Transcript: Prop. 30 Asks If the Richest Californians Should Be Taxed More to Pay for Green Infrastructure

This is a transcript of the Prop Fest episode explaining Proposition 30 on the 2022 California ballot. Check out KQED’s Voter Guide for more information on local and state races.

Olivia Allen-Price: Hey, hey, hey. I’m Olivia Allen Price. And welcome back to Prop Fest, our deep dive into this year’s California Propositions. Today, we take a closer look at Prop 30, the taxes and air quality proposition. Here’s how it will read when you see it on your ballot.

Ballot read: [00:00:19] Proposition 30 provides funding for programs to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by increasing tax on personal income over $2 million.

Olivia Allen-Price: So, rob from the rich and give to Mother Earth, or is this properly a handout for the ride-hailing company Lyft? I’ll say this. You know, it’s going to get interesting when Governor Gavin Newsom and conservative groups in California are on the same side of an issue. We’ll dig into it all today on Prop Fest, a podcast series made by us here at Bay, Curious and our friends at the Bay.

Here to help us cut through the noise on Prop 30 is Kevin Stark, senior editor of KQED’s Climate Desk. Welcome, Kevin.

Kevin Stark: [00:01:05] Thanks for having me.

Olivia Allen-Price: [00:01:06] So let’s start with this. At a high level, what are voters being asked to decide on in Prop 30?

Kevin Stark: [00:01:11] So Proposition 30 is a climate measure. It’s meant to reduce the state’s greenhouse gas emissions and fight air pollution. So the way it would work is it would raise the state income tax for people who earn more than $2 million a year by 1.75%. And this would generate between $3 billion and $4.5 billion dollars each year. That’s according to an analysis from the Legislative Analyst’s Office. The money would go into a trust fund that could be used for three things: EV car rebates, chargers for those vehicles and wildfire suppression.

Olivia Allen-Price: [00:01:46] Kevin, Let’s dive into those three buckets a little bit more, starting with getting more zero-emissions vehicles on the road, which is where I understand 45% of the money made from this tax increase would go.

Kevin Stark: [00:01:57] When a person goes out to buy a car, they get a tax rebate. It would offset the price of the car. California already has some rebates and the governor just invested another $6 billion from the state’s budget surplus into EVs. But Prop 30 creates a pot of money that can’t be raided by the general fund. It ensures continued investment over time.

Olivia Allen-Price: [00:02:17] And we should add, this money could also be used for zero-emissions public buses, agricultural and construction vehicles and even bikes, adding in more bike lanes or increasing bike-share access. Okay, let’s get into the second part of this fund, which would get a 35% cut of the new tax.

Kevin Stark: [00:02:34] Money would also be spent on chargers and infrastructure to help support all those new electric vehicles that are out on the road. A key detail here is that this investment is targeted at communities with less money and high air pollution. They would be getting these chargers.

Olivia Allen-Price: [00:02:47] So more car charging at apartment buildings and low-income single-family homes and more fast charging stations in publicly accessible places.

Kevin Stark: [00:02:56] And the rest of the money would go to firefighting and suppression programs, you know, training and hiring firefighters.

Olivia Allen-Price: [00:03:05] You know, the goal of this measure is to help combat climate change. Is focusing on zero-emissions vehicles really the best way to do that?

Kevin Stark: [00:03:14] California’s top source of greenhouse gas emissions is transportation. So overhauling how we get around is the change that we can make that will have the largest impact. You know, toxic smog, while it’s a lot better than it was in the 1960s, is a problem that California has never been able to solve. There’s one group, Move LA, that has been working on this for years. Back in 2020, they convened a bunch of California’s climate intelligentsia, climate leaders, and said they asked them this question: If you had $30 billion to spend fighting climate change, what would you do? And I covered this event at the time. Kevin de Leon, he’s a former leader of the state Senate. He’s running for mayor of L.A. He spoke and made the case that, you know, L.A. is still, for many years in a row, the most polluted city in America. Here he is speaking at that move L.A. event back in 2020.

Kevin De Leon: [00:04:03] And we know that these very consequential health impacts have a disproportionate impact on children, especially children of color, those of the lowest economic mean. So what I would do is first order of business is get diesel trucks off the road. Got to get diesel trucks off the road. Second is you got to build out charging infrastructure for passenger cars. The infrastructure has to be there.

Kevin Stark: [00:04:29] So, ideas from this event seeded, what would become Proposition 30. You know, to answer that question, how would you spend $30 billion to fight climate change? It was EV rebates and chargers.

Olivia Allen-Price: [00:04:41] And I understand there’s a pretty broad coalition of groups supporting this prop. And we’ll get to those in just a minute. But the involvement of one group has raised some eyebrows.

Kevin Stark: [00:04:51] I am fairly certain that you’re referring to Lyft the ride hailing giant. They are essentially bankrolling this campaign right now and have donated or loaned the campaign about $15 million so far, at least at the time that we’re taping this in early September. The no campaign hasn’t received any donations yet, but I think that is surely going to change.

Olivia Allen-Price: [00:05:12] Why is Lyft pouring money into this prop, which we should know that they did not put on the ballot themselves?

Kevin Stark: [00:05:17] I would say that Lyft is under a lot of pressure to increase its electric vehicles. Last year, the state mandated that they increase the rides from electric vehicles by the end of this decade, which is, you know, seven years from now, something like 90% of Lyft miles need to be with an electric vehicle. Lyft has said it’s onboard with this plan, but it wants the state to invest in chargers to make this possible. And you see that their support here is probably a part of that. The majority of Lyft drivers buy their own vehicles, so the company will have an easier time meeting this goal if EVs are more affordable for their workforce, you know, which is everyday Californians. Lyft also needs the charging infrastructure. I should note that the governor, Gavin Newsom, is opposing Prop 30.

Gavin Newsom: Fellow Californians, I need to warn you about Proposition 30, one company’s cynical scheme to grab a huge taxpayer-funded subsidy.

Kevin Stark: He’s painted this as a corporate bailout and he called it a special interest carve out devised by a single corporation to funnel state income tax revenue to their company. Of course, the insinuation there is that he’s talking about Lyft.

Olivia Allen-Price: [00:06:12] Mm. So Newsom sees this as like, instead of Lyft investing its own money to buy more EVs or help their employees buy more EVs, they’re kind of getting this help from California taxpayers.

Kevin Stark: [00:06:23] I think that might be good politics if you’re going to oppose something like this, to paint it as a corporate bailout, but I think it’s a cynical and disingenuous take on this measure, which was actually devised by transit and environmental justice groups around Los Angeles. I was a little bit surprised that Newsom made this statement.

Olivia Allen-Price: [00:06:43] Help me understand why, you know, this puts the governor at odds with his own party, environmentalists, lots of other left leaning groups. Like, what is, what’s behind this?

Kevin Stark: [00:06:54] I can’t say for sure what Newsom’s thinking is on this, but there are a few theories. One, people have questioned if he’s getting pressured by rich donors to his campaign who don’t want to see their taxes increased. You know, raising taxes is not a popular idea nationally, so if he’s setting himself up for some kind of national campaign, not a good idea. The second is, I think, I bit more charitable, which is that he just spent $6 billion of a budget surplus on electric vehicles. That money is going to roll out over the next five years. So, Prop 30 would add to that, but it does it through a proposition system that sort of locks the state into this spending plan and it’s really uncertain. Like, this is tied to income tax, tax from the state’s richest people, if we go into a recession, the state might be expecting money, might create programs to spend money on electric vehicles that all of a sudden isn’t there. So, it gets into the idea that this is an unstable source of revenue. The last theory is that the governor is just trying to line up with the California teachers. You know, California Teachers Union is a huge financial supporter, tons of political power in this state, and they helped him beat his recall last year. The teachers union is against Prop 30 because they’re generally against measures that might mean less money in the general fund, which is where schools get a lot of their funding from.

Olivia Allen-Price: [00:07:56] Joining Lyft in supporting this prop are a host of environmental groups and some unions who stand to gain from the green jobs that this prop would create or support. Tell us about them.

Kevin Stark: [00:08:07] It’s a really wild, broad coalition. It has groups like Youth versus Apocalypse, which is a high school Bay Area environmental justice group. You know, I see them out staging direct actions. They’re shutting down the streets of San Francisco. They’re staging die-ins at congressional leaders’ offices. But then there’s Sacramento Democrats and scientists and, yeah, a company like Lyft, it’s kind of this, like, Frankenstein coalition.

Olivia Allen-Price: [00:08:36] But at the end of the day, Prop 30 is a tax increase. So not everybody is a fan of that 1.75% increase on people who are earning more than $2 million. Right.

Kevin Stark: [00:08:47] Absolutely. There are the groups that always oppose taxes, the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, there’s California Republicans, there’s, you know, the California Chamber of Commerce. They argue against this plan just on the fact that it would raise taxes. Jennifer Barrera is the chamber’s CEO. She told me, you know, they would always oppose a new tax probably. But now, given high inflation and high gas prices, it is a bad time. And she also noted that the state has already the highest personal income tax rate in the country. Here’s what she said.

Jennifer Barrera: [00:09:20] We have a huge concern on increasing that personal income tax rate even more, what that impact would have to our competitiveness, what that impact would have on our general fund. And so that is the primary reason why we oppose this initiative.

Kevin Stark: [00:09:35] So people who make more than $2 million a year in California pay more income tax than they would in any other state. For some context, Oregon and New York also have high taxes, but their rates are just below 10%. If this passes, people would be taxed at around 14%.

Olivia Allen-Price: [00:09:53] I found it kind of interesting that wildfire funding was sort of lumped into this prop that is primarily about electric vehicles and I get the relationship sort of between the two. But still, it makes me think back to 2020 when wildfire funding was a part of Proposition 19, which was largely about property taxes. And it kind of has me wondering, like, why is wildfire funding being kind of tossed into these props that might on the surface not seem related?

Kevin Stark: [00:10:23] Yeah, I think it’s a great question. So I think there’s two ways of looking at that. Let’s take a compassionate view to start. Wildfire smoke is the top source of air pollution in the West. And increasingly, this is how the vast majority of Californians are touched by climate change. You know, you probably remember back in 2020 the lightning fires that we had. You know, we had firestorms all across the Bay Area. We had 30 straight days where we had toxic air, which has never happened before in modern history. So this in some ways is about air pollution. And it makes sense if you’re going to be fighting smog, you know, reducing carbon emissions, also reducing the pollution. You could see how all of this is connected. The sort of cynical, political way of looking at this is that firefighters are an incredibly powerful political group in California, and it’s really hard to vote against tax rebates for people that want to buy electric cars and money to hire firefighters. So as organizers are building a coalition for this measure, I could see a situation in which they’re trying to bring together the most groups that would make this successful.

Olivia Allen-Price: [00:11:31] Kevin, thank you so much.

Kevin Stark: [00:11:32] Thank you.

Olivia Allen-Price: [00:11:33] Kevin Stark is a climate editor at KQED.

In a nutshell, a vote yes on Prop 30 means you want to increase taxes on Californians with incomes of more than $2 million a year. With that money going towards getting more zero emission vehicles on the road, building green infrastructure and supporting wildfire suppression and prevention programs. A vote no means you’d like things to stay as they are right now.

That’s it for Prop 30. You can find more prop fest episodes at baycurious.org. And if you want the lowdown on more state and local races, check out KQED Voter Guide. We’ll put a link in the show notes.

Propfest is a collaboration between two KQED podcasts, The Bay and Bay Curious. Find us both wherever you listen and hit that subscribe button. We’ll be back tomorrow with our final prop fest episode on Prop 31, the flavored tobacco prop. I’m Olivia Allen-Price. We’ll see you tomorrow.