Despite its extraordinary advantages and unmatched promise, California faces profound challenges: the highest cost of living in the continental United States, a shrinking middle class, nearly half of the nation’s unsheltered homeless population, and the second-lowest rate of homeownership in America.
Unfortunately, we hear this tale all too often. We know that California can work better for more people, but year after year, vital funding approved by voters and appropriated by the Legislature disappears into a maze of agencies, programs, and bureaucratic silos with little public visibility into whether those funds are achieving their intended purpose, although often well intentioned.
Californians deserve a government that measures results, tracks outcomes, and provides clear accountability for every public dollar spent — especially on the state’s most urgent challenges — from housing and homelessness to infrastructure and public safety.
Thankfully, Proposition 41 will help solve this problem.
Prop. 41 is simple and smart. It requires the independent State Auditor — an existing, non-partisan position in California — to conduct public financial and performance audits of programs seeking new special tax funding. This includes identifying potential savings by addressing fraud, waste and mismanagement, which helps to streamline state spending and get funding to the programs where it should go. It will also shed light on the effective programs where we can learn lessons to amplify areas where the state excels in providing effective affordable services.
It’s hard to believe this doesn’t already exist. But thankfully, we can make it happen, by supporting Prop. 41.
The measure also requires the independent State Auditor to conduct ongoing and future audits — all public — that will ensure continued oversight, accountability and assurances that tax dollars are being spent efficiently. Radical sensibility.
We value catching and correcting problems, not just throwing our hands in the air in despair. Let’s not give up on expecting that taxpayer dollars are to be used as intended, when intended.
A poignant example of this is California’s homelessness crisis. In recent years, California has directed roughly $24 billion toward housing and homelessness programs, spread across nine state agencies and more than 30 programs.
While well meaning, the council responsible for coordinating this work was not consistently tracking spending or evaluating whether the programs were effective.
Billions of dollars could not be evaluated for success because the outcome data simply did not exist, and when an audit was finally conducted, it couldn’t determine whether most of them were cost-effective, because the state had never collected the data needed to tell.
One program that promised 20,000 housing units for unhoused individuals experiencing serious mental illness delivered fewer than 1,800 in six years.
California taxpayers deserve more, and so do the beneficiaries of these life-saving programs.
It took an independent audit to force the state to begin collecting basic data on whether its homelessness spending works. Prop. 41 builds that oversight in from the start. It requires audits that assess whether spending is achieving its intended outcome, and requires ongoing audits every four years so problems are caught and corrected instead of repeated.
In a recent survey conducted by Public Opinion Research in conjunction with FM3, voters across California are very concerned with how taxpayer dollars are being spent on critical programs, failing to provide accountability or transparency in how taxpayer dollars are used. In fact, sixty-three percent think that the state government will only fix wasteful spending if independent oversight and public reporting are required by law, which is exactly what Prop. 41 would do.
The same survey found that 84% of voters think state politicians are not spending tax dollars efficiently, 72% of voters give California a failing grade in efforts to address homelessness, 62% of voters think that California is failing to spend tax dollars effectively and that a majority of voters think that at least half of every dollar the state spends is lost to waste, mismanagement or fraud.
That’s a lot of discontent with how tax dollars are being spent and frankly, Californians deserve better.
California voters have approved more than $200 billion in special taxes, bonds and dedicated revenue over the last two decades, and a review of these revenue measures has found a persistent pattern of hoarded funds, missing data, broken promises, ballooning costs and devastating impacts for Californian’s most vulnerable.
When our accountability measures fail, millions of Californians, including working families, low-income students, people who rely on Medi-Cal for access to health care, the unhoused, those facing mental health crises, and communities of color are the ones who suffer the most. We have to do better.
With more transparency and accountability, our tax dollars can actually provide the services and serve the programs that California needs. We hope that voters join the New California Coalition, along with other good government groups, auditing experts, small businesses and community advocates in voting YES on Proposition 41.
Tracy Hernandez is the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of The New California Coalition, a non-partisan civic organization and grassroots advocacy group for millions of voters across the state.