Millions for What? Inside California’s Secretive Earmark Process
What do martial artists, mime performers, and a farmers market have in common? They all received millions of dollars from the state budget this past summer. The money was earmarked for them, set aside as part of a longstanding and opaque budget process that CalMatters’ reporter Stella Yu has spent a long time trying to understand.
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Ericka Cruz Guevarra: I’m Ericka Cruz Guevarra and welcome to The Bay, local news to keep you rooted. Martial artists, a mime troupe, and a farmer’s market. These things don’t appear to have a lot in common, but there’s money set aside for all of them in the state budget that Governor Gavin Newsom signed this summer as part of a little-known budget process called earmarking.
Yue Stella Yu: Earmarks are this special pot of money in the state budget that gets quickly approved without much of a public debate or public notice.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: CalMatters reporter Stella Yu slogged through the new state budget to find out which projects got money through this annual and secretive process, one that raises concerns about transparency and equity.
Yue Stella Yu: And even after earmarks are approved, it is hard for the public to find them out in hundreds of pages of budget bills, or find out who requested for them. It’s a very strenuous process.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: We peel back the curtain on earmarks and discuss the Bay Area projects that got millions of dollars through this process. So yeah, I mean, we’re talking about this one part of this larger budget process that happens in the California legislature, maybe a part of the process that not a lot of people know about. And we’re talk about earmarks here. I mean what are earmarks exactly and how is it different from how money is usually doled out by the legislature?
Yue Stella Yu: Earmarks are almost a shortcut for some of the projects to get funding. How it works is that the state assembly and Senate leaders can set a spending cap for lawmakers. And lawmakers can submit a wish list in private of projects in their districts that they want funded. Because budget is this very fluid year-round process for lawmakers, in August, right before the session wraps, that is also an opportunity for them to tuck these projects into a budget amendment bill. It’s a very secretive process. The governor himself will also come up with a list of funding requests. Then it’s usually decided by the governor and the two legislative leaders on what gets funded. And lawmakers don’t put their names next to the projects they asked for. So you wouldn’t necessarily know who asked for them unless they start issuing press releases or attend ribbon cutting ceremonies and things like that to essentially take credit for what they asked for after.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: What percentage of the overall state budget gets earmarked every year and how do they decide? Like, what is this pot of money?
Yue Stella Yu: It is a very small percentage compared to the size of the entire state budget. This year, for example, the state budget is about $300 billion, so it’s a lot of money. But the earmarks we’ve identified account for just $1.3 billion.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: And it’s still taxpayer money.
Yue Stella Yu: Totally.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: I wanna talk about what exactly got earmarked this year in the California state budget. I mean, we’re talking about quite a bit of money. When we’re taking about the regions of California that really benefited from this earmarking process, where did most of these earmarks go?
Yue Stella Yu: Yeah. We did an analysis that broke it down by county. So Los Angeles was the biggest winner this year with at least $300 million in earmarks. So that’s about a quarter of the total. Other top winners are in the Bay Area. Alameda County got almost $180 million and San Francisco got $109 million. One of the more noteworthy counties was Santa Barbara. So this is Senate President pro Tempore Monique Limón’s home county. It has about 450,000 residents, but it received almost $73 million in earmarks. Just to give you an idea of how big this is, I mean, Tulare County in the Central Valley is very similar in size, but that county received just $200,000 in earmarks. So that’s $200,000 compared to 73 million. There’s no rationale or a method of calculation that dictates how the money should be spent.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: So you mentioned Stella the Bay Area was a big winner in this year’s earmark process. Who exactly is getting the money and for what kinds of things in the Bay area?
Yue Stella Yu: So the biggest ticket item in the Bay Area was the $125 million to buy the Golden Gate Fields. This is the now defunct horse racetrack that is straddling Albany and Berkeley. And so originally a nonprofit and the regional park district in the East Bay said that they were going to raise $175 million to turn this space into a public park.
Speaker 1: Now’s the time for us to imagine something different and Colgate fields.
Speaker 2: Berkeley Mayor Jesse Aragon says this is a big opportunity to develop one of the most prized properties in the entire Bay Area.
Yue Stella Yu: Then in May Newsom came out and said, you know, we’re just proposing that the state would foot most of the bill and he wanted in the final budget. There’s some other noteworthy Bay Area projects. There’s a total of $38 million that went to arts, museums, dance groups in San Francisco alone. You have $5 million to revamp the Castro Theater. You have three million dollars to a dance group whose founder was inducted into the Hall of Fame by the Newsom’s. You have almost $3 million to the Center for The Art of Translation, $400,000 to the San Francisco Mime Troupe, and there is another dozen or so dance companies or opera houses that each got half a million to a million dollars in state funding. And finally, just to name a few others, the UCSF Dyslexia Center got $8.4 million for dyslexia research. And this might be one that’s near and dear to Newsom’s heart, right? Because of his personal battle with dyslexia. $10 million went to San Francisco for road paving in different areas. And another $7.4 billion went to landscaping and irrigation at certain traffic medians. This is noteworthy because it’s very specific. You know, this is the type of funding that usually comes out of city or county budget for public works. So it’s unclear why the state needed to step in and why specifically for San Francisco. What my analysis shows is that no other county received this type of funding, you know, in such a specific way this year.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: All of those projects sound very random to me.
Yue Stella Yu: Yeah, that is one way to put it.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: We’ll have more with CalMatters’ Stella Yu right after this break. By the way, if you appreciate the local deep dives that we bring you here on the Bay, consider becoming a sustaining KQED member. We can’t do this work without you. Just go to donate.kqed.org/podcasts. We’ll be right back. Stella, my last few questions for you here. It seems like there were some pretty clear winners in this year’s earmark process, but who would you say loses?
Yue Stella Yu: In our analysis, there is a total of 17 counties that did not appear to get any earmark funding at all. Most of them are more remote counties in lower population areas, right, and mostly represented by Republicans. So it could be that there’s just fewer people there, or it could that they are represented by Republicans who are in the super minority that they just don’t have enough power to push through these funding requests. So in terms of winners and losers, definitely the Republicans are not taking as much home through the earmark process, as it always has been the case.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: It sounds like there is not a very satisfying answer that we’re gonna get today about why these projects were chosen, but what might contribute to why these projects get chosen in the earmark process? Is it, in some cases, because the governor is interested in a particular project or a certain legislator just has maybe more power or influence?
Yue Stella Yu: Yeah, that’s a great question. Because there is no definition on when the process should happen, right, or how much money, exactly, should you take from the state budget to distribute to districts, it is really up to the leaders in the legislature and the governor. I actually talked to Senator Dave Cortese, who is a Democrat from San Jose. And he did give me a little glimpse into how he approaches his asks. He told me that he tends to ask for funding for someone he knows, right? Some group whose work he’s very familiar with. And his rationale is, you know, look, I’m not going to give billions of dollars, state dollars to a nonprofit whose work I don’t know. I mean, that is putting my reputation at risk as well. So that kind of gives you an idea of what types of work, or what types of groups these lawmakers tend to gravitate toward, but he’s also just one of 120 lawmakers. For some of these projects, the reason is a mystery. We can see the apparent ties between certain lawmakers and the projects, but we can’t really prove that these projects are funded because this specific lawmaker requested them. I mean, those are the types of questions that we may not get answered. I have someone in the nonprofit world quoted in the story saying, if that is how nonprofits get money now, why do we waste this time and energy to go through the normal grant application process when we can just spend the money lobbying lawmakers to please let us jump through fewer hoops?
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Yeah, and it raises the question for me of like, why do we have this process at all? I mean, it seems like it’s been the norm in California. And even as you mentioned, outside of the California legislature, I mean at the federal level as well, for a long time.
Yue Stella Yu: So the rationale is if you go through the normal grant application process, the state agency that’s distributing the money might not understand the gravity of this project. A lot of those projects have perhaps not gotten the money twice in a row, three times in a row. But the rationale, is the local lawmaker might understand that need better. And so through this process, they can champion it and perhaps this would get to the much quicker. So that is what the proponents say about the merits of this process.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Yeah, and I guess if you’re a state legislator who wants to bring money home to your district, this is one way you see to do it.
Yue Stella Yu: Totally. Yeah, and you know, there is merit in talking about this right now because the election is around the corner, right and lawmakers who got earmarks this year will want to tout those achievements to win reelections Especially if they’re in a tough race if they have something they can point to as hey voters, look at this I brought this home then they can prove to their constituents that they did something for the district. So yeah, so I’m glad we’re talking about it now because voters who are interested in in that aspect of it could look into what exactly their representatives brought home and and that might influence how they vote.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Well, Stella, thank you so much for sharing your reporting with us. I really appreciate it.
Yue Stella Yu: Of course, yeah, thanks so much for bringing me on to talk about it.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: That was Stella Yu, a politics and campaign reporter for CalMatters. This conversation was cut down and edited by me, Pauline Bartolone scored this episode, we got extra production support from Gabriela Glueck, music courtesy of APM. If you want to get in touch with us here at The Bay, feel free to send us an email or at thebay.kqed.org. The Bay is a production of listener-supported KQED. You can help power our show by becoming a KQED member. Just go to donate.kqed.org/podcasts. Support for The Bay is provided in part by the Osher Production Fund. Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco, Northern California Local. And I’m Ericka Cruz Guevarra. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you next time.
Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by The Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco-Northern California Local.