yeah, great question.
It's actually something that we struggle with a lot
and the President and I consider this issue pretty much
talk about it almost every day.
So, we have a non partisan board and they have to be
people who are recognized in the parties
as representative of the party.
You can't have a Republican who Republicans go,
"Oh that's not a real Republican."
You know, this is a person who's done that.
Or Democrats, it's the same with Democrats,
you really have to have a board that understands the value.
We also have something called a state wide leadership
council which is a broader group where we bring
actually the party leaders in and then people
hopefully more representative around the state
who provide us with guidance on what we do.
We also are blessed that we have an endowment
that was very substantial, we're well endowed
and so it works out good I mean in that sense.
We don't need to get financing for all our research
and that keeps us a level of independence that's great.
I have to say that every organization,
every person who works has a viewpoint
regardless of where you are and so for my research,
we have offices in San Francisco and Sacramento,
our main office is in San Francisco.
Most of my researchers are pretty liberal, let's be honest.
But what they live by as our code is that their research
will dictate the answer.
So, in corrections
we're doing this amazing project on corrections.
We've gone out to 12 counties that represent two thirds
of the state local jail population
and with realignment there's this big wave of people
who've moved to jails as versus the prison system.
There's no system that follows corrections
versus local governments.
So, we are literally going down to counties
and creating a data set on arrests, time served,
services that they're getting, and we're making,
we're working with the counties
to make the data work together.
So we're trying to get like terms for the like sentences
and those types of things
and then we're trying to connect that up
with the state system.
So, we need to use that and so we're doing
and we're doing all those things.
And now my researchers, I have wonderful researchers,
they really want realignment to work
and not to have created more crime
or created more victims or done those types of things
and I have literally seen them in a couple
of research periods, they're like oh I think this doesn't
come show that crime has gone up,
and in one case it has shown that auto thefts
have gone up and household crime have gone up,
but they did find that serious and violent crime
didn't go up so they were somewhat happy.
But they were actually sad, which encouraged me
'cause I want them to want crime to go down, right,
don't we all want crime to go down and not go up?
So, I'm excited about that but they also were willing
to report the research as they found it
and that's very important and we really strive
to make sure we do that.
We're peer reviewed and so we look for reviewers
that have a contrarian view from what our report's
going to say.
You can and so I think that's also a very important
part of it, but again I think all organizations
and every researcher has a bias, we got individual views
and those kind of things and we just have
to hopefully set up a system that avoids that.
But it's interesting for me, a lot of people
want us to do research, want us to do advocacy research
and we don't do advocacy research.
We specifically don't do that.
When somebody gives us money, 'cause we do get donations,
they are not allowed to change the outcome of our reports.
They are allowed to check it for technical work.
So, privacy is a huge issue,
and particularly in the prison population
there's federal protections for that, EDD,
I was talking to the professor about EDD,
there's privacy protections for that.
We can show them the report and say are we inadvertently
violating this privacy protection,
but we're not going to change the outcome,
and that's just it's something we strive to do every day.
But it's a great question and it's very difficult.
Hi, Deborah, thank you for your
presentation, I'm also older and I'm also retired too.
But my question has to do with the new gas tax
and registration tax that just came up.
I understand that the $52 billion project came about to
because the Governor raided the general fund
to fund his high speed rail and that when they had this,
when they were voting for this thing a lot of
the representatives were on the fence waiting
for a posh deal from the Governor, I don't know
how many hundreds and millions of dollars
were passed along to these representatives,
both Republican and Democrat that eventually voted for it.
And I guess the Governor wanted to come to the well again
to get more funding through this tax thing,
my question is to you since you came
out of the legislation area and the transportation,
if you could talk about that a little bit.
And then also I now understand there's a grass root
organization that are fighting it right now
to put it on the ballot, I believe I think it's only
signatures and I know the Democratic side is fighting it
and such if you could just talk to that a little bit,
I'd appreciate it.
Sadly I know a lot about this.
So, transportation funding, part of my wave theory
I actually forecast that transportation was going
to be a big issue when I was driving my youngest daughter,
didn't go to Claremont, she rebelled,
driving her around the state and roads were horrible.
And I knew at some point members
were going to start doing bills.
So, they did start doing bills and this was four years ago
and there's a problem with our transportation funding
system for a number of reasons.
Yes, the Governor has diverted general funds,
well let me step back.
Transportation funding is traditionally paid for
by user taxes in California.
It is not usually paid for by general fund.
It wasn't until the budget crisis of the great recession
that we took transportation taxes that were
specifically dedicated, this is Diesel surtax
but paid for by truckers and we used it
for general fund purpose to pay off transportation bonds.
So, we were diverting some money and then we had this crisis
in transportation based on the fact that your cars
are more energy efficient, they get more miles,
we fund our roads by the surcharge or gasoline.
We have some electric cars that never pay a surcharge,
there's a whole reason why we weren't gonna get enough money
and then we have this problem of it costs more
to build roads in California, right.
So, we've got these two things that are happening,
we're going to run into a crisis in our roads.
You've driven on our roads compared to other states,
they're pretty deplorable.
We pull in on transportation taxes and people
in California really care about roads,
they really hate transportation taxes.
I mean, it's no doubt a loser issue for the legislature,
it's just bad.
So, the Governor believes in transportation,
it really does, you need to fund these things
and he starts to negotiate.
People are concerned about the high speed rail
that is a bond and that was paid for with the bond money
and bonds are paid out of the general fund.
So, he really didn't raid general funding,
it's just how bonds are paid in California.
But members did object to the continuing funding
of the higher speed rail because they really feel
that it's over cost and all sorts of issues with it
and they are pretty much hoping when the Governor goes,
that goes away.
So, that's kind of how that's happened on that.
So, the Governor needs at least one Republican
in the Senate to pass the tax and so he starts
negotiating with Jeff Denham who's a termed out member
of the Senate and he actually has a legitimate
transportation issue.
He represents Stockton and a lot of his constituents
take the train, or drive in to the Silicon Valley
because they can afford a house in Stockton
and they have to drive to Silicon Valley.
He got a port project, I think it was a $200 million train
but at least it was transportation oriented
because I've been there when we done taxes
and you got a swimming pool, a club,
I mean it really was a very legitimate transportation issue.
And he really was going to be putting up
a very difficult vote and some other members
got similar things of that nature.
There is now a recall on one of the Senators
from Orange County.
There was some efforts to stop the recall
by changing the election process,
they did it with a budget trailer bill,
which is a really interesting thing we could talk
about for hours about that mechanism.
One of the Dem members from the Dem caucus in the Senate
actually came to one of the events right after
the recall was launched and he said if they qualify that
he will be gone, it polls so badly in his district
straddles LA and Orange County, it's a tough thing.
He's potentially gone.
In addition, there are two initiatives to repeal
and the Senate, I guess it's the congressional Republicans
and Darrel Ice in particular is funding
one of the initiatives.
So those initiatives will probably qualify
for the ballot.
So, this will be an issue that we'll probably poll on
and it will continue to be an issue.
In the meantime the business community is very upset
that supported this because of the trade goods
and all these types of things.
And so they actually will run a campaign
to oppose the repeal of it and to support the member
who's being recalled.
So, it's gonna be definitely something you can write about
in a couple years.
It's going to be a very interesting political issue
but again transportation taxes, the climate change
cap and trade tax which also adds cost to your fuel
polls better than just a straight at the pump gasoline tax.
(chuckles)
One of the things that you noted
was that constituents or members respond not only
to your research when the time is right
and when the conditions are right,
but they care a lot about their constituents.
It seems to me that there's a natural avenue
for you to reach out to constituents
and to take all of your beautiful information
and translate what us pointy egg heads try to say
into language that might sway constituents
and thereby influence members and policy.
Do you undertake any of those efforts?
This actually was one of the first questions I asked
when I got there and the answer was no.
And it's just a matter of resources,
we don't have enough resources to do it.
Because it's the number of constituents you have to reach
are pretty high, right,
and to get to that level where they actually respond to it.
I think our polling is the closest that we do
but it's mostly reflecting people's viewpoints
as opposed to encouraging people to move a certain way.
But it is actually something we've discussed
as an organization and they've told me actually no.
So, we'll see if that changes
but it is the right thing to do.
I believe as a former policy maker
that all of the issues we deal with are never come out
of the member's minds just on high.
It comes from something they're experiencing
in their community and the support they have.
If it doesn't come from that, they usually get
a pretty big pushback and so the fact that
you look at education reform or tax reform
or those kinds of things that people are hearing about
and feeling about and they have to have some level
of support for them to go there because members are
sensitive to the election, they really are.
And I think if I were to do any reform is to go around
to people and say they really do care if you vote,
and they really do care about who you vote for.
And so make sure that you're out there explaining
and being present to your members because they do care.
Well, unfortunately we all have classes
and we have to move on, but this has been a fascinating
discussion so please join me in thanking Deborah Gonzalez.
(applause)
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