Bee Opinionated: ‘Poor’ potholes + City under investigation + California fights for abortion

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Hello again, this is Robin Epley with The Sacramento Bee Editorial Board, bringing you the best of the state’s opinion journalism for the last week.

I went to an interesting meeting where Sacramento County supervisors Rich Desmond and Pat Hume were discussing and answering the community’s questions about transportation and road repairs in the unincorporated county.

Sacramento County’s “Pavement Condition Index” — measuring the health of local roads — is at an embarrassingly low average of 48 out of 100, placing us firmly in the “Poor” category. The worse the roads are, the more damage it causes to vehicles, at a cost that gets passed down to taxpayers either way.

“We can no longer simply look at these things as something we’re going to do in perpetuity. We have to be thinking about the investment,” Sam Rice told me. Rice is the transportation team lead for the Environmental Council of Sacramento and sits on the board for the Sacramento Metro Advocates for Rail and Transit, where he advises the city of Sacramento and other communities on how the future of transportation can co-exist with smart climate policy.

We already know that continuing to rely on personal cars is a problem; not only are they gas-guzzlers, but increased car traffic drastically adds to the production of greenhouse gasses, further exacerbating climate change and environmental disasters like the wildfires damaging so many communities every year.

“We’re effectively throwing good money after bad, and increasing our community’s reliance on oil, gas and cars in a textbook case of a sunk-cost fallacy.”

It’s become increasingly clear that Sacramento County can’t afford to keep patching roads that only serve one mode of transportation, and we’re never going to find money for projects that don’t take environmental concerns into consideration.

“But neither can we allow the poorest, most underrepresented parts of our county to pay for maintenance while cities like Sacramento, Elk Grove, Folsom and Rancho Cordova all sit pretty in the ‘fair,’ ‘good’ or even ‘excellent’ categories of the Pavement Condition Index.”

Ho on Homelessness

“Ho’s crusade stands no chance of actually improving our homelessness crisis and, instead, threatens to make it worse. It needlessly complicates a tenuous partnership between the city and county to make tangible progress in the coming months by expanding both shelter and treatment services.”

The Sacramento Bee Editorial Board took umbrage with Sacramento County District Attorney Thien Ho’s announcement last week that he is seeking to investigate officials at the city of Sacramento for potentially violating civil or criminal laws.

Ho is fanning dangerous political flames, the board wrote, “there is widespread and understandable public frustration at the lack of progress in reducing the number of local residents who end up on the streets, which has been proven to be mainly caused by the lack of affordable housing.”

“We fear a political trend in Sacramento that seeks to tap into public anger by suggesting that our region’s leaders have not sufficiently criminalized homelessness. A war on homelessness will fail just as locking away the user in yesteryear’s war on drugs did.”

Ho believes the city is misinterpreting the Boise v. Martin federal court decision that limits local intervention if the community cannot provide shelter to homeless people living in an encampment. He contends that the court decision does not prevent Sacramento from enforcing a state public nuisance statute if a local encampment fits that definition.

We think that if Ho wants to truly help, he could support the construction of many more Safe Ground sites as an important step toward improving overall public safety.

“What a waste of time and an unfortunate distraction. It perfectly reflects the degrading state of Sacramento politics. Elevating friction among governments is no way to make progress when solving the region’s homelessness demands tremendous partnership.”

State of Abortion

Since the fall of Roe v. Wade in 2022, more than a dozen U.S. states have put bans on abortion.

Recently, Iowa’s state legislature banned most abortions in the state as early as six weeks into pregnancy, a time frame that happens before many people even know they’re pregnant. Just three weeks ago, a federal judge allowed a 12-week abortion ban in North Carolina, and last week, testimony began in a class action suit by 13 women against the state of Texas, where they say new abortion laws “made it impossible for them to receive proper care while pregnant,” according to Dallas Magazine.

Two legislative bills this year, both from Senate President Pro Tem Toni Atkins, seek to continue California’s efforts to protect and enhance reproductive health care access and fight back against continued attacks at the national level, wrote the Bee’s editorial board last week.

Now, those bills only wait for approval by the Appropriations Committee and then the full Senate, before passing under Gov. Gavin Newsom’s pen.

They’re also part of a 2023 priority bill package from the California Legislative Women’s Caucus — 12 bills by caucus members and an additional 17 bills championing reproductive justice, supported by the partnership between the caucus and California’s Future of Abortion Council.

“I am astounded that we are where we are,” said Atkins. “Even during those decades of protection, there was always an effort to try to undo the ability of women to access abortion. It seems as though we have gone back in time, and that is so horrible to think about given how long we fought.”

Opinion of the Week

“We don’t want Disneyland to train our military.” — House Speaker and Assemblyman Kevin McCarthy on… honestly I don’t understand this one. He was talking about a pay raise for the military, but also somehow about Diversity, Equity and Inclusion training? Thankfully, the Fresno Bee Editorial Board has a much firmer grasp on McCarthy’s delusions than I do.

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See ya later alligators,

Robin