Little breakthroughs on big issues
Tackling housing, oil, voting rights, and more
Welcome to a Thursday evening edition of Progress Report.
Before we dive in, I just want to take a moment to update and thank everyone who donated to the fundraiser for Sharon Bogat-Weathley, the pro-union who was illegally fired by Amazon this summer. Thanks entirely to your generosity, Sharon raised enough money to pay the security deposit on an apartment, so she can finally move into a place of her own again and focus on rebuilding her life and finances. I’m immensely proud that this community was able to come through in her time of need.
Speaking of Amazon, I reported and produced this new video report on the effort to unionize new Starbucks-AmazonGo hybrid store in Times Square. The two corporations are making employees do twice the work for no extra pay in one of the busiest locations in the world.
And now, let’s get to the news — we’ve got coverage of voting rights, potential health care breakthroughs, righteous threats to the oil industry, and more to discuss. We’re running a feature on Sunday that I’ve been working on since before the election, so get excited for that, too.
Voting Rights
Mississippi: It looks as if the ballot initiative process may be making a comeback sooner rather than later.
In 2021, the Mississippi Supreme Court, faced with the scary dual prospects of democracy working and cancer patients being permitted to ease their pain with marijuana, decided to toss out the entire ballot initiative system on a dumb technicality. Republican legislators in the state House then sought to reinstate the process under tweaked qualification rules, only to have the whole thing fall through when the Senate sought to craft rules that would have made it nearly impossible to qualify a ballot initiative anyway.
A new report quotes one of the lead legislators on the House side as saying that they’re close to a breakthrough, and likely one that will make direct democracy actually accessible.
“It would have been unattainable to have such a big threshold of signatures,” Shanks said. If you increased it that much, the only initiative, at that point, would be a large corporation with money to spend.”
However, after a summer’s worth of meetings, Shanks said the Senate is slowly but surely inching closer to the House’s original number.
“I’ve run into the lieutenant governor several times and he’s actually brought it up to me, so I think he’s ready to do something,” Shanks said on a recent episode of MidDays with Gerard Gibert. “I think we’ll be able to get that knocked out.”
Ironically, any new ballot initiative system would first have to be approved by voters on a direct referendum.
Texas: Speaking of overruling the will of the people over some minor weed liberalization, everything is bigger in Texas:
Five cities passed the decriminalization ballot measures with strong margins on November 8, but city councils and officials in at least three of those localities are facing criticism from advocates over their attempts to undermine the reforms. In Harker Heights, for example, the city council voted last week to repeal the ordinance altogether.
In Denton, meanwhile, local officials haven’t pursued an outright repeal of the reform measure that voters approved there, but they have challenged key provisions, saying that the city isn’t authorized to direct police to make the prescribed policy changes. However, the mayor and city manager have said that low-level cannabis offenses will continue to be treated as low law enforcement priorities.
We’ve been supporters of the folks behind Ground Game Texas, the grassroots organization that launched and ran these initiatives, for a long time now. It’s a great theory of change, with these initiatives serving multiple purposes: They’re a way to implement good policy, sign up new voters, and get people engaged with government that can be responsive to their needs. Thankfully, Ground Game Texas will be fighting back against these violations of democracy, because the result now is showing people that their vote doesn’t matter.
Boston: If governments think 16- and 17-year-olds can handle the responsibility of giving birth and raising children, there’s no reason for them not to give people that age the right to vote. In Boston, legislators just got one step closer to doing just that.
The Boston City Council voted overwhelmingly Wednesday to give 16- and 17-year-olds the right to vote in municipal elections, but the prospects of the proposed change becoming reality remain murky.
The 9-to-4 vote sends a home-rule petition that would implement expanded eligibility to Mayor Michelle Wu. If she signs it, it will then go to the state Legislature, which has chosen not to support similar proposals from several other Massachusetts communities.
If the Legislature breaks from that pattern and backs Boston’s proposal, it will also need to be approved by the governor — in all likelihood, current Governor-elect Maura Healey — in order to take effect.
There’s definitely a long way to go, but we’re seeing this happen in more and more cities. That could include Culver City, right outside LA, where an initiative on allowing 16- and 17-year-olds to vote in local elections looks likely to be decided by just three votes.
Health Care
Medicaid: After fierce battles and a heartbreaking near-miss in North Carolina, the Democratic governors in both that state and Kansas may be close to finally pushing Medicaid expansion over the finish line.
Will Lawrence, Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly’s chief of staff, said the governor plans to introduce a bill in both chambers and tour the state talking about Medicaid expansion, which would cover 150,000 people. He said he’s “optimistic that we’ll get something done” with the governor entering her second and final term and Republicans less concerned about giving her political wins that would factor into a reelection campaign.
Some Republicans may be bending toward passing Medicaid expansion due to the ongoing collapse of rural hospitals, which have suffered rightly under a new paradigm of big monopoly systems. Medicaid expansion would provide many of them the funds needed to keep the lights on.
Big Oil
Maine: This is exciting in so many different ways: A ballot measure to create a publicly owned power company is moving closer to qualifying for the ballot in Maine.
An effort to buy out Maine’s two foreign-owned utilities to create a consumer-owned utility known as Pine Tree Power Company is moving forward and could be on the statewide ballot in Nov. 2023.
In July 2021, Gov. Janet Mills vetoed a bill passed by the legislature that would have created Pine Tree Power. She said that bill was hastily drafted and amended in the legislature, but she acknowledged that Maine’s utilities need to perform better.
Backers of the initiative collected enough signatures to get it sent to the legislature, which can either adopt it as a law as is or send it to voters. Either way, a publicly owned public utility would be a huge accomplishment in this time of price gouging and ongoing privatization.
California: The big oil companies that are facing a prospective windfall tax on gas profits decided not to show up to a key meeting called by the California Energy Commission on Tuesday.
Chevron, Marathon, PBF Energy, Phillips 66 and Valero — all declined to participate in the hearing. In letters to the commission, most said speaking publicly about their operations, maintenance and inventory levels would force them to divulge trade secrets.
PBF Energy, however, added that “the politicization of this issue by Governor Newsom, heightened by the misleading information he released and commented on related to our (2022 3rd quarter) earnings, precludes us from participating in this hearing.”
According to PBF Energy’s Q3 financial report, the company’s profit jumped from $59.1 million last year to $1.06 billion this year — an increase of nearly 1700%.
The findings of that hearing will be crucial as the legislature debates the windfall tax bill in the comings days and weeks.
Education
North Carolina: Some good news for public schools in NC, which just rejected two for-profit charter school systems from fast-tracking approval and cashing in on tax dollars.
ALA-Monroe would pay Charter One, an Arizona-based management firm, a 15% management fee. The money would be taken off the top of state funding the school receives. Charter One manages more than two dozen schools in Arizona, North Carolina, South Carolina and Nevada. Six of the schools it manages are in North Carolina and include Wake Preparatory Academy, a large K-12 school located in Franklin County near the Wake County line.
Smaller, North Carolina-based American Traditional Academies would charge Legacy Classical a 14% management fee, State board vice Chairman Alan Duncan said. He added that a 14% fee would apply to federal monies as well. Legacy Classical would be the first school managed by the EMO.
Republicans on the state Board of Education were not happy with the decision, because destroying public schools by shifting their funding to for-profit, religious private schools has now become a mainstream policy in the GOP.
Arizona: Unfortunately, a whole lot of money is going to charter schools in the Grand Canyon State via a new school vouchers program.
Arizona will spend at least $313 million on education vouchers this school year, according to the Arizona Department of Education's first quarterly report on the program since the Legislature made vouchers available to all students.
Since the end of last school year, the Empowerment Scholarship Account program has more than doubled in size. It now covers more students than many school districts in the state. Families can use the funds for tuition at a private school, tutoring services, therapy services and learning materials like books or art supplies.
Gov. Doug Ducey and the legislature jammed a gigantic school voucher bill downtime throats of Arizonans that voted just two years ago to tax the rich and use the proceeds to fund public education. The state Supreme Court tossed that result (sound familiar?) and now the public is stuck with this. Make no mistake, this is going to be a remarkable boon for private and religious schools, which will have their expensive tuitions subsidized by the state.
Affordable Housing
Colorado: Well this would be cool:
On the heels of a successful campaign to direct Colorado income tax dollars toward affordable housing, a ballot proposal for Colorado’s 2023 electionwould impose a fee on every real estate transaction in the state to fund affordable housing.
The Community Attainable Housing Fee ballot proposal submitted by an unnamed group last month to the Colorado Legislative Council would impose a 0.1% fee on all real estate deals in the state.
Colorado communities across western Colorado are harvesting record-high revenues from sales and lodging taxes as well. Combined with soaring real estate transfer tax revenues, voter-approved new taxes on short-term rentals and a surge of federal stimulus and infrastructure dollars, communities are seeing a once-in-a-generation bounty of income for capital projects.
Colorado has been booming for years, and in part due to state tax laws, it has a serious affordable housing crisis. Home prices are going through the roof, making this a potential great source of further construction of affordable units.
Wait, Before You Leave!
Progress Report has raised over $7 million dollars for progressive candidates and causes, breaks national stories about corrupt politicians, delivers incisive analysis, and continues to grow its paid reporting team. Yes, we pay everyone.
None of the money we’ve raised for candidates and causes goes to producing this newsletter or all of the related projects we put out. In fact, it costs me money to do this. So to make this sustainable, hire new writers, and expand, I need your help.
For just $5 a month, you can buy a premium subscription that includes:
Premium member-only newsletters with original reporting
Exclusive access to group chats
Financing new projects and paying new reporters
You can also make a one-time donation to Progress Report’s GoFundMe campaign — doing so will earn you a shout-out in an upcoming edition of the big newsletter!