Huffman and Wood Heard from Humboldt and Talked About Governor Newsom Sending the National Guard ‘North’ to Go After Illegal Cannabis Farms

Congressman Huffman and Assemblyman Wood in Eureka [All photos by Kelley Lincoln]

U.S. Congressman Jared Huffman and California Assemblymember Jim Wood held a joint town hall meeting at the St. Bernard’s High School auditorium in Eureka on Thursday the 21st. The hall was packed to standing room only with several hundred attendees. After brief opening remarks, Huffman and Wood took questions from the audience. Topics included, National Guard troops, healthcare needs, the Green New Deal, gun violence legislation, and an amendment to the United State Constitution explicitly stating corporations are not people and that money is not protected speech.

In his introductory remarks, Huffman said he is having his first opportunity since being elected to serve with Democrats controlling the House of Representatives. This change allows him to now chair the Water Oceans and Wildlife subcommittee. He had been the ranking minority member on the previously named Water, Power and Oceans Committee up til now. The gentlemen introduced themselves and within ten minutes were taking questions from the audience.

A student from Arcata High School asked,

[R]ecently Governor Newsom said he would send National Guard troops into our area to eradicate marijuana grows. I want to know what that’s going to look like on the streets in our rural communities because I know there’s been a lot of concern it will be a parallel to the CAMP program….And second of all, with legalization impacting our community so hard in our economy, I was wondering if there’s any programs to help us stabilize?

Wood answered first.  He felt the weight of this question, but his attempt to calm the waters fell flat.

[Newsom] said ‘northern California.’ He didn’t specifically say ‘Humboldt County.’ I think that’s important. He didn’t call anybody out.

When the murmuring and groans drowned him out, he backed up. “OK, I understand, I understand this meant Humboldt.”  Wood went on to say he has long been an advocate of keeping legalization rules manageable.

What I’ve said from the beginning, what I continue to say to all the regulatory agencies is, ‘you need to keep this simple, and you need to keep this achievable.’ And it’s not. It’s really not.

However, Wood says while some people want to come into compliance others continue to destroy watersheds and those entities are who he believes the Governor wants to target.

Wood did not think Humboldt would see a military occupation,

I don’t think he intends to restart CAMP. That is certainly nothing I envision. I don’t think we’ll see 250 troops in Humboldt next week or anytime soon. And [Newsom] did also say an additional 150 [National Guard] will be available to help with some of our fire prevention.

Huffman believes enforcement is necessary to keep people in the legal market.

It’s interesting that the loudest calls we get for enforcement are from those that have come out of the shadows and made the investment to get right with the law….They don’t particularly want to be undercut by folks sliding back into the black market. So enforcement is an essential piece of this transition. It has to happen. How it happens is significant. It has to happen in a fair, transparent and an honest way….[but] unless you enforce there will be backsliding into the black market and we won’t get the benefits of the market.

A St. Bernard’s student asked about wildfire prevention. Wood said he sees an “unprecedented level of investment” in fire prevention at the State level. And Huffman said a particular piece of federal legislation is moving forward with wide support. If passed, the US Forest Service will finally have a separate pool of funds for prevention. Currently their annual budget gets spent on fire suppression efforts which cost millions of dollars a day.

The crowd.

A woman expressed her desire to see Congress and the President go without pay if another “government shutdown” were to occur. Huffman said he has introduced “backstop” legislation. If enacted, any future shutdown would trigger an “automatic Continuing Resolution at existing funding levels.” Nonetheless, Huffman worries about the “unintended consequence” that such a backstop may take the urgency out of future budget fights and so may ultimately be counter-productive. With regard to pay during this last event, Huffman said

If [Trump] had the power to shutdown the government and stop the legislative branch from getting paid, he would have loved that….[As it was,] he could shut down his own agencies, but Congress kept working and kept pushing back….so I think we have to be careful about the unintended consequences of these things.

When asked about healthcare, Wood illustrated the complexities of the health industry by noting that the question used a variety of terms with different meanings. Wood boiled it down stating he believes what Californians want is “high quality, good access, low cost healthcare.”

There was some shouting of dissent from the back of the room, but Wood pressed on and explained the Governor has started a group to study the challenges of a single payer system identified over the last two years by the Assembly Health Committee that Wood Chairs.

There are Constitutional challenges that we have to get over….The biggest challenge we have is to ask the federal government to use 52% of the money we need to actually fund this. That’s about $200 billion a year. So one of the first things the Governor did was to send a letter to the President, and to Washington DC, to say ‘we want permission to have this waiver, to be able to bring this money to California so we can take care of our healthcare goal.’

That is an absolute critical component because without that federal money we can’t do it. $200 Billion is the size or our current state budget.”

The Governor’s letter, dated January 7^th, seeks a waiver to directly access the $200 billion dollars already spent by the U.S. Congress in California for healthcare via Medicare, Medicaid, the Affordable Healthcare Act, military medical insurance called TriCare and federal tax exemptions to Californians for health insurance premiums. Governor Newsom’s letter reads in part,

I ask that you amend federal law to enable states to apply for and receive Transformational Cost and Universal Coverage Waivers, empowering California to truly innovate and begin transformative reforms that proved the path to a single-payer healthcare system.

The letter goes on to explain something Wood mentioned at the town hall meeting,

High and rising healthcare costs mean workers’ wages have not increased to the extent they should have, and small businesses struggle to offer healthcare to their employees. The rising costs are unsustainable and are exerting immense pressure on the budgets of State and local governments, employers and families.

Even with this cumbersome hurdle, Wood said, “California may still become the first State to make universal healthcare a reality.”

Huffman said healthcare is most properly a federal issue and that the federal government is already “deeply, deeply involved” in healthcare with medicare, medicaid and the veterans health system. Huffman said he supports a national health plan for everyone. In the meantime, Huffman said he has introduced legalization to make it possible for people aged 55-65 to buy into medicare early. He said there are few insurance “products” targeting this age group because they tend to have pre-existing conditions, but that they have a markedly lower risk than the current medicare population. Huffman said bringing this younger cohort into Medicare will likely decrease the per person cost of the entire group making Medicare more cost effective overall.

When asked how he felt about the Green New Deal, Huffman said he is a co-sponsor. He described the recently televised questions from the Republicans in Committee about the likelihood for limiting vacations, eliminating cars, and forcing people to be vegetarian as disingenuous.

Huffman said the existing legislation outlines goals for achieving renewable energy targets and for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but leaves the details for how to achieve the goals to the legislature to debate. Huffman invited the audience to look for the details at “factcheck.org.”

Congressman Huffman explained that with over 90% of the world’s science community in agreement that human civilization is in jeopardy, climate action is “reasonable” in the present moment.

Wood pointed out that California has already outlined its goals of reaching 100% renewable energy by 2045.

Sean McLaughlin of Access Humboldt pressing for net nuetrality.

Several other topics, including gun violence legislation, mental health services, net neutrality, Congressional introduction of a “We the People Amendment,” Amtrak train funding, and more were covered in the question and answer period. The entire conversation can be heard in three segments on the archive on KMUD.org by entering “huffman” in the archive search bar.