Tim Draper, a silicon valley billionaire, has submitted the paperwork to put dividing California into six states onto the ballot this fall. He needed 800K signatures, but provided 1.3 million. This indicates the idea has more traction than people thought.
The idea behind it is govt in California is too big and indifferent to look after actual resident needs. In particular, trying to enforce laws which make sense in one region but is utterly useless or harmful in another can finally be fixed by creating new state lines. The state lines are a legal identity in the first place: one law on one side, another law on the other. Counties aren't funded well enough, nor do they have the ability to stop obnoxious lawmakers in LA from ruing life in Eureka. Dividing the state into 6 corrects this problem. We'll have all new problems, instead, but at least the new problems won't be the same old hopeless ones. New problems, local problems, can be fixed when the solution has to be local too.
I don't think the sub-states will give a damn if Congress approves the new lines or not. Once it passes on the ballot, it's law as far as the parent-State is concerned, and figuring out the budget and tax laws will be the interesting next step.
Considering my current residence in North California is a weird state which includes lake Tahoe and my home town out near the coast and most of the active wine country with Jefferson border north of me, full of poverty, and Sacramento part of this state, the city nobody really wants. We also end up with Davis, Napa Valley, Sonoma, Alexander Valley, Bodega Bay, Marin County, and Point Reyes. The tax revenues from Marin County and Tahoe will provide plenty of cash for the state, provided they don't spent it all on welfare crapholes like Vallejo and South Sacramento. Those are towns needing dedicated arsonists.
Jefferson contains the two largest dammed reservoirs, and three of the biggest rivers. They also have the most pot growers. And one of their stated goals is legalizing pot. For them, not getting arrested, and growing dope openly, by large volumes, is declaring war on the Mexican smuggling cartels. Serious dope production would strip most of the money out of Mexico, and they'd fight it if they can. But they pretty much can't. Jefferson is too far from Mexico for cross border corruption to work, and any Mexicans caught will be slaughtered. The folks living up there have no compunctions over that sort of extra-legal correction of border patrol corruption. The border patrol lets the smugglers in, the locals kill them when they show up. I wonder what the death toll will end up being? And are the Mexican mob killing drug growers in Colorado this summer? Or are they going to steal their harvests first, so the killing hasn't started yet? In any case, Jefferson is all about the Agriculture, and legalizing the illegal kind. They've got control of the downstream water supply and could easily insist on cutting releases into the Sacramento River in order to refill Shasta and Oroville reservoirs, leaving the rivers very low south of Marysville. I wonder if Sacramento would send troops north to Oroville and try and seize the dam by force? Probably not. Sacramento is all about the bribes. I don't think those will work.
Silicon Valley is welcome to suffering with San Francisco and Berkeley and Oakland in its borders. The arguments should drive lots of rational people out, and the massive tax increase will prove too much for the welfare dependent. Since the water there comes from other states, they are going to find desalination a really important detail. And rue the toxins in the San Joaquin Delta where they pump water near Antioch and around the Bay to Oakland. Hayward and San Jose and the Peninsula get their water from Tracy, which would now be Central California, the Forgotten State. The Salinas Valley remains in agriculture, and the new state holds Big Sur and Monterey and Carmel. In theory, its lots of potential money and jobs and taxes.
Central California has Stockton and Fresno and Merced. Its got Yosemite, so they can make some tourist money. And they've got the Train To Nowhere. Perhaps they'll restore their passenger train system and stations again. Heavy Rail passenger trains like the ACE (Altamont Commuter Express) would work along all those towns on Hwy 99. Lots of orchards and quite a few serious reservoirs and the San Joaquin River. They also have free reign to cutoff LA's access to the Owens River, in the eastern part of the new state, which means they can develop agriculture there again. The Long Valley used to be a serious place for growing crops, like Salinas. The agricultural state should focus on what its good at, and how to deal with its water supply, and whether to pump its water to LA or not.
Western California, which runs from San Luis Obispo into LA and Riverside, and up into the San Bernardino Mountains, would retain its essential character. They will just have to pay FULL PRICE for water, instead of making the rest of us pay. I expect that price to be quite dear, sufficiently expensive to drive the illegals out of the state, which should cut LA's population by about 2/3, and thus reduce their water demand the same amount. That solves much of the problem. Since we already know that the Border Patrol ignores illegals crossing, I suspect it will be necessary to have border patrol guards and inspectors in every state, and after illegals get shot, they'll find it safer not to come here at all. Maybe LA housewives, if there's such a thing, will look after their own damn kids and clear their own damn bathrooms and cook their own damn food. I've never seen or met a Mexican housekeeper up here. As far as I can tell, that's an LA thing. LA can pay full price.
South California, which ironically contains most of the Mojave Desert, Palm Springs, and San Diego and Imperial Valley, needs to renegotiate on their Colorado River water access. If they get it, good for them. San Diego is so alien to me it really feels like another state already. This is where the drug smugglers rule, and the border patrol take long siestas, their entire jobs, their whole careers, letting the aliens waltz across to steal jobs. Not just from me, but from those who came here legally, raised families, and became semiskilled farm labor, like those in the vineyards who are third or fourth or tenth generation American citizens whose ancestors were Mexican once. They don't want competition over wages on the fields they've been working for generations. The voters in Central California will decide. Then negotiate with South California for transportation options.
Congress ignoring the new states will impact the senate, of course, since redrawing the districts and having new elections based on the new districts will need to happen right away, making for some odd changes at the House of Representatives too. Nancy Pelosi said "You can find out about what's in the bill after you vote for it" (how she forced Obamacare into law) can expect to have to choose which state she's in: Vallejo-Napa or Oakland and understand that once she chooses she may be out of the job. As many fuzzy hippies as there are in North California, there's also some grim multimillionaires who think she needs to be kicked to the curb with the rest of the trash. Redistricting has a huge impact on survival, which is why her evil political party is so ruthless about it to retain power, and when you consider that the majority of the state of California is utterly republican, the danger to her is real. More dangerous if she somehow stays in power since that may result in some unusual response to correct. No idea what that would be, but when a problem presents itself, folks find solutions. California is about crushing dreams, after all. That Jiminy Cricket wishing crap is LA BS.
If California succeeds in dividing, and finally settles down into rational govt instead of mocking itself with incompetence, other states will follow. And there's been quite a few of these movements over the years.
- Eastern Oregon has nothing in common with damned Portlandia. A Portland-Vancouver city-state would probably make both the states they're pulled from breathe a sigh of relief.
- Eastern Washington has nothing in common with Seattle. Seattle is too much like Berkeley, and Eastern Washington just wants to see the Apple Harvest.
- Most of Nevada finds Las Vegas to be ugly, disgusting, and just another suburb of LA.
- Colorado wants to divide the Western Slope from Denver, and the plains part of the state thinks they'd like to divide too.
- West Texas and South Texas need to be different states from Dallas North Texas and East Texas, which is nearly Louisiana according to folks who have been there. Austin Texas is sort of like Berkeley politics, which offends most Texans. Shoving that into a state full of oil wells and rednecks would be a great joke on them.
So yeah, it would happen here first, but we'll see other states follow and pretty soon there would be a hundred states, and DC can try and manage Puerto Rico. Good luck with that. I don't care. I'm only interested in local issues, local problems, local solutions.
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