Women on corporate boards + Recall watch + Fixing the ‘bottle bill’

Good morning and welcome to the A.M. Alert!

REPORT ANALYZES PROGRESS OF WOMEN ON BOARDS

California corporations made some progress in adding women to their boards last year, but still have a long way to go.

That’s the finding of a new report from the Diligent Institute, which according to its bio was founded in 2018 “to offer a global perspective on corporate boardroom practices.”

While the report contains international findings, it paid special attention to California, which in 2018 passed a law requiring that publicly traded corporations headquartered in California have at least one woman on their board by the end of 2019, with some corporations required to have two women on their board by the end of 2021.

According to the Diligent Institute report, 21.3% of board seats were held by women in 2020, and in 2021 that number is now up to 23.8%. California has a higher percentage of women on boards than does the U.S. as a whole, which has 21.4%.

Of the 475 California companies included in Diligent’s data set, 106 of them added a single individual to their boards in the last year. Of those, 58% were women.

This is substantial progress, but still a long way from the vision of gender parity in boardrooms, said Diligent Institute’s Dottie Schindlinger, a co-author of the report.

Schindlinger said several areas could stand to be improved upon, including requiring private corporations, which are not subject to the California law requiring women on boards, to publicly disclose more data, as well as providing a better way to measure such things as race, ethnicity and LGBTQ status of corporate board members, without invading their privacy.

You can read the report for yourself by visiting here.

RECALL WATCH

Nearly a year after they first launched the campaign, leaders of the petition to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom on Sunday announced they had collected more than 1,950,000 signatures, nearly half a million more than the minimum needed to put a recall on the ballot.

Sitting in front of giant yellow “Recall Gavin” signs in a Hyatt conference room across the street from the California Capitol, recall organizers Orinn Heatlie, and Mike Netter, and advisor Randy Economy said they were confident that the effort would have enough signatures to qualify by the March 17 deadline.

The group praised the huge number of volunteers who helped the effort. Of the nearly 2 million signatures, they say 1.6 million were collected by volunteers. On any given day, between 5,000 and 10,000 volunteers are gathering signatures across California, they said. The average weekly collection is around 90,000 signatures.

“I don’t think you’ve ever seen a volunteer movement like this,” Netter said. “It’s literally people from all walks of life, all parties, all religions. We have a diversity across the board collecting and united against one thing, and that’s the fact that California needs a new governor.”

Even with the declared victory from the petition collectors, there’s no guarantee the recall will qualify for the ballot. County election officials have until April 29 to verify submitted signatures. After that, the Secretary of State has 10 days to determine if there are enough valid signatures to qualify for a recall election.

The latest report from the Secretary of State’s office, released on Feb. 19, shows just over 83% of recall signatures were determined valid.

On Sunday, Economy said the campaign would be watching California officials closely in the coming weeks. He specifically said he was skeptical of Secretary of State Shirley Weber, who was appointed by Newsom earlier this year. As the state’s top election official,she will oversee the recall effort.

“Shirley Weber is now not controlled by the people, she’s accountable to Gavin Newsom, and her office is going to play a big role in the certification of this,” Economy said.

GROUPS CALL ON GOV TO MODERNIZE BOTTLE BILL

Representatives from 10 groups have written a letter to Gov. Gavin Newsom urging him to modernize California’s beverage recycling program.

“California has a proud tradition of environmental leadership. The adoption of the 1987 California Beverage Container Recycling and Litter Reduction Act is no exception, with the system achieving 85% recycling rates, diverting hundreds of billions of beverage containers from carbon-emitting landfills, and creating thousands of jobs across the state,” the letter begins. “In recent years, however, the system has fallen into crisis, with a series of self-reinforcing problems driving performance down each year. We are writing to urge you to prioritize overhauling the current system to reposition the state’s bottle bill as a prized environmental standard-bearer, in line with the best performing deposit return systems in the world. This is a logjam that can only be solved with executive leadership.”

The letter is signed by Michael O’Heaney, of The Story of Stuff Project; Katherine O’Dea, of Save Our Shores; Dianna Cohen of Plastic Pollution Coalition; Laura Deehan of Environment California; Emily Rusch of CALPIRG; Bradley Angel of Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice; Barbara Sattler of Alliance of Nurses for Healthy Environments; Alexandra Nagy of Food & Water Action; Liza Tucker of Consumer Watchdog; and Susan Collins of Container Recycling Institute.

The letter points out that since 2013, 1,300 beverage container redemption centers across the state have closed, leaving many communities without a center to recycle their cans and bottles and reclaim their deposit.

“Across the state, there’s now an average of just one redemption center per 23,000 people, while in the Bay Area the figure is one per 60,000 people, one of the worst ratios for any deposit program anywhere in the world,” the letter says.

The groups urged Gov. Newsom to take action on the state recycling system, with a focus on consumer convenience, high collection targets, manufacturer responsibility and the facilitation of reuse.

You can read the full letter for yourself by visiting here.

QUOTE OF THE DAY

“It’s abysmal that the minimum wage is $7.25/hour. It’s even more abysmal that we can’t find 60 Senators who agree with that sentiment.”

- Rep. Ro Khanna, D-San Jose, via Twitter.

Best of the Bee:

• The California District Attorneys Association asked California’s attorney general Friday to open an investigation into the group’s own accounting practices, saying an internal review has determined more than $1 million in asset forfeiture funds may have been spent improperly, via Sam Stanton.

• President Joe Biden’s sweeping infrastructure plan could include a number of new taxes or fees — including one on electric car owners — to pay for transportation projects, according to a California Democrat who attended a meeting at the White House this week, via Kate Irby.

• Nearly a year after California classrooms shuttered in the early weeks of the COVID-19 crisis, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law Friday to send $2 billion to help schools reopen by April 1, via Hannah Wiley.