Guest Commentary written by

Julie Gill Shuffield

Julie Gill Shuffield is the executive director of Patients Come First California.

While the official vote won’t be certified until next month, the results were clear enough to declare a victory for a California ballot initiative on health care, namely Proposition 34, an effort to make sure that drug sale revenue is used solely on health care.

Prop. 34 confronts the longtime abuse of the federal 340B prescription drug program and will hold bad actors accountable if providers don’t spend 98% of their revenue on patients. California voters got it right.

The 340B program was intended to facilitate drug discounts for entities like nonprofit hospitals and clinics so they could then pass on the savings to patients. The concept is simple enough: Hospitals are in a position to leverage discounts on behalf of medically underserved populations, and the cost of the medicine should be lower for patients — but that’s not happening. In fact, these bad actors buy deeply discounted prescription drugs and then turn around and charge both patients and insurance companies higher prices while pocketing the difference.

Even though the Prop. 34 arguments provided to California voters in the state’s ballot guide were not as detailed — it simply said revenues should not be used to name stadiums and pay exorbitant CEO salaries — it was enough to convince voters to support it.

The 340B program lacks adequate transparency and oversight, and the data reveals a large and rapidly escalating problem. In a 2020 audit, the United States Government Accountability Office found more than 1,500 violations of the 340B statute. Investigative reports show that hospitals across the country, including in California, were billing patients who qualified for charity care and misled patients about their treatment coverage.

This has become an ongoing practice in the Golden State, with monopolistic health care systems in hospital deserts getting away with charging patients exorbitant prices for basic medical care. These hospitals purchase drugs at a discounted price and then charge patients 200-700% more to earn a profit.

To be clear, a small administrative fee to cover the cost of procurement and dispensing is reasonable, but this is price gouging that targets vulnerable patients who are in desperate need of the medicine they’ve been prescribed. Prop. 34 permits a fee of 2%, but the remaining 98% must be spent directly on patient care.

There are urgent calls for Congress to reform the 340B program, with some manufacturers proposing a rebate that would ensure patients are on the receiving end of the lower costs. Unsurprisingly, the hospital industry has fought vociferously. Since Prop. 34 passed, perhaps they are now playing Monday morning quarterback and wishing they had already agreed to reasonable safeguards and transparency.

We can only hope that 340B providers have received the wake-up call issued by California voters and will come to the table with solutions that work.

When revenues are not directed towards patients, their quality of life is impacted. Now, under Prop. 34, these bad actors are the ones with their corporate quality of life impacted. What an ironic, bitter pill to swallow.

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Guest Commentary written by

Bob Stonebrook

Bob Stonebrook is a small business owner based in Carlsbad.

For a great many Americans, the November election results elicited an intense reaction. These responses, played out in real time on election newscasts and social media timelines, included everyday working people, media celebrities, television and movie stars, and even past and present politicians, including our own Gov. Gavin Newsom, who very quickly announced his plans to “Trump-proof” the state through all necessary legal and legislative means.

His plan would theoretically aim to shield California’s progressive policies from any federal manipulation by bolstering resources for the Attorney General’s office and other state agencies in preparation for long, drawn-out legal battles with the Trump administration. The problem is that this is an exclusively defensive approach to solving a grassroots problem that will outlast Trump’s second term. 

A far better and proactive approach — and one that would significantly increase the benefit to all Californians over the long haul — is to improve the effectiveness of our state government.

The results of this year’s elections have spoken volumes about what we have become as a nation and what is most important to our citizens. Most Americans wake up before the sun rises every morning, toss back a cup of coffee and bust their tails for the next 45 years. They work tirelessly for their families, and they want to be treated fairly and objectively. They want to feel safe and accumulate a small measure of economic security for their children. 

Basic governance creates the space for attaining those modest aspirations. 

In 1969, Peter Drucker, the influential management consultant, author and educator, noted in the now-defunct Public Interest journal that the greatest factor in our “disenchantment” with government is that government has not performed. 

His remedy holds just as true today. Improvement in government requires “…the clear definition of the results a policy is expected to produce, and the ruthless examination of results against these expectations. This, in turn, demands that we spell out in considerable detail what results are expected rather than content ourselves with promises and manifestos.”

Overcoming disenchantment requires achieving results.

California’s government is not achieving results, and our disenchantment manifested in the vote to overwhelmingly adopt Proposition 36, for example, which reclassifies some misdemeanor theft and drug crimes as felonies. Public safety is a basic government function that is foundational to a thriving state. 

And there are other basics that need attention: Fostering a thriving economy calls for addressing systemic challenges with balanced policies. Attracting businesses and promoting economic growth through supportive measures — rather than imposing burdensome regulations and legal obstacles — can prevent the exodus of businesses, preserve access to critical goods and services, and sustain entry-level job opportunities. 

This approach offers a far less antagonistic pathway to reduce unemployment and bring California in line with national economic benchmarks.

And nothing requires a more “ruthless examination of results” than our state’s approach to its homeless population. California must finally put someone in charge of homelessness response to bring alignment and focus on achieving results that get and keep people off the streets. Similarly, establishing systems to properly care for those with mental health and substance abuse issues, and creating programs to assimilate legal immigrants into our communities, would offer individuals a path towards a better life and provide a measure of hope for a brighter future.

These are building blocks that would help Californians trust that our political leaders have our best interests at heart. By recommitting to these governing basics, our state can set the stage to achieve much grander goals on clean air and climate. Each new measure builds a layer of protection against potential federal policy shifts and ensures that California’s underlying values and laws remain intact.

Government effectiveness means more than instituting barriers of prevention — it means setting clear goals and objectives that will achieve results for constituents and stamp our state as a model of proactive leadership for years to come.

Fifty years ago this month I moved to Sacramento and a few months later, just after Jerry Brown became governor, began covering politics for the long-defunct Sacramento Union newspaper.

I have lived in five different homes — soon to be six — and my workplaces have always been in downtown Sacramento, near the Capitol.

That experience, plus research for my 1985 book on California megatrends, forms the background of some observations about the Sacramento region’s evolution. So here goes:

In 1974 the six-county region (Sacramento, Yolo, Yuba, Placer, Sutter and El Dorado) was home to barely a million people. However it was on the cusp of explosive growth, as was the entire state, thanks to a wave of migration and a baby boom. Today the region has about 2.5 million residents, making it the nation’s 28th largest metropolitan region, equal to the Las Vegas and Austin, Texas areas.

Much of the growth has been in Sacramento’s suburbs, so the city now contains just a fifth of the region’s population and has ceased to be its economic center, while jobs and businesses have flourished in the suburbs.

As the local economy evolved from state and federal government employment — including four large military bases — into technology and other fields, voters had two opportunities to merge the city with what were mostly unincorporated communities in Sacramento County.

Merger would have made Sacramento the nation’s seventh or eighth largest city, with the economic and cultural clout that comes with size. But voters rejected both proposals, one in 1974, the other in 1990, and several suburbs incorporated into cities.

The consolidation failures reflected historic economic and political conflicts between the city and its suburbs which today still undermine cooperative policymaking and are visible in chaotic responses to the ever-growing homelessness crisis and the perpetual wrangling over transportation issues.

Glen Sparrow, who headed the 1974 consolidation effort, later blamed Sacramento’s “civic gentry” — its long-dominant families — for torpedoing its passage because they didn’t want Sacramento to grow.

The 1990 effort died because suburban voters saw city officials as incompetent ideologues, while Sacramento’s dominant Democrats feared that suburban Republicans would take control.

The failures blocked the city from controlling development outside its borders, and its downtown commercial district, once full of department stores, withered. It regained some momentum after the Sacramento Kings downtown basketball arena opened in 2016. But the proliferation of homeless encampments, a fatal gang shootout, a violent demonstration and the pandemic, which emptied state offices, erased much of that progress.

Meanwhile city government has become a model of dysfunction, with officials squabbling over mundane issues, chronic budget deficits and ceaseless conflicts with the county government, particularly over homelessness.

The lack of cohesion means that Sacramento has flubbed opportunities to gain status among metro regions.

Two examples involve its unique positioning at the juncture of two major rivers, the Sacramento and the American.

Local officials blocked a canal that would have connected the Sacramento River to the channel that carries ocean-going ships to a Yolo County port and its lake, thereby missing an opportunity for spectacular waterfront development a la Southern California’s Marina del Rey.

While the city is redeveloping an old railyard adjacent to downtown, it could have done something truly special by redirecting some American River water through canals, emulating San Antonio’s famous Riverwalk.

A third is a failure to fully capitalize on the closure of McClellan Air Force Base in the 1990s. While the base has undergone a workable conversion to civilian use, its unique facilities also could have become another campus of the California Polytechnic State University, fueling off-campus technology businesses.

Regions prosper when they have united and visionary leadership — such as North Carolina’s Research Triangle. Sacramento lacks that vision.

History will — or at least should — see a $165 billion error in revenue estimates as one of California’s most boneheaded political acts.

It happened in 2022, as the state was emerging from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Department of Finance, based on one short-term spike in income taxes, projected that revenues from the state’s three largest sources would remain above $200 billion a year indefinitely.

Newsom then declared that the budget had a $97.5 billion surplus, although that number never appeared in any documents.

“No other state in American history has ever experienced a surplus as large as this,” Newsom bragged as he unveiled a 2022-23 fiscal year budget that topped $300 billion.

With that in mind, he and the Legislature adopted a budget with billions in new spending, most notably on health and welfare programs and cash payments to poor families.

Within a few weeks, Newsom and legislators learned that real revenues were falling well short of the rosy projections. But the damage, in terms of expanded spending, was done.

Two years later, buried in its fine print, the deficit-ridden 2024-25 budget acknowledged that sales taxes and personal and corporate income tax revenues would fall well short of the $200 billion a year projection, estimating a $165.1 billion shortfall over four years.

The past two years have seen budgets with deficits papered over with direct and indirect borrowing, tapped emergency reserves, vague assumptions of future spending cuts, and accounting gimmicks. For instance, the current budget “saves” several billion dollars by counting next June’s state payroll as an expenditure in the following fiscal year.

This bit of fiscal history is important to remember because the twin 2022 acts of overestimating revenues and overspending billions of nonexistent dollars on new and expanded services continues to haunt the state, as a new analysis indicates.

The Legislature’s budget analyst, Gabe Petek, unveiled his office’s annual overview of the state’s finances Wednesday and it wasn’t a pretty picture.

There’s been a recent uptick in personal income tax revenues thanks to wealthy investors’ stock market gains , some stemming from Donald Trump’s presidential victory. However, Petek said, government spending — much of it dating from 2022’s phony surplus — is continuing to outpace revenues from “a sluggish economy,” creating operating deficits.

“Outside of government and health care, the state has added no jobs in a year and a half,” the analysis declares. “Similarly, the number of Californians who are unemployed is 25% higher than during the strong labor markets of 2019 and 2022. Consumer spending (measured by inflation‑adjusted retail sales and taxable sales) has continued to decline throughout 2024.”

Meanwhile, it continues, “one reason the state faces operating deficits is growth in spending. Our estimate of annual total spending growth across the forecast period — from 2025‑26 to 2028‑29 — is 5.8% (6.3% excluding K‑14 education). By historical standards, this is high.”

Petek’s grim outlook coupled with the more conservative bent of voters, as shown in this month’s election, present a political dilemma for a governor and a Legislature oriented toward expanding government.

Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas, reacting to the analysis in a statement, indicated that he’s gotten the message.

“We need to show restraint with this year’s budget, because California must be prepared for any challenges, including ones from Washington,” Rivas said. “It’s not a moment for expanding programs, but for protecting and preserving services that truly benefit all Californians.”

Newsom will propose a 2025-26 budget in January, but no matter what he and the Legislature decide, the structural budget deficit will still be there when he exits the governorship in 2027. It will be part of his legacy.

Guest Commentary written by

Letitia Grenier

Letitia Grenier is the director of the Public Policy Institute of California Water Policy Center, where she is also a senior fellow.

In the wake of one of the most consequential elections in American history, California looms large. What occurs here is happening to roughly one in every eight Americans — and what’s happening in California is climate change. 

The summer of 2024 was the hottest on record globally. Here in California, residents sweltered through the hottest July the state had ever experienced. And one of the most important ways California is experiencing climate change is in its water. 

The state’s naturally volatile climate is facing whiplash like it’s never seen before. Increasingly intense droughts are being followed by major floods. Snowpack is diminishing, and sea level is rising. Vegetation is drying out, exacerbating severe wildfires that occur earlier than ever each season. Everyone is feeling the effects, though low-income, underserved communities — many of color — are feeling it most acutely. And rising temperatures are driving these changes.

Fortunately, California is a national and international leader in climate mitigation, reducing the greenhouse gas emissions that are leading to a warmer planet. Yet even if global emissions drop precipitously tomorrow, the next several decades of climate change are already locked in.

California will be managing its water under changing conditions for the indefinite future.

The state has taken important steps to adapt to climate change’s effects on water, but as Public Policy Institute of California researchers argued in a new report, it’s not yet on the right trajectory to manage some of the changes underway — or the greater challenges ahead. 

The good news is that California can make significant progress when it pays attention to a problem. Urban water use has remained flat since 1990, despite millions of new residents, which is a testament to the power of California’s famed innovation and creative thinking. The state is also undertaking difficult but necessary work to improve management of its vitally important groundwater resources, as well as the headwater forests that supply some two-thirds of the state’s water.

While this work isn’t easy, it’s pointing in the right direction. 

But there are two areas where major overhaul is needed: freshwater ecosystems and flood management. More than a century of land and water management has left our rivers, wetlands and estuaries in bad shape. Even without climate change, many of these ecosystems are becoming unable to supply clean water, protect us from floods or support California’s diverse and unique native fish and other wildlife. Warming and its effects are only making conditions worse. 

Perhaps the most worrisome issue is flood management. The increasing likelihood of large floods is largely ignored, and we continue to put homes and businesses in areas that face high flood risk today or in the future. This, as we saw with the hurricanes that devastated the southeastern U.S. this fall, is a recipe for dangerous, damaging floods.  

But it’s not all doom and gloom: California is a state of dreamers and doers, and this is a time to set our sights high.

We can make floods less destructive, using them to bolster the water we store underground. We can retool agriculture for 21st-century water scarcity. We can craft policy that prioritizes frontline communities. And we can undertake larger-scale restoration projects that restore the natural processes of our headwater forests and freshwater ecosystems.

As we’ve seen on the Klamath River — where a salmon found its way upstream just weeks after the final dam came down — if you build it, they will come.

While the federal approach to climate change mitigation and adaptation will likely change under the new administration, California can continue to lead. We have access to significant resources and we can find opportunities in climate adaptation, as we have in the transition to clean energy.

We can — and must — meet the challenges of today with adaptations that address the problems of tomorrow.

Kamala Harris could count on winning California’s 54 electoral college votes as she campaigned for president, and the state’s voters delivered. In fact, California’s electoral votes were almost a quarter of the 226 she won nationwide, 44 short of what she needed to defeat Donald Trump.

Simultaneously, however, Harris’s party fell short of regaining control of the House of Representatives, thanks in part to failing to flip as many seats in California as party leaders, such as Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi, had hoped.

Those outcomes illustrate the powerful role that the nation’s most populous state plays in determining who controls the federal government.

Looking ahead, however, California’s clout in both presidential and congressional elections — and therefore in the rooms where post-election policy decisions are made — is shrinking. It’s a stark reminder of the old adage that demography drives destiny.

California experienced strong population growth for the first 150 years of the state’s existence, largely due to migration from other states and nations and a high birthrate. The state’s decades-long expansion reached a high point in the 1980s when its population exploded by more than 25%, from 23.8 million to 30 million, due to strong foreign immigration and a new baby boom.

There was a newborn every minute.

The decade’s population growth granted it seven new congressional seats after the 1990 census, increasing from 45 to 52. In 1992, Bill Clinton claimed the state’s 54 electoral votes, becoming only the fourth Democrat to win the state in the 20th century.

Democratic nominees have continued to win California’s electoral votes in every presidential election since, but they could no longer count on a new harvest every decade.

Population growth began to slow in the late 1990s, thanks largely to out-migration of Southern California aerospace workers and their families as defense spending dried up after the breakup of the Soviet Union.

It gained one seat after the 2000 census, but population growth stagnated during the 2010 decade, with a net increase of 2.4 million, just 10% of what occurred in the 1980s.

The state lost a congressional seat after the 2020 census, so California now has 52 districts. The COVID-19 pandemic and other factors, such as a declining birthrate and increasing death rate, have led to population stagnation since then.

“California lost 433,000 people between July 2020 and July 2023,” the Public Policy Institute of California calculated. “Most of the loss occurred during the first year of the pandemic and was driven by a sharp rise in residents moving to other states. But fewer births, higher deaths and lower international migration also played a role.”

That’s where we are now: roughly 39 million, a bit under the 2020 census number. But the future looks like slow growth at best, which means the state will likely lose four or more congressional seats, and therefore electoral votes, after the 2030 census.

A 2023 analysis by the liberal Brennan Center estimated that California will lose four seats, while the conservative American Redistricting Project pegged the likely loss at five seats.

It’s a major chunk of a wider shift of population, congressional seats and electoral votes from blue states — New York will also be a big loser — to red states such as Texas and Florida, whose economies are growing smartly and where housing is affordable.

By either 2030 projection, were the 2032 Democratic nominee for president to carry the same states that Harris did this year, he or she would win 12 fewer electoral votes.

Demography is destiny.

Voters in California’s farm belt, stretching more than 400 miles from Kern County on the south to Tehama County on the north, delivered solid majorities for Donald Trump in this month’s presidential election.

They were obviously outvoted in heavily populated coastal and urban counties, so rival Kamala Harris claimed the state’s 54 electoral votes. However, it is Trump who will be moving into the White House, and of all California economic sectors, agriculture arguably has the most to gain or lose during his second presidency.

There are three policy issues particularly important to California’s farmers that Trump wants to change. If he does what he has promised, one might benefit the industry and two might damage it.

The beneficial change is what California Farm Bureau President Shannon Douglas, in a post-election statement, calls “securing a sustainable water supply.”

For years, state officials have been trying, either through regulatory decrees or negotiations, to reduce the amount of water San Joaquin Valley farmers take from the San Joaquin River and its tributaries to enhance flows through the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, thus improving its water quality to support fish and other wildlife.

Farmers are miffed that after two wet winters filled the state’s reservoirs, state federal water managers still limited agricultural deliveries.

A few days before the election, the state Water Resources Control Board issued the latest version of its water quality plan, but the supposed compromise is being critiqued by both farmers who want to minimize restrictions and environmentalists who demand a crackdown on water diversions.

Trump stepped into the issue during his first presidency, directing federal water regulators to increase agricultural supplies, and is likely to do so again.

Just before the election, Trump described California water policy, in all caps on his Truth Social website, as “INSANE POLICY DECISIONS,” which he defined as “the ridiculously rerouting of MILLIONS OF GALLONS OF WATER A DAY FROM THE NORTH OUT OF THE PACIFIC OCEAN, rather than using it, free of charge, for the towns, cities & farms dotted all throughout California.”

The two pending issues that could backfire on farmers who voted for Trump are imposing tariffs on imports from China, which could invite retaliatory tariffs on agricultural exports, and deporting undocumented immigrants, who comprise at least half of the state’s agricultural workers.

Despite objections from California’s Republican congressional delegation, Trump hit China with tariffs during his first term and “China retaliated with import tariffs that target U.S. agriculture,” according to a report from the University of California’s Giannini Foundation of Agricultural Economics.

“For almonds and pistachios, the tariffs did not reduce the volume of U.S. exports to China,” the report continued. “However, the trade war diminished California exports of walnuts, wine, oranges, and table grapes.”

Cracking down on undocumented immigrants has been a bedrock issue for Trump throughout his political career, and he’s promised to make good on his deportation pledge immediately after taking office.

For a variety of reasons, the state’s farmers have had difficulty finding enough workers to till and harvest their crops in recent years. Immigration restrictions, California’s high living costs and the creation of new factory jobs in Mexico are among the reasons.

California has as many as 2 million undocumented residents, many of whom work in industries ranging from construction to agriculture. The full-blown roundup Trump promises would have an immense economic effect on the state, with agriculture arguably the most vulnerable.

When Central Valley farmers were enthusiastically backing a second term for Trump, they undoubtedly were hoping for relief from water restrictions. Yet that could be the smallest impact Trump 2.0 may have on their industry.

Guest Commentary written by

Seema Policepatil

Dr. Seema Policepatil specializes in internal medicine and lifestyle medicine and is a member of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine.

As a physician, I am closely following a bird flu outbreak that is hitting our Central Valley dairy farms hard, especially since the California Department of Health reports at least 21 human cases. This number seems to increase each week in our state, which has more dairy cows than any other. Bird flu has spread to at least 291 dairy herds in California.

As a board-certified doctor in internal and lifestyle medicines, I support the health department’s efforts to monitor and test for bird flu, I appreciate those calling for additional protections for California’s dairy workers, and I commend our public health officials for doing a good job of confronting the immediate crisis.

But it is also time to take a hard look at the food production system that puts farm workers in close contact with sick cows and birds, the standard American diet that demands it, and the health ramifications of both.

Facilities with large numbers of animals in a small space are a threat to public health because they provide ideal conditions for viruses to spread, evolve and possibly acquire the ability to infect people. Research shows that intensive animal agriculture has been implicated in influenza viruses jumping from animals to people, and some believe this bird flu could even become the source of our next pandemic.

Recently officials announced the disturbing news that bird flu has infected a pig in Oregon, a troubling development that health experts say could mean a more transmissible and virulent virus.

Consumers and farmers who want to be part of a more healthful future may wonder about alternatives to intensive animal farming. If you’re a poultry farmer and bird flu has wiped out your flock, you may be considering a change. In fact, some are repurposing their chicken houses to grow crops.

California dairy farmers also encounter significant challenges, and many already were choosing to exit the business. Now the bird flu outbreak among dairy cows is presenting yet another problem. 

Some of these farmers are likely thinking about phasing out the cow’s milk operation and transitioning to plant-based milk production, or growing crops or orchards. Actually, this trend is already underway. Just a few years ago, the Giacomazzi family of Hanford, owners of California’s oldest dairy farm in operation of more than 125 years, switched from cow’s milk to almond milk.

This transition couldn’t come at a better time. The plant-based milk industry, a $2.9 billion business, is booming. Almond milk is the most popular plant-based milk. California produces 80% of the world’s almonds and the most almond milk in the United States.

But these transitions involve costs, and California should support farmers who choose to make these changes. We should also help dairy farmers who transition to growing oats for oat milk, like Califia Farms in Bakersfield, for example, or almond or soy for milk sold by San Diego Soy Dairy — or any other crop they find profitable.

Shifting away from animal agriculture helps our environment and our economy and improves worker safety. I have found for myself and my patients that it also improves health. A plant-based diet focused on fruits, veggies, beans and greens grown in California can help maintain healthy weight, lower blood pressure and improve heart health.

I know this from my own personal experience and from treating patients with diet-related diseases. While our public health officials try to control our current crisis, I am hopeful California will transition to a way of eating and growing food that is both safer and more nutritious.

It got lost in the massive attention paid — with good reason — to Donald Trump’s triumphant return to the presidency, but a quiet revolution occurred in Los Angeles County.

Its voters approved a ballot measure to completely overhaul how the huge county, whose 10 million residents are greater than the populations of all but 10 states, is governed. After the 2030 census, the county’s Board of Supervisors will be expanded from five to nine members, hopefully making it more representative of the county’s incredible demographic diversity.

One could argue that the board should be even larger, perhaps 13 or even 15 members, to reduce each member’s constituency to a more manageable size. However, nine is certainly better than five.

The most startling aspect of the change is that the reform was placed on the ballot by a majority of the present board. It effectively reduces the clout that individual members have wielded, something that politicians are generally unwilling to do.

“People really want this change. They know it is time,” Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, chair of the board and co-author of the measure with Supervisor Janice Hahn, said on Tuesday after it became apparent that the measure would pass.

“Five supervisors for 10 million people? That doesn’t make sense,” Horvath added. “Even with the hardest working supervisor, people would like to see you more and pay more attention to their needs. It means we can do a lot better.”

While expanding the board received most attention prior to the election, another element of the overhaul will potentially have a greater political impact: the creation of an elected county executive, in effect a mayor of the county. The first election for the new position will occur in 2028.

Given the county’s size, it will hands down be the second most important political office in California and a very obvious stepping stone to the governorship, particularly since whoever wins the position is almost certain to be a Democrat.

With dozens of mayors, congressional members and state legislators — plus nine county supervisors — Los Angeles County will have no shortage of political figures vying for the powerful position.

Creating an elected county executive was the most controversial aspect of the proposal for the two board members who opposed placing the issue on the ballot. Supervisor Kathryn Barger, who voted against the measure with colleague Holly Mitchell, said it was wrong to have a position with no term limits.

“That will politicize our chief executive officer position. We need an executive that is nonpartisan and unbiased running the daily operations of the county, not another politician,” Barger said in a statement.

The quiet revolution that occurred in Los Angeles sharply contrasts with what didn’t occur 400 miles to the north in San Francisco. It’s a city and a county combined, California’s only such entity, governed by an elected mayor and an 11-member Board of Supervisors.

San Francisco voters ousted the incumbent mayor, London Breed, in favor of a wealthy philanthropist, Daniel Lurie, declaring that they wanted a change in governance. But at the same time, they rejected a ballot measure that would have reduced a bewildering array of 130 semi-independent commissions that wield much of the city government’s authority.

The interlocking powers of a mayor, supervisors and the commissions are widely cited as preventing San Francisco from addressing its most obvious civic issues, such as homelessness, crime and housing shortages.

A rival measure to study the commission system, which was placed on the ballot by the Board of Supervisors to thwart the more meaningful proposal, apparently passed.

Kudos to Los Angeles but a raspberry to San Francisco.

Ballots in Los Angeles were still being counted last week when the resistance to President-elect Donald Trump began to take shape. By Friday, the city’s incoming police chief, Jim McDonnell, was promising the Los Angeles Police Department would refuse support for Trump’s much-ballyhooed deportation schemes.

“The national election has caused many Angelenos to feel a deep, deep fear,” McDonnell said in a statement to the city council, which was debating — and ultimately approved — his nomination. 

“I want to be unequivocal,” he added. “LAPD will protect LA’s immigrant community. We will not cooperate with mass deportations.” 

McDonnell’s statement responded in part to a lurking concern about his record: During his time as Los Angeles County sheriff, that department, which operates the jails, cooperated with federal immigration authorities who would deport people after they were arrested. Although the number of prisoners turned over to the feds fell during McDonnell’s time in that office, some immigrant advocates equated his participation with support. That concern was only ratcheted up by Trump’s election and the sudden fear that Washington’s long arm was about to reach into this city’s longstanding embrace of immigrants.

Mayor Karen Bass, who chose McDonnell for the job, wasted no time in asserting her authority over this closely watched matter of police policy.

“My message is simple,” she said. “No matter where you were born, how you came to this country, Los Angeles will stand with you, and this will not change.”

Those policy pronouncements place Los Angeles squarely at odds with the Trump campaign’s immigration rhetoric, with its shrill insistence that it will launch “mass deportations” on the false theory that illegal immigrants are causing a spike in crime. (In fact, illegal immigrants offend much, much less frequently than people born here) Trump has been spouting versions of that fabricated argument since he launched his first campaign in 2016, and he shows no signs of letting up. 

One of his first announcements as president-elect was to name Tom Homan as his new “border czar.” Homan promptly endorsed Trump’s deportation plans and, in language aimed squarely at local officials, warned cities and states to “get the hell out of the way.”

That’s just bombast, because what may be most striking about Los Angeles’ defiance is that it is not the product of an emerging liberal agenda. In fact, the effort to keep LAPD out of the business of enforcing immigration law is neither new nor liberal. It has its roots deep in LAPD’s history, dating from a time when a very conservative chief headed the department, and President Jimmy Carter was in the White House. 

And in a city that has fought over every aspect of its policing, it is one that leaders of all types have come to embrace.

Special Order No. 40

In the fall of 1979, LAPD Chief Daryl F. Gates, who was later known for launching gang sweeps and using a battering ram to knock down crack houses among his many “achievements,” issued a standing order to the police officers under his command. The directive, known as Special Order No. 40, specifically commanded that “officers shall not initiate police action with the objective of discovering the alien status of a person.” It also barred officers from arresting or booking anyone for a federal immigration code violation. 

That did not, as some critics suggest, establish Los Angeles as a “sanctuary city.” People in the country illegally, including those living in Los Angeles, could be and were arrested and deported. But the LAPD recognized that it could not protect and serve the whole of Los Angeles if it was seen as the agent of immigration enforcement.

As Gates and other city leaders understood, allowing the LAPD to play that role would undermine trust. Witnesses would be afraid to come forward to report crimes or testify against criminals. Criminals would then go free. Victims in immigrant communities would suffer, and so would those outside those communities, as crimes went unsolved and innocent people were victimized.

There is a principle at work in all of this that is worth noting, even if it won’t affect the policies or programs of an utterly unprincipled president driven chiefly, or perhaps solely, by personal aggrandizement. 

It derives from Catholic teaching and was influential in the thinking of Gov. Jerry Brown, who studied for the priesthood as a young man. It’s called “subsidiarity,” and it argues that responsibility for addressing social problems generally should flow to the most local organization or unit — that the parish understands its needs better than the diocese. 

Or, in this case, that a city understands its residents better than Washington. 

It’s not an argument for localizing everything. Basic human rights transcend locality, which is why we don’t permit slavery in some areas and not others, for example. But it recognizes the life of communities and their distinctive qualities. It appreciates that experience is personal, not abstract. 

Indeed, that same principle is at work in federalism, an idea that was appealing to conservatives when some states were more conservative than the federal government, but whose appeal passed as soon as conservatives seized power in Washington. 

It’s worth considering here. Los Angeles prioritizes public safety, and the city has long realized that safety is enhanced by treating people who live here as equally entitled to the protection of the law — regardless of how they got here. That’s a time-tested value in LA, whose adherents stretch from Daryl Gates to Karen Bass. 

Los Angeles does not need Donald Trump or Tom Homan to tell it how best to protect its residents.

If resistance to Washington is going to be effective over the next four years, that’s the form it needs to take — not pouting or performative displays of anger but retrenchment to values and the stalwart defense of them in the face of broad and ill-considered acts of vengeance or retribution.

Los Angeles has a right to safety, and it has gone through a long, thoughtful struggle to achieve it. It has no obligation to let anyone, even a president, deflect it from that course.