More on the State of Jefferson

by Rally Sally

Back in the early 1990s, Stan Statham, then the North State’s assemblyman, avidly promoted a plan to split California in two. Lately he’s revived his old cause just as some North State conservatives have embraced the idea of breaking our rural northern areas from the rest of urban California.

He’ll even tag-team with State of Jefferson boosters. He told Tehama County leaders at a meeting last month, for instance, that Assembly researchers studied his idea in 1992 and found that an independent Northern California would be financially viable. Money, of course, is one of the critical questions the independence-minded have struggled to answer, so this seemingly objective report would lend weight to their claims that the North State could go it alone.
Statham was kind enough to supply a copy of the 1992 report — “Two New Californias: An Equal Division.” And his memory serves him well. The financial analysis really did find that breaking up the state would leave two parts that could easily be self-sufficient.

Unfortunately for Jefferson proponents, the dividing line was well into what everyone up our way thinks of as “Southern California” — along the nearly straight-line northern boundary of San Luis Obispo, Kern and San Bernardino counties. Broken there, the report found, the Southern California megalopolis and Northern California could each go it alone well enough (though the report noted many potential complications).

But does anyone who yearns for a State of Jefferson yearn for a state whose population center is … the San Francisco Bay Area? Of course not. Those conservatives’ desire is to shed California’s liberal over-reach. But in Statham’s theoretically viable split, the politics of Northern California would be, if anything, distilled into an ever higher-proof liberalism. Seriously. Many of the still-conservative corners of the state are in the south. Orange County, anyone?

And, sorry, rural California still couldn’t pay the bills on its own — and never could have. Then, as now, residents of the prosperous Bay Area counties paid far more in state taxes. Some Jefferson boosters argue that if we could bring logging and other resource industries back, our economy would thrive again. Even in the late 1980s figures parsed by the Assembly report showed the rural counties of the North State had higher unemployment and lower incomes. That was before the northern spotted owl was listed as a threatened species, the national forests were strictly protected, and the timber industry was disastrously upended.

That transition was wrenching and, especially for the most isolated mill towns, left lasting damage on communities. But the numbers show we weren’t well off, compared with the rest of the state, even then.

Financially viable to split California? Maybe, but not in the way the latter-day Jeffersonians imagine.