I kind of wish Arnold was more vocal about the stupidity of them dismantling what he built. Was only $5.8million/year to maintain the $200million+ initial investment. What a huge waste.
Santa Clara County is hell bent on closing Reid Hillview airport — how quickly they forget that in times of serious disaster, those airports are lifelines. Watsonville was cutoff during the 1989 earthquake and it was the relief flights from GA pilots that kept that town alive during that time. Disaster preparedness is a fundamental role of the state, especially a state like California where you have the potential for huge catastrophes mixed with difficult geography and lots of people.
The idea that a bunch of GA misfits flying their mosquitos will be helpful in case of a major city being cut off by land is something only the AOPA could come up with. In that event they'll be landing C-5's and 744's full of potatoes at SJC. One flight of a 744 is worth 400 GA flights.
I imagine it could have been less than $6 million/year if the state was willing and able to recertify the equipment in the same way the DoD does with medications.
I think state and federal government should work together to create and fund independent state/federal agencies to handle the storage, handling, and certification of stockpiled goods. It'd probably pay for itself fairly quickly.
Edit - That could be a problem for many politicians. I imagine a lot of pork comes from replacing expensive equipment and supplies.
Thing about disaster preparedness that needs to be mentioned over and over. When you do it right, everything looks very easy, like it wasn't a big problem. A good plan may look like you didn't do very much at all, whereas efforts when stuff goes bad because of bad plans can look like a lot of amazing impressive stuff getting done heroically.
Current worst case projections for New York State are for around 30,000 ventilators needed at the peak of the epidemic. 2400 is not insignificant but hardly enough in this case. Nobody predicted or projected the scale of the current crisis in terms of ventilators needed. Germany is best prepared of all countries, has around 30,000. Hopefully we flatten the curve enough so those worst case projections never materialize.
There is going to be a lot of second-guessing after this is all over.
I find it difficult to blame the governor of a state with a $26 billion budget deficit in 2011 for cutting this. How many people were thinking about pandemics then? How many voters would have chosen to keep this program or discontinue it?
We are about to enter another deep recession and similar cuts will be made, which may seem unwise to people a decade from now.
> I find it difficult to blame the governor of a state with a $26 billion budget deficit in 2011 for cutting this. How many people were thinking about pandemics then?
The one who put it in place? Someone had the foresight to implement this program.
It's one thing to forgive someone for not having foresight but it's something else entirely to actively dismantle the fruits of your predecessors foresight.
> It's one thing to forgive someone for not having foresight but it's something else entirely to actively dismantle the fruits of your predecessors foresight.
A pandemic seemed about as improbable then as an alien invasion. What should the government have cut instead? School spending? Social services? How do you think the voters would have responded? Remember that the budget deficit was enormous.
It's pretty hard to defend funding pie-in-the-sky ideas like global pandemics when people have concrete, immediate problems. Just a month ago, the concept of a global pandemic that would shut down a huge portion of the economy seemed insane to 99% of voters.
A pandemic seemed about as improbable then as an alien invasion
People have warned about a global pandemic for decades, and there were a few near misses - Ebola in 2014, SARS, MERS. Bill Gates was quite vocal. It's a 100-year event, something that people prepare against. No sane person builds in the 100-year floodplain!
> No sane person builds in the 100-year floodplain!
Doesn’t that describe most of Florida and the Gulf Coast? In practice many, many people are willing to build on 50-year floodplains, and not in ways that leave a perfectly good house afterwards either. No houses on stilts or anything similar.
Call me tinfoil-hatted, but the ignorant populace is egged on by disaster capitalists, enabled by out-of-control campaign financing in the US. Catastrophe means profits, just look at the bailout package that just went through. Disaster preparedness needs to be overseen by actuaries, but we can't have that.
> No sane person builds in the 100-year floodplain!
Oh, we do that all the time in the UK. They build super-expensive pokey houses with little postage-stamp gardens on 5-year floodplains and all sorts of idiots buy them.
We’ve known that pandemics were going to get more likely as international travel got faster and cheaper, and population density rose and absolute population numbers rose. These factors have been part of the horror stories that epidemiologists tell each other late at night when the lights are out:
“so it was a normal year, and airlines reduced the cost of India to USA flights by 20%,”
horrified gasps (the audience knows where this story is going)
Pandemic might have seemed improbable to you as a layperson, but the medical community has been bracing for this for decades. The less seriously you take it, the less seriously your politicians take it and the less seriously pandemic preparation gets funded.
Only needed $5.8million/year in an overall budget of $129billion. It also resulted in an ultimate loss of an already spent $200million initial investment.
"In televised remarks Monday, Newsom said the state will lease beds in struggling hospitals around the state and is eyeing convention centers, motels and state university dormitories for use as hospital wards. One such lease, in Daly City, may cost the state as much as $3.2 million a month for 177 beds."
Making small investments for the future is what economics is all about.
> Making small investments for the future is what economics is all about.
This isn't economics. It's politics.
How could you sell something like pandemic preparedness in 2011? How could you present a long-term picture, knowing what was known in 2011, and argue that such a thing was a budget priority compared to jobs and social services?
I can't imagine that any politician in 2011 would have been taken seriously when talking about pandemic preparedness, given the context of the massive recession that we were still climbing out of.
Maybe by mentioning the swine flu pandemic that had just happened in 2009? Californians live in earthquake country – they understand preparing for cataclysmic event in the medium-to-far future.
I remember those budget cuts. As far as I could tell, the state engaged in efforts to make the most damaging cuts possible in every department while leaving pet construction projects and similar things alone (cutting state parks really hard for example).
I think it's combination of wanting to demonstrate the seriousness of the problem combined with cutting projects that don't have constituancy.
Yep, you just jogged my memory. I was living and working in Goleta at the time and I definitely recall seeing those folks every time I went to campus and even IV of the course of a few weeks.
Your federal government should use 10% of their yearly defense budget (700 billion) for epidemic/health preparedness. In a way it is part of national defense ...
Reminds me. Prop 13 was passed in the 70's when Brown was governor. One of the things the proponents hammered on was Brown's budget was running a surplus.
Jerry Brown passed the California "rainy day fund" in November 2014 on the same ballot on which he was re-elected. Literally re-elected on a budget surplus platform.
>I find it difficult to blame the governor of a state with a $26 billion budget deficit in 2011 for cutting this.
Getting rid of funding for pandemic preparedness in favor of funding a high speed rail system to nowhere does seem particularly short sighted in retrospect.
That’s what leadership is: being able to make hard choices and selling that to the voters. I haven’t met anyone opposed to disaster preparedness funding, but I have met plenty of people opposed to the bottomless pit spending for various causes du jour.
California objectively seems to operate much better since Prop 25 excluded the minority party from having a say on the budget. The behavior in a two-party system of a minority party that knows it's going to be a minority party indefinitely is frequently to sabotage everything possible in hopes of making the ruling party's life difficult, or to make them look incompetent. Stripping them of power doesn't turn legislating into dictatorial rule by fiat, it just moves it into the consensus-building processes of the majority party. Two-party rules with a sidelined minority party looks a lot like a coalition government in a multi-party system.
The jungle primaries actually make even that case better.
You don't have the case where some nitwit edges out a reasonable candidate in the primary and then wins the general simply because they have (D) or (R) next to their name.
In California's case, if we send two Democrats to the general election, the Republicans get to weigh in on which they find more acceptable. It forces the candidates to the actual center.
It would work that way for two Republican candidates as well, but a whole host of Republicans simply quit after we un-gerrymandered the state.
Edit: I see the msn link was chosen because of no paywall. I wonder if there is a way we can give a h/t to the LATimes as well for the fantastic reporting though.
I'm still of the opinion that pandemic preparedness should be treated like a threat to the nation and part of the military budget. It should not be up to the states to prepare, it should be federal and treated as any other military threat of an unknown enemy. It's crazy to think that we spend so much on tanks and fighter jets and military but can't find some loose change for viral pathogens. What about when the enemy deploys a virus against us?
Does anybody else find it ironic that a Republican governor (Arnold) commissioned the $200m mobile hospitals and that a Democrat (Jerry Brown, subject of one of the best Punk songs ever) dismantled the project?
It depends on the economics and politics of the day. Richard Nixon (R) was a gun control advocate. Most Democrats were on the wrong side of Civil Rights.
I might be projecting; but there is probably a fair amount of overlap between people who are in favour of enacting good emergency preparedness are the same sort of people who like balanced budgets (whether by raising revenue or decreasing costs). Those sort of people seem to struggle in US politics and the electorate doesn't seem to prioritise that sort of thinking.
It isn't surprising that the government would be caught flat-footed by anything that wasn't needing a regular response. Long-term thinkers only get voted in by accident; the public prefers charisma.
>the electorate doesn't seem to prioritise that sort of thinking.
>the public prefers charisma.
Democracy is not really tuned to long term thinking. It's tuned to "the next election cycle", and in places like California elections are happening all the time.
I disagree. A multi-party system exacerbates the problem I'm talking about (lack of long term thinking). If we get government that swings back and forth between multiple parties with vastly different visions for the country every cycle, that seems much worse than swings between two parties that are fairly aligned at their cores.
Just trying to understand: does your comment assume full power swinging between many parties? What about distributed power proportional to party representation?
So I think the US is missing two important things:
1. Preferential voting rather than first-passed-the-post, which is an idiotic system designed the maintain the status quo; and
2. Mandatory voting. The level of voter suppression in the US is simply staggering.
But having a multi-party system doesn't really solve anywhere near as much as you might think. Other countries have this. Israel being one. And there you have single issue and single interest parties who hold a disproportionate sway because they only care about one thing.
In Australia at times we've had a small party (2-5 sEnators out of 76) who hold the balance of power and whatever pet issues they have have to be addressed, which is fine if you agree with them but not so fine if you don't. In times passed this has included the Australian Democrats (whose bargain with the Howard Government to pass GST also led to the downfall of the party in big part) and the Greens. But it could just as easily have been One Nation, a dog-whistle anti-immigration, pro-White party that looks like a real "pioneer" in the Trump era.
Does mandatory voting make things better? My unresearched fear would be that the people who don't bother to vote without mandatory voting are even less informed than the low-informed masses that do vote. If that line of thinking is correct, then it implies that mandatory voting would swamp the polls with masses of people who would be the most easily swayed by political advertising
Mandatory voting fosters a culture where being an informed citizen is part of one's civic duty, but ballot spoiling should absolutely be built into the system. If you force people to shoot up, you need to give people the ability to voice that they don't like any of the options presented, or that they just don't have an opinion.
I think you're projecting, this was cut in the name of balancing the budget by decreasing costs (albeit to help meet a massive budget deficit) if you read the article.
I'm working off the rumors [0] that California has a massive long term problem which is generally being ignored by successive governments. I don't see how they can sustain an emergency preparedness program if they have that sort of business-as-usual preparedness problem. Step 1 to me is always be prepared for the most-likely future case, then step 2 is prepare for progressively less likely scenarios.
That article was written during a booming stock market, too. CalPERS (the retirement fund in question) projects something like 7-8% stock returns to stay even nominally solvent.
If the market doesn't (pretty much fully) recover within the next six months, the entire CA pension system is going to be catastrophically insolvent.
The sad part is that the pension system is already walking dead. They’re going to need a bailout, it’s only now people are starting to have real conversations about it.
Should the CA tax payer pick up the bill for promises made to state employees that were never expected to be payable? We’ll see how that goes. Either way the tax payer and the pensioners lose.
California voters passed Prop 25 which took away the Republicans ability to hold the budget hostage. That took most of the Republicans remaining power away.
The slow dismantling of Prop 13, which Prop 25 played a part in, has certainly helped a lot. However, Proposition 218 remains largely intact, and California's ballot-box budgeting woes are far from over.
I guess if you get your California economic outlook from Grover Norquist's spokesman, you might get an incomplete picture. May I recommend a second source, such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics or other reputable agency?
"The respirators were allowed to expire without being replaced"
WTF? How difficult is it to keep the reserve as FIFO buffer in respirator supply chain? You probably don't even have to take them out of standard shipping container.
When your FIFO is suddenly flooded with a massive time-limited over-supply: a lot gets lost, and re-creating that over-supply really isn't part of your normal operations.
