Bear Essentials January 9th: Choose your own disaster
January 9, 2026
It's 2026 and California is facing impossible choices at every level. The feds just handed us a Colorado River water plan that reads like a choose-your-own-disaster menu. In San Francisco, trying to build housing means getting sued for doing too much AND too little. People are fleeing California for Wisconsin — not because they love cheese and frostbite, but because California’s price tag has made staying untenable. Meanwhile, AI windfalls paper over structural budget crises, and our biggest reservoir is so full we're opening spillways while still harboring flashbacks to our most recent drought cycle. It’s an election year — let’s dig in.
First and foremost…
The New California Coalition kicked off 2026 with a bristling New Year’s Day OpEd in the San Francisco Chronicle outlining the stakes of the coming elections. In her commentary, NCC President and CEO Tracy Hernandez framed up a bubbling “rebellion at the center” in California, a new constituency for results-based governance that’s already starting to weigh in at the ballot box. “Forget left versus right and ideological purity tests,” Hernandez writes. “2026 is about builders versus blockers.”
DAMMED IF YOU DO — California’s water future just got handed a choose-your-own-disaster menu. The Trump administration’s draft plan for the drought-ravaged Colorado River doesn’t offer solutions so much as ultimatums: strike a state-led deal by Valentine’s Day, or brace for federal intervention. The proposed options? Either honor century-old water rights and risk total river collapse, or spread cuts more “fairly” and slash California’s supply by over a million acre-feet a year. Translation: the Imperial Valley dries up, the Salton Sea explodes into a cloud of toxic dust, and Palm Desert golf courses become a fond memory. The Bureau of Reclamation has no preferred plan because it doesn’t want one — just leverage. Meanwhile, California faces a no-win paradox: protect its legal entitlements and risk losing everything, or share the pain and still get gut-punched. All of this as the Southwest trudges through the driest quarter-century in over a millennium. Friendly reminder: Things can always get worse.
🤫 Everything you should know
🧠 - MAHAN WEIGHS IN — Governor Gavin Newsom and Congressman Ro Khanna spent the holidays trading barbs over taxing billionaires and denying California’s spectacular talent for wasting money. Still, you can always count on San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan to skip the performance politics and offer something useful to the dialogue. In an opinion piece published by the SF Standard, Mahan slices through the noise with a novel suggestion: maybe we fix the fraud, incompetence, and fiscal black holes riddling our state government before inventing new taxes that will likely drive wealthy people and businesses out of the state. Mahan makes the case that both Newsom and Khanna are half right — and dangerously close to making things worse. If you care about California’s solvency, this one’s worth your time. — SF Standard
🤦 - ZONED AND CONFUSED
San Francisco finally tried to get serious about its housing crisis — and now it’s probably going to find itself stuck in the middle of a lawsuit sandwich. Mayor Daniel Lurie’s “Family Zoning” plan, which rezones 60% of the city to allow taller, denser housing in historically underbuilt neighborhoods, is already under legal attack. Two NIMBY-friendly groups claim it will “displace thousands of low-income residents” and “harm hundreds of historic buildings” — because nothing says equity like freezing a city in amber. Meanwhile, YIMBYs are threatening to sue for the opposite reason: the plan doesn’t go far enough. Either way, the message is clear: trying to build housing in San Francisco demands a strong masochistic streak. — SF Chronicle
😵💫 - PEOPLE ARE DITCHING CALIFORNIA…FOR WISCONSIN?!?!: — Greg and Sara Cebulski did what many Angelenos only threaten to do after staring down a $6 latte and a million-dollar teardown — they actually left. With Greg’s Discovery Channel paycheck intact, they cashed out of L.A. and landed in Appleton, Wisconsin, where $360K buys you space, sanity, and a sunroom. Same job, fewer palm trees, actual seasons. Turns out, the Midwest is quietly outpacing the coasts — not just on cost, but wage growth too. Is it any surprise, when our lawsuits blocking development are matched only by the Badger State’s number of affordable homes? — Wall Street Journal
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🎙️ 💬 🎧 - ON THE POD: UNTOLD SILICON VALLEY
Untold Silicon Valley digs up the buried bones of tech's early days—before apps, before IPOs, when orchards outnumbered engineers. It's history with bite: founders, funders, and forgotten egos who turned farmland into the motherboard of the modern world. Think origin stories, minus the PR polish and with better storytelling. — Untold Silicon Valley
💧 💧 💧 — WE’RE THE WETTEST!
Image: U.S. Drought Monitor
In a development that is sure to have drought-scarred residents rubbing their eyes or cleaning their glasses, California is the only state in the nation — including Alaska and Hawaii! — to have no dry areas of any kind. It’s an astonishing feat and testament to the power of the successive atmospheric rivers that have pounded the state early in the rainy season. Managers at the state’s second largest reservoir, Lake Oroville, have even gone so far as to crack open the country’s tallest spillway to make way for future rains. The drone video is worth a look.
🏃♂️ 💨 ✋ FAST FIVE
- 🤨 Mysterious “news” website aims to influence Californians. CalMatters
- 🤣 Take that, Sin City: Team denied trademark for “Las Vegas Athletics” NY Times
- ✂️ State sues after Trump cuts billions in federal child care funding for California. KQED
- 🪦 Longtime journalist/constituent remembers the late Rep. Doug Lamalfa. CalMatters
- 🤖 AI windfall helps CA narrow projected $3B budget deficit. LA Times
