More from Assemblymember Chris Rogers' Town Hall in Sebastopol

Part 2: Weakening CEQA, gender-affirming care, sanctuary cities and more

Assemblymember Chris Rogers at his Town Hall in Sebastopol on August 4, 2025. (Photo by Laura Hagar Rush)

This is Part 2 of our coverage of Assemblymember Chris Rogers’ Town Hall in Sebastopol, which happened on Monday night. See Part 1 here. In the article below, Rogers continues answering questions from constituents in the audience.

QUESTION: Have you heard of the California Fair Elections Act (SB 42), which is an effort to repeal the ban on public financing of election campaigns in California by putting a measure on the November 2026 ballot? What do you think of it?

I’m very supportive of public financing of elections. I think that money has a corrosive effect on politics, and that you end up seeing people who have more access, quite frankly, because they have money that they can invest. I think if we’re going to have a truly level playing field, there has to be a system in place in which the primary function of a legislator or a representative isn’t to raise money, that it’s to represent their constituents.

So, yeah, I’m very supportive of that. I will also tell you, when I was there in Santa Rosa, we did what’s called charter review, where you provide opportunities for folks to vote on different amendments to the city’s charter. The other one that I was very supportive of, and continue to be very supportive of, is ranked choice voting to make sure that you don’t just have first-past-the-post systems that benefit the same few folks.

QUESTION: Noting the reliance of people on cellphones during emergencies, the questioner wanted to know if there was any effort to keep the area around cellphone towers free of debris that could catch fire.

I hadn’t heard about that, so let us look into that a little bit. That is an area that we could explore on the Utilities and Energy Committee or the Communications and Conveyance Committee. We actually have been dealing with a tangentially related issue called “ghost lines.” They are abandoned utility lines that continue to stay in operation. It looks like the Eaton Fire may have been started by one of these ghost lines that So Cal Edison may have been leaving in operation and actually charging folks for it, even though it was inoperable, and then it started the fire. There were issues with ghost lines in the Kincaid fire as well. So we’re advancing conversations around that.

I’ll also mention another bill that was pretty significant that worked its way through this year, AB470. So right now, AT&T has what’s called ‘carrier of last resort status,’ where they are required to provide service for folks in rural areas, particularly when you’re talking about, that that emergency services. There’s a bill that was proposed from a member from LA to essentially let AT&T out of the carrier of last resort status, because the argument was, the cost of maintaining a copper line system was inconsistent with new technologies and also passing that cost on to consumers. When it came to the Communications and Conveyance Committee, I voted against it, and then we were actually able to get the author to completely exempt all rural areas from her bill. She’s continued to move this into the Senate, but the bill now only applies to high-density areas like LA. It is specifically written in the bill, because of an amendment that we were able to secure, that Sonoma, Mendocino, Humboldt, Del Norte, Trinity—that this didn’t apply to any of those areas. So if the question is AT&T still required to be carrier of last resort for copper lines in our area? The answer is, yes.

There is a CPUC process that they can go through to remove that. The CPUC has already rebuffed them multiple times, so presumably they’ll continue to do that. But legislatively, we didn’t touch it. We wouldn’t allow them to get out through a legislative remedy.

QUESTION: Do you see any interest in the legislature bringing back the idea of getting a public-owned utility?

I’ll tell you just right off the top, I am a huge fan of public utilities. I think that that is an area that I’ll be interested in over however long I’m able to serve in this position, up to 12 years.

Moving in the direction that allows public utilities ownership, there is one factor that we need to figure out how to solve, first and foremost, before we can even get into the conversations around infrastructure, and that’s the people. There are a number of employees that work for PG&E that have a pension system. Before you disenfranchise those folks, we have to figure out how to transfer their pension over to make sure that they’re made whole. That’s the first barrier you are not going to get past in any discussions about public agencies if you can’t solve that problem.

Outside of that, we have been gathering a lot of information from other states where PG&E actually is teaching classes on how to avoid being municipalized. So that way we can backtrack it and actually change California’s laws to make it more permissive.

My two cents is, I think that Community Choice Aggregators are the camel’s nose under the tent. [Editor’s Note: Sonoma Clean Power is an example of a Community Choice Aggregator.] They actually have a rate base with enough money to bond against it to purchase the infrastructure—because the infrastructure is really expensive. There’s also liability issues and risk issues that we have to be very clear with the public that they are taking on. You’ve seen the impact on PG&E during a wildfire, but I think by and large, when you have an investor-owned utility that is making decisions based on what’s going to provide the most to their shareholders, I think that that is a flawed system. Having a municipal utility, where you can reinvest that money in your local community, I think is a much better way for us to go. But there’s a couple of hurdles that we have to get over before we can even really get into that conversation.

QUESTION: My issue is pesticides. I know in Humboldt County and some of the other counties, Caltrans cannot spray pesticides on the roads, especially near schools and public places. In Sonoma County, that’s not true. They can still spray here, all around Sonoma County. Is there any possibility you could talk to them about that?

There’s a piece of legislation that one of my colleagues, Damon Connolly, who represents from Highway 12 down to the Golden Gate Bridge, ran last year; it was vetoed. He’s running it again this year. It would require CalTrans to work with the local board of supervisors to determine what level of spraying or what level of management they would like along the highways in their county. There’s a disparity where Caltrans will sometimes listen to boards of supervisors elsewhere, but they’re not listening to Sonoma County’s preference. So this bill would mandate that they work with those local electeds to be able to implement in Sonoma County.

We have what’s called the Russian River-friendly Guidance. That’s what Santa Rosa now uses, where we banned most pesticides. There’s a progression of mechanical removal or other types of interventions before you get to using heavy things like neonicotinoids. At that point we banned neonicotinoids and others, but that piece of legislation would require CalTrans to work with the county to be able to implement whatever their protocol is at the local level. So there’s a bill on it, but the governor has not been particularly supportive of it.

QUESTION: I would just love to hear about what you’re doing to help us work against ICE. Also, I’m a psychologist at Kaiser, and I’m really glad that you’re so supportive of gender driven care. Kaiser is capitulating and pre-complying to executive orders that are not law, and they’re politically deciding our medical care and disenfranchising parents from making choices for their children. No matter how you believe about what’s happening with gender in this current, modern world, it’s up to us to decide about our medical care.

First of all, thank you for your work, and this was the whole discussion that we were having around trans athletes as well. You do not want politicians making health care decisions, period, right? Regardless of how you feel on the issues, you don’t want us trying to adjudicate or legislate health decisions. I’ll start there.

But as it pertains to pushing back on the federal government, one of the things that I firmly believe and have had discussions about is that the first step towards fascism is to pre-comply. So don’t pre-comply. Make them force you. Make them pull your funding, make them change the laws. Don’t comply because they tell you to. Be that thorn, right?

I think that that’s what California is trying to make sure that we do on a number of fronts. The first vote that I took when I got to the assembly was to provide additional resources to the Attorney General for the purposes of doing two things: one was funding a network of immigration attorneys to make sure that we can provide due process for folks who are facing deportation. And if you don’t believe in due process, I don’t know what to tell you. That is as anti-American as you can get. So first of all, make sure that folks have resources available to them.

Then you see the cascading effect from that, where the Trump administration has gone further, doing things to deprive people of that due process. The second is a pot of money specifically to have the Attorney General be able to defend our rights in court. In the first Trump administration, we had to sue Trump over 200 times. We were successful over 70% of the time. The amount of money that we returned to our communities by fighting those lawsuits was more than we spent on those lawsuits. It was a good investment for Californians, and not just because we were defending democracy, but literally defending the budgets for our cities and for our counties and for our funding that was being withheld.

What we have continued to see since then is an escalation from the White House that is meant to do nothing more than terrorize communities. It was very public and very apparent. When he had military personnel situated in Los Angeles while they were doing raids, we were monitoring very closely to make sure that they weren’t participating in immigration enforcement. They were defending federal buildings, which is why you ended up seeing so many articles about them sitting around with nothing to do, because there was nothing like that that was happening, right? And if they had sent those folks into the field, it would have been an escalation that I would like to think Congress would have actually taken action on, because it’s an indefensible use of military personnel on our own citizenry, right?

So we have continued to look at ways that we can strengthen the state and particularly defend our immigrant population. ICE and immigration enforcement is a federal issue. We can’t tell the federal government and we can’t prevent the federal government from doing these raidings, from doing enforcement. What we can and have done is made sure that our local law enforcement does not participate.

And I will tell you, pretty much every local law enforcement person that I have talked to about this issue firmly believes that the way that the federal government is doing this is harming their relationships and the trust that they’ve worked to build with immigrant communities and is making their jobs harder.

Then I mentioned earlier, we’re doing a lot around data privacy. You have folks that were told under the Obama administration, under the Biden administration, ‘Come forward, get into the system. We’ll find a path towards citizenship. We’ll provide health care.’ You have Dreamers who were told, ‘Come forward and we’ll help you to get citizenship.’ And now that’s all been blown up by the federal government. So folks are on a list. Folks aren’t accessing health resources because they are worried that that data is being shared with ICE. It is destroying communities.

And as I mentioned before, I’m a co-author on the piece of legislation to prevent ICE from wearing masks, and that they have to have their badge and be identifiable. That’s common sense.

As one of my friends said, one of the founding principles of this country is the ability to face your accuser, and you should not have enforcement that is happening without a face and a name to it. Not the least of which, because we have seen vigilantes pop up, who have no affiliation whatsoever to ICE and law enforcement, that have continued to do the same thing and basically abduct people. It is unconscionable that we see people disappearing from our communities, being flown out of the state as quickly as they can grab them to deny them due process, and then they disappear.

That is not the America that I was told I was being born into. It doesn’t match the ethos of a democracy. And I think that we need people to continue to be loud and find ways to defend our communities.

QUESTION: Can the state enforce that?

No. It’s very clear in the Constitution that immigration enforcement and immigration policy falls at the federal level, and they have systematically failed to provide a meaningful or reasonable path to citizenship. So when they tell you that they are going after the folks who, you know, ‘They should just do it the right way.’ Well, the right way is so confusing and not actually accessible for most folks, that’s not a real way. And when they tell you that they’re only going after people who are criminals, well, now the data is showing that that’s not true either. A majority of the folks that they are grabbing have no criminal history whatsoever. It comes down to racism, that’s what it comes down to.

QUESTION: How do you feel about the sanctuary county or city movement?

Yeah, so there’s a movement—if you have not heard, there’s a hunger strike at the Board of Supervisors around Sanctuary County status. When I was on the city council in Santa Rosa—I like to tell people getting elected to the assembly was déjà vu, all over again—but I got elected to the City Council in 2016. It was at the same time as Trump, and the first thing that we had to confront was the impact on immigrant communities that we were seeing, and there was concern from some of my colleagues about using the term “sanctuary,” just because—quite frankly, Trump can’t really read—but if he did control on which cities were doing sanctuary that it might draw attention. So we did what was called the Indivisible City resolution that reaffirmed all of the same things that a sanctuary status said, including the directives to law enforcement on when they could and could not interact with ICE and what that meant for our immigrant communities.

The Board of Supervisors just adopted the same principles not too long ago. Chris Coursey is now on the board of supervisors. He was the mayor in Santa Rosa at the time. So for him, it was an easy discussion. I don’t know that he even needed to read his packet, since he helped write the original one.

But there are folks that want to go further and actually say “Sanctuary” status. I haven’t had a chance to meet with them yet, but I would be curious to hear from them what they think is missing from the Indivisible ordinance that they would get from a Sanctuary ordinance—if it’s just a turn of phrase, if it’s just the name. I’m happy to have a conversation with them about that.

We have SB 54 and other state laws that dictate exactly what that documentation looks like, and whether we call ourselves a sanctuary state or not, Trump thinks we’re a sanctuary state. He’s identified us as one, so we have those protections that are in place either way.

QUESTION: Now that California is weakening CEQA, where do we go from here, and will there be any effort to amend it again to get those provisions back?

I’m not sure if you were here at the beginning. I did talk a little bit about this. I voted against the budget trailer bill that had the CEQA reforms in it. It’s not going to be easy. So one of the things that I mentioned, and really you need to take notice of in Sacramento, is that you do have a fight or a split that’s happening amongst the Democratic Party. You have progressive Democrats and you have moderate Democrats. That’s always been the case, but now with Ezra Klein’s [book] Abundance coming out, that’s given fuel to the moderate Democrats to essentially eviscerate environmental protections in the name of addressing very real issues that do exist.

There are barriers to building housing, there are big barriers to getting energy projects or transportation projects, but that’s giving them the credence to run around CEQA to weaken environmental protections, as well as community meeting requirements or community input requirements. It’s something that you need to pay attention to for the next couple of years, because that is the flavor of the discussion in Sacramento. You don’t have Republicans that have much say in anything. They vote no on everything because they have to, and they’re not a factor, really. But you do have a split amongst Democrats on how to move forward on cost-of-living issues, particularly as it pertains to environmental issues.

We have a bill actually where we’re trying to strike some of that balance. It’s for the County of Sonoma Regional Rarks. Right now, when you acquire a new open space area, you do have a couple of years of lag time, because there’s so much analysis that has to be done before they allow people to be out there. Our bill looks at that. I’m a staunch defender of CEQA. But our bill looks at it and says, ‘You already have existing roads. You’ve had people driving on these roads. You’re now turning them over for people to walk on. You should be able to do that quickly without having to spend years waiting to get people out there.’ So there’s ways for us to do this thoughtfully. There’s ways for us to do this through the legislative process.

Some of the CEQA reform bills that ended up in the budget I voted for in committee because there was a thoughtful discussion about it. But when you threw them all together and did it in the dead of night without participation from folks, I was out. That’s like a Republican tactic, and it was happening at the same time as the Big, Beautiful Bill being introduced at 2 am—it was a challenge.

The middle ground on this issue is trying to address all the regulations or trying to follow through and make sure a project meets all the requirements, but in a timely manner, so it doesn’t take two or three or five years for a project to get off the ground. That’s generally been the most effective approach.

Be really honest. Folks have weaponized CEQA. They really have, and you can’t pretend like that hasn’t happened, and they have created an environment that has allowed for a backlash against CEQA and significant reforms. What we should be doing is looking at the abuses of CEQA and finding ways to eliminate those or to expedite them.

So, for instance, rather than fighting every single housing project on the basis of CEQA, if you need to do a CEQA lawsuit, make sure that the courts are equipped to be able to analyze it quickly and say, ‘Is this actually a legitimate concern, or is this just a weaponization of CEQA to prevent that housing from being able to go in there?’ There’s a way to do that that takes thoughtful analysis and discussion.

We weren’t able to do that because of the way that it [Newsom’s CEQA bill] was forced through and the way that people just scapegoated CEQA. And I will say there are some areas that are better actors than others that have leaned in and have created housing.

I’m going to tout Santa Rosa for a minute. We have the second highest score in the state for the pro-housing designation by focusing our attention on downtown, where we should be building housing in the county seat, and protecting our community separators and our urban growth boundaries. There’s a way to do both, but it takes actual analysis, and it takes folks having hard conversations with one another. We just weren’t having those.

COMMENT: Unfortunately, there are too many NIMBYs.

You say NIMBYs. My personal favorite is CAVE people, Citizens Against Virtually Everything. Or BANANAS is the other one: Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone. There’s a number of acronyms that have worked their way through, but that’s kind of the problem, right? You can have reasonable people who support CEQA and who want to know the impact of development on their community and want to have a say at the local level, but you also do have people who have completely abused the system and made it a target in Sacramento, and the folks who see it as more of an abuse than an asset, are winning right now.

QUESTION: I’m wondering about the Medicaid cuts federally, and how we are doing with figuring out strategies as a state. Our beloved West County Health Services, these are partly federally funded. So where do we stand?

The cuts to Medicaid, they’re going to be devastating. It is the biggest liability for the state of California. It’s about a third of our budget, about $800 billion for medical, and that’s part of why we ran AB1460 this year, to really try to support our clinics, especially in places like Sebastopol, to make sure that they were getting the resources that they needed.

I will tell you just off the top, I am a staunch believer in single payer health care and universal health care. I think it’s a better system. We are oftentimes putting a Band-Aid on a broken system in the reforms that we’re doing, but with Trump in the White House, that’s where it sits right now. That’s the best that we can do.

There has been a fight in Sacramento about how best to fund our health systems, and I’ll use this to kind of jump off into some of those. Specifically, there was a fight over the state’s commitment to providing health care for everybody, regardless of immigration status. The governor in his budget proposed a $100 per month stipend that he expected undocumented immigrants to pay to be able to get health care. The legislature negotiated that down to $30 a month, but there was a very real feeling from a lot of us that that was creating a two-tiered system between immigrants and non-immigrants in California. It didn’t recognize that whether you’re documented or undocumented, you were paying taxes, whether it’s sales tax or your personal income tax, while also not being able to access the benefits that you were paying for. So that was a big fight, and that’s where it ended up, was that $30 a month, but we delayed the implementation for two years, hoping that the state’s budget will be in a position where we can repeal it before it actually goes into effect.

We are looking at how best to fund state resources, given the backdrop of the federal government trying to cancel our funding. And some of you may have heard me say this before: California is the golden goose. We pay $80 billion more in taxes to the federal government every year than we get back. Texas—because we’re comparing ourselves to Texas right now—Texas is a taker state. They take in more from the federal government than they pay. So California is subsidizing other people’s bad economics, subsidizing their lack of resources for folks. And if we could, we would withhold our federal taxes. We can’t, but there are some things that we are looking at doing.

The Progressive Caucus in particular has three different proposals that are on the table that we’re going to be reviewing. So one that I’m pushing is that, now that we know what this Big, Beautiful Bill is going to do for billionaires and corporations, that for every tax break they get, California does a corresponding tax increase—so even though that individual ends up paying the same amount that they were paying, we capture that funding and it stays in California, rather than us sending those taxes to the federal government. That’s one that we’re working on.

The second one that we’re working on is called the McTax. For corporations like McDonald’s or Walmart, what they oftentimes do is they hire low-income workers, and they don’t provide health care for them. Instead at their orientation, they hand them a packet to sign up for MediCal. And so the idea would be, we charge those employers for the amount of their employees that end up on MediCal that same type of stipend that we’re now charging to our immigrant community. Charge that to the freeloaders that aren’t paying for health care for their employees and invest that in our health systems.

And then the third one is probably the most complicated and the longest ramp up. It’ll take about five years, but it’s called the Water’s Edge Designation. So right now, California is one of the only states that allows corporations to designate how they will pay their taxes—for international corporations, how they will pay their taxes to California for the goods and services that they sell in our communities. Every other state doesn’t allow them to choose this discrepancy, and they, of course, choose the one where they have the lowest tax liability, so the water’s edge designation. Damon Connolly is working on this piece of legislation. If we only did what Texas does to charge international corporations, it’d be $2 billion a year of additional revenue for California. So we are looking at how best to implement that. It’ll take years for it to ramp up, because they do that designation every seven years.

California spends about $100 billion a year on tax breaks for corporations, for individuals. Only about 2% of it goes to low-income folks through the Earned Income Tax Credit or the Young Child Tax Credit. So we’re looking at changing our tax credits to better correspond with keeping money in California and reinvesting them in areas where we have been attacked by the federal government, specifically around health care.

QUESTION: I really implore you, please do something about education. We are the fourth largest economy in the nation, and our kids suffer. Our schools suffer. I’ve been a trustee for 20 plus years. We do our best. But I tell you, we are really struggling.

I’m going to start by talking about Prop 13 when you talk about under investment and education investment. But I do think that there are some reasonable reforms out there we should talk about, like, for instance, why the hell is that vacation rental down the street from me getting Prop 13 protections? We can talk about that.

From structural issues in California, we have created this volatility that relies on sales tax that underinvests in education and infrastructure. But one of the things that we pushed back on this year from the legislative perspective was a couple things around education: One was we pushed back on the 8% cut to the CSU/UC system that the governor was proposing. In fact, we leaned in and invested $45 million in SSU to protect our community asset.

We also did something that was a little bit quiet, where the last few budgets, the governor has insisted on underfunding Prop 98 and then doing a true up down the road, which means [schools] lose money. So we didn’t allow that to happen this year. We actually cut that out of the budget to make sure that we were investing what we expect to invest in our education system. But it’s still not enough…There’s also a state mandate that the state refund cities and counties for unfunded mandates. Good luck getting that funding.

QUESTION/COMMENT: I was gonna say that’s one of the biggest issues that we do have: they make all these mandates. Like we have to have tampons in the boys bathroom, but they don’t pay us to do it. So what do you think happens to the tampons that go in the boys bathroom? They end up on the ceiling because it’s a joke. Not that it’s not the right thing to do, but then give us some money to make it happen and make it appropriate.

I hear you on funding. We’re working on it, I promise.

You can keep track of Assemblymember Chris Rogers at https://a02.asmdc.org/

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