So there's a story in the local news that the City of Fresno is planning
to do some stuff with this big lot near chik Chancy Park. They want
to put in a big parking garage and a new housing unit. It's going
to be discussed on the Thursday city council meeting. Basically that they want to
build an affordable housing unit and a parking garage on this one lot that's just
south of chi Chancy Park. So basically there's a lot. Basically it's bounded
by let's see, what are the streets here, corner of the corner of
H Street and Mono Street in downtown Fresno, sort of south of chik Chancy
Park. So and it goes along H Street as far as in you,
and it kind of stops it in you, all right. So it's actually
it's right next to the big parking lot that people use for parking to go
to Grizzlies games. Now I am sort of questioning this a little bit.
And granted I'm coming from a place of not knowing all the ins and outs,
but I think there are some questions. I think the whole project of
downtown revitalization is just completely fraud right now due to a number of problems.
One the disastrous developments that have happened over the last several years with the high
speed rail that which is going to be a signature building block component of our
downtown revitalization efforts over the next twenty years. Building this big new high speed
rail station which was sold to Fresno. And let's recall that the citizens of
Fresno County voted for the ballot initiative to establish the high speed rail, a
majority of Fresno County voted for it. The high speed rail was sold to
Fresno as this will be the great connector. It's going to connect Fresno to
the rest of California. You know, a high speed rail system connecting you
know, Los Angeles to San Francisco, you know San Diego, San Francisco,
and Fresno will be a hub in it. And this will allow Fresno
to This will fundamentally transform the economy of the San Lanquin Valley, will give
us connection to the rest of the state that we've never been able to have
before. Well, that fundamental promise is no more. All we have a
commitment for and boy, the state legislature and state legislators from Los Angeles are
really grouse have been grousing about this for years now. The only commitment we
really have right now is Mercaid to bake Field, that the high speed rail
is going to go from Merced to Bakersfield. We're struggling to get the funding
even to complete that. Even that is ludicrously expensive. And the you know,
the the commitment from Governor Newsom, who's not going to be around forever,
by the way, who's going to be out of office, you know,
this time two years from now, and maybe we have a pharaoh who
knows not, you know, a pharaoh who knows not Joseph in the governor's
office two years from now. The commitment from Governor Newsom is we're going to
finish the Merced to Bakersfield stretch to establish the viability of the broader system.
And there's nothing about a Merced to Bakersfield train that demonstrates the viability of a
train that's supposed to connect San Francisco to La Nothing about the conditions between of
travel within the San Joaquin Valley is at all similar to the conditions of travel
that would have to take place for a genuine San Francisco to La connection even
down to like logistical construction legal Okay, you know, if you're using eminent
domain to seize a corner of farmer McGregor's field out in the middle of nowhere,
you know, north of Madera somewhere, that is a lot less costly
than trying to seize property in downtown San Francisco, or property you know in
Burbank or something for the high speed rail to go through. It's also,
I think also there's the just a physical engineering difficulty building the high speed rail
across the San Joaquin Valley. We're said to Bakersfield, which is the flattest,
least populous, least mountainous stretch of the high speed rail is going to
be a lot easier and does not demonstrate the viability of building, you know,
trying to build a high speed rail train where you have to somehow blast
through the grapevine. You can't really go over the grapevine, it's too steep,
So you got to blast through the grapevine somehow through the mountains. You've
got two different sets of mountains. You got to figure out how to cross.
You got to figure out how to build a train. That's able to
withstand being built over the San Andreas fault. Anyway, the high speed rail
station is supposed to be this big hub of downtown Fresno revitalization, and I
just don't think very many people are going to use it. And the estimates
for the number of people who are going to use the high speed rail they
keep going down. As has you know, with the development of Tesla did
not exist in two thousand and four, the continued development of electric cars and
California's California's commitment to this wasn't my commitment, California's commitment that by twenty thirty
five, one hundred percent of all the new cars being sold in the state
are going to be electric cars. With that commitment from the state, the
reasons for building the high speed rail, the environmental reasons for building the high
speed rail, get fewer people driving gas power of cars, that rationale is
going down. So I just don't think a lot. We're going to build
this big train station, and I just wonder how quickly it's going to turn
into a husk. I just wonder how quickly it's going to look like an
abandoned Greyhound station. Added on to that, the city had all these grand
plans for downtown revitalization that we're premised around this promise from the State of California
made in the bumper days of twenty twenty two. So in those rosy sunshine
days for the state budget where we had a big old budget surplus because the
state was flush with federal COVID money, Governor Newsom makes this grand pledge to
good old Jerry Dyer. Hey, Jerry, we're going to give you two
hundred and fifty million dollars for downtown development. Here's the first fifty and then
in twenty twenty three we'll give you one hundred million, and then in twenty
twenty four we'll give you one hundred million. Wow. Thank you so much,
mister Governor. This is great. I Jerry Dyer, trust your promises.
I shouldn't be too mean to Jerry Dyer about all this. I mean,
you know, Newsom is the only governor he is able to deal with.
So you know that's the whatever promise he can get is the promise he
can get. It's not his fault that Gavin Newsom is not great on keeping
promises. So twenty twenty three comes along. Oh sorry, city friends,
No, you know that one hundred million dollars we were supposed to give you
this year and one hundred million dollars next year. We're gonna just bump that
to next year. We're gonna we're gonna delay that by one year cause the
state budget is facing a massive deficit in twenty twenty three. Now that we're
out of the sunshine days of twenty twenty two, where we're a dishing out,
you know, grants left and right, giving a million dollars to a
planned parenthood clinic and Fresno just for funzies. No, sorry, guys,
we're out of money. So we're gonna bump your one hundred million dollars instead
of twenty three and twenty four, we're gonna bump it to twenty four to
twenty five. Then last week we hear, oh, sorry, guys,
we gotta bump it by another year. So now it's gonna be in twenty
five twenty six. So the city's plan for this lot, and again this
is the proposal here is it's this lot bordered by H Street and Mono Street,
a sort of Inyo H Street, Mono Street or sort of the streets
that are sort of nearby. It's the This is the lot that's right next
to the main parking lot that people use for going to Grizzlies games. We're
gonna take this lot and we're gonna turn it into lower income housing plus a
parking garage the point. And we're going to use that first installment of fifty
million dollars to pay for it. Now, the idea for the two hundred
and fifty MILI was to help support projects like this, build more parking struct
matures, build more housing units. You know. I think the city's plan
was to have you know, part of the way to revitalize downtown is we
need more people to live there. We need more people to live there in
order to sustain more businesses. So I think the overall plan with Okay,
if we have all this two hundred and fifty million dollars, is to do
all the infrastructure and building necessary for ten thousand more people to live in downtown
Fresno. Okay, it's an ambitious goal, understandable goal. You want more
people there that will support more businesses, that will help revitalize downtown. So
we're going to use this fifty million just for that. But the problem is,
from my way of looking at it. You know, halfway doing something
is almost can in certain circumstances, almost be worse than doing nothing at all.
So I guess this is my fear. We've got this money, so
we're gonna build housing, We're gonna build a parking lot, will put in
some more people. But if that two hundred million dollars never comes through,
and that is, by the way, my prediction, I don't think that
two hundred million is ever coming, or at the very least, I think
it's gonna get delayed far enough out that it's gonna be in the hands of
another governor. Basically, the problem the state faces is that our normal for
the state budget is going to be deficits for the foreseeable future. California is
way dependent on a really rather small band of high income taxpayers, a relatively
small number of people who are sustaining the entire tens of billions of dollars state
budget through they're paying a very high income taxes and particularly very high capital gains
taxes, and the amount that the state has been collecting in capital gains taxes
especially has dropped like a stone basically from like twenty two to twenty I think
it was from twenty one to twenty two or twenty two to twenty three,
the amount of capital gains taxes dropped by like eighteen billion dollars. So basically
people were selling off their assets and not wanting to invest in California or pulling
their investments from California. Capital gains tax, by the way, that's the
tax that you pay for selling an investment, some kind of investment, either
real estate, property or stock or something. So when you buy a stock
at X value, the value of the stock increases by let's say, the
value of the stock increases by a million dollars. When you sell that stock,
you then pay capital gains tax on it. But it's only when you
sell it. You don't pay tax on gains that you have not yet realized.
You have to realize them by selling the stock first. Anyway, we're
getting way less revenue from that. So I guess this is the question that
needs to be asked for the city council. What if the other two hundred
million doesn't come through, is it wise then to build this housing unit here
and this parking garage If the rest of the downtown revitalization program is just not
happening, we'll dig into that question more after the break. This is the
John Girardi Show on Power Talk. The city wants to buy this lot,
or well, the city wants to develop rather this lot just south of Grizzly
Stadium into a housing unit and a parking garage, using the first fifty million
dollars of the total of two hundred and fifty million dollars that the State of
California has pledged to give for downtown development. I think someone's got to ask
some questions about, you know, the idea of a job half done,
of a job half done or in this case, one fifth done, and
whether that is worse than a job not done at all. So let me
explain, we're going to use part of the first fifty million dollars that the
State of California gave us for downtown development. And again the idea was fifty
million dollars in twenty twondred million in twenty three, one hundred million twenty twenty
four. Then that got pushed to, well, instead of twenty three and
twenty four, we'll do it in twenty four to twenty five, And now
it's been pushed to Okay, well, we'll hit you up in twenty five,
twenty six. So who knows if that two hundred million is coming in
My guess is that it's going to continue being kicked down the can as we
have, you know, deficit budget after deficit budget, year after year in
California, and that eventually we will get to a point where maybe it's not
Governor Newsom, maybe it's governor somebody else who says, hey, Fresno,
we don't have this money. We're not going to give it to you.
I know Gavin Newsom pledged it, but I'm not going to give it.
Sorry. I think the city kind of needs to just plan as if that
two hundred million's never coming. That's my thought. I think they need to
start planning as if that two hundred million might never come, because I don't
think it will. And so here's the thing. Yes, that two hundred
fifty million was in part designed to sustain one more housing in downtown Fresno at
a population of about ten thousand, additional people to downtown Fresno that will help
support and sustain businesses. There are parts of downtown Fresno that are ghost towns,
that are sparsely populated. Basically, we can't really sustain enough business down
there. We don't have enough people down there, so let's have more people
down there. To have more people, you need more housing, all right.
If you're gonna have more people, you're gonna have more business. You
need more parking. Parking has always been a problem in downtown Fresno. Let's
build more parking, okay, but the other But then there's the other less
sexy stuff that we were supposed to do with that two hundred and fifty million.
There was a lot of stuff with sewer, basically sewer stuff that needed
to be revitalized, water drainage stuff that needed to be revitalized, and that's
what a lot of that money was going towards. I guess I'm sort of
wondering if we're going to use this first fifty million. Are we using this
first fifty million the right way? Should we? How would we be using
this first fifty million if we thought this is the only fifty million that we
are going to get from the state. Obviously, it seems like we're a
little hemmed in as far as the kinds of things we can use the money
on. Has to be for downtown, has to be for certain kinds of
development, and I'm sure, there are more strings attached to this money,
but I sort of wonder, like, are there other things that we need
to do that are are there? Basically, what is the wisest way to
use this If this is all we're going to get, And that's the thing,
I'm afraid this is all we're going to get. Are we going to
have enough as far as infrastructure to support the new people coming into this housing
unit? Is just building one lower income housing unit? How much is that
going to help sustain business growth downtown? Are we just going to bring in
more people who aren't sustaining business growth? I mean, is this going to
be a middle class community that's coming in. I mean, certainly people who
are sub middle class need a place to live. I mean that that's critically
important. I guess I'm just not sure that this development is going to really
vitalize you know, you know, booming businesses in downtown or the hottest the
hottest restaurant in Fresno. Is this new place in downtown everyone's talking about.
People are coming from all of the city. You have to at some point
be able to build and sustain businesses that people want to drive from Northeast Fresno.
To go to go visit and go see and I don't know that we're
I don't know that just doing this is going to sustain it. And maybe
it's unreasonable to expect that. And honestly, I saw this in I think
it was in the Fresno b this idea in politics that there is a good
answer, that there's always some good answer, there's something that someone should be
doing to fix the problem, there's a fix for the problem. Where After
Governor Knwsom announced, yeah, we're delaying the two hundred million dollars by a
second year to Fresno, Fresno B has this editorial saying that the city leaders
need to hold Gavin Newsom accountable for his promise to bring to bring this pledged
fund to the city of Fresno. How that's easy to say in an editorial,
they need to hold him accountable. Newsom has no accountability. Newsom has
won three elections. Now he's in his second term. He's not running for
reelection anymore. He's not account He doesn't need to give a flying rip about
what voters think. Nobody's gonna try and recall him again after the disaster of
the first recall. Accountability what do you mean accountability? He made a dumb
promise when the state was flush with money, and now he realizes he can't
follow through with it because we have deficit. What do you mean accountability?
Guys, there just might not be a solution for this. We might have
just totally screwed up downtown development. Through one the high speed rail, which
construction is taking flipping forever. We're gonna have this big old train station that's
supposed to have all these businesses and all these things that for a train that
I just that both I doubt and the research is indicating fewer and fewer people
are interested in riding on. So I don't know who's going to all these
people who are allegedly going to be at this train station supporting all these businesses,
allegedly building one new lower income housing unit with this fifty million dollars,
And maybe there's more we can build. I don't know. Maybe I'm overstating
this, but we're limited in how much more housing we can build if we're
not also going to use the other two hundred million dollars for infrastructure stuff,
for sewage stuff, water drainage stuff, all the other stuff you need to
sustain this grand plan of ten thousand more people living in downtown. Maybe we're
just completely screwed. You've got the again, it's not just that the high
speed rail is not a lot of people are gonna write it in the meantime
until it's established. It's completely gunking up downtown with all the construction that's taking
forever to actually build the stinking thing. I don't know, like, well,
well, we got to be sure to hold Gavin Newsom accountable for that
money. We can't hold him accountable. He's accountable to nobody. He fears
neither God nor man. Even when he was up for reelection, What does
he care if every single person in the city of Fresno votes against him,
He'd still win with sixty percent of the vote. He fundamentally doesn't give a
rats behind about being accountable for Again, what was probably just a dumb promise
he made for the one year where our state had a big old budget surplus
because we had a bunch of COVID money, And he's probably just regretting it
now. All right, when we return, I want to talk about this
as far as my long running opinion that the central value should be its own
state illness happened, but why it should be its own state and the idea
of what a state is or should be. Next on The John Girardi Show,
I want to talk about my long standing belief that the Central Valley,
the San Joaquin Valley, should be its own state, even though I'm somewhat
ambivalent about this because I think every project for splitting the state of California up
is kind of a helpless lost cause and doomed to fail just because of the
basic political realities of the US Senate. If you actually created a state called
San Joaquin, basically the way that you do it that people first have to
understand, how do you create a new state? How does a new state
come into being? Well, basically you need a vote on the part of
whatever existing state the proposed new state is being created out of. Okay,
So the California State Legislature would have to vote to say, yes, we
are authorizing the approval of the establishment of a new state to be separated from
US in California based on this territory. So the State of California would have
to vote for it, and Congress would have to vote for it. And
there's no way that's going to happen. All right, First, I just
highly doubt that state legislators would go for it. I don't know that a
lot of our Central Valley legislators would even go for it, even the Democrat
most of the Democrat legislators, I don't know that they'd actually go for it.
They like the Central I mean, the Central Valley, for one thing,
gives California a bunch of extra electoral College votes every presidential cycle. And
the only way that Congress would vote to approve it is if there was some
kind of even split as far as the likely new Senate seats that we'd be
generated by creating a new state. So they're not going to vote to establish
a new state of Central California. If that's going to just give Republicans two
more seats in the US Senate. Democrats are not going to stand for that.
They would want to, you know, simultaneously create some other Democrat stronghold
state that would guarantee them to extra Senate seats and plus Democrats really like getting
that big fat stack of however many electoral College votes California has, I think
it's about fifty. California gives the Democrat candidate for president fifty electoral college votes
every single election, so Democrats don't want to give that up. That's the
only way they that's like the cornerstone, the foundational building block of Democrats winning
presidential elections is they start with this huge fifty electoral college vote advantage. So
they're not going to give that up. They don't want to risk that.
So it's never going to happen. Let me preface that, but by rights
it should. Let me explain why I think a lot of us just kind
of accept the boundaries of the current fifty American states as a given, like
this is just the way it is, California being as big as it is
both physically but also population wise, and I think both are important. Actually,
it's just kind of taken as this as a given. Well, that's
just how California is. And people meet proposals for splitting the state into smaller
states with a mixture of bewilderment and like, that's ridiculous. Why would you
split up California? As if the boundaries of the state of California were drawn
by the hand of God himself? What is a state? What is a
state supposed to be? Now, the founding fathers had all read their Aristotle.
They were all sort of educated westernmen, had all read Aristotle's political theory,
and they were also reading Enlightenment thinkers political theory. But I think there's
still a decent bit of Aristotle that's sort of rattling around in them. And
Aristotle's politics, one of the things he does is kind of describes what a
polus is supposed to be, and the polis, the Greek word polis polis
was kind of the main building block of governance of political communities in ancient In
the ancient Greek world in which Aristotle was writing, the polis that was sort
of the central political entity, sort of like the way countries are today.
That's sort of what polises were, and alis for Aristotle was basically a city
center and its outlying rural environs, the suburbs, the smaller villages, smaller
cities surrounding the big city, so Athens and its surrounding area, Sparta and
its surrounding area. That was sort of the most fundamental way that Plato and
Aristotle, Greek political thinkers, the way they thought of politics was with the
building block of the polis. So a polis for Aristotle made sense as a
community bound together by shared ties of loyalty, affection, love that's based in
sort of various kinds of commonalities. We are all this kind of a people,
this kind of a people with this kind of in this for Aristyle,
this kind of a racial background, this kind of a shared history, this
kind of a shared religion, this kind of shared devotion and cults to these
particular kinds of gods. This kind of people does this kind of thing.
And you could see with the different city states of Greece, the different pulleys
of Greece, that their form of government even was different from place to place,
depending on the character of the city. So one of the things people
talk about Athens was the first true democracy. That's true, but all of
the city states of Greece had, or many of the major city states of
Greece, most of them did have some form of basically an ability for the
citizenry to vote as a body on certain kinds, on laws of different kinds.
Okay, so they weren't. It's not like Athens was the one government
that wasn't a monarchy and everyone else was a monarchy. Even city states like
Sparta that had some kind of monarchy. They actually had two hereditary monarchical lines
in Sparta. Even in those places there was some sort of assembly or boult
as the Greek word was, where people would vote on stuff, and the
idea was Greece was characterized by what's called hoplight warfare, where the standard fighter
was a hoplight, a heavily armed infantry infantryman. Where the idea in the
ancient Greek world was that you provided your own gear. Okay, so it's
your sword that you paid for, your helmet, your armor that you paid
for, and you served as a hoplight defending the city, defending the police.
And basically the idea was, well, if you're fighting, you get
a vote on whether or not we go to fight. So pretty much every
city state had some sort of mechanism for and this is also a little bit
reflected in the Roman Republic and its republican system that a lot of their voting
bodies of the citizenry were There was one in particular that was almost set up
like a military unit. So basically the idea was if you fight, you
get to vote. And Athens there form of warfare was actually, yes,
they did do hotlight warfare, but also they had a navy. They were
the most developed naval power in the Agan world. And to be in the
navy you just needed to pull an ore, You just needed to row.
You didn't need to have all the money to afford all the expensive hotplight armor.
So hey, if I'm going to be on this boat rowing to go,
if to fight in this war, I should have a vote too.
And that's part of the reason why some people think that Athens in particular was
a democracy. Was more spread out anyway, So sorry to get on that
tangent. That's why more Athenians voted than did Spartans or Thebans or whatever.
So the character of the place is what made the political community, that all
of these people who are bound together by common interest, economic interests, social
interest, religious interests. Aristotle probably would have emphasized more so than we would
today racial and religious union. Unity. But these common ties of affection and
love that give you sort of an identity as I am this kind of a
person. And when you look at California, do we really have that?
I mean, when someone asks me, are you a Californian? I mean
I don't really identify as a Californian. I don't think of myself as first
and foremost a Californian. I might say I'm an American, or I'm from
Fresno, I'm from the San Joaquin Valley. I have a much stronger cultural
life experience. I have many more ties of love and loyalty and affection to
the San Joaquin Valley, having grown up here and lived here and loved the
people here. I care about those things I'm about. I'm far more different.
Basically, I have a lot more commonality with people from Nebraska than I
do with people from San Francisco. And I think the Founding fathers were like,
all right, well we have all these different colonies that were established,
and they were all established by groups that were very similar. Okay, the
people in the Virginia Colony, they were all Anglicans, and most of them
were they were English settlers for this. This this everyone in Pennsylvania had all
these Quakers in Pennsylvania. They were all this one kind of people. A
Massachusetts, We're all people this other kind of people. A lot of them,
you know, were Puritan settlers, had this kind of religious background,
they had this kind of economic interest. The original colonies sort of made sense
as political entities sort of in the way that the Greek city states did,
and your political life was chiefly lived under the founder's vision of federalism at your
state capital. That was the key thing. That's why we were United States,
a group of thirteen states almost pretty much like little countries that united together
for certain kinds of federal purposes as established in the US Constitution, which is
a restrictive, exhaustive list of Basically, the federal government can only do what
is enumerated in here. So that was sort of the idea was, let's
have states that people with your political life has chiefly lived in your state,
because that is your version of the Greek polis centered around your state capital,
the outlying rural areas surrounding it, and your care your concerner with the economy
of that region, the culture of that region, the health and well being
of that region, and that's where you focused your political energies. We don't
have that in California. We are fundamentally governed by people in Sacramento who are
from the Bay Area, who are from la and who fundamentally don't care about
us. They're not from here. They don't care about agriculture, they don't
care about the things that we care about that fundamentally is why I think California
should be split up into different states. I think this state is fundamentally not
a natural political community. When we return, just to close out the show,
Oh my gosh, do you know why that one women's basketball player from
Iowa is popular? It's only because she's white. Liberal sports writers at it
again next on the John Girardi Show. So I don't know how many of
you know who Jamel Hill is. Jamel Hill was a female sportswriter who worked
for ESPN for a while and basically got herself fired from ESPN by being a
huge liberal jerk. And she has since just failed continued to fail upward basically
because she's so liberal. People just keep giving her more and more prestigious jobs
and she just plays the same notes all the time. Caitlyn Clark is a
basketball player in the WNBA. Now, she was a very famous college basketball
player at Iowa. She was extremely exciting. Lots and lots of people were
watching women's college basketball. Actually it was getting better ratings than men's college basketball
several points over the last two years because of her. And she thinks it's
racist. Why because Caitlyn Clark is white and not a lesbian, and it's
problem that she's so popular. Okay, I mean, what do we want?
Finally women's basketball is getting some popularity and this gal has to be the
turd in the punch bowl. Oh, it's not gay enough, and it's
bad that she's white. All right, that'll do it, John Girardi Show,
See you next time on Power Talk.