For the Firing Squad: California’s Future
As some of you might know, I live in San Francisco, California. I love California, unabashedly. My state has been a cultural and technological icon of our country for decades, and we have used that power to rise as a base for standing for what’s right, even when the rest of the country equivocates. We’ve lived that legacy out from fighting back against HIV/AIDS to resisting ICE activity.
Having said all of that, it pains me to see California where it is today.
Welcome to California sign at the northwest end of California State Route 266 in Mono County, California. Famartin, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
California is a lumbering beast. “California inc” is huge—we have the nation’s largest bureaucracy, and systems of commerce and public services. Steadily over the past few years, they have all been getting worse.
Our housing prices are rising at astronomical rates, forcing people out of our dense urban areas. Our systems of bureaucracy are slow, delaying new development. Our education system, while the best funded in the nation, is failing our African American children, with only 28% of Black fourth graders reading at or above a basic level. Our drug abuse problem is fueling our homelessness epidemic. Fires have devastated our So-Cal communities, with rebuilding efforts mired in gridlock. BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) is facing a deficit of $350-$400 million dollars, with its only potential respite a upping of an already high sales tax. And we havent even mentioned high-speed rail
So you get the picture: California is sleepwalking towards destruction. It’s going to take some pretty big swings to get us out of our present predicament. Large change, and large change now. Unfortunately, interest groups entrenched in our large bureaucracy have opposed such large changes for a while and have, in turn, contributed to California’s decline.
Some think we can rely on the AI industry to power California into the future, but alas, the data shows we’re heading for an AI crash anytime now.
This is the situation California finds itself in as we enter the 2026 California gubernatorial election.
Outgoing Governor Gavin Newsom has presided over much of the decline I mentioned previously. I don’t think he’s solely to blame for all of this, but I do think he has not done enough to fix it, because of his beholden nature to the state’s many powerful interest groups. I wish him luck (actually, I don’t, we have better candidates!), in running for president. In his absence, it’s clear California needs a bold leader willing to turn the situation around and remake California for a new future.
Governor Gavin Newsom speaking with attendees at the 2019 California Democratic Party State Convention. Credit: Gavin Newsom, via Flickr.
The many candidates vying for California Governor this year, and there are many, 16 Democrats, and 5 Republicans, have exchanged much banter. What concerns me is that amidst the noise, we are losing sight of the most important question: Who can govern effectively and restore California as a national model of success?
First, I would like to address the elephant in the room: Donald Trump. Trump has repeatedly attacked California, withholding federal funds and threatening to deploy Minneapolis on our streets. He has aimed at our Governor, and Newsom has responded with a passionate fire that has supercharged his own 2028 prospects.
Combating Donald Trump is all well and good. What I fear, however, is that discussions over policy are getting drowned out by a less productive discussion about which candidate will best stand up to Trump.
I am confident any of the Democrats running will stand up to Trump, and that they will do it well. I am less convinced that they can all govern California effectively.
One way to show Donald Trump that his days are numbered is to present the American People with a model of excellence for what Democratic governance can look like. California, presently, is not that. We can make it that. We can lead with examples and results. We should aim to do just that.
In this article, I want to talk about two issues that I think are going under the radar in the discourse surrounding this gubernatorial election. From those, I hope to articulate a way forward for California’s future, and the philosophy its future governor should be taking notes from.
Two Issues in the Bay
First, the teachers’ strike.
After failing to come to an agreement with SFUSD (San Franssico United School District), the SF teachers’ union organized a general strike, which lasted for around a week. The San Francisco school district’s 50,000 students, many still struggling to recover from years of school closures and learning loss during the pandemic, are represented by the SF teachers union, which represents 6,000 teachers, aides, nurses, counselors, security guards, and other workers.
The strike was prompted by the District refusing demands from the union to a 8% raise over two years. An independent fact-finding report had already determined the district couldn’t afford this. The San Francisco Unified School District is, after all, under state fiscal oversight and facing a large deficit after years of chronic overspending.
Despite this, a tentative agreement was reached, with the district agreeing to the bulk of the unions’ demands. The deal came after a week of action that saw individual union members go so far as to effectively ask kids to stop learning entirely in solidarity with the strike, by urging their parents to avoid accepting independent study packets from the district. Those members alleged they were a covert attempt to continue earning state attendance revenue — a claim debunked by the state.
The strike was also notable for being the first one in fifty years, the last being in 1979. That last strike came in 1979 after the passage of Proposition 13 gutted property tax revenues, and 1,000 teachers were laid off. This time, certificated educators walked off the job just two years after winning a nearly 20% annual raise. Other sticking points included the union’s vehement opposition to the district putting $111 million into a state-mandated rainy-day fund, arguing that money could instead go to salaries and benefits.
Meanwhile, the strike cost the district between $7 million to $10 million in state attendance revenue each day schools were closed.
These outcomes are, flatly speaking, ridiculous. They amount to taking a district with strained resources, and choosing to siphon more of those resources off towards a class of workers that already has one of the highest salaries in the nation, with an average of 100k thousand a year.
California teachers deserve fair wages and benefits. But it’s worth noting they are already the best paid in the nation, despite the state in many instances having worse educational outcomes than poor states like Mississippi.
For years, it beat back legislation that would require California elementary school teachers to be trained in the “science of reading.” Decades of interdisciplinary research show that this approach — which emphasizes foundational literacy skills such as phonics, or sounding out words — is particularly effective in teaching kids how to read. It’s a key reason why children in poverty-stricken red states such as Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama have higher literacy rates than kids in California.
One would think the California Teachers Association would want to reduce these achievement gaps. Instead, it argued that mandating the science of reading would reduce teacher input over the curriculum.
Democratic lawmakers have been wary of combating the teachers’ unions, worrying that the union might very well flex its power to take down anybody who opposes them. This is not how we should be doing politics. The teachers’ union is acting like a mob enterprise, not an organization that wants the best for California students.
The power of the teachers’ unions, a large public sector union, has led to the slow degradation of the quality of California’s education system. Any prospective governor needs to be willing to take on the teachers’ union, and to make it clear that they won’t offer the union what it wants if that comes at the cost of providing a quality education to California’s students.
Already, that strikes Tom Steyer off the list. He’s vocally supported the teachers’ unions in the strike, and attacked opponents of the unions as “agents of big tech”. Big tech agent here: these thuggish unions are only dragging California kids down with them. If we are to move forward, we must elect a governor who will take them on.
Tom Steyer speaking with attendees at the 2019 California Democratic Party State Convention. Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
BART
BART (Bay Area Regional Transport) is under immense strain. The agency faces a roughly $350 million budget deficit in the next fiscal year and has warned that if it doesn’t get a windfall of cash, it will likely have to close 10 stations by January and five more by July 2027. While it has secured a $590 million loan from the state, it can spend the money only if a proposed tax measure passes, a tax measure that would raise the Bay’s already high sales tax, since the revenue will be used to pay back the loan.
In the event that the measure fails, and BART can’t safely run a scaled-back train system with 15 closed stations, BART warns that BART service could cease altogether within two years.
While it is legal for BART to endorse ballot measures, the SFMTA ( SF Metro Transit Authority) cannot under city policy, according to the City Attorney’s office. However, both can share information about dire financial realities. BART has raised public awareness about what could happen if the measure fails through social media posts, public hearings, and news coverage.
But yet whats not mentioned is the chronic mismanagement of BART. BART evicerated its finances long before it was in this “doomsday situation”.
BART spent $96 million on overtime in 2023. That’s 14 percent of the entire agency’s spend on salaries — not on new trains, not on security, not on anything else that’s important. On overtime.
A KQED investigation found that 57 employees more than doubled their base salaries through extra hours. The inspector general blamed rigid union rules, persistent staffing gaps, and an outdated timekeeping system so broken that investigators couldn’t even extract the data they needed. When Inspector General Claudette Biemeret told the board she couldn’t access overtime justification codes, Chief Financial Officer Joseph Beach contradicted her in the same meeting, claiming the data was accessible all along.
BART’s own financial reports expose how upside-down the business model has become. In the 2024 fiscal year, fare revenue was roughly $219 million. Operating expenses were about $1.02 billion. The agency’s annual report shows that employee-related costs — wages, benefits, overtime — dwarf what riders pay to use the system.
Before the pandemic, fares covered about two-thirds of operating costs. Today, they cover less than a quarter. Over the past decade, BART ridership has fallen by more than 50 percent while employee headcount rose by almost 30 percent, and total employee spending nearly doubled. That’s the trajectory that produced the “doomsaday”
The agency didn’t adapt to declining ridership by cutting costs. It assumed taxpayers would always cover the gap.
A Pittsburg/Bay Point-bound train approaching MacArthur station. Pi.1415926535, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
It would be a mistake to reward this at the ballotbox. The solution for BART to get itself out of this situation is to bring in fiscal austerity, including cutting overtime payments. A commitment to comprehensive reform, before asking the voters for a bailout, is what’s needed. If not, it’s likely that even if the ballot proposition passes, we will find ourselves in this same situation five years on.
Conclusion
Anybody who wants to be California governor should be laser focussed on these issues. Cut the pander, and be a mine layer. Too long has the status quo of decline gone on in California. We need someone in Sacramento who will speak truth to power, and actually get in the grime of government, instead of allowing these two aforementioned entrenched interests (BART, Teachers unions) continue to wreak havoc on our state
California Democrats ought to talk about results and progress, not bluster and banter.