A Very (Very!) Quick Midterm Voting Guide

Because I’m a busy grad student with a dissertation to propose, but I still care about you, but just not as much

Propositions:
1:Bonds for Housing Programs
Quick tangent: What is a bond? A bond is a personal loan that individuals give to the state by purchasing them. It is like investing in the state. You buy a CA bond with the promise that the State will pay you back in the future, with a return on investment. These are sold on the open market and therefore are subject to the general fluxuations of the investment market.
Longer explanation: https://www.treasurer.ca.gov/publications/bonds101.pdf
What it does: It provides the state with 4 billion dollars (through the selling of bonds) to build more low income housing, fund a program that gives home loans to veterans, and fund a few other minor projects. There are no new projects here, just continuing or additional funding for existing programs.
Endorsement: Yes.

2: Bonds for Mental Illness Housing
What it does: It ratifies an existing law, which created a program to help find permanent housing for people with mental illnesses who are homeless or at risk of chronic homelessness. It basically moves money around to help fund bonds with existing mental health money. It doesn’t add any money to anything, it just moves money around to fund a program. The general argument against is that it takes too much money out of the funds that already exist for mental health care and traps it in one specific program.
Endorsement : Yes

3: Bonds for Water Supply
My friend helped write this pretty comprehensive guide to Prop 3, s/o Sarah Diringer! https://www.newsdeeply.com/water/community/2018/10/29/untangling-the-complexities-of-californias-proposition-3-water-bond
Read that.
Endorsement: Yes

4: Children’s Hospital Bonds
What it does: Provides the State with 1.5 billion dollars to create grants that would go to hospitals building facilities to deal with children specifically. Most of this money would go to private non-profit hospitals (72%), but some would go to the University of California hospitals(18%) and 10% to other hospital types. The list of hospitals is quite specific (there are 8 hospitals that would get the 72%), but they are all children-focused hospitals. The money is for “Capital Expenses” so they would have to use the money to build new buildings or facilities or things like that.
Endorsement: Yes

5: Property Tax Special Rules
What it does: It changes property tax laws in specific cases and is confusing.
CA property tax is weird. When you buy a home, you pay a property tax of 1.1%. This then increases by 2% each year, regardless of the value of your home. So if you buy a $100,000 home, your property tax is $1,100. Now if your property values go up and your home is now worth $150,000, your property tax does not go up proportionally. It just ticks up 2%. So the law treats the $150,000 home as if it was worth $102,000. Got it? Now, if you are over 55 or disabled, or were a victim of a natural disaster and you move into a LESS expensive home, your property taxes don’t go up. So if you are over 55 and you bought your house 30 years ago for $100,000, it might be worth $400,000 now. But if you move into a home worth $250,000, your property taxes won’t go up, they still use the calculation from your old house. This proposition gets rid of this rule and creates a new rule so that if you buy a MORE expensive house, you pay less in taxes than you would without this prop. If you move into a LESS expensive home, nothing changes.
Endorsement: No.

6: Gas Tax Repeal.
What it does: Repeals the gas tax passed in 2017, which raised the gas tax by 12 cents a gallon, and raised 5.1 billion dollars for “transportation funding,” which includes road repairs, improvements, and the like. For context, CA spends about 35 billion on transportation funding per year.  A YES vote is to get rid of this tax. A NO vote keeps things the way they are.
Endorsement: No.

7: Daylight Savings
What it does: This would allow the State Legislature to vote on opting out of Daylight Savings time (like Arizona and Hawaii currently do.) Nothing would change immediately, it would just allow the legislature to do this if they want. Because of a law passed 70 years ago, the state legislature has to ask voters to give them this power.
Endorsement: Yes.

8: Dialysis Regulation.
What it does: There are a number of for-profit Dialysis centers that exist in the state and have an estimated annual revenue of $3 billion. Dialysis is a process that mimics kidney function when an individual has kidney failure. It is an outpatient procedure that patients must undergo regularly to survive, generally about 3 times a week. This bill would regulate this industry and prevent them from charging more that 110% percent of cost for this procedure and establishes regulations and enforcement mechanisms. Currently these organizations can charge whatever they want for this procedure. This may lower healthcare costs generally and medical and medicare costs more specifically.
Endorsement: Yes.

9: Not on the ballot! Don’t worry about it!

10: Rent Control
What it does: It changes the current law to allow local governments to establish their own rent control standards. Currently, rent control can only be established by the State government, and any buildings built after 1995 cannot be rent-controlled. This would get rid of these restrictions and allow local governments to decide if they want to establish rent control on their own. Some cities may expand rent control, others may not. It would be up to each city to decide.
Endorsement: Yes

11: Ambulance Workers On-Call Regulations
What it does: Currently, hourly workers are entitled to take breaks without being on-call, or interrupted. This would make ambulance workers exempt from this law. They could then be required to be “on-call” during lunch or rest breaks, essentially keeping them on-call for their entire shift. Currently this is in a bit of a grey area, as most ambulance companies do require that their employees be on-call for their whole shift. However, some employees have sued and said that this violates labor law. The CA Supreme Court has decided that private security workers cannot be on-call for their entire shift, but they have not ruled on ambulance employees. This would undercut these court cases and create a specific exemption.
Endorsement: No

12: New Standards for Farm Animals.
What it does: Changes standards for farm animals, and modifies cage requirements for chickens, pigs and calves raised for veal. Currently the law says that the animals must be able to turn around freely, stand up, lie down and fully extend their limbs. This would modify the law to specific space requirements to “cage-free” housing for egg-laying hens (which is about 1 cubic foot of space per hen, but without any specific cages, 24 square feet of space for breeding pigs, and 43 square feet for calves.
Endorsement: Yes

Statewide Office Endorsements:
Governor: Gavin Newsom
Lieutenant Governor: Ed Hernandez
Secretary of State: Alex Padilla
Controller: Betty Yee
Treasurer: Fiona Ma
Attorney General: Xavier Becerra
Insurance Commissioner: Ricardo Lara
Board of Equalization (3rd district): Tony Vazquez
Senator: Dianne Feinstein
Representative: Vote for your local Democrat

Justices:
Carol Corrigan: No
Leondra Kruger: yes
The following may not apply depending on your specific district:
Tip: If you google the names of the justices, you can easily find out who appointed them and use that to make your decision. It is a useful shortcut.
Victoria Chaney: No
Helen Bendix: yes
Elwood Lui: Yes
Victoria Chavez: No
Luis Lavin: Yes
Halim Dhanidina: Yes
Anne Egerton: Yes


Long Beach Ballot Measures:
AAA: Yes
BBB: No
CCC: Yes
DDD: Yes
WW: Yes