Weekend Links: Nov. 12-14

Billion-dollar roadkill, the Great Gavin Newsom Hunt, and 8 other stories to consider in your quest to understand the Golden State

Happy Friday! Greetings from What is California? HQ, where that sweet sound of the season whispers forth in the hazy, marzipan-tinted dawn:

CLLLLAAAAAAWWWWWWWWWW 🍂🍁 🚜

Yes, dear reader—it’s claw season in Sacramento. For three months every year—from midautumn to midwinter—a three-person city sanitation team trawls the roads to scoop up piles of fallen leaves. In a kind of heavy-equipment ballet, a sanitation truck leads a tractor that is outfitted with a giant metal appendage resembling a pie server with tall sides. Then the pie server opens in the middle, suddenly resembling a crude… yes. It kind of is a claw.

The tractor driver swivels and swerves and then lowers the claw to the road. He’s (it’s always a “he”) excellent at what he does; the driver today has a long, wispy white hair and a white beard, like the wizard he is. Barreling ahead, the metal scrapes the asphalt. The sound is like an orchestra of shovels dragged along the roadway, droning in unison. It’s loud but not punishing or even entirely unpleasant, and anyway, you’re not really hearing the claw so much as watching the claw as it maneuvers forth beneath a car-length mound of wet leaves.

“Oh, it can’t get all of those, can it?” you ask yourself. Yes, it can. In one motion, the wizard at the wheel closes the claw and lifts it to the mouth of the sanitation truck ahead of him. There, another sanitation worker has compacted the previous pile of clawed leaves, making room for the new one. The claw deposits its cargo without spilling a single leaf. It goes back for one pass, grabs stray leaves, does the whole thing again.

And then the claw is gone, leaving only the echoing, metallic tenor of industry in the distance. Have I mentioned I love to watch highly proficient people do the things they’re very good at? The claw crew is at or near the top of this list.

Anyway! How are you? Did you check out state auditor Elaine Howle this week on What is California? She talked about her impending retirement at the end of the year, some of her greatest hits on the job (looking at you, EDD), and why she’s not a huge fan of the term for which she and her office might be best known—”scathing audit.”

It’s not too wonky (I promise!), and when we ask “What is California?”, conversations like this are as important as anything about movies, Silicon Valley, agriculture, or anything else, for that matter. Through 21 years of audits, Elaine Howle might know more about how California works than anyone else in government:

And I hope you'll consider checking some of these out if/when you are so inclined:

• Why California’s Lettuce Lands are Unlikely Vaccination Leaders - Joe Mathews, Zócalo Public Square
  Starting off with some good news here from Gonzalez, about 17 miles southeast of Salinas on Highway 101. In this tiny rural town of 9,000, where agriculture is the main industry and only 10 percent of the majority Latino population has a college degree, a public-health collaboration between growers, labor and local leaders has resulted in a 98 percent COVID vaccination rate among residents. (By comparison, hard-hit Central Valley and North State ag centers are hovering below 50 percent.) It’s all about money in the end, but still: State leaders could learn a thing or two from the fascinating dynamics that fueled this phenomenon protecting a class of essential workers who keep the rest of us fed and can’t just log on from home.

Wildlife-Vehicle Collisions (WVCs) are expensive! (Map graphic via Road Ecology Center, UC Davis)

• Annual ‘Roadkill’ Report Identifies Hot Spots and Paths Forward - Kat Kerlin, UC Davis
  Did you know that UC Davis hosts a Road Ecology Center that reports annually on wildlife-vehicle collisions—also known as WVCs? The collisions are frequent and stunningly expensive for state agencies, drivers, and insurers: “In the past five years, collisions between wildlife and vehicles cost California at least $1 billion and potentially up to $2 billion.” During that time, “more than 300 mountain lions and 557 black bears were reported killed on roads” (and those numbers are likely higher since not everyone reports these collisions), and as many as 5,000 Pacific newts are killed every year while attempting to cross a road dividing their habitat and their seasonal mating zone. And I thought Tinder was bad.

• Column: L.A. County’s sheriff called me a ‘vendido,’ a sellout. Let’s talk about selling out - Gustavo Arellano, LA Times
  This piece reminds me of a baseball metaphor: In baseball, a big part of how far a home run travels has to do with the velocity of the incoming pitch. The harder a ball is thrown, the farther it generally goes when the hitter makes good contact. In this instance, the lawless and truly awful Los Angeles County sheriff Alex Villanueva fired a fastball at LAT columnist Arellano in a bullying Facebook Live video, rebuking Arellano as a “vendido” who sells out other Latinos in his work. Arellano responds here with about as hard a rhetorical swing as a person can take, crushing Villanueva’s sophistry out of the park: “He oversees a department where more than 50% of deputies are Latinos. As you likely know by now, Latinos have disproportionately suffered from the COVID-19 pandemic. […] But get this: Just about 43% of sheriff’s deputies are fully vaccinated, which puts the Latinos they deal with, for good or bad, at risk of contracting the disease.” Oh… and there’s more. It’s gone!

• Inside the Crime Files - Anne Marie Schubert for Attorney General
  You have to hand it to Schubert, who has married self-mythologizing political narrative with true-crime mania in this new podcast glorifying her prosecutions as Sacramento County’s district attorney. An unintentionally funny, hyper-earnest Schubert tweet this week gives away the game—the show is explicitly labeled a campaign ad in her quest to be California’s next attorney general: “Join us, and our host Anne Marie Schubert, to hear from the prosecutors, investigators, forensic experts, and victims from those crime files, who have changed the course of criminal justice.” It’s kind of a brilliant play compared to what the incumbent Democrat Rob Bonta has built up so far—the limp storytelling arsenal that CalMatters’ Emily Hoeven referred to this week as a “slew of press releases.” Watch this race in 2022.

• Where is Gov. Gavin Newsom? - Shawn Hubler and Soumya Karlamangla, NY Times
  This dispatch from the NYT does the best job summarizing the Gavinological convulsions of the last couple of weeks, during which time California’s chief executive further strived to outdo the flagrant, flamboyant arrogance of governors from Texas to New York. And you’ve really got to admire the towering aloofness of his latest self-own: Quietly stepping away from public life after his Oct. 27 COVID booster shot, abruptly canceling his trip to the UN climate conference in Glasgow, and resurfacing last weekend at the opulent wedding of a Getty oil heiress at San Francisco City Hall (officiated by Nancy Pelosi, no less). He said he just wanted to trick-or-treat with his kids! For two weeks? Meanwhile, in an ill-advised and swiftly deleted tweet, first lady Jennifer Siebel Newsom fired back at critics who dared ask the whereabouts of the governor of the world’s fifth-largest economy:

  Sophia Bollag @SophiaBollag

  Her tweet was deleted, but here’s a screenshot

  

  Only five more years of this for us, in all likelihood! Can’t wait.
  

• Investors sour on cannabis after Democrats fail to help industry - Paul Demko, Politico
  Cannabis may be the fifth largest crop in California—ahead of wheat and even tomatoes, according to a new report—but this week has yielded some pretty rough news for the legal cannabis industry. This article traces the downturn of investor faith in the business, and then there’s this upsetting coda: According to a stunning report, four cannabis growers who were going through the permitting process to cultivate cannabis legally in Mendocino Country say they were robbed by a marauding gang of law enforcement officers and Fish and Wildlife agents. RELATED: Graham Farrar of Glass House Brands on What is California?

• 25 years later: How Prop. 215 changed the cannabis landscape for Humboldt County and California - Isabella Vanderheiden, Times-Standard
  So how did legal weed get to this awkward position in the first place? Thank Dennis Peron, the pioneering pot advocate who, uh, lit up the 1996 ballot initiative that legalized medical marijuana in California. This month marks the 25th anniversary of the passage of Proposition 215, whose incalculable impact is chronicled in this fascinating piece. As pot aficionados might say, I don’t remember it like it was yesterday.

• Here’s what California could do to help fix the supply chain - Grace Gedye, CalMatters
  I’m nothing if not solutions-minded (and tired… I’m also tired). Here we helpfully have not only the gist of America’s supply chain woes, but also a sort of Big Four of fixes that California can engineer to help smooth things out. All things considered, it’s still a sobering reality check—particularly where the shortages of warehouse workers and truck drivers are concerned. RELATED: If you really want to go deep on port backlogs and the existential angst of the trucking industry, check out this excellent (and admittedly bleak) essay by a self-described “20-year truck driver” explaining that part of the supply-chain breakdown.

• The West on Fire - William Deverell, Western Edition podcast
  I was late getting to this excellent podcast series from the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, which recently completed its first season uniquely chronicling the history of California’s battles against fire. And not just wildfires, either: Episodes include an in-depth look at the legacy of Black firefighters in L.A., the Indigenous history of (and argument for) controlled burns, and my favorite, a closer look at California’s complicated relationship with Smokey Bear. (Because… a bear. Obviously.)
  

And finally…

• See’s Candies Makes 26 Million Pounds of Candy Every Year - Insider
  Happy 100th anniversary to See’s Candies, which opened its doors in 1921 in a Los Angeles storefront at 135 Western Ave. North. When I lived on the East Coast in the years before See’s had built up its shipping presence, the candy enjoyed a sort of mini-mystique in the vein of other Western U.S. exclusives like In-N-Out Burger. People would snap it up in malls and at airports. Now the candymaker, which still manufactures Mary See’s original recipes at a factory in L.A., ships anywhere and everywhere, but it’ll always be synonymous with California. This year has seen countless media tributes, but here’s a cool one from the quaint pre-pandemic era of 2018:

Thanks for reading and watching, and have a safe, happy weekend…

-S.