Political columnist Dan Walters talked about the history and ever-changing economic conditions in California during a speech in Santa Barbara on Thursday night.
“There’s nothing certain about California, other than the certainty that it’ll change,” Walters said during his talk at the Lobero Theatre on California politics of the past, present and future.
To a packed theater, Walters, a CalMatters columnist who has been covering California politics since 1975, spoke about the state’s big issues that he said include high housing costs, power shortages, insufficient infrastructure and a lack of leadership from state politicians.
The event was hosted by Spotlight Santa Barbara and sponsored by Noozhawk, along with the Santa Barbara South Coast Chamber of Commerce, American Riviera Bank, Nicholson & Schwartz CPAs and Pence Vineyards.
Noozhawk publisher Bill Macfadyen introduced Walters and led a Q&A session after Walters’ speech.
“Dan is an author, commentator and the foremost authority on California politics and public policy,” Macfadyen said. “More importantly, he’s a journalist’s journalist. I’ve been a loyal and enthusiastic reader of his work for nearly 40 years, and I know many of you have as well.”
Walters discussed the conditions that led to what he said are six big issues that have been facing the state for the past 15 years: a housing shortage, a power shortage, a water storage, a looming gasoline shortage, poor reading and math scores in K-12 education, and homelessness.
“The problems that were there when Gavin Newsom became governor seven years ago are going to be there when his successor is inaugurated next January,” Walters said. “We should be more insistent that those who aspire to the office, not just the governorship, but certainly including the governorship, stop screwing around and deal with these things.”
To help shed light on California today, Walters spoke about the state’s past and pointed to the period between the mid-1970s and the end of the 1980s as one of the most important eras in California history.
“It was an era where we retired an old California — I would call it the post-World War II California — and we were experiencing a whole new version of California,” Walters said.
Dan Walters responds to a question during a Q&A session, moderated by Noozhawk publisher Bill Macfadyen, left, after Walters’ speech Thursday night at the Lobero Theatre in Santa Barbara. Credit: Daniel Green / Noozhawk photo
He explained that the baby boom that started in 1946 had stopped, causing the post-war population growth to slow down.
“It gave rise to a certain syndrome that was believed to be accurate at the time, but wasn’t,” Walters said. “That was, ‘Hey, we’re slowing down, our population isn’t going to grow anymore. We don’t need to build all that new stuff.’”
By new stuff, Walters explained that the state stopped constructing highways, schools and colleges, dams and canals, all of which had been built during the post-World War II era to serve the rapidly growing population.
However, Walters explained that from 1980 to 1990, California’s population grew by 6 million people, a 24% increase.
“They should have started building those schools and building all these things they needed, but they had already stopped,” Walters said. “They didn’t get started again, which we now regret — whether we know it or not, we regret it.”
Walters credited the population growth to a new baby boom and immigration coming into the state, now without the infrastructure to support it. He said that has led to crowded highways, power shortages and water shortages.
“There we are, stuck with all these things that we could have been doing and we hadn’t done, and we never did, really, when you get down to it,” Walters said. “Which is why we have power shortages, which is why we have crowded highways, and water shortages and on and on and on.”
Today, California has a $4 trillion economy, the fourth largest in the world, but it also has the nation’s highest rate of poverty because of the cost of living, leading to what Walters called a plateaued population as some workers leave for more affordable states.
In the past 10 years, Walters said, California has lost 10 million people to other states. While that’s slightly offset by people having babies, immigration and people moving to California, there is a net loss of about 200,000 people.
“The downside to that is that the people who are leaving California tend to be adults, your working-class adults, adults without college degrees,” Walters said, “which means that if you check in with your local auto garage or your construction companies or the plumber companies, they are having a hell of a hard time getting people because people leave because they can’t afford to live in California.”
Walters warned that if California doesn’t address issues such as education, transportation, water and electricity, it will lead to the state’s undoing.
Co-founder Brian Goebel says during Thursday’s event that the goal of Spotlight Santa Barbara is to create a space where people can gather to hear different perspectives and have civil conversations. Credit: Daniel Green / Noozhawk photo
“We can’t survive in the long run; it’s going to catch up to us,” Walters said. “The promise of California will not be fulfilled the way it should be.”
When asked how to make California better when there is a political supermajority not dealing with these issues, Walters said there has to be civic leadership willing to hold politicians accountable.
“Without that civic leadership kind of kicking them in the keister, then the tendency is to just kick the can down the road and not deal with it,” he said. “I think they have to believe that there is a stronger civic demand that they do it, and with penalties if they don’t do it. You have to be willing to put people out of office if they don’t do it.”
Looking to the future, with so many challenges facing California, one attendee asked how it’s possible that Newsom is considered a front-runner in the 2028 presidential race.
Walters said that at this point, the race is more akin to a beauty contest with no one is looking at policies or performance yet.
“Nobody’s paying attention to the fact that the budget’s not balanced, or the bullet train isn’t being built, or all these other things, because it’s just not that stage of the game yet,” Walters said.
Noozhawk publisher Bill Macfadyen introduces Dan Walters before his talk Thursday night in Santa Barbara. Noozhawk sponsored the Spotlight Santa Barbara event. Credit: Daniel Green / Noozhawk photo
Thursday’s talk marked the inaugural event in the new Spotlight Santa Barbara speaker series.
Spotlight Santa Barbara was founded by Brian Goebel and Jeff Giordano with the goal to create a space where people could be together to hear different perspectives and have civil conversations.
“We need people to pay attention, to be involved in the community, to hold our leaders accountable, to get out of this inertia phase, to get rid of the cognitive dissonance,” Goebel said. “That’s what we’re really hoping to do over the course of the speaker series.”
At the end of the night, Goebel announced that the next speaker will be Greg Lukianoff, a New York Times bestselling author and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, who is scheduled to speak in Santa Barbara on Oct. 8.