Photos and video: Andrew Goff

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At 11:20 Monday morning, roughly 300 Eureka High School students walked out of class and marched up the block to the district administration building, where they proceeded to shout chants and hold up banners in support of a departed administrator.

“We want Ed! We want Ed! We want Ed!” the students chanted in unison.

By all accounts, Ed Sonia forged deep personal bonds with many students in his role as Eureka City Schools athletic director, overseeing more than 70 coaches, 40 volunteers and about 40 percent of the student bodies at Eureka High, Winship Middle School and Zane Middle School. He was also serving as an assistant principal at Eureka High, and in a phone conversation this afternoon he said he was simply spread too thin.

“We had a couple of administrators leave — there’s been a lot of movement [among] the admin team at Eureka High, and I took on a lot of the workload,” Sonia said.

He added that he had informed Interim Eureka High School Principal Rob Standish and other administrators about his dissatisfaction.

”I’d gone in to my administration before and told them I was overloaded,” he said. “My principal knew that this was coming to a head. I could only take so much.”

While the administration may not have been surprised at Sonia’s move, the students who walked out today didn’t see it coming.

“We are all very heartbroken,” Eureka High senior Moriah Bowles told the Outpost during today’s protest. “Ed was not only a member of our staff but he was a friend. He was a very close friend.”

Bowles and other students said this is just the latest development in a larger trend of educators and administrators leaving the district for one reason or another. Former teacher and athletic director Kristina Christiansen, for example, stepped down under duress last year after more than two decades at Eureka High. She is now suing Eureka City Schools for harassment, a hostile work environment, sexual discrimination and retaliation.

Other administrators, including former assistant principal Angela Shull and former Eureka High principal Jennifer Johnson, recently left the district Eureka High in favor of other jobs in the area.

“We’ve already had two athletic directors leave — and coaches. We’ve had so many coaches leave because of the treatment,” Bowles said. “And we’re tired of it.”

Leah Gee, a former district employee and mother of a Eureka High student, attended today’s protest, and she said these departures are symptomatic of larger problems in the district.

“We’re not losing people because of the teacher and educator crisis or them burning out on the job,” Gee said. “They’re burning out on the district.”

She blames Superintendent Fred Van Vleck and the district’s board of trustees, which is charged with overseeing him.

“Fred Van Vleck needs to go,” Gee said. “Nobody is checking him. There’s no checks and balances.”

The protesting students swarmed the sidewalk outside the administration building. Several held brightly colored protest signs on butcher paper while others clutched smaller signs hand-lettered on colorful office sheets. 

“What is the common denom?” one sign read.

“Why 2 athletic directors in 1 year?” another asked.

Yet another read, “Why are good people leaving our district?”

Other messages included, “When is enough?” “Fix our environment” and “Take responsibility for your actions.”

The Outpost walked into the administration office during the protest in search of Van Vleck, but we were told by front office staff that he was not available at the time. When we reached out later via email he referred us to Standish, who we spoke to on the phone this afternoon.

“I can say that although I’m proud of the passion our students have for educators, Mr. Sonia resigned of his own accord,” Standish said. “I’ll be acting as interim athletic director as we search for a replacement, and I’ll be doing my best to make sure the sports programs can continue uninterrupted with the help of our amazing coaches and staff.” 

Asked about the larger trend of departures from the district, Standish said, “I really can’t speculate on that.”

At the protest, Eureka High senior Sidney Madsen said she worked directly with Sonia in her role on the Student Advisory Council, which helps to make decisions for the Humboldt-Del Norte (HDN) High School Sports League. 

“And it really hurt that he had to resign because I know that he cares so, so much for his students,” Madsen said. “He would always pull me aside; he would always make a point every single day or every other day to tell me, like, how good I’m doing and how much I mean to him.”

Today’s demonstration was a way to return the favor, she said. 

“He cared so much about these kids and his job. Getting no support from the D.O. [district office] really took a toll on him.”

Fellow senior Amaya Gee (Leah Gee’s daughter) agreed, saying Sonia was just “a really cool dude.”

“We just bonded, I guess,” Gee said. She, too, brought up the departure of numerous coaches and teachers from the district.  “And I think this last one really impacted everybody because Ed cared so much about everybody. I think he impacted not only just us but also the parents. He did a lot for our school. I don’t think [the administration] knew how much Ed impacted our school and how much he did for us.”

A few adults stood across the street watching the protest. One, licensed psychologist Michael Morris, said he’d been working with Sonia to incorporate sports psychology into Eureka High’s sports programs.

“Ed just gets it, that we’re here to mentor these young people, that it’s beyond the sport,” Morris said. “These sports are more vehicles for mentoring young people to become these positive members of our society, and he got that. It’s just, it’s such a big loss not to have him anymore. I’m just heartbroken.”

Will Zerlang, a local contractor and parent of an EHS student, said he stepped in to become the coach of the school’s cross country team this year, and he agreed that this is a big deal. 

“Losing Ed obviously is a huge loss for the students because the students love Ed,” Zerlang said. The EHS cross-country won the HDN championship this past weekend, after the squad learned of Sonia’s departure, and Zerlang said they ran for him. He also said Sonia was a huge help to him in his first year of coaching, and his sudden absence complicates the team’s future.

“On the 19th we’re supposed to go take three vans down and rent six hotel rooms [for a competition],” Zerlang said. “Ed was the one who was going to make that happen for me. Now I’ve got to figure out how to [do it].”

Standish sought to reassure people who may be concerned.

“I very much want the public to know that we’re going to continue to work very hard to make sure students have access to athletic endeavors and we’ll support them through that,” he said.

As fall sports come to an end and spring sports ramp up, this is a very busy time for athletics, and Standish said he’s had an “an overwhelming amount of support from coaches as we work through and make sure these programs continue. That’s really what’s important to me right now, keeping them taken care of.”

About 20 minutes into the protest, after the students had marched around the block, they revived their chants of “We want Ed!” A few minutes later, they changed the refrain to “No more Fred! No more Fred! No more Fred!”

On Friday, Standish announced Sonia’s departure with an all-EHS-staff email that began with this: 

I am writing today to announce our Athletic Director and Assisant [sic] Principal Ed Sonia has let me know he no longer has the passion to finish the school year in this postion [sic] and has resigned effective immediatly [sic].  This is unfortuante [sic], but we are appreciative of the work Ed has done.

Sonia said the claim that he has lost his passion is patently false. 

“I never said that,” he told the Outpost. “Every person on that campus knows that’s not true. That’s the opposite of me. My passion for those kids and that department … .” He paused, trying to find the words. “It’s extensive, to say the least.”

Sonia said he didn’t work for the district long enough to address the larger trend of departures, but he feels today’s protest wasn’t all about him

“I think this is much bigger than myself,” he said. “This is maybe the tipping point, I get that. It just happens to be this way because of how I connect with my kids. It just shows I poured my heart into our kids and my programs. It feels good to see it didn’t go unnoticed by the people who mean the most.”

Namely, the students. Below are more photos from today’s protest.

(Click photos to enlarge)

Hey, you. Pssssst. Election Day is tomorrow. Remember? It’s getting down to the wire, here. And you haven’t turned in your ballot yet.

So you’re a lazy-ass procrastinator. That’s OK! You’re in fine company. The important thing is to get on it ASAP. Really. Your good friend LoCO is here to help. For the sake of argument, we’re going to assume that you fall into one or both of two categories: People who don’t know how to turn in their vote-by-mail ballot and people who aren’t sure how they should vote.

How do I turn in my ballot?

The very easiest thing to do is just to drop that sucker in the mail! But, careful – you have to make sure that it’s postmarked on or before Election Day! So if you mail it today (Monday), you shouldn’t have a problem. But if you want to mail it tomorrow (Tuesday), you want to make sure that it gets there early enough for the post office people to put that stamp on it! To be safe, take it directly to the post office and put it in their hands.

Alternatively, you can drop your ballot off at any of the county’s 36 polling places – here’s a list – or at one of the drop boxes – here’s that list — or at Elections Office HQ. That’s at 2426 Sixth Street, Eureka.

Lost your vote-by-mail ballot? Then what you’ll want to do is head to your local polling place – here’s that list again – and request a provisional ballot. They’ll set you up.

Who do I vote for?

We’re not going to tell you who to vote for! But we are going to give you some resources to help you figure out who/what you want to vote for.

First: For all those statewide races and propositions, we highly recommend the incredibly useful 2022 Voter’s Guide put together by our friends at CalMatters. This is the home of the “Propositions in a Minute” series of videos so many of you appreciate, and they’ve also got a bunch of stuff on the Governor’s race, and the Secretary of State race, and the race for Attorney General, and etc., etc. They even have the Supreme Court applicants on there. (Though not, alas, the appellate judges. You’re kind of on your own, there, I’m afraid.)

For your local candidates and measures: First of all, you want to check the voter information guide that was mailed to you. (Didn’t get one? You can request an online version here.) That’s going to contain all your official candidate statements and arguments for and against measures.

Second of all: LoCO Elections! Most candidates in most of the most important races have been patiently answering readers’ questions, and you can review those answers at this link.

Third of all: The KEET-TV League of Women Voters candidate forums! You can find recordings of all those great events at this link. Scroll through to find the one you’re looking for.

Fourth of all: If you’re on Facebook, take a scroll through the candidate interviews conducted by Friend o’ the LoCO and Eurovision Song Contest expert John Kennedy O’Connor.

Okay!

You now know as much as you’re ever going to know! Get on it!

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PREVIOUSLY:

• Local Tribes Demand Immediate Action After Upstream Farming Association Found to be Illegally Diverting Shasta River Water From Reaching the Klamath
• Ranchers, Tribes, State Officials Clash Over Shasta River Water

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California’s water officials plan to impose a $4,000 fine on Siskiyou County ranchers for violating orders to cut back their water use during a weeklong standoff last summer.

State officials and the ranchers agree: A $4,000 fine isn’t much of a deterrent to prevent illegal water diversions during California’s droughts. The proposed fine would amount to about $50 per rancher.

A rural water association serving about 80 ranchers and farmers — facing mounting costs from hauling water and purchasing hay to replace dried out pasture — turned on their pumps for eight days in August to divert water from the Shasta River. State and federal officials said the pumping, which violated an emergency state order, threatened the river’s water quality and its salmon and other rare species.

Rick Lemos, a fifth generation rancher and board member of the Shasta River Water Association, said violating the drought order “was the cheapest way I could have got by … When you’re to a point where you have no other choice, you do what you have to do.” He said the alternatives “would have cost us, collectively, a lot more.”

The penalty — $500 per day for eight days of pumping — is the maximum amount the State Water Resources Control Board’s enforcers can seek from the group of Siskiyou County ranchers under the state’s water code. The proposed fine requires a 20-day waiting period or a hearing before it is final.

The small amount and the long delay underscore the limited powers that the state’s water cops have to speedily intervene in conflicts over diversions they have declared illegal.

“They obviously don’t have much enforcement power, because they showed up and told us, ‘Shut your pumps off right now.’ And we said no,” said Lemos. “You would think they’d get an injunction and shut the pumps off, wouldn’t they?”

Julé Rizzardo, the water board’s assistant deputy director of permitting and enforcement for the division of water rights, said the agency’s powers are limited.

“Unfortunately, there are circumstances such as this where the economic gains that folks can get by violating curtailment orders are greater than the potential penalties available to us,” Rizzardo said.

Karuk Tribal Council Member Arron “Troy” Hockaday was disappointed by the fine.

“The punishment doesn’t fit the crime… We’re fighting for the fish. The fish are our life,” Hockaday said.

The penalty, he says, sends a message: “Siskiyou County does not have to listen to what you guys have to say — we’re gonna do what we want. And nothing’s gonna happen to us.“

In addition, the ranchers could face fines of $10,000 a day for future violations.

Under the state’s water code, fines can be larger than $500 a day only after the water board finalizes a cease and desist order, which requires a 20-day waiting period or a hearing. In the case of the Siskiyou County ranchers, Lemos and his neighbors shut their pumps off almost three weeks before the penalty would have increased to $10,000 a day.

“We knew that was coming. That’s why we pumped the water before it happened,” Lemos said.

Jim Scala, a third-generation rancher who is president of the Shasta River Water Association’s board of directors, said he hopes the association agrees to not pay the fine and fight it instead.

“I don’t want to pay them a dime. I want to take them to court,” Scala said. “Because if we pay them $4,000 or $10,000, that’s like admitting that we were in the wrong.”

The fight began simmering in August 2021, when the water board adopted emergency regulations that allow curtailments of water pumping when flows dip below a certain level to protect the Shasta River’s salmon.

Facing dry conditions and dwindling flows, the state ramped up curtailments in the spring and summer of 2022. In early August, the Shasta River Water Association petitioned the board to continue diverting water to fill stock ponds.

But before the board had responded, the ranchers notified state water officials in an Aug. 17 letter that they planned to violate the curtailment that day.

“I don’t want to pay them a dime. I want to take them to court.”
— Rancher Jim Scala

The river’s flows dropped by nearly two-thirds and stayed there for a week until the farmers and ranchers turned the pumps back off — a “precipitous drop” that state officials said could jeopardize the river’s fish.

The state agency said that it recommends the maximum allowable fine due to the “significant volume diverted in a short period of time, … the impacts to the watershed, the sensitive timing of this violation” before salmon migration, and the continued pumping even after a violation notice and a draft cease and desist order were sent.

The river empties into the larger Klamath and is home to key spawning and rearing grounds for fall-run Chinook salmon and threatened Coho salmon. The water board’s notice Friday said that violating the curtailment resulted in lower flows that could “exacerbate negative water quality issues” and “limit fish mobility and survival.”

“This action has direct impacts on more senior water right holders and sensitive fisheries that the Emergency Regulation intends to protect,” the notice said.

“The punishment doesn’t fit the crime… We’re fighting for the fish. The fish are our life.”
Arron “Troy” Hockaday, Karuk Tribal Council Member 

Such skirmishes could flare more often as climate change brings more severe and frequent droughts to the state. But experts warn that the state’s powers don’t match the urgency of stopping illicit water use.

“The system still allows one rogue user to decide to pay a fine rather than comply with the law,” said Jennifer Harder, a law professor at the University of the Pacific’s McGeorge School of Law. “California is a world-class economy with world-class natural resources. The state agency charged with protecting its water resources should be given world-class tools.”

Rizzardo said the state doesn’t have the resources or data necessary to police 40,000 water rights holders, particularly during a severe drought.

“We empathize. We recognize the hardships. We have been out in the field, to try to understand the situation more holistically,” Rizzardo said. “But we also aren’t going to ignore the blatant violations.”

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

PREVIOUSLY:

• “Going Down,” November 3

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Press release from the Eureka Police Department:

On November 3, 2022, at about 12:55 p.m., officers with the Eureka Police Department responded to the 2800 block of Broadway for the report of a collision involving two vehicles. The driver of the involved truck was reported to be uninjured while the status of the driver of the sedan was unknown.

Once on scene, and with the assistance of Humboldt Bay Fire and City Ambulance, it was determined that the driver of the sedan was deceased due to injuries sustained during the collision. The Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office Coroner responded to the scene while the investigation continued.

Next of kin has been notified and the driver has been identified as 32-year-old Aldo Emmanuel Zaragoza of Fortuna.

Based on the initial investigation, it appears Zaragoza was traveling southbound on Broadway prior to the collision. For unknown reasons Zaragoza veered across the center turn lane and into northbound oncoming traffic, colliding with the truck. It does not appear drugs or alcohol played a factor in this collision.

This is an ongoing investigation, anyone with information is asked to contact Officer Sollom at jsollom@EurekaCA.gov or (707) 441-4060.

Poverty fell in California during the COVID pandemic, recent data shows, largely due to state and national safety net programs, especially the expansion of federal child tax credits.

But a deadline to file for those tax credits expires November 17, prompting advocates in California and a few state lawmakers to sound alarms.

“If you haven’t been doing your taxes, now is the time,” said Assemblymember David Alvarez, a San Diego Democrat who held a press conference reminding people to file and claim the tax credits.

“As an advocate for children, and as a parent of two, I know that the need is high right now, especially for families with children as they struggle to keep up with all the inflationary pressures.”

The California Policy Lab, a nonprofit that analyzes public data, estimates about 290,000 California children living at or near poverty could miss out on the 2021 child tax benefit — leaving $928 million on the table, according to Brett Fischer, co-author of its latest report. That’s because 37% of the people who became eligible under the 2021 guidelines — mostly those making little or no income — may be unaware they need to file income tax forms to receive the credit.

“The concern is that a lot of individuals who were eligible for this credit would not end up going through the administrative burdens of applying and filing taxes in order to gain the credits,” said Hilary Hoynes, a public policy and economics professor and the Haas Distinguished Chair in Economic Disparities at the University of California Berkeley.

Tracking poverty

Contrary to many expectations, California’s poverty rate dropped from 16.4% in 2019 to a projected 11.7% in fall 2021, according to research by the Public Policy Institute of California, a non-partisan think tank, and the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality. They use the California Poverty Measure, which takes into account this state’s high housing costs and various government-funded anti-poverty programs and payouts.

Based on this measure, about 4.5 million Californians live in poverty, which is pegged at $36,900 annually for a family of four.

Millions more would have been in poverty, statistics show.

The federal government’s poverty rate generally measures income from a person’s work. Under that measure, the number of Californians who fell into the poverty income threshold — say, earning $36,900 or less for a family of four — actually rose from 10.5% in 2018 to 11.6% in 2021.

But that rate doesn’t include such government assistance as child tax credits or public benefits like CalFresh. The government counts those in its supplemental poverty measure, and the Public Policy Institute similarly counts that additional help in its poverty measure.

With that assistance, 3.9 million Californians stayed out of poverty, the institute said.

State unemployment insurance, the expansion of food assistance, utility bill assistance and rental assistance all probably helped avert a bigger crisis, analysts believe.

A spokesperson for Gov. Gavin Newsom credited much of California’s positive poverty numbers to state spending, such as the $18.5 billion the state sent to residents via direct payments, $8 billion in rent relief and $2.8 billion that helped with overdue utility bills.

“California acted swiftly to support Californians hit hardest over the past few years,” said Alex Stack, a spokesperson.

At the federal level, experts said the most impactful poverty relief was the expansion of the child tax credit, which paid families $3,600 for each child under 6, and $3,000 for children ages 6 to 17.

Sleeping in a car

In San Diego, some who received the extra money from the child tax credit say it definitely made a difference.

After sleeping in a borrowed car for four months, Angela Reyes Melo and her teenaged son have squirreled away almost enough money to put down a deposit on an apartment in Lakeside, a rural suburb outside of San Diego. Some of that $3,000 came from the expanded federal child tax credit, she said.

“It saved my life,” said Reyes, who earns about $18,000 a year as a cook while supporting her son whose disability leaves him mostly non-verbal.

Still, she worries about affording that $1,600-a-month apartment and acquiring beds and furniture. But just having a roof over their heads will be a relief, she said, likely safer than sleeping in a car or at some of the shelters.

Recently a man stuck his hand in the car while they were trying to sleep, she said, and people often fight at the temporary shelter in downtown San Diego.

“If you just look at them they start screaming… and try to fight you,” she said.

Reyes also worries that her stash of cash for her apartment is slowly being whittled away by rising food costs. “Just getting everyone a burrito can cost almost $50,” she said, referring to her four-person family.

When more is less

Advocates say there are hundreds of thousands of California families with very low incomes like Angela and her son. Some experts argue that COVID-era stimulus measures should be extended, pointing to the impact they’ve had on these families.

“It’s not rocket science for how to reduce child poverty,” Hoynes said. “We just need to give people money. And that’s what we did.”

But more money can feel like less with inflation. The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ quarterly index shows wages and salaries rose by more than 5% in the fiscal year ending in September — but when adjusted for rising prices, real wages and salaries declined by 3%.

Hoynes said families said they spent relief money on basic needs such as food, school supplies, clothes and bills.

That’s how Rosalee Reyes, 29, said she spent her child tax credit. Reyes, her partner and their 18-month-old baby, Elly Rose, had been living in an apartment but recently moved into a temporary shelter adjacent to San Diego’s Civic Center downtown.

“Kids are very expensive — diapers, wipes, and things like that; the money was gone within a month,” Reyes said.

“We spent it pretty much on basic needs for Elly. At that time I did have an apartment, so it went to things like gas, lights, water … I think they should have kept the credit, because it was helping a lot of families. For people who live paycheck-to-paycheck, that just provided a little extra to get through the rest of the month.”

Poverty rebounds

Carmen Ruiz Valdez, a program coordinator for Dreams for Change agrees. The San Diego-based nonprofit which helps stabilize homeless or very low-income families also assists people trying to collect tax refunds and relief benefits.

Valdez said she recently assisted a father who earned $27,000 a year but was living on the streets with his two children. He was unaware that stimulus funds were available because he had not filed tax returns, Valdez said.

With her help, he found out his family qualified for a $14,553 tax refund. “He had tears in his eyes,” she said.

Most of these COVID-era anti-poverty programs ended in mid-2021. Sarah Bohn, the vice president of research and senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, predicts that new economic data will show a different poverty picture in 2022.

“We’re expecting that when we look at 2022 poverty and income inequality, that it will increase,” she said. “It won’t look as favorable as it does right now.”

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This article is part of the California Divide project, examining income inequality and economic survival in California.

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

Hundreds of thousands of Californians previously shut out of Covered California — the state program that offers discounted health insurance — soon can participate because the eligibility requirements are changing.

Prior to the new rules, individuals who had access to an employer-based health insurance plan through a family member were not eligible for Covered California. Employer plans are often expensive for spouses or children, driving up the cost of coverage for those family members. Those caught in this unaffordable “family glitch” have few choices: buy the expensive plan, try to buy a bare-bones plan separately or go without health insurance.

In April, the Biden administration issued guidelines to fix the near-decade-long problem and last month the federal government adopted the regulation. Starting in January 2023, if a family’s premium costs more than 9.12% of the household income the family could be eligible for federal susidies, or discounts, through Covered California.

According to the UC Berkeley Labor Center, the “glitch” impacts an estimated 615,000 people in California, mostly women and children from low and middle-income families. The center estimates that about 400,000 of those people would be eligible for financial assistance through Covered California based on their income.

“For the people impacted, it could be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars,” said Anthony Wright, executive director of Health Access California, a consumer rights group. “It really does have an impact on the health and well-being of the family and their finances.”

A state analysis by Third Way, a national think tank, found that a California family of four with $53,000 in annual earnings would likely save about $4,340 a year in health insurance premium costs. The report shows that lower-income households would see the most significant savings.

The federal government is footing the bill for the expansion and pays subsidies directly to the health plans based on Covered California’s marketplace prices. The Congressional Budget Office reported that it would cost $44 billion over the next 10 years to cover family members previously impacted by the family glitch.

Covered California pays for outreach to families, including those who have been caught in the glitch, said Jessica Altman, executive director of Covered California. Covered California has a $109 million annual budget for marketing and the bulk is spent during open enrollment to outreach to Californians to sign up or renew coverage.

Open enrollment started this week and runs through Jan. 31, 2023. Coverage can begin as early as Jan. 1.

In San Jose, this is the change Patricia Moran has been waiting for. Moran doesn’t know yet how much she will save when she’s finally able to enroll in a Covered California plan. She is confident it will be less than what she pays now for health insurance.

Moran, 63, has been on her husband’s employer-provided plan for nearly eight years because she got sick and could no longer work. The plan is expensive but she needs it to pay for monthly injections for her aggressive rheumatoid arthritis.

“I’m stuck. I can’t have Medicare or any other help,” she said.

For Moran’s husband, the plan is free. For her, it’s $1,200 a month — almost half of her husband’s paycheck. That’s $14,400 a year, or about 21% percent of the couple’s total income from his job as a maintenance worker at a school and from the child care program Moran runs at her home.

Even with insurance, the injections cost $250 a month, said Moran, who said they give her mobility and the ability to care for the kids in her child care program.

“This is a big relief,” Moran said about the new policy. “It’s going to help a lot. We can have some savings for our retirement. It’s been so hard because we have to pay the mortgage, we have our bills and all of this stuff.”

California health advocates have been trying to solve the glitch at the state level for years but it was too expensive for the state to pay the cost. The federal government had to decide to fix it and fund it.

This change should help reduce the number of uninsured people in California. The state has experienced the steepest decline in the number of uninsured since the federal Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, launched in 2013. Since then, some 35 million people have enrolled in health plans nationwide, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

The state’s rate of uninsured residents dropped from 17% in 2013 to 7% in 2021. More than half of the 3 million still uninsured in California are eligible for some sort of coverage, according to UCLA Center for Health Policy Research and UC Berkeley Labor Center. The remainder, about 1.2 million, are undocumented immigrants who are ineligible for coverage through the exchange, although some may now qualify for public programs..

Any change that increases coverage for Californians, especially children, is a boon, Wright said.

“This is a big deal toward the goal of a government guarantee that everybody has access to affordable health coverage,” Wright said of the policy change. “The more we get rid of asterisks and exclusions the better.”

The change comes as employers continue to shift insurance costs to families. According to a Kaiser Family Foundation survey, premiums for family coverage increased 22% between 2016 and 2021.

Nationally, about 5 million individuals are eligible only for unaffordable employer-provided insurance. More than half of those are children. Among adults, more women than men are caught in the glitch.

“It created an unaffordable situation for a small but meaningful group of people,” said Christine Eibner, a senior economist focused on health care at RAND, a nonprofit research organization that published a report about the issue in 2015. “Most of them were enrolling anyhow and paying the higher premium. They could be paying 15% to 20% of their income.”

In California, of the estimated 615,000 who are stuck with high-priced employer insurance plans as their only option, researchers estimated that about 87,000 are uninsured, Altman said. About 35,000 are in the individual market paying full rates and the majority are paying for that expensive employer-sponsored coverage, Altman said.

“There are families that can save thousands of dollars — middle-income families, lower-income families — that it’s going to make a significant change for,” Altman said. “There is value in helping people who have coverage to connect with lower-cost coverage.”

If people are uninsured or have expensive coverage they are less likely to get the care they need.

“This is a big deal toward the goal of a government guarantee that everybody has access to affordable health coverage.”
— Anthony Wright, executive director of Health Access California

Those who stretch their budgets to sign up for employer-based plans may take the least expensive plan with higher deductibles or catastrophic coverage, Wright said. That could result in people going to the doctor less or not using the plans they have because they would still have to pay out of pocket.

“We believe it’s important to have the whole family covered,” Wright said. “There is a real result of not having coverage. The uninsured live sicker, die younger and are one emergency away from financial ruin.”

The Affordable Care Act requires employers with at least 50 employees to offer health insurance to them and their dependents. Spouses are usually included but not required under the law. In California, 47% of people are enrolled in an employer-provided plan. A national study published in the Health Affairs Journal found that families spend an average of 16%of household income paying employer-based premiums.

Before the latest change, the Affordable Care Act allowed employees to obtain insurance through discounted state programs if their employer health plan cost more than 9.1% of their income, which is considered unaffordable. Employers face penalties if their workers are obtaining insurance through those state programs.

Also, prior to the latest change, the law did not define affordability for family members and employers faced no penalties related to the cost of premiums for family members.

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

“Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside a dog it’s too dark to read.”

— Either Groucho Marx or Jim Brewer

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Books are an intrinsic part of my life: I read them, I write them, I trade them, I steward them (in the Little Free Library in Old Town Coffee & Chocolates), I borrow them (from the library), I refer to them (in the Humboldt Room of the library), I edit them, I get them printed and published, I’m never without one. Or 10.

Books, in some form, have been around for at least four thousand years. For instance, we have an alabaster disc naming Enheduanna as the author of poems written, in cuneiform, on the disc. She was priestess of the moon god Nanna and daughter of Sargon the Great (2340-2285 B.C., founder of the Akkadian Empire. Enheduanna wrote more than poetry: her Ninmeshara, copied on at least 100 clay tablets, is a lengthy account of a revolt against her nephew, for instance.

For the world’s first long book, that is, epic, the earliest of these that’s survived the millennia is that of Gilgamesh, which chronicles the fantastic adventures of the king of Uruk and his pal Endiku, including the Flood Story, plagiarized by the writers of Genesis over a thousand years later. The oldest surviving clay tablets of the Epic of Gilgamesh date to around 1800 B.C., although the most complete versions are more recent copies from Ninevah. Soon to follow were Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey.

All of these were hand-copied until about a thousand years ago, with the first attempts at mechanical copying in China and India. Then came the breakthrough year, 1455, with Johannes Gutenberg’s (1398-1468) mechanically-printed 1,200-page Bible. Once the dam was broken, the flood poured out. Within 50 years of Gutenberg’s Bible, over 250 printers were furiously at work all across Europe using his technology. Historians estimate that 15 million books were printed mechanically between 1455 and 1500, more than the sum total of all books copied manually before then.

Today, the business of books — real, paper, dead-tree books — is booming. Each year, almost a billion physical books are sold, bringing in revenues of nearly $10 billion. And no wonder! The magic of it all! To carry around, perhaps as a paperback in one’s pocket, the story of a life, drama, conflict, instructions on how to succeed in life & love, the history of a town or the world or the universe, the wisdom of those who lived long ago, a Bible or Book of Miracles or the Tao, the imaginations of futurists and fantasists … and all for free, from a library; or for peanuts, from a secondhand store; or for the price of a decent meal out if you want the latest hardbound best-seller.

Somewhere in every book there’s a gem to be uncovered, often a tiara’s worth of precious stones. Here’s what I found in the last one I read, Elizabeth McCracken’s The Hero of this Book, a tribute to her late mother, buried in an otherwise unassuming paragraph: “Her memory for unhappiness and misery was terrible.” To have that inscribed on one’s gravestone! Or this speaks to me, a wannabe “good writer”: “I don’t think writing is that hard, as long as you’re comfortable with failure on every single level.” (See Hemingway: “It is easy to write. Just sit in front of your typewriter and bleed.”)

A few years ago, I discovered graphic novels — what I’d previously spurned as “comics” — starting out with arguably the best of the best, Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series. What fun! Great storytelling in words and pictures! Now I never travel without at least one new graphic novel to savor after dark, before sleep, to kickstart my dreams.

So many books, so little time, so my two bits of advice to readers. One: read everything and anything, put nothing off limits. Two: Don’t keep reading a book if you’re not enjoying it. Life’s short. Move on to the next one.