March 18, 2026 · Budget Subcommittee No 4 Climate Crisis Resources Energy And Transportation · 34,111 words · 20 speakers · 702 segments
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Got it, kid. There you go. Good, Good. Good morning and welcome to Assembly Budget Subcommittee number four on Climate crisis, Resource, Energy and Transportation. Today we're really pleased to welcome Secretary Garcia and the departments under the California Environmental Protection agency. We have 10 presentations today, so a lot to get through. For each presentation item, I'll ask each of the witnesses in the agenda to introduce themselves before they begin their testimony. At the end of the presentation, members of the subcommittee may ask questions, make comments or request a presentation on any of the non presentation items. We will not be taking a vote today on any of the items on the agenda. After all the items are heard, we will take public comment. For members of the public who wish to provide public comment, please limit your testimony to items that are on the agenda. Each member of the public will have one minute to speak. Let's begin with Secretary Garcia's opening remarks. Secretary Garcia, happy to have you.
Thank you. Good morning.
Good morning.
Good morning. Chair Bennett and members of the committee, always a pleasure to be here with you. Frankly, always a pleasure to be able to share some of our work. I want to start by just acknowledging the, the fluctuation point that we find ourselves in. With so many challenges in front of us, whether that be from extreme heat to unprecedented wildfires and storms, severe drought conditions, ongoing, et cetera, and needless to say, a unique relationship with the federal government that has left many of our communities vulnerable to the intensifying impacts of climate change. I think you would all agree that our partnership at this moment is more important than ever. And if there's one thing that I want you all to leave here with today, it is the knowledge that we are very lucky to have an incredibly talented workforce all across our state, but including at Cali pa. I feel extraordinarily privileged to lead an agency where the staff are dedicated to creating real, tangible benefits for Californians to enhance their climate resilience, to improve air quality and water quality all across our state. So I hope that you see that from our team. I want to share a couple of examples of our work before going into maybe some of the questions you all might have on the budget proposals before you. And I want to focus a bit on two areas of concern that I think you all share with us. The first is, you know, disruptions and changes in the nature of the Environmental Protection Agency's work resulting from attacks from the federal administration. And the second is the is really improving Our ability to maintain a nimble approach to respond to some of the evolving changes in our environment. As we move forward. I know we'll be talking about some of the work around landfills and subsurface elevated temperature events, which are one example of those evolving shifts in our work. So I'll start with something that we're very proud of, which is the work that we're doing to address methane. And this is an area where, with the absence of federal leadership in the climate space, there is a real void at the global scale. And of course, you all know well that California is no stranger to stepping into the role of global leadership. And so while we're occupying this space, which is familiar to us, it is also a growing space for us. I will say that our international partners are increasingly looking to us to demonstrate the leadership that is sorely lacking with the federal administration. They're looking to us for hope, but also for tangible examples of what they can do to move the needle to reduce the impacts of climate change. And methane, of course, as you know, is a super pollutant. It has over 80% the potency of greenhouse gas emissions. So it's all the more critical to dramatically reduce it and slash methane emissions where we can. We're working on this through implementing diversions of our landfill organics going to our waste landfills. And we're seeing quite a bit of progress in this space. We have a lot more to do, but we are seeing now over 90%, 97%, in fact, of jurisdictions offering residential organics collection, 100% are having edible food recovery programs. We're issuing so much in community composting grants, which carry a multitude of benefits as well on the ground for communities all across our state. At the same time, we're also strengthening methane accountability through innovation and partnership there. We are detecting methane leaks where they're occurring across the oil and gas sector and other sectors. And again, this is an example not only of what we're doing to create tangible benefits and reductions in methane emissions here in California, but also across the globe. Now, federal rollbacks have also impacted the extent to which our communities could face threats from exposure to toxics. And this is in air quality, this is in our water systems, and also in our lands. So we remain committed to and proud of our work to drive down air pollution at the community level. We do a lot of this in partnership with our air districts. We owe a lot of gratitude to you all for, you know, granting us the authority, the direction, and the funding to be able to continue this great work. And this is an area where again, we will be pivoting to see more of a focus on our community air protection work in partnership with the air districts and with local governments in water infrastructure and resilience. You know, the state board has Provided More than 11 billion in financial assistance to drinking water, wastewater and water recycling, as well as stormwater and groundwater projects. Again, we're very proud of this work, particularly as we see the federal government roll back not only on its investment, but also its protection of communities from certain contaminants of concern in our water streams, our wastewater and drinking water streams. Through the SAFER program, we're also continuing to bring systems back into compliance. Another area that we will maintain a heavy focus on as we move forward, particularly under this federal administration. And we're also overseeing the cleanup of more than 6,000 residential properties impacted by lead contamination, specifically, specifically at the former Exide Vernon facility. This is an area, of course, where we want to continue the great progress that we've already made. And that is the subject of one of our budget change proposals. Finally, in addition to addressing legacy contamination, as many of you know well, we're also looking forward into the future to see how we can reduce waste streams from chemical contaminants and chemical products to which we are unfortunately still a bit reliant on. But we're looking at ways to enhance safer alternatives and the access to safer alternatives to, for example, chemical based pesticide products. This is an area of great pride of mine, personally, of ours, through the Department of Pesticide Regulation and our partnership with growers, with innovators, with the organics agricultural community, and those who are interested in really moving the needle on how we can deploy more regenerative practices across our state, which we will only benefit from now and into the future. And with that, you know, I want to just note that the accomplishments again are great. But in order to demonstrate continued meaningful progress, the challenges we continue to face require us to again stay on our toes. So we have a couple of budget change proposals before you. I'll start with landfill response and enforcement. As you know well, our waste streams are changing and our climate impacts are intensifying, which means that the risks around our landfills, specifically the risks presented to communities that find themselves in proximity to those landfills, are increasing. And to address these risks, we're proposing a coordinated strategy that strengthens landfill response and enforcement capacity across multiple boards and departments, and many of whom are here represented today to answer questions that you might have. But ultimately, we're looking to strengthen our ability to monitor Detect, prevent and rapidly respond to subsurface elevated temperature events which we're seeing. More characteristics emerge for these while we improve coordination across our boards and departments to ensure a consistent statewide approach. Now, recent federal actions have also created uncertainty around transportation, specifically around emission standards. Making our leadership in the space even more important and making our ability to protect the great progress that we've already achieved really critical. The Governor has proposed a new incentive program designed to support first time buyers of zero emission vehicles. This proposal provides a point of sale incentive which is matched dollar for dollar by original equipment manufacturers for first time zero emission vehicle buyers in order to accept accelerate consumer adoption of new zero emission vehicles and keep us on track to meet our clean air and climate goals. You know, the last time we saw gas prices not quite at this level, but nearing this level, I think we're at about a 30% increase in prices at the pump currently. We did see a significant uptick in purchases of zero emission vehicles. It's incumbent upon us to ensure that we continue to provide this as a realistic option for our residents. Particularly as these price fluctuations continue to take place. Now finally, as I mentioned, exide cleanup. The Department of Toxic Substances Control is also seeking to critical cleanup work associated with this former facility. Our proposal would allow additional residential properties and impacted communities to be remediated. Continuing our progress toward addressing this long standing area of contamination and environmental injustice here in our state. I think many of you are familiar with the details of the former EXAD Lead acid battery recycling facility. And again, we're happy to answer questions here. Two last areas of proposal that I wanted to mention to you all, of course, Prop 4. We spent quite a bit of time discussing Prop. 4 here just about a year ago. And the State Board is actively now implementing Prop. $4 with anticipated awards from four of the five dedicated grant programs within this calendar year. Very much looking forward to that. And as we are approaching that, we're prioritizing critical needs such as enhancing water quality and ensuring safe drinking water with significant funding allocated to wastewater and drinking water infrastructure projects. And finally, the State Board is also continuing its work to implement the Bay Delta Water Quality Control Plan. This is one of the most important efforts underway to protect our water resources all across our state. Advancing this work is essential to safeguarding our water quality, supporting our ecosystem health and protecting the communities, farms and industries that rely on this critical watershed. I want to thank you again for having us here this morning. We are looking forward to answering any questions you might have and certainly look forward to continuing the great partnership that we have moving forward. Thanks.
Thank you very much.
We really appreciate you being here.
I have a few questions to kick us off and my colleagues here and perhaps will be joined by our vice
chair at some point in time
later. But, you know, the first overall policy
I want to bring up is we have this polluter pay sort of principle. And I think it generally good for government to try to, wherever possible, do
two things, which is match ongoing revenue with ongoing expenses.
Expenses. And if some action somebody's taking is causing an ongoing expense for the public, for the citizens that we have to address, then those people that are causing that should be the ones that are paying for that.
And we try to match that.
I mean, the road tax is a classic example. You know, people do wear and tear on the road, so we try to find some way of matching the people that are causing the problem with. With the solution to the problem. So that's always a challenge for governments to try to institute and maintain that and adjust that as circumstances change. But it's particularly a challenge right now as we're talking about affordability and, you know, the things that you need to do to try to adjust and make sure that that's the case also have an impact on affordability.
So that's the first. What are your thoughts about where are we in terms of trying to match those two, the people causing the problem with the solution, and how far along are we? What kind of changes do you see? What kind of things should we be
looking at to make that policy a more effective policy in the future?
Sure, sure. So I appreciate this question. And first, I want to acknowledge, you know, while the. While the characteristics of this program are a bit distinct from what I think your question is getting at in terms of operators for facilities more akin to a landfill, et cetera, I do just want to give a nod to the extraordinary work that not only this legislature but also past legislatures here in the state of California have done through the cap and investigation cap and trade program to really provide what has become an emblematic program that embodies the polluters pay principle in a way that makes market sense, that makes good economic sense, and also makes environmental sense. So this is something that I think really runs deep in our state in our approach to handling the balance of environmental harms and economic growth in terms of some of the issues that we're seeing now that I certainly classify as the emerging challenges that we want to maintain our ability to respond to adequately. You know, we're first looking at the issue of legacy contamination, and certainly that is a priority to continue to clean up and to, frankly, continue to maintain a focus on accountability for this is an area where our enforcement work is critical. And the support that you all have shown us with respect to our ability to expand that enforcement work is extraordinarily important for us. We need to be able to handle investigations properly. We need to be able to pursue claims against operators and hold them accountable so as to insulate and protect the general public from having to absorb that risk. So that's sort of the way that I see us focusing in this space, first and foremost, and then pursuing, you know, adequate cost recovery, ensuring that our penalties and our ability to leverage cost recovery over time reflect the real challenges that are in front of us Sometimes this requires statutory changes, which I have seen a lot of willingness on the part of so many of you and your colleagues to be able to explore with us.
Excuse me, I'm going to interrupt you right there.
Would you pull the microphone a lot closer? Oh, sure, no problem. We've had some requests already.
Yes, of course. I've seen a lot of willingness from you all and your colleagues to help us address the need to restructure penalties. And our ability to really ensure that there is a deterrent effect for our enforcement work, which, again, is really critical in this respect. And our ability to recover costs for violations, existing violations, and frankly, to see how some of our statutory authority may need to be tweaked to be able to encompass perhaps new violations, things that conditions that we may not have seen, seen in the past that do need to now come into the structure of some of our penalties. So I guess I would again reiterate, I think enforcement accountability and cost recovery are critical. And enhancing the tools that we have to be able to address these issues as they come up are going to be all the more important to ensure that we maintain our commitment to a polluter pays principle.
So we have in our agenda, we have some significant discussion about the issue of vacant positions and positions that are funded by special funds, positions that are funded by general funds. So special funding seems to match our principle pretty well. You know, we have a mill tax, and the mill tax pays for the implementation of the regulatory aspects of that program.
We're now, we have a bit of
a history here of a great deal of frustration with how we were implementing some of our regulations, et cetera. And so in partnership with the governor's office legislature, we decided to beef up those regulations and the staffing for those regulations and pay for it with increases in the mill tax, even though the mill tax hadn't been changed for two decades. We were able to win support for making that change.
And now we have. We've made the change, we have the
increase, and now we're talking about cutting the positions.
So could you help me with your
perception, because we're going to talk about that more today as we go forward with your perception of this issue of trying to balance our budget and the challenges that we have with that using special funds money to cut special fund positions that don't have an impact on the general fund, although there is some indirect impact on the general fund. And I'm going to try to pick the brains of our Department of Finance people with regard to that.
But I have concern about that and
I'd love to at the beginning here at the intro, sort of get your perspective of this because we'll be asking other people in your department these questions also.
Of course, I will kick it over to my colleague here at Department of Finance to answer some of the maybe more specifics around the vacancies and that approach. But I would say from our standpoint, we have been engaged particularly with stakeholders interested and curious about what this means, given the somewhat recent increase to the milfee, which again, we're very proud to have landed what I think is a very sound approach to that increase. You know, we remain committed to the specifics associated with that MILFI increase, the workloads that it supports. You know, the Department of Pesticide Regulation has already done so much incredible work to ensure that we do not miss a beat in the scope of that work. And that was very carefully crafted in a way to ensure that we're able to really leverage the fee structure increase. And I would say more generally, particularly with the budget scenarios that we are living that we're foreseeing in, it is time to take a careful look at our fee structures. Yes, these revenue streams can fluctuate. It is not the first time that these revenue streams are tapped, for lack of a better word, when we have fluctuations in the general fund. That's something that's a tool that we've relied upon in the past and it's something that we should continue to keep in mind as we're looking at the overall health of our programs, as we're looking again to the deterrent effect for certain activities, and as we're also looking at how to support the work going forward. But suffice to say, in terms of the MILFI increase specifically and the Department of Pesticide Regulations work there, we remain committed to fulfilling that work. And we will continue to periodically reassess our revenue structures to be able to reflect the challenges ahead. But I'll kick it over to my colleague at Department of Finance if they want to add anything on the vacancies.
Good morning. Andrew March of the Department of Finance chair, as you mentioned, this will be a further discussion later. But with regard to the various special funds and I think potentially particularly with the milfy, we would note that, you know, reducing vacant positions now would potentially provide us more time before we would have to increase the MILFY again in the future to provide additional buffer.
Thank you. We went two decades without increasing the
mill fee, which was a mistake.
But we had lots of challenges and
concerns about regulations and enforcement, et cetera. And consistently we heard, well, it's because we're underfunded, we're understaffed, we don't have enough staff to do this.
That's what we heard all the way
up to increasing the mill fee. Now we're increasing the mill fee and now we're laying off or reducing the positions there.
And so, you know, saying we're committed
to, you know, enforcing those things. I really need to hear more specificity later when we get to this, but
I would like to hear the rationale
that we're confident that we don't need these positions because we went through a battle.
I mean, we, the governor's office and
the legislature used up political. It took political effort to increase the MIL fee. And I specifically, particularly tried to push
through, you know, cost of living increases
and trying to match that so we wouldn't have these problems.
So where is the assurance that the
positions we said we needed just 18 months ago
that we really needed because we had all of these shortfalls, suddenly
we think we can get by without those. Or is it just a statement that
the budget is so bad we're just
not going to be able to enforce the regulations the way we wanted to do that? That's the concern that I have.
Sure.
Could you help me with that?
Sure, yeah. I appreciate that concern. So I wouldn't say that we absolutely do not need the positions. I wouldn't say, you know, that we are not challenged to figure out how to make the commitments happen within the department. I think the challenge and opportunity that we have in front of us is to figure out, you know, all across the board how to build in efficiencies in our approach. That was always the idea with the structure to the mill increase. And certainly once we're able to maintain a bit more of a healthy workforce, we certainly intend to do that. I think what you're hearing from me is a strong commitment to ensuring that we are not left without the ability to do the best that we can to meet the commitments that we made during negotiations leading up to the MILFY increase. You know, we believe very strongly in those and we remain committed to those. The vacancies, you know, you'll hear the Department of Finance kind of tick through the details on that, as you just heard from Andrew. But I don't want that to indicate to any of you that we do not still remain committed.
So I appreciate the commitment to do
the best that we can. And I assume we had that same commitment three years ago before we had the position. And the question is, you know, we should.
We should.
And I need to say this more often, I think, and I will try to say this more often, if we work for the public and collect the public dollars, we have a greater responsibility than people in private industry to work really hard and to work really efficiently and, you know, to really be committed. And I assume we had that same commitment three and four years ago when we were having the departments coming and saying we can't, we can't do this properly because we don't have the positions. And so if we had the same level of commitment four years ago that we have today, which is do the very best we can to try to enforce it, I remain concerned that we still are losing these positions. So it is something we're going to have further conversation with. But I wanted to try to get your perspective to see if you had some sage insights for us as we tried to attack this particular aspect of it.
I have a few other questions, but I want to turn over to my
colleagues and see if they have any questions here in the introductory aspect of this.
And then we will be hearing all 10 items still.
So these are overall questions for, for the secretary.
Thank you.
I just wanted to. I know you mentioned X side and I wanted to first say welcome back, Congratulations on your new baby.
Thank you.
I didn't actually expect to see you here, so it's nice to see you.
It was a feat.
Yeah.
So are you.
I know as I've worked and I know we're going to be talking about Chiquita in a minute, but, you know, it's been clear, become very clear to me how important transparency is for our communities to have the information that we have because oftentimes they are the ones who are raising the alarm bells when maybe we should have noticed and didn't or before we even notice or could. And so I know that there's been work around verification sampling at Exide. And I wonder when this is going to be released to the public, if there's plans for that.
Do you mean from the department. From the Department of Toxics?
Yeah.
I don't have a date for that off the top of my head, but I missed. They are here. Yeah. And we could potentially ask Director Butler when she's up at the podium or up at the.
Or than.
Sure, go for it. Thank you.
Great question.
Could you pull that really close? Everybody needs those microphones.
You can pull the microphone. Yeah.
There you go.
Noisy in here.
My name's Than Berg. I'm Deputy Director of Site Mitigation and Restoration at dtsc. So the verification and retrospective sampling started in April of last year and continued through December. So we have. Our contractor is working on all those reports. We then have to get them and we're evaluating them. And so we're going to be releasing those reports on a site property by property basis, in rounds as they become available. So we're really close to releasing the first round, which will be about 18, and then we'll continue to do that as we get the reports ready to release. Each report is about 100 pages, so they're not short. But the good news is that as we're doing the sampling, the purpose was to determine whether or not the cleanup previously was according to the plan that we were mitigating the risk to the greatest extent possible. And so thus far, we feel very good about the sampling that we're receiving that is confirming that we were successful in doing those cleanups.
Okay, great. And you say it's coming soon. Do you have any ballpark estimate of what soon means?
I wish it was last Friday, So I'm hoping in the next couple of weeks. Trying really hard.
Okay, thank you. Appreciate your work. Thank you. I know there's been a lot of. As we've been working on Chiquiti Canyon Landfill, there's been a lot of comparisons to Exide when I talk to people about it, and what a nightmare that has been as well. So I feel a lot of camaraderie with what the community of Exide is going through as well. So thank you for your work there.
Assuming Member rogers.
Thank you, Mr.
Chair.
Going from actively burning landfills to sealed and closed off landfills. I sent a letter a couple of weeks ago. I look forward to a response from you and your agency. But we have a landfill just outside of Laytonville in Mendocino county that has been capped the cap was damaged in 2015. The cap has still not been fixed. And while I understand that most of that falls on local jurisdictions, local counties to oversee cap landfills once. Once they actually reach that point, for many of our smaller communities, they don't really have the funding or the expertise. So I'm hoping you can talk a little bit about what you can do to partner with small communities or rural and poor districts to try to help make sure that there isn't significant issues around concerns with health and safety. In my letter just to refresh, was asking for some additional testing in the surrounding area, particularly on tribal land that was not eligible for some of the grants and funding for testing, just if for nothing else, for ease of mind for the community that lives there.
Sure. And thank you for your letter. Thanks for your patience as we respond. I actually just was able to see it myself this week. I'm just freshly back, so I appreciate your patience with this. The issues around that landfill are not unfamiliar to us. I think you're familiar with our history working with the Laytonville Rancheria on some of the testing, together with the Bureau of Indian affairs several years back and U.S. ePA. You know, I've asked my team to think about how we can use existing data, access to current information, potentially look for the ability to conduct any new sampling. And we need to think creatively around some partnerships to be able to do that. But we're certainly thinking about what some options are to enhance the access to information in that region, because we know that those concerns are very real. I've been up there and visited several times myself. And so we want to make sure that we're able to enhance that data to the extent we're able. But I'd also like to brief you on some of the work we've already done to date so that you have some access to that information at your fingertips as well. So thank you.
Yeah. But even pulling back from that specific example, understanding that you probably run into this in many communities that are smaller and don't have as many resources, do you feel like the agency has the authority and the funding that it needs to. To be able to assist rather than just monitor and put pressure on the local counties to do something?
Well, you know, some of the ways in which we've talked about with many of you, the enhanced authority and some of the tools that we could garner through our oversight of landfill operations in general, in response to what we're seeing, the challenges at Chiquita, but also in general, I think would support our ability to take A more careful review of some of the data, work with the counties. Yes. But also potentially leverage our own resources to get that original information and data ourselves. So the short answer to your question is I don't think we have the perfect tool set currently. I do think the issues around landfill caps, landfills still in operation, are going to continue. And so I would say we're actively looking at ways to enhance our access to resources and oversight and authority to be able to, to examine some of these issues in real time.
Yeah, I appreciate that. Just to punctuate the point and I'll get off of it, Mendocino county has a budget shortfall where they can lay off literally their entire public safety, sheriff's firefighters and then still have a deficit. And so just finding them as the only tool to get them to make changes is never going to be an option that's going to be helpful.
Yeah, appreciate that.
Any anybody else during the introduction? Assemblymember Gallagher Yeah, thank you, Mr. Chairman. We didn't have the Resources Secretary last
time and so I was just going to ask on the. I know you oversee CARB to some extent, the new proposal for 200 million for zero emission vehicles. You know, there's been criticism of that in the past, that a lot of that went to wealthier individuals and helped them buy cars that they probably could have afforded on their own. How do you see, you know, this program being more successful this time? And have you had some discussions at all about that?
Sure, I have and you know, appreciate the observation and critique that I know is common across the state in terms of access to resources to purchase new zero emission vehicles. I'd say the approach on this proposal is really intended to respond actively to, you know, the attacks that we're seeing from the federal government on our direct authority to regulate not only. Emissions, not only zero emission vehicles, but really emissions from combustion fuels. And so seeing that the transportation sector remains such a significant source of emissions means that we do have to see more of an uptick in zero emission vehicle adoption. I mentioned a bit earlier, you know, the last time we saw fuel prices at this level, we did see more of an uptake, a significant uptake in zero emission vehicle adoption, which we hope that we can continue to see. This particular proposal is really intended to match with the OEMs at a point of sale, the ability to increase access to zero emission vehicles. During this time we're trying to deploy all of the tools that we can that we continue to have access to. And so we're really hopeful that this approach, given the context that we find ourselves in will be successful. But I fully appreciate, you know, the concern and the consideration that we will continue to have that our existing programs that really focus on low to middle income Californians and their specific access to zero emission vehicles remain just as important to ensure that this is not something that is only accessible to a limited few, but is actually accessible to those who may need it the most.
And just following up on that a little bit, do you think that CARB has gone too far in the sense that it's pushing things and mandates and otherwise? The credits issue has come up here obviously recently in the news that's affecting affordability. I mean, we all want to do something. I mean, it's a big priority of everyone to make sure that California is more affordable. And yet many of the things that CARB is pushing for, I can tell you, a lot of people in my district were actually kind of happy that there was some pushback on the mandate for zero emission vehicles. And the reason why is because similar to Mr. Rogers, you know, in our rural districts, we don't have charging stations, our constituents can't afford a zero zev. We have to drive really long distances and especially in agriculture, we need diesel and gas trucks to move our goods to bring them to your table so you have affordable, healthy food. So like, I mean, do you think that there does need to be some reining in of CARB to ensure that
we actually have things that are affordable,
we're not passing on too much cost, you know, to consumers?
Well, first I'd say, you know, there are many things that are impacting affordability today for Californians. And you know, I think we need to really consider each and every one of those issues that are affecting affordability for families all across our state. With respect to, you know, CARB's approach on zero emission vehicles, we have been at the forefront that's long been a part of our leadership and our history, not only in, you know, again, adoption of zero emission vehicles, but frankly, you know, providing the tools to regulate emissions from combustion fuels, but also enhance efficiency so that people aren't spending as much money on gas in vehicles in the state of California. Those, those efficiency standards help with costs at the pump, with prices at the pump. So we want to actually see more of that. You know, there are a lot of benefits associated with our regulatory approach. Those are benefits that are felt at the household level, benefits in terms of costs reduced, in terms of healthcare costs, and, you know, missed days at work, missed days at school, et cetera. So I think the ledger we can talk about in more depth. But at this moment, I think the task before the board and before us as an agency and us, I'd say overall as a state, is to ensure that we're really refining our approach to make sure that we're providing the type of access that Californians need today, not necessarily focused on our long term goals. Yes, those are still there. Yes, we need to prioritize progress toward them. But the immediate priority is ensuring that Californians have access to what they need on their tables, in their homes and to be able to get to and from work. I very much appreciate the issue in rural areas. I think this is also why these programs don't exist in a vacuum. They also exist in collaboration with our sister agencies to ensure that charging infrastructure goes up in our rural areas and rural communities to ensure that we have equitable access to that all across our state. And I hope to continue the conversation with you and your constituents as the Air Resources Board has done and is continuing to do currently.
Thank. Thank you. We have 10 items and so we do need to move on here. But I have a few final questions.
Check with my colleagues.
So first of all, you started off your comments talking about how many challenges
there are out there. And there are an enormous number of challenges when it comes to climate change, when it comes to what we're trying to get done in California in terms
of protecting our environment, trying to match
resources and poor polluter pays, et cetera.
So we have these enormous challenges and we have limited resources. And it's why I would say that
you have, I think, one of the
two or three toughest jobs in California.
And that is, and I don't mention that lightly, I think trying to juggle to make this all happen. I'll give you just a classic example. The question about ZEVs is really a CARB question, but it also, you know, the Environmental Protection Agency has, you know, has a voice in so many of these sort of, sort of things.
I will offer this. You know, with zev, we got ourselves to what I feel like we started
a Plateau at about 25% adoption and
then sort of getting that next group of people.
And I would still think we're going to have challenges getting to an all EV adoption by 2035 as our goal is.
I think we're still making a mistake
if we don't identify and clearly reinforce that plug in hybrids that get a
certain amount of distance.
Whatever CARB would come up with should be something that counts temporarily towards our ZEV goal. Because just as assemblymember Gallagher pointed out,
there are just places where this range
anxiety and the number of charging stations, et cetera.
This is not a comment for you.
It's really a comment. We had carbon and we did a lot of things about all of the ZEV program and stuff last year, so
wanted to get that on the record. But it just shows the.
It's an example of the enormous challenges that, that we have out there.
So you have this really tough job and we look forward to being partners
with you in terms of doing that.
And we welcome you coming and letting us know where you're having the greatest
difficulty with the limited resources and the challenges that are out there.
So as we've asked some of these questions up here, we're not out to get the department or anything else. We're out to try to make the
department as effective as possible, recognizing that we don't have the resources to attack everything the way we would like to attack those things as we go forward.
So, you know, you made comments about
cap and trade and that being a polluter's pays sort of thing, and yet many of us in the legislature are
concerned that we're violating that principle because we're collecting the money from the carbon auction. But we're not using that money always directly to try to reduce carbon emissions.
We're using it for general fund, Department
of Motor Vehicles and those kinds of things. So we're trying to move that direction
and we hope this is another opportunity for us to remind the employees administration that we think that's the one place where we should definitely match. You know, the polluters pay aspect of this, which is the money collected from the carbon auction ought to be reserved for actions that are doing that. There should be a good faith effort
that's that will come up over and
over again here with Department of Finance. And I know they heard that last week.
My final two questions for you, could you just reflect on us what you
see in terms of environmental justice and
the evolution in the state of California in terms of a commitment to environmental justice, and where you see the next
challenges are in terms of our efforts to deal with the environmental justice issue.
Sure.
Appreciate the question and I'll just note. But before answering, you know, the Air Resources Board, of course, is a board within our agency family. So CARB questions are always fair game. And again, I do genuinely mean that we really want to continue to engage in these discussions because they are challenging, they are difficult, and they have been for us for quite some time. With respect to environmental justice, I think we are lucky in California to have such a robust network of environmental justice focused organizations, and many of the sort of traditional conservation based environmental nonprofits and organizations are also really focused on environmental justice issues and challenges here, here in California because of that history and movement building that has taken place here. So I count us all very lucky to be able to benefit from their good work, the research, the organizing, the work that they've already done on the ground. I think right now one of the biggest challenges facing us all collectively in light of that is really coming from a fundamental vulnerability that many of those organizations are facing that frankly, some of our staff are facing when they are doing environmental justice work. And that is because that term has become so loaded, has become the basis for attacks on people, even personally. And so I don't discount the very real impact that that has on our ability to continue to engage with stakeholders on the ground and to continue to have our staff even take on roles that might make them feel uncomfortable, that might put them in positions that are unsafe. We don't ever want to do that. So that's been something that's been very challenging in the environmental justice space. I'd say the thing, the aspect of our environmental justice work that we remain deeply committed to and that as Secretary, I am very focused on, is making tangible, real differences on the ground in environmental justice communities. We've seen a lot of great progress in the investment of dollars from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund in disadvantaged communities over the past 10 years now, 10 years plus. And so that's been an area that's of strong focus of ours, but it's also something that's permeated the approach that so many of our other departments have taken, including departments like the Department of Toxics that's very focused on environmental justice communities through our work in vulnerable communities, through our cleanups, through the Department of Pesticide Regulation and much of the work that they've done. As you all know, we have environmental justice advisory committees now at almost every board and department. And that's been something that's long been pushed for by many environmental justice based organizations. So I think there's been quite a bit of evolution in the work and the uptake of that work across our state agencies. But the priority being that we maintain a real focus on delivering tangible results, on protecting people, on making sure that they see that we're not only committed to environmental justice work, for procedural or outreach and engagement aspects of it, but really meaningful aspects of it. And finally, I'll just end with the notion that dealing with environmental injustice is Somehow worthy of attack from the federal administration. It's ludicrous, truly. But I also want to note that it's really about making sure that our programs and our efforts are as effective as they can be. When we focus on driving down emissions in disproportionately burdened communities, we make sure that all the state benefits, the entire state benefits from that. The nation, I'd posit, the world benefits from that. That's where our efforts are going to go the farthest. That's where our dollars in investment go the farthest. And so that's something that we remain committed to even as a matter of efficiency.
An incredibly effective answer. Thank you.
No problem.
Yeah, that's, I think, very helpful and it'll take me to my last question.
And you started to allude to this with your answer there. And that is, can you give us your opinion of the scale of the impacts from the federal administration's cuts and hostility and vindictiveness towards California and how that is affecting California from the perspective of the head of the Environmental Protection Agency?
Sure. Well, we talked a little bit about, you know, some of the ways that we want to maintain a nimble approach, particularly in the zero emission vehicle space. And this particular proposal in light of some of the federal attacks on our zero emission vehicle programs, you know, the attacks on our authority have been so unprecedented and are leaving us in this kind of lockjam of litigation. And so I think the impact to our resources in that respect, you know, these will be lawsuits that, you know, may go on for a very long time. And that's going to take a lot of resources, a lot of attention away from the work that is about just making progress and continuing that progress. So I would say that kind of an overarching impact is that, and that is a real challenge that we find ourselves up against again, something that we've really worked on building our muscle to respond to in the legal space. But I'd also say more broadly, the underfunding and cutting of science and scientific offices that our agency works in great partnership with and relies upon for access to data and information on emerging contaminants, on toxicological considerations, weather patterns, all of that information and that sort of baseline of access to just good science and data is incredibly impactful. Losing that is incredibly harmful. And, you know, in some ways we've been able to frankly benefit as a state from some of the folks who have fled these cuts and a lot of the movement away from science. But, you know, I can't discount the impact that that is really having on the nation and certain on California. And so I think we're at a time where our commitment to science is critical. We will continue that. But it's certainly impacted our work. It will continue to impact our work. And then we have to stay apprised of what we can do to maintain our muscle memory in this area, given the federal administration's defunding and cutting of so many critical programs.
Secretary Garcia, you're an eloquent spokesperson for
the agency and the department and for California. Thank you.
Thank you.
I really appreciate you giving us your time here this morning.
Of course. Thank you so much. Chair, thank you again. Members, I do want to note before just leaving the table, we can get you more specifics from the Department of Pesticide Regulation. I appreciate the concerns on the mill fee. This is an area that is very important to us, so want to make sure that we're able to answer your questions.
I think you'll certainly find as the
hearing goes on that we will both
have a lot of questions and we'll
probably have a different perspective than where the administration is at this point in time.
Great, thank you very much.
And now we will go to issue two, Landfill support, response and enforcement. And we have a cast of thousands on this panel, so people will have
to rotate in terms of heading up to the table.
So we have.
Yeah, they will introduce themselves, but I'm just trying to figure out who all.
Yeah, so get close if you're on the panel. But you're not here yet, right? Oh, please. If you guys excuse me for one second. Nobody knows. The air conditioning just kills us up here.
Oh, we feel it too.
There's plenty of room.
I am going to file a unfair labor practice against the state for this. But if you will introduce yourselves as you begin your. Begin your testimony. And give me one more second. I want to make sure I'm at the right page here. There we go. Great, thank you. Who wants to go first?
Sure. Hi, Brandy Hunt, Deputy Secretary for Fiscal Policy at Cali Pennsylvania, here to present the landfill inset BCP to you. As you noted, we have several of our board's departments and offices that are part of this, this bcp and they'll be here to answer your questions. For a high level Overview, we're requesting $5.1 million in 12 positions and that is across CALPA and several of our bdos. Just as an overview of what set events are. They're an emerging environmental issue that can disrupt landfill operations. They diminish disposal capacity and unfortunately the broader community Impacts, including a concerning rise in illegal dumping in the surrounding area. So it's a secondary effect of these SET events. Some of our BDOS that are involved in this work CalRecycle, who in this BCP will take the lead in administering the additional grant funding that we have asked for. The California Air Resources Board has an active role in monitoring the air in and around the community where the SET event is occurring. Occurring. We have the Department of Toxic Substance Control who is also here today, and they are instrumental in evaluating the potentially hazardous conditions caused by hazardous waste and they are going to offer technical support related to waste stability and overall environmental safety. We also have the State Water Resources Control Board here who focuses on groundwater and ensuring that we are keeping our water clean, safe and healthy. And lastly, Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment does all of the assessments and evaluations of what safe levels are and how our community members are being impacted. Looking ahead with your approval with this proposal, we envision a future where our state's ability to manage these events is more rapid, significantly strengthened. We also want to be able to identify risks earlier so that we can respond rapidly or implement tools where we can reduce the impact and detect things early before they become a public health issue. With that, I'd like to thank you for your time and consideration and we'll open the floor for questions and ask that my colleagues come up when it is time for them to answer.
Great. Thank you very much. Department of Finance.
Jamie Gonzalez, Department of Finance.
No further comments at this time, but
here to answer any questions.
Great.
LAO Good morning, Mr. Chair and committee members. Frank Jimenez with the Legislative Anna's office. As we've said in other hearings, given the tenuous budget situation, we recommend that the legislature use a high bar in approving any budget proposals, both those from the general fund and special funds. For this proposal, we find that it does meet that high bar in addressing a critical health and safety need. The funding in positions would support state and local entities in addressing the two current active set of SET events in California. And the ongoing portions of this funding would help those same entities in preventing and mitigating future events from happening. But happy to take any questions.
Great. I will turn it over to our premier landfill Assemblymember expert. Assemblymember Chiavo.
Yes, an unwanted title.
Truly,
I thank you so much. I am incredibly grateful to the Chair for flagging this and inviting me to sit on the committee today. And unfortunately, to my chagrin and my community's chagrin, I'm becoming known as Chiquita Pilar because everywhere I Go. I talk about this horrific disaster happening in our community, the Chiquita Canyon Landfill. That burning and will be burning for 20 years. 90 acres of burning trash underground, that's 108 football fields. It is making my community sick and really ruining lives. And so I wanted to join this budget subcommittee hearing not only to highlight this ongoing disaster, but also to ask a couple questions about the landfill response and support and enforcement funding. For three years, Castaic and Valverde have been plagued by toxic, nauseating and cancer causing chemicals that are being released by the SET event or the subsurface elevated temperature event at Chiquita Canyon Landfill. But for the public, let's be clear what this means. It's really God knows what types of trash are liquefying at hundreds of degrees. We heard just recently they are at temperatures of 261 degrees at Chiquita Canyon Landfill. And just to level set water boils at 100 degrees. So this landfill is literally hotter than boiling water. And that's what's spreading these harmful gases and deadly liquid around our community. Recently it was reported that these temperatures are excessive, at least in multiple of the well heads where they test them. I know that the chair and my colleagues have heard me speak many times about this and I'm really grateful that so many of my colleagues have been so supportive and even coming to the community, meeting with family members and experiencing, seeing what they're experiencing with, you know, their children having daily nosebleeds, nausea, vomiting, tremors, debilitating, you know, career ending illnesses where people are no longer able to work because they're so sick. And most recently there have been three funerals due to cancer in this community. Just that I know of. People are fleeing generational homes, homes where they grew up, Homes where they thought they found their forever homes.
I'm sorry it's so horrible.
Take your time.
We have, we have a few other
things we can cover and then come back to what you want to say.
Would you like to do that?
It's okay. It's okay. And I'm incredibly grateful for how the state is responding. There has been robust response from state agencies. And I know I saw you racked up over 20,000 hours, staff hours on this $2.5 million to a disaster that the operator truly has caused. And I know we all agree that the landfill should foot the bill. But I also know that work needs to continue and that's needs to continue to direct the landfill to take substantive action. So I wanted to get into some questions around the proposed funding. So can you explain a little bit about these positions, because I know there's already a lot of staff that are dedicated and have been spending a lot of time on this issue. And from what I understand, it's going to be for Chiquiti Canyon and also Elsa Bronte. Is that correct?
That's correct.
Yes.
Correct. Okay, so just those two.
Correct.
Okay, so is this. Are these positions going to be increasing the capacity, replacing folks that need to be doing some other things? How is this. Is this going to be bolstering the response, or how are these positions going to help in terms of the response?
So the easy answer is everything. Right now we are committed to responding, and so we're going to do what it takes to respond, which means there may be staff who are working on other things right now that are responding to Chiquita Canyon in El Sobrante, and they'll continue to respond until we can hold the landfill operator accountable. These positions that we're requesting will augment that. We're looking for experts in geological engineers, people that can really look at slope
stability
that we don't have that really specialized expertise right now that we see there's a large need. And once we can get to a place where the set event is reducing, we're able to. To mitigate what's going on. And we're getting the community, hopefully as soon as we can back into a place where they are staying in their homes and they have healthy children and are healthy themselves, then those staff will start focusing on other events that do need to be monitored. And we're gonna focus on doing the waste characterization and the research that we need to do so that we can mitigate these events, we can catch them early so that they aren't creating these types of issues in our communities.
I appreciate your optimism. With estimates of it, Bernie, for 20 years, I don't imagine that in the next year, although, oh, my goodness, if there could be a solution in the next year, I would do anything for that. So I'm a little concerned. I mean, I'm curious if this seems like it's enough, because in addition to Elsa Bronte and Chiquita, we know that there's 11 landfills total that have gotten waivers from the EPA to operate at higher temperatures. And so there's potentially 11 landfills in the state that are on their way to being a set event, if they are not already. And so, you know, my. I guess I wonder if you think this is actually enough, because we know it's. I mean, as we've seen by the Multiple agencies that you listed off that I've been meeting with monthly as well. This is a huge, huge response and very staff intensive.
You can answer that.
Good morning. Alana Matthews, Deputy Secretary for Law Enforcement and general counsel. And I first want to say that we are sorry that your community is experiencing that. And I think that's the underlying goal and motivation of why you've seen such a robust response from Cal EPA in our videos. For right now, it is enough. I will say that our current response has required the diversion of a tremendous amount of resources that are currently assigned. I mean, we have staff within our videos. This is primarily all of what they are doing. So part of this proposal is to allow us to have staff who have been diverted from their primary duties to go back to that and to add on to that. And I think that there are three ways that our proposals are trying to address the ongoing need that we see in dealing with the active to set event landfills as well as potentially. And that would include increased on the ground support so that we have positions to provide additional staff and experts to enhance the current response efforts. We also want to look at state cost supports because these funds will also help cover the costs that the state is currently shouldering as we divert that from other functions and then the future detection and improvement. So again, we're still trying to figure this all out and to be able to do that and have sufficient support and resources to. To properly assess and monitor. And if there needs to be further compliance or enforcement actions, we want to make sure that we have the staff and resources. And that, of course, includes technical as well as other classifications to really have a comprehensive approach to make sure we are effectively responding to said events.
I mean, I guess I would say, and I completely see that. I completely see how this has taken over people's jobs when they, you know, and taken them away from other things that they really need to be doing. And so I agree that this augmentation is really, really needed. And I guess I would just, you know, urgency is the name of the game in this. On this issue and in the other landfills. I think that we need to get really on top of them to make sure that they don't turn into the kind of disaster that we're seeing at Chiquita Canyon and at El Sobrante, though very, very, very different. Because we know, I mean, this is really. I mean, this can mean financial disaster for the state if we don't get these under control because it's a million dollars a week. I don't Think anyone probably knows this. It's a million dollars a week just for them to truck the toxic leachate, which is the liquid that the, you know, landfill is producing just for that is a million dollars a week for one landfill. And so we had 11 landfills on fire, and they're trucking. I mean, not only does it cost a lot to truck that leachate, just our one landfill is running out of places to take that leachate. Now we are taking it to other states. I've heard that they're taking it to Mexico, which I think is illegal. So, you know, it's like, it's a disaster creating disasters in other areas. So we like. I hope that some of what this will go to is also bolstering the ability to respond to the other landfills that clearly are operating at higher temperatures if they're getting waivers to do it. And really, like, ultimately, at the end of the day, we have to change the culture of these landfill landfills, because these landfills have just. And, you know, and we've probably allowed them to just kind of hot rod these landfills. And, you know, and we hear them in these meetings say, oh, well, you know, by the EPA standards, right, you're not supposed to get to 131 degrees. That's red flags. But they will say publicly at meetings, oh, we don't really worry until it gets to 150. There's a culture of total disregard in these landfills that they are not concerned about letting these landfills heat up. And once it gets out of control, as we've all seen at Chiquita Canyon, it grows and grows and grows and we can't get it under control. So we already have the names and locations of the other landfills. I think we got to really, really, really get on top of that. Just one last question. Around the million dollars for local assistance, what is that million dollars going to? Is that specifically for LEAs? Like in the case of Chiquita, it would be the LA County Department of Public Health or the county, or is it for community members, organizations? How is that going to be distributed?
CAL recycles part of that specific part of that proposal.
So I'm going to ask my colleague from CalRecycle to come up and give some details about the grants.
Okay,
Thank you, Mark. To be with CalRecycle. Thank you for that question. The money is focused on the local enforcement agencies. And our strategy is to recognize that LA county and Riverside County LEAs are struggling to address the current set events. And so we would earmark a large portion of that money to them initially. But we also, as you've observed, aware that other landfill could be. Landfills could be subject to the same set event. And so we want to start funneling money to the other leas with landfills to prepare them, to equip them, to better monitor for said events and be prepared to address those set events if they were to occur.
Oh, good. Okay. That's great to hear. I have to say, if we're giving money to lacdph, they need to do a better job. They have been horrible to work with and deplorable in their response. And I, as someone who fought for public health for 20 years, almost all of the 20 years in my career, I have been shocked, so shocked and dismayed about the LACDPH response to Chiquita Canyon. I mean, it took them like a year. Finally, they came out with we should improve a message that gets sent out if the air monitors are putting out alarming levels. Like, we had to fight tooth and nail just to get them to inform local physicians that, you know, maybe they should be informing them of the health impacts that this is having. So I hope with that money will come a very strong conversation about their responsibility to step up in real ways and, you know, and actually help people, especially when it comes to protecting public health in our community. That's all my questions. I just. I wanted to just leave with one little bit more around the urgency. I am. You know, I have to thank everyone in this room, everyone who may be listening, who is part of these agencies for responding. The response has been robust, as I said. I know it's been painful for everyone to hear these stories every month, and I really know that people's hearts are in it. I also see that what we're doing is not working. Like, at the end of the day, right. We are stuck in this situation where we are at the mercy of the landfill in a lot of ways. And the landfill strategy is delay and don't pay for stuff that they don't have to. Right. I mean, it seems very clear to me that they are just dragging their feet. We have been trying to get them to cover the landfill for the last year, and hardly anything is happening. We've been asking them to put a barrier in so the fire doesn't grow into another part of the landfill. They've been putting insufficient plan after insufficient plan after insufficient plan forward. And we just were going back and forth with them forever. And I'm hoping other things are happening and coming, but I think it calls into question our whole System and response. And I think that in moments like this, we have to be really reflective about how we need to change what we are doing and how we do it to be able to respond and take action in real ways that helps people. Because at the end of the day, that's what these agencies are for, right? All of your agencies are to protect people. And I am so grateful, so grateful that you are there. But I see where that system fails. It is failing in this situation where the Air Resources Board is like, oh, we see all these toxic things, but we don't cover health, right? So health has to respond when it comes to health. And Department of Public Health, the LA County Department of Public Health has not been responding. Their pathetic survey was not enough. And so, you know, so I think that we have to think creatively right now, because right now what is happening is that we are just stuck in a back and forth with this landfill that does not want to spend money and does not want to fix it. And the more they drag it out, the better off they are. And the more they drag it out and don't take action, the sicker our community is. And while there is a lot of kind of, what's it called when just like spinning around, I don't know. Anyway, there's a lot happening over here to go back and forth with the landfill and respond and hold them accountable and cite them and da da da, da, da. There's not actually a lot happening on the landfill to mitigate this situation. And there is nothing happening to get our community out of harm's way. Nothing. And that's why I've been calling for a state of emergency to the governor, to the county, doing it again today, state of emergency. If we don't change any of our response, it at least gives financial relief to our community where they can get mortgage forbearances and other tax relief just automatically. They are being told they cannot get any of that relief because there is no emergency declared. And people are desperate to get out of this community now because they know they are all getting too sick. So I hope that we can find all of the creative ways to hold this landfill accountable to make them pay for it. But we have to just make things happen. We have to make things happen in the interim because it is too slow and people are getting too sick while we push paperwork around with these guys who don't want to help. So thank you, thank you, thank you for all you do and thank you for your future creative thinking that will even make more happen. Thank you,
thank You. I see.
Assemblymember Rogers, thank you so much.
So part of it is I just want to make sure it's very clear. I represent the other end of the state and this is still an important issue to me. This isn't just a specific issue for Assemblymember Chavo in her district. But we're all watching what the response is and asking questions about what that would mean for our own communities to go through this. And we know that it's not just one landfill. So I wanted to start with kind of a general question, which is I heard, I think 17 times, holding the landfill accountable. And I want to know what that means. Does that mean making sure that they're taking care of the long term health of the people impacted? Does that mean addressing issues around the inability to sell those homes? Does it mean forcing them to do things like capping the landfill? Like when, when the department says holding them accountable? What's the definition for holding them accountable?
Well, that definition is sort of dependent upon the authority of each of the BDO's. In addition to Cal EPA and all of our boards, departments and offices under that umbrella of the agency, there is also authority with the local entities and also with US epa. So for us, our budget proposal really reflects resources being committed so that for the jurisdiction under or the authority under Cal EPA and our bdos that we can exercise to the fullest extent of that. And just as though we have specific authorities, there's also specific jurisdictions that everyone has. So this is a very unique situation because CalRecycle, CARB, DTSC, they're all different authorities under which they act. So Cal EPA sort of plays this coordinating role. And so what that means for us is making sure we have a coordinated and consistent enforcement response to hold a landfill operator accountable. And that requires making sure there's information sharing. We understand, we have updates on whatever regulatory actions fall under specific authorities that others understand that and they understand how they're impacted so that we can have a coordinated approach. So depending on the authority of the agency, it could have a different meaning. But I think overall for the agency, it really means understanding what those authorities are and having a coordinated and consistent effort so that we are able to hold the landfill account.
And I'm going to interrupt here just I know we have a number of questions and comments that the member is going to want. We have 10 items. We're on item number two right now. We've been at this for more than an hour and a half now. And we always take a fair amount of time with the agency Director But I'm going to ask that the respondents try to be very efficient with your answers and that assembly members take into consideration that it's 11 o' clock and we have a hard removal from this room at one o', clock, so we have eight more items. So if everybody can be as efficient
as possible but Continue.
Anything else, Mr. Rogers?
Yeah, I think what I need to hear from you is an understanding that holding them accountable needs to be more extensive than what they built in as their cost of doing business. That the creative solutions that my colleague is looking for don't exist if holding them accountable is cheaper than implementing those creative solutions, and that folks in other districts that operate other landfills need to see that holding them accountable means that preventative measures from them are less expensive than allowing something to happen that then they can later write off because we don't do enough to do enforcement. So particularly when I hear concerns from my colleague that they have been asking for a cap to try to help prevent some of the health issues. And I've, and I've met with some of the folks down there who are dealing with cancer and other types of health impacts from this, I need to hear from our agencies that holding them accountable means forcing them to do the things that are going to save human lives and make sure that the financial burden of this doesn't fall on the people who are impacted, but falls on the business that has allowed this to happen. That's what I need to hear from the agencies. My other question, and then I'll get off it, Mr. Chair, is if there are 11 other landfills that have received a waiver, what are you doing to coordinate with folks at the local level in those jurisdictions to make sure that there's additional monitoring, compliance, to make sure that we don't end up hitting this self perpetuating disaster, which is what this is.
What part of it is asking for this proposal to get more resources so that we can make sure that we have staff to coordinate not only within the local regulatory community, but also with the local agencies and local communities to assess, monitor, investigate, look at compliance and enforcement, to your point earlier, to do that.
And that's that million.
That is not the million because that deals with CalRecycle, but from Cal EPAs. The amount that we are asking for is specifically for a dedicated position that does the coordination. So looks at the other landfills that potentially have a waiver or may show other indications that it could be a potential set event to gather the working teams, the relevant BDOs to do the proper assessments Great.
Thank you.
And I'm going to ask everybody that
comes up on the panel when you
talk, if you could move your papers to the side so that you can pull those microphones. You don't have to close your paper, but you got those microphones have to be really close to your mouth. We have people still letting us know
that they can't hear you.
You really have to be up here like this. There's a big difference between that and this. And I even have to remember the difference is I can't pull my microphone forward. You guys can. So please don't let the. Don't put the paper between you and the microphone. You're too far away. You have to move the paper to the side and pull the microphone. Assemblymember. Gallagher. Yeah, I'll try to be quick here.
What is causing these set events?
I think we should bring up Maybe DTSC and CalRecycle, who are. Have more scientific expertise in what's causing them.
Sure.
And just like, if we could just kind of lay out just what are the key factors that. What do we know right now? And I know we're trying to be efficient. So just lay out, what do you think are the things that are leading to these set events?
Don't let the paper get in the
way of the microphone. There you go.
Ptsc, Site mitigation Restoration. We don't always know exactly what causes it. Sometimes there's things in the landfill that ignite, depending on what's been disposed of there, that will start the landfill reaction. But because it's so deep in the
landfill and we don't have a lot
of causal reports and investigations, we don't always know exactly what causes the landfill and this reaction to occur. And I'm hoping that Mr. Debee here has more.
Thank you.
Thang Mark to be with CalRecycle. Again, not much more to add. But what is difficult for us is that there isn't a true pattern that we can see as yet. These kind of events happen all over the country, all over the world, and when they're investigated, half of them come back with no definitive answer on what the cause was. And what's baffling, too, is we see landfills that are very similar to ones experiencing a set event, that aren't experiencing a set event. You know, the same types of waste, the depth of the waste, the moisture content, all of those things are very, very similar. But one landfill would have a set event, and one won't. So we are learning a lot from the current set events, and we will be Applying that to our approach going forward to other landfills. Better monitoring, looking at, well, temperatures to see.
I don't mean to cut you off. I'm just trying to get. Is this a newer phenomenon or has it been going on for a long time?
It's very new to California.
Okay, so within the last five years is when we've seen this or what?
Yes.
Okay, so that begs the question, is it something new that we're putting into landfills that could be contributing to that?
Lithium ion batteries, I'm guessing.
Well, I mean, that's one question, but I'm just saying, like, is it something new that we maybe have been putting into landfills as causing this phenomenon? What do we know?
Yes. It would just be conjecture, but that is something that we're looking at. One thing that we've identified is, as we all know, lithium batteries are much more prevalent than they have been. People are not good at keeping them out of the waste. So we know that some are going into landfills. Could that be one of the reasons we're seeing this now and hadn't seen it in the past?
We.
Are you seeing it deeper in there, like, deeper layers of the landfill, which would suggest maybe, you know, stuff from far in the past that maybe we're putting the landfills, or are we seeing
it maybe at the higher layers with these set events?
We're seeing it at all layers in terms of high temperatures.
Okay.
Are we seeing any difference in, like. I mean, is. Are we seeing this happen where people are not properly, you know, I don't know all that goes into but putting linings or different things in place or. I mean. Well, I think everyone's been more compliant or not.
Each set event is different, as Mark has mentioned. And that's part of the reason why
we have this proposal is because we're
trying to get more resources and staff so that we can determine more accurately the scope of the problem in California as we've recent. This is more of a recent phenomenon that it has come to attention. So we still have work to do with that, and that's what we're committed to doing.
If I may, are there, like, more compliant ones that we don't see this, like. Or maybe like, meeting standard and others that don't?
Yes.
Okay.
Yes.
If I assemblymember Schiavo, I've been torn landfills.
So what I have learned is that. And what I think has some potential to lead to said events is that we have also incentivized extracting methane, which there's a lot of good Things about that. But if you over pull, if you over pull methane out of the landfill and then it starts pulling, something has to replace that, right? So it pulls in oxygen. It's like fanning a fire. And so landfills are already hotter, right. They're decomposing, they heat up naturally. And when oxygen is introduced, that can lead to a set event. Cracks happen in the, in the landfills. That's just normal occurrences. Right. So heating events, from what I understand from landfill operators, other landfills that I've toured, heating events are normal to happen. But if you're on top of it as a landfill, you will see, hey, this one's heating up over here. We gotta go investigate what's going on. Oh, there's a crack. Let's cover it up with dirt. They can get it down to a normal temperature within hours or at least days from what I understand. And so in places where that has not happened, right. And it's growing for months and months and then years and years they really have been not on the job. Right. So that's another way other than like combustion type things and you know, ion batteries and all that kind of stuff. Certainly in this landfill, it's an older part of the landfill. So maybe it's because we weren't really regulating as well. What was going into that landfill at the time. Could be all kinds of toxic stuff. Right?
There's.
I don't even want to think about it, but there's the Rocketdyne. You know, Santa Susana field lab is not far away and they could have been bringing rocket fuel and all kinds of junk from there over that's super toxic. So
it's.
I think that because we have to be careful. And I know that LMRs, that CARB has updated recently were brought up earlier. But I think those methane, the landfill methane regulations, we have to be super, super thoughtful in the monitoring of that and making sure that we're not over incentivizing, drawing out the methane. Because on Chiquita there's a power plant that operates, doesn't operate anymore because the gases are so toxic. It's not a high enough methane level anymore. But they were powering Santa Clarita, part of Santa Clarita, with the power coming out of that. But so there has to be that balance to make sure that you're not overpooling and then bringing in oxygen that's going to just fan the potential flames.
Okay, I'll just go. Is that another cause that you guys are investigating?
Yes, definitely. Thank you. Member Schiavo Yes. Operational issues can play in. Overdrawing of gas is something that we're noting and are monitoring and trying to assess if that is part of the cause. Yes.
And do you guys.
Do you guys follow up and like have them report to you their temperatures at different levels and if they're seeing something that's too heavy that you guys go in that. Well, what are you, you know, do you go in and require them to
cap it or is that a power
that you're going to. AB28 is a bill that we are considering as a legislature right now that would make sure things happen at certain temperatures.
Just generally the responsibility for gas control is with us EPA and air districts and part of their reporting system does require regular reporting on wellhead temperatures. So there are monitoring of it. I think the new lens that we're bringing into this is being able to recognize patterns and know what they mean and take actions to address them.
And.
Well, I'll just, I'll end on last note. It's just that it seems like we don't quite know exactly. So that's one thing we need to get to the actual bottom. What is the cause. Right. So that we can formulate the solution. But yeah, I mean, I think we should also be looking at. We just heard earlier we're moving forward with, you know, more and more electric vehicles. We use a lot more lithium ion batteries and like everything that we're utilizing. Are we creating. It's a question that we should be asking, are we creating another environmental problem, you know, with what we've been doing and how do we address that?
Well, I really appreciate all of these questions and I note that the five questions that we asked here always try
to make sure we get all of
these questions out and I think they've been pretty sufficiently answered. Except when does Cal EPA expect the
scoping and regulations to be completed?
Thank you again, Mark. To be with Caloricycle, our expectation now is that we would have CalreCycle, the Water Board, DTSC and other partners weigh in a scoping opportunity, get our hands around, make sure that we have everything in the reg package that we want.
Please, we're running out of time.
Just tell me when.
I'm sorry. Six months for scoping and then a year for the formal rulemaking.
Thank you very much. I think that the difficulty of this
topic, as you know, I think we
all appear across the aisle, included, recognize this is really a challenging topic. And every time we do something new technologically, we increase the likelihood or we have another challenge in front of US lithium ion batteries are here. They're going to be a big part of. Because we have a real challenge with climate change, which is another technology that created an impact. These things all have impacts. But it does tell me two things. One, we have some legislative, and I think we're probably going to have more legislative fixes that need to come so that we put into statute real penalties for people not properly monitoring and all of that. And Assemblymember talked about that. But I would offer to you that. But given that as many resources have gone into this as possible, our current idea that we're just going to landfill everything is simply outdated. It does not work anymore. It's not a question of if these other ones are going to catch. It's going to be when these other
ones will catch at some point in
time and have these set events. And that's why I want to make sure that we do come up with funding for a study on what are the new things we should convert over to. I point out that in Oslo they're doing incineration, which is a terrible word, you know, from an environmental standpoint, but they now are doing carbon capture with that. We should at least study that. But not just that, but every other way. But we, we can't just keep landfilling our way out of this situation. It has to change. This should be the clarion call for that. And we need a whole new way now. Recycling is a real key. But recycling will have, as you see with Beckside as example, you can have problems with recycling, but recycling is the ultimate thing that we have to get to. But we need the funding for the second half of this. And I'm just a little concerned that we're challenged to do this, that we won't come up with funding for the study to say what is the new way forward? But that's the challenge that EPA and everybody else in the agency have to help us with. And with that, thank you all very much, really appreciate this. And we're going to go to issue three, Assemblymember Schiavo, we really appreciate you, your participation at this point in time. Everybody, if you will be prompt with your presentations and concise with your answers, we would really appreciate it. And we're at issue three, which is safe and affordable funding for equity and resilience, the Safer Drinking Water Program update and impacts of the new Cap and Invest program.
So
we will start.
Good morning to see you this morning. Chair Bennett, members of the assembly, my name is Joaquin Esquivel. I have the honor of serving as the chair of the State Water Resources Control Board. The State Water Board is a five member board. We, along with our nine regional water quality control boards, oversee water quality regulation in the state. The State Board also administers water rights. And as about a decade ago, the division of Drinking water was transferred over to the state board and so oversees drinking water regulation and agencies in the state. Taking a quick step back, as Secretary Garcia said, we continue to here urgently address the challenges that climate change are putting onto our communities. And when it comes to access to clean and safe drinking water, our communities were already dealing with legacy challenges in their access. And so climate change certainly adds a sense of urgency so as to ensure that those communities that are impacted most don't continue to bear that brunt. I think as we all know, in 2012, the state of California was the first state in the nation here to acknowledge the human right to water. But it came with a few caveats and those included no additional funding at the time of that passage or authorities. And through the course of the last decade plus the state of California, with the partnership here, with the legislature and state board and importantly the leadership here of the governor have gone from a moment where we didn't have dedicated funding to where we have additional authorities. And in 2019, the Safe and Affordable Fund was passed. It guaranteed 130 million over the course of 10 years yearly. 130 million. And proud to say since 2019, in the passage of the Citizens Safe and Affordable Fund, we have gone from 1.6 million Californians down to 600,000 today without access. That's an improvement of a million Californians over the course of these years. And in that time we've actually brought 320 systems back into compliance, benefiting 3.3 million Californians. So that benefit is larger than you know when you look at those net numbers. And that's because we have the challenge of at risk and other failing systems. So the number of Californians without access to clean water is not a static number. It is one that is evolving as additional systems face challenges, whether through drought or climate change or additional maximum contaminant levels and come out of compliance. So Today we have 98% of Californians, 98.5 that are served by water systems, that are served by systems meeting standards. So over 98% of Californians have access to clean water. Of the 400 drinking water systems currently on the failing list, which is that 600,000 figure of Californians, all of our working toward long term solutions. I think importantly to note as well, since 2019, the state board has actually distributed 1.8 billion in drinking water grants. That it is a larger number because the board has used the Safe and Affordable funding to really maximize other pots of funding, including the state revolving funds, general bond obligation and general fund expenditures here that have helped bolster the dollars that we have to work with. But that 130 million from the Safe and Affordable Fund are our most flexible. They're allowing us to respond to interim drinking water needs and emergency drinking water needs, while also providing technical assistance and construction dollars with lower requirements than some of those federal programs or even others. So now we're really working with the communities with some of the most intractable, long standing problems, of which drinking water may be only one of the issues they face. Each community requires unique solutions tailored to their needs and circumstances. Timeframes are often extended due to issues of governments and related process. Emerging contaminants make finding solutions much more difficult. So the work we have still in front of us is to keep an eye on these funding sources. As we know that the IJA, or the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which was passed in the Biden Harris administration is coming to an end. And so we see those dollars decreasing. There have been threats, diminishing capitalization grants coming to the drinking water and clean water state revolving funds from the feds. And so we are at a moment where we're keeping an eye certainly on the uncertainty of those various funding sources, while also making sure that we keep our eye on the goal here of
ensuring all Californians have access to clean water.
I'll stop there for now.
I'll just also note that there is
no other state in the nation that
has a program like this that is
focused on communities with access to clean water that have the data and here just the machinery, if you will, on the governance side that has been built because communities have demanded it. So the accountability of this program, the fact that we have a dashboard that daily is updated on how many Californians are currently served with systems that are not meeting compliance, gives me a lot to be proud of and really fortunate
for the leadership of the governor here,
who when he came in in 2019, made this and continues to make this such a huge priority. And we wouldn't have the sort of success that we have seen without the partnership of a number of water agencies, communities and other environmental justice groups that have been a bridge to so many communities out there in their need.
Thank you very much, Department of Finance
vid, long wing with the Department of Finance. Happy to answer any questions.
Thank you. Lao.
Good morning, Mr. Chair and Members. Sonja Pettic with the Legislative Analyst Office. I just wanted to provide a little bit more information, I guess, about some of the impacts of SB8 4, the cap and Invest restructuring bill, on the SAFER Fund for general awareness. So as Chair Esquivel mentioned, the SAFER Fund has had a set amount of funding, up to 130 million backfilled with general Fund if GGRF funds were not enough each year. The way that the Cap and Invest program has been restructured, the SAFER program is now in the third tier of programs that are funded with greenhouse gas emission greenhouse gas reduction funds. What this means is that Tier 1 and Tier 2 must be fully funded before any funding goes to the programs in Tier three. So this creates a little bit of uncertainty about how much funding the SAFER Program's going to get each year. So, so that's one impact. And then the second impact I want to mention, which I hope I'm explaining this correctly, and the Chair may wish to ask Finance, Department of Finance or the Chair Escovel, if I've explained it correctly, because SAFER is Now in Tier 3 and Tiers 1 and 2 have to be funded first as the auction revenues come in. The SAFER Program may not get any revenues throughout the year until the the end of the year when more is known about how many how much revenue is available to provide to Tier three programs. So what this means, this isn't necessarily a problem. It essentially means that the program is going to be funded in arrears, like sort of closer to the end of the year, but it will create this weird transition period for fiscal year 26, 27 where they may not get any funding until the end of the year. So just wanted to raise that issue for your general awareness and you may want to check that I've explained that correctly.
I think she said it right. Is that correct, Department of Finance?
Very much correct.
Great, thanks. And so what is your plan for
how to make this transition to funding in arrears versus funding in advance?
Yeah, I appreciate that we're actively right now going through our projects where they are in the pipeline. And importantly, as I said, we do have other sources of funding. And so we're just making sure that we're not delaying any projects, that we continue to fund projects as they become ready for that investment and are looking to ensure that again, we're using our
other pots of funding to be able
to cover any gaps that there may be. But I just have to give a lot of credit to the Division of Financial Assistance, our folks in the program, we don't make communities hunt and peck amongst our various pots that we receive to figure out what they match best
for for we do all that ourselves.
And so we will continue to provide that level of service to folks.
We will manage whatever the legislature and
the resources were being provided and do
our best to bridge the gap.
I'm going to move quickly through the questions that we've prepared for you guys
in advance because I want to make
sure we get those answers into the record. But I have one question in advance, in advance of question one and that is, you know, impressive numbers going from 1.6 million people to 700,000 people
in the report in terms of improvement, in terms of people that have access now to safe drinking water, what's the definition of somebody now having access? I know some places we're still delivering water on a weekly basis so that people have drinking water. Are those people counted as having safe?
Thank you for the question, Sheriff. No, folks that are receiving emergency or interim water, you know, the system is still not meeting a maximum contaminant level. So they are still categorized as a failing system and still show up as great.
Thank you. And again, we'll try to be as
efficient as we can with the questions
and answers here with regard to this.
We have thousands of small water districts throughout California. Many of them are under capitalized, underfunded structures that are capital structures that are teetering with climate change.
We're probably going to have a constant battle of as we're improving some of these water districts.
There are others are going to fall into this.
So this is an absolute essential program
that everybody should have access to clean, affordable drinking water.
And these small districts certainly need both
assistance, but they also need monitoring and some pressure being put on them and whether it's viable for us to maintain
in the future all of these small water systems. And I know that you folks have been focusing on trying to consolidate where
it makes sense for the customers and
you're getting a lot of pushback from the water districts themselves.
And it's understandable.
If you have five water districts, that's five people that are general managers of water districts, that's maybe five members on the bus, 25 board members. They all want to keep their position and those. And we have to make sure we try to overcome that and give the
citizens what is in the best interest of the citizens in the long run.
So I throw that out there as that I think that you've answered the question one, but how much is the program projected to receive in 26, 27 I think it's 89 million.
Am I correct?
I'll look to our Department of Finance colleagues.
Yes, I can answer that. For fiscal year 2627, the governor's budget projects $92 million in proceeds in 2627. I'll also note that all of the historical transfers into the Safe and Affordable Drinking Water Fund would still be available for expenditure. So that is also available, but we
are cutting back from 130 million to
the 92 million, correct?
Yes.
Under the new structure of the Capitan Invest expenditure plan, the annual proceeds can be up to $130 million. Then depending on proceeds and tier one and tier two appropriations needing to be met first, then there would be a proportional downward reduction from the maximum of $130 million. And the projection as of governor's budget is for $92 million in proceeds.
So the bottom line is we are decreasing funding. We are projected to be decreasing funding
for the SAFER program, correct?
The projection currently, yes, it projects $92 million. I'll just note that the governor's budget is not proposing this or any change. It simply reflects the actions that the bill package that the legislature passed last year and was signed by the governor. So just wanted to note that.
Well, there is a change. So there is a change and it's
changes in how we have sort of implemented the tiering structure.
And the tiering structure has been changed since the passage of SB840.
The tiering structure was changed.
So this is, this is not just
that there's been a change and the
SAFER program is going to get less money. And I think that that's going to be a concern. I think there are many areas where the legislation is going to be willing to accept cuts and. But whether it's in the SAFER program
or not is a real question in my mind.
Then what's the fiscal impact and the tiering structure, you know, that we have in terms of ggrf? I think we've just covered question three. Question four. What specifically is funded by the SAFER program that can't be funded by revolving funds or general obligation bonds? And do you have any examples of
that funding that are essential for a project?
Yeah, a lot of it is on
the emergency and interim side. It's our most flexible dollars ultimately. So, you know, it's a bit of a fund of last resort when we think of, say, response to the drought where we funded well over nearly 3,000 hold water tanks and are still providing hold water to a number of folks
who still have dry wells.
So that's the most at risk of
all of the programs insofar as what we wouldn't necessarily fund.
Are you asking?
Yes, it's hard to say what exactly we wouldn't amongst there but amongst the other items ultimately that we're funding with the safer funds that were not say with those other funds are things like construction are, you know, they are our most flexible dollars.
Ultimately they have the less the least amount of strings, if you will attached and let us be most flexible.
Can those emergency water deliveries be funded
by the revolving fund or the general fund?
They can't.
Exactly. So I won't speak for the general
fund, but certainly not the state revolving fund. The federal programs, they don't allow for
that sort of flexibility. General obligation bonds. I didn't mean to say general funds.
So anything besides the emergency deliveries that can't be funded by the revolving fund
or general obligation bonds, again it's also going to actual construction and technical assistance
would be the other category of things
that we're again most nimbly able to
fund with the safe and affordable fund
that those other funds are less nimble around.
And then how are you measuring success? What are the criteria you're using?
Yeah, the top line really is how many Californians are without access to clean water. But it includes to your point, earlier metrics around consolidations. We've been able to do 180 consolidations since 2019. And yes, to your point, there are communities where it's more challenging, but we see a lot of momentum in gaining that more regional and greater resilience by ensuring smaller systems are either matching up with larger ones with the resources or pulling together to create a better, more financed system.
And I strongly encourage you to keep exercising your authority to push to push
when it's in the best interest of customers.
Right. I see somebody who wants to make a comment. Seminarymember Gallagher.
I'll just make a quick comment. I agree with you, Mr. Chairman. It is unfortunate that, you know, SB840 deprioritized this program. This is a program that my former colleague Devin Mathis from the Central Valley really pushed for. A lot of these areas where we need safe drinking water, where we need to improve the drinking water systems are in rural areas, many in the Central Valley, but also in my district, you know, these rural areas where we need to make improvements so that we can ensure safe drinking water for these communities. This has been a really good program and it is unfortunate that was deprioritized.
Thank you.
And instead, you know, we prioritize high speed rail. You Know, I think if you ask these Central Valley communities, these rural communities, what would you prefer? Do you want safe drinking water coming out of your faucet or do you want a high speed rail in your community? I'm pretty sure I know the answer.
Thanks.
So it's an example of misplaced priorities and I hope that we can change that in the Future.
Thank you. Mr. Gallagher, final question for you. What are the primary challenges to getting
the last 6, 700,000 people covered?
Yeah, these are again, some of our most intractable and long standing communities that have been without access. Sometimes there's resistance. We're having to use our mandatory concern consolidation authorities and drag folks through a process. So sometimes it's the local conditions that are driving those I also just have to flag. We know that we have emerging contaminants of concern like PFAS or microplastics that are coming down the line. So when I think of the challenge
that we have, I think it's helping
to message that we have made incredible progress. We have a program here that's working and folks may see that number increase. I'm here telling you there are 600,000 Californians still yet without access to clean water. We want to see that. You know, that's our major metric. We need to get that down to as low as possible. But it is an ongoing challenge that we will have to keep an eye on as a state and as a people as to how to be sure that that number keeps going down.
Thank you very much. Appreciate it. All right, we're ready to move on to issue number four.
All right, this is around the Safe Drinking Water State Revolving fund Administration fund. As I had just mentioned, you know of the tools the state board has, the state revolving funds, both on the clean water side, but here we're talking about the drinking water side are incredibly important because it is a growing fund into perpetuity, meaning that the longer we go here, the more we invest in it, the more resource we have. It was first created in 1997 by amendments for the federal Safe Drinking Water act, where annual federal grants associated with state match interest earnings and revenue bond proceeds provide a revolving loan program into perpetuity. As I said, since its inception, we have funded $4.3 billion. It has been actually funded, with apologies, $4.3 billion. And in turn, we have been able to finance 5.1 billion in projects, including 750 million in principal forgiveness or grants to communities. This request ultimately is to allow us to use what authority, authority we've had for a while. Which is fee in lieu of interest to fund the staffing for this program. The yearly sort of staffing costs for the administration of the drinking water State revolving fund is around 7 million. And as I said, we're seeing a reduction in the capitalization grant from the feds. And so we're starting to see a gap in the resources we need to even get the dollars out. And so this fund would allow us to use that fee in lieu of interest in order to then keep funding our staff and ensuring we have a funding source and here a fund to be able to pay for the staffing it requires for this program.
Great. Thank you.
Vid Long Wing Department of Finance I'll just add that the proposal is simply requesting the expenditure authority to just expend the funds that are already there. So I just wanted to make that technical clarification.
Thank you for that.
Great Lao.
Sonja Pettic with the Lao and I just add a little bit more context, which is that because the annual grant from or the annual allocation from the federal government fluctuates each year, it means that the amount that's provided for administration also fluctuates each year. Each year, even as the fund itself has been growing over time and the workload associated with that has been growing over time. So this proposal would really provide a more stable source of funding. In addition, happening at the same time, the water Board's about to experience a bit of a cliff as the IIJA funds drop off. Meanwhile, Congress is also there's a recent spot and growing trend to provide allocations not through states state revolving funds, but rather as direct sort of earmarks to specific projects. So this means not only is there going to be less funding provided to the state, which then the water board can prioritize for specific projects, but that the administration or the amount, the percentage amount for administration associated with that annual lower allocation will also be lower. So there's kind of multiple things happening at the same time. But I think this proposal provides a way to sort of stabilize the funding for the administration required to run the program.
We have four questions that you've sort of answered in your comments. I'd like to have you just echo any other thoughts you have. Elio pointed out the congressional directed spending and the impacts any specific projects that are at threat as a result of this.
I'll just say, you know, as Elio said here, the fact that the program has seen a reduction in the capitalization grant that we received because of earmarks is a real concern. It also is a concern because even if Some of those earmarks are coming to the state of California. Regrettably, the Environmental Protection Agency, US epa, doesn't have the staffing or expertise it seems to get those dollars out. They're kind of just sitting there. They have not been all awarded. And so it's kind of a double hit where, you know, these earmarks are happening. They're not actually then even being delivered to the states and having these consequent impacts on not just California, but all the state's abilities to continue to have a secure source of funding that was there prior to this earmark challenge.
You know, we saw this last week when we had the conversations about what's
happening with weather and weather forecasting, et cetera. But these cuts are having a specific and material impact on the quality of life of people.
It's very hard for people to make
the connections between all of these things.
But when you're talking about just trying to get these basic projects moving, you
know, the
people of California are suffering
from those cuts that have been made at the federal level.
Yeah, the ija, the Bipartisan infrastructure Law, I think for a lot of us, we thought was a turning point where the federal government was returning as a strong partner in the investment of our water systems. And that has. That has not carried through.
Thank you.
Anything? All right, all right, all right. We are going to go to issue five.
All right, this is here. Permitting impacts of the recent Supreme Court decisions and a request for 2.6 million in fiscal year 2627 and ongoing and 12 permanent positions from the Waste Discharge Permit Fund to conduct essential water quality permitting enforcement work in response to the 2023 U.S. supreme Court decision, the SAC IT decision, which has reduced the federal jurisdiction over our water bodies. The Sackett ruling substantially narrows what quantifies as waters of the United States, reducing federal Clean Water act jurisdiction and leaving gaps ultimately in oversight of wetlands and other waters. The State Board have analyzed internal data on orders issued since the Sackett ruling. Per the requirements of the the 2024 Budget act report of those impacts was sent to the legislature on January 2026. The budget change proposal request is aligned with that report to the Legislature. The board must redesign programs to fill gaps left by the loss of federal oversight and ensure state protection where federal law no longer applies. In many cases, the state processes require more time and resources than the federal processes that were historically used. And the BBCP indicates trailer bill language will improve but not eliminate the need for additional resources. So, you know, at this time, it is really critical that even amongst the federal Rollbacks that we maintain our momentum and protections on water quality. I think it's important to note that actually, since COVID we have seen a doubling of the complaints on water quality on the water quality side that have come into our office and I think reflects what is a continued desire from Californians to ensure that the places that they recreate the rivers, streams, lakes, bays, are fishable, swimmable, and ultimately don't harm public health. And so really appreciate the consideration of this budget change proposal. As we noted just here, on the funding on the drinking water side, these, these rollbacks from the federal responsibilities are meaning that our state agency and authorities are just having to step up and fill the gap and appreciate the support.
Thank you so much. First question I have is really, if these budget positions aren't filled, what are the impacts going to be of the existing gaps that have been left from the federal government?
If we don't have the resources to be able to respond, it means that polluters and others out there that could put, you know, are potentially off the hook without the resources one to ensure that we can move through permits quickly but also respond to what are, you know, threats or enforcement needs that are out there. I think that it's important to remember that a lot of efficiencies had been built into the federal programs, the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System, mpds program permits. And what's at risk is delaying housing, delaying critical projects that the regional boards now are needing to then permit if we don't have the resources to match the expeditious improvements that we had prior to this rollback.
Any questions? Any questions?
Thank you. Yeah, I didn't grab the gatmoback, did I? Right.
Yeah. I didn't adjourn
the vast authority being passed back and forth here. Right. The. You mentioned, you mentioned trailer bill. That's all I heard, but I didn't. I didn't hear any. Could you repeat whatever it is you said about the trailer bill to clarify?
The administration is not proposing any statutory changes as part of this budget proposal.
Okay.
So you have no trailer bill?
No.
Okay, great. All right.
The.
I think that I agree with LAO that this is sort of an intelligent way to come up with a. Trying to handle the administrative cost here.
Right.
Oh, we haven't. Oh, we haven't jumped to LAO yet. I agree with LAO and watch and see what she says. Right. Yeah. You'll be surprised too.
Right.
Go ahead.
You hardly need me. Mr.
Chair,
let me. Sonja Pettic, again, let me start with the proposal at hand. First of all, as noted in the Agenda, our office finds that this proposal meets sort of this high bar for legislative consideration. The request is justified and supported with workload data. We recommend the legislature approve the proposal. But then I did want to mention that for context, that in 2425 when the board first came forward to request positions, the legislature only approved some of the positions at that time and did not approve these 12 particular positions because it expressed a desire to gather more information about the actual workload impacts resulting from the Supreme Court decision. It also wanted more information about the sorts of limitations that are in current state statute that cause the state program to be somewhat more inefficient than the program under federal authorities. So to that end, the legislature required a report from the Water Board which the Water Board provided In January of 2026, just this past January. And in that report, the Water Board highlighted a number of areas in current state statute that are creating additional workload, creating longer timelines, but not necessarily creating more quality permitting, should you say so? A few of these areas are. A few of the areas that are affected are enforcement. The state processes are less able, the states less able to be proactive when it comes to enforcement. The penalties are a lower amount. Both of these deterrent effects then are less effective. There are some other issues. I won't go into all of them. I'll just name one more which is when the state board rather than the nine regional boards issues a water quality control plan or amends a water quality control plan at the state level, it only applies to to waters of the United States. This is how state statute is written. So then each of the nine water quality. Sorry, each of the nine state water board, regional state water boards have to then amend their water quality control plans to match the state plan. You can see that there's opportunity for improved efficiency there. So we would recommend that the legislature consider some or all of these issues and consider making some changes to statute. It could do this through trailer bill, but it could also do this through the policy process. And the policy process would allow for a more in depth discussion and consideration of trade offs.
I wanted to take this opportunity to say over and over again, the LIO has been pretty consistent in coming up
with policy guidelines for us to use to evaluate these budget proposals and then applying them to these. And so it's been, I think, very
helpful to know that we have an LAO office that has created sort of
the criteria for approval and therefore the criteria for rejection and has been firm in sort of the application of those. I think has been very helpful for
the legislature again to have this role.
So I really appreciate this and the support for this. I think the, you know, we were at 38 positions. We approved 26, and now we're back with the 12. And I see that they've sort of passed muster in terms of, yes, there is the requirement out there to be able to do this. So I agree. And these, I mean, water is just a pretty essential issue for us to make sure that we get right. And this Sackett ruling has thrown lots
of complications at us in terms of moving forward.
So I appreciate that. I have a couple quick questions. Are you okay? Great. And the. How long does it generally take to complete the projects funded by. I'm sorry, I jumped over. Oh, there we go. I've had it marked up here.
Right.
In terms of the statutory changes. Lao was talking about statutory changes and you guys decided not to pursue any trailer bill. Lao was encouraging us to do something. Do you folks see benefits to having some changes at some point in time, whether it's this year or not?
Yes.
As our report indicated, there are efficiencies that we could be building into the program and are supportive of trying to figure out how best, whether through the legislative process or just continued technical assistance to you all here, how to ensure that we get some of those efficiencies.
So I know this is a very politically sensitive question to ask because normally you are strictly forbidden to try to give us any suggestions about legislation, but is there a way that we can work with the administration and find out from you what you think are the most appropriate things so we can decide whether to do them by administrative trailer bill or by legislative trailer bill or by policy legislation either next year or something done as a gut and amend bill this year.
Department of Finance.
I'll just say that in the report that the Water Board has provided, you know, we describe in detail the limitations faced under current statute. Our understanding is that, you know, there's conversations in the policy process. And so the Water Board. We're open to conversations and just answering any questions on the report and the limitations described in the report.
So do the appropriate policy committees have. Have. Are they having conversations with the water Board?
I believe there are conversations ongoing and we are providing technical assistance.
Great.
All right. Thank you very much. I appreciate that. Any other of these questions that are critical from our perspective? Right. Thank you. There we go.
Thank you.
We're at issue six, the elimination of the vacant positions. This is where you're going to earn your pay. Okay, great. And the Department of Toxic Substances Control, State Water Resources Control Board and Department of Pesticide Regulations all have eliminations of vacant positions. And we are going to start this time with the Laos report or response and then turn it over to the Department of Finance.
All right, thank you, Mr. Chair Sonia Pettic. Again on this issue, I've organized my comments into four sections. So I'm first going to start with sort of a lay of the land to provide context, then go over what's included in the governor's budget proposal, then discuss what the Joint Legislative Budget Committee found in its review of these proposed eliminations and what it conveyed to the Department of Finance in a December 2025 letter. And then finally I'll conclude with our offer assessment and recommendation. So to start, you should have a handout. It's just a single page with a figure. We thought it might be a little easier to think about or to follow along rather if you had a visual. So over the past couple of years, the governor's administration has proposed a number of options for reducing spending across state departments. One of those methods was to simply reduce spending in non personnel areas. The other was to eliminate vacant positions. And that's what we're here obviously to talk about. So at May Revision Last year, May 2025, the governor came forward with a specific proposal for reducing or for rather eliminating positions. And the proposal was to eliminate roughly 6,000 positions across departments. And this is the first row of the figure. Given that the proposal came forward in May, it didn't give the legislature a lot of time to consider the specific positions proposed for elimination or the impacts of eliminating those positions. So a compromise was reached. The final budget agreement Essentially, if you look at the next row of the graphic, the final agreement in effect eliminated roughly 5,000 positions, but gave the legislature additional time to review roughly 1,000 positions. The joint Legislative Budget Committee was the entity given the task of reviewing those positions. So in December, the JLBC provided the letter to the Department of Finance in which it did not concur with eliminating 650 of those thousand positions. So we're in the third row on the graphic. So in effect, that eliminated about 360 positions. Of the 650 positions that the JLBC did not concur with, roughly 350 of those are in our essentially environmental positions. There are positions in the departments under the Natural Resources and Cal EPA agencies, as well as positions at Food and Ag and the Public Utilities Commission. Within Those positions are 138 positions affecting the departments before you today, the three departments before you today. And it's our understanding that the remaining environmental positions will be heard at subsequent, subsequent hearings. Okay, so what does the governor any clarification questions before I proceed? So there's a lot of numbers to throw at you.
Just a comment, very helpful. I mean you can look at this or you can read and try to do this sentence by sentence. And it's much easier to do it this way.
Thank you. I thought could sort of follow along with the darker shaded squares. So what the governor proposes is basically the governor's January budget proposal built in savings from the elimination of all 6002 positions. So back again at the top of the hierarchy on the graphic at the three departments before you today, that would generate annual savings of about $21 million. Okay, so moving on. What did the JLBC find in its review and why did it non. Why did it not concur with 650 position eliminations? So in its review, the Joint Legislative Budget Committee reached out to departments to learn more about the various positions and their functions, why these positions were authorized in the first place. And it used some specific criteria to do this. For example, were any of the positions authorized as part of a reform effort or to improve program outcomes? Were any of the positions associated with law enforcement? Were any of the positions associated with revenue generating activities such as issuing fines or penalties? And then were the positions supported with general fund or supported with special funds? So at the Department of Toxic Substances Control, the JLBC did not concur with eliminating 80 of the 112 positions proposed. The JLBC considered whether these positions performed key functions for the department or supported important legislative priorities. The JLBC had specific concerns about eliminating positions that were established as part of reform efforts in 2022. And these reforms included addressing structural deficits in two of the special funds, sub accounts or special fund accounts. These reforms also created a Board of Environmental Safety and expanded programs to address high priority programs and activities. At the State Water Board, the JLBC did not concur with eliminating 43 positions, which was roughly half of the positions proposed for elimination. The JLBC considered whether the positions were associated with permitting and enforcement of discharges. One of the issues we were just talking about whether they were associated with water rights or enforcement of curtailments or other drought activities, flood management, groundwater recharge, water quality control plans, chemical contamination, Prop 4 supported drinking water programs and other drinking water programs. Basically it looked at are these positions supporting core functions of the state Water Board? We'd note that and the JLBC found that many of these positions were established to regulate industry and are supported with industry fees. And moreover, some of these positions were actually authorized to ensure more timely issuance of permits at the Department of Pesticide Regulation. The JLBC did not concur with the elimination of 15 of 19 positions. These are all special funded. And these are actually positions that were discussed earlier in this hearing that were associated with legislation passed in 2024 which increased the MIL assessment to address structural funding deficit, enhance core functions, and improve timelines. Okay, so lastly, I will provide the LAO's assessment and our recommendations. So to the extent that the legislature wishes to retain rather than eliminate some of these positions, it will erode some of the savings that the governor built into the baseline budget, and the legislature likely would have to look elsewhere for a similar level of savings for these three particular departments. The total savings in the budget proposal is about 21 million. However, our second finding is that eliminating positions supported by special funds has no real direct impact on the general fund. I'm sort of stating the obvious here, but if you go back to the handout at these three departments, eliminating these positions would result in savings of about 3 million general fund, the rest of it is from special funds. So eliminating those positions, positions, and the special funds is not going to help the state's general fund structural deficit. Granted, special funds can be used to provide loans to the general fund when needed. But as I just went over, some of these funds actually had structural deficits. So they're not, they don't have a lot of excess lying around to make loans in addition for funds that for funds. Sorry. Some of these positions also were just authorized to do priority legislative activities. I would also note that for special funds, a lot of these programs are meant to regulate industry, and industry pays fees to cover the costs of that regulation. So they're sort of calibrated to, to make sure that the fees are set in a way to just cover costs. So there may not be a lot of extra funding in those funds. Okay, I'll try to wrap this up. Mr. Chair. Our third point is that eliminating certain positions could have undesirable program impacts. And so there would be important trade offs to consider if you do choose to eliminate them. And finally, just because a position is vacant doesn't mean the position is not important. Important. There are any number of reasons that a position can be vacant that have nothing to do with program need. So what do we recommend? We recommend the legislature maintain the special funded positions. Not only do these not help with the state's budget situation, but they serve important purposes and you may have undesirable program impacts on the general funded positions. It's slightly trickier because the same logic applies. These are also important positions, but given the state's budget situation, we recommend that the legislature weigh these against other priorities across the budget. Thank you.
Thank you very much. Thank you very much. And I wanted to move us along
because I knew this one was something that it was going to take a little bit more time. So your timing was fine.
Mr. March, you have the unenviable position of each week coming to see us to talk about. But that's, you know, it reminds me of something that I heard when I first got here and talking about being on this position.
They said, oh, you don't want to
be on those subcommittees because when there's tough times, all you have to do is spend all your time talking about cuts.
But
it is the reality that we have to deal with and you have that. But we have some significant issues being raised by lao. We have a lot of respect for lao. So we want to give you an opportunity to present the executive branches positions
on this, and then we have some questions for you.
Great. Good afternoon. Andrew March with the Department of Finance. I won't go over any of the history as the LEO laid it out very well, but I think just two points that we would make. Generally, we think of positions that a department has sort of as a pool that they have authorized positions, rather than thinking about the specific duty of those positions. So when the JLBC asked departments what the duties of specific positions were, we provided that information. But that doesn't preclude the department from using another vacant position or reprioritizing positions overall in the department to meet the needs of that. So I think just generally, I would encourage the legislature to not think of it as if a position is eliminated that that work is not being done because it could be done by another position that's vacant. And we've generally seen the vacant position level remain steady across the last few years, statewide around 60,000 positions. Departments may have vacant positions for a number of reasons. They may hold positions vacant to cover increased costs elsewhere. There may be unforeseen costs that come up throughout the year that departments may use that flexible funding for. So that's the first point. Second point is, as Elio noted, special funds are still a really important thing. They're funded by fees. And so in order to create control, some of these fees, vacant positions or the elimination of the vacant positions can Help reduce fees, prevent the need for fee increases to happen sooner rather than later. Also control maybe unsustainable fee increases that may happen for some of the funds. Additionally, as Elio noted, some funds are in a structural deficit. So to the extent that we can control costs now, that would help us in the long term. I'm joined by colleagues from the various departments and also my colleagues from the Department of Finance to help answer any questions that the legis legislature may have today.
Thank you. Thank you very much. I'm going to jump first, you guys have thoughts? Because I want to get right to the meat of the matter. You know, Leo, I think appropriately suggests
that we should not cut the special funded positions.
I hear your response, but I have to say in terms of weighing both of the arguments, Leo's arguments feel stronger from that standpoint. Number one, when you say the work being done by these special positions could be done by somebody else, well, if that was the case, we wouldn't have
created the special position in the first place.
But we did create the special position
in the first place.
And we, as Elio points out, there are many reforms that we wanted to make and we were not happy with
what was happening at and what we
were told by the departments were we can't do those things because we don't have enough staff. So it begs the question if we've asked these departments if the legislative intent was we want more enforcement or more regulation or more proactive work here to avoid problems for Californians, that if the response was, well, the only way you can do that is we need these positions to be filled and then to turn around and say, well, we can go ahead and cut these positions because we'll do this with somebody else. The two simply don't match up. The second thing that I think doesn't match up when you say, well, we're trying to keep fees down, yes, we do have an issue where we have an affordability question. But trying to keep fees down when there are special fees defeats our purpose of the polluter pay sort of principle. And it's not always a polluter here, but the expenditure of funds should be matched with the revenue coming from the people causing the expenditure. So if somebody makes a lot of profits because they make widgets, but those widgets pollute the environment, then we should have a fee on the widgets so that the people that pay for the widgets are paying for the pollution that goes along with the environment. Your idea that eliminating the special position says we're not going to charge properly. The amount of money that it really takes to deal with the pollution caused by the widget. So for both of those things, I would respond and say I just don't think that they carry the same merit. So I feel strongly. I don't know where my colleagues are yet, but I think you're going to find the legislature feeling pretty strongly. The LAO is right on the special special funds when it comes to the. Before I get into the general fund, I wanted to ask this question because as I read the report, a few places that alluded that a special fund cutting a special fund will actually save some general fund money also cutting a special fund position, Is that correct or is it's $19 million we would have to come up with if we want to keep all of the positions recommended by the JLRB or whatever that, you know, recommended by that committee, we'd have to come up with 19 million in general fund. Is any of that because we keep the special fund positions? Who keep the special fund positions?
Will they?
Are they 100% funded by special fund or is there some general funds slipping in there? That's what's a little bit unclear to that.
It depends on the department. A number of departments do use multiple fund sources for a position. So if the legislature chose or if the ultimate end result was to keep a position, it could be multiple special funds that fund it and the general fund. So you couldn't necessarily just say, oh, well, we just want to fund that position with special funds. Then there would be some sort of impact overall.
Great.
Thank you. So I'm going to ask LAO and then I'm going to ask you to your thoughts and response. When you came up with the $19 million in general fund that we would have to come up with, does that include sort of this partial funding, et cetera, that Mr. March just referred to?
It's looking at it in the aggregate. So it's taking all the partial position. You know, there may be 0.2 of a position. Right. So it's looking at it in the aggregate. So departments would have to like if you wanted to only keep special funded positions, they would have to. It would be sort of a puzzle in the background to figure out how to make that work with just special funds and not having those little pieces of general fund for various positions.
But if we, if we wanted to keep the general fund positions, also $19 million will cover.
Putting the, putting the whole puzzle back together.
Yeah, yeah. With the special funds.
All right, great. And I think. Oh, and then the other thing is the legislature works hard and turned trying to, at budget time, trying to get some of its priorities put into the budget. But it's always been, from my perception, it's a challenge and we barely get a little bit in in terms of that. But we have worked for the reforms and some reforms that have been very important in the last couple of years. And it's sort of a, I think going through the process, there's been a pretty accurate review of, hey, if you do this, you're basically rejecting the very reforms that the legislature really tried to advocate for in the first place. And so another reason why much more inclined to accept the LAO's recommendation for sure on the special funds and to see if we can advocate to find the $19 million in general funds from other, other, other sources somewhere. Any questions by my colleagues? Yeah, Assemblymember Rogers. Yeah, thanks.
And I will admit I'm a little bit of a split brain on this one because I recognize even if the legislature insist on those positions being in there, our tools are limited to force hiring to occur. In fact, you know, they're not before us today. But cdfw, for instance, has a vacant position in Mendocino county to approve timber harvest plans. We'll have questions about why some of these positions haven't been filled. But from a budgeting perspective, what I heard is that from Department of Finance is that oftentimes these positions are intentionally held open because they are spending more money on other positions or other things are costing more money. So I'm hoping that the LAO can weigh in a little bit about the turnback process. How, how can we best try to make sure that even if we find space in the budget to create these positions, how do we make sure that the dollars ultimately are going towards the outcomes that we are going for? And how much do we reasonably expect at the end of the year to have saved from vacant positions that we approved the positions for but then ended up not being sold? Is there some historical data that you can provide there?
I don't have historical data at my fingertips, but no. You do raise a good question, and as does Department of Finance, that sometimes when the legislature authorizes a position, it doesn't necessarily manifest as a filled position at the department. And departments may use some of the funding more flexibly. But I do think that in the JLBC's review of some of these particular positions, a lot of these are positions that the departments want to fill. Like you raised fish and wildlife, for example. A lot of these positions are sort of law game wardens. They're in law enforcement or they're helping with permitting and they just need the, you know, the go ahead. This has been sort of this issue has been going on for a couple of years. So there have been, you know, departments have held off on hiring. In addition, I'd point out at DTSC and DPR some of these efforts, reform efforts, and the legislation passed in 2024, those are recent efforts. So the departments only just had these positions authorized in the last couple of years. So they may not have filled all of the positions yet. But to your point about oversight, I guess the legislature does have sort of limited tools if it can't sort of force the hiring of a position. So I guess that's where legislative oversight will be really important to ensure that you're seeing the outcomes that you're hoping for.
Yeah, I think that getting the folks from each of the individual departments to give us an overview of what will you not be able to do with these positions being eliminated would be helpful. I know you mentioned that you have those folks in the room would love to bring them up and see if they can walk us through for those departments. What can Californians expect to fall off by not having these positions that are funded and what priorities are either prioritizing over them?
Certainly I'd welcome my colleagues from the various departments to come up and we can go through those various questions.
So that's dtsc, Water Board and dpr.
Happy to start the conversation here. Alejandra Duran, I'm the Deputy Director of Legislation and Policy at the Department of Department of Pesticide Regulation. Thank you for the question. That is certainly a question that JLBC did ask of our department and we submitted responses to. And I'll try to be as brief as possible in my response here today, given timing, you know, a lot has been referenced in reforms to departments and DPR did receive a significant amount of resources in 2024. We received 170. And that came accompanied by AB 2113, which was an increase in the mill and a number of policy requirements placed on the department. And to touch a little bit on that, while the 19 positions that are proposed for elimination are not part of those 117 positions, the 170 positions that were approved by the legislature were built off of the baseline of having those those 19 positions. And those 19 positions do work directly or indirectly in part of the new policy requirements placed on the department specifically in registration, branch, continuous evaluation, reevaluation, all components that are very specific. In AB 2113, for example, in July of 2027, a provision of 2113 will go into effect where there's timelines and time frames for when we have to complete registration for a new pesticide product, for example.
Great, thank you.
Hi, I'm Karen Mogus, chief deputy director at the State Water Board.
Thank you.
You're violating the paper between the. There you go. Pull that microphone forward now. Right. Thank you.
All right, I'll just shoot from the hip.
Great. So I'll start with the approach that
the water board took to make the cuts of the vacancies. As we were asked to make the cuts, it was a snapshot in time of what positions were vacant at that moment.
We have organizations across our headquarters, State
Water Board, and then the nine regional boards all were requested sort of proportionate, proportionally to make cuts to their current vacancies proportional to the total number of positions that were in their organization. And so our cuts spread across all of our organizations and many of our program areas. And so when, to answer your question, what has been impacted? I'll highlight some of the higher level key drought response in our water rights and conservation programs has been a big hit. I'm speaking programmatically, that actually is spread over a couple of organizations. Our response, our work on the Bay Delta Plan amendment also has taken a hit.
And then generally speaking, many of our
vacancies were in our core regulatory programs. So when you talk about permitting and being able to respond to applications for projects or just permitting, our regular dischargers has taken a huge hit. And while we have in some key
areas been able to redirect staff to
cover the workload, that has not been able to be achieved. Because what happens then is the program they came from is then also impacted by the vacancy cut. So it just is a domino effect. So those are the program areas I'd like to highlight and happy to answer any more specific questions.
So in your charge, was there any, ever any discussion or ask for you to evaluate whether positions that currently have somebody in the position were less important than some of the vacant positions?
So that's where the redirects occurred. So at the time when we were given, here's our list of vacant positions, and they were sort of locked down. Then we at that point decided for certain key positions, priority positions, could we redirect staff into them? And that happened on a limited basis.
And was your specific charge to cut a corresponding percentage from each of the different regions? And does that assume then that the amount of work in some areas is not more substantial or at the moment more important or more urgent?
I'm Sorry, can you repeat that?
I think if I heard you correctly, you said that you had a percentage from each of everybody got a corresponding haircut in each of the different regions.
Correct.
But that also assumes that each region doesn't have priorities that are more urgent where you would need to have additional staff and maybe other regions where things are a little bit set for a little while. Is that correct?
Yes, I would say that again, where the regions had to cut in a priority area because that's where the vacancy was at the time they were able to redirect other staff and into that workload on a limited basis.
And if I may, as a member, what my colleague from the Water Board described is how the Water Board approached this specific exercise. Departments were given flexibility to choose sort of their prioritization for various vacant positions. But it was based on sort of a June 2024 snapshot. Because if you remember, this goes back to the 2024 budget, when that was proposed in May revision and then adopted in the 2024 budget where the administration was directed to go and find these sort of vacant positions for savings.
Yeah, gotcha.
Yeah, Just. Just before my time up here.
Yeah, please go ahead.
All right.
Good morning, Mr. Chair members Brian Brown with the Department of Toxic Substances Control. So it sounds like for dtsc, we took in some ways a pretty similar process to the Water Board, which is we tried to both balance prioritization of programs and workload with spreading the impact of the reductions somewhat proportionally across our different programs. Because the reality is when you're eliminating over 100 positions, there's no way not to impact all of your programs, even the ones that are the highest priority or where the workload is greatest. One other. So that ultimately did mean that all of our programs really were impacted, including enforcement and public safety programs, cleanup, oversight, really the gamut. One other thing I did want to just mention with respect to the question about why positions can be vacant. It might not be unique to dtsc, but is, I think, an important part of our story is, as was referenced earlier, the fiscal and governance reform bill that was passed in 2021 increased revenues and then allowed us to bring in over 300 new positions in the 2022 fiscal year. So as these cuts were being implemented, we had had about two years to start bringing, start filling those positions which we had been doing. We had brought our vacancy rate. When those positions were first authorized and added to the department, we were up near 30% vacancy rate just because of the sheer number. By the time the vacancy reduction drill went into place. We had brought that down to about 15%. So we had slowly been making progress and we're still working towards that. But that is why department of our size did have as many vacancies as we did.
Thank you so much.
Thank you. Chair. Good afternoon, everyone. Yeah, just wanted to kind of take each department in turn, starting with dpr. So, as you noted, we did approve the increase to the mill fee, which was significant. Your response seemed to inject some ambiguity into this, but my understanding, our understanding is the mill assessment fee was enacted to help fund the very positions that would be subject to the state sweep here. Is that not accurate or is, I
think, as my colleague noted, is that the positions that are proposed for elimination were not part of the increase that was associated with the MIL fee. So there was the increase of the MIL fee and then a subsequent increase of the number of positions for the department. However, they are supported by the MIL fee over all these 19.
So there's a connection. Can you describe the kind of work that will be impacted if these positions are eliminated? I'm particularly interested, as I'm sure the public is, would these position sweeps impact DPR's ability to properly approve and regulate pesticides?
Yeah. The 19 positions are across a number of our branches, including the branches that are responsible for registration, evaluation, enforcement, work, health and safety, you name it. We took a similar approach to our sister bdos here to identify positions to minimize overall impact to our programs and other statutory requirements. I think overall there will be a level of impact to the work that we do in that space, even though we have new, you know, the rest of the 117 positions that are going to be coming online this July.
So that's obviously of concern and we'll continue to evaluate that and push back as needed. So, dtsc, similarly, can you describe some of the impacts on department's work, particular particularly around the 2022 reform goals, if these positions were eliminated as proposed?
Yeah. Thank you. So of the 112 positions, it's roughly 20 or so that were funded by the BCPS in 2022 to implement reform. This included some positions to support the Cleanup and Vulnerable Communities initiative. It includes a couple of criminal investigator positions as well as some other enforcement and emergency response.
Great. Our great committee analysis highlights that many of the positions that are proposed for elimination either assist in revenue generation or perform work that is reimbursable. And we're kind of hearing that theme today. Can DTSC elaborate on that and explain what the potential budget impact score could be if these positions are eliminated, given that interplay.
Yeah, certainly. So we do have a couple of the positions that were in or were assigned to our fees unit. So that is the unit in our financial division that over worked with cdtfa, the Department of Tax and Fee Administration, on the collection of some of our core fees that support our programs. So eliminating those positions does have some impact in our ability to do some of that oversight work that's been a focus the last couple of years. Even more than that, though, we do have quite a few positions in DTSC that are reimbursable through a couple of different mechanisms. A lot of our oversight work in site mitigation, particularly overseeing voluntary agreements to do cleanup work and revitalization work, that work is reimbursable by the entity requesting the oversight. We also, for example, in our permitting division, many of our permitting staff work directly with facilities, and those facilities pay what we call the permitting fee for service. And so they directly reimburse us for our cost to do that permitting work. And we have a few other areas as well, but a lot of those are probably the core ones.
Thank you. And then finally, state Water board, you started talking about a couple of the areas of concern, namely drought and also the permitting process. If you could be more specific, on what impact would the proposed sweeps have on California's ability to respond to drought?
Oh, sure. So in particular, the work on drought includes our implementation of the conservation regulations that were adopted a few years ago. That of course, helps with water supply
reliability in local areas.
There are also work, permitting work that ramps up during drought.
So water.
Right. Water availability analysis, water.
Right.
Curtailment and enforcement of those curtailments. And let's see, I have a number of other things that are related to water quality permitting as well, but those are the key effects. And just drought planning, being able to do all of the work to address temporary urgency change petitions and, you know, things that need to happen when we're in the middle of a drought emergency.
Would it be fair to ask kind of a similar question around dealing with flooding as well? Is that an issue?
I don't think the positions that have been eliminated have an impact on flooding specifically.
Okay. And then on permitting, put simply, how is the elimination of 90 positions, the majority of which are positions relating to permitting, going to improve the permit approval process? In fact, won't this slow permitting even more?
Yeah, it's going to definitely impact our ability to get permits out the door as well as implementing those permits. So that means getting out, doing inspections. You heard about the need for additional Resources in response to the Sackett inspections are a huge way that we are able to identify where we have problem areas and conduct enforcement to get people back into compliance. And that crosses all of our program areas. So when I talk about permitting, I'm talking about facilities that are wastewater treatment plants. I'm talking about municipalities or industrial sites where stormwater runs off and they need to control the contaminants in their stormwater. I'm talking about timber harvest and utility work to prepare for wildfire and respond to wildfire. It is a broad swath of program areas that do similar activities that are going to be impacted.
Great, thanks. And then maybe one last to the administration. At some point, these vacant positions were deemed necessary by environmental departments. How does the administration plan to balance the needs that these positions were created to address?
Yeah, so generally departments operate with some level of vacant positions. So some departments, I think ideally we would want to see a department sort of around 10% or lower to be able to function properly, understanding that there are different, you know, retirements or people leaving the state, people coming out of the state, and just the natural ebb and flow of how these positions work. The goal of this exercise was really to decrease that number of the amount of vacant positions that departments were carrying that they were maybe using for other activities or that were long time vacant positions. So the goal was not to impact the amount of the work being done because ultimately those positions were vacant and so they by virtue were not doing work. So the goal was really to sort of shrink that overall pool and be able to reduce the amount of ongoing funding and ongoing employee compensation adjustments that the state continues to provide for positions that are vacant where the funding may not be used or the position is not filled.
Thank you. One final question for dpr. You know, we had a pretty good
battle on the mill fee. I believe we lost the part of the battle that I think was most important, which was to have it be adjusted for inflation each year, which means
the mill fee each year is going
to collect less and less money, even though the cost to implement the regulations, et cetera, will go up.
So we're already sort of starting to fall a year behind. We will be falling more behind, but it was a battle and we had lots of opponents to the increase in the mill fee. Can you please share what the response is from those people that are paying a higher mill fee to the proposal
to eliminate the positions that were funded by the higher mil fee?
I'm not sure I understand your question, Mr. Bennett.
Okay, we. There are people that are paying a higher mill fee. Right. They, we convinced them that they, that we needed this for these positions and so therefore they should go along with it. They dropped their opposition to the higher mill fee in exchange for us dropping the consumer price index being the inflation factor added to, to the milfy, which would have kept the MILFY then current. So they dropped their opposition because they thought they were getting these positions that would increase permitting and speed things up and you know, get them answers at
least now we're cutting those positions. What are they saying about it?
Yeah, I know there's been a lot of interest, of course, in keeping the department whole by stakeholders. I think we appreciate the advocacy that you especially did here in your house when a very difficult two thirds vote bill was in front of you. We have communicated out that while these positions are critical in supporting the regulatory, programmatic and statutory work that the department is doing, there's a large focus on AB 2113 requirements that some, like I mentioned, are still coming online July of next year, specifically on the registration timeframes. In the absence of these 19 positions, we would still work towards meeting those statutory requirements and you know, working internally, you know, where we can build efficiencies.
So you said there's been quite a bit of interest. What kind of comments?
What are you hearing from them?
Can you share what are they saying
to you guys about this proposal?
I believe it's my understanding that stakeholders that were involved in the AB 2113 conversations would like to keep the department whole. I think they've made that public.
Thank you, thank you, I appreciate that. And I just try to put this into context. We started with 6,000 vacant positions to be cut and we were, as Lao pointed out, we were asked to do that last May in the May revise, which did not give us very much
time, weeks to try to analyze 6,000 positions.
We worked out a compromise and we
analyzed 1,000 of those 6,000 positions.
We knocked it down to 600. So out of 6,000 positions, if 10% of them don't get cut, we're still cutting 90% of the vacant positions. That's a significant impact. So I know, you know, trying to come up with $19 million now sounds like a lot to try to come up with in terms of general fund. When you think about the, you know, 90% of the 6,000 positions were not, not being challenged in, in terms of moving forward. Still a big issue. But I hope that the administration will view this as, as a significant improvement from the administration's standpoint. And I would like to offer my perception from years of trying to work with government agencies and stuff is that we can never from the diet, even you folks at your level, you can't get in there and micromanage these departments about how efficiently each position is being. You know, well, if you change that person over there, you just can't. What you do is you squeeze a little bit and then they have to adjust and then you squeeze a little bit more and they have to adjust. And if they adjust inappropriately and we start to find real problems and we step in and go, no, you have to do this. And that's sort of what has happened. Now, we weren't squeezing before because we were coming from all those big budget surplus times, but this is a squeeze down with a little bit of an adjustment to try to take care of what we think are legislative priorities that that are out there. And so I hope we view it as a pretty good win in terms of going from 6,000 positions to essentially 5,400 positions being cut, you know, in rough figures and stuff as we go forward. But I think there's going to be significant concern in the legislature about these last cuts. And we appreciate you being here again and having this conversation with us. We must be out of this room soon. But we're going to go to question issue 7 and then we're going to go to issue 10 at the request of Assemblymember Conley. And then we will go back to issues eight and nine. So for everybody in the audience, if you want to be aware of that, we're going 7, 10, 8, 9 and 9. All right. And we're still going to have to move quickly. All right. Even with this. So question seven, it's the implementation of SB54. We have a lot of concerns about implementation of SB54 and I'm going to ask my question in advance and hope that you will answer it in your comments so that I think it might be more efficient. And that is we're really concerned about the finalized regulations regarding the unauthorized category for exclusion of food and agricultural packaging. Seems like a big exclusion, the treatment of chemical recycling vis a vis management of hazardous waste rather than the state standard of avoiding generation of habit hazardous waste in the first place and the exemption of over the counter medication packaging. The other big one is under the categorical exclusion process, if the final regulations continue to allow it will produce or the pro will pay for the cost of CalRecycle's review and evaluation of exclusion claims or will taxpayers be on the hook for that work? And if CalRecycles determines that an exclusion is not merited, is the producer required to pay fees retroactively to the pro or to pay for Cal Recycles efforts? I wanted to read those two into the record here so that the public listening would know that we're asking you to answer those two things in your responses right now, if you can. So go ahead. You're on.
Sounds great. Thank you, Chair and good afternoon, members.
Good afternoon.
Appreciate the opportunity to be here today. I'll keep my opening remarks short so I can jump right into responses to those questions.
Okay.
I'm Zoe Heller. I'm the Director of the Department of Resources, Recovery and Recycling. I'm joined by Chief Deputy Mindy McIntyre. I'm just going to jump right in. So I'm going to quickly orient you as to where we are in implementation of 54 and then go into the responses to your question.
Okay.
We closed a 15 day comment period on February 13th. We are in the process of reviewing the hundreds of comments that came in. The main change that was made in the last draft of the regulations was specific to the exclusion for food and ag commodities, as you just asked about.
Our goal is.
Say that again, please.
The main change in the last regulatory draft that we released was specific to the exclusion for the food and ag commodities packaging. So I'll address that in just a few minutes, a few seconds here. Our goal is to get these regulations submitted to the Office of Administrative Law as quickly as possible so that we can have regulations that go into effect prior to the submission of the plan, the Producer Responsibility Organization plan, to the Advisory Board. And that deadline is June 15th. So we have some very important deadlines coming up. The next critical deadline that I just want to mention for you all is that the Department will need to have the plan reviewed and will need to have the plan reviewed and have acted on the plan by the first of the year. So 27-1-1, we feel we're on time to do these things. We know it's a tight timeline, but we're working closely with the Producer Responsibility Organization to be able to ensure that the law is implemented as it is. Now to get to your questions on the categorical exclusions for food and agriculture products, commodities, and the packaging for those products. This was introduced in a draft of the regulations based on a concern that there wasn't enough clarity to determine what defined a conflict with federal law. There's a specific mention in the law and I'm just going to read it so I don't mess it up, which
is
I'm in the wrong place.
Here we go.
Which is the proposed regulations.
Well, sorry.
That the regulations that CalRecycle develops cannot conflict with federal requirements. So the way that we addressed that was by putting within the regulations a process, a noticing process where those producers could notice us with what the federal law is and why they're unable to comply with the law by utilizing packaging that would comply. So how our regulations are demonstrating that conflict. So unlike the other exclusions that are in the law, this is not automatic. It requires a notice, it requires a process, it requires a determination or rather a demonstration of that direct conflict. So within the last draft of the regulations, we put quite a bit more specificity around what that means, what that process looks like, what our expectation is as far as the information that we receive, how that's submitted to the department, how that will be transparent so others can see it. If that's not available for those producers within the law and so specified within our regulations is a unique challenges exemption, which then is not an exclusion. That packaging would be part of the program and those producers would be paying in to the overall implementation of the, of the plan, of the program and ultimately would would identify a pathway towards compliance. So they may not be able to do it today because of a unique challenge, but they would demonstrate how they would build that infrastructure, build the collection to ultimately bring that package into compliance. So there's a couple of different pathways for packages that are challenged in the near term. Exclusions would be a rare example of one. We anticipate we would see a lot more exemptions coming in and we anticipate that there'll be packages that won't need either. Now, to answer your question about how that's ultimately paid for, you know, the legislation specifies that anything that CalRecycle does under the law is reimbursed by the producer responsibility organization. We anticipate the evaluation of these notices that will be coming in is a small portion of the overall program, but it is one that will ultimately be reimbursed by the producer responsibility organization.
Thank you very much. Of course, anything else you want to present.
We've shared with you a visual. That's the timeline that shows what we've done, you know, what we've done, what the PRO has done. We've already published quite a bit of relevant information for implementation of the law. I just want to bring to your attention the needs assessment. It's a comprehensive document that shows what infrastructure looks like in the state today and what's ultimately needed to achieve the requirements of the law. That's being used by the producer responsibility organization to get that plan done. We anticipate reg soon and looking forward to providing any further updates or answering any other questions you may have for
the benefit of the public that might be watching. This is what was passed out. Very helpful. Visuals are always good as we move forward. So thank you and applaud you. As I talked about, the EPA has one of the most difficult jobs not far behind that is CalRecycle in terms of that. Okay. Is that it from you folks? Right. All right. We want to jump over to lao. I'm sorry, Department of Finance.
Jamie Gonzaleva's Department of Finance. No further comments at this time, but
here to answer any questions.
Great. Thank you. Elio.
Frankie Manez. Elio. No prepared remarks for this informational item, but happy to answer questions.
Great. Other questions? Assemblymember Rogers yeah, just a quick question.
I might have just missed it, but when you have the categorical exclusion process where you mentioned that they'd have to come up with a plan for how they're going to come into compliance, do you have a timeline or an appeals
process for that at all for the categorical exclusion? No. We get the notice and that's the action. But the department has the authority to be able to ask for additional information at any time. So if we receive a notice and the conflict isn't clear, we can ask for additional supporting information to be able to make a determination. There are prescribed timelines for the categorical exclusions that I'm not recalling right now, but we can get back to you with that information.
Yeah.
I'd just be curious to see if I'm a producer and I have an exclusion. Obviously we want to push them into finding a way towards compliance, not just giving them a long Runway where in which they can continue to not come into compliance with no real teeth to force them to. So I'd be interested in more of that info.
Yeah, absolutely.
How about the chemical recycling?
That was another part of my original
question vis a vis the management of hazardous waste. Can you.
Oh, yeah.
Apologies for not addressing that one. So through the regulatory process, we've made a lot of changes to that part of the regulations. It's challenging to provide clarity around that piece given that it hasn't been done before, what we have in regulation right now. A couple of things that I want to highlight for you is the question that I believe we received was why not use the California definition? And one of those reasons is because the responsible end markets that are going to be receiving this plastic Packaging and material are likely to be all over the United States and the world. So part of the way in which we developed these criteria was thinking about what could be demonstrated to the Department. We've also moved the hazardous waste criteria to another section of the regulations. And this is important because the section that we moved it to specifies the criteria for responsible end markets. So even before recycling technology determines whether it generates hazardous waste that's managed properly, it would need to determine that it's compliant with all environmental laws, that we're getting transparent information about what that process looks like, the environmental protections that are in place, et cetera. The requirements for a responsible end market are rightfully very stringent and those have not been determined yet. The Producer Responsibility Organization Circular Action alliance will be determining what those responsible end markets are within the plan that they submit to us.
And when they are determined, what will happen.
Part of that is our plan review. So as we review, we will ensure that the responsible end markets that are within the plan are consistent with the regulatory and statutory requirements.
Okay, great. I'm going to rip through these other questions quickly. And the what are the eminent deadlines 26 and 27 given the year delay in the regulations, you're confident you'll be able to stay on track? I think you partially answered that already and think you're going to.
We're motivated and confident.
There you go. Good. The standardized regulatory impact assessment SRIA indicates that SB54 implementation will save Californians $32 billion. Does the SIRA make any effort to assign incident of producers costs and savings associated with compliance?
Yeah, that's a very good question and thank you for asking it. You know, the SRIA that we had delivered with the initial regulatory package does demonstrate this significant benefit. Also within the SRIA there's numbers that are related to producer costs and those sorts of things. The average Californian household cost specific to implementation of the regulations. I think the best way to answer that question is yes, we see incredible benefit with implementation. But there is a cost and part of the needs assessment document that we just developed does a much. It builds on the SRIA in its analysis to determine the different pathways that producers could take to compliance and that will be quantified and specified in the Producer Responsibility Organization's plan. One of the benefits of extended producer responsibility is that we ask the producers what is your vision as to how you're going to achieve these recycling rates, these source reduction requirements? And they demonstrate that in their plan. So there will be cost savings through certain ways in which they're reducing the amount of packaging used. But there's also going to be investments in innovation and identifying new packaging. So it's hard to specify specifically to the producer costs, but we look forward to learning that with you as we
receive the so the clear answer is that the 32 billion doesn't right now include that. But you will be getting that later with.
Yeah, I mean it does. It includes the overall benefit of the regulations, but we don't have it specified to the producer.
But it is. So it there is an estimate included
in the 32 billion?
Yes, I believe so. I will.
Great. And then do you continue to see this law as critical to reducing plastic pollution and single use packaging? What's the vision for 2032 if SB54 is implemented as the governor and the legislature enacted? That was our last question that we submitted to you in advance and hope you've got a Absolutely.
Commission chair. Absolutely. We're still seeing by volume in the landfill about 50% plastics. It's a lot by volume. You know, we're still local governments and Californians are still shouldering the cost for managing these materials. So it's absolutely critical that we implement move forward to achieve these ambitious but needed rates and dates and statute in 2032. What success will look like for all of us is just a different relationship with the goods and how we receive them in California. Whether it's at your local coffee shop having access to more reusable mugs or having more access to refill within the grocery store or just less packaging for E commerce, we're going to see quite a bit of innovation and it's needed. And also to get to share some of your comments from earlier about landfill capacity and identifying ways in which to pull more of this material out of landfill. Extended producer responsibility is a great model for that. And with us seeing plastics is still 50% by volume in landfill, this program should help us see a significant decrease along with the source reduction requirement.
Great. Could you please clarify? Will the PRO reimburse CAL recycle expenses associated with this effort to analyze categorized exclusion requests by producers, or is that the only case for the unique challenges
of the exemption process?
Yes, because that's overall part of the implementation of Senate Bill 54.
So yes, it will. They will reimburse CAL recycle.
They will reimburse CalRecycle.
Got it.
Thank you.
All right.
Yeah.
All right, we're going to go.
You look like you're leaning just to be clear.
The exclusion process and the unique challenges.
Exemptions are two different components.
And the unique challenges will be a
part of the pro's overall plan, so they will reimburse us through the normal process for that component.
Good.
Thank you. We're going to go to issue 10, then we'll come back to issues 8 and 9. Issue 10 panel, if you will come up. Assembly Member Lee we're sorry, but we announced that we were changing the order about 20. Oh, and Assemblymember Lee was going to join us but cannot join us now. So Department of Pesticide Regulation, Environmental Justice Advisory Committee Committee and I'm going to.
Thank you. Good afternoon Committee. We're really excited to be here. My name is Celia Pazos. I am the Deputy Director for Environmental justice and Equity at the Department of Pesticide Regulation, or dpr. I'm here to provide an update on the department's implementation of AB 652, which established the Environmental Justice Advisory Committee. Or what we'll refer to from here
on is the ejac.
So I lead DPR's environmental justice and Equity Office, which has several areas of focus, including tribal affairs, supporting the Department's relationship with California Native American tribes, public engagement, which includes language access and community engagement, and embedding equity and justice throughout the Department's work and measuring outcomes. The Environmental justice and Equity Office also supports the EJAC. So as I mentioned, the EJAC was established by AB652, which was signed into law in 2023. The committee is tasked with providing prioritized recommendations to DPR on ways to integrate environmental justice considerations into Department programs, policies, decision making and activities, and and on how the Department can improve its engagement with communities with the most significant exposure to pesticides. The EJAC had its inaugural meeting in December of 2025 in the 2024 budget act. The legislature approved two staff positions to support the E JAC. These two staff positions are part of the EJ and Equity office and they make the EJAC's work possible. Their duties, as noted in the legislatively approved bcp, include developing the member nomination and appointments process, supporting public processes associated with the ejac, planning for and executing meetings, and executing and managing related contracts. Their duties also include supporting with technical assistance and engagement with the committee. They coordinate and process EJAC member's travel arrangements and reimbursement claims, and they also develop and maintain a DPR EJAC webpage. As the Committee moves forward, the EJAC is tasked with adopting a charter, discussing and determining potential meeting locations, and identifying topics of interest that will inform their prioritized recommendations. These staff will support by coordinating internally with subject matter experts to provide data, presentations and other information to the EAC for and in between their meetings to inform agenda development, committee discussions and.
Ultimately prioritize recommendations. These duties are not all inclusive but provide some insight into the staff's responsibilities. These staff put a lot of great intentional work into getting us to that first meeting that took place in December, but that work is still ongoing as the E JAC is still moving from its initial formation into the core work as envisioned by the Legislature. The staff's work has not been and is still not yet focused on maintaining an existing body, but rather to establish a brand new committee creating the internal processes needed to create a dynamic forum to meet the needs of the people it was established to serve. As the EJAC continues to meet and discuss its priorities, we fully expect that staff's work will evolve depending on the topics and the direction that the EJAC takes to develop their prioritized recommendations as required by the bill. The legislatively approved BCP also provides funding to support two annual meetings, per diem funds and contract funding to support facilitation, technical assistance, translation or interpretation, and other contracting needs. This is reflected in the draft charter publicly posted ahead of the December EJAC meeting and that the EJAC discussed at their first meeting. So at that December meeting the EJAC provided a number of edits to the draft charter and requested a modification to state that the EJAC will have at minimum two public meetings annually in alignment with the bill. A revised draft charter will be discussed during the next EJAC meeting. With only one meeting so far, we are unable to provide an accounting of the cost breakdown for two annual meetings. Initial costs have so far been incurred for foundational structure of the ejac. Their first meeting was held in DPR Sacramento Regional Office, but AB652 requires at least one meeting per year to be held in a community with high pesticide use. We anticipate there will be additional costs as the Committee hosts one or more meetings outside of Sacramento. The contract funds included in the AB652BCP are a reflection of the anticipated cost to provide the EJAC and the public the needed resources to participate in meetings and for the committee to develop prioritized recommendations for submittal to the Department. What resources the Committee will need to accomplish its goals are still to be determined. DPR is committed to meaningful engagement with environmental justice stakeholders through the EJAC and through the Department's ongoing efforts to integrate environmental justice and equity into its work. That concludes my prepared statement. So thank you and we'll take any questions.
Great. Assemblymember Conley thank you.
Deputy Director, Welcome.
Thank you.
As you noted, AB652 required DPR to hold a minimum of two meetings per year for the E. Jack. And just to clarify, my understanding of the drafted charter is at least it appears a DPR would hold no more than two meetings per year. Is that correct? Per the charter.
Well, as I mentioned, we're making some revisions to the charter. So at this time we receive funding to support two annual meetings.
Okay.
But since we've had that one meeting so far, we can't really determine what the two meetings a year will cost.
Okay, so we are talking about two meetings.
Right.
Okay. And if you could clarify what are the roles and responsibilities of the two full time staff supporting the ejac?
Sure. Well, I wanna start off by saying that our goal is really to set the committee up for success and, and provide them the resources and the support that they need to develop prioritized recommendations that are actionable and meaningful for the department. So the staff will support a lot of internal coordination at this time. Like I mentioned, they were really involved in setting the committee up, which included nomination and appointments and all of those pieces that needed, the committee needed to get going.
So.
But as the committee's work evolves, that staff will really help connect and liaise between the committee and our internal staff. That's just a snippet of their responsibilities and we can go into it and I had some more details, but that's a good picture of what they're working on right now.
I mean, I guess, yeah, kind of to ask it directly. Can you explain why two full time staff are only able to facilitate two EJAC meetings per year?
I'm trying to gather my thoughts here to like best answer this question, so thank you.
Put another way, I mean, frankly, why does DPR need two full time staff positions if they are only able to schedule two meetings per year?
Maybe I can chime in and you can add some color to it.
You know,
we did a lot of, we had a lot of discussions with other departments that have similar ejacs. And when I say similar, I mean the same goal admissions. There are other EJACs at other departments, boards and offices that look very differently. They have different requirements. You know, we're a Bagley keen committee and based on conversations and lessons learned from, I think Those, those other BDOs that really informed the work and the resources that we needed. And that's why you saw two full staff and the amount of money that I think the 220,000 for contracts and solicitation and whatnot that informed the two full time staff. I Think it's a reflection of all the work that does go on to really.
And thank you. But I'm fighting a 1:30 deadline and I still have to do public comment. So I'm trying to cut your answer down.
And yeah, I'm going to drill down a little bit more. And obviously we appreciate the work being done and understand this is kind of being stood up in some ways. But bottom line is how does holding two meetings per year amount to an annual cost of $220,000? And I think comparing the costs that we've seen with other EJAC efforts and in other departments, DPR's costs do appear significantly higher. So why is that?
Well, I can start off by clarifying a little. The $220,000 in contract costs were part of the BCP, as I said, to provide the resources to the committee that they may need to develop those prioritized recommendations. We currently have not spent $220,000. So it's not incurred costs. So far we've only incurred costs to establish the EJAC and set the foundation for the ejac.
And maybe you can talk a little bit in your answer. Talk again. Specifically what kind of contracts are being let out.
Right now we have a facilitation contract for $95,000 and then we've incurred $10,000 annually for it licensing for the 11 members and the three alternates. So the $220,000 is. Is there when the committee identifies its own needs and we imagine they will. So for technical assistance or interpretation or different facilitation needs, we anticipate that more costs will be incurred. But for now it was just the foundational pieces to get them going.
And Assemblymember Conley, can you. I'm sorry, we literally have a hard 130 another committees walking in here. Great.
I'm gonna just wrap up question. As a deputy Director, how will you be involved with the ejac?
Yeah. Thank you. So I am very involved with the ejac. Like I mentioned, the two staff that support all of the ejac's work are within my office. I help with the committee logistics and help lead the team into making sure that those recommendations that the committee ultimately provides are meaningful and that we can implement them at the department. So I'm very involved. Yes.
All right, thanks.
Thank you very much. We are going to have to jump over items eight and nine. And so I just want to offer a quick 60 second. If there's anybody that's on a panel for item eight and nine who feels like they have something that's urgent that should be communicated to us. Would you please come up to the witness stands for the item eight and nine? Anything urgent. Okay, great. And then I won't be able to announce how much time you have for your public comment until I know how many people are making public comment. So would you please line up? And then the sergeants, would you please announce outside one last time? If somebody's coming for public comment, they need to come in now. And then, sergeant, would you please count the number of people online right now so I can divide it by our time. Count the number of people in line. Seventeen people. We have 20 minutes. Everybody has a minute. But you have to make the transitions quick.
Perfect.
Okay.
Good afternoon.
Chair members. Kayla Robinson with California's Against Waste want to start by strongly supporting item number two on landfills. As Assemblymember Chiavo mentioned, the situation at Chiquita Canyon Landfill is a full blown environmental disaster that has decimated nearby communities, even if the harm hasn't been fully reported. Residents have complained for more than three years and were largely ignored while agencies pointed their fingers on who should act. The Intergency Task force is led by Cal. EPA is exactly what should have happened from the start. Someone must have the authority and the resources to stop this, especially given the lack of federal oversight from the epa. And we also appreciate the administration including illegal dumping in this vcp. The dumping disguised as land application mirrors the abuses we see elsewhere, like in Antelope Valley, and must be addressed as a statewide enforcement priority. And I just want to comment on item number seven, the CalRecycle SB54 update. We largely echo the staff and committee concerns. Many states are watching California and we can't afford to submit any polls. And their draft rules look more like protection for the status quo instead of real change. Thank you.
Thank you.
Good afternoon, Mr.
Chair and members. Jennifer Fearing here on behalf of a number of clients primarily around issue seven for Oceania, Monterey Bay Aquarium and the OSHA Conservancy. Thank you for the good conversation about SB54 implementation and the questions of the Director. I just wanted to state on the record a significant objective of SB 54. In addition to the environmental and public health benefits we hoped it would produce long term was the resting of the crisis of costs that have always been leveled on consumers, ratepayers and taxpayers associated with single use packaging and plastic pollution. And that the entire objective was to shift the onus of that onto producers. And in that Syria that you discussed that $32 billion is the net benefit. So that's after taking into account the $21 billion of cost which they identified for producers, which they can tackle by making different decisions to assure that their materials have a value at the end of their life and can bring those costs down. But I wanted to be also clear that the Syria may divide the those numbers by the number of households in California, but there's not evidence that EPR packaging programs increase costs on consumers. And so those benefits will accrue to every Californian and just want to make sure.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Hi, Matteo Kushner with Community Water Center. Also, on behalf of Clean Water Action Water foundation and Physicians for social responsibility, LA just want to speak on the safer item. I believe that was item three. The program was reauthorized last year at a appropriation of $130 million annually from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. In the original creation of the program, there was a legislative backfill to ensure that the funding would reach under $30 million annually. That's now gone and there's a shortfall of $38 million in the funding as was discussed. So I just want to stress how important this funding is. Multiple members of this committee, their districts are among the highest in recipients of SAFER funds for infrastructure and technical assistance. Some member Rogers was one of those. So just stressing how important this is and how we want to ensure that the program stays funded. Thank you.
Thank you.
Good afternoon. Mariela Rocha with Leadership Council for Justice and Accountability. Despite being the world's fourth largest economy, hundreds and thousands of Californians still lack access to safe and affordable drinking water, a basic human right. However, as noted in the committee's analysis, since the start of the SAFER program in 2019, 900,000 people Californians have gained access. But there's still a large gap to be filled. On issue three, we urge and four, we urge the legislature to backfill funding for the saver program to 130 million and restore the commitments to maintain this level of funding during DJRF shortfalls. And we urge the state to continue its commitment to Californians who lack access to safe and affordable drinking water. Lastly, on issue six, we have concerns with the elimination of positions at the state water board that supports that safe Safe drinking water grants and systems Sustainable Groundwater maintenance management action because the WAR is funded. Thank you.
Good afternoon. Julia hall with the association of California Water Agencies want to provide two brief comments. First, on issue three, on behalf of the California Water association also as well as aqua, we strongly support the SAFER program and urged the legislature to fully fund that program at the previously statutorily amount, guaranteed amount, the program is critically important for facilitating projects in underserved communities. And so we really urge support for that one. And then on issue six, related to the vacant positions, we would urge the legislature to maintain those vacant environmental positions consistent with where the Joint Legislative Budget Committee landed last year. We're especially focused on the positions at State Water Board and Fish and Wildlife. These positions are often paid by the regulated community. They're providing important services, permitting, oversight, environmental protection. These are super important. And we think it's really important to make sure they're funded, especially for those that are special funded. Those are being paid by the regulated community. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Good afternoon. Good afternoon. Kim Delfino, on behalf of Defenders of Wildlife, California Native Plant Society, Cal Trout, Golden State Salmon association and the Power and Nature Coalition. On issue number five, we strongly support the the budget change proposal by the administration to add 12 pys due to the rollbacks under the Clean Water Act. With the Sackett decision. For issue number six, we really appreciate the robust conversation you had here around the elimination of positions at the state Water Board. In particular, we actually, while we appreciate very much the Joint Legislative Budget Committee's recommendations to protect 43 of the 90 positions, we believe all 90 positions should be protected because a number of those positions left unprotected are still fee funded positions. We don't see any reason why we should not be hiring for fees that have already been collected and deposited and are currently sitting in the state Water board's account and that those tasks are left undone. And we also believe that the general fund savings, if you add up the general fund savings for the PYs funded through the general fund for the Department of Fish and Wildlife.
Thank you so much.
State is 100th of 1%. It's nothing.
Good afternoon.
Kyle Jones, on behalf of the San
Joaquin Valley Water Collaborative Action Program, which includes water agencies, environmental groups, environmental justice organizations and local governments, and also on behalf of Restore the Delta in support
of the full funding for the SAFER program.
Thank you. Thank you. Wow. Star.
Good afternoon.
Taylor Trifo, on behalf of the Central Valley Salinity Coalition.
We support backfill for the safer. And you asked the question about where
the agricultural community who agree to pay more on the mill fields.
We want DPR to be fully stacked and funded. Thank you.
Thank you.
Good afternoon, Chair Bennett. And I said I'm Ever Rogers, Megan Cleveland with the Nature Conservancy. On issue five, we want to strongly support voice our strong support for the BCP that the water board submitted. We also want to echo on issue 6 the comments made by Kim Delfino. And then finally, we would like to request the legislature appropriate 500,000 from the cannabis tax fund to the state Water Resources Control Board to support water data tools and cannabis impacted watersheds in the north coast region to enhance drought resilience and further salmon recovery efforts. Thank you.
Thank you.
Good afternoon. Chair Katie Hawkins with Trout Unlimited. We're just echoing the comments from TNC
on issue number five and then also
the agenda item number six on support of the elimination. Excuse me. Strongly support the legislators not.
Sorry, apologies.
Don't eliminate any more agency positions. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you.
Chair Members. Dan Seaman, on behalf of California environmental voters on issue six, we strongly urge you to maintain these positions, many of which are critical to processing clean energy infrastructure. Permits were key to speeding up projects that we need to see accomplished. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Good afternoon, Mr. Chairman and members. My name is Dan Jacobson speaking on behalf of a number of groups that have come together to try to figure out how to accelerate clean energy issues. Item number six is really important because many of those positions are the ones who will permit for those clean energy developments and cutting of them means that we're going to slow down our clean energy development. So encourage you to keep those. Thank you.
Thank you.
Good afternoon, Committee chair and members. Thank you for your time today. Kai Klassen, on behalf of Breast Cancer Prevention Partners commenting on I believe it's item 22, which is a BCP regarding the safer consumer products implementation and enforcement of product bans being AB347, AB2515 and SB1266 at DTSC. This is very important work. So we are pleased to see it's being discussed as a priority. Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Hello.
Hello.
Good afternoon. Myra Sanchez with California for Pesticide Reform. And I want to thank the committee for Putting issue number 10, the EJAC budget for DPR on the agenda and want to stress the importance of the EJAC to raise issues from communities highly impacted by pesticide use and the importance of revising closely the budget and working with DPR to make the budget more transparent and more efficient.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Christine Wolf, Good afternoon. Committee with Waste Management in support of the landfill response multi agency request.
Thank you.
Thank you very much. Want to thank everybody that participated, particularly my colleague, Assemblymember Rogers being here for the full duration. And this is really pretty important hearing that we had this morning. A lot of important things for California, but with that we're adjourning this meeting well in advance of the 1:30 meeting. We're giving you 10 whole minutes to make the transition. There you go. That's right.