The California Legislature is beginning its summer recess having passed the latest state budget. The $310 billion plan reflects our values, dedicating spending to getting homeless people off the street, supporting schools, keeping public transit afloat and treating mental illness. As a member of the state Senate’s Democratic majority, I voted for all of those things.
We can do that with two major changes in the way we work. First, we need to stop hamstringing programs and services with special interest demands that doom them to fail. Second, we need to gather and evaluate data on how our programs are working, and that includes supporting independent watchdogs to tell us when government is wasting our money and failing to get the job done.
Efforts to help homeless Californians have been similarly stymied. Proposals to require treatment for mentally ill individuals who are living on the street and too sick to care for themselves have repeatedly been blocked by civil rights groups arguing that people essentially have a right to live homeless and untreated.
And while we spend more than $6 billion a year on mental health services, the state has very little information about which programs are working and which are not. Yet the Newsom administration has quietly opposed legislation to collect data and measure results. Bills to do so were introduced in 2021 and 2022 but failed to advance.