Proposition 4 defies easy categorization. Is it a water bond? A climate resilience bond? A Christmas tree with environmental gifts to private and public interests across the state?
The answer is yes. The $10-million state bond is all of those things. The disparate expenditures in this proposition’s 15,000 words of text are a reflection of the all-encompassing nature of climate change, but also the political deal making in the state Legislature needed to get this measure on the Nov. 5 ballot.
Despite some misgivings about the process, we think voters should vote yes on Proposition 4. It will save the state and Californians in the long run to invest now to gird against the growing and inevitable impacts of climate change.
Ideally these investments could be made without financing, but the state’s revenue is too volatile to provide a steady source of revenue. A few years ago California started putting tens of billions of dollars of its massive budget surplus toward climate programs, only to cut some of those same programs a few years later when the state slid into deficit. California’s ability to prepare and respond to the effects of climate should not be captive to the state’s boom-bust budget cycle.
The biggest chunk of spending, $3.8 billion, is for water projects, such as storage, reuse and recycling, cleaning contaminated aquifers and drought and flood protection.
The rest of it will fund a grab bag of climate, energy, conservation and agriculture projects, including $1.5 billion for wildfire prevention and forest resilience, $1.2 billion to protect the coast from sea level rise and $1.2 billion to conserve and restore habitat. There’s $850 million to help build offshore wind turbines, transmission lines and battery storage, $700 million to upgrade and expand parks, museums, zoos and aquariums, $450 million for extreme heat and $300 million for farm sustainability projects.
Proposition 4 will help California be proactive in the face of this slow-building disaster, investing now to protect communities from climate impacts that are worsening as global warming accelerates. And there is no question that the vast majority of the spending in this wide-ranging package is necessary and valuable.
Like any large government spending plan, there are items that seem tangential to the bond. In this case, we call out the $20 million for shade canopies, tables and other equipment for farmers markets and $15 million for vans to transport farmworkers. But those line items are small relative to the overall spending that focuses mostly on worthwhile projects that taxpayers will end up paying for one way or another.
Opponents, including state Senate Minority Leader Brian Jones (R-Santee) and the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn., say it’s irresponsible for the state to borrow money to backfill programs cut for the budget and that the $400 million in annual debt payments will tie lawmakers’ hands to respond to other priorities in the future.
In a perfect world, that may be true. But it’s even more irresponsible to consign responsibility for protecting California from the climate crisis to future generations.
The last environmental bond California voters approved was Proposition 68 in June 2018, but that $4.1-billion investment was more narrowly focused on parks, water and coastal resilience projects, and nearly all of it has been spent or allocated. The last state water bond voters approved was a decade ago, and some of the money is still being allocated. In November 2018, voters wisely rejected Proposition 3, a pork-filled $8.8-billion water bond that would have forced state taxpayers to pay for projects that should be funded by private interests.
Lawmakers who negotiated Proposition 4 say they learned from that measure’s defeat and kept the pork to a minimum. Still, we expect lawmakers to be more responsible with the public’s money. When they come back in a few years with another climate bond, as we can almost certainly expect, it needs to be more lean and focused, without opportunistic giveaways that erode Californians’ trust.
But the few concerns about the bond are eclipsed by the much more pressing threat posed by climate change. California can’t afford to wait. Voting yes on Proposition 4 will help California weather the climate crisis that grows more dire by the year.