‘Rebuild California’ With Former Congressman Doug Ose

Former California Congressman Doug Ose says California’s elected officials have lost touch with the concerns of the state’s residents, and the everyday demands of life in California, largely because they are .

California Globe sat down with Ose this week and discussed his effort to save California, and his project, the “Rebuild California Foundation.”

“Where are we today? Where will we be in five, ten or 20 years,” Ose asked. “And how can we undo some of these bad policies?”

“I spend my time thinking on a statewide basis.”

Doug Ose is a former California congressman who served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1999 to 2005, representing California’s 3rd Congressional District. Honoring his term limits pledge of three terms, Ose did not run for reelection, and instead returned to Sacramento and went back into private business.

Rebuild California

Ose addressed many of California’s big-picture issues: water for agriculture and urban use, public education failures, roads and transportation issues, the homeless explosion as well as mental illness and drug abuse, California’s regulatory framework, unaffordable healthcare, among others.

“Our leaders have saddled Californians with new burden after new burden after new burden all in the name of progressivism,” Ose said. This led him to form Rebuild California, a 501 (c) (3), to find an alternative path to solutions “that don’t involve being more socialist,” Ose added.

Rebuild California addresses many of these same issues:

*When our elected officials spend taxpayer resources to provide free healthcare to illegal aliens while fining citizens if they don’t have health insurance…

“Why do parents put up with public schools?” Ose asked. He noted that his children went to public school, but those same schools aren’t performing for the students any longer.

*When our elected officials raise taxes on fuel but refuse to use the money to expand road capacity…

*When our elected officials think that providing $700,000 apartments to mentally ill persons or drug addicts without first providing treatment…

“These 150,000 people living on the streets need medical and mental help,” Ose said.

*When our elected officials refuse to maintain our prisons to constitutionally acceptable standards and a federal judge orders the release of thousands of dangerous criminals back into our communities…

“Then the rest of us are forced to pay the price in the form of higher taxes, worse traffic, aberrant behavior in our parks and on our streets, and increased crime in our communities.”

The annual budget for the state of California has doubled in the last ten years.  “Has your quality of life improved by a similar amount?” Ose asks.

When Gov. Jerry Brown returned to office in 2011, his state budget was $98 billion, and increased to $200 billion by 2018. This was a 110 percent increase in eight years, with a population increase of just three million. Governor Gavin Newsom’s 2020 budget plans to increase overall spending to a historic high of $222 billion, and we haven’t even hit the May 2020 Revise yet.

There is no end in sight to California’s record spending, and Ose said there is no accountability for the ever growing state spending either.

With California’s highest-in-the-nation taxes, Ose said more than 71.5% taxation is going to special interests. This has caused nearly 700,000 Californians to flee the state in just 2018 for greener pastures and more business and taxpayer friendly states.

Absent from most lawmakers’ discussions of California policy is what Ose describes as “the tedious nature of running a business in California.”

Ose noted that legislators are on a 15-minute calendar. “Unless they spend three hours every evening studying up on what they will hear in committees the next day, they’re lost.” And they vote anyway.

One example is Senate Bill 100, but California’s renewables mandates are many and convoluted:

When California’s Global Warming Solutions Act, AB 32, was passed in 2006, it was sold to the public as a necessary step to reduce dangerous carbon emissions. California politicians gloated over being the first state to enact such an aggressive policy. But it didn’t stop there.

In 2015, Gov. Jerry Brown claimed California had an overpopulation problem, and the ongoing drought at the time was proof that the explosion of population in California has reached the limit of what the states’ resources can provide.

“We are altering this planet with this incredible power of science, technology and economic advance,” Brown told the publisher of the Los Angeles Times. “If California is going to have 50 million people, they’re not going to live the same way the native people lived, much less the way people do today.… You have to find a more elegant way of relating to material things. You have to use them with greater sensitivity and sophistication.”

This allowed other climate change bills to infect California. SB 350 by Sen. President pro Tem Kevin Leon (D-Los Angeles), now requires the state to procure 50 percent of electricity from renewable energy and double energy efficiency savings by 2030. But Wait!

In 2018, Gov. Jerry Brown signed Senate Bill 100, also by Sen. Kevin Leon, setting a 100 percent clean electricity goal for the state, and issued an executive order establishing a new target to achieve carbon neutrality – both by 2045. These mandates leave utility companies no wiggle room. Is it any wonder PG&E is in bankruptcy?

Using more renewable energy causes the entire electricity grid to be unreliable because sun and wind are intermittent and inconsistent.

With these strict renewable energy mandates and Brown’s warnings about a statewide population explosion, many in the state wondered why Jerry Brown and Democrats roll out a welcome mat and a Swag Bag full of goodies to illegal aliens and Middle Eastern refugees? This has only made it harder to meet the strict lower carbon emission goals of California’s Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, also known as AB 32 – at least according to Jerry Brown’s rules.

Illegal aliens, who are enticed here with an assortment of freebies and entitlements, fuel Jerry Brown’s “population explosion.”

Ose is dealing not with “what ifs,” but with the realities California’s politicians have legislated. And he wants a long term plan, rather than today’s instant gratification politics.

As Rebuild California addresses, “The unfortunate condition California finds itself in today: out of control homelessness, perpetual traffic gridlock, unaffordable housing, unaffordable healthcare, mental illness and drug abuse rampant, petty crime out of control, failing public K-12 schools,” these issues are big, but not insurmountable, but only if serious adults who are looking ahead 20-30 years, are in charge.