Newsom’s California: From The Golden State to The Garbage State

California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) tacitly admitted last week that California has morphed from the Golden State into the Garbage State.

After launching the $1.2 billion Clean California Initiative in 2021, the state, in cooperation with Caltrans, communities and volunteers, have removed nearly one billion pounds of litter and debris from California’s highways and public spaces since the program’s inception.

Newsom, who is flirting with a 2028 presidential run, bragged on social media that Caltrans has “removed 3.4 million cubic yards of litter and debris from highways and public spaces in California—enough trash to fill more than 136,000 garbage trucks” and is “revitalizing every corner of the state.”

3.4 million cubic yards of litter and debris equals 935,000,000 pounds– nearly one billion pounds of trash strewn along and under the highways and littering public spaces throughout California.

In a July 2022 press conference, Governor Newsom highlighted the Clean California Initiative, stating: “It’s simple: all Californians deserve clean streets. That’s why we’re cleaning up California like never before in our state’s history. I’m proud of the work we’ve done in just one year to make the Golden State a cleaner, safer place to call home – and we’re just getting started.”

The initiative was launched as a three-year, multi-agency jobs, environment, and public education program with a billion dollar price tag. The program includes local grants to entice applicants to participate in the initiative and offers a “Clean California Community” designation for cities and towns that “demonstrate a commitment to cleanliness.” The grants are awarded to local communities, tribes, and transit agencies for projects that include trash removal, landscaping, public art, and overall improvement to public spaces.

Although the program was originally designed to create more than 10,000 jobs, with a focus on hiring people from “underserved communities,” including “incarcerated and unhoused” individuals, hundreds of these jobs were eliminated due to state-wide budget cuts in 2024. In January 2024, state climate programs overall, including Clean California, faced $2.9 billion in cuts.

The Los Angeles-based nonprofit Chrysalis had to shut down crews it operated through the program, leaving dozens without work, and many community grants and related beautification projects have been delayed due to the lack of funding.

The budget cuts to Newsom’s Clean California Initiative also highlight the Governor’s systemic problems related to government inefficiency and largesse, fiscal mismanagement, and the approximate 9,800 hazardous homeless encampments in the Los Angeles area.

One such encampment contributed to the November 2023 Interstate 10 fire after an audit found that Caltrans had failed to perform yearly inspections of freeways. In the audit, Caltrans “found” that they hadn’t conducted annual inspections for the past 15 years. During that timespan, only five inspections were completed. As annual inspections were ignored, both flammable materials like pallets and trash were allowed to pile up, for years, without inspection. The audit also found that Caltrans failed to act when problems had been identified.

As Caltrans was skipping freeway safety audits, they also failed to pick up pallets of trash under and near the 1-10 freeway which gave needed fuel to an arsonist, causing over $3 million in damage and closing a portion of the freeway that serves over 300,000 cars a day.

California not only has a billion dollar trash problem, it has a $37 billion homelessness problem, and these two problems are inextricably linked. No matter how much trash is collected, the 9,800 homeless encampments in Los Angeles are certainly a bio-hazardous impediment to Clean California’s goal of “zero litter.”