89.3 KPCC: “The latest initiative to split up California is not the first. Or the 10th. Or even the 100th. There have been at least 220 efforts to hack California up into smaller states, with at least five just since 2000.”
I happened across this article on the Six Californias effort and appreciated the history lesson. The article goes on to outline a few of the prior efforts complete with maps representing the new states. I had no idea this has been attempted over 200 times. Wild.
Some articles on the subject are serious, others pretty funny.
“It just doesn’t seem fair,” San Anselmo’s Johnny Colla, a member of Huey Lewis and the News, emails from a tour stop on the East Coast. “When Draper got the map and the magic marker out and started carving up the state like a second-grader, why didn’t he include our county in the little empire he wants to call ‘Silicon Valley’? I mean, we’re affluent, opinionated and self-centered just like the ‘young Turks’ down there in the South Bay. And, shoot, I want to be a part of what would be the state with the highest per capita income in the nation, don’t you?”
On the serious side of the fence. I live in what is known as the Central Valley. It would become Central California in this scheme and would instantly become one of the poorest states in the union.
The gaps are underscored in California’s non-partisan Legislative Analyst’s analysis of the proposal. According to the report, the new state of Silicon Valley, which would encompass most of the Bay Area, Santa Clara County and parts of the Central Coast, would have the highest per capita income in the nation, out-ranking Connecticut (funny coincidence that Draper happens to reside here). Meanwhile, the neighboring state of Central California, encompassing mostly poor agricultural counties in the Central Valley, would be at the very bottom in per capita income, behind Mississippi.
The arguments for it claim it will make Government more accessible and more efficient. I doubt it, and I doubt we’ll see this effort succeed. It is, after all, the 220th attempt. Guess we’ll find out in 2016.
