California received $800 million from a settlement with German carmaker Volkswagen over its cheating on pollution emission testing and has spent $600 million to install a network of chargers for electric vehicles, but studies have found that many of them are unusable. Members of the California Air Resources Board took turns last week expressing frustration with the high failure rate of Electrify America’s network, lamenting that it would discourage people from buying zero-emission vehicles. Nevertheless, the board voted unanimously to give the company the remaining $200 million.
As for the other candidate, California has been reducing the number of inmates in its prisons for the past decade, responding both to federal court decrees about overcrowding and changing political attitudes. From a high of about 170,000 inmates 18 years ago, the prison population has declined to about 90,000. Nevertheless, the prison system’s costs have continued to climb, thanks to ever-increasing costs of health care and generous contracts with the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, the union for prison guards, pushing their salaries to an average of $158,000 a year. It now costs taxpayers $132,860 a year for every person still behind bars, according to calculations by CalMatters. That’s 50% higher than the cost for someone to attend Stanford University.
One might think that the Legislature would do its duty by delving into these dysfunctions and holding administrators, including the governor, accountable. But California is a one-party state and Democratic legislators are reluctant to embarrass a Democratic governor, so they pay only passing attention to managerial failings.