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In modern American politics, voters at the local and state level are asked to weigh in all the time on ballot measures involving public policy. What’s strikingly consistent across the nation is just how contrary voters are and how ready they are to object to anything. In San Diego, for a local example, an utterly mundane 2016 measure to change the City Charter’s language on municipal bonds so that it conformed with the state Constitution and changes in state law drew the objections of 21 percent of voters. Very lopsided results are extremely rare.
But that wasn’t at all the case Tuesday in two special elections in North County. More than 94 percent of the voters in both the Rainbow Municipal Water District and the Fallbrook Public Utility District supported leaving the San Diego County Water Authority, reflecting intense displeasure with the authority’s indifference to the negative effects that its very costly rates have on farmers.
Secession isn’t normally a practical option for water agencies. But because Rainbow and Fallbrook have existing infrastructure connected to the Eastern Municipal Water District in Riverside County — which has significantly cheaper water — the agencies pursued an exit strategy. In doing so, they complied with state law and got the go-ahead to pursue the change from the San Diego County Local Agency Formation Commission. The districts will have to pay the county Water Authority $24.3 million over five years to cover exit costs, a sum recommended by agricultural economics expert Michael Hanemann in his independent analysis.
If the authority wins a lawsuit meant to stop the divorce over what it contends are unfair terms, Tuesday’s election results will be set aside. But the authority’s request for emergency action by the Legislature to stymie Rainbow’s and Fallbrook’s departure failed — and if karma is real, so will its lawsuit. The parallels between how the giant Metropolitan Water District of Southern California treated the authority for decades and how it’s treated Rainbow and Fallbrook are obvious.
What should worry elected officials across the state, however, is that the David vs. Goliath perspective that hung over the Rainbow and Fallbrook votes — the sense that this was finally a chance for the little guys to say “enough is enough” to their tormentors — is a sentiment shared by millions of California voters. Water and power rates keep going up, up and away. Meanwhile, the ongoing nightmare related to housing costs may be on the brink of getting even worse. A story Wednesday in the San Francisco Chronicle was only the latest to suggest that home insurance rates could skyrocket as more insurers quit the state rather than navigate its dysfunction. Tuesday’s report that Gov. Gavin Newsom’s approval rating had hit an all-time low in a new UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll — declining in “nearly every major voter category” — was a surprise only to those insulated from the extent of public discontent.
Will this discontent fade and prove a blip on the radar, diminished by the many continuing huge pluses of life in California? That’s very possible. But what is also possible is that this disillusionment translates into a Proposition 13-style paroxysm upending the status quo of state politics. Rainbow and Fallbrook voters are far from the only state residents who are mad as hell and not going to take it anymore — whatever it may be.
