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Justice Samuel Alito Took Luxury Fishing Vacation With GOP Billionaire Who Later Had Cases Before the Court — With Help From Eureka’s Rob Arkley

Justin Elliott, Joshua Kaplan and Alex Mierjeski / Wednesday, June 21, 2023 @ 7:37 a.m. / D.C.

Photo obtained by ProPublica.

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This story was originally published by ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

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In early July 2008, Samuel Alito stood on a riverbank in a remote corner of Alaska. The Supreme Court justice was on vacation at a luxury fishing lodge that charged more than $1,000 a day, and after catching a king salmon nearly the size of his leg, Alito posed for a picture. To his left, a man stood beaming: Paul Singer, a hedge fund billionaire who has repeatedly asked the Supreme Court to rule in his favor in high-stakes business disputes.

Singer was more than a fellow angler. He flew Alito to Alaska on a private jet. If the justice chartered the plane himself, the cost could have exceeded $100,000 one way.

In the years that followed, Singer’s hedge fund came before the court at least 10 times in cases where his role was often covered by the legal press and mainstream media. In 2014, the court agreed to resolve a key issue in a decade-long battle between Singer’s hedge fund and the nation of Argentina. Alito did not recuse himself from the case and voted with the 7-1 majority in Singer’s favor. The hedge fund was ultimately paid $2.4 billion.

Alito did not report the 2008 fishing trip on his annual financial disclosures. By failing to disclose the private jet flight Singer provided, Alito appears to have violated a federal law that requires justices to disclose most gifts, according to ethics law experts.

Experts said they could not identify an instance of a justice ruling on a case after receiving an expensive gift paid for by one of the parties.

“If you were good friends, what were you doing ruling on his case?” said Charles Geyh, an Indiana University law professor and leading expert on recusals. “And if you weren’t good friends, what were you doing accepting this?” referring to the flight on the private jet.

Series: Friends of the Court

Clarence Thomas’ Beneficial Friendship With a GOP Megadonor

Justices are almost entirely left to police themselves on ethical issues, with few restrictions on what gifts they can accept. When a potential conflict arises, the sole arbiter of whether a justice should step away from a case is the justice him or herself.

ProPublica’s investigation sheds new light on how luxury travel has given prominent political donors — including one who has had cases before the Supreme Court — intimate access to the most powerful judges in the country. Another wealthy businessman provided expensive vacations to two members of the high court, ProPublica found. On his Alaska trip, Alito stayed at a commercial fishing lodge owned by this businessman, who was also a major conservative donor. Three years before, that same businessman flew Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in 2016, on a private jet to Alaska and paid the bill for his stay.

Such trips would be unheard of for the vast majority of federal workers, who are generally barred from taking even modest gifts.

Leonard Leo, the longtime leader of the conservative Federalist Society, attended and helped organize the Alaska fishing vacation. Leo invited Singer to join, according to a person familiar with the trip, and asked Singer if he and Alito could fly on the billionaire’s jet. Leo had recently played an important role in the justice’s confirmation to the court. Singer and the lodge owner were both major donors to Leo’s political groups.

ProPublica’s examination of Alito’s and Scalia’s travel drew on trip planning emails, Alaska fishing licenses, and interviews with dozens of people including private jet pilots, fishing guides, former high-level employees of both Singer and the lodge owner, and other guests on the trips.

ProPublica sent Alito a list of detailed questions last week, and on Tuesday, the Supreme Court’s head spokeswoman told ProPublica that Alito would not be commenting. Several hours later, The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by Alito responding to ProPublica’s questions about the trip.

Alito said that when Singer’s companies came before the court, the justice was unaware of the billionaire’s connection to the cases. He said he recalled speaking to Singer on “no more than a handful of occasions,” and they never discussed Singer’s business or issues before the court.

Alito said that he was invited to fly on Singer’s plane shortly before the trip and that the seat “​​would have otherwise been vacant.” He defended his failure to report the trip to the public, writing that justices “commonly interpreted” the disclosure requirements to not include “accommodations and transportation for social events.”

In a statement, a spokesperson for Singer told ProPublica that Singer didn’t organize the trip and that he wasn’t aware Alito would be attending when he accepted the invitation. Singer “never discussed his business interests” with the justice, the spokesperson said, adding that at the time of trip, neither Singer nor his companies had “any pending matters before the Supreme Court, nor could Mr. Singer have anticipated in 2008 that a subsequent matter would arise that would merit Supreme Court review.”

Leo did not respond to questions about his organizing the trip but said in a statement that he “would never presume to tell” Alito and Scalia “what to do.”

This spring, ProPublica reported that Justice Clarence Thomas received decades of luxury travel from another Republican megadonor, Dallas real estate magnate Harlan Crow. In a statement, Thomas defended the undisclosed trips, saying unnamed colleagues advised him that he didn’t need to report such gifts to the public. Crow also gave Thomas money in an undisclosed real estate deal and paid private school tuition for his grandnephew, who Thomas was raising as a son. Thomas reported neither transaction on his disclosure forms.

The undisclosed gifts have prompted lawmakers to launch investigations and call for ethics reform. Recent bills would impose tighter rules for justices’ recusals, require the Supreme Court to adopt a binding code of conduct and create an ethics body, which would investigate complaints. Neither a code nor an ethics office currently exists.

“We wouldn’t tolerate this from a city council member or an alderman,” Sen. Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat and chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said of Thomas in a recent hearing. “And yet the Supreme Court won’t even acknowledge it’s a problem.”

So far, the court has chafed at the prospect of such reforms. Though the court recently laid out its ethics practices in a statement signed by all nine justices, Chief Justice John Roberts has not directly addressed the recent revelations. In fact, he has repeatedly suggested Congress might not have the power to regulate the court at all.

“We Take Good Care of Him Because He Makes All the Rules”

In the 1960s in his first year at Harvard Law School, Singer was listening to a lecture by a famed liberal professor when, he later recalled, he had an epiphany: “My goodness. They’re making it up as they go along.”

It was a common sentiment among conservative lawyers, who often accuse liberal judges of activist overreach. While Singer’s career as an attorney was short-lived, his convictions about the law stayed with him for decades. After starting a hedge fund that eventually made him one of the richest people in the country, he began directing huge sums to causes on the right. That included groups, like the Federalist Society, dedicated to fostering the conservative legal movement and putting its followers on the bench.

Other guests on the trip included Leo, the Federalist Society leader, and Judge A. Raymond Randolph, a prominent conservative appellate judge for whom Leo had clerked, according to fishing licenses and interviews with lodge staff.

On another day, the group flew on one of the lodge’s bush planes to a waterfall in Katmai National Park, where bears snatch salmon from the water with their teeth. At night, the lodge’s chefs served multicourse meals of Alaskan king crab legs or Kobe filet. On the last evening, a member of Alito’s group bragged that the wine they were drinking cost $1,000 a bottle, one of the lodge’s fishing guides told ProPublica.

In his op-ed, Alito described the lodge as a “comfortable but rustic facility.” The justice said he does not remember if he was served wine, but if he was, it didn’t cost $1,000 a bottle. (Alito also pointed readers to the lodge’s website. The lodge has been sold since 2008 and is now a more downscale accommodation.)

Arkley. Outpost file photo, 2013.

The justice’s stay was provided free of charge by another major donor to the conservative legal movement: Robin Arkley II, the owner of a mortgage company then based in California. Arkley had recently acquired the fishing lodge, which catered to affluent tourists seeking a luxury experience in the Alaskan wilderness. A planning document prepared by lodge staff describes Alito as a guest of Arkley. Another guest on the trip told ProPublica the trip was a gift from Arkley, and two lodge employees said they were told that Alito wasn’t paying.

Arkley, who does not appear to have been involved in any cases before the court, did not respond to detailed questions for this story.

In the last decade, Singer has contributed over $80 million to Republican political groups. He has also given millions to the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank where he has served as chairman since 2008. The institute regularly files friend-of-the-court briefs with the Supreme Court — at least 15 this term, including one asking the court to block student loan relief.

Singer’s interest in the courts is more than ideological. His hedge fund, Elliott Management, is best known for making investments that promise handsome returns but could require bruising legal battles. Singer has said he’s drawn to positions where you “control your own destiny, not just riding up and down with the waves of financial markets.” That can mean pressuring corporate boards to fire a CEO, brawling with creditors over the remains of a bankrupt company and suing opponents.

The fund now manages more than $50 billion in assets. “The investments are extremely shrewdly litigation-driven,” a person familiar with Singer’s fund told ProPublica. “That’s why he’s a billionaire.”

Singer’s most famous gamble eventually made its way to the Supreme Court.

In 2001, Argentina was in a devastating economic depression. Unemployment skyrocketed and deadly riots broke out in the street. The day after Christmas, the government finally went into default. For Singer, the crisis was an opportunity. As other investors fled, his fund purchased Argentine government debt at a steep discount.

Within several years, as the Argentine economy recovered, most creditors settled with the government and accepted a fraction of what the debt was originally worth. But Singer’s fund, an arm of Elliott called NML Capital, held out. Soon, they were at war: a midtown Manhattan-based hedge fund trying to impose its will on a sovereign nation thousands of miles away.

The fight played out on familiar turf for Singer: the U.S. courts. He launched an aggressive legal campaign to force Argentina to pay in full, and his personal involvement in the case attracted widespread media attention. Over 13 years of litigation, the arguments spanned what rights foreign governments have in the U.S. and whether Argentina could pay off debts to others before Singer settled his claim.

If Singer succeeded, he stood to make a fortune.

In 2007, for the first but not the last time, Singer’s fund asked the Supreme Court to intervene. A lower court had stopped Singer and another fund from seizing Argentine central bank funds held in the U.S. The investors appealed, but that October, the Supreme Court declined to take up the case.

Photo obtained by ProPublica.

On July 8 of the following year, Singer took Alito to Alaska on the private jet, according to emails, flight data from the Federal Aviation Administration and people familiar with the trip.

The group flew across the country to the town of King Salmon on the Alaska peninsula. They returned to the East Coast three days later.

In Alaska, they stayed at the King Salmon Lodge, a luxury fishing resort that drew celebrities, wealthy businessmen and sports stars. On July 9, one of the lodge’s pilots flew Alito and other guests around 70 miles to the west to fish the Nushagak River, known for one of the best salmon runs in the world. Snapshots from the trip show Alito in waders and an Indianapolis Grand Prix hat, smiling broadly as he holds his catch.

“Sam Alito is in the red jacket there,” one lodge worker said, as he narrated an amateur video of the justice on the water. “We take good care of him because he makes all the rules.”

“The exception only covers food, lodging and entertainment,” said Virginia Canter, a former government ethics lawyer now at the watchdog group CREW. “He’s trying to move away from the plain language of the statute and the regulation.”

The Alaska vacation was the first time Singer and Alito met, according to a person familiar with the trip. After the trip, the two appeared together at public events. When Alito spoke at the annual dinner of the Federalist Society lawyers convention the following year, the billionaire introduced him. The justice told a story about having an encounter with bears during a fishing trip with Singer, according to the legal blog Above the Law. He recalled asking himself: “Do you really want to go down in history as the first Supreme Court justice to be devoured by a bear?”

The year after that, in 2010, Alito delivered the keynote speech at a dinner for donors to the Manhattan Institute. Once again, Singer delivered a flattering introduction. “He and his small band of like-minded justices are a critical and much-appreciated bulwark of our freedom,” Singer told the crowd. “Samuel Alito is a model Supreme Court justice.”

Alito did not disclose the flight or the stay at the fishing lodge in his annual financial disclosures. A federal law passed after Watergate requires federal officials including Supreme Court justices to publicly report most gifts. (The year before, Alito reported getting $500 of Italian food and wine from a friend, noting that his friend was unlikely to “appear before this Court.”)

The law has a “personal hospitality” exemption: If someone hosts a justice on their own property, free “food, lodging, or entertainment” don’t always have to be disclosed. But the law clearly requires disclosure for gifts of private jet flights, according to seven ethics law experts, and Alito appears to have violated it. The typical interpretation of the law required disclosure for his stay at the lodge too, experts said, since it was a commercial property rather than a vacation home. The judiciary’s regulations did not make that explicit until they were updated earlier this year.

In his op-ed, Alito said that justices “commonly interpreted” the law’s exception for hospitality “to mean that accommodations and transportation for social events were not reportable gifts.”

His op-ed pointed to language in the judiciary’s filing instructions and cited definitions from Black’s Law Dictionary and Webster’s. But he did not make reference to the judiciary’s regulations or the law itself, which experts said both clearly required disclosure for gifts of travel. ProPublica found at least six examples of other federal judges disclosing gifts of private jet travel in recent years.

Meanwhile, Singer and Argentina kept asking the Supreme Court to intervene in their legal fight. His fund enlisted Ted Olson, the famed appellate lawyer who represented George W. Bush in the Bush v. Gore case during the 2000 presidential election.

In January 2010, a year and a half after the Alaska vacation, the fund once again asked the high court to take up an aspect of the dispute. The court declined. In total, parties asked the court to hear appeals in the litigation eight times in the six years after the trip. In most instances, it was Singer’s adversaries filing an appeal, with Singer’s fund successfully arguing for the justices to decline the case and let stand a lower court ruling.

The Supreme Court hears a tiny portion of the many cases it’s asked to rule on each year. Under the court’s rules, cases are only accepted when at least four of the nine justices vote to take it up. The deliberations on whether to take a case are shrouded in secrecy and happen at meetings attended only by the justices. These decisions are a fundamental way the court wields power. The justices’ votes are not typically made public, so it is unclear how Alito voted on the petitions involving Singer.

As Singer’s battle with Argentina intensified, his hedge fund launched an expansive public relations and lobbying campaign. In 2012, the hedge fund even attempted to seize an Argentine navy ship docked in Ghana to secure payment from the country. (The effort was thwarted by a ruling from the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea.) Argentina’s president labeled Singer and his fellow investors “vultures” attempting extortion; Singer complained the country was scapegoating him.

In 2014, the Supreme Court finally agreed to hear a case on the matter. It centered on an important issue: how much protection Argentina could claim as a sovereign nation against the hedge fund’s legal maneuvers in U.S. courts. The U.S. government filed a brief on Argentina’s side, warning that the case raised “extraordinarily sensitive foreign policy concerns.”

The case featured an unusual intervention by the Judicial Crisis Network, a group affiliated with Leo known for spending millions on judicial confirmation fights. The group filed a brief supporting Singer, which appears to be the only Supreme Court friend-of-the-court brief in the organization’s history.

The court ruled in Singer’s favor 7-1 with Alito joining the majority. The justice did not recuse himself from the case or from any of the other petitions involving Singer.

“The tide turned” thanks to that “decisive” ruling and another from the court, as Singer’s law firm described it. After the legal setbacks and the election of a new president in Argentina, the country finally capitulated in 2016. Singer’s fund walked away with a $2.4 billion payout, a spectacular return.

Abbe Smith, a law professor at Georgetown who co-wrote a textbook on legal and judicial ethics, said that Alito should have recused himself. If she were representing a client and learned the judge had taken a gift from the party on the other side, Smith said, she would immediately move for recusal. “If I found out after the fact, I’d be outraged on behalf of my client,” she said. “And, frankly, I’d be outraged on behalf of the legal system.”

The law that governs when justices must recuse themselves from a case sets a high but subjective standard. It requires justices to withdraw from any case when their “impartiality might reasonably be questioned.” But the court allows individual justices to interpret that requirement for themselves. Historically, they’ve almost never explained why they are or are not recusing themselves, and unlike lower court judges, their decisions cannot be appealed.

Alito articulated his own standard during his Senate confirmation process, writing that he believed in stepping away from cases when “any possible question might arise.”

In his Wall Street Journal op-ed, Alito wrote of his failure to recuse himself from Singer’s cases at the court: “It was and is my judgment that these facts would not cause a reasonable and unbiased person to doubt my ability to decide the matters in question impartially.”

Critics have long assailed the Supreme Court’s practices on this issue as both opaque and inconsistent. “The idea ‘just trust us to do the right thing’ while remaining in total secrecy is unworkable,” said Amanda Frost, a judicial ethics expert at the University of Virginia School of Law.

For Singer, appeals to the Supreme Court are an almost unavoidable result of his business model. Since the Argentina case, Singer’s funds were named parties in at least two other cases that were appealed to the court, both stemming from battles with Fortune 500 companies. One of the petitions is currently pending.

Leonard Leo, center, on the 2008 fishing trip with a guide and other guests. Leo attended and helped organize the Alaska fishing vacation. Photo obtained by ProPublica.

Grey Goose and Glacier Ice

The month after Singer got home from the 2008 fishing trip, he realized he had a problem. He was supposed to receive a shipment of frozen salmon from the Alaska lodge. But the fish hadn’t arrived. So the billionaire emailed an unlikely person to get to the bottom of it: Leo, the powerful Federalist Society executive.

“They’ve escaped!!” Singer wrote. Leo then sent an email to Arkley, the lodge owner, to track down the missing seafood.

The only clear thread connecting the prominent guests on the trip is that they all had a relationship with Leo. Leo is now a giant in judicial politics who helped handpick Donald Trump’s list of potential Supreme Court nominees and recently received a $1.6 billion donation to further his political interests. Leo’s network of political groups was in its early days, however, when he traveled with Alito to Alaska. It had run an advertising campaign supporting Alito in his confirmation fight, and Leo was reportedly part of the team that prepared Alito for his Senate hearings.

Singer and Arkley, the businessmen who provided the trip to the justice, were both significant donors to Leo’s groups at the time, according to public records and reporting by The Daily Beast. Arkley also sometimes provided Leo with one of his private planes to travel to business meetings, according to a former pilot of Arkley’s.

In his statement, Leo did not address detailed questions about the trip, but he said “no objective and well-informed observer of the judiciary honestly could believe that they decide cases in order to cull favor with friends, or in return for a free plane seat or fishing trip.”

He added that the public should wonder whether ProPublica’s coverage is “bait for reeling in more dark money from woke billionaires who want to damage this Supreme Court and remake it into one that will disregard the law by rubber stamping their disordered and highly unpopular cultural preferences.”

Arkley is a fixture in local politics in his hometown of Eureka, California, known for lashing out at city officials and for once starting his own newspaper reportedly out of disdain for the local press. By the early 2000s, he’d made a fortune buying and servicing distressed mortgages and also become a significant donor in national GOP politics.

As his political profile rose, Arkley bragged to friends that he’d gotten to know one-third of the sitting Supreme Court justices. He told friends he had a relationship with Clarence Thomas, according to two people who were close with Arkley. And the Alito trip was not Arkley’s first time covering a Supreme Court justice’s travel to Alaska.

In June 2005, Arkley flew Scalia on his private jet to Kodiak Island, Alaska, two of Arkley’s former pilots told ProPublica. Arkley had paid to rent out a remote fishing lodge that cost $3,200 a week per person, according to the lodge’s owner, Martha Sikes.

Snapshots from the trip, found in the justice’s papers at Harvard Law School, capture Scalia knee-deep in a river as he fights to reel in a fish. Randolph, the appellate judge who was also on the later trip, joined Scalia and Arkley on the vacation, flying on the businessman’s jet.

Scalia did not report the trip on his annual filing, another apparent violation of the law, according to ethics law experts. Scalia’s travels briefly drew scrutiny in 2016 after he died while staying at the hunting ranch of a Texas businessman. Scalia had a pattern of disclosing trips to deliver lectures while not mentioning hunting excursions he took to nearby locales hosted by local attorneys and businessmen, according to a research paper published after his death.

Randolph, now a senior judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, did not disclose the trip. (Nor did he disclose the later trip with Alito.) Randolph told ProPublica that when he was preparing his form for 2005, he called the judiciary’s financial disclosure office to ask about disclosing the trip. He shared his notes from the call with a staffer, which say “don’t have to report trip to Alaska with Rob Arkley & others / private jet / lodge.” Kathleen Clark, an ethics law expert at Washington University in St. Louis, said, “I don’t understand how the staff member came to that conclusion based on the language in the statute.”

On June 9, Arkley’s group chartered a boat, the Happy Hooker IV, to tour Yakutat Bay. On the way over, Scalia and Arkley discussed whether Senate Republicans, then in a contentious fight over judicial confirmations, should abolish the filibuster to move forward, according to a person traveling with them.

A photo captures Arkley and Scalia later that day gazing off the side of the boat at the famed Hubbard Glacier. At one point, a guide chiseled chunks off an iceberg and passed them to Scalia. The justice then mixed martinis from Grey Goose vodka and glacier ice.

It remains unclear how Scalia ended up in Alaska with Arkley. But the justice’s archives at Harvard Law School offer a tantalizing clue. Immediately before the fishing trip, Scalia gave a speech for the Federalist Society in Napa, California. The next day, Arkley’s plane flew from Napa to Alaska. Scalia’s papers contain a folder labeled “Federalist Society, Napa and Alaska, 2005 June 3-10,” suggesting a possible connection between the conservative organization and the fishing trip.

The contents of that folder are currently sealed, however. They will be opened to the public in 2036.

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One Group of Students Fled Community College in Record Numbers During the Pandemic. Can These Schools Lure Them Back?

Adam Echelman / Wednesday, June 21, 2023 @ 7:37 a.m. / Sacramento

Marcelo Baca, 62, puts on a graduation robe with the help of his son, Jason, 16, before a graduation ceremony at Mt. San Antonio College in Walnut on June 15, 2023. Photo by Alisha Jucevic for CalMatters.

Grizzled farmworkers are the hot new commodity as community colleges try to reverse a years-long enrollment decline.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the “golden age” of higher education — where more and more adults were attending college every year — came to a halt, and California’s community college enrollment plummeted to a 30-year low.

The state community college system lost hundreds of thousands of students, but it was those 50 years and older who left at the highest rates compared to other age groups.

From Siskiyou County, on the border with Oregon, to the Inland Empire, college leaders told CalMatters how older, low-income adults often had to work “essential” jobs or to step back into the workforce to support their families. Because of their age, they faced an increased risk of COVID-19. Many were less comfortable using Zoom or they lacked an adequate internet connection for online classes. As a result, these older students left their college ambitions to the wayside during the pandemic.

Now they are also trying to reel older students back in with new programs and concerted outreach efforts. While some colleges have managed to buck the downward trends, others have found themselves competing for the same students.

Enrolling farmworkers

During the pandemic, the College of the Sisikyous saw one of the biggest enrollment declines across all age groups.

With roughly 2,500 fewer students total in 2021-22 compared to the 2018-19 academic year, the College of the Siskiyous could lose about $2.3 million dollars — just over 10% of its total funding.

Compared to other age groups, students over 50 years old left at the highest rates. And it’s a problem that’s been happening for years, even before the pandemic: COVID-19 was just “the straw that broke the camel’s back,” said Samantha Worthington, who oversees adult education at the college.

Instead, the college’s enrollment issues began as a result of competition from other schools.

Similar to many California community colleges, which have looked to out-of-state residents and even international students, administrators at the College of the Siskiyous started to look beyond the county line about seven years ago, especially for older students.

The college partnered with an organization called the Farmworker Institute on Education and Leadership Development to offer classes to farmworkers who live hundreds of miles south in places such as Monterey and Kern counties. Often, these students study to improve their English, to learn new career skills, or work towards a degree.

In the 2017-18 academic year, the College of the Siskiyous enrolled 827 farmworkers over the age of 50 in the program.

This year, the College of the Siskiyous has 11 such students over 50 years old.

Along with consistently low wages, these farmworkers had high rates of COVID-19 infection and few worker protections that ultimately pushed them away from classes, Worthington said.

Community college enrollment decline and competition

The decline in students is also because other colleges — faced with their own declining enrollment numbers — saw an opportunity to target the same students.

In 2021, Bakersfield College launched a partnership with the same nonprofit organization to target local farmworkers and declined to sign the collaborative contract it had previously made with the College of the Siskiyous.

In the course of a few years, Bakersfield College launched a flurry of new initiatives, all aimed at boosting enrollment for older students. Administrators opened new teaching centers in South Bakersfield and in the rural town of Wasco. They created a new program to educate people experiencing homelessness and another one, in partnership with the local school district, to teach parents about child development.

From the 2018-19 academic year to 2021-22, the most recent year with verified enrollment data, Bakersfield saw an increase of more than 41% in students over the age of 50, the largest increase of all the state’s 116 community colleges.

Bakersfield College is also a leader in enrolling high school students. In fact, the new California Community College Chancellor Dr. Sonya Christian — a former Bakersfield College president — has said she wants to enroll every 9th grader in a college course, something she first piloted in Kern County.

Now, College of the Siskiyous has turned its attention from farmworkers to prisoners, joining the many colleges who seek to enroll more incarcerated students. The college is also preparing for budget cuts. For example, Fields said the college is canceling classes with only five or six students.

Popularity of noncredit courses

The key to recruiting and retaining older students lies in the way which classes are taught, but most colleges aren’t making the necessary changes, said Kathy Booth, a project director at the education research group WestEd.

To lure older students to school, community colleges need to offer flexible and engaging courses that have clear and specific career outcomes. “The most frequent award that’s given out is a general studies associate’s degree,” she said. “There are very few employers that are asking for associate’s degrees outside of a few technical fields, so that sort of general education is less valuable to a working adult.”

Instead, adults over the age of 50 often want to take noncredit courses, which do not count toward degrees. Noncredit courses are short, free and typically vocational, covering topics such as HVAC repair.

But across the state, colleges struggled to move many of the most popular noncredit courses, such as those in automotive repair, healthcare, and early childhood development, to an online format.

In the 2021-22 academic year, Mt. San Antonio College had about 34,000 students taking noncredit classes, the largest volume of students in the state. Like most colleges, Mt. San Antonio saw a drop in the number of students over 50 who enrolled since the start of the pandemic.

Madelyn Arballo, the vice president of continuing education, is not worried, though. “The first year of the pandemic was really bad, but the second year, we rebounded,” she said. Arballo expects that the college has already reached pre-pandemic levels once the final numbers are tallied for the recent spring semester.

Moving quickly

Arballo attributed some of Mt. San Antonio’s success to her department putting together new classes and certificates quickly, such as a course on COVID-19 contact tracing that it offered for just a few months. Of the 103 students who enrolled in contact tracing courses in the 2021-22 academic year, 41% were over the age of 46, she wrote to CalMatters.

Instead of telling prospective students why they should go to college, she tries to tell students what they could earn or do after college: Contact tracers, for instance, were making $25 an hour at the time the class was running.

Even though these adult students often start out taking one or two quick, noncredit classes, they may end up working towards an associate’s degree, or even transferring to a four-year university, once they realize the earning potential of a bachelor’s degree, said Arballo.

Marcelo Baca, 62, started taking noncredit courses last year in an effort to get his GED, but he isn’t stopping there. He plans to graduate with an associate’s degree in business and then transfer to California State University Fullerton to ultimately become a financial advisor.

It’s not his first attempt at a degree. He immigrated from Argentina in 1989 to attend community college in Orange County, but he couldn’t afford it and dropped out. He became undocumented and despite living in the state for decades, he was ineligible for financial aid. When he was finally in a position to restart school, he said he was diagnosed with colon cancer, and later, sent to the ICU for complications due to COVID-19.

Now he’s finally pursuing his dream, even if his children beat him to it.

“I may be super old, but I don’t care.”

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Adam Echelman covers California’s community colleges in partnership with Open Campus, a nonprofit newsroom focused on higher education. CalMatters.org is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media venture explaining California policies and politics.

‘Not Adequately Prepared’: Civil Grand Jury Says Humboldt County Must Improve Its Disaster Planning

Ryan Burns / Tuesday, June 20, 2023 @ 5:20 p.m. / Courts , Local Government

File image from USGS

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In its latest report from the 2022-23 session, the Humboldt County Civil Grand Jury says the Humboldt County Sheriff and Board of Supervisors have been “casual to a fault” when it comes to organizational preparedness for large-scale disasters.

The report notes that communities in our region are especially susceptible to such catastrophes given the extreme weather fluctuations, wildfire risk, tectonic activity and steep, erosive topography. 

“When such conditions coincide – cascading events – the potential for unmitigated catastrophe grows,” the report says before immediately mentioning the 2011 Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant meltdown in Japan, which triggered widespread radiological contamination. Yikes!

The Civl Grand Jury doesn’t have authority to investigate private companies such as PG&E, which maintains an underground storage area near King Salmon for highly radioactive material left over from the decommissioned Humboldt Bay Nuclear Power Plant. 

Both PG&E and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission say that storage facility is secure enough to withstand any catastrophic event, and the Grand Jury notes, “County government officials take these assurances at face value.”

But the Civl Grand Jury does have authority to investigate the county’s own preparedness, and as noted above, they found it lacking.

Among other findings, the 19 volunteer members of the Civil Grand Jury note that the county’s Emergency Operations Plan hasn’t been comprehensively updated since its first publication in 2015, though they note that the Office of Emergency Services (OES) intends to rewrite that plan over the next two years.

Cutting to the chase, the report says, “We find that Humboldt County is not adequately prepared to deal with a major natural and unnatural disaster.” 

The county government formed a “Disaster Council” back in 2011, but the Grand Jury found no evidence that the council has met since 2015, nor could they find anyone with the county who could provide a list of the council’s current members.

This lack of activity is bad news given the “rapidly developing science” on such matters as climate change, sea level rise and plate tectonics, the report says. 

“The Humboldt County Civil Grand Jury concludes that while individual companies and various first-responder agencies and departments seem to adequately respond to incidental emergencies, the Board of Supervisors and the Sheriff have been lax with respect to their responsibility to maintain a comprehensive plan for responding to large-scale disastrous events,” the report concludes.

Ultimately, the Civil Grand Jury makes seven recommendations, paraphrased below:

  1. The Board of Supervisors should fully staff the Disaster Council and schedule meetings before the end of the year.
  2. Before the end of next year, they should also expand the council’s membership to include “state-mandated members from culturally diverse communities, utilities, and emergency communications, as well as the integration of interpreters and translators.”
  3. They should direct the council, in coordination with the Sheriff’s Office, to submit a comprehensively updated Emergency Operations Plan by the end of next year.
  4. Sheriff Billy Honsal should clarify the chain of command and direction of the Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) and other local volunteer emergency preparedness groups by the end of this year.
  5. Sheriff Honsal should direct the OES to “write and print for release an easily-understood emergency preparedness handbook, including emergency evacuation routes and destination maps to all county residents and visitors by no later than March 31, 2024.”
  6. Honsal should direct the OES to update its contact directory regularly and distribute it to county emergency agencies and local volunteers by the end of the year. And …
  7. Honsal should direct the OES to include a contingency plan in the Emergency Operations Plan addressing spent nuclear fuel storage emergencies, by the end of next year.

Both the Sheriff and the Board of Supervisors are required to respond to the report over the next three months.

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DOCUMENT: Humboldt County Emergency Preparedness: Ready or Not?

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Previous 2022-23 Grand Jury reports:

California Lawmakers Wage Delta Water War With Newsom

Rachel Becker / Tuesday, June 20, 2023 @ 3:57 p.m. / Sacramento

Geese swim in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta on October 13, 2020. Photo by Florence Low, California Department of Water Resources

Amping up their concerns as a deadline looms, key California legislators today escalated their pushback on Gov. Gavin Newsom’s efforts to streamline the Delta water tunnel and other infrastructure projects.

The stalemate could become a critical lever while lawmakers haggle with Newsom over the 2023-2024 budget leading up to his June 27 deadline for approving the spending plan.

A bipartisan group of 10 lawmakers from the Assembly and the Senate signed on to a letter today urging Newsom and legislative leaders to stall Newsom’s package of infrastructure bills “for as long as the Delta Conveyance Project remains a part of the proposal.”

The legislators said Newsom’s proposals — which would overhaul permitting and litigation for expansive projects like the controversial tunnel plan to replumb the Delta and send more water south — could cause environmental harm.

“Rather than taking up a few blocks like a stadium, the tunnel would span multiple counties and impose water and air quality concerns throughout the region. If the project is litigated under (the California Environmental Quality Act), the process should not be rushed,” said the letter, spearheaded by Assemblymember Carlos Villapudua, a Democrat from Stockton and a member of the Delta Caucus.

In mid-May, Newsom unveiled an executive order and package of wide-ranging proposals to streamline state approval of major infrastructure projects, such as bridges, reservoirs, semiconductor plants and the Delta tunnel. Some of his proposals aim to keep transportation, energy and water projects from stalling under legal challenges related to the California Environmental Quality Act and make the state more appealing for federal funding.

The fight pits Newsom against lawmakers who say they feel “jammed” by Newsom’s use of the budget process to fasttrack the bills. Environmental groups and salmon fishermen are squaring off against building and labor groups. And Delta counties are once again waging a decades-long battle against a massive water project that would reshape their region.

The Newsom administration says the changes are urgent because California needs to more rapidly build water and energy projects to prepare for climate change.

“The proposals that the governor brings forward we don’t bring forward lightly into the budget process, but because we have to take action now,” California Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot said at a joint hearing of the Assembly Judiciary and Natural Resources committees in early June. “We need to be in a dead sprint implementing what we call our water supply strategy for a hotter, drier future.”

Newsom’s Deputy Communications Director Alex Stack said the package “ensures California would still have the same nation-leading environmental protections while also cutting unnecessary red tape that has stalled key climate projects for years.”

The final budget is not contingent on Newsom’s infrastructure proposals, and they could be enacted after it’s signed. But experts suspect they will be a political lever as negotiations hashing out the budget continue through the end of this month.

Introduced as budget trailer bills less than a month before the Legislature’s June 15 budget deadline, Newsom’s proposals bypass the typical legislative policy committee lineup and give lawmakers and the public less opportunity for deliberation or amendments.

“It feels disrespectful to the process, to all the work that we’ve done … to have something come at this late date and want to be rushed through that has had such an impact on my district, and the state and the 4 million people who reside in that area,” Sen. Susan Talamantes Eggman, a Democrat from Stockton, said in a committee hearing this month.

Assembly consultants warned in a report that this approach “significantly limits transparency and public input” and “increases the potential for creating unintended consequences.”

“They (Newsom officials) want to rewrite more than a century of California law in a backroom deal,” Doug Obegi, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told CalMatters.

The package of bills “ensures California would still have the same nation-leading environmental protections while also cutting unnecessary red tape that has stalled key climate projects for years.”
— Alex Stack, Newsom Deputy Communications Director

During informational hearings held in early June, lawmakers noted that this is not the first time that the Newsom administration has brought policy proposals into the budget process. “It is starting to feel like we are being jammed by design,” said state Senator Monique Limón, a Democrat from Santa Barbara, said at the Senate Natural Resources and Water hearing.

‘Overly onerous’ regulations or ‘railroading’ projects in?

Water providers, business interests and several labor unions have voiced support for Newsom’s policy package.

“Major infrastructure projects are too often bogged down in overly onerous regulatory processes and a siloed approach to permitting approvals, which increases overall costs and delays critical projects,” the Association of California Water Agencies, Mojave Water Agency, and the Almond Alliance all wrote in individual letters.

Much of the opposition stressed the impact on the tunnel project, including a coalition of the five counties ringing the Delta — Sacramento, Solano, San Joaquin, Contra Costa and Yolo.

Newsom officials “want to rewrite more than a century of California law in a backroom deal.”
— Doug Obegi, Natural Resources Defense Council

“The Legislature is being asked to railroad over the objections of 4 million people and the 25 county supervisors that represent them and are trying to protect their homes and communities,” said Karen Lange on behalf of the Delta Counties Coalition at an informational hearing of the Assembly Committee on Water, Parks, and Wildlife. “In the case of the tunnel, every county and city that is affected by it opposes it.”

Stockton community organizations, salmon fishers and environmental groups said Newsom’s plan would remove guardrails and hamper litigation against the Delta tunnel and other projects.

One Newsom proposal, for instance, would exclude certain internal communications such as emails from the administrative record prepared for litigation if they didn’t ultimately reach the final decision-making body.

Assembly analysts warned that this “allows the agency to pick and choose what documents to include in the record.” Though these records could be available under a separate California Public Records Act request, this too can lead to lawsuits and delays and “could prove very costly to public agencies.”

In today’s letter, legislators criticized parts of the package that would set a time limit for lawsuits challenging the tunnel and other projects and reduce protections against killing certain wildlife species, such as sandhill cranes that winter in the Delta.

Crowfoot told CalMatters that the proposals were not developed specifically to push through the tunnel project.

“I haven’t been part of any internal conversation on fully protected species and our need to modernize it that discuss the Sandhill crane or its relationship to the project,” he said. “The intent is not to short circuit any environmental review or public input, but it is to ultimately get to an answer around whether this project can be supported and move forward.”

Decades in the making yet still decades from completion, the proposed tunnel has been called both a water grab and a critical update to water supplies for 27 million people, mostly in Southern California, and 750,000 acres of farmland. State officials say it would protect a vital water artery from earthquakes, sea level rise and extreme swings from wet to dry, while local communities and environmental groups say it would upend the way of life and sensitive ecosystems of the Delta.

The estimated price tag, last updated in 2020, is around $16 billion, which would eventually be paid back by water agencies receiving its supplies. Last year, a draft state environmental report warned that the tunnel project would harm endangered and threatened species, convert 2,300 acres of farmland, and disrupt cultural and historic sites.

Asked why the administration included such a fiercely contested issue in the infrastructure package as part of the budget process, Crowfoot said in an interview, “We simply can’t kick the can down the road on this question because it generates disagreements and controversy.”

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CalMatters.org is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media venture explaining California policies and politics.

Retired Owners of Fortuna Restaurant Tom’s Sourdough Killed in Arizona Double Homicide; The Suspect, a Eureka Man, is in Custody

Ryan Burns / Tuesday, June 20, 2023 @ 11:45 a.m. / Crime

Tom’s Sourdough Pizza Villa in 2017. | Google Street View.

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Eureka man Aaron Michael Bryant, 31, is in custody in Arizona after fatally stabbing Tommy Edward Hinton, 62, and Annette Lee Hinton, 59, former owners of the now-closed Fortuna restaurant Tom’s Sourdough Pizza Villa, according to the Bullhead City Police Department.

In a statement posted to social media, the Bullhead City Police Department said that on Friday, June 16, around 5:49 p.m., officers responded to a 911 open line on which a woman was yelling for help. Dispatchers received another call about a man stabbing a woman.

Officers later determined that Bryant stabbed the Hintons during an argument and was then shot by a neighbor, the police department reported. 

According to the Mohave Daily News, medics responded to the scene and requested air medical transport, which took one patient via helicopter to Valley View Medical Center in Fort Mohave, Arizona, near borders of both Nevada and California.

Officials later said that Bryant is in custody.

Tom’s Sourdough Pizza Villa, a longtime fixture in Fortuna, closed its doors in August 2018, after which the Hintons moved to Arizona. (The building, at 101 12th Street, later reopened as Paul’s Live From New York.) There was also a Tom’s Sourdough on Myrtle Avenue Eureka for a while.

Several times over the past two years, Tom Hinton reached out to Bryant on Facebook, where Bryant was posting about employment and emotional struggles. At least twice, Hinton encouraged Bryant to leave Eureka and come to his part of southern Arizona, which is just across the Colorado River from Nevada.

“Hey buddy jobs everywhere down this way,” Tom Hinton wrote in an April 2021 comment beneath a post in which Bryant said jobs here were hard to come by.

A few months later Hinton repeated the invitation: “Come on down buddy. $15.00 for any job. The casinos are 5,000 workers short. Any job you can imagine.”

Bryant’s most recent post, published in February, was a request for help to get food, to which Tom Hinton replied, “What’s up kid. You doing ok,or just need a change? Let me know.”

The Biggest Survey of Homeless Californians in Decades Shows Why So Many Are on the Streets

Marisa Kendall / Tuesday, June 20, 2023 @ 7:26 a.m. / Sacramento

A man starts a fire while his wife sleeps inside their makeshift tent along a barbed wire fence near Highway 99 in southwest Fresno on Feb. 11, 2022. Photo by Larry Valenzuela for CalMatters/CatchLight Local.

Losing income is the No. 1 reason Californians end up homeless – and the vast majority of them say a subsidy of as little as $300 a month could have kept them off the streets.

That’s according to a new study out of UC San Francisco that provides the most comprehensive look yet at California’s homeless crisis.

In the six months prior to becoming homeless, the Californians surveyed were making a median income of just $960 a month. The median rent for a two-bedroom apartment in California is nearly three times that, according to Zillow. And though survey participants listed a myriad of reasons why they lost their homes, more people cited a loss of, or reduction in, income than anything else.

The study’s authors say the findings highlight the idea that money, more than addiction, mental health, poor decisions or other factors, is the main cause of – and potential solution to – homelessness.

“I think it’s really important to note how desperately poor people are, and how much it is their poverty and the high housing costs that are leading to this crisis,” said Margot Kushel, a physician who directs the UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, which conducted the study.

Already the study – which the authors say is the most representative homelessness survey conducted in the U.S. since the mid-1990s – has drawn attention from high places.

The initial idea for the survey came from California Health and Human Services Secretary Mark Ghaly, Kushel said. Ghaly’s office has been involved along the way, though the state didn’t fund the research.

“As we drive toward addressing the health and housing needs of Californian’s experiencing homelessness, this study reinforces the importance of comprehensive and integrated supports,” Ghaly said in a news release. “California is taking bold steps to address unmet needs for physical and behavioral health services, to create a range of housing options that are safe and stable, and to meet people where they are at. We are grateful for the voices of those who participated in this study, as they will help guide our approach.”

The survey comes as local governments press Gov. Gavin Newsom to distribute ongoing funding to fight homelessness, arguing the one-time grants he has doled out so far don’t allow them to make lasting progress. Newsom has resisted that kind of multi-year commitment, although his administration has allocated nearly $21 billion toward homelessness and housing since he took office.

The UCSF team surveyed 3,198 unhoused adults throughout California between October 2021 and November 2022, and conducted in-depth interviews with 365 of those participants.

What drives California’s homeless crisis?

When asked why they left their last home, respondents cited conflict between roommates, not wanting to impose on the person or people they were living with, domestic violence, illness and breakups.

A loss of or reduction in income was the most common response, with 12% of people saying that’s what caused their homelessness. Just 4% blamed their own substance use or drinking.

All of those varied factors that led people to lose their homes often have underlying roots in economic instability, said Jennifer Wolch, a professor emerita at UC Berkeley specializing in homelessness.

“This lack of income and severe instability and housing precarity, it has spillover effects on people’s relationships, their use of alcohol and other kinds of problematic substances,” she said. “It impinges on their health status.”

The story told by one survey participant, identified as Carlos, shows how someone can gradually descend into homelessness. He had to stop working after falling off a ladder and injuring his spine, but wasn’t eligible for workers’ compensation because he had been paid in cash. Unable to afford his rent, he moved out of his apartment and rented a room in a new place. He soon left due to conflicts with his roommates. He then briefly lived with his sister’s family, until they faced COVID-related job loss and he moved out to avoid becoming a burden. He lived in his truck until it was towed due to unpaid parking tickets. Now, he lives in an encampment in a park.

Most of the homeless Californians surveyed said a relatively small amount of cash would have saved them from the street. Seventy percent said a monthly rental subsidy of $300-$500 would have kept them from becoming homeless, while 82% believed a one-time payment of between $5,000 and $10,000 would have worked.

Jennifer Loving, CEO of Santa Clara County nonprofit Destination: Home, hopes the study’s findings will help debunk what she says is a common myth that people are homeless because of their individual failings, rather than because rents are outpacing wages. She’d like to see California’s leaders take notice.

“Hopefully it will inform a statewide strategy,” she said, “because we need a statewide strategy to be able to manage how we are addressing homelessness.”

Another California homeless myth

Another myth the study attempts to dispel is that most homeless people flock to California cities because of warm weather, liberal policies and generous services. In reality, 90% of the people surveyed said they were last housed in California, and 75% live in the same county as where they lost their housing.

That’s important to remember, Wolch said, because it’s easy to disregard unhoused people who we think “aren’t from here” and haven’t paid taxes here.

“People who are homeless are your neighbors,” she said. “People who are homeless live in the same city that you do and they possibly have lived there longer than you have.”

The survey painted a bleak picture of the traumas and tragedies that made survey participants more vulnerable to ending up on the street. People reported growing up in depressed communities with few job opportunities, where they experienced exploitation and discrimination. Nearly three-quarters said they had experienced physical violence during their lives, and one-quarter had experienced sexual violence.

One in three people surveyed attempted suicide at some point.

Mental health and addiction also were a common undercurrent in the lives of many of the unhoused people surveyed, which is to be expected in a population that has suffered so much trauma, according to the researchers. Two-thirds of people reported experiencing mental health symptoms – including depression, anxiety or hallucinations – in the past 30 days. Homelessness and all it entails, including lack of sleep, violence and difficulty accessing medication, exacerbated their symptoms, many people said.

About one-third of people reported using drugs three or more times a week – mostly methamphetamines. And 1 in 5 people who reported regular drug or heavy alcohol use said they wanted addiction treatment but couldn’t get it.

Jail to homelessness pipeline

The study also emphasizes the relationship between incarceration and homelessness, said Alex Visotzky, senior California Policy Fellow for the National Alliance to End Homelessness.

More than three-quarters of people surveyed had been incarcerated at some point during their life. And in the six months before becoming homeless, 43% were in jail or prison, or were on probation or parole. The vast majority of those who had been incarcerated received no help signing up for housing, healthcare or benefits upon release.

“That drove home for me this point: Incarceration, homelessness and then subsequent criminalization are fueling a really vicious cycle for marginalized people, especially Black and Latino Californians, that’s both causing and prolonging homelessness,” Visotzky said.

‘We don’t have enough housing for poor folks’

To solve the homelessness crisis, the main problem California needs to address is the lack of housing that’s affordable for extremely low-income residents, according to the researchers. The state has just 24 affordable and available homes for every 100 extremely low-income households, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

Among the solutions the researchers proposed: expanding vouchers that use federal, state and local dollars to subsidize people’s rent. They also suggested piloting shared housing programs where multiple households live together and split costs, while also providing funds to help people remain with or move in with family or friends.

Kushel hopes the study helps drive public support for these ideas, which in turn will spur politicians to act.

“I hope that it really focuses our efforts on housing, which is the only way out of homelessness,” Kushel said. “It’s almost so obvious it’s hard to speak about. We don’t have enough housing for poor folks.”

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CalMatters.org is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media venture explaining California policies and politics.

How Fresh Will CalFresh Be? Food Benefits on the Table in State Budget Talks

Rya Jetha / Tuesday, June 20, 2023 @ 7:13 a.m. / Sacramento

A customer picks produce at the Fairfield Farmers’ Market on June 15, 2023. Photo by Semantha Norris, CalMatters.

Every Thursday at the Fairfield Farmers’ Market, many customers don’t pay for their fruits and vegetables with cash, credit card or Apple Pay. Instead, they go to the information booth, swipe their CalFresh EBT card and receive paper vouchers to spend on produce.

Under Market Match, California food aid recipients get as much as $10 in matching money — meaning they have at least $20 to spend every week at their local farmers’ market.

“We already spend $200 on meat and cheese at Costco,” said Mitzi Castillo, who lives in Fairfield with two young daughters. “If I didn’t have Market Match, they would have to wait ’til next week to eat fruits and veggies when my husband gets paid.”

Castillo buys cherries, strawberries and blueberries from one of the many farmers who also reap benefits from the program, which brings customers and more cash to more than 270 farmers’ markets across the state.

“For me, I get more money, and for the people who use it, they can feed their family more,” said Salvador Navarro, a farmer from Stockton who said he makes as much as $300 from Market Match at the Fairfield Farmers’ Market, more than enough to cover the cost of his stall.

Together with his stalls across the Bay Area, Navarro says he makes $50,000, or a fourth of his income every season, from CalFresh customers and Market Match.

Market Match is the largest funding beneficiary of the California Nutrition Incentive Program, which is run by the California Department of Food and Agriculture. In 2022, the program provided about 38 million servings of fruits and vegetables to CalFresh participants, accounting for $19.5 million in CalFresh and Market Match spending at farmers’ markets across the state.

However, like many initiatives, the fates of Market Match and other healthy food and nutrition programs are in flux as legislative leaders and Gov. Gavin Newsom negotiate the final state budget while tackling a $31.5 billion deficit.

Although the plan that legislative Democrats pushed through on Thursday includes $35 million for the incentive program, advocates, CalFresh recipients and farmers worry that the money won’t be in the final budget.

“What we’re doing now is trying to get the ear of the governor,” said Minni Forman, the director of Market Match, which also includes community groups coordinated by the nonprofit Ecology Center. If the program is not funded in the final budget, Forman says the program will return to fundraising in the philanthropic world, which could mean a major reduction and even the end to Market Match.

“I’m worried, and I’m fighting as hard as they are to make sure that it is (part of the final budget),” Assembly Budget Committee Chairperson Phil Ting told CalMatters.

The San Francisco Democrat authored the 2015 law creating the incentive program that now funds Market Match and also championed additional funding in 2018.

Ting declined to comment on the status of ongoing negotiations between legislative leaders and the Newsom administration, as did Senate Budget Chairperson Nancy Skinner, an Oakland Democrat.

Sen. Melissa Hurtado, a Bakersfield Democrat, emphasized the importance of the $35 million for the nutrition incentive program, calling it a “priority” and highlighting her bill to make it official state policy for everyone to have access to enough healthy food.

Keeping Market Match funded is also a priority for farmers across California promoting the #FundCNIP campaign. They include Jeff Nielsen, an organic avocado farmer who manages Cambria Farmers Market and three other markets. He says that because of the program, people who don’t traditionally go to farmers’ markets find foods they like and keep coming back.

“They’ll get $10, $20, even $30 (in produce) from the market, which is a really big win,” said Nielsen. “For every local that comes every week, it supports them, the farmers, and the community.”

Farmer Salvador Navarro and his daughter Kimberly at the Fairfield Farmers’ Market on June 15, 2023. Most of Navarro’s customers use Market Match and other benefit programs to buy their produce. Photo by Semantha Norris, CalMatters.

The worries about the possible demise of Market Match and other healthy food incentive programs are growing amid broader concerns that California faces a “catastrophic hunger crisis” as pandemic-era extra CalFresh benefits come to an end. Even with those additional benefits, 20% of Californians experienced food insecurity in 2021. This year, the number is expected to rise rapidly.

Last week, U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra visited Sacramento to address food insecurity and nutrition inequities.

“I know the governor has been moving in ways to try to address those social needs, including food insecurity for so many Californians,” Becerra, a former state attorney general and member of Congress, said at a press conference. “I don’t believe that my state, which I’m very proud of, is going to abandon the effort to try to keep people moving in the right direction, and that of course, has to include healthy foods.”

Where food aid stands in budget

So far, the Legislature has approved the governor’s more modest anti-hunger proposals, including the creation of a summer program for eligible households to receive $40 per month in food assistance benefits for each child, a substantial drop from the $125 per month for each child that families received last summer. Lawmakers have also approved the expansion of California’s food assistance program for undocumented immigrants 55 and older, beginning in late 2025.

Overall, the governor’s May budget proposal included a total of $2.7 billion in state and federal funding for anti-hunger programs. However, the Legislature’s budget includes a variety of food benefits that the governor did not include:

  • $35 million for the incentive program that funds Market Match and a handful of other incentive programs;
  • $30 million for a CalFresh $50 minimum benefit pilot program;
  • $9.9 million for a broader California Fruit & Vegetable EBT pilot program;
  • $3 million to extend a CalFresh program to buy safe drinking water.

The original proposal to increase the minimum CalFresh benefit from $23 to $50 per month statewide was estimated to cost $95 million. However, the Legislature’s budget deal includes only $30 million, enough for a pilot program in some counties. As budget negotiations continue, there is some doubt that even the reduced $30 million will make it.

“I recognize with the budget deficit that it’s going to be hard to include,” Sen. Caroline Menjivar, a Van Nuys Democrat who authored the minimum benefit bill, told CalMatters in a recent interview. “But the impact is so big, should this pass and get funding.”

While Market Match focuses on farmers markets and uses vouchers and tokens, the California Fruit & Vegetable EBT Pilot Project borrows a model pioneered by Massachusetts to promote nutritious shopping at grocery stores.

Eli Zigas, the food and agriculture policy director at SPUR, a nonprofit policy research institute, says that CalFresh recipients predominantly shop at big-box stores and supermarkets. The test program allows recipients to get money rebated directly back on their EBT cards after buying fruits and vegetables at authorized grocery stores.

The pilot plans to have more than 80 locations running by the end of the summer, but Zigas worries that the final budget may delay efforts to make the program statewide and permanent. Last year, when the state had a record budget surplus, the program received $120 million. This year, supporters asked for $94 million over two years, but received $9.9 million in the Legislature’s budget.

A customer picks produce at the Fairfield Farmers’ Market on June 15, 2023. Photo by Semantha Norris, CalMatters

Back at the Fairfield Farmers’ Market last week, 82-year-old Gurdial Singh walked from stand to stand, using his Market Match vouchers to buy vegetables. “My wife and I will cook dinner together tonight with the zucchini, eggplant and cucumbers,” he said. “We enjoy this program very much as senior citizens.”

Luis Nava, a market manager with the Pacific Coast Farmers’ Market Association who staffs the Fairfield Farmers’ Market, said he wants to send a message to the governor:“We need this program to help low-income families, and if it goes away, it will take away food from our kids’ tables. We need it. We really, really need it.”

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CalMatters.org is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media venture explaining California policies and politics.