March 16, 2026 · Budget Subcommittee No 6 Public Safety · 36,966 words · 24 speakers · 461 segments
All right. We like to call to order the sub budget number six Committee on Public Safety. And good afternoon. I'd like to welcome everybody here today. We will be covering issues from the Judicial branch and the Office of Emergency Services. I would like to welcome the honorable Patricia Kelly from Santa Barbara county, who I know her flight was canceled, but we still want to honor her. And the honorable Rodney Cortez from San Bernardino County Superior Court Presiding Judge who are with us today. All public comment will be taken at the end of our last item and each person will have up to one minute each for public comment. We will not be taking any votes today. The speakers are listed in speaking order for each of the items. Please keep your remarks within the allotted time communicated to you by my staff and remember to introduce yourselves prior to speaking. We will now move to our first panel issue. 1. Judicial Branch Overview of budget priorities. Michelle Curran, Administrative Director, Judicial Council of California. Kate Becker, Court Executive Officer, Superior Court of Ventura county and Chair of the Court Executives Advisory Committee. And Zileko Leodorovich, Budget Services Director, Judicial Council of California. Go ahead.
Good afternoon, Chair Ramos and members of the committee. My name is Michelle Curran and I serve as the Administrative Director of the Judicial Council. In this role, I lead the council staff organization, working with the Chief Justice Patricia Guerrero and members of the Council as the policy making body for the state court system. I'm pleased here to be here with you this afternoon to speak with you about the judicial branch's budget priorities for the upcoming fiscal year and to address any questions that you might have. As the third branch of government, the judiciary represents 1.3% of the state's general fund budget. These public resources authorized and and appropriated to the judicial branch from the other branches of government enable the courts throughout the state to provide access to justice for all Californians. The Judicial Council partners with various courts with all the courts from throughout the states. From our small courts like Modoc and Del Norte, serving populations of 30,000 people, to counties like San Bernardino and Los Angeles that are serving millions of Californians with the shared goal of maximizing the benefits from your investment of public funds and ensuring accountability for how those funds are spent. California's justice system provides a legal pathway for our state's residents to exercise their constitutional rights. It enables them to deal with life and business issues that require legal resolution. In upholding the rule of law, our court system is integral and to maintaining public safety. We welcome the opportunity to share information on our priorities and the related funding needs to advance those priorities in order to better serve the public and to carry out the branch's constitutional duties. The Chief justice and the Judicial Council support the Governor's proposed budget. In our statement that summarized the budget after it was released, Chief Justice Patricia Guerrero thanked Governor Newsom for his continued support even in these challenging budget times and also added her willingness to continue to work with both branches of government as the budget is finalized over the next several months. The proposed budget continues to support core operations of the judicial branch, including $70 million for increased trial court operational costs, $11 million for increased pay rates for Supreme Court and Court of Appeal Court appointed counsel, $5.2 million for continued support for the Court of Appeal case processing, and $135.5 million for courthouse construction and other facilities. These proposals reinforce the branch's goal of achieving adequate, stable and predictable funding for a fully functioning judicial branch. We also appreciate the Committee's discussion later today on remote proceedings which continues to be a priority for the branch. We Recognizing that ongoing economic and revenue uncertainty continues to affect the state's budget outlook, the Chief justice and the Judicial Branch remain committed to being constructive partners in addressing these statewide fiscal challenges. Since 2223, the branch has contributed hundreds of millions of dollars cumulative general fund solutions to help mitigate statewide budget shortfalls. I am joined today by Kate Beaker, Court Executive Officer of the Ventura County Superior Court who is also a member of the Judicial Council. At this time and with the permission of the Chair, I hope that Ms. Beaker can speak to some of the important impacts of this increase of $70 million for trial court operations.
Thank you.
Thank you. Go ahead.
Good afternoon, Chair Ramos and members of the Committee. My name is Kate Beaker and I serve as the Court Executive Officer for the Superior Court of Ventura county and the Chair of the Court Executive Advisory Committee, otherwise known as seac. Thank you for the opportunity to present to you today on behalf of the trial courts. I want to begin by expressing our sincere appreciation to this committee for your support. We are grateful for your investments in the judiciary. We are also thankful to the Governor and the support the proposals in each his administration has put forward in this year's budget. We are acutely aware of the challenging fiscal environment California is navigating, including an estimated 2.9 billion budget shortfall this year. In light of these headwinds, the Governor's proposal to provide the judicial branch with 5.7 billion is a testament to the value the administration places on the fair and timely administration of justice. This this budget provides a foundation of stability that allows the Branch to focus on Its mission of serving the public with consistency and transparency. We are particularly appreciative of the 70 million in ongoing general fund to support the trial courts in addressing increased operational costs, which is fundamentally an investment in our people in Ventura and in courts across the state. Our greatest challenge is retention of highly skilled people people. We operate in the same labor market as our county partners, yet we face a unique disadvantage. While counties can leverage diverse local revenue streams and tax bases to provide competitive cost of living adjustments, the courts must remain entirely dependent on the state budget allocations. Without the ability to match the pay increases afforded by our counterparts and local government, the court is put in a structurally disadvantaged incentive staff recruitment and retention. The 70 million in operational funding combined with the 21.7 million for health and retirement benefits is vital to closing the gap and ensuring we don't lose our talent to entities with broader revenue generating capabilities. What does that translate to for your constituents when courts are not adequately funded? Adequately funded cases may be delayed whether a parent seeking a timely child custody order, a family trying to settle the estate of their loved one, or worker pursuing lost wages or survivors needing a restraining order delays that profoundly affect the day to day lives of our residents. Stable funding allows our courts to push forward transformative initiatives across our 58 trial courts in Ventura. We have implemented civil e filing and remote conferencing systems that save time and trips to court. We have also been able to prioritize the public's needs by redesigning our website interface and expanding our clerk services through the lunch hour. Continued trial court operation funding will allow us to maintain and expand upon these customer focused initiatives. In closing, the Court Executive Advisory Committee strongly supports the Governor's budget proposal for the trial courts and views it as a vital investment in the stability of our local justice system. This funding plan offers the necessary resources to maintain our daily operations and protect the progress we have made in expanding access to justice even as the state navigates a challenging fiscal landscape. By prioritizing trial court operations and the well being of our workforce, the Governor is ensuring that court courts remain reliable, accessible institution that Californians can depend on every day. We are deeply appreciative of the Governor's commitment to our courts and we thank this committee for your time, your partnership and your ongoing support of the trial court's mission.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
Assemblymember Amos. I'm just here to help with some questions if you might have any.
Thank you so much for that. Thank you for your testimony. Any questions, Comments from the Daisy? Mr. Lackey?
Yeah, I Appreciate your optimism, but I am going to express some frustration. I represent a large portion of San Bernardino county and it's miraculous what they do there in that court system and the deficit situation there is not only knowing it's mean, it's mean. The fact that they are so short judges and have been, I've been, this is my 12th year here. It's been a problem the entire time and there's been very little progress in San Bernardino county, especially facilities wise. I wish the people, policymakers would visit there and see the miracles that are done there and judges are exposed to extremely dangerous circumstances there, yet there's no
energy to change it.
And I find that to be disgusting and an affront against justice, truthfully. And the fact that we have a surplus in LA county of judges and we have the whole time that I've been here and yet we have deficits in San Bernardino county which is one of the largest counties in the entire state, maybe even the country,
but yet
there's no energy,
very little energy to fix it. And I don't know what it takes to get movement. I don't, I'm not, certainly not blaming you guys because you've got what you've got to work with and it's just frustrating, it's just so frustrating to see that San Bernardino county gets left holding the bag every time we're talking about money and facilities and improvements and I find it to be unfair and I just wanted to express that.
Thank you for your comments and thank you for your testimony. Last year we had a hearing around this certain topic and money was put into the budget for that. So we do know that people are listening when we're having these hearings. So thank you for your hard work for that. As now we'll move to issue 2 proposition 36 update Henry Ng, Department of Finance Mark Jimenez, Department of Finance Francine Byrne, Criminal Justice Service Director, Judicial Council of California Kate Beaker, Court Executive Officer, Superior Court of Ventura county and Chair of the Executive Court Executives Advisory Committee and Zlatko Theodorovich and Caitlin o', Neill, Legislative Analyst Office yeah, did I go ahead? Who wants to go? Henry
Henry Yang, Department of Finance so while the governor's budget so while the governor's budget does not include any additional funding to the court for Prop 36, the government budget maintains the 130 million included in the 2025 Budget act, including 20 million one time general fund to address increased court workload and 15 million one time general fund for pretrial services, both of which are available over multiple years. So the judicial Branch has through June 30th of 2028 to spend this money down.
Thank you for that, Francine.
Yes, hi. Thank you, Chair Ramos and members of the committee. My name is Francine Byrne. I'm the Director of Criminal Justice Services at the Judicial Council of California. And I really appreciate the opportunity to be back here today to talk to you a little bit about the implementation of of Prop 36 in the courts. I'm going to present a little statewide data that we collected and describe the ways in which Prop 36 has been implemented in the state, as well as some of the challenges associated with that implementation. I will also touch upon the ways that the funding is used or being planned to be used in the future. I was planning to start with a lot of caveats about our data, but all the information that I would have provided is in the report on page 11. And that goes through sort of some of the challenges that we have with the data collection. And I just wanted to caution because of some of those, I would caution against using a lot of inferences related to the outcomes that you will be talking about. I also wanted to say that in the report you do not have information related to the impact of Proposition 36 on specific demographic groups. That is not a data element the courts can collect with consistency. We hope to have a little bit more of that information next year when we get data from the Department of Health Care Services that we'll be getting some of that through county Behavioral health. But in order to really understand the impact of the proposition on that community, I would suggest looking to the research community or local justice system partners such as public defenders, prosecutors and jails and county treatment. So in 2025, California courts received nearly 35,000 felony filings for Proposition 36 cases. Approximately 55% were for felony drug charges and 45% were for felony theft charges. Courts received about 15,000 over 15,000 felony theft cases under Proposition 36, approximately 38 of which resulted in a conviction during the reporting period. However, many of those cases were still in the process of adjudication during the time period. We don't have any statewide information on sentencing, so we don't know exactly what happened to those cases. Some went to prison, some were likely put on probation or other ways forms of disposition. We do know that some of the theft cases ended up in our collaborative justice courts, either pre or post conviction or in diversion programs. So moving on to the treatment mandated felony cases. About 12% of the treatment mandated felonies. Of the more than 19,000 cases filed involved defendants that opted for treatment during the reporting period. Of those, approximately 3% had their cases dismissed because they successfully completed treatment, 7% had their judgments imposed, and 67% were still in treatment. The remaining cases were either somewhere in the process or their whereabouts were unknown. There's a variety of reasons why these numbers appear to be relatively low. Some of these cases may have also have higher level violent charges that would make the defendant unlikely to be offered treatment in lieu of incarceration. Also, it's important to note that defendants can opt into the treatment option at nearly any time in the predisposition process. So it can take a long time for them to decide that they actually want to take the treatment option. And finally, the treatment takes a long time. So to be effective, the courts are varied on how much treatment that they are suggesting. But drug courts, for example, traditionally will ask for at least 6 to 12 months of treatment. So that's why we don't expect to see a lot of graduates in this first year. Finally, we don't have the information on when the defendants who opted in for treatment or access treatment actually came into the system. So any of the defendants who came in sort of later in this reporting period likely have not had their cases fully adjudicated. The Courts report that Prop 36 has had a significant impact throughout the criminal justice system beyond just processing of those cases. They are telling us that there is an increasing workload for misdemeanor cases. Defendants are less likely to want to plead to an offense that may be considered priorable, and they're more likely to go on to trial. As a result, courts have implemented new ways to process these cases, with many creating dedicated calendars modeled after drug courts. However, there are some challenges associated with that because of the lack of resources, particularly for justice system partners such as probation or treatment, who at the time of during this reporting period had not yet received their funding. It's my understanding that those funds have now gone out, so we're hoping to see some different numbers in the upcoming report. We are very, very appreciative of the funding that the courts received to process these cases. They received those funds in September and it's a three year as Henry mentioned. So we don't have a lot of information yet about the specific expense expenditure amounts. However, we do know about how they are planning or have been using the money. They're adopting diverse strategies. Most courts have used or plan to use the funds for staffing, contracting, administrative cost and treatment court related expenses. Specifically we have and we know that some courts are hired or plan to hire subordinate judicial officers to hear the cases, or collaborative court coordinators to help shepherd them through the system Business Operations Analyst who might streamline the operations and enhance program efficiencies. And finally, it's important to note that it takes about three times the amount of time to process a felony case as it does a misdemeanor case. So there's a lot more clerk time, court time, et cetera. So the courts are actually using some of the funding to pay clerk time to cover that overload. So we cannot we don't yet know what the ongoing need will be. We're hearing that it's quite a bit of impact, so we suspect that there will be an ongoing need before those three years are completed, and we should be able to assess that need more comprehensively in our next report. That's all I have. I'm open for questions.
Thank you so much for that.
Kate Beaker My apologies if I repeat some of what Francine just said, but thank you again, Chair Ramos, for allowing me the opportunity to speak on Proposition 36 and the impact to the courts. The California courts are fully committed to implementing the measure as enacted by voters and appreciate the funding provided to do so. Early implementation shows the measure provides valuable tools and account accountability and treatment, but it also has created some operational demands on the courts. Successful implementation will require continued partnership between the judicial branch, the governor and the legislature. There have been varying methods throughout the courts on how to address the increased caseloads under Prop 36. Several courts, including Los Angeles and Ventura, we've just folded them into existing courts and treatment courts rather than creating a separate court calendar. However, Orange superior court, having 28% of the workload from Prop 36 has created an entire clerk's office and courtroom to address the managing workload. And as Francine stated, San Bernardino has hired a subordinate judicial officer at this point limited term due to the funding to preside over these cases. There have been challenges for courts, clerks, offices and courtrooms with implementations and increased case filings, court hearings, compliance reviews and probation related proceedings. Implementation requires additional judicial resources, including court hearings to determine eligibility to Prop 36, increased felony case processing, treatment, compliance monitoring and probation review hearings. In order to gauge the success of Prop 36, there's a need to update case management systems to capture the data elements that Francine was mentioning for the program, which creates additional demands on case management systems, court data tracking and compliance monitoring processes. Courts must invest in technology and administrative systems to track these outcomes. Understanding that Prop 36 reflects voters desires for both accountability and treatment. And California courts are committed to implementing the law effectively. But long term success will depend on sustained investment in court operations and treatment capacity. The courts look forward to the continuing partnership to ensure measures achieved its goal measure that measure achieves its goals of improving public safety, addressing substance use disorders and maintaining access to justice statewide.
Thank you.
Thank you so much for that testimony. As now we go to Mr. Zaleko
again here just to provide any answers to questions that may come up.
All right.
Thank you. Thank you so much for that. Elio.
Thank you. Caitlin o' Neill with the Legislative Analyst Office. We have a technical concern relating to the estimation of the state savings attributable to Proposition 47. That's calculated by the Department of Finance. Specifically, the Department subtracted the entire Proposition 36 impact on the prison population from its baseline Proposition 47 estimate. So in other words, it assumes that all components of Proposition 36 interact with the sentencing provisions of Prop 47 when actually only a portion of the Prop 36 sentencing changes had the effect of reversing or partially reversing Prop 47. So we would recommend that the legislature direct the Department of Finance to correct this at the May revision.
HENRY yang, Department of Finance so we agree that the impacts of Proposition 36 are still uncertain as the proposition has only been in effect since November 2024. However, we are still working with CDCR to refine these estimates and methodology. So we will we will present additional adjustments to Proposition 47 at the May revision and this will be in consultation with the governor's office.
Thank you so much for that testimony as now we bring it back to the dais. Senator Lackey.
Yeah, I'll tell you what's not uncertain is the fact that implementing Prop 36 been estimated to cost about $400 million. I see here about 130, which we're thankful for something. But another thing that's not uncertain, cost savings from Prop 47. I would challenge that in a very serious way on a number of fronts. Number one of them is think just because you're jailing less people doesn't mean there's not other costs. Let me mention one
whip into a
Walmart or a Target or any of
these retail centers
and how many items are locked up?
Why do you think that is?
Thank you.
Prop 47, well done. Not so much. That was an errant policy in my opinion. That's why Prop 36 was so overwhelmingly popular statewide. It wasn't because there's a wave of conservative thinking. It's everybody's impacted by this everybody. And we are not showing the support for the voice of the people. Shame on the governor for that. That is not right. It's unfair. And to try to sell it as a cost savings. No, doesn't work. It's not real. And I would just say that before it's all said and done because obviously we have the may revise. We have all these other opportunities. The budget has not been drafted yet. Prop 36 deserves to be funded more than 130 million. It just does for a number of reasons. I could go on and on but I won't bore you. But I do think it deserves to be said what I just explained.
Thank you for your comments, Sumo member Schultz.
Yes, thank you very much, Mr.
Chair.
Thank you all for the presentation. I have sort of two topics I'd like to cover. One is more really related to metrics and data and then I'll talk about pre trial in just a moment. Mr. Chair, I don't know if this is going to fall under the purview today or if this is a budget sub one jurisdiction, but does Department of Finance or for that matter any other panelists have a sense of the demand for behavioral health treatment space versus existing county capacity?
We do not have information at this time but we can definitely circle back
and get back to you.
Thank you. Yeah, for the sake of time I'll move on, but that is some information I would like to have as we navigate the budget process together. So thank you for that. The second is in reference to the original text of Proposition 36. Did the proposition include any way to assess the actual outcomes of treatment mandated felonies? What I'm really looking for are those metrics of success. Anyone have a thought on that? Maybe judicial counsel.
Well, in the Budget act that provided the funding for us, one of the things we are tracking is the number of people with the treatment mandated felonies who were their cases were dismissed as a result. And we do have that in the data. It's a little early to assess now as I mentioned because of the time it takes to get into treatment. And that's why I was mentioning it's a very low number right now. It's just hard to say because we don't have access to individual level data we can't track over reporting periods. So we know how many people for the year and and how many filings and how many people graduated as it were or had their cases dismissed. But we don't know what time those folks came into the system. I think next year when there's been a full year of implementation. We'll have much better data on that.
Okay, thank you very much for that. And the only comment I'd make before I move to my last topic is I agree with our vice chair of this committee. Obviously I want to see Proposition 36 and implemented that is the will of the voters. However, I would point out as I have before, the Proposition 36 did not include a funding mechanism. Even the metrics of success, I would argue, really weren't present. And so these are the issues that the legislature has to now grapple with. The only thing I would push back to the vice chair is I believe that everyone, all parties here at the table are proceeding in good faith and trying to implement it given very limited resources and what I would characterize as a pretty tough budget year. So appreciate you all being here. The last question I have is really on the issue of pre trial services. I think this is probably most appropriate to judicial counsel, but anyone can answer. What have we seen in terms of pretrial services caseload trends, especially over the last 24 months as we've seen the passage of Prop 36 moving forward. And do you expect further increases as we see Proposition 36 continue to go into effect?
Yes, we have seen. I don't have the numbers in front of me, I apologize. But we have seen a fairly significant increase in the number of pretrial cases, cases and assessments that have been done. We think part of that is the cases are being held longer in the jails, there's more time to assess and the caseloads are going up significantly. Can't remember the percentage though. I'm sorry, I can get that.
That's okay. Do you. I mean, so is it fair to say that in the next 12 months you expect to see even more demand?
Yes.
So I guess that begs my final question. And that is, do you think, given what we have in this early January forecast allocated for pretrial services, do you think that's going to be enough? Do you think that there needs to be a look at further resource allocation to really build the robust pretrial services that we're going to need to implement the full vision of Prop 36?
Well, I know the judicial council fully supports the governor's budget, as we've said before, and we're very appreciative of that. I do think that the impact of Prop 36 will have a continued workload impact on pre trial services moving forward and decisions will have to be made at the local level how to cover that caseload change.
I appreciate the answer and I'll tack on one more and I'll try to ask it in the most fair way that I can appreciate the support for the governor's proposal. Is it the position of judicial counsel that there might be a need for even further resource allocation above and beyond what the governor's initially proposed?
I think we are hearing from the courts with pretrial fundings that they are having to look at their services and cut back in certain areas given the amount of funding that hit that they are the reduction that they are anticipating.
Okay, good answer. Thank you all very much. Look forward to continued conversations before the May revise.
Thank you so much. And on the Prop 36 data that's still coming in, we heard that different data that you're presenting today could escalate in the future. And looking at that time, what would be the optimal cycle to really collect data? Would it be the year, the two year, the three year? And do we see that as increasing with the data that's coming in?
That's an excellent question. I don't think it's so much about the cycle, it's just more about the limitations that we have to track the cases over the reporting period. So whatever, because we have to get aggregate level data from each court, so we'll never really be able to align it correctly. What we will see is as cases move forward next year there may be, or at some point there may be more people that opt into treatment than there are filings. For example, it'll never quite line up perfectly because we have to get aggregate level information just on the reporting period. So it's not about the timeline, unfortunately, it's more about the capacity to, to track individual cases. I do think though, that's where we talk about in the report, actually reaching out to the research community and others who actually might have the capacity or doing local evaluations. We may try, we will try to do maybe in some courts that will love us, try to do a more in depth look to actually get some timing, some more time related data in the next system as well. But again, the court's case management systems are rather limited and are not built to track outcomes in this way. So looking to the research community or justice system partners may provide more objective data that would be useful.
So it's extracting data from different multiple software components that might not be compatible.
You might.
So for courts it tracks the life of the case, right? So yes, and there's multiple case management systems, but we extract and we do send to the judicial council Certain date of elements. But it's also like Francine said, it's not a matter of like a filing, but then someone could get treatment maybe six months down the road and then they enter into treatment and then they're either somewhat successful, they can get certain treatment and that kind of life of their case is tracked not through the courts though, because the court's only doing it through like the life of the case itself. But behavioral health or probation might be tracking those kinds of outcomes. So yes, I'm saying yes, that could be different case systems that come together to try to give you a look of someone's specific case. Does that make sense?
It does. And it adds to having someone look at all the information that's more equipped to looking at and bringing up data that way. So it sounds like there's following the court case, but then in between, if someone opts into the Prop 36 eligibility, non eligibility goes to the program. There's not a mechanism that's tracking all that to bring that data out. And so. Okay, so we'll take a look at that. But it is interesting that the statement has said that as time goes on you believe that there'll be an increase in some of this data that's coming before us now.
So there will definitely be an increase in what we're talking about as the outcomes because it takes so long to get to treatment and to then once you're in treatment to be successful or not. So because it's the first year our report has people, we don't know exactly when they came in, but let's say if you came in in September, you're not going to be tracked in the reporting period for this report, most likely because there hasn't been enough time to to make for those decisions points to happen. So next year we will see people, we will still look at the reporting period, but there will be a lot of defendants that entered into the system this year and are having their outcomes sort of going through say in March or something like that. Just because we have to only get aggregate level. It's really a snapshot of data for the reporting period. But there will be more time in second and subsequent years for those treatment outcomes to be realized.
And I believe in your testimony those that were going after Prop 36 to be eligible were found ineligible because of the offense was more of a violent felony that took them out of that eligibility for Prop 36. Can you elaborate a little more on that?
Sure. I don't know if technically it's eligibility, but yes. So if you have a defendant who gets a Prop 36 charge, but also has another sort of higher level charge or violent charge. It is unlikely that they would process the Prop 36 case per se because they wouldn't want the person out in treatment. So typically, and you probably know better than me, but they would plea or reduce the charge on the Prop 36 case as part of a plea bargaining process, but then perhaps be incarcerated on the higher level charge.
Okay, thank you for that. And then the caseload on the courts, Prop 36, the challenges that are there. Can you elaborate a little more specifically on those challenges?
Well, so it's interesting because. So I'm right next to San Bernardino from Ventura and we haven't seen the number of petitions, but they have hundreds more than other courts. And I know that Alameda is also seeing that the higher filings. It somewhat depends on the district Attorney's office if they're filing Prop 36 petitions, if the offenses that, like Francine was saying, are they higher level, if they're felony, depending on if there are multiple charges with them. It just depends really. And it's all over the place. When we've talked to my fellow CEOs, I can't really give you a specific, except it depends on possibly the DA, possibly how many petitions are filed under Prop 36 and how the court has decided to manage those. So it is really all over a spectrum. So it's hard to give you a specific answer, but it is. It's a spectrum from all court even I thought LA would have had a far larger amount of petitions. They don't, but Orange has an entire unit. So. Yeah, so it's just, it's kind of varying. So we're not exactly sure because we're also still kind of implementing through our CEOs and our allocation. So where it's. I can't give you a very specific answer, but to tell you that sometimes it's depending on the DA, depending to go with charges with Prop 36.
Okay, thank you for that. And in the testimony you mentioned, there was 12% that seek treatment under Prop 36. What was the success rate again?
So again, there's 12%. I think it was only 3% during that reporting period that had their cases dismissed. But again, we don't know. There might be quite a few more of those defendants that opted into treatment that will have their cases dismissed in this reporting period. So this is from December to, I mean January to December, they may have opted in. And so that's where I want to just have a Lot of caution about looking at the outcomes right now. Next year it should be we'll have a little bit more information to be able to sort of make better guesses about those. But because treatments, you know, most, I don't know how long it is in your county, but treatment programs in order to be effective really do last several months. And so just it may not have happened in the reporting period that we have data for, usually 12 to 18, 12 to 18 for drug courts.
More long term, right? Yes, thank you for that. Department of Finance, you mentioned that you're going to be coming back with May revised figures. Can you elaborate on areas that you're actually looking at and hearing about the data collection, how that could be a constraint to get true information back to justify increasing dollars here? Can you elaborate a little more what it is you're going to be specifically looking at?
The additional information that we'll be providing? The May revision has more to do with the Prop 47 estimates. We're not exploring any. We're not necessarily proposing any new data requirements or additional funding.
It's just the new methodology for determining
the Prop 47 figures.
Prop 47 continues to bring in some of those dollars to offset Prop 36, but we're hearing to get a truer picture and maybe even a cycle of a time frame to understand what truly is happening. Sounds like it's not throughout the state of California. Every court, it's sporadically different courts that are filing at higher rates for Prop 36. I think getting that data would actually start to have a clearer picture of where it is that we're headed. So certainly if you could put some time into that to try to figure that out a little bit more based on the testimony that we're hearing here today, that would be appreciated. Any other comments, questions? We want to thank you for your testimonies. Now we'll move to issue three remote court proceedings. Jessica Evangency, Policy and Research Director, Judicial Council of California. The Honorable Rodney Cortez, Presiding Judge for San Bernardino Superior Court. Drew Solderberg, Legislative Analyst, Office. Mark Jimenez, Department of Finance and Henry Ng, Department of Finance. Who is going to lead?
I will kick us off.
All right, thank you.
Thank you. Chair Ramos and committee. My name is Jessica Devonshinzi and I am with Judicial Counsel's Office of Policy and Research. Today I will share key findings from our most recent report on trial court use of remote technology. Remote proceedings as we now know them were an emergency response to the COVID 19 pandemic and have since become a structured statewide framework as part of this framework, judicial counsel is required to report annually on the use of remote technology in both civil and criminal proceedings. Because of this data collection efforts, we know that since March 1, 2022, California courts have held over 6 million remote proceedings. And during our most recent reporting period, courts averaged 7,098 remote proceedings per day in California. This means that every day, thousands of court users were able to avoid taking time off from work, arranging childcare, or traveling long distances in order to attend court proceedings. Diving a bit deeper into the numbers, between September 1, 2024 and August 31, 2025, there were 1,746,288 remote proceedings statewide. About 1.2 million of those were civil, and a little more than 550,000 were criminal. Beyond the numbers, we're finding that the impact on court users is significant. 95% of users reported a positive experience during the last reporting period. And in Los Angeles, the court began tracking tangible benefits of remote proceedings. In an eight month period, over 6,200 users reported saving time and money on transportation. And approximately 4,000 users reported avoiding missing work to have or did having to miss work to attend hearings. These findings help demonstrate the remote proceedings enhance access to justice, and the court's use of remote proceedings prioritizes access, fairness, and accountability. Thank you for your time. I'm available for questions.
Thank you so much. Presiding Judge Cortez, good afternoon.
It's good to see you.
Good to see you.
Chair Assemblymember Ramos, and members of the committee. My name is Rod Cortez. I serve as the Presiding Judge of San Bernardino county. And I very much appreciate this opportunity. And I, of course, appreciate Assemblymember Lackey's comments and passion for the needs that we have in San Bernardino County. And I certainly appreciate this opportunity to address you today regarding remote proceedings in our California courts. The current authority permitting courts to conduct remote proceedings is set to expire at the end of this year. We're hopeful the legislators will act to extend this. As Assemblyman or lackey pointed out, San Bernardino county is the largest geographical county in the contiguous United States, home to over 2.2 million residents. We operate 12 court locations throughout the county. Throughout the county. And depending on where residents live, traveling to a courthouse can take anywhere from four to six hours. And that's one way that's assuming that they have access to a vehicle. In 2025, our 103 judicial officers conducted approximately 64,000 remote proceedings between 250 and and 300 per day. Across all litigation types, 33% of juvenile proceedings involved at least one remote participant. 59% of probate hearings were conducted remotely. But today I'm going to focus on the human impact behind these numbers. Remote proceedings began as an emergency response during COVID today. They must be recognized as a critical and permanent pathway to justice. For many in our community, appearing remotely is not a matter of convenience. It is the difference between having their voice heard or being shut out of the system entirely. Without it, people face impossible choices. Spending money on child care that should go to food, risking their jobs to take an entire day off, or in the case of juveniles, missing school to travel to one juvenile dependency courthouse in our entire county. One courthouse that's serving 20,000 square miles. Let that sink in. I'd like to share a few examples that my judicial colleagues have shared with me in anticipation of of me coming before you today to give you some of what they have witnessed firsthand. Some youth in juvenile hall are medically isolated with compromised immune systems. Exposure for even a few minutes could be life threatening. Remote proceedings allow their cases to move forward. Youth at our Pine Grove fire camp face an eight hour one way drive to court. Remote eliminates a 16 hour round trip. For our parents in the military stationed out of state or overseas. Remote appearances have transformed participation from nearly impossible to routine. Remote access ensures no voice goes unheard, giving our juvenile court judges the out of state testimony they need to fulfill their obligations under the Indian Child Welfare act without burdening families with the cost of hardship of travel. In family law, a mother broke her leg in a car accident and couldn't drive to court or to the custody exchange point. The father filed an emergency motion claiming she couldn't care for the child. She was able to appear remotely from a hospital bed in her home via Zoom. The judge made the necessary orders and she continues to appear remotely throughout her recovery while keeping her shared custody. An elderly man sought a domestic violence restraining order, but had mobility issues, no reliable transportation and lived in one of our remote mountain communities. He filed his request and appeared at his first hearing via Zoom. Access to justice would have been impossible otherwise. For victims of domestic violence who fear encountering their abusers at the courthouse, video appearances allow them to participate and testify when they might otherwise not go through with the hearing at all. And for parents and child support and custody matters, many living in different counties, states or countries, remote appearances mean the court get more information rather than less information. That is always the best interest of the child and the children that we serve. These examples are merely a highlight of various cases we hear daily throughout our county by way of remote procedures. There are many more examples from criminal, from civil probate, conservatorship and traffic in closing remote court proceedings are not merely an innovation, they are a lifeline. By preserving this option, we reaffirm our commitment to a justice system that is truly inclusive, one that does not ask people to choose between feeding their families and having their day in court. I want to thank Chair Assemblymember Ramos and members of this committee to allow me this opportunity to address you today on this very important issue.
Thank you. Thank you so much for your testimony.
Alio DREW soderborg, Legislative Analyst's Office we're just here for questions on this one.
Thank you. Department of Finance.
HENRY yank, Finance so while there is nothing new in the government's budget for ROE access, I would like to note that the 22 Budget act did include 33.2 million in 202223 and 2023 24. And an ongoing 1.6 million to support MO access in court proceedings and the government's budgets maintains that ongoing 1.6 million to continue to support that infrastructure.
Thank you for that. Now bringing it back to the dais. Any questions? Comments from the dais? Senator Lackey, I'd like to just thank
Judge Cortez for making the point and validating how important this program is, especially to these rural regions. But it isn't just the rural people that benefit from this, urban people as well. I dare anybody to rebut that. Bring them on. Let's hear what they have to say. There is no such rebut. And this is one thing that I'm proud of, that we've done well and why it's in jeopardy. Thank heavens. It's just a timeline. But even though our resources aren't as plentiful, we have to do this. This is one of the things that we've done well. Why in the world would it be in jeopardy? Thank you for being here and for validating the very points that need to be validated. And it's not just me, but many people are so thankful. I mean, people that live in Needles, people that live in these very remote parts of San Bernardino county, they don't have a lot of money. Many of them, they struggle and they're trying to comply with court demands. Even a traffic citation, it becomes a very serious matter. And anyways, thank you for being here. And I couldn't agree with you more. And all I have to say is thank you for being here.
Thank you so much for your comments. Assembly Schultz thank you very much.
Mr. Chair, a couple of questions and then a brief comment. So as I. As I see from the report, the Budget act last year did include the trailer bill to extend the remote court policies through the end of this calendar year. My question for the administration is when should we expect to see a proposal, I would assume to continue the extension of remote. Is that coming in the May revise?
For example,
we currently don't have a proposal for the May revision to extend
the remote to extend the timeline.
We don't.
All right, thank you. Did you have anything else, Helio? Okay, I have a brief response to that, but I'll save that for comment. The question now would turn to our representatives of the judicial branch. Assuming that it were extended, do we have sufficient resources baked into the judicial budget to continue to facilitate all of the technological upgrades that we'll need to do to continue to offer this service?
I can't speak to the budget. What I'll just speak to is San Bergil County. We have upgraded all of our courtrooms, which, as we pointed out, are lacking, but they are all able to provide for these remote proceedings. That's our county,
Zlatko Theorovich, from the Judicial Council. It's a great question. And there have been significant investments in upgrading our courthouses and courtrooms. And that's an ongoing need that we will evaluate based on the resources that are available. And to the extent that there was a need for some additional investment, we would be working with the administration and legislature to seek that. But for now, courts have received resources to upgrade their technologies.
Wonderful. Well, thank you all for your answers. I'll just echo the comments from our vice chair. I definitely encourage more collaboration and would love to see, frankly, made permanent in the budget process. I understand there might be policy reasons why we want to continue to extend it from time to time, but I will just offer the comment of one member of the Budget committee. In my prior career, I worked at California Department of Justice, and. And we very much utilized and took advantage of the remote policy. I think it should be made permanent statewide. And here would be just two very concrete examples I can offer. At doj, I was prosecuting major fraud cases all across the state. And it was incredibly helpful to me. And I like to think that I offered more service to the people of California in trying to keep them safe by being able to appear remotely in Ventura county in the morning and sand San Bernardino county in the afternoon, which I recall one specific instance I had to. I don't know that it could have been in two places at once. And I was able to work more efficiently being able to use the technology that very much exists to be in quite literally two places at once. I'd also mention again crediting the vice chair's comments, I appreciate the testimony about the need for this tool in rural areas or more rural areas, I should say. But in urban areas, I would argue that the busing system that we have for, for those incarcerated in Los Angeles county is incredibly unreliable and not all that uncommon. To see attorneys appearing in court, myself included, for three hours at a time only to find out that the inmate wasn't transported. It was a complete waste of a day for everybody and an inconvenience for the person incarcerated who just wanted to have their day in court. Point I'm trying to make is the technology exists to prevent, quite frankly, what I would categorize as waste in the system. So my feedback to the administration is appreciate all of your leadership over the last few years to get us to this point. Would love to see it made permanent. I think that's frankly talking of wins. As the Vice chair said, everybody benefits from making that policy change and that investment.
Thank you. Thank you so much for your comments. In speaking in testimony, it was mentioned that 1.2 million civil cases were utilized remote court, is that right?
Correct.
And then 550 criminal cases. And that's statewide statistics?
That's statewide, yes.
Then there was a 95% participation. What was a 95%?
That is individuals who reported having a positive experience with the proceedings.
Thank you. So you can see the statewide approach to being able to utilize remote course that was instituted by the COVID pandemic that we've seen. But we also now seen that this is a program that's successful in the state of California, throughout the state. Right now, narrowing it down to San Bernardino County Presiding Judge Cortez, you mentioned that 250 to 300 cases a day go through San Bernardino County Superior Court. The remote. Remote.
Yes.
Correct. And does that was 20, 25 statistics
and does that follow the statistics of civil versus criminal also?
It does. It's across all case types.
And you brought into the real life issue of individuals, youth that have immune system disorders that would be put at, at harm's way within the judicial system if they were forced to appear in person. Can you elaborate a little bit more on that?
Well, when you have a, like in that circumstance a juvenile that is immune compromised and putting them on the bus or the transportation to get them to the court and the amount of time that it takes to get there through the traffic as well as then sitting in the jail holding facilities. I'm not a physician but I understand when we get that type of a notice from the physician that this person's life is at stake as a judge we're going to find any opportunity to ensure that that life remains stable but also provide an opportunity for them to have access to justice. And if it's via remote we're going to find a way to justify that
remote proceeding and in staying with life saving action through remote court proceedings. Restraining orders was something that was administered through remote court proceedings that then restraining orders were granted that then might not have been granted if they had to appear in person.
You know, now as a presiding judge I don't sit in a courtroom, but in my 20 years on the bench I've had 19 years in a courtroom and it's not unusual to have litigants that file for emergency protective orders not show up for that very reason is they are scared if they come to court they're going to be face to face with this particular individual that they're seeking to have protection against. Providing this gives them one more opportunity and so we can see and recognize this opportunity for them to have their voice continue to be heard.
Thank you for that. And you also mentioned that remote court offers Indian Child Welfare act cases to be able to be heard. It'd be interesting to see on the statewide level how many of those cases are also being heard for California's first people in this nation and Department of Finance. I think hearing all these things, I believe when you go back and look at the may revise, there's enough here to warrant the extension of this program that we would be looking at favorably. Coming back to this committee. Thank you so much. Thank you for your testimony. As now we'll move to issue four Orange Central justice center facility modification proposal in the alo's assessment and recommendations related to trial court construction costs. Zeletko, Tamir Ahmed, Drew Solderberg and Henry Ng. Oh, Amanda Garcia too. And then I'll do the titles. It's getting a little. This is the fourth one so I'll keep it going. All right. Zaleko, are you first?
Yes, I am and I appreciate the opportunity. This afternoon let's give a quick overview. Then I will turn it over to Mr. Ahmed to talk about the specifics related to the Orange Central justice proposal. We do appreciate the review. First, we appreciate the funding that's proposed in the governor's budget for this project as well as the rest of the facilities projects they meet a lot of important needs. We also appreciate the recommendations from the LAO in terms of their support of the projects and recognizing that in this tough budget that there will be investments that are needed. We have, you know, looked at the recommendations as it relates to sort of the notion of the funding structure, and we appreciate the interest and the creativity, but generally feel like the process in which we submit our proposals to the department of finance for consideration and then assessment in the annual budget has been working. We know that be it, whatever methodology is used, we're still constrained by the funds that are available each year in the budget. And so that is, again, an important part of us being a partner with both the governor and his staff, as well as the legislature and funding our facilities program. And then as it relates to oversight, we are, you know, we are a branch who wants to be transparent, and we will do what we need to in terms of working with our partners at the department of finance. We already do work with them in terms of assessing whether projects should go down a capital outlay path or a facilities modification path, which Mr. Ahmed will discuss. But again, we welcome transparency and oversight and want to be good stewards of public funds. And I'll turn over to Mr. Ahmed to talk about the specific project.
Thank you.
Thank you. Good afternoon, Chairman Ramos and members of the subcommittee. My name is Tamara Ahmed. I'm the director of facility services for the judicial council. I want to express my sincere appreciation to the governor and the legislature for their support of the judicial council facilities program. Today I wish to clarify the distinction between judicial council's facility modification program and the capital outlay program and explain why both are indispensable to the successful operation and stewardship of our statewide court facilities. The facility mass notification program, also known as fm, is intended to help extend the life of a facility. FM projects cannot change the function of a facility or expand a facility currently because of funding limitations. Facility modifications are dedicated to urgent and essential repairs that ensure our buildings remain safe and functional. The current funding levels address emergency needs such as a chiller or a boiler replacement, an elevator repair, when they are down. The annual FM budget allows us to respond swiftly to unforeseen events, minimizing disruption and maintaining building safety and reliability for court users. Larger, critical projects are deferred until sufficient funds are available. In contrast, the capital athlete program focuses on major renovations, construction of new courthouses, and large scale facility replacements. Capital outlay projects are prioritized based on a statewide assessment of need as required by the legislature, considering factors such as seismic safety, overcrowding security and poor physical condition. These projects are typically multi year investments planned and funded through the Judicial Council's five year infrastructure plan which guide requests to the state for federal facility construction and substantial upgrades. Both funding categories are essential and complementary Facility modifications maintain and protect the integrity of our existing programs while capital outlay, investment transfer our infrastructure. I want to turn our attention to the Orange Central Justice Center Fire Life Safety project. I want to briefly describe its scope and factors that led to increased cost. The Central justice center is a major facility spanning 592,000 square feet, 11 stories and housing 66 courtrooms with the Judicial Council owning the building and the court occupying 92% of the space. Prior to property transfer from the county to the Judicial Council, the county upgraded fire alarm, fire sprinkler and emergency voice systems on certain floors. The Judicial Council project would expand these upgrades to the basement and lower floors. However, the work as progress, several unforeseen challenges emerged revealing hidden hazardous building material, leaking pipes with fireproofing and multiple ceilings in above ceiling spaces. The most significant cost drivers were the discovery of non compliant or original construction. Fire rated corridors on the plans were not completed for the above ceiling areas. The State Farm Marshall required additional egress analysis to ensure these corridors ensuring adequate exit in emergency situations. Thank you for your attention for these essential funding programs and projects and I'm more than happy to answer any questions
when my turn comes if I might
just supplement that for a moment. We understand that, you know, cost increases like this are going to happen, but they are in our best interest in the state's interest to make sure that we are managing our projects and the scope of costs in an aggressive manner. And if Tamara, you might be able
to just speak as to how you
and your team try to manage cost, I think that would be helpful for the committee to hear especially as this cost was quite a substantial increase in what is that you do in your
team to make sure we're stewards of defense.
Yeah. Before we start any project, we take a look at the scope. We make sure that we try to do as much investigation as possible. But in this condition, especially with the Central justice system, it was kind of hard to do that because the project is in a state is an occupied facility that was hard to get to. And also we look at as built in order to build off of that. Unfortunately, with this particular project, the county did not build what was on the plans and that what really caused a tremendous increase to the project cost.
So the project was constructed in 1966 and was not designed to the blueprint or built. So when they went to make their estimate, the belief was that it was built to what was the spec Only upon initial demolition did they notice that the above rafter sections were not built to fire code. And so it's a matter of if the building was built consistent with the plans, then the scope would have been correct. But they upon demolition found that it was not built the way it was supposed to.
Thank you for that. Now we go to Ali O.
Drew Soderborg, Legislative Analyst's Office we don't have any concerns with the proposals for funding for the process that are in front of you today. However, we do recommend that the legislature consider how much additional general fund it's willing to dedicate to court facility projects on an ongoing basis. Given the magnitude of the judicial branch's facility needs and the serious condition of the general fund, it's not possible for the state to address all of the judicial branches needs in the short run. Instead, what we recommend is that the legislature establish an amount that it's within willing to dedicate two court facility projects on an ongoing basis and doing so would give the ability of the court system and the state to make both short and long term plans. And to further this, we recommend that you direct the judicial branch to provide a long term plan for facilities based on the amount of funding that the legislature is willing to provide. Specifically, we recommend that this plan be required to be provided on January 2028 and that it include details on how the funding would be divided between construction and facility modification projects to maximize the amount of time that existing facilities can continue to be used. It could also include other things such as innovative ways to finance new construction. The legislature could also consider whether or not it should provide additional funding to the judicial branch to reassess its facility needs. So in your agenda, I believe it's on page 15. It's outlined that there is about 80 different projects currently valued at about $21 billion. A portion of those projects were reevaluated the Los Angeles projects, and that increased their costs. And so the legislature, to get a sense of how much the total need is, could consider providing funding to the judicial branch to do a reassessment. How much additional funding would be necessary to do this would depend on what the legislature wanted the assessment to include. For example, it could direct the branch to reconsider its facility needs in the light of changes to its operations, such as increased use of remote proceedings. We also recommend that the legislature consider providing additional oversight of facility modification projects. So as you heard there were difficulties that the judicial branch ran into on the Orange Central justice center project with the cost increasing substantially beyond what was originally estimated. While this is, you know, this is a relatively unique circumstance, it does raise the consideration that the state might want to exercise more oversight of these facility modification projects, particularly if we're going down a path where we're investing more in facility modification projects to keep our existing facilities in good condition. This oversight could take different forms. It could be as simple as directing the Department of Finance to ensure its cap outlay staff review facility modification projects on a more standardized basis. Or it could take a more significant form and you could direct the judicial branch to submit its facility modification projects to the cap outlay process so it'd come under the overview of the state public works. With that, I'm happy to take any questions.
Thank you so much for that. Amanda Garcia, Department of Finance
yes.
Hi.
Amanda Garcia, Department of Finance on the capital outlay side, we are proposing trial courthouse projects in order of need as identified in the 2019 reassessment. Our priority is to balance the efficient completion of projects while being mindful of the availability of resources. As each project is unique in scope, the state proposes that we continue to both individually fund each project and provide the existing oversight through the state public's works board. We do at capital outlay work closely with our support colleagues, and we follow the direction of the state administrative manual to determine whether projects are considered a support or capital outlay project. There are existing and legitimate reasons why these projects should be classified one way or another. We also do feel that these projects should follow the statewide approach of reviewing each project on a case by case basis and ensuring that each project project does have the appropriate oversight.
Thank you so much. Department of Finance Henry Yang, Department of
Finance Just to add a bit more to oversight, to the extent project cost increases, the judicial branch, of course, has to put in a budget change proposal for additional resources. Of course, these are reviewed by finance, the legislator and are addressed in these hearings. So in that sense there is some, to an extent, some oversight. And the legislature can always, of course, request for informational hearings if additional details are necessary. However, we do recognize that there has been some delays and project costs have increased. So we are open to the legislators input and we can certainly take that back to financial consideration.
Thank you so much. As now we bring it back to the dais. Any comments, questions? Assemblymember Schultz, thank you very much.
Mr.
Chair.
Thank you all for your testimony today. I don't have a question. I did want to Just provide some context. This is now the second hearing that we've had this year where we're discussing significant increased costs for projects. In this case, I understand the project nearly doubled in price. There are certainly factors that are unavoidable, avoidable, like inflation. And before I go on, I do want to say that in the short time I've been here, in all the hearings, I do really appreciate the representatives of the Judicial Council. You probably gave one of the most thoughtful and detailed answers and really walking me through why this happened. And look, I understand that this is a very unique situation, but I bring all this up to say that I am beginning to notice a pattern here. And while I completely respect and appreciated the comments from the administration representatives, I have to wholeheartedly agree with the recommendations laid out today by the lao. When I am noticing a pattern develop, I do think we need to do even more to make sure that when we're seeing continued overruns of costs that we're at least doing everything that we can to exercise the greatest legislative power we have. And that's of oversight. So thank you all for your testimony. No question today.
Thank you so much. Senator Schultz, looking at. Can you elaborate a little more on the 1966 plans? Certainly plans were adopted, moved forward to the local level. But approval of those plans and oversight inspections, those relied on at the local level.
Yeah, this building was built by the county. It's only since in the early 2000s when the state through the Trial Court Facilities act took control of, you know, almost 500 county buildings. So this was built under the auspices of local government and not so we relied again on the plans that were approved then to assess the need to remediate the shortcomings of the fire life system. And again it was. The building was not built to the actual blueprints.
What year was that that the state then started to oversee the construction?
We started taking over in the early 2000s. It was a multi year process of building transfers based on agreements between the county, the court and the Department of Finance about transfers to of those buildings.
Thank you for that. And so that does go into what's being presented. Right. Budgets and different things for projects when we're not sure that pre 2000. Right. If they're going to fit the blueprints that are there. So that adds to some of the constructional management. But another question is on the systems and the rating of the different projects that are moving forward and the list that's out there. I guess it's on a 10 year plan. Does that also Allow for those assessments to have moving variables, meaning what's going on in the climate at that time with the, with the different political or different things that we're seeing and the need in certain areas of courts and the justice system throughout the state of California, is there opportunity to take those into consideration?
Also at a high level, there was statute passed that directed and gave us specific criteria to use. It was so it was not just a judicial council determined methodology. And so that's how the list was created. But any future amendments to that would require resources. We understand that the budget is tight. We appreciate, you know, that that's acknowledged by the lao. But at this point, we know that we need to do an assessment. We just this is not the time, given the budget considerations, for us to embark on that again, given the available resources.
So do you believe that?
We know we need to do one, but we're going to work with the administration and the legislature to get that funded at some point.
So do you believe the list that's there now is something that continues to be needed in the state of California, or would an assessment change any of those proposals?
Well, I would suggest that again, I could have Mr. Ahmed get more detailed, but at a high level, the projects that are in that immediate will remain
in the immediate need.
And the notion that somehow there may be some leapfrogging happen is highly unlikely. In fact, when we did the assessment initially, it didn't not all counties and courts raised their hand. So it's likely that that list will grow. But the criteria effectively are going to keep those, you know, those, those projects in the immediate need category likely in the same place it'll be what happens as we will look at other conditions and more courtrooms and courthouses will need to be on the list that were not on the list previously. Counties who, because of our pace of maintenance and deferred maintenance, what might have been in 19 or 2018, 2019, were in an okay place, have now come to the point where they might need to be considered for replacement or renovation.
In addition to that, you know, the list is a valid list because it's I mean, it was done in 2019. And it's a very valid list because it takes into consideration the immediate critical need. But also when emergency, when critical projects are needed to be funded, changes have been made. For example, you know, you have approved the District 6 Court of Appeal that was inserted in the list because the court was going to be thrown out because of the end of their lease. So there are, when emergency situations happen to amend the list in order to bring a project forward.
Those have taken place based on emergency, based on liability, based on safety.
Yeah, safety. The court is not going to have a space because their lease is expiring. For example, in front of you, there is a proposal to relocate some courtrooms for the LA court because the federal government had decided to dispose of the building. So a lot of courtrooms had to. We came up with a plan in order to relocate them into, you know, existing space. And this was the most extreme economical way that we found out. That was supported by the Governor.
Thank you so much for that and thank you for your testimony. Is now we're going to move on to the Office of Emergency Services. Issue five.
Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you so much. As we now move to issue 5. Victim Services funding Eric Swanson, Deputy Director, Finance and Logistics Administration, Cal OES Ricky Hammett, Assistant Director, Grants Management, Cal OES Sarah Metz, Psychological Director of Trauma Recovery Service, national alliance of Trauma Recovery Centers Leah lachapel, Director of Survivor Advocacy for the Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking Chair Gonzalez Gonzalez, Government Consulting Heather Gonzalez Lao Drew Sotenberg, Lao Sarah Swan, Department of Finance and Zachary Voss, Department of Finance. We'll start with Eric Swanson.
Good afternoon Chair Ramos and members. I'm Eric Swanson. I'm Deputy Director of Finance and Logistics administration for Cal OEs and with me is Ricky Hammett, our Assistant Director of Grants Management. I'm going to start by just talking a little bit about our victims grants programs as a whole. And then your consultant asked us to kind of narrow the focus to VOCA. Cal OES administers approximately 315 million annually which funds 70 victim service programs providing financial and technical assistance and support to victim service providers to ensure victims and survivors in California receive trauma informed victim centered services which include rape crisis, sexual assault, domestic violence assistance, human trafficking, transitional housing, homeless youth and exploitation, Internet crimes against children, child abuse treatment and underserved victims. Now I'll kind of talk a little bit about the subset of VOCA within that within the victims programs. A significant number of our programs are funded through the Victims of Crime act or VOCA Victims Assistance Funding. These programs serve as a critical lifeline for crime victims across California, supporting 35 Cal OES administered programs and approximately 800 grant sub awardees assuring the delivery of essential trauma informed services in communities across the state, in large urban areas, down to rural and underserved areas as well. VOCA provides direct services. For example, hotlines, crisis intervention, emergency shelter and transitional housing programs are designed to meet the diverse needs of California victims, including services for all kinds of crime victims through victim witness assistance centers and targeted support for specific crime types such as domestic violence, sexual assault, child abuse and specialized services for historically underserved populations, including elders. This last fiscal year, VOCA supported more than 330 unique victim service providers and had services to more than 402,000 victims of crimes, of which 68% received services for the very first time. The amount of VOCA Funding Federal VOCA funding has fluctuated dramatically over the last few years. The highest amount we received in California was in 2018, which was 396 million, and the lowest was 2014, 87 million. In 2025, California's allocation was almost 143 million. To account for these reduced state allocations, recent budgets have included one time state backfills to support victim services. For example, the 2021 budget included 100 million one time general fund available over three years. And 2024 and 2025 budget cycles included about 100 million. Cal OES estimates that maintaining current service levels would require around 220 million in 2026. And with that, we're available for questions once the rest of the panel goes.
Thank you so much for that. Now we go to Ricky Hammett.
I'm just here to respond to questions.
All right, I'll just go down the list. Sarah Betts.
Hi.
Thank you and good evening, chair and members of the subcommittee. And thank you so much for this opportunity to present to you today. It's my honor to be here. My name is Dr. Sarah Metz and I'm here representing the national alliance of Trauma Recovery Centers. This is the organization that's responsible for replicating the UCSF Trauma Recovery center model across California and the Nation. Today, there's 20 TRCs in California and 53 nationwide. Trauma Recovery centers provide life saving comprehensive services to California's most underserved survivors of violent crime. We are a critical element of the victim services, public health and public safety ecosystems, helping survivors access much needed comprehensive mental health care and case management. TRC services help survivors to stabilize housing, access medical care, navigate the legal system, and return to work and school. The Trauma Recovery center model was developed at UCSF nearly 25 years ago with bipartisan legislative support. And since then, state investment has expanded access across California where our centers now serve more than 9,000 survivors annually. The reason trauma recovery centers work is not just what we do, but it's how we do it. TRCs are specifically designed to reach survivors who are least likely to access traditional services, low Income survivors, communities of color, immigrants, unhoused individuals and victims of violent crime who often fall through the cracks of fragmented systems. Our model is evidence based and multidisciplinary. We combine community based assertive outreach, mental health care, comprehensive case management, medical advocacy, legal advocacy under one coordinated team. Survivors do not have to navigate five different systems alone. We bring those systems together around the survivor. Unlike traditional clinic based model, TRCs use assertive outreach. We meet survivors where they are in hospitals, homes, shelters, community settings, reducing barriers to care and increasing engagement. Our services are time limited, intensive and focused on stabilization and recovery, helping survivors regain safety, housing, employment and emotional functioning so that they can move forward. When survivors receive comprehensive trauma informed care early, we reduce long term health care costs, decrease reliance on emergency services, improve cooperation with law enforcement, and reduce the long term social and economic impact of violent crime. And this model works. Over the course of our 16 week evidence based model of care, we see measurable reductions in survivors need for ongoing medical care, legal intervention, substance use services and financial crisis support compared to usual care. Clients that receive TRC services experience a 56% increase to return to employment, a 41 greater reduction in homelessness, and this happens all at 34% lower cost than usual care. Additionally, clients have more than a 40% reduction in post traumatic stress disorder and major depression symptoms and report reduced disability related to the cr. And this is not incremental improvement, this is meaningful recovery. This means survivors have fewer emergency room visits, fewer repeat crises, less reliance on public benefits. And in short, survivors leave TRC safer, healthier, more stable and less reliant on high cost public systems. And these aren't short term improvements, they're long term cost avoidances for the State of California. And I was asked to speak to some of the differences between trauma recovery centers and programs that are funded by voca. So some of the main differences for us is we don't silo our survivors of crime, meaning they don't have to go to different agencies depending on their crime type. We serve survivors of all crime under one clinic. So similarly we focus on comprehensive clinical case management and mental health combined with an emphasis on outreach. We're measurement guided treatment and we really focus on outcomes and we help to coordinate our services across multiple complex systems. So we're coordinating with district attorneys, with victim services, with special victims unit, with hospitals, with employers, really trying to get all survivors back on their feet. And we are currently facing a severe funding disruption that threatens the sustainability of this model. The initial report by the Legislative Analyst Office could be upwards of 85% reduction. And what that would do is bring us from 20 TRCs across the state down to four, bringing our service numbers from 9,000 survivors to 1,000. And these survivors, they're not going to disappear from us. They will turn to emergency rooms, urgent care clinics, and already strained public health and entitlement systems, often at significantly higher cost and with far less specialized support. The likely downstream effects are increased unemployment, housing instability and worsening medical and mental health outcomes for generations to come. When we invest in trauma recovery, we invest in public safety, we invest in public health and the long term stability of our communities. California has spent 25 years building a nationally recognized evidence based model of care. And the question before us is whether we protect that investment or we allow it to unravel. Thank you for your time.
Thank you so much for that. As now we'll move on to Leah LaChapelle and Chair Gonzalez.
Thank you so much.
Either one.
Yeah.
Good afternoon. I think almost good evening now, Chair Ramos and members of the committee. My name is Leela Chappelle. I'm the director of policy and advocacy at the Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking, also known as cast. I am here today, very grateful to be here today to be in support of Assemblymember Mark Gonzalez and Senator Lena Gonzalez request to authorize funding for the Human Trafficking Victim Assistance Program, or the htvap. For more than two decades, CAST has worked directly with survivors of both sex and labor trafficking across California. And through that work, we've seen firsthand that escaping trafficking is just the first step for a survivor. The work that is required is a coordinated set of services that address housing instability, legal barriers, trust, trauma and economic exploitation. And that is exactly why California created this program in 2015. This program recognized that traditional victim services were not designed to meet the specialized needs of human trafficking survivors. HTVAP ensures that survivors have access to comprehensive continuum of care. And under this program, providers are able to offer critical support, including a 24 hour cross crisis line, emergency confidential shelter, temporary housing and long term housing assistance, legal assistance, and that includes filing for T visa applications, protective orders, things of that nature, as well as clearing criminal records tied to their exploitation. Providers also have to provide things like food, clothing, all of those emergency needs that come up for survivors. Transportation to court hearings and medical appointments, emergency financial assistance, counseling, and referrals to community partners like the ones that are represented here. In practice, this means that when a survivor escapes trafficking or needs help escaping a trafficker, there is someone that they can call when they have nowhere safe to sleep. That Means that there's a place that they can go. And when they face legal barriers, whether it's immigration relief or protective order or a criminal record tied to their exploitation, there is an advocate and an attorney that is trained, specialized in that assistance and is ready to help them. The most recent grant cycle that we have for this program demonstrates how essential this infrastructure has become. In California, we show that We've served nearly 5,000 survivors in the last year through these partners. Over 2,000 of those were children and young adults, and 88% of the survivors served in this program identified as people of color. Those numbers reflect not only the scale of need, but they reflect something more important about how trafficking operates in California. Survivors intersect with multiple systems. Housing, instability, immigration processes, the criminal legal system and the labor market. Without specialized services that understand these intersections, survivors will fall through the cracks. This moment also raises a broader question about the role that the states play when federal protections become unstable. CAST provides federal TTA to providers across the country. And so we can speak to what we're seeing federally in areas directly related to human trafficking services and survivor safety. One example that we would really like to flag that we're working with our federal partners on is the removal of the Not One More report from the Department of Justice website. This is report that is congressionally mandated and is developed through testimony from more than 250 tribal members, trafficking survivors and families of missing loved ones, and federal partners. It documents the crisis of missing and murdered indigenous people and outlined concrete solutions to protect vulnerable communities and the intersection of human trafficking. While there is a lack of universally agreed upon or California specific data, the data that we do have comes from the 2015 study from the National Congress of American Indians suggests over 40% of sex trafficking survivors identify as Native or American Indian or Alaska Native. And the majority of those come from homes that have been fractured by forced residential boarding schools. But we know that that statistic is very low. Another example that we would like to bring forth from the federal perspective is the removal of all victim identification and sensitive location protocols by the federal immigration enforcement, as well as ongoing litigation in California regarding the deportation of immigrant survivors who have protective visas. Earlier this year, when one of cast's clients with lawful status was detained and almost died in detention when their prescribed medication was withheld from them, it was HTVAP providers that were able to not only defend their rights, but help them secure their freedom. Freedom. These providers are really at the front line of making sure that survivors rights are defended. We've defined their rights, we know their rights. And we're often really the only ones who know where these survivors are. California has historically stepped forward in these moments. HTVAP is a clear example of that leadership and it recognizes that survivors cannot rely on a patchwork of programs that were not designed for their circumstances or their needs. They need specialized providers who understand trafficking dynamics, immigration protections, and the long term stabilization that is required to prevent retrafficking. Today, over 31 community based organizations across California provide these services. And without this specialized network, many trafficking survivor, particularly immigrants and survivors from marginalized communities, would lose not only access to services, but also the protection that prevent retrafficking. Detention and continued exploitation programs would face service reductions. Wait lists would grow and survivors seeking help would encounter fewer safe places to turn. The loss would not simply affect service providers, but it would perfect the survivors and their children who rely on these programs to rebuild their lives. Maintaining HGVAP is not only a survivor support issue, but it's also a matter of public safety. Our law enforcement partners rely on these services to ensure that survivors are stable enough to cooperate with prosecution and are able to prosecute these cases. This is also a matter of the responsible stewardship of the state's existing investment into these services. California has built this specialized network to respond to trafficking. So reauthorizing this funding is essential to ensure that this network remains intact and can meet the need of survivors across the state. Without reauthorization, funding will revert to pre pandemic levels on July 1st of 2026. So we face a funding cliff that is imminent. And these 31 service providers and the survivors that they serve are looking to the state of California to see what will happen next. And especially now, human trafficking survivors are waiting to see how will California support them. Thank you again for your time and your continued commitment to addressing human trafficking in California. Myself and our legal counsel, Chair, we are happy to answer any questions.
All right, thank you so much for that testimony. Chair Gonzalez, are you there for technical.
I'm just here for technical questions, Mr. Chair.
Thank you so much. Elio.
Nothing to add.
Thank you. Department of Finance.
Thank you. Zachary Voss, California Department of Finance. The federal government has not indicated the amount of federal VOCA funding California is set to receive for the next fiscal year. That information is critical to considering the magnitude of this funding need and its general fund impact. The administration is sensitive to the importance of this funding and the discussion of whether there should be a state backfill for any potential federal reduction in VOCA funding is something considered in the broader context of the condition of the general fund, broader cuts to federal funding and the universe of funding needs.
Thank you so much for that. Any questions, comments from the dais, Mr. Schultz.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you all for your testimony. Wanted to start on the issue of VOCA funding. It's my understanding that we have certainly seen this growing gap, this decline in VOCA funding available to California. A lot of contributing factors, one of which is a sharp decline in the prosecution of federal white collar crime over the last 10 to 15 years, which as a matter of policy is concerning enough. But I guess the question in terms of the budget is has OEs been involved in seeking a permanent federal solution? And if not, if there haven't been discussions there about a federal solution, has the administration considered possible options at the state level to help stabilize these programs as opposed to the sort of every year coming back and revisiting it with the one off solution?
So as far as a federal solution,
we haven't been involved in talks around that.
And then for the state solution, we are still in this annual request for abacfill.
It was just as you know, the
crime victims fund allocation has varied dramatically
from like 396 million in 2018 to
87 million in 2024.
So that is something we can consider doing more of a permanent solution versus having to, you know, come to talk about a backfill.
Thank you. Anyone have anything they want to add? Okay, the only before I go to my other question, I would just say appreciate the willingness to engage on the issue. Would definitely encourage discussions with our attorney general. We have a little known but pretty robust white collar prosecution group in the special prosecution Section, Criminal division at Agony. I don't know what he would say, but I'd just be very curious to see if the staff has any thoughts on a state approach to stabilizing the funding. And then of course I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that it would be awfully nice if the federal prosecutors involved were as equally focused on going after those with incredible power and resources who are very much committing crimes. Very concerning that we've seen such a sharp decline in white collar prosecution, I can tell you from experience. Experience it's very much alive and well that that organized crime syndicate. And yet we haven't seen the prosecution there. Okay, shifting gears, trauma recovery centers. A little bit of an easier question, I suppose. I'm just wondering, aside from referrals from DAs and law enforcement, how do folks know about your services? That that's question number one. And then question two. Would be, do you offer services to folks that aren't necessarily the direct victim of a crime, but maybe someone who is a witness to it or family of victims? Just what can you tell me more about that?
Yeah, great questions. Thank you. So each trauma recovery center has different referral pathways, but some of us are also connected with Level 1 trauma centers or our local Department of Public health. So we'll get referrals from health systems, from hospitals, from other community mental health clinics, from shelters. So it really varies. Our goal with our model is really to eliminate barriers to accessing care. So we have a very low threshold from that perspective. And then in answer to your other question, absolutely. We serve derivative victims. So we serve derivative victims of homicide. Sometimes we will also serve derivative victims. So parents whose children have experienced crime or abuse, as well as folks who have potentially been in harm's way during a crime, but weren't themselves a direct victim.
Thank you so much, Assemblymember Schultz. VOCA funding. We always find ourselves in a game of waiting to see what comes from the federal government before we land on a number that's there. In 2025, we landed on 143 million. So it'd be interesting to see when those dollars start to come forward from the federal government to see where we're at and putting money back into voca. So we'll be looking forward to that update in the future to the trauma recovery centers. I want to talk a little bit more about your funding. Is it similar to the VOCA funding where the federal government does put money into it, or is it all state funding?
Yeah, so right now it's for our treatment programs. It's all state funding that gets delivered through the California Victim Compensation Board through the TRC grant.
Thank you for that. And you're saying that what's being proposed is an 85% reduction?
That's correct. That was based on the initial report from the Legislative Analyst Office. And this also speaks to, I think, that impact of Prop 36 on Prop 47 savings. Because I think about 10% of the Prop 47 savings were allocated to TRCs.
Okay, I understand. Okay, thank you for that clarification. That's there. And then the trauma recovery centers, you mentioned that it's not that it's not done in silos. Is that correct?
Correct.
Can you elaborate a little bit more on that, on the treatment longevity, those types of things?
Absolutely. So we're a short term model. So our goal really is to get folks back. Back to their pre morbid, so pre experience level of functioning if not better. What I'm meaning by the siloed is we coordinate care basically with any entity that has been that that survivor is interfacing with. And also we don't limit which survivors can access our services. Meaning we don't just limit to sexual assault survivors, we don't just limit to IPV survivors. We serve survivors of any type of interpersonal violence. Many of our TRCs serve clients across the lifespan. Yes. And we really work to address any area of their life that has been impacted by the crime, which could mean helping them to apply to entitlements that they're eligible for, helping to work with their employers to kind of mitigate impacts like job loss, helping to mitigate impacts like being evicted from their home because they can't work because of the injuries. So we really have a very comprehensive approach in supporting our survivors that can include additional things like helping them to get U visas or T visas. So really, each treatment plan is individualized to whatever that specific impact was for that survivor.
And do you believe that this is more of a preventive measure that's saving resources down the road for the individual?
Absolutely. I mean, I'm not only a director of a clinic, I'm also a clinician. And we absolutely, hands down prevent folks from incarceration. We prevent folks from having to go to acute emergency services for psychiatric needs. That our interventions really do mitigate those impacts, not only for that person, but for the their community. So that can include things like helping to mitigate future violence that's perpetuated with untreated impacts of violence, helping folks, again, to remain employed, to remain housed. So we really come in very early and very comprehensively to stop whatever impacts we can at that point and within a short period of time.
Thank you so much for that. And then can you elaborate more on the HTVAP funding? Federal versus state funding?
This is general funds. This is all state funding.
All state, yes.
And it was first passed in 2015. That was 10 million a year. We knew that 10 million a year was never going to be enough for the largest human trafficking population in the entire nation. But that was what we took to get our foot in the door. And then in 2021, the pandemic in 2020 hit and the funding became a real crisis point because we literally had nowhere to put survivors who were who needed help. Remember, emergency shelter is one of the biggest points of the htvap. There are many portions of that program, but the emergency shelter, because you cannot take a human trafficking victim and place them in a regular Homeless shelter. Every trafficker, I can guarantee you, knows where the shelters are in their community. It is their favorite recruiting grounds. They need secret facilities. That is what human trafficking victim services offers under the htvap. These are secret safe houses that a survivor can go to and be safe from their trafficker. So the funding was passed in 2015. We got an augmentation in 2021 of an additional $10 million. That's when the funding became much more adequate for what we have in this state, which is again the largest human trafficking population in the country. That funding then was reauthorized in 2023. We are now in 2026, which means July 1st is the cliff we fall off. We go back to pre pandemic funding levels for the largest population in the nation. So that's why we're here today to talk about how important it is that we do not allow this funding to lapse. It has to be reauthorized in this year's budget. What it is, it's a three year, just like in the past. It's three years of funding as a one time funding. So it's one time spending appropriated over three years.
All right, thank you so much for that. And July 26 would revert back to pre pandemic levels.
Exactly.
Because there was one time funding given at one point.
So it was in the 2015 budget act, it was 10 million ongoing. In 2015, there was an additional 10 million. It was $30 million to be appropriated over three years. That brought total funding to $20 million. We had a reauthorization in 2023 and now we need that additional reauthorization in 2026 or we go back to the 10 million pre pandemic level.
All right.
And those. That's one time funding or ongoing funding.
So the, the regular funding is ongoing, but the request has always been one time. It's $30 million. It's appropriated over three years. And then every three years we come back to you to ask to reauthorize that funding.
Thank you so much for your testimony and to all of these topics and testimony coming forward. Voca, trauma centers and certainly human trafficking are areas that, you know, the work is out there and it needs to be done. And taking all this testimony to heart. Right. And to make sure that we do advocate for the funding that's there and to make sure that the voices are being heard and resonated in these chambers. And certainly looking back to Department of Finance, looking to see if some of this testimony and looking at some of these things coming forward may revise. I know VOCA we wait to see what the funding is going to be at the federal level, but looking at these both, if I understand it, are both state entirety funding on it. Certainly we could take some of that back and relook at some of those things for may revise.
Sarah Swan Sarah Swan, Department of Finance will certainly take this back and the
information that's been provided today.
Thank you.
Thank you so much. Any final comments? Thank you so much for your test and your work in keeping people safe. Thank you so much.
Thank you Mr. Chair.
As now we're going to move on to our next issue which is issue six. There'll be two panels that will be discussed on this issue itself. The first panel will be Steve Yarbrough, Deputy Director, Public Safety Communications Cal OES Eric Swanson, Deputy Director, Finance and Logistics Administration Cal Oes Heather Gonzalez, Andrew Soderbergh, Lao, Sarah Swan and Zachary Voss, Department of Finance and we'll start with Mr. Yarborough.
Good afternoon Chair Ramos and members of the committee. Thank you for the opportunity to give an update on California's next gen 9.1-1 system. You'll hear us refer to it as Next Gen next generation or NG911. California remains committed to delivering a modern, reliable and Secure next generation 911 system that works for all Californians. To achieve this goal, we've developed a transition and implementation plan with milestones that have been presented to the 911 advisory board. The next gen 911 will allow emergency call centers to receive voice calls, text messages, images and video from callers. These capabilities significantly improve situational awareness for responders and dispatchers, allowing them to better understand and respond to emergencies. California's next gen 911 system is acquired as a service from our vendor partners and is funded primarily through a dedicated surcharge on all in state telephone users. Cal OES is confident that the system will deliver what we're referring to as the best in class solution or most advanced technology available for life saving service. And I'd like to give a little bit of a history of the deployment of the project so far. Between 2019 and the fall of 2024, Cal OES worked with contracted service providers to deploy next gen 911 using a regional approach. This approach divided California into four regions and then it also had a statewide backup provider as a fallback position in case one of the regions ran into trouble. The regional model as it was designed was intended to improve resilience of the system and to make sure the Availability of the system was always there, but it also introduced significant complexity. Each region effectively operates as an independent system, and the interaction between the regional providers and the statewide backup provider requires custom interfaces and routing logic. During testing and the early deployment of the next gen 911 system, Cal OES and our local partners identified issues related to call routing, transfer functionality and system reliability. In several cases, calls were routed incorrectly or they were transferred improperly or they experienced degraded voice quality during handoffs between the systems. Public safety answering points experience operational challenges that further complicated things. Requires the dispatcher who is answering the 911 call to handle calls from both the legacy 911 system as well as the next generation 911 system simultaneously. And it requires the human to then figure out which of those two types of calls are coming in and treat them differently. That puts an extra burden on the dispatcher that we think should be solved by a technological solution rather than a human solution. So rather than risk expanding these service disruptions to other public safety answering points throughout the state of California, Cal OES made a deliberate decision to pause future transitions of new public safety answering points onto that network and to carefully assess the architecture and its and its confounding problems. This decision was made with one priority in mind and that was to protect the residents of California by providing a stable and functional system. So what calauias learned from this episode as after it undertook an extensive review of the system and engaged directly with local partners, first among those was visiting the public safety answering points and then second of course was sitting down and talking face to face with each of our vendor partners and all of the dispatchers and emergency call centers throughout the state. Calloway has looked at the best practices that are available within the industry and also what could be learned from other states deployments of next gen 911 systems. The feedback we received and the observations made were invaluable and it became clear that the regional architecture introduced unnecessary complex complexity for PSAP operations and created multiple points of potential failure. As a result of that review, Cal OES developed a revised strategy focusing on simplifying the system architecture and adopting a statewide approach consistent with the national best practices. Under the updated strategy, California would move to a statewide model rather than the regional model. This approach simplifies the architecture by eliminating the regional providers and the custom interfaces between the systems that were needed. The statewide provider model aligns with the standards, which are published by the National Emergency Number association and covers the technical standards required for 911 systems, the long term statewide provider will be required to deliver a system that will achieve 99.999% availability. It will be supported by multiple data centers, and it will have redundant network paths and geographically diverse infrastructure. By adopting those standards, we can eliminate the California specific design elements that were included in the regional model and we will be able to provide a proven, secure architecture that is already operating successfully in other jurisdictions. Our goal remains unchanged. We want to deliver a reliable, modern network for all Californians. But our strategy is updated to reflect the lessons learned from early deployment and aligns with California's system with national standards and best practices. By simplifying the architecture, adopting a statewide provider, and implementing strong oversight and reporting, we are confident that the state is now on the path toward a successful next gen 911 deployment. With that, I'm happy to answer any questions.
Thank you. Thank you so much for that. Do we have Eric Swanson want to add to that?
Eric Swanson just available for questions.
Thank you Lao Heather Gonzalez with Lao Good afternoon Chair and Members. As you know, OES is moving rapidly toward major changes in the state plan for next generation 911. It is our view that while these alterations may be entirely appropriate, changes of this magnitude to a public safety system this important are best accomplished under close oversight. In addition, we do not know whether, if faced with options and trade offs, the Legislature would adopt, amend or reject the changes that OES is pursuing. For this reason and others that I'll cover more thoroughly in this presentation, we recommend that the Legislature temporarily planned cause forward movement on this project while it gathers the information necessary to either increase confidence in the plan OES has proposed or enable it to work towards an alternative that the Legislature prefers. Now, you should have before you a handout we prepared for this hearing. It contains summarized information on next generation 911 systems. It's pulled from this brief which you may also have as well. The state's more than 10 year effort to plan and deploy such a system is included in here, as are recent challenges OES faced during deployment and what they propose to do next. The handout also summarizes our findings and recommendations. Now, by way of background, we direct your attention to page one of the handout which explains what next generation 911 is. Simply put, next generation 911 uses Internet Protocol based technologies instead of copper wire to Deliver and Route 911 calls. This system consists of four major components networks, core services, geographic information systems, and call handling equipment. We include formal definitions of these in your handout, but as a rough analogy, you can think of a next generation 911 system as a dedicated emergency highway system. The network is the highway core services are the traffic control which direct vehicles based on verified addresses. The Geographical information System is the official master map that ensures that calls go to the right dispatch center in the right jurisdiction and that first responders go to the right locations and call handling equipment is in the local control rooms where dispatchers receive and manage emergency communications to work together like they should. All of these components, as well as the phones and the carriers that use the system must be interoperable. That is to say, they must all speak the same digital language and not just the same language. Ideally, they should have the same dialect. Getting everyone in this system, the dispatchers, telecom companies, phone carriers and so forth to speak the same dialect is one of the central challenges of our transition to Next Gen911 turning to the state's effort to upgrade our 911 system to a next gen system, as you'll see from page three. Two of the handout, we have traced the overall state effort to as early as 2010 when the state developed the roadmap to next generation 911 under former Governor Schwarzenegger. However, we date the current effort to 2015 because that's when the legislature enacted SB 1211, which statutorily directed OES to get started on this project. That said, it was not until 2018-19 that meaningful amounts of funding became involved available, and that's when OES was able to execute the contracts with the regional vendors and the statewide backup vendor, which we colloquially refer to as the regional approach or the regional system, and that would build and deploy the next generation 911 system. We have now deployment of this regional system included trenching and laying, fiber optic lines, structural and electrical work at dispatch centers, and the installation of both hardware and software. Though it is unclear to us what portion of these installed features and materials could be repurposed especially least expensively if we adopt the changes OES has proposed. We should also note that despite the challenges OES has identified with the regional System, in their February 27, 2026 report to the Legislature, they reiterated previous statements indicating that the regional system is currently delivering caller location and text text to 911 services to all dispatch centers in California and that 23 dispatch centers have begun transitioning voice calls to the system. Turning now to our assessment and findings, as OES has explained, when an initial tranche of dispatch centers begin transitioning voice calls to the regional system, problems surfaced. OES reviewed these challenges and has concluded that the best solution is to switch from the regional approach to a statewide approach approach. Although AES has not yet submitted a BCP requesting authority to make these changes, we reviewed the information provided by them so far and our assessment may be summarized as follows. Number one this project is overdue and future budget needs are unclear. We feel especially strongly that the Legislature be provided with the best possible estimates of the costs needed for next generation 911, the legacy system, and support for dispatch centers in this budget year and future years under any plan that is adopted. 2. We want to be very clear that we believe that major changes OES has proposed may be entirely appropriate. However, all changes come with tradeoffs and we do not yet have enough information about the options OES considered and the ones that didn't to be able to lay these out fully. But as an example, unless the statewide system envisioned by the updated transition plan is designed carefully, a regional approach may offer greater redundancy and may be more able to withstand failure as a result. On the other hand, the regional approach may have too much redundancy and may have become so complex that it suffers inoperability compared to the envisioned statewide system and is effectively fatally flawed. Different things to weigh Cost may also be a trade off. Although we have no information on which to judge at this point, as will management needs, it may be easier for OES to manage a single contract with a single vendor than it would be to manage multiple contracts and vendors. However, relying on a single contract could expose the state to price increases, unfavorable contract terms, or even reduced innovation because it will be painful and expensive to switch vendors again and because competition between vendors is an advantage to the state as a buyer, we just don't know what the options are or what the technical cost or managerial trade offs would be if these options could be compared. Our third finding is that changes of this magnitude to a system this important are best undertaken under close oversight and that is currently lacking. The state 911 system has an advisory board, but it is only advisory as we've been told by cdt as a public safety telecom project. This project is not subject to the typical CDT project approval and oversight processes and to date of course, the legislature has not been provided with a statutory proposal, trailer bill language or a BCP for consideration of this change. Our fourth finding is that available information leaves key questions unanswered. Although OES has provided high level descriptions of its plans and reasoning, we are missing or have insufficient answers to the following six questions. First, what is the exact nature and scope of the problem or problems OEs encountered with the regional system, and will the new plan solve these problems? Now, before I move on to the next four, I want to pause and really stress these first two nature and scope of the problem and will the solution address the problem? And the reason that I want to highlight these questions especially is because when we asked independent experts and stakeholders what advice they would give you if they were faced with a question you are now facing, the near universal response we got was to get very, very clear on those first two questions. In addition, we have four other questions that we would include, which are what other options were considered? How do these options compare? How will the system comply with state privacy and security regulations and law? And is there sufficient oversight of this project, which takes us to our fifth finding 911 technology will continue to evolve It's a mischaracterization to think of deployment of the next generation 911 system as having an end date where the project will be done. Yes, you can likely identify a date at which the legacy system can be decommissioned, but that doesn't mean next generation 911 will be complete. It's a system that is going to change over time and this will likely happen at a much faster pace than was possible historically. Now to our recommendation. Based on these findings, we recommend the following first, oversight hearings, including not limited to the one we're having today, preferably before, may revise so that if you receive a BCP or even without one, you can make the most informed decision possible when the budget is adopted in June. We strongly recommend these hearings focus on the key questions we have raised and that they include a meaningful comparison of options and trade offs, including cost. 2. If this analysis is not possible, we recommend that the Legislature consider adopting language in the budget or elsewhere that would prohibit OES from implementing the statewide approach and until an independent, technically proficient third party or team, which could include the state auditor, a Blue Ribbon commission, or even a select committee, is able to do this comparative analysis. Third, to strengthen oversight of the current project, we recommend quarterly fiscal reports and monthly progress reports to the Legislature Until Legacy911 has been fully decommissioned. And lastly, looking at the long term future for these systems, including the potential for nationwide interoperability and future innovations, and the myriad of trade offs and policy questions that might develop as a result. We recommend that the Legislature consider whether ongoing oversight is appropriate and what form that might take. Thank you for your time and attention. We're available for questions.
Thank you so much for that in depth testimony. Department of Finance thank you.
Zachary Voss California Department of Finance. We don't have anything to add to the background at this time, but we're here available to answer any questions.
Thank you so much for that. Back to the dus. Is there questions, comments? Thank you, Assembly Member schultz.
Thank you, Mr.
Chair.
So
appreciate all the testimony. And I want to ask this question in the way that I would imagine that a constituent would ask me, because if they see this tape, they will probably ask me for the question. So over the course of the last decade, we've spent nearly half a billion dollars on the implementation design and roll out of this program. My understanding, by the way, is about, if I'm not mistaken, 85% of it was expended on the vendors. The question is what was the public benefit for all that? I don't know what to tell them. What did the public benefit in spending all of that money? Because right now I see none. And I want to be clear. I'm not trying to be hard on anyone. I just, this is a question I know I'm going to get asked. So what would you have me tell them? In what way did the public benefit.
Well, I think it, yeah, it ties back to the nature of the way we acquire next gen 9. 1:1, the system and what we're, what we're paying for is the service or the use of that network for a period of time. And so similar to if you were, you know, using your cell phone, for example, you might pay for access to the network for that month and beyond that month, you don't have an enduring benefit. And so you get the use of the network for that month or that year. And so your point about the 85% is tied to the monthly recurring costs for that. So paying the assortment of vendors who provide the next gen 911 system, 85% of that $450 million number is the monthly recurring costs. So as to the benefit that was received, it's the use of the network, such as it was during that time. And so that means it was there for our use for the five year period of time that that contract was in place. And then obviously once the contract ended, then it transitioned over to being paid for and acquired under the tariffs under the Public Utility Commission. And so the payments continue going forward from there. So as we, as we continue to look at this, it's important to recall that or remember that it's going to continue to require a payment to have access to that service off into the future. So it's the use of the service.
I appreciate the answer. I guess the one question, or I guess the point back I'd raised to you is, sounds like we spent a lot of money on something that didn't work very well. Would you agree?
Yeah, I think the facts of the case would bear that out. Yes.
I guess the next question I would have is to the point that the LAO made. I think 2018 makes a lot of sense as a starting point because although there was prior direction, I know the first tranche of significant funding was in 2018. Why is it 2026 and we're only now talking about the ineffectiveness of the program? It just seems to me like we spent hundreds of millions of dollars when we should have been having this conversation years ago.
So I think there's a couple of factors that come into play on that. Obviously, in 2020, the COVID pandemic arrived and that slowed things down significantly. So our progress was hindered by the fact that we weren't able to actually go in person to do the work necessary to transition. Also pertaining to the pandemic, there were supply chain impacts that required delays where usually there hadn't been any. So acquiring equipment also was slowed down. Now, that's not to say that that answers the question entirely. Obviously, there was planning that went on in the early phases, deployment of the network that needed to take place. And then when we start transitioning, that's when we began seeing the impacts that were so concerning that it caused us to make the pause. And so I think it's a confluence of those factors together that caused the delay that you're taught or the length of time that you're talking about.
Now, forgive the naive question, I'm not an expert in most things, but to me, it seems like a statewide approach would have made the most sense from the beginning. Why the regional approach? To me, that's nonsensical.
I think at the time, deference was given to the idea that California is a very diverse and very large state. And so it made sense at the time to, I think, approach each of the regions in such a way as to treat them as being a unique area. What I think, you know, the issue that you're putting your finger on is that it deviated from what had been successful in other places. And I don't have an answer as to why that particular decision was undertaken. I could certainly go back and go through the records and see if we have an answer for this specific reason why. But I know that that's one of the factors that weighed heavily in our analysis as to the path forward. Was it Seems like it's buying more difficulty than is necessary to produce the outcome that we need. And so for that reason, you know, the difficult, and I think the Lao mentioned this as well, is, you know, when you're making something this complicated, you're opening up the surface area for difficulties of being able to design it in such a way that it works, or you're also exposing yourself to increased cybersecurity vulnerabilities. And so I don't have an answer as to why.
Yes. Would you like to add?
If I can add, as it's been explained to me, part of the value of the regional approach is the decentralization. Speaking following on Mr. Yarborough's comment about cybersecurity, there's one argument that could be made that having a regional system where you have multiple places where you could stop before you get to a statewide outage, that that could theoretically provide, that there may be other ways to architect a statewide system that could allow for that. Still, that's something that would need to be explored. But that is my understanding of why it was developed in that way.
I appreciate both of your responses, and I think that what you made about the point you made about cybersecurity is a good one. It also speaks to your earlier point about there's no right or wrong way to do it. There are pros and cons with either approach. It would just seem to me, I mean, obviously, if I had a time machine, there's a lot that I would do. But one thing I might go back and say is while there are certainly benefits in terms of security to a regional approach, could we not foresee issues with the different vendors of different systems communicating with each other? Again, it's just, I guess I'm speaking to preaching to the choir here, but it really speaks to the need to have foresight and anticipate some of these questions before we expend large sums of money. Last couple questions, Mr. Chair. So again, I want to ask you these in terms of just as I would have a conversation with my constituents when they come and inevitably ask me questions, what exactly have been the technical issues that you have run into in the rollout of NextGen?
So the technical issues we've run into is in the routing of the call. So when the call comes in, it needs to go to the correct public safety answering point. And if it doesn't, then that impacts the efficacy of the system at large. That's one of the things that we've run into. And so misrouting another one that we've run into is dropped calls. When we go to transfer a call from one location to another, if the call doesn't actually get transferred and received at that secondary destination. Third is when a successful transfer does take place and if there's degraded audio quality when it arrives, then that's another problem that we've run into. So those are the three top ones, I think that come to mind.
Okay, thank you. That is very helpful and something that I can wrap my head around. So the next question that they would then have and I certainly have is so walk me through how transitioning to a statewide approach would resolve any of that.
Yeah. So in terms of, of cobbling together the different regions, if you have the interface controls between those two regions aren't mapped appropriately, then you're going to end up with the traffic taking a wrong turn. To use the highway system analogy, there's many ways you can get there, but if you take a wrong turn and end up at the wrong destination, then that's the problem. And so eliminating the need to figure out across the boundaries of the two disparate networks.
Right.
Because you're talking about they need to speak the same language or the same dialect. And so if it's all native to one provider, then the different dialects go away. And that's, I think the main focus as to how you solve that problem is by removing the differing dialects from the conversation.
What other options did you consider?
Well, I think those are the two primary ones is remain with the status quo of a multi vendor solution or go with what has worked in, and we've seen work in other states and that doesn't require custom development or coming up with a California specific solution. And that is the statewide model. So those are the two.
Okay.
All right, that's all for now. Thank you very much.
Thank you so much for your testimony. And some questions do come up. Certainly the first one from Leo, I mean, would you be willing to pause the system now and to relook at it?
Well, I think there's a. I don't know that it has to be an either or situation I'm reluctant to pause given the fact that it's going to continue to cost us on the order of $100 million a year to pay for the network that we have. And if we pause transitioning, then the meter is still running, so to speak. So I would be in favor of continuing to solve or solve for transitioning public safety, answering points onto the network while simultaneously figuring out the things that we can figure out. And I recognize that it isn't an ideal situation. But what I'm thinking of is while there is no finish line, there is a date at which we have all of California's public safety answering points with the technology that is intended here. And the further we delay that out into the future, there's risks associated with that that are happening to the public and to the first responders who are out there trying to serve the public. So I wouldn't want to delay getting the 440something PSAP onto the network unduly. So if there's a way to balance those competing interests then I think that's probably a better approach to it.
I was just going to say too. Let me add that one important factor to consider, as you know, is that we have so many big events coming to California in the future and part of our emphasis is to make sure that we're ready for when those come. So that's sort of our sense of urgency as well.
Thank you for that. Alio.
I just wanted to add that our recommendation on pausing is to get you through to May revise. So because your mechanism of course would
be June definitely and so tied to the BCP request. Is that a way that we could monitor the progress of this project without final approval and one bcp?
Yeah, I think there's a couple. It doesn't have to be all through the bcp. I think we would agree with the LAO that we can have discussions on what the level of oversight and transparency is. And for sure I think we've tried to work with. We've met a couple of times with your Ledge staff. We have reports that we gave this year. We let folks know last year through a BCP that we had sort of we needed to rethink the direction we were going in. There will be eventually as we've come up with a plan of how we think is the best way to move forward. There will be a funding update associated with that eventually. Because we do owe you as well. We agree with the lao. We do owe you the costs associated with that funding plan as well.
Thank you for that. And to the $455 million that's already been spent surcharge towards users. Right. The consumers actually paid for that. Can you tell us how much of that is still being used? How much of it was wasted? How much is still being part of the whole program moving forward?
Yeah. So the $455 million was for the term of that contract from 2019 to 2024. And so we had the use of the service during that period of time. And so I don't think of it in terms of it was wasted. I think in terms of we acquired a service for a period of time and we received that. Since then we've been under tariffs and have continued under on that basis. So I think more where the heart of the question is going though is is there an enduring benefit that comes from having spent that? And the short answer to that is no. It's similar to if you're renting a house, the landlord may put in a new carpet and paint the walls for you, but you don't get to take the carpet with you when you transition to a new rental property. It stays there with the, with the house. And, and that's how I view the, the one time cost to build this network. The first time around 85% of the monthly recurring fees. So the other 15% were startup costs. And that's going to happen anytime that we, that we transition to a new provider for our system. And so what you, what you're looking to do though, is have a relationship in such a way that those costs become smaller and smaller as time goes on in terms of a percentage of the total payment. So that's how I prefer to look at it.
So just so I'm clear, are you saying that 85% of the 400 million plus is retained and is usable for the ongoing structure that you're presenting?
No, no, unfortunately that was for service period that ended in 2024.
So we're basically starting again in the beginning or at zero.
I think zero dollars.
I guess the way to think about it, I think again is that for that period of time, we in the state enjoyed the benefit of those services and that's what we paid to get those benefit of those services.
Thank you for that. You did mention that there's success in other jurisdictions. Can you elaborate on those jurisdictions?
Yeah, the first one that comes to mind is North Carolina. They have a single provider for their state. And as they rolled it out, they also were challenged with some weather events, such as Hurricane Helene, if I'm not mistaken, was the one. And during that their network operated as intended and survived the event such that they were able to route traffic around the impacted public safety answering points. And so we've seen it in places like North Carolina, I believe there's, you know, as many as 15 other states distributed throughout the nation. So some of them in the Midwest, some of them on the west coast, up north, further from here. So we've seen it play out and I think what it does is it points to the fact that this design, this regional design was conceived of in 2018, let's say, and begun implementation.
That was going to be another question when that was established in that state.
Well, so here in California, we conceived of a regional approach, but we've learned a lot since then. And you know, I think learning from what we've, the experience that we've had and the experience of peer states throughout the nation is one of the ways that we make sure that we don't end up in this situation again in a handful of years down the road is because we're taking best practices and standards and building them into the solution so that we aren't building something that has never been accomplished before. And that was one of the challenges with the regional model is it just hadn't been proven out in such a way that it was successful. And so rather than continue down that road, we choose something that has worked in a number of jurisdictions and go with that so that we don't end up having to have this conversation again in five years.
No, definitely. I think we're all in agreement. We don't want to be here again. Close to half a billion dollar investment where now we're not even seeing any component to that. The question was, you looked at South Carolina, when did South Carolina start that 911 system?
I don't have the answer in front of me right now, but I can certainly pull it up.
Thank you. In discussion on oversight, what are you proposing as far as the oversight? Is there matrix that if you did move forward bcp that would have that built into it as far as matrix oversight, that then would allow for a continuation versus the way how we got here today. And do you have any input on that?
Yeah, well, the way I was looking at oversight is that we, on a quarterly basis meet with our 911 advisors advisory board and report to them what we've accomplished and what we're looking to accomplish in the near term. And so a quarterly reporting structure seems to make a lot of sense to me in that regard. So that's the approach that I was looking to take.
So we would like to see more in depth. Right. More to the project itself. If a vendor is hired at a certain area for a statewide vendor, then maybe we understand where that's at and that could be a step forward before we get to a point to where we're sitting here again at close to half a billion dollars of surcharge towards the consumer. I understand that it's not coming from the general fund, but it's a surcharge to consumers, constituents of ours, and so building in something of that sort. I'm asking you if you would have an idea of when that update should be there before the legislature starts to enact and say here's when we want that reported back to us.
I don't think I have a specific answer to that question. I know over the last year we've produced a couple of such reports to the legislature. One was in the November timeframe and one was here recently in the March timeframe. And so I feel like in conjunction with the other elements of oversight and you know, I think that works pretty well.
I guess the question is, do you believe there should be oversight and if there was oversight by the legislature, would we be at the the point to where we are today?
I I firmly believe oversight is valuable and don't have any objection to that.
Thank you so, so much for that. And I do want to try to put people's minds at ease. There is a 911 system functioning in the state of California. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Yes.
So we have what we refer to as the legacy 911 system and it is out there and operational at all of the 440/public safety answering points right now. And it will remain so until such time as we get all of the public safety answering points transitioned successfully onto the next generation 911 system. And so in a manner of speaking, we'll be having the legacy system while we were are building and deploying to the next gen system. Once that's done, then of course we could decommission the legacy system that's based on copper telephone lines and analog routing structures. So yes, all the calls are going to an answering point right now and it will continue to be that way forever.
Now moving forward, you're looking at securing vendor contracts for a statewide approach that has been proven successful in areas like Southern California, which you'll get me the yes, the timeframe of when that went active in South Carolina and other jurisdictions now moving from I guess the old system to the new statewide system, regions versus statewide. Have all the vendors and contracts been made whole? Is there any liability moving forward that we should know about?
No, there, there is no liability. The, the contracts that we had with our vendor partners for the regional system all expired in 2024. So there is no further, further obligation on our part to that. Since then they've been operating under the tariff structure and that is essentially a month to month concern. And so we continue to engage with them through the month to month service process. And we will of course give them the 30 days notice before we end up canceling the service with them.
Thank you. And just one more question and then I'll go to leo. Now moving to the statewide model, has there been any action taken by OES to start moving that direction?
So, yeah, there's a couple of steps that we've been working developing the statement of work for an open solicitation that we intend to put out onto the street and ultimately award in the fall timeframe of 2026. So that is a statement of work that is intended to meet industry best practices, practices and standards and also build in the resiliency that we all know is necessary from a mission critical public safety communication system. So working with experts in the field to make sure that we have the right terms inside of that statement of work and working with our partners at the Department of Technology to make sure that we have all of the new telecommunications terms and conditions built into this contract, as well as cybersecurity terms and conditions, some of which are new since the last time we went out for a contract. And so we want to make sure all of that's built in. So that's the coalition of people who are involved in moving that forward.
Thank you so much for that, Elio.
I just wanted to make sure that we included in the conversation that the statewide model absolutely can work. But there have also been statewide failures. There have been like Pennsylvania had a statewide failure. So we need to look carefully at how the model is developed to ensure that it doesn't expose us to that. The other challenge with a single vendor is what is known as vendor lock in which basically once they this next vendor comes, it's going to be really hard for us to back away a third time. And so whatever choice is made now, that kind of ramps up the importance of it. And the third thing is that while we're talking about the network here, we also have to remember this is a system and the network is part of the system. There are other parts of the system like the dispatch centers. Will they have the right technology to be able to take these calls? We have to move everybody together. Will the, Will your telephone carrier who provides your right, will your iPhone have the GIS information in it to send to the system? Will it carry us? All of these various entities are moving slowly in this direction. But even if we had a flawless network, the fiber optic was perfect, the core services were perfect. There could still be other aspects of the system that could still be a problem. So I just want to expectation set with that and make sure that that's part of our understanding.
Well, thank you for that. And looking for that information on best and worst case scenarios on a statewide model, mentioning South Carolina as a success model. Maybe we need to see worst case scenarios out there also.
Right.
Assemblymember Schultz, thank you very much, Mr.
Chair. Forgot to do two things, sir. Just wanted to thank you for being in the hot seat today. I came in pretty skeptical and I thought you did a good job, all things considered. The only thing I wanted to close with as you all prepared on the may, working on the May revise and you'll be back before us soon. The analogy was used, you know, it wasn't a complete waste necessarily. It's like renting a a place. You can't take things with you.
I get that.
Just so you have the mindset of one legislator. Yeah, we rented the apartment and I guess we had the space, but the lights and the plumbing hardly worked. So before I renew the lease, I want to know that those are going to be cured. And at this point in time, without more information, I have to agree wholeheartedly again with the Laos analysis. I don't have a degree of confidence. So that's what I'm looking for between now and May. Thank you.
Thank you for that.
And thank you so much for being forthcoming with all the information. And we look forward to working with you and getting the information moving forward. Thank you so much.
Thank you.
As now we move to panel two, as we give a little time for panel one to clear out before panel two comes forward. Our second panel is Dan Ferguson, CEO of NGA 911 Systems, Barbara Nguyen, Chief Growth Officer, NGA 911, and Chief Daniel Muncie from San Bernardino County Fire Protection District. Welcome, Chief Muncie.
Thank you.
Who's leading the discussion? Is Don Ferguson going to lead it first or who's leading?
Out of respect for the chief there, if you want to start, or I
can start, I would.
Listening to the hearing today was very educational. You have 99 problems and I don't think this needs to be another one today. What the public doesn't understand is a lot of the technology that they have every day on their cell phones do not translate to public safety. I often joke and say my wife's been tracking me since 2009. Yet we have a very difficult time knowing where the callers are. They're calling the 911 system. Think about my kids. I want to know where they're at and if they're in a situation where they can't call. Maybe that's in an active shooter situation. Maybe it's in the mountains that we have in our backyard. If they can't get a cellular signal, the ability to text 911 is extremely important. Today we live in a data world where we share data. The public wants to send us videos of what's happening. This is great for the firefighters that are responding so we can develop the situational awareness that we need or the appropriate resources so that we can mitigate incidents quicker. That's the promise of NG911 that was given to us in 2018. And it's a promise that we've been building our systems on. We have spent an immense amount of money in our local Dispatch center, confire JPA to prepare for NG911. We bested our staff's time. They've had the software, the hardware, the training come in to start moving in that direction. And as we've been waiting for the promise of 911, we've had system outages from the legacy system. Whether that's copper wire theft or other issues that have led to our 911 system being temporary
unavailable.
The greatest fear that I have as a fire chief is undoubtedly a firefighter passing while on the job. But the second greatest fear that I have is a massive failure of our 911 system. So to keep that firefighter safe, almost everything we do is based on a pace of plan. A pace plan means we have a primary plan, an alternate, a contingent, an emergency plan. So you can imagine that when I think of the next generation 911 system, how important you must understand that this is a redundant system. And I think the Lao's report was excellent. I thought your comments were excellent. I think that you described exactly the feeling of the fire service. So I'm a little bit more than just the fire chief for the county of San Bernardino. I'm also the California Metro Fire Chief's president. I sit on the Firescope board of directors. I sit on national committees, including the past president of the International association of Fire Chiefs Tech Council widely and those three groups, the fire chiefs agree with what I'm saying. When we look at the top three issues facing a fire service, this conversation comes up. Our legacy 911 system, how it's prone to failure, the promise of the next generation 911 and why has so much time been invested in this over the years? Is it making it better? Is it making it harder? Is it just simply making it easier? By moving away from redundancy. So I'll stop and allow NGA to place their comments, but I'd be happy to answer any questions.
Go ahead.
Chair Members of the Committees thank you thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today. And thank you for your ongoing focus on public safety in California's 911 system. My name is Don Ferguson. I'm the CEO of NGA911. Our company operates next generation 911 systems across the United States and globally. In California we've deployed Los Angeles and Central regions. It is NENA compliant and Cal OES tested and approved. We built it on the most modern cloud services available, Amazon Web Services. We subject ourselves to annual well architected reviews by aws. The architecture is not only locally geodiverse but also nationally diverse, ensuring a modern, robust, flexible, scalable and up to date 911 system for Californians. California's transition to NextGen as approved by the legislature in 2019 is similar to to the regional architectures deployed in Florida and Texas, where risk is mitigated across geographic regions and multiple vendors. To add some historical Context about California NextGen In June 2021, the NextGen Core system was validated at the Cal OES Testing laboratory, including successful interoperability testing between the regions and statewide provider. The first PSAPs went live later that year. Additional deployments followed in 2022 and early 2023. By 2024 the Next Gen infrastructure installation was completed at all 449 Public Safety Answering points across California. Currently, the NextGen network is connected to more than 100 telecommunications service providers, geospatial routing is validated and the system has been fully and successfully tested statewide. Around August of 2024, in the middle of pre migration readiness testing, when at least 62 PSAPs were readied for turn up, the project was paused, meetings were canceled and all communication from Cal OES stopped. This was very odd and confusing. In November of 2024, Cal OES asked NGA to provide a detailed record of 134 system incidents that occurred during the early deployment of NextGen. These incidents occurred in 2022 and 2023 during the initial deployment and were highlighted by the media. Unfortunately, the media was not interested in the fact that the early incidents were all corrected. In any event, we complied fully with this request. We provided approximately 3,000 pages of documentation including logs, trace files, root cause analysis, maintenance records and operational procedures. All the empirical factual data provided lessons learned that have been applied to the impressive system in place today. Here are some findings in that Detailed Analysis first, the regional provider was a single point of contact so all issues were reported to the region. This had the appearance that all issues were caused by the regional provider. That is a false narrative. Second, only 21% of these very early issues were attributable to the region and the breakdown of these 21 tickets is as follows. Twelve tickets were related to test configuration or spam mitigation. Six were service degradation where 911 calls were still delivered. One was an actual outage that affected only T mobile calls to Tuolumne County Sheriff which lasted approximately 40 minutes. One triggered the automatic failover to the statewide provider and 911 calls were unaffected, demonstrating the importance of a multi vendor regional architecture. The conclusion is that the regional architecture was not the major contributor to these early issues, so a plan to dismantle the regional architecture does not align with the lived experience of the California NextGen 911 project. Third, and this is very important, the majority 79% of the early issues encountered had nothing to do with the regional provider at all, but rather were associated with various other issues alignment to the legacy system, the statewide provider, adjustments to next gen call delivery from the carriers, operational procedures, PSAP training or project communication 79% it is important to note that incidents that occurred during early deployment were not concentrated in a single vendor or component, so singling out one vendor does not seem logical. The incidents were distributed across the broader ecosystem that makes up a 911 system. This is what a real system integration effort looks like. Many of the challenges encountered during this period stem from a reality that every state in the country faces, namely that old legacy 911 equipment is an obstacle to a perfect 911 system. The question is not whether modernization should continue. It absolutely must and at a much faster pace because the legacy system has been failing for a long time, as evidenced by large scale legacy network and CPE outages in Los Angeles, where I live and other parts of the state in the past six months. The question is whether decisions about the future of this system will be guided by the evidence of how the system actually performed or by narratives that do not reflect or fully reflect the operational record. The regional approach adopted by the legislature and Cal OES is the correct approach and is in fact currently able to function as designed and anticipated. Public safety infrastructure should not be redesigned based on misinformed journalists looking to create a story. Redesigns affect real costs and risks. The regional networks continue to provide service today and have not experienced systemic or systematic technical failures. The ESINET is solid There have been software application bugs, all of which have been aggressively addressed during the life of this project. The design to pause has placed the entire state at risk. As people are forced to rely on a failing legacy 911 system. The situation worsens every day and the risk increases. The Olympics, World cup and super bowl are coming to California. Lives should not be entrusted. Lives should be entrusted with a robust regional design that is ready for Turn Up. We welcome oversight and accountability along with technical review. All of the regional components are ready and we are excited to turn it on. Decommissioning of the legacy system can start and does not need to wait for 2030. Interim contracts and solutions are unnecessary since the current active tariff structure can hold vendors accountable to high service levels. And there is no need to build a new system since the one we have works and is ready for Turn Up. If we have learned anything from the LA fires where I live, it's planned for the worst. Don't put all your eggs in one basket and have multiple, multiple contingency plans. When the single network, when the single statewide provider architecture fails, it will take out all 449 PSAPs, affecting all 400, all 40 million residents across the state at the same time, just like it did in Pennsylvania. That is a tragedy we can avoid with a little more oversight and a regional design that divides the state into four distinct regions. Let's turn on the regional system we know works and deliver Californians the system they already paid for rather than risk, rather than ask them to wait another five years, spend hundreds of millions more for a lesser system. Thank you. I look forward to your questions.
Thank you so much for your testimony. Is that NGA911's testimony or do we have a second?
That is our testimony. Thank you.
Thank you. Alio.
Nothing to add.
Thank you. Back to the dais. Senator Schultz.
Oh, you knew I'd have questions. Mr. Chair.
Yeah.
Thank you for the testimony. I'll be candid. I don't know if we're going to agree on approach, but that's not the point of my question. You maintain that the regional approach is the right, proven way to go. I do hear that. If I think back to what I heard from the last panel, they felt pretty strongly that shifting statewide would resolve some of the issues that they identified. So in all fairness, my question to you is. Please walk me through what? Why they're mistaken or why they are wrong? Why wouldn't a shift to a statewide approach be better for California?
Sure. Thank you for the question. There were three Issues that were identified, call routing, dropped calls and audio quality. I'll start it with audio quality and my background is technical. I've lived, eaten and breathed this project since 2019. Audio quality on next gen or for that matter any phone call can be from the caller going up to the carrier's network, being handed over to the esinet, passing through the esinet and landing at the psap. Audio quality can be affected by all of those.
So
moving to a statewide provider is not going to handle an audio quality issue. That's one, two, call routing. I can specifically talk to call routing. The call routing that we're talking about or the situation that I have in mind is this, that the Verizon i3 network that we deployed took us 18 months to build that with Verizon and when a caller hung up. So it's a hang up call that hang up happened at a certain period of time within that call and the just at the ingress of the call, it didn't know how to route it. That's a bug. It affected about nine calls a day and those calls were default routed to Mono County. So Mono county was handling abandoned call events and calling them back. We own that bug, we fixed it, we built a patch and we're waiting for Cal OES to approve the application of that patch. Dropped calls, I think is more on transferring of calls. We had a bug, the bug affected one to three transfers a day and we developed a patch for that and that patch is waiting to be applied. So it's a couple patches that are already done and this system will continue to evolve. It'll continue to get pressure from changes in the way that the carriers interact with 911 services. We're no longer in this static world of Legacy911. This is a dynamic IP system that is going to continue to evolve. There will be problems. The handling is to have the processes and the procedures in place to handle those quickly and effectively.
Thank you. The other question that I had since you mentioned Legacy911, I may have misheard you. I just wanted clarification. It sounded, I didn't write it down, but it sounded like you were saying that the legacy 911 system was failing or perhaps there were defects with it. I would certainly agree that there are so many positive additive qualities of next gen, so much more that we can do to respond quickly, quicker. But is your testimony that you feel legacy911 is failing in California?
It is in fact failing. It's not an opinion. It is in fact failing.
And walk Me through it like a kindergartner. In what ways do you feel that it's failing?
So the details of exactly, precisely the failures in the legacy system and the root cause of those failures in the legacy system are better. Asked if color we s but and
I will at the right but since you are here before me, please describe how you feel. It's failing.
What I what I specifically I live in Los Angeles. That's our home. I have three boys, wife. We love la. Sacramento is not bad either. Since we're all here in Sacramento. There have been two major outages, one at laso and I would recommend bringing LASO to calling them, asking them the nature of that outage and what the root cause was. The second was LAPD and the LASO was about 12 hours, I think, but don't quote me on that. And LAPD lasted multiple days degraded service. And I would certainly invite LAPD to talk about those outages. And those are all in the past six months. Just as two. There are many others, but those are just two.
I appreciate it. I'll leave you with a very similar posture that I left the last panel. You know, there is some common ground between what I heard from both panels, but there's also disagreement in the solution. And as I sit here looking at the budget season, I definitely need more information. I'm not yet convinced that what Cal OES is proposing is a better solution. But I equally would want to see over the course of next few months greater degree of confidence that this system that has been initially invested in, that has started can continue to work and get more effective. So that's just my invitation to you as one member of this budget subcommittee. Would love to get more information in the coming weeks and months before we have to make a final decision. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you so much. Chief Muncie, you mentioned the legacy legacy system and certainly the terrain of San Bernardino county mountains. And we have all the different trains there. Can you elaborate more on on where that the system is failing that so that we know that, that there is a need, an urgent need to continue to move forward in the 911 system?
Well, to be clear, I think our legacy 901 systems, the very best 1970s system that there is in existence today. The problem is, is that our requirements are to be 2030. That's what the public expects. That's communication that we need from everything for the use of robotics to just positioning location. So moving into that next generation is the most important thing. As far as the fail points, a lot of it is just that legacy system just getting tired. It wasn't built for the number of calls that are currently routed through it. The routers don't have the capability and it's just not modernized to what we're trying to do today. So we put a lot of fixes on that system. We use third party solutions, we tie our CAD systems together all to bandage a legacy system. And these create new fail points. This is really a government's and it's about interoperability and when you talk about governance of multi systems to create that redundancy, that reliability, it takes a lot of work. You need very good project managers, you need very good agreements and you need oversight to bring this into fruition.
Thank you for that. And we heard certainly from the last panel and you heard our need for oversight during that time, during our comments. I also want to get to the point that you brought up with the 911 system that you believe that some of the criticism is more driven by the media, not by fact driven facts. Is that correct?
Yes, correct. That is correct.
Can you elaborate a little more on that?
So this I'd like to elaborate on that and at the same time answer one of the questions that you asked the prior panel. In fact I wrote down your questions and would like to offer answers. So this, this all really this pause, this timeout, whatever you want to call it, all started with NBC News reporting that NextGen, correct me if I'm quoting it wrong, was going to kill people. Next Gen California NextGen system in California was going to kill people. It was really over the top reporting. It was driven. It was driven from issues that I shared with you that were experienced in 2021, 2022, 2023. Like from older days, older lessons learned. And that right around that time is when the pause came in. We were doing pre migration readiness testing. NBC News gets wind of issues with the next gen project. I don't know how and then this pause comes. So I draw a direct correlation between that news reporting and the pause.
And to your understanding there is no fact driven reason for that pause to have happened?
I think it's always good to reflect. I think that taking a timeout and saying what are our lessons learned is is. Is very healthy. I think 18 months is way too long though. And how long do you need a timeout? I can tell you during that pause period NGA one of the we are a regional provider. We cover half the state. We were not brought in for a single discussion with Cal OES about our lessons learned In. In. In the five years that we were running the project. That was odd. That is odd for me.
Thank you for your testimony. Did we have a follow up question?
Something results, I would say, just in fairness, it sounds like you wrote down my question earlier. Would love to hear your answer as well, please. And if you could maybe just remind myself and everyone else in the room what the question was.
So
what did the public benefit? The answer, the raw truth of it is, and we're a service provider of half the state, the answer is nothing. If you want to be honest with them, nothing until you turn it on. This is why I'm here advocating to turn it on. Hold us accountable. Make sure that we've crossed every I, dotted every T, followed these protocols that the chiefs follow because they work. Hold us accountable. Turn it on. Then you can say it was well worth it. That's one why now it's the NBC News story started. There was at the same time a change in leadership at Cal oes. Those two correlated. I think a new person came in and said, I want to do it my way, short of it. That's why now. And you can correlate those regional versus statewide. North Carolina has 11 million people. The project started from 2015, finished in 2024. Turns out North Carolina is almost the same size as a region in California. California is a bigger state. It's a larger geography. The logic behind regions is you cannot suffer a statewide outage. You need to have vendors that you're spreading your risk fundamental and you're distributing risk even further by having a statewide backup. Because if my region doesn't get it right, I can fail to that backup or I can fail to the other region. But what you will not encounter is a statewide outage with a regional approach. Mitigate risk, multiple vendors, competitive landscape. Make sure all your eggs are not in one basket. Make sure that they follow the NENA standards so they are interoperable. And if they are not interoperable, write an sla. Hold them accountable and say make it work. We do not. As a regional provider, we do not have a single SLA or corrective action plan against us. That's a fundamental tool to engage your vendors and to hold them accountable. We have none of that. That's an out point.
Thank you so much for your comments, Chief Muncie. You know, it's good to see you here. We go back to the days on San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors confire. We've worked on a lot of these issues. We looked at different facilities in the Valley and up in the high desert to make sure that there is repeaters and those things moving forward and it is terrain. So this is an issue that really has gotten my attention, the 911 system. I will say though, that we had a hearing last year on the 911 system and the fires Altadena, and we did identify that 911 locally went out and it took a little while then the state 911 system came into place. So there is a mechanism that is working out there. And I want to let people know that if you call 911 today, there will be somebody answering that call. So 911 is not in jeopardy. Today we are talking about the future of the 911 system to make sure that it is compatible with the growth that's there with the cell phones and the different things that are moving forward. And so I do want to thank you and thank you, Chief Muncie, for taking the time to be up here and bringing not only San Bernardino County's perspective, but the statewide perspective also to this body as we were given a lot of information around this subject here today. So thank you so much for your testimony. As now we'll move to our final panel. This one
Issue seven.
All right, we're moving on to issue seven, Southern California Wildfire Recovery updates. Robin Finnegan, Deputy Director, Recovery Cal OES Eli Owen, Assistant Director, Recovery Operations Cal OES Eric Swanson, Deputy Director of Finance and Logistics Administration Cal OES Sarah Swan, Department of Finance Zachary Voss, Department of Finance Heather Gonzalez Lao Drew Sotomberg, Lao and we'll start with Deputy Director Robin Finnegan.
Thank you very much, Chair Ramos, for inviting us here today. Committee members, nice to see you all. My name is Robin Fenig and I am the Deputy Director for Recovery at Cal oes. Here with me from our Recovery Directorate is Eli Owen. He's the Assistant Director of Recovery Operations. And we're happy to answer questions about our engagements to help support the ongoing recovery efforts in Los Angeles. Eli and I both serve as state coordinating officers for the state for this disaster and have done so since the disaster was federally declared on January 8, the day after the fires started. This declaration turned on the public assistance, individual assistance and post disaster hazard mitigation programs and also afforded California the access to direct mission tasking by FEMA with support from other federal agencies. Cal OES recovery, including Eli and myself, deployed to Pasadena on January 10th, and the wildfires were only about 20% contained during that time. We worked with our FEMA counterparts to set up what's called the Joint Field office or a JFO and we began our operations the next day. On January 11th. Strong coordination was maintained with our local jurisdictions, our federal and state partners, and we remained on the ground for almost all of 2025 with our team. We attended late night town halls, met with survivors at disaster recovery centers, and coordinated with our partners across state, local and federal government. We, I would say officially returned to Sacramento November 21st when the JFO closed and we continue to secure as much funding and technical assistance support for our partners and across the state of California. After the JFO closed, we transitioned to a satellite office down in Southern California where we have 40 Cal OES recovery staff engaged to help support our local partners. We also continue our bi weekly calls with both the city and county of Los Angeles and monthly calls with the city of Malibu. And I think as recently as just a few days ago, at the end of last week was our last set of calls with all three stakeholders. One of the main topics that we have been asked to discuss with you today is soil sampling. I first want to start off by saying that Eli and I, I would say, are pretty, pretty, especially in the last year. We are experts in the delivery of the public assistance programs as well as the hazard mitigation programs. We're not the subject matter experts for contamination remediation, toxic substances, thresholds for concern, public health impacts and the like. We're cost recovery facilitators, you know, and we're working to help support our state agencies, our tribes and local partners to get as much funding reimbursed from the federal government through our grant programs as possible. We have listened to the discussions and findings of these experts through our soil workgroup that emerged through our joint field office operations and still remain engaged there today. So first and foremost, Cal OES is very committed to advocating for the safe, timely removal of wildfire debris. And we evaluate each debris mission by its own merit. So we look at the size, the scope, the breadth of the removal process, local jurisdictions capabilities and capacities, and the state role in wildfire cleanup really depends kind of on that scale and complexity of the event. I will say that Los Angeles is not the typical event that we do. We do a lot of debris operations, but it's not typical. In some cases, local jurisdictions have the capacity to manage their own debris removal programs. In these instances, CAL OES will provide technical assistance and help facilitate potential reimbursement through the California Disaster act or cdaa. For larger magnitude or more complex events, we will, as the state will work with our CalRecycle partners to lead debris operations. And that's really when local capacity is exceeded. And then there are those certain magnet, certain events that are of magnitude that are. That are this kind of the size and scale of something like la, where we have access to direct federal aid. And at the state's request, the federal government will then lead the debris operations. In regard to soil testing, the role of CAL OES is limited to cost Recovery. Up until 2018, FEMA's policy was to initially remove 3 inches of soil and test it. And if the testing failed to meet certain standards, they would go back and then do an additional 3 inches of soil removal and then have additional testing. After the Camp Fire, FEMA changed their approach and stopped funding soil testing after the debris removal and instead opted to implement a standard of removing the full six inches right away. It was faster and more efficient. To help speed local disaster recovery. Any soil sampling that the state chooses to do will not be reimbursed by the federal government. Despite this, the US EPA began an ongoing effort that started in January of this year. The use EPA conducted soil testing for data analysis on cross sectional sampling of 100 randomly selected properties in the Eaton Burns GAR. Testing only for lead levels. The US EPA has stated that they will share the results of the samples when they are available. And the EPA will share it with both the county and the state with the general geographic information, but will not disclose any of the privately identifiable information about particular properties or property owners. But individual property owners will get their confidential results. They just will not share those confidential results with the government partners. Another top line ask from the committee was to also discuss ongoing FEMA reimbursement efforts. There are currently 696 active FEMA public assistance projects totaling approximately $1.2 billion in estimated eligible costs. We'll continue to evolve those costs as the scopes of work and insurance settlements and appeals are finalized. Reimbursements from FEMA are taking a significantly longer time frame than the historical average. To date, only about 4% of anticipated federal share has been obligated by FEMA. With over $500 million pending obligation, Cal OES continues to press on FEMA to increase the amount obligated so that we can get much needed federal funding into California communities. Since late 2024, FEMA has implemented multiple program delivery changes that obligate projects faster administratively. But the reimbursements and construction timelines are slowing because of some of those post obligation revisions that have to take place. Place people have to submit change requests and it slows down the entire program for the local communities trying to access funding, and there are a lot of eligibility disputes that result during all of those processes. CAL OES is actively supporting applicants through their appeals, helping with technical assistance and coordination, and also pushing on FEMA to help resolve some of those eligibility issues. To provide immediate relief, the legislature approved $2.5 billion in wildfire response and recovery funding under AB100. With the chair's permission, I will now turn to my colleagues from the Department of Finance to introduce the Control Sections.
Thank you,
thank you.
Zachary Voss California Department of Finance so I'll start with a high level overview of the Control section. Control sections 90.00 and 90.01 authorized a cumulative $2.5 billion in total augmentation authority, and this is for a variety of purposes related to disaster response and recovery. The various authorities and their associated expiration dates were authorized by three separate bills. The first, Control Section 90 of the 2024 Budget act, authorized the Director of Finance to augment any department or agency appropriation up to a total of 1.5 billion for a variety of disaster response and recovery efforts, and these include State Department disaster response costs related to the wildfires in January 2025, funding to Los Angeles county and cities within the county for response and recovery from the Eaton and Palisades fire, and backfills to taxing entities who lost property tax revenues as a result of the Eaton Palisades fire. Second, Control Section 90.01 of the 2024 Budget act authorized an additional $1 billion in augmentation authority, bringing the total to the 2.5 billion that I mentioned previously. Lastly, Control Section 90 of the 2025 Budget act authorizes augmentations within the cumulative 2.5 billion authorized by the prior two from the 2024 Budget act for continued state agency recovery costs also related to the Eaton and Palisades fire, Los Angeles County Community College response and recovery costs related to those fires, and state agency costs related to the enhanced public safety resulting from fiscal year 2425 and 2526. Public demonstrations and then control sections 90 and 90.01 also require finance to post the Los Angeles Wildfire Response and Recovery Expenditure Report on our website with regular updates and as noted in the most recent report, Finance has approved a total of $547 million in augmentations to date and then happy to answer any questions. Specific questions on the Control Section.
Thank you so much for that. Alio Nothing to add. Thank you so much. Did that conclude the testimony from oes?
Yes, it did. Thank you very much Chair Ramos, thank you so much.
We have any questions, comments from the dais, some of the member Harbinian?
I do.
Thank you.
Mr.
Chair, thank you for having me and thank you guys for being here. It's good to see you. Thanks for everything you're doing for the communities affected by the wildfires. I represent the areas affected by the Eaton fire, so appreciate everything you guys have done there and what you continue to do. And I'm just going to go through just some questions. I understand that you might not be subject matter experts for some of these, but your best answer and to the extent someone else, maybe you can just point me in that direction. But there were a number of questions here that the staff report had outlined that we were hoping to get answers for and I just didn't hear a lot of that in the testimony. So I'm just going to, for purposes of fact finding, make sure that we go over these. So one of the things about the recovery in both Eaton and less so in the Palisades is soil testing and whether there's going to be funds for that. So there's obviously three options for paying for soil testing. Federal government, the state or local government. Who ultimately decides which of these entities actually pays for testing soil testing?
Well, I mean, ultimately. So the request itself starts with the local government. Right. An entity has to make a request to cal OES for us to even evaluate what various levels of support to turn on and to show that it does, you know, exceed their local capacity in terms of who actually pays for the soil sampling. I mean, post 2020, the federal government has not reimbursed any soil sampling. So it will either caught, it would either fall to the local or state various funding streams to actually pay for it. And it really depends on what assistance mechanisms are turned on. I think throughout the years there have been a variety of different samples, state packages to assist for certain disasters in certain time frames. But I mean ultimately it starts with a local request and it really depends on what mechanisms are available for particular disasters and they've varied widely over the years.
Anything to add or is that consistent with your understanding?
Yeah, nothing to add to any of that. I. I'm imagining you're moving toward the control section funding question.
Yeah, sure, yeah, we'll get there. And I appreciate that. I guess my question then here I know the local government, the county for example, and Eaton Fire did request soil testing and was told that federal EPA and the Cal EPA decided not to do it. And my understanding is this is the first wildfire, urban wildfire Especially that we haven't done proactive post remediation widespread soil testing. Is that your understanding as well?
What we can say is we did make a request to FEMA. FEMA, I believe it was February 19, 2025. The same day FEMA responded and declined the request. And then we do know that the county set up their local program. The county has a local program that's ongoing today as well as several other similar but discreet soil testing programs through universities that remain active today.
And none of those programs are state sponsored or government sponsored. Those are all. Those are effectively nonprofit institutions, educational institutions that have. Have done that on their own accord.
Correct.
Louisiana county has their own program that's up and running. So that's a government on its own. And then usc, I believe has a clean program, UCLA also has one. And then there's a couple of private nonprofits that are also playing in the space.
Got it.
Caloeus noted that historically when soil testing was necessary and performed by eligible local jurisdictions, quote unquote, California Disaster Assistance Act CDAA funding has been used to reimburse these activities. What other conditions must be met for the state to actually conduct additional soil testing and what actually would be an eligible local jurisdiction?
Just for a clarifying question, when you are asking about a local jurisdiction, are you asking in the like the public assistance or CDA programs or are you asking.
Right. Yeah. What would be a local. It's a term of art, as you know. This is what you do. I don't but eligible local jurisdiction. And I guess, you know, obviously the upshot is why isn't Eaton and the areas that surround the fire, why aren't those eligible local jurisdictions.
So both in the state CDA program is set up to mirror the FEMA public assistance program specifically for when federal disaster assistance is not turned on. And there's also some assistance provided to help cost share when federal. So the CDA program in terms of eligibility mirrors that of the public assistance program. And specifically the FEMA public assistance program would define a local eligible jurisdiction as a county, municipal government, certain tribes, certain special districts and certain private nonprofit organizations. And I'll say that the private nonprofit organization eligibility processes a whole separate conversation.
I can imagine, right?
Yeah, I can imagine.
And that state agencies are also eligible in both or in just in the FEMA program, obviously not in cdaa. And could you remind me of the first part of your question?
I think you answered it and I guess that was going to be my follow up. I guess based on that it would seem as though the county of La the city of la, city of Malibu, city of Sierra Madre, it seems like they would be eligible local jurisdictions, so that if, if soil testing was performed, it seems as though based on that, they would be eligible for reimbursement under the CDAA process. I don't want to put words in your mouth, but would you agree with that?
Yes.
Okay. So if the county, city of LA or the cities of Sierra Madre or Malibu wanted to do testing, they would seemingly be eligible for state reimbursement under cdaa.
Yeah, that is our understanding as well.
That is good to know. And I guess going back to. Looked at Department of Finance as a related question, you did mention, I think you said 547 million of control section funding has been allocated. What would it take, I guess for. I think there's a lot of folks, not just me, but other folks in and around the fire zones that are obviously a little anxious and want more funding to be allocated because there's a lot of need. What's it going to take to actually get more funds allocated? So that testing, for example, and there's a host of other issues, but I'm obviously focused on soil testing so that soil testing can get done.
So. And Zach Foss, Department of Finance Generally speaking, the requests all flow through CAL oes, who coordinates with the Department of Finance. And so usually the request is initiated, there's supporting documentation is gathered, there's a lot of review of that and back and forth. Eventually, once CALIS has reviewed and approved the supporting documentation and the eligibility for the Control section, they consolidate a single request, if it's multiple entities, and then forward that to the Department of Finance with a recommendation. At that point, Finance will review the package and will coordinate internally with our various budget units to just make sure that costs are eligible and we agree that they're unabsorbable. And then at that point, if we concur, we'll notify the legislature. And then pursuant to the Control Section, we wait three days before we approve an executive order to make the transfer. So it's generally speaking, if it's an eligible cost specific to soil testing. So as my colleague noted, you know, normally there's like the, for locals, there's the CDAA route, but if it's deemed necessary to be performed by a state agency, then historically those costs would have been considered eligible through the Disaster Response Emergency Operations Account, or draoa. But given the magnitude of this particular disaster, the Control Section funding was set up in part to be used in lieu of that DRAO funding for State agencies.
Mm.
So it looks like. I mean, there's really three pots of money, Drayo, as you call it, the control section. And then there's obviously CDAA reimbursement. And I guess sitting here today, what's confusing to me is that we're 13, 14 months out. Testing still has not been done. We noted that there's Now, I think, 100 random properties that are being tested by EPA and that will be disclosed. Obviously, there's thousands of properties that have been affected sitting here today. Why hasn't, in your understanding, testing been done if there are seemingly these. These three separate avenues to actually fund it?
I would say that, you know, unfortunately, I don't think that Eli and I, as we sit here today, we're not experts in public health. We really have to. We'd have to, I think, have a discussion with our colleagues at Cal epa, since they are the folks who are, you know, they're the experts in the field.
Okay, yeah, understood. And, you know, I think that for obvious reasons, that for our communities affected by this, I think that is a question that we are getting on a daily and weekly basis, which is tell us why this hasn't happened. If there. There's obviously money here. It's been sitting there for over a year, and people still live in areas that are clearly contaminated. And I think the state and the federal government and local government have a responsibility, and I want to make sure that we're not. We're doing everything we can at the state level. Caloeus, you noted that there was this policy shift going from 3 inches to then the top 6 inches of soil that was being removed and then just not conducting further soil testing. Is that a written policy somewhere where I can find that?
So the policy is not in any official. What's called public assistance program guidance. It's a culmination of FEMA letters back to us where they spell out the change, and then they're inaction to pay for projects that we've submitted in 2020 and 2021, when we did do debris operations. And part of it was part of the soil testing, which they have not reimbursed yet. So it's our living through assessing those situations and then seeing the writing. And February 2025, when they responded to our request, which really kind of spelled it out.
And you guys are not the subject matter experts, but you deal with them. Is it their understanding that the 6 inches is actually sufficient, or.
Go ahead.
I'll just. I'll just.
Actually, yeah, it was largely informed by national standards for post wildfire operations across FEMA disasters inform by the US epa.
Got it.
So when and if testing takes place and it comes back that the soil isn't safe and there's contamination, what happens then? Who's on the hook for the remediation? Does the state pay for it? Who pays for it?
Well, I mean, so if results do come back above either the CAL EPA or US EPA predetermined levels historically the parcel would require a rescrape of the soil where a contractor would obviously need to do additional soil removal and then it would be retested and the costs associated with those rescrapes are typically absorbed into the operation. But again, I think the in the weeds process questions would go more towards Cali PA about, you know, all of the different things that go on during that rescraping operation. I'll be honest, we haven't had that particular kind of rescraping operation since I've been at calaways.
Would you, in your experience, having not been through something like that, just noting these different pots of money and your job is to really try to figure out how to get it. Where would you think that the pot of money would come from for re scraping? Would it come from Dreo? Would it come from Cal OES's
the
CDAA funds or would it come from federal reimbursement?
Potentially, it really depends.
Well, I think it depends on who conducts the work. They have to be legally responsible to do the work first and foremost. So in this situation, if there was, you know, if it was led by the state, CalRecycle would be in charge of that. Their funding mechanisms afforded to CalRecycle would include a wider range, including either control section Dreoa and I would turn to, you know, to you guys to validate that. Department of Finance colleagues Zach Voss Department
of Finance I guess I don't have a ton more to add to that other than like we said before, if it was, if it was deemed necessary and eligible within the confines of the control section specifically or any other of those sources like they each have individual types of requirements. So that type of request is all coordinated through CAL oes. They vet the supporting documentations and the eligibility, they would pass that request to us, we would review it similarly and make sure that we agree with those costs and the eligibility determination. But each, I think criteria is specific to the pot of funding. So without a specific example, I think it would be hard to determine. But that's the general process.
Is it following up on that then is it your understanding that control section 90 00B. Does it allow for funds to be used for environmental testing and other actions to protect public health? Is it your understanding that that would qualify?
I guess. Zachary Voss, Department of Finance I guess, I think if it were deemed necessary, then, you know, as eligible, then it would qualify. But in terms of the actual, like that specific use, if it's eligible, I guess similar to my colleague, like, I'm not the expert in determining that eligibility, but we rely on coordination across the various departments to make sure that, you know, they're performing the review and then we check that to make sure we concur, essentially. But yeah, I couldn't speak to that specific example.
Got it.
If I may, if I may add, I mean, again, we would. It would have to be deemed necessary by a state or local public health agency that would have jurisdiction to make that determination. So.
So the determination of whether it's necessary, in your knowledge, is whether a public health agency with jurisdiction makes that determination. So that could be LA county, that could be LA City, it could be the state, but there has to be a public health agency. It could be the federal government that makes that determination.
Okay.
We would consult the experts.
Yeah.
And this isn't. You're not under oath. I understand. You're not the experts. This is, you guys are doing a great job answering these questions. I really do appreciate it, Mr.
Chair.
I only have really one or two more and the last one, I believe is just so there was a memo from Cal oes, and that memo somehow was leaked. I don't think it was supposed to be public, but it did note, similar to what you said today, that fema, quote, FEMA provides federal reimbursement for disaster recovery activities that are required by state or local law. And when asked about whether the federal government would reimburse the state or soil testings, as you've noted, quote, the federal government has expressly stated that they will not reimburse costs for soil testing costs in response to our requests. Any soil sampling that the state chooses to do will not be reimbursed by the federal government. And I guess the question is, why do we think that's because we don't have a state law in place that mandates soil testing.
So I don't necessarily think that the FEMA's willingness to reimburse would change if we necessarily had a state law on the books in the sense that it's a national set of program and policies. And, you know, FEMA is largely consulting the US epa. And so that would not necessarily dictate what the public assistance program guidance would be if we would, if it would be eligible to reimburse.
So I cause hypothetically we could have a state law saying that we needed to do the testing, but that doesn't determine whether the federal government has to pay for it.
That's correct.
And then final question is just CAL EPA came out and you're not CAL epa, I understand that, but they came out with a residential soil evaluation guide for 2025 for the fires, the Los Angeles fires. And to your knowledge, are any of that guidance, is any of that codified anywhere for statewide standards on how to remediate soil post wildland urban interface fires? And really that's the zone in between unoccupied land and human development because those fires are different. Is there any codified standard within state law that actually dictates that I would
have to defer to California on that? I do know that the city and the county, when folks are contacting them with concerns, are specifically working through state and local guidance. Whether that's formally codified or not, I can't speak to that today. I apologize.
Appreciate you guys. Appreciate everything you guys are doing. The whole department and as you said, many, many of you were living in these communities for a long time and including the firefighters and everyone else who is serving the communities. And it does not go unnoticed. And I appreciate everything. And now we're just trying to figure out how to get some of this additional work done and pay for it. So appreciate it. Mr. Chair, thank you for indulging me and letting me be a part of it.
Thank you so much. Assembly member Harbin, just a few questions for myself. If we could walk through the funding stream, disaster comes in this case the fire, certainly then you would apply natural disaster or declaration and then FEMA would reimburse the state for some of the funding. Now in the past that has worked out, but with this situation, it hasn't worked out because of the administration and different administrative driven components. So if we were able to get in there and do the cleanup, we would be able to get reimbursed by FEMA for what? The work that was done at the local level. Is that correct?
That is correct.
And so then if we were able to do that, which didn't happen this time because FEMA rejected it, we would have been able to clean the soil to the specifications of the local government that then would have allowed for development to move forward on clean soil.
Well, pre2020, when that policy did change, they would scrape the 3 inches and then they would test and if the soil then fell below certain thresholds, again typically determined by the US epa, because that was what guided the federal policy decisions, then they would re scrape and retest. But if they did the three inches of the initial three inches and the the soils were not below certain threshold or above certain thresholds for certain substances, they would not go back and rescrape an additional three. They would do no more testing. So it in some ways yes and in some ways no. So the process itself has changed. And so there's not necessarily a guarantee that there would have been additional testing after that. Does that make sense?
It does. And the reason, you know, we're driving that question is that the local jurisdictions are actually the ones that move forward on new housing permits. And then the caliber of the fire that came through has never been seen before. So contaminants in the dirt, contaminants in the soil, the cleanup that needs to be done. But what did happen is that the reimbursement from FEMA didn't come. And instead who did the initial cleanup of that soil?
US epa.
So it was a direct federal assistance operation. Phase one was conducted by US cpa. Phase two was US Army Corps.
And in prior situations was that the same situation that would have happened with federal coming in doing the initial cleanup.
So it depends on going back to how when we assess when a disaster occurs. Obviously different disasters have different sizes and complexity. Depending on the scale and size of the disaster is what requires the response or the recovery, so to speak. In state previous disasters, for example, state led it would be a calrecycle contractor or in some cases in 25 recently we have the counties leading it with technical assistance from the state. In this case, because LA was so complex in the scope of it, we did a direct federal assistance to the federal government to come in and US CPA cleaned it and Army Corps did the phase two is what we call a structural debris removal. And I would note though that in that process of cleaning up, they did take six inches of the soil. So it's so just there was removal done as part of the process, but
to the caliber of fire that was there not seen before. I think that's the question. Was six inches enough for this caliber of fire? And we're finding there still is soil compaction issues that are there, I believe hindering home rebuilding in the area. And so then who is responsible for that right to move forward? Is it the local level? Is it the state? And looking at within the Department of Finance existing funding that's in there, is there funding available to those that are still seeking for soil compaction and cleanup.
Zach Voss, Department of Finance I think, I guess kind of touching still on the examples we've highlighted. It depends on who does the cleanup. First of all, like my colleague mentioned, if it's a local jurisdiction and they're deemed eligible for CDAA funding, that could be a stream. If a state agency is tasked to do it and it's deemed necessary, it could be eligible for control section funding. So those are a couple examples, but it would be, I think, dependent on that determination.
So the homeowner is still stuck, right, getting insurance and getting those things to move forward, but yet can't move forward to start rebuilding because the soil compaction doesn't meet the standards of the local jurisdiction to issue that initial cup. So at whose area and where's the responsibility lie? Certainly FEMA has sent letters of that they're not going to actually send any funding. So then does the local government declare an emergency that then seeks the state? So the whole issue of bringing this together and having a hearing on it is because we have residents right in a fire that we've never seen before and hopefully we never see again, but trying to learn from what it is that's in front of us and how to make sure that we're navigating through there. So looking at again, maybe we could go back and look at funding in the budget that specifically would go towards soil compaction that would would help out the local government in this, in this situation. It's just an idea, but I think, you know, to Assemblymember Harbinian's point, it's been a the fire came and we're still at this point to where people are trying to rebuild their lives. And this is a component that's there. And they don't understand the complexities of the federal government saying we came, we cleaned it, but it doesn't. It's not clean enough for you to move forward. So whose responsibility is it, local government or the state? So I think that's a question that should be there. And as far as the funding stream, if there is existing funding, is there something that we have to modify to allow that funding to be used for it? Those are questions that I believe that this committee is bringing up based on this hearing. I'm not sure if others have any input into that. Lao,
if you wanted to make it absolutely clear that Control Section 90 would provide for this, you could I don't know what you'd have to think about what other uses for those funds you might want. That would be something to consider as you, as you balance that out. I think that would be the principal root fund forward that I can currently see. But I'm happy to look into it a little bit further and get back to you as to maybe some options.
Definitely. Thank you. Elio, Department of Finance too. If you could look at existing funding and criteria around there, maybe there's some modifications that would fit this scenario. Again, we've never seen it before and we're all trying to work together for the betterment of the people that lost so much during those fires. That would be appreciated. Any other questions? Thank you for your testimony.
Thank you very much. Chair.
Thank you. As that concludes our final panel. As now we move to public comment. Public comment. Please state your name. You have one minute. Please state your name. You don't have to take the full one minute.
Okay, good.
Good evening Chair Ramos and members. My name is Jody Catches and I'm from the Santa Clara County Housing Authority serving youth experiencing homelessness. I wanted to request the inclusion of 75 million in the 2627 budget for the Homeless Youth Emergency Services and Housing program as well as the Homeless Youth Emergency Services pilot program in order to preserve and expand critical services for homeless youth for another five year grant cycle. 50% of chronically homeless adults had their first episode of homelessness as a youth and these programs can be more cost effective by addressing the issue upstream before youth experience the trauma of years on the street and become part of that chronically homeless population.
Thank you.
Thank you for your comments.
Hi, my name is Stephen Sprague. I'm a businessman here in Northern California. But I was a firefighter paramedic for many, many years here in California. Grew up in San Bernardino County. Families all still down there working address the 911 NESGEN system issue. As Cal Oes pointed out in the previous meetings, a legacy 911 system built in the 1970s is fragile and end of life. Yet Cal OES wants to keep it in place through 2030. This should be the biggest concern. It should be looked at by the legislature. Cal OES previously reported outage Data at the 911 advisory board meetings, but abruptly stopped reporting after June of 2024. Here's what they aren't sharing and this is what should be looked at. From October 22 through June 2024, 911 network outages for the Legacy Network 22,000 hours 911 was down across the state Next Gen 0.
Location outages legacy 6913 hours first responders had no location for the callers next gen 124 hours call processing equipment legacy 5121 hours that 911 personnel did not have access to critical data nextgen 2.9 hours by the way, this data was pulled from Cal OES 911 advisory board meeting with presentations from October 22 through October 2024. That's where I got it from. Other media have covered legacy outages that were ignored by Cal OES. February 2020612 plus hours outage in Los Angeles County Sheriffs January 20206 Marin county outage on legacy August 2020536 hour outage across Los Angeles county in multiple jurisdictions caused by the legacy outage they mentioned some states April 2024 multi state outage by a single provider Nebraska, Nevada and South Dakota 2025 three state outage caused by a single vendor Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi these are just a few of the things that we need to be taken care of. I appreciate your committee's interest and involvement in determining all the facts, not just those that conveniently support an unjustifiable pivot and waste of $455 million in years of development. They say transparency, but it shouldn't be limited to the issues that fit Cal OES's agenda. Their pivot from a regional approach to a less redundant single statewide solution is being questioned because they'll be throwing away those $455 million of taxpayer investment. An IP based infrastructure is built. It's across California. It's working today to support the location accuracy which is important. Please wrap it up and next gen where the state is allowed if they could have moved forward. It doesn't need to be rebuilt. When the Bay Bridge, a critical lifeline, was found to have flaws during completion, California didn't tear down the bridge, they built and build a new one. Instead they implemented oversight and mitigated the issues. This shouldn't just be about the next generation 911 project. This should be about the 911 lifeline needed for California citizens and first responders.
Thank you, thank you for your comments.
Good Evening Chair Ramos and members. My name is Ryan McCray and I'm with Bill Wilson center in Santa Clara county serving youth experiencing homelessness. I respectfully request the inclusion of $75 million in the 202627 budget for the Homeless Youth Emergency Services and Housing Program and the Homeless Youth Emergency Service Pilot Program to preserve and expand critical services for homelessness. Homeless youth for another Five year grant cycle funding. This proposal ensures continuity of care, prevents service disruptions and positions the state to intervene early before young people become chronically homeless, which carries far higher long term costs. At Bill Wilson center we are continuously making an impact in the lives of our clients at our drop in center, young adult family shelters and housing programs. We ask that you continue supporting our efforts. Thank you.
Thank you for your comments.
Mr.
Chair Juliana Voris, on behalf of the League of California Cities, I want to thank you for having this hearing. I'm here to speak on Proposition 36 funding. We very much appreciate the hearing of this issue. Cal Cities is in strong support the full implementation of Proposition 36 to manage the complex cases which offer which often require treatment, increased supervision and without those services, successful treatment is often difficult. We were in support of Proposition 36 as an organization in large part because of the diversion and the treatment provisions in Prop 36. And our members did not want to go back to mass incarceration. However, we so we are in strong support of the budget request from assembly wherein and Senator Blakespeare for 400 million for supervision and accountability and all of the hearings on Proposition 36 when it was going through and the hearings on retail theft. What we heard a lot about was accountability. So we urge the legislature to consider full funding for implementation and to implement the will of the voters when they pass Proposition 36. Thank you very much.
Thank you for your comments.
Excuse me, Chairman Ramos. Ray lebove representing California Appellate Defense Counsel. The panel attorneys and we're here to express our appreciation for the money that's in the budget to provide a compensation increase that's very much needed to to address retention and recruitment issues, to address the significant backlog. We want to express our appreciation to the Judicial Council, to the Department of Finance, to the Governor's office and especially to the legislature for your understanding and support of this issue. Thanks so much.
Thank you so much for your comments.
Good evening. John Roberts, Central California Appellate Program. I'm the assistant director.
I'm here in support of item number
one and in support of these panel attorneys that Mr. Levov was just talking about. They're highly talented, hardworking, dedicated attorneys who have been underpaid for years. And we're facing a serious recruiting issue on behalf of all the projects. We're deeply grateful that the governor's office has recognized the importance of these attorneys. And we hope the legislature also recognizes the crucial role these attorneys play in the criminal justice system.
Thank you.
Thank you for your comments.
Hello, my name is Scott Cameron. I Am an attorney and I accept court appointed appellate cases and I'm here
in support of that budget line item. Thank you.
Thank you so much.
Good evening Mr. Chair Micah Doctoroff. On behalf of Smart Justice California. We are here in support of the 25 hour rate increase for Court Appointed Counsel program. $100 million to backfill the lost federal federal VOCA funding. First to support critical victim services and in support of $34 million in bridge funding to address the funding gaps for the trauma recovery centers. Thank you so much.
Thank you so much for your comments.
Good evening, Chair Ramos. My name is Phil Melendez. On behalf of California for Safety and justice, we'd like to express our strong support for additional funding for the California Trauma Recovery centers. Also last year Cal OES was set to award almost 50 million to survivor serving organizations through the first in the nation flexible grant Assistance for Survivors grant program. However, it was cut from the budget before the grants could be awarded and we encouraged the legislature to work with the administration to reinstate the funding so that we can provide immediate support to crime survivors and victims. And lastly, we support the VOCA funding ask.
Thank you. Thank you so much for your comments.
Good evening Mr. Chair. Members. Usha Majchler on behalf of the California State Sheriff's association, we renew our deep concern that the governor's 2627 budget once again fails to fund fully fund the implementation of Proposition 36 as intended by the voters. To ensure individuals are served, we need adequate funding to support treatment and other jail related costs, supervision and other probation services and judicial workload. Finally, to uphold the promise made by Proposition 36, California must provide the resources vital for the measure's successful implementation. But of course we are grateful for the support of the legislators who continue to recognize the need for funding for meaningful treatment and enhanced accountability in our criminal justice system. Thank you so much.
Thank you so much for your comments.
Good evening and thank you, Chair. Thank you everyone. My name is Richard Barton. I'm the Director of Housing services for the Sacramento LGBT Community Center. We run two homeless shelters for youth here in Sacramento. In the last year, we have actively prevented three suicides from happening on our site and one in three of our residents are either thinking about or planning to kill themselves. We need all the support we can get and we join our colleagues in asking for 75 million in the 2627 budget for homeless youth emergency services. Right now I'm trying to figure out how I can work on my budget to have more than $10 a day per person for food. That's what we're looking at in budgets right now. We very much ask for your help and support. Thank you.
Thank you for your comments.
Mr. Chair, good evening. Shane Gusman, on behalf of the Prosecutor's alliance here on the VOCA funding issue, really appreciate the robust discussion on the funding. I think everybody would agree that it's a critical issue that we need to cover. We're here to support the hundred million dollar request to go to the VOCA funding to cover the gap between what the Feds provide and the need to provide these services. Thank you.
Thank you for your comments.
Good evening. Chair Ramos, thank you so much for picking up the VOCA issue for a third year in a row. I'm Grace Glaser here on behalf of the California Partnership to End Domestic Violence. And do you just want to quickly address some of the comments that were brought up during voca? So. So for reference, there is an ongoing federal legislation that is trying to address the gap in funding that is HR909. It's currently on the Senate floor. And then additionally a couple years ago, the legislature passed AB 2432, authored by Assemblymember Jesse Gabriel. That bill recently went into effect. We have not seen that fund build up yet, but are continuing to work across the state to ensure that is implemented and then additionally want to push for the request for 100 million in one time. I do understand that there's hesitation given that we haven't heard from the federal administration about the state level allocation. However, last year we didn't hear from them until July and survivors can't wait that long. So I would respectfully request that this committee continue to champion this issue as you have for the past few years. And thank you for all your work on this.
Thank you so much for your comments.
Hello. Thank you for having me. My name is Selena Alvarez and I'm the Executive Director of Empower yolo. Empower YOLO is a rape crisis center and a domestic violence provider across the river here. Empower YOLO provides is also a family resource center that supports individuals. 40% of all of our clients that access services do identify as either a victim or survivor of abuse of some sort. And so I'm here today to also ask for the $100 million backfill for the Victims of Crime Act. We have already seen a decrease in funding from Cal oes, specifically in some of our programs for child abuse services. Any more fundings would be catastrophic for our agency and many across the state.
Thank you.
Thank you for your comments.
Good evening, Chair Ramos. Sarah Brennan here On behalf of Valor California Sexual Assault coalition consisting of 84 rape crisis centers and other organizations supporting sexual assault survivors. Also here in support of the 100
million 4 VOCA victims of crime. Funding being included in the May budget.
This funding provides a critical safety net.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
Good evening. My name is Holly Fleming. I'm here on behalf of Children's Advocacy Centers of California. We do child abuse response throughout the state. And I am also here in support of the 100 million for VOCA funding. This is the only state level funding available to the organizations who help California's most vulnerable victims which are children. And without it we'll see children not getting the support they need. Communities will be less safe. An investigation into child maltreatment will be more expensive. Thank you so much.
Thank you so much for your comments.
Good afternoon. Chair and committee Denise Choise out with the California Coalition for Youth. We're a statewide advocacy organization representing our children and youth experiencing homelessness on their own. Respectfully requesting the inclusion of 75 million in the 202627 budget for the Homeless Youth Emergency Services and Housing Program. YE and the Homeless Youth Emergency Service Pilot Program. HY pilot to preserve and expand the critical services for homeless you for another five year grant cycle. The most current data from OES on these two programs show that they've collectively provided 2,400 youth with housing support, over 4,000 nights of shelter and 30,000 meals. These youth in crisis will know will have nowhere to go to stay safe. These programs close within the budget year. Studies have shown 20 to 40% of our young people experiencing homelessness are victims of human trafficking. And 68% engage in survival sex because they don't have a place to stay. There's no safe place for them to put their head down at night. So we can't afford to let these youth experiencing trauma be on the streets. Thank you.
Thank you so much for your comments.
Hi there.
Sevy Christian with ENCODE AI. We're a nonprofit advocacy organization that advocates for AI policy that benefits the public interest. We were a co sponsor of SB53 last year. Senator Wiener's bill on transparency and AI frameworks which was not discussed today. So I'll keep it short to mention that the budget change proposals submitted by oes we just want to make sure the actual role and qualifications for whoever is receiving the critical safety incidents stipulated under that legislation are adequate enough to ensure that they have the requisite expertise necessary so that it doesn't become a black box exercise. And we've been working with your staff on this issue and appreciate your time.
Thank you so much.
Thank you. Chair and staff Ryan Morimini with the California State association of counties, representing all 58 counties. As it relates to issue number two, Proposition 36 implementation, we really appreciate the discussion earlier and CSAC is also in support of the $400 million ask to expand service caseload treatment as well as individual case planning, monitoring and supervision. As it relates to issue number six, first and foremost, we're deeply appreciative of this committee as well as champions in both houses of the Legislature for their efforts to secure critical funding to help supplement that federal allocation. While counties and CSAC specifically continue to advocate through the federal budget appropriations process and also on federal pending legislation, the fact of the matter is county and community service providers are on the verge of full program closure, as was noted, and we are part of the large and diverse coalition of nearly 300 entities that are are pushing and requesting for the $100 million one time ask to help address the funding gaps. Thank you so much.
Thank you so much for your comments. Any other public comment seeing none sub6 is adjusting.
Sam.