Being what it is, California has a mélange of complex public policy issues – some of them fully blown crises – that defy resolution year after year, decade after decade.

Rather than recognize and deal with their complexities, the state’s politicians tend to condense responses into money. K-12 education exemplifies the syndrome. The state’s nearly 6 million public school students perennially fail to make the cut in national tests of academic achievement, often trailing states that spend far less per-pupil on their schools.

It indicates that money is only one factor, and perhaps not the most important one, in educating children. Nevertheless, the political debate over the state’s educational deficiencies begins and ends with how much money is being spent, thereby providing a convenient excuse for failure.

California’s newest crisis, the nation’s highest level of homelessness in both absolute and relative terms, is following a similar arc. Why upwards of 200,000 Californians, and probably more, are homeless involves factors that, much like educational aptitude, are as individual as fingerprints. While theories on causes and potential cures abound, once again the politics of the issue is focused on money – how much to spend, who spends it and who, if anyone, is held accountable for outcomes.

The politics of homelessness – or rather of spending on homelessness – appear to be entering a very contentious phase. Early in his governorship, Gavin Newsom appointed himself as the state’s homelessness czar and during the first three years of his governorship (2018-21) the state spent nearly $10 billion on battling the social malady, according to a new state report.

The money paid for 35 different programs administered by nine different state agencies.

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Ben Christopher | Contributed

Independent expenditure committees funded by special interest groups are spending millions of dollars to make their picks in the California primary. In some races, they are clearly supporting or opposing candidates. In others, the strategy is more complicated.

If you haven’t noticed, your mail carrier certainly has: Election season has arrived in California and with it, the regular flood of political ads from unions, corporations and other special interest groups hoping to influence your vote.

Though contributions made directly to political candidates are capped by state law , no such limits apply to “independent expenditure” committees — so long as those outside influences are, in fact, independent and don’t coordinate with the campaigns they’re trying to help.

With early voting already underway and just two weeks to go before the June 7 primary, millions of dollars of help is now inundating California, showing up in races up and down the ballot. Perhaps you’ve driven past a curious bobble-headed billboard , had your mailbox stuffed with mailers sponsored by innocuous-sounding neighborhood groups or been puzzled by campaign ads that seem to be promoting the wrong candidate .

That’s all the handwork of what California election watchers refer to simply as “I.E.”

Though independent political spending is still dwarfed in California by old-fashioned direct contributions to candidates, it can play an outsized role in competitive elections, said Ann Ravel, who has served as the top campaign finance watchdog for both the state of California and the federal government . As an unsuccessful Democratic candidate for state Senate in one of 2020’s most fiercely competitive legislative races , she knows from first-hand experience.

“When you see it in person, it’s a lot different than when you see it as a regulator,” said Ravel, whose South Bay race against fellow Democrat Dave Cortese became a $6.2 million proxy battle between organized labor groups, housing interests and tech companies including Uber and Lyft. “I remember thinking, ‘Oh God, now I have to go to all these meetings with all these people and suck up to them?’”

Unlike relatively small individual contributions, six-figure spending by a single interest group in a close race can be difficult for a candidate to ignore, she said. “You have to be able to compete…I think that’s the problem.”

Another common feature of independent expenditure committees, said Claremont McKenna College political science professor Jack Pitney, is that they most often play the role of bad cop, attacking candidates they want to knock off.

“It provides a certain degree of cover to the candidate who benefits,” he said. “They can’t be accused of going negative.”

Even for seasoned politicos and election reporters, the rivers of cash can be complicated to track — and sometimes even convoluted to make sense of. For the fascinated, outraged or perplexed voter, consider this your user’s guide.

SHADES OF BLUE

Accounting and financial oversight doesn’t always inflame political passions, but the race to become California’s next controller is shaping up to be among the most competitive statewide races. With five well-financed candidates — four of them Democrats — and no clear front-runner, it’s a remarkably open race. Just in terms of money raised by the campaigns, themselves, it’s the highest-dollar statewide race.

The conventional wisdom is that Lanhee Chen , the lone Republican, will snag one of the two spots for the November ballot. That leaves the four Democrats fighting for the second spot.

Enter JobsPAC, an IE committee sponsored by the California Chamber of Commerce.

“The race for a spot in the general election is a jump ball between the four major Democratic candidates — each start with limited name ID and no statewide bully pulpit for communications,” reads a strategic memo produced by the committee earlier this month.

Its Democrat of choice: state Sen. Steve Glazer of Walnut Creek. The committee’s goal, the memo continued, is to get out the pro-Glazer message “at a scale and frequency usually reserved for top of the ticket statewide and/or high profile congressional races.”

“Just to have an open seat for constitutional office is not too common,” said Marty Wilson, who oversees the Chamber’s IE activity. “We’ve had a longstanding relationship with Steve, so from our perspective for an open seat it was just natural that we would back him.”

CalMatters 2022 Voter Guide What Californians need to know to prepare to vote Go to Voter Guide

Big business throwing its financial weight behind a preferred Democrat is not a new phenomenon in California . Given the lowly state of the state’s Republican Party, which hasn’t fielded a successful statewide candidate in California since 2006, the Chamber, along with much of the state’s business community, has long seen the pragmatism in backing moderate Democrats against more progressive alternatives in both statewide races and in legislative and congressional districts.

As a result, the most competitive races across the state often don’t pit Democrats versus Republicans, but candidates from different ideological factions within the state’s ruling party. It’s often in those races where independent expenditure committees funded by business, labor and other competing interests do electoral battle.

This year, those top targets for IE cash include an East Bay state Senate race , featuring Democrats Lily Mei and Aisha Wahab and a Sacramento state Senate standoff between Democrats Angelique Ashby and Dave Jones. In both races, those candidates are almost certain to grab the top two spots needed to make it to the November ballot. But money is flooding in early anyway as competing interests race to secure a healthy margin on Election Day, sully their opponents’ standing with voters and mount a financial show of force.

Other races attracting big spending this election season include competitive (though likewise thoroughly Democratic) Assembly races in San Diego , Hayward , San Mateo , Inglewood and Palmdale .

And while the biggest race for independent expenditures this year so far is the competitive contest for attorney general, in second place is the thoroughly non-competitive race for superintendent of public instruction . As of Friday, nearly $1.8 million had been spent to support incumbent Tony Thurmond. Virtually all of that came from a single committee funded by teachers and school worker unions.

Why spend so much to boost a relatively safe candidate in such a low-voltage race ?

In a statement, Jeff Gozzo, a strategist with the committee, simply said: “Thurmond has shown real leadership for students, parents and educators.”

THE ‘PICK YOUR OPPONENT’ PLOY

If you’ve been listening to the radio lately, you might have heard an ad that sounds as if it backs Democratic Attorney General Rob Bonta , but which dedicated a curious amount of airtime to his most conservative opponent, Republican Eric Early.

Rather than warn voters about Bonta’s better-funded challengers, Republican Nathan Hochman or unaffiliated Anne Marie Schubert , the ad noted that Early is a “true conservative,” a “huge Trump supporter,” “a big Second Amendment defender” and a “leader” in the recall effort last year to oust Gov. Gavin Newsom from office.

The ad was sponsored by the independent expenditure group Communities for Justice Supporting Rob Bonta for Attorney General 2022, which is primarily funded by uber-wealthy Bay Area liberals including Quinn Delaney and Patty Quillin, along with the state’s prison guard union, which endorsed Bonta.

Last week, another Bonta-backing committee reported spending another $250,000 to “oppose” Early.

What gives?

Boosting your own candidate while not-so-subtly raising the profile of your preferred opponent is a tried-and-true tactic in California. In 2018, Newsom pulled the same maneuver in the lead up to the primary by blasting Republican John Cox . That was an effort to herd the fractured GOP base around Cox’s candidacy, ultimately to the detriment of Antonio Villaraigosa, a fellow Democrat and moderate alternative.

“ Three-dimensional political chess ,” is how San Francisco Chronicle reporter Joe Garofoli characterized the pro-Bonta ad. “This is how you get a Dem/Rep runoff,” tweeted Democratic political analyst Paul Mitchell . The California GOP, which endorsed Hochman, denounced the ad as a “ misinformation campaign .”

Dan Newman, a consultant for Communities for Justice, said the messaging on Early is consistent with the committee’s own polling that he is most likely to finish second behind Bonta in June, beating out the much better financed Hochman and Schubert for a spot on the November ballot. Early, who ran for attorney general in 2018 and helped organize the 2021 Newsom recall effort, is “already relatively well known and well-loved in MAGA-land,” said Newman.

But the messaging also reflects the political calculation that Bonta would likely have an easier time against Trump-boosting an ultra-conservative , rather than a relatively moderate Republican or a party-less prosecutor famous for bringing the “Golden State Killer” to justice.

The Bonta campaign, itself, seems to have absorbed that lesson as well. In a recent press release, his campaign touted Republican opponent Hochman’s unclear stance on abortion . As messaging, it performs double-duty: celebrating Bonta’s progressive credentials on the issue for the Democratic Party’s base, while casting doubt on Hochman’s conservative bona fides with GOP voters.

But opponent shopping can be a risky game, said political scientist Pitney. In the 1966 governor’s race, Pat Brown “dumped a lot of opposition on George Christopher,” the moderate Republican mayor of San Francisco, in order to steer the GOP nomination to whom Brown’s camp believed to be the less electable alternative.

That “weaker” candidate, Pitney points out: “This washed up old actor named Ronald Reagan,” who went on to beat Brown by 15 percentage points.

What does the IE want?

When a politician’s campaign spends money, it’s easy to deduce what they’re after: They want to win their election.

Spending by independent expenditure committees — which sometimes cobble together contributions from many sources and may either support or oppose a candidate — can be a little more complicated.

This month a committee funded by the state’s landlord lobby and the California Association of Realtors, spent roughly $150,000 to support the candidacy of Fremont City Councilmember Teresa Keng, a Democrat hoping to represent north San Jose . But the group is not solely interested in Keng. It spent more than $20,000 each on both former Assemblymember Kansen Chu and former San Jose City Councilmember Lan Diep, two other Democrats in the same race.

What do Keng, Chu and Diep have in common?

They aren’t Assemblymember Alex Lee, a self-described Democratic Socialist who supports rent control and believes the state should be providing housing directly to renters . So far, the committee has also spent more than $300,000 to defeat him.

That multi-candidate strategy might not be apparent to a South Bay resident who gets one of the committee’s mailers. To find out, a curious voter would have to look up the committee’s name — Housing Providers for Responsible Solutions — on the state’s online campaign finance portal .

While the inclusion of “housing providers” in that committee’s name offers a strong clue about its funding and policy preferences, not all IE groups are so instructively titled.

A notable example: San Diego Families Opposing Georgette Gómez, a significant spender in the race to fill the seat of former Assemblymember Lorena Gonzalez , who stepped down in January to lead the state’s largest labor organization and has endorsed Gómez. Her chief opponent is former City Councilmember David Alvarez. Some of the top funding for the “families” group comes from a list of similarly unhelpfully-named committees: Californians for Jobs and a Strong Economy and Keeping Californians Working.

Reported donations to those committees show that the ultimate source of the cash is a who’s who of some of the largest business interests in the state, including Uber, Amazon, Sempra Energy and Chevron.

And though a committee may carry on spending from one election to the next under the same name, that doesn’t mean its funders — or even its overall political purpose — stays the same. Another recent contributor to the San Diego Families committee is the Coalition for Public Safety Reform, Training and Transparency.

It was initially established by the Los Angeles Police Protective League, the union of LAPD officers, but the league was removed as a sponsor earlier this year. Since then, funding has come from organizations further south: the Deputy Sheriffs’ Association of San Diego County and Sycuan Band of Kumeyaay Nation near El Cajon.

Recycling existing committees for new political purposes and mixing and matching existing coalitions behind new names are both common practice, said Doug Morrow, a Democratic political researcher who tracks independent expenditures.

“The sponsors change, but the committees live on and the consultants get paid,” he said.

A double-edged sword

For a candidate, having a well-financed committee in your corner that can spend unlimited gobs of cash has its perks. But sometimes all that financial help comes at a political cost.

In the race to replace Autumn Burke, the former state Assemblymember who unexpectedly stepped down from her Inglewood seat earlier this year, candidates Robert Pullen-Miles and Tina McKinnor have both been beneficiaries and targets of an inordinate amount of independent expenditures.

The biggest spenders rushing in to assist Pullen-Miles, a former Burke staffer who has her endorsement : oil giants Chevron and Valero through a longstanding committee called Coalition to Restore California’s Middle Class. In an overwhelmingly Democratic district that extends to the beach, that isn’t likely to be a popular association. Pullen-Miles’ opponents are using that to their advantage, characterizing him as the candidate of “big oil.”

McKinnor, a former Burke staffer who left that post on bad terms, and who was also a high-ranking organizer in the state Democratic Party, has the backing of progressive groups and much of organized labor. But she, too, has some industry spenders in her camp that have proven to be a political liability. The biggest spending pro-McKinnor committee, the Alliance for California’s Tomorrow, is funded in part by the tobacco company, Philip Morris. With that connection in hand, the Pullen-Miles campaign threw together a website drawing attention to his opponent’s “ dirty dollars .”

As an illustration of just how convoluted these financial interventions can be: When Burke, Pullen-Miles’ backer, was first elected to the Legislature in 2014, the Alliance for California’s Tomorrow spent more than $60,000 to help her.

A similar kind of guilt by financial association has come to dominate the race to fill the state Senate seat in Sacramento to be vacated by termed-out Democrat Richard Pan. There, former Insurance Commissioner Jones has been the subject of a gauntlet of negative ads funded by Future PAC. Most notable among them — a billboard emblazoned with a Jones bobblehead .

Future PAC, which has spent nearly $500,000 so far to hammer Jones, serves as a clearinghouse for a wide variety of industry groups and unions, including hospital associations, pharmaceutical companies, agricultural interests and the umbrella organization for the state’s police officer unions.

But Jones and his supporters have fastened onto one contributor in particular: Californians for Jobs and a Strong Economy, another business-backed IE committee, supported in part by oil and energy companies. “Big Oil wants Angelique Ashby,” says a mailer from California Alliance, an IE funded by California Environmental Voters, Consumer Attorneys of California and Opportunity PAC.

Ashby, a Sacramento City Councilmember, responded in a tweet Monday that she has kept a pledge not to take fossil fuel money in her campaign.

“The IEs have the money and so whoever the IEs are for or against, that’s used to define the candidate,” said Steve Maviglio, a Democratic political consultant who supports Ashby and has volunteered with her campaign. “They’re not helping.”

• DISCLAIMER: The opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by the various author’s articles on this Opinion piece or elsewhere online or in the newspaper where we have articles with the header “COLUMN/EDITORIAL & OPINION” do not necessarily reflect the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints or official policies of the Publisher, Editor, Reporters or anybody else in the Staff of the Hemet and San Jacinto Chronicle Newspaper.

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A new California program to financially reward college students for volunteering has drawn national attention — but less than half of its budgeted money is going to actual student aid.

The California Volunteers College Corps program, backed by $159 million in mostly state money, promises to award up to $10,000 to 6,668 low-income students who volunteer in K-12 education, on climate action or to reduce food insecurity.

That only works out to $66.7 million for students, though. So where is the other $92 million going?

Mostly it’s going to hiring and administrative costs despite no guarantee the program will continue past 2024. Some experts think that money split makes sense because students could benefit from training and there’s a chance the program would get additional funding in the future. Other experts think the money should go directly to students, so fewer of them will have to work on top of their other responsibilities.

“I think this is a classic question of is it better to give a person a fish or teach them how to fish,” said Nora Silver, a professor who studies nonprofits at UC Berkeley’s business school and herself led a volunteer program. To her, the program does both: It gives students money directly and includes a lot of programming to train students and connect what they learned as volunteers to the job market.

Nor does she find the total costs of the program out of whack. The budget details to build out the network of colleges and nonprofits — including career, academic and financial aid advising for student volunteers — are “necessary to offer a well-functioning program,” said Silver.

Related:

The flipside of that argument is to just give out the fish — or cash — directly to students. That’s what Robert Shireman would have preferred. He’s a higher-education director at the nonprofit Century Foundation and had a senior position overseeing higher-education policy in the Obama administration.

“I would have plowed the money directly into financial aid based on need and not a new temporary service program,” said Shireman, who noted that many low-income students already work to afford college.

The program is set to last two years, though Gov. Gavin Newsom suggested at a Jan. 18 press event that he’d ask the Legislature to expand the program “if this thing works.” Part of the money will go toward an external evaluation of the program.

Silver thinks the goal is expansion. The program reminds her of the early days of AmeriCorps, the federal volunteer service created in the 1990s. “I don’t think anybody’s going into this saying this is a two-year program,” she said.

Where does the majority of the money go? Almost all of that $92 million that’s not going directly to students is meant for program costs, according to a budget CalMatters received from California Volunteers, the state office running the program. Forty-five colleges and universities — nearly all public — will share the money.

Of that, $77 million is for a whole array of operations work to build up the volunteer program. That includes money for the colleges whose students will be in this program to develop their local programs and partner with the nonprofits where students will work. Costs include:

• hiring consultants and staff, acquiring extra office space and IT equipment;

• recruiting the actual student volunteers and funding the nonprofits where they’ll do their volunteer work;

• providing students career and academic advice plus training events;

• and an external evaluator, who’ll be hired at a later date, to assess the volunteer program.

Another $15 million is reserved for California Volunteers personnel.

Not only is the program a way for students to give back to their community but it’s also an opportunity that allows students to be “learning about a career and also earning while learning that career,” said California Community Colleges Chancellor Eloy Ortiz Oakley.

But a state program for connecting students to careers already exists. Last year’s state budget injected $200 million into a new work-study program for college students, with $300 million more planned for this year.

How will students get money – and when?

Student participants will begin volunteering through the program fall of 2022. Upon completing 450 hours during the academic year, each will get $10,000.

The money is split up into two buckets — $7,000 paid out regularly and a final lump sum of $3,000 after a year of service. As students fulfill their hours, they’ll be paid as if they’re campus employees through their college or university’s payroll system. Even if students don’t volunteer the full 450 hours, they’ll receive a prorated amount of the initial $7,000. But to receive the final $3,000, students will need to complete the full 450 hours of service. Unlike the federal AmeriCorps, undocumented students may participate in the California volunteer program. State officials want 20% of the volunteers to be undocumented students who receive state financial aid. They’re eligible for the same $10,000 available to other students, but their pot will come from state dollars only, while federal funds will cover a portion of $3,000 other students will be awarded.

“State officials want 20% of the volunteers to be undocumented students who receive state financial aid. Their pot will come from state dollars only.”

But all that extra money may create a headache for some volunteers. The $7,000 volunteers work toward counts as income, which may “impact a student’s financial aid,” reads a program FAQ . Campuses are urged to work with their financial aid offices to “mitigate any impact” for students. Also, the $7,000 is taxable income, meaning taxes will be deducted each paycheck.

Only full-time students will be eligible for the service program.

The College Corps state volunteer program builds on a smaller effort California launched in 2020 , about six months into the COVID-19 pandemic. Though that smaller effort had the goal of attracting 250 students, ultimately 199 participated, according to performance review data that Julie Goggins, a California Volunteers spokesperson, shared with CalMatters. And some — 7% — didn’t complete their full hours of service and so weren’t awarded the full amount for which they were eligible. Most students — 90% — also acquired professional development skills, according to performance review assessments. Some colleges from the pilot round are also participating in College Corps.

A bigger big picture

The budget for the volunteer program makes sense, but the devil’s in the details, said Alexandra Graddy-Reed, a professor who studies nonprofits at the University of Southern California. She likes that students who volunteer will receive various layers of advising. It’s another way for the colleges and the state to expose those low-income students to opportunities wealthier students often already receive through their families’ connections, Graddy-Reed said.

All those services require more personnel and hiring people is expensive, which helps explain the program costs, she said. The mix of volunteerism and various advising “sounds good to me” as a way to spend tax dollars, Graddy-Reed added. Still, she’ll want to see the specific hiring decisions colleges will make at the local level and whether most of the operational funding will be for College Corps or for general campus operations.

Campus-level contract amounts won’t be available until the summer, according to Goggins.

Some campuses have begun advertising their programs. UC Davis and three other Sacramento-area colleges will share up to $16 million for about 1,000 student volunteers. Fresno State and Fresno City College will bring on about 120 students over two years.

Shireman, who preferred to have the money instead go directly to some of the poorest college students. pointed out that Newsom vetoed a bill last year that would have given cash awards or fully covered tuition to more than 100,000 additional college students.

Newsom and lawmakers have dramatically expanded the state financial aid program in other ways that give students aid directly, like cash and grants to fully cover tuition. But those are all ongoing programs, while the money for the volunteer program is just two years. From a publicity standpoint, it’s probably better to create a temporary program, such as College Corps, than to briefly expand access to ongoing grants only to have them disappear soon after, Shireman mused.

Mikhail Zinshteyn | Contributed

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The Biden administration wants families with children to know that there is roughly $193 billion waiting for them — all they need to do is file their taxes to claim it.

That estimated total is what remains of the expanded child tax credit, and the administration is concerned that some of those most in need of the assistance may be the least likely to get what is due to them.

President Joe Biden increased the payments and expanded who was eligible as part of his coronavirus relief package. While most families already received half of the credit as monthly payments last year, they’ll lose out on the remaining balance unless they file their taxes.

Vice President Kamala Harris, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and White House senior adviser Gene Sperling held a virtual event Tuesday to encourage people to send their tax forms to the IRS, including those whose incomes are so low that they might not have traditionally filed.

Harris said that families should go to childtaxcredit.gov to check their eligibility. The tax filing deadline is April 18.

“The truth is there are people across our nation who work hard every day and still struggle to get by and it should not be this way in our country,” Harris said. “You still need to file your taxes. That is the only way to receive the second half of what you are owed.”

The public push is occurring at a critical juncture for both the U.S. economy and the child tax credit program. Inflation is running at a nearly 40-year high, meaning that the additional money from the credit will help offset the costs of food, gasoline and other goods as the U.S. is still emerging from the pandemic. But efforts to renew the expanded credits for another year have been blocked in the Senate, making it important for advocates to demonstrate how the credits have reduced child poverty by an estimated 40%.

Yellen said research suggests that the payments are among the most promising policies for combating poverty, highlighting recent research to suggest that the money was linked to higher brain activity in the babies of poor mothers.

“There is very little equivocation that these policies lift up the lives of millions of people, and, in so doing, lift up the country,” Yellen said.

Several lawmakers and nonprofits are taking part in the outreach, and there are plans to hold events in all 50 states and Puerto Rico during the tax filing season. Yellen noted that nonprofits are often better at reaching out to poorer populations.

As part of the $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package, Biden increased the child tax credits to $3,600 annually for each child aged 5 or under and $3,000 for those who are ages 6 to 17. The government began to send the payments out on a monthly basis starting last July, meaning that there are six months worth of payments waiting to be claimed by people filing their taxes.

The administration estimates that roughly 58 million households would qualify for the credit, which average $3,300 and could be used to offset an existing tax bill or be paid out as a refund.

Workers without children could also get additional help this tax season if they file. The relief package nearly tripled the earned income tax credit for workers without dependent children, meaning that 17 million people could receive credits worth $1,500.

The expanded child tax credits were seen as slashing child poverty to the lowest levels on record. A recent analysis by researchers at Washington University in St. Louis and Appalachian State University found no evidence that the monthly payments caused parents to stop working. But critics say that making the credits larger and fully refundable — which ensures that poorer families qualify for the entire benefit — leads to fewer people taking jobs that pay and creates a drag on the economy.

Biden pushed to continue the expanded child tax for another year as part of his “Build Back Better” agenda. But in an evenly split Senate, West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin opposed the expanded credit out of concerns that its price tag could increase the deficit and worsen inflation.

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The first batch of physical checks are estimated to begin going out on Oct. 6, according to a schedule on the California Franchise Board’s website.

The state has already deposited more than 2.5 million payments of up to $1,100 into the bank accounts of eligible Californians whose information was already on hand with the state tax agency as the preferred refund method.

California stimulus checks: October tax deadline looms for payment eligibility For those not signed up for the direct deposit refund option, checks will be mailed out starting next week and will continue to be issued through the beginning of 2022.

California will be sending out the Golden State Stimulus checks to eligible residents in batches based on the last three digits of the recipient’s ZIP code.

The following timeline provided by the Franchise Tax Board shows when the payments are anticipated to be sent:

Last 3 digits of ZIP code Mailing time-frames

000-044 10/06/2021 through 10/27/2021

045-220 10/18/2021 through 11/05/2021

221-375 11/1/2021 through 11/19/2021

376-584 11/15/2021 through 12/03/2021

585-719 11/29/2021 through 12/17/2021

720-927 12/13/2021 through 12/31/2021

928-999 12/27/2021 through 1/11/2022

(California Franchise Tax Board)

It will take up to three weeks for payments to be received once mailed out, according to the agency. California’s Wait Times dashboard has more details on tax returns and refund processing time frames. Under the Golden State Stimulus program, California will send a $600 payment to qualifying residents, plus another $500 if they claimed at least one dependent on their tax return last year.

Residents eligible for the program are those who: submitted their 2020 tax return (or do so by the Oct. 15 deadline); earned between $1 and $75,000 last year (adjusted gross income plus wages) last year; have a Social Security Number (SSN) or an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN); and can’t be claimed as a dependent by another taxpayer.

Golden State Stimulus checks are expected to provide a total of $12 billion in direct relief to Californians financially impacted by the ongoing pandemic, with an estimated two-thirds of residents benefiting from what’s been touted as the largest state tax rebate in U.S. history.

The direct payments are part of a $100-billion budget plan signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom over the summer, and the program is being funded in part by federal COVID-19 recovery funds.

Tracy Bloom | Contributed

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Now is the time.

The federal funding spigot has been turned on full force to combat COVID-19. States also are putting money into the effort. Money is flowing to local, state, and federal agencies. Money is flowing to private contractors. Typical protocols and safeguards have — by necessity — been left behind in the rush to protect the country from a pandemic unprecedented in modern times.

So now is the time to watch closely where that money flows.

Chances are good that your local government will be receiving some share of the funding. Ask your local officials where they are spending that funding and then follow up. Was it received? How much? Where did it go? And, most importantly, how is the spending going to make a meaningful difference in helping prevent the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic from being just as bad as the first?

We already know that there was ample warning of a viral outbreak like this. For decades there has been discussion about how to respond to this kind of scenario. Billions of dollars have been spent on various efforts to prevent, detect, and track outbreaks. Countries like South Korea and Singapore put some of those systems into operation shortly after the novel coronavirus outbreak was announced in Wuhan, China. The United States and other countries, as we now see, were caught flat-footed. So, what will happen now that the world has changed? How will all of this government funding be spent?

There are many lessons here from past disasters. I call out three questions to consider below.

Is this spending going to have meaningful impact, or was it a way to please a local constituency?

We all know that Congress spreads the money around. It does not necessarily go to the places that will have the highest impact on public health or public safety. It often is doled out during the bill drafting process in the proportion necessary to win votes. Idaho gets some money so the senator from Idaho will back the bill. New York gets some money to win the sizeable New York congressional delegation’s support. In the Atlantic, Steven Brill wrote an excellent piece about efforts to protect the United States from terrorism after the September 11 attacks. It describes a scene in which Richard Clarke, the former White House anti-terror chief, burned a bagel in his toaster at his house in Rappahannock County, Virginia, a town of about 7,400 people. Brill wrote:

“This monster fire truck with four volunteer firemen — two teenagers and two guys my age — arrived,” Clarke recalls. “They could barely drive the thing. It had a logo on it calling it ‘Attack 2.’ ” Clarke was stunned to find out that the truck had been paid for in part by a $160,000 federal homeland-security grant.

As you track how money is being spent in your area, you’ll want to ask: Was the contractor hired for this job was the best equipped to meet the task or were they chosen because they lobbied the hardest?

When you find out that a piece of funding has been allocated, ask about who will actually do the work. Ask whether the project will go out for bid. If it is substantial, it likely will, even if the bid process is swift. Those proposals can be requested and reviewed. And you can size up for yourself whether the contract who won the bid was ready for the job. The most infamous recent example of a mismatch between the scope of a job and the size of a company came after a tiny company in rural Montana won a $300 million contract to restore power in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. Alan Gomez at USA Today wrote about a month after the hurricane:

Whitefish — based in Whitefish, Mont., the hometown of Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke — was formed two years ago and had two employees when it was awarded a contract with PREPA six days after the massive hurricane struck on Sept. 20. Since then, Whitefish has struggled to get power crews to Puerto Rico to repair the ravaged electrical grid. As of Sunday, 70% of the U.S. territory remained without power. Democrats and Republicans in Congress have called for investigations. … The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) also raised doubts. FEMA issued a statement on Friday that it was not involved in awarding the contract and said it had not yet approved any reimbursement money for Whitefish.

Who is overseeing this spending to make sure a fraudster doesn’t make off with the money?

When things are moving fast and dollars are flowing freely, people with a tendency toward mendacity find a way to take advantage. This goes way beyond price gouging. There have been numerous stories about people taking advantage of donations and government spending in the wake of disasters. Pay attention to agency investigations and audits. Often someone inside an agency gets wind of something going awry. There is a whistleblower complaint or an audit requested. You can ask for a copy. This can happen early or years later. In 2008, seven years after the September 11 terror attacks, Natarajan Venkataram, who had been the director of management information systems at the New York Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, was sentenced in U.S. District Court in Manhattan to 15 years in prison for the theft of more than $9 million dollars.

Much of the money was taken from federal funds meant for the creation of a computer system to track and identify forensic evidence and identify victims of the September 11th terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center. … [I]nvestigators successfully traced financial transactions to India, which so far has resulted in the City’s recovering $6.12 million that was embezzled in the scheme.

So, pay attention to what is happening right now. It could make the difference between whether we are ready for the next wave of COVID-19 or whether we are once again caught unprepared.

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