We’ve got a great one for you this week, kicking off with our President & CEO arguing that voters should see the receipts before they approve the next tax. Meanwhile, El Niño showed up early and in a particularly foul mood. About 100,000 state workers set a strike date demanding more of…pretty much everything. And in Kern County, children are riding sheep.

But first, a clarion call to action! Monday, October 19 is the final day to register to vote in the November 3 general election. If you haven’t yet registered, get it done!

NCC WEIGHS IN ON PROPOSITION 41

In recent years California has dumped tens of billions of dollars into housing and homelessness programs, spread across nine state agencies and 30 different programs. When an independent audit finally dug in to see if the programs were cost-effective, the report was basically one huge shoulder shrug emoji. The state had never collected the data to find out.

One program promised 20,000 housing units for unhoused people with serious mental illness. Six years later, it had delivered fewer than 1,800. Seems like a problem!

That’s the crux of the case NCC President & CEO Tracy Hernandez makes for Prop. 41 in the Los Angeles Daily News. Prop. 41 directs the independent State Auditor, a nonpartisan office that already exists, to run public financial and performance audits of any program that asks voters for new special-tax money. The audits would repeat every four years. The initiative also bars new state taxes that exclude revenues from the state spending limit. “It’s hard to believe this doesn’t already exist,” Hernandez muses.

Voters seem to agree. The Yes on 41 campaign commissioned a survey from Public Opinion Strategies and FM3. In it, 84% of voters said state politicians don’t spend tax dollars efficiently. You’d be hard-pressed to get 84% of voters to agree that oxygen is good for breathing these days.

CalMatters has another face-melting example of frivolously frittered funds at the California High Speed Rail Authority. We won’t go into it here to keep our own blood pressure in check, but it’s worth reading if you’re curious about whether or not your tax dollars are paying for trips to a cigar lounge. (Spoiler alert: They are!)

Opponents of Prop. 41 call it a poison pill for Proposition 40, the “billionaire tax,” because 41 cancels 40 if it gets more votes. Maybe. Our view is simple though: If your tax proposal can’t survive an independent audit, the audit probably isn’t the problem.

Hernandez calls the approach “Radical Sensibility.” That’s NCC in a nutshell.

<READ THE OP-ED>

EVERYTHING YOU SHOULD KNOW

🏠 CEQA’S CLOSE-UP

Way back in 1970, the top song in America was Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” That same year, Governor Ronald Reagan signed the California Environmental Quality Act. In retrospect, it was pretty on-the-nose. Since then, the law has become the cudgel of choice for anyone wanting to block, well, pretty much anything they don’t like. This November, voters will get their own crack at the law. Prop. 45 would set deadlines for environmental review of “essential” projects, including housing, roads, water systems, broadband and wildfire work. (You know, the stuff a modern civilization needs to operate.) Agencies would have 365 business days to decide on an environmental impact report, and courts would have 270 days to resolve lawsuits. Public comments would get a 45-day window. A judge could halt only the part of a project that breaks the rules, not the whole project.

Did we just hear someone say “Radical Sensibility”?

Opponents of the initiative lament its lack of surgicalness. Ahem. We’ve been doing “surgical” for years, one project type at a time, and we still find ourselves at the bottom of a soul-crushing housing hole. Asking a review process to finish on a deadline hardly seems unreasonable. — KQED

🌊 DAM SCARY STUFF

California climate super-scientist Daniel Swain says the 2026 El Niño “has already become the strongest on record by almost any metric.” He puts the odds of a wetter-than-average winter at 90% to 95%. The coast has already been punched in the face by a preview. Waves from Tropical Storm Rachel splintered the boardwalk on the Long Beach peninsula and gobbled up beachfront homes. Farther south, a crack opened in the bluff below Pacific Coast Highway at El Morro, and Caltrans cut southbound PCH to one lane.

The bigger concern is inland. A new State Auditor report found 57 California dams in poor or unsatisfactory condition. The 40 riskiest sit near densely populated coastal cities, and their failure “could collectively endanger as many as 1.5 million people and cause more than $265 billion in economic damage.” After the Oroville spillway failure in 2017, lawmakers gave the Department of Water Resources the power to penalize owners of unsafe dams. The auditor found the department “has never taken punitive enforcement actions.” With a cost of roughly $28 billion to make the necessary fixes, we think we know why they didn’t get done. — CalMatters

💼 OUT OF OFFICE

California’s biggest state employee union is planning to not show up to work on October 21. SEIU Local 1000, which represents roughly 100,000 workers, authorized the one-day strike with 96.2% support among voting members after contract negotiations with the state collapsed. At issue? Pay, health care and additional remote work. The Newsom administration wants the Public Employment Relations Board to stop the strike, arguing that the union hasn’t completed required mediation procedures or adequately protected essential services. Now the battle has shifted to who is deemed “essential” in the event of a strike. Quite frankly, it’s kind of a weird negotiation.

Also weird: California’s reliably pro-union political establishment now finds itself on management’s side of a picket line. — Sacramento Bee

🐑 ONLY IN CALIFORNIA: SHEEP THRILLS

We’ve spent a lot of time in today’s newsletter talking about who gets to audit whom. In the Kern River Valley, accountability is simpler. You either stay on the sheep or you don’t.

Tomorrow night, the Kernville Chamber of Commerce hosts the Kernville Stampede Rodeo at the John E. McNally Arena. Gates open at 5:00 p.m., and the action starts at 6:00. Grown adults will ride bulls and rope calves. That’s cool, but the real headliner is mutton busting, where small children climb onto a sheep and hang on for dear life. Few muttons actually get busted. The wily ruminants regularly buck their pint-sized riders.

By all accounts, Kernville is a great place for a rodeo. It started as Rogersville, named for a prospector who found gold while chasing his runaway mule, which feels very rodeo-adjacent. A saloon opened in 1863 and the town became Whiskey Flat. A year later it was Kernville. Tomorrow, it’ll be the center of the mutton-busting universe.

Explore Kernville

🏃‍♂️ 💨 ✋ FAST FIVE

1. 📉 Bay Area blues. In the 2026 Silicon Valley Poll from Joint Venture Silicon Valley, 60% of Bay Area residents say the region is on the wrong track and 46% say they’re likely to move away. — San Jose Business Journal
2. 🔌 Hungry machines. BloombergNEF projects that data centers could use 20% of U.S. electricity by 2035, up from about 6% today, which matters a great deal to a state that already has some of the country’s highest power prices. — Global X
3. 🏢 Vacancy, no conversions. Nearly a third of San Francisco’s office space is empty, yet the city hasn’t finished a single office-to-housing conversion, and advocates hope a new tax incentive will change that. — New York Times
4. 🏅 Home-team Nobel. Stanford’s Robert E. Hall, who was born in Palo Alto, shares this year’s economics Nobel with Michael Woodford for work on how governments and central banks steady a volatile economy. — Stanford News
5. 🥪 Pastrami with a side of sticker shock. Marc Canter, owner of LA’s legendary Canter’s Deli, is getting crushed by high costs. The restaurant’s monthly LADWP bill has climbed from about $24,000 to $36,000 in four months. Insurance has spiked to $100,000 a year. Meat? Try $36,000 a week. — SFGATE

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