- Hosted by KQED's.

"Political Breakdown," leading candidates for California governor are visiting KQED in San Francisco for a series of Town Halls.

On May 4th, former U.S.

Representative Katie Porter, answered live questions from members of the audience about her vision for the state of California.

- Thank you all for being here tonight.

And let me show of hands, who's gotten a ballot already?

Yes, like everybody, right?

It's officially election month in California and that's why we're delighted to have with us tonight for our very first candidates Town Hall, somebody who quickly developed a national reputation and profile when she went to Congress.

In 2018, Katie Porter flipped an Orange County congressional seat from red to blue.

She describes herself as a single mom with a minivan who understands what ordinary Californians are going through, struggling to make ends meet.

In congressional hearings she used a whiteboard to grill CEOs of big pharma and others about how much they pay their workers, how much profit they make off of their medications.

Now she's vying to become California's next governor and she's hoping to become California's first woman elected governor.

Please welcome Katie Porter.

Good to see you.

Thank you so much for coming.

- Yes, of course.

- So we will take questions from the audience, but why don't we begin since you've been so helpful already.

Tell us, you know, why do you want to be governor and why you?

- Yeah, so this race is really about California's future and I think a lot of that is getting lost in the fear of the present moment of what Donald Trump is presenting.

And also in California, kind of having had like a series of kind of dynasty type governors.

I mean, Jerry Brown wanted to be governor again so we were all like, yeah.

And then, you know, Gavin made it very clear he wanted to be governor and waited eight years.

So everyone was like, yeah.

And I think what's getting lost here is we have to make change in California and we have to do it in a smart way.

We can't do it in a reckless way.

We can't do it in a way that's just about catering to donors.

But we really do have to make change because it's coming.

It's not a choice.

AI is coming and the changes are gonna be tremendous.

I just saw the, the billboards all over San Francisco today about don't hire humans.

And I think if you'd asked someone even two years ago if they would've thought there would've been billboards saying that, that brazenly, we would've said no.

So it's really about the future.

It's about how do we bring down costs.

Affordability for me, it's not a buzzword.

It has been my life's work.

And the fact that I'm not funded by corporations means that I really will do what I think is best for California.

And that's the only reason that I'm in this race.

- You, I mentioned in the intro, 'cause you're so famous for this and you've put it in your ads, the whiteboard which you used in congressional hearings to grill CEOs and big pharma.

How does that translate into the governor's office?

- Yeah, - Because you can imagine legislators might not take to that very well, you know, being lectured or grilled.

So how do you, like, how do you translate that into an executive position?

- Yeah, so let's talk about that because I, I think it gets at some of this question about who I am, how I would lead, the question that every woman faces, temperament.

So let's talk about that.

My job on the oversight committee was to hold powerful people to account.

And I did that job and I did it really, really well.

I did it in a way that gave the American people confidence that government worked.

I did it in a way that created deliverables like free COVID testing for every single person in this country.

But that was my job.

It was to do oversight and I did it.

The governor's job is a little different and I know that and I understand that.

So the best in, I think the best experience I can draw on is when then Attorney General Kamala Harris, in the middle of the sort of the, after the middle of foreclosure crisis, she gotten the banks to promise to change their behavior.

And then she realized that they weren't gonna pick up the phone, they weren't gonna help Californians, they were just gonna keep sending letters that you're getting foreclosed on.

And so she appointed me to set up a statewide foreclosure prevention program.

And when I took that on, everybody said like, this is too big.

People are gonna call, they're gonna want help, God forbid, people calling government wanting help.

And I said, only set up that program.

But we brought home double for California what the big banks had promised.

And we did it.

We, our program spoke six languages.

We traveled across the state, we went to churches, we went to military bases to help people figure out whether they could save their home and if not, what their next best option was.

And that is an example of not just taking government as it's always been, but asking really what do people need and making government be that.

And I think that's where we're at in California.

We've spent a lot of money in California and we keep spending more money and people are saying, well, but the stuff isn't getting better.

And that's a sign that we need to have some fresh thinkers and we need to have somebody who's willing to reinvent how we do things.

- You used the word temperament, and I know you've answered this question many times, but - Please ask again.

- I wanted to give, I wanted people here tonight and watching online and listening on the radio to, just to hear it directly from you.

It's no secret, there was a viral video that showed you snapping at one of your aides.

She was in the background of the video.

And I guess it raises for some people questions about, well, personally, like I wouldn't wanna work for somebody like that.

But more importantly, for somebody who wants to be governor, how can you assure people that you will be good to work with?

Whether it's your, your staff or legislative staff or lobbyists or anybody who wants to deal needs to deal with the governor.

How, how, how can you reassure them that that's, that was, that was an exception the the person that they saw in that.

- Yeah, so I mean the single most important thing to me personally about that moment isn't something that I can easily show because it happened five years ago, the moment.

But the most important thing, which was what happened right afterwards, which is that I apologized to that staffer.

We finished our day together, working together, and we kept working together for four years after that.

And when I left the stage after the NBC debate, the staffer texted me and I hadn't heard from her in a few months.

And she said, if I were a California voter, I would vote for you.

And that means a lot to me.

And so in all of the hundreds of times that I've been asked about this and talked about it, what has been lost is what was really, what I think should be most important, which was what happened with that staffer.

This video didn't come from that staffer.

This video came from an opponent to make space for himself.

And I think that aspect of it is what troubles me the most.

And in fact, the staffer said to me, I don't want this attention.

I don't like being the girl who walked into the video.

And I know you don't like being the lady who yelled in the video, but we are all better than our worst moments.

I give that grace to everybody I've ever worked with, every staffer who's made a mistake, who kept working for me the next day.

And I'm asking for some of that grace from others.

But I don't think we should delude ourselves, Scott.

There's not a candidate in this race who hasn't made mistakes.

Some of them very long-term decisions that they now characterize as a mistake.

- There are people who aren't in the race anymore as well.

- There are people who are not in the race that the California establishment, including Sacramento, was very, very quick to hop on board that and unwilling to believe that Eric Swalwell could have been the kind of person with a bad temperament that led him to sexually assault people.

And so I do think we have to kind of interrogate why does this moment, which is real and for which I genuinely have taken responsibility then and now and have shown that I'm gonna do better.

And I think a good example of that is, you know, the interview with Julie Watts, like she was on the debate stage with me on, on Wednesday night, whatever night that was.

And I, I think I, I think a lot of the men struggled with Julie and I think she was one - Of the moderators of that - Yeah, of the, she was kinda hogging a - Lot of the time and, - And I think I did great with Julie.

And so I actually did show people exactly what I said, which was that sometimes you have to do better than you did - And sometimes you have to be assertive.

- And sometimes you have to be assertive and look, she, you know, I think the other thing I'll say is that 30 of my staffers wrote a letter to The Washington Post recently about what it was like to work for me.

And so that's what I'm gonna carry with me in the remainder of this race and for the rest of my life is when I made a mistake, what did I do?

I took responsibility, then I made it right, I've made it right since then.

I've apologized and I compare that to candidates even today who are saying, well how dare you even ask me that question?

That's MAGA, that's MAGA talking points.

Or you know, they asked Xavier Becerra for example, like about the migrant children.

And that was a very hard situation.

I, I have empathy for how hard government service is.

But his response was to say that asking that question was playing into a hoax.

And to me that raises questions of temperament and leadership that I think are really genuine.

- Alright, let's take some audience questions and Josh Fernandez is our first questioner and there you go.

Go for it.

- Hello.

- Hi Josh.

- Josh Fernandez, proud San Franciscan, parent and a small business owner.

My question is, what is your plan to help California small businesses grow and thrive as the cost of goods and living continue to grow?

- Yep.

So two things I would flag Josh.

One is that we have to work at the government level to bring down expenses because what we've done so far is we've said, okay, wages need to be higher, wages need to be higher, wages need to be higher.

And why?

Because people can't afford to make ends meet you.

You feel that and your employees feel that, but then those costs get passed back along to us and everything gets more expensive.

And then guess what we need to do?

We need to raise wages again.

So what I wanna do is say government policy is contributing to a lot of these costs.

Government decisions about housing.

I give you the easiest example.

We build in California, two years slower than Colorado, the state with good environmental protections and good worker protections.

And the result is that housing here costs 10 to 20% more just because of the time that it takes the delay.

So then what happens?

Housing costs more.

So we ask businesses to pay more, but then people need more because the goods cost more.

And around we go.

So really recognizing that, yeah, I am the first one to take aim at big corporations that are cheating people, whether that's pharma and it's price gouging where I passed legislation and whiteboarded a couple of of folks, but it's also like Government needs to own some of these policies.

The second thing is rethinking taxes.

We're in a moment today where we've allowed as Democrats, Republicans to own tax policy.

Nonsense.

We can't solve problems unless we have good tax policy.

And so one of the things I want to do is, right now when when you make a dollar of profit, you pay 8.84%.

If that's the only buck he makes all year, he pays 8.84%.

But a corporation that makes $500 million in profit after expenses pays the same 8.84%.

So that's not a progressive tax.

And we're a progressive state and we expect individual families, if you get a bonus, if you make a little more, you might trip up into the next tax bracket.

So what I would do is have those most profitable corporations go from 8.84 to nine and a half, 9.75 so that I could knock your taxes down as a small business, especially in your lean years to 4% to 5%.

And I think that would make a real difference for you.

- I wanna ask you about a particular kind of small business, which is cannabis stores.

You know, they have been complaining that it's very hard to make a profit.

Some have closed.

There is a crushing tax burden on them.

There have been some bills in the legislature to make it easier for them to sell other things so they can, you know, not, you know, have entertainment or sell muffins or whatever.

Do you have any thoughts about that or as a mom of three do maybe you don't want them to?

- No, no.

I mean California has made the decision to legalize cannabis.

That was a decision that was put to the voters of California.

I'm a mom, I know where my kids are and what they're up to.

And I'm sure sometimes it's mischief and that's okay.

So I think the problem here is that the state looked at cannabis when we made the decision to legalize it and they said, oh goody, revenue.

And then they put a tax on it that really made it impossible for cannabis, legal, regulated, honest cannabis businesses to operate at a profit.

It's the same problem we just went over with small business.

And so what's happened is the black market and unlawful cannabis market is thriving and our small businesses and medium-sized businesses and startups here in California in the cannabis industry are struggling.

So I, I think this is more of the same.

It's a, it's an endless search for revenue without a willingness to see how do those taxes than cycle back into the economy?

And here the really high taxes on cannabis businesses have cycled back into the economy to cause those businesses to close and illegal cannabis to still thrive.

- Alright, we're gonna take another audience question from Margarita Mendez.

Thank you so much.

- Good evening Ms.

Porter.

My name is Margarita Mendez and I'm a public school teacher.

I teach middle school Spanish and I've been teaching for 33 years.

Public schools are facing a crisis finding qualified teachers to work in our schools.

Teachers can't afford to live in the communities they teach and healthcare costs are out of control.

As governor, what is your plan to help better fund our public schools?

- Yep.

- Thank you.

- So today I took a car between locations in San Francisco and my driver is a fan, which is always better than the alternative.

Sometimes I get into cars and they're like, Gavin Newsom sucks and this is the entire ride.

But today the driver was a fan, but he shared this.

I said, well, do you live near here?

'cause I, I think I had a couple extra tickets to come tonight.

And I was like, maybe I'd like to like to invite this driver and and his wife.

I said, would you guys like to come?

And he said, oh no, I, I live in Modesto.

And I said, well wow, you're, you're a long ways from home here at the, at the airport driving.

And he said, well I drive my daughter into the, into the Bay Area every day.

And I said, oh, what does she do?

She's a teacher.

She can't afford to live in the Bay Area.

So she commutes round trip four and a half to five hours a day so she can teach in our Oakland public schools.

That is really, really wrong.

And that is the status quo in California that if you vote for this status quo, that is what is going to continue to happen.

So the number one biggest expense that most people have is housing.

And so you have to have that be your number one priority.

And I am the only candidate in this race who has been willing from the first day I got in more than a year ago to even have a number one priority, much less to make it housing, which is people's biggest expenses.

Cause everybody else is whatever your biggest whatever, that's your issue.

That's my priority, that's your thing.

That's my priority.

Housing has to be the biggest priority.

I spent my career studying families in bankruptcy and there it's the house, it's the home, it's the rent that is what is taking up 40, 50, 60, 70, 80% of people's budgets.

And particularly for teachers, one of the things I really am excited about is free childcare.

Because if housing isn't your biggest expense, you've told me something about yourself, you're probably someone with young children because childcare costs more than housing for many folks, especially if you have more than one kid.

So we have to make investments in bringing down that cost of housing and the state has to put some skin in the game.

One of the things I'd like our teachers to have and families to have is onsite childcare at every one of our public schools.

Many of our schools have declining enrollment because our population's gone down and we can use that space.

Every public school in Irvine has onsite daycare and it's huge reason why I moved to California as a mom of two little boys with another one and I was pregnant and I thought I can actually make it here as a working mom because the city and the state are giving me what I need, which is childcare.

Right.

And I paid for it, but it was just to even have it was transformative.

- How do they pay for it in Irvine?

How do you pay for it?

In Irvine?

No, in Irvine - You said it's free in Irvine?

- Yeah, so we have it in Irvine and it's subsidized.

So some people pay the full freight, some people pay subsidy.

The land comes from the school district so there's no rent that takes a big chunk off the cost.

They're run by nonprofits who run the childcare.

And so that's good.

It's not for profit.

And then the city steps in with their dollars and subsidizes it, the tuition for people who can't afford it.

And so it's before care, it's after care, it's school holidays, it's the half day of kindergarten that you have to figure out what to do with and it's really important.

So I don't wanna dodge your question though about how we would fund education.

So one of the ways is renewing Prop 55.

This is really important and this is gonna be on our ballot in November.

This is a tax on people who earn over $250,000.

We've gonna have multiple tax revenue measures on the ballot in November.

That's tough because people tend to not want to be overtaxed and I think that's reasonable.

But Prop 55 really is important or we will lose what we're doing.

But the bottom, the biggest thing we need to do is make it more affordable for our teachers to live.

Because right now we're seeing base teacher salary now in Los Angeles, they just negotiated I think is up to 75, $77,000.

And you know what?

Still gonna be hard for those folks, which is why I'm proposing eliminating California state income taxes for those earning less than $100,000 and I'd pay for it with that graduated corporate tax that we just talked about.

- Thank you very much.

Let's go to another question.

This one from Susan Mallon.

- Hi.

Hi there.

Yes.

I'm Susan Mallon, I'm a California native and a longtime San Francisco resident and renter.

So my question is, how will you ensure housing affordability for renters and first time home buyers in San Francisco and California in general?

- Yep.

So we've heard a lot of talk about housing and building more.

That's been the big discussion.

And then of course we haven't really done that, right?

So it's gonna take someone who's gonna sort of bust through and think differently about things in order to get that housing built.

But building more by itself, it's only gonna help a little bit with cost, right?

So there is a supply demand aspect to housing.

We don't have very much of it.

We have more jobs in ratio to housing than any other state.

So one of the biggest reasons we can't add jobs and we can't add business here is because their workers can't find places to live.

So there building more is part of it, but if we build more without building faster, it won't really be much cheaper.

So the faster's huge.

What does that look like?

It looks like permitting reform on the front end it looks like in what we call post-entitlement.

So after you get the permission to build, dealing with some of those delays, modernizing the building code.

Right now if you build a housing apartment building that has 4,000 units, do you know you have to follow the same rules if you build something with four units, that doesn't make a lot of sense.

The other thing I would say is innovating in how we build.

Housing's one of the only things today we still build, still design, still do everything kind of the same way we did a hundred years ago.

Even housing finance.

It's, we're back to the same 20% down payment that we had in the 1930s and 40s.

So I would say innovating in building materials, innovating in construction technique, innovating in architectural design and innovating in housing finance.

One thing I really support that is gonna be on the November ballot is there's, and I did research on this as a law professor, there's just no research behind a 20% down payment.

Now I was ground zero when we went to a 0% down payment and just send in whatever you want each month.

That doesn't work either.

But we rubber, we kind of snapped back all the way to a 20% down payment.

And that is creating a huge class of people who can never get to home ownership, which is much more financially sustainable because it, you put your money to work, it becomes an an asset for you over time it can help you in retirement.

So there's no one answer on housing.

But I will say that I think I have been very, very clear and consistent, this is my number one priority and have rolled out a number of solutions that will work.

But speeding it up has got to be part of the answer.

- Do you support expanding rent control at all?

- So I don't, and I wanna tell you why.

Because the research on rent control and we have now 30, 40, 50 years of good research, not just in California but also in other parts of the country.

And we have at the city level in some cities.

So we can do really good experiments and we can look at what happened before we had a city enacted rent control and what happened after.

The problem with rent control is if you have a rent control unit, it works really, really well for you.

Now you're stuck there, decide to have a couple kids better get bunk beds because you can't leave it, right?

But it really works for those people who get it.

The problem is it slows down the cost of building more housing and you end up in a big shortage.

So there's a direct correlate between rent control and not having enough supply of housing and not having enough of the right kind of housing.

So I did really support what California passed a couple, I think a year or two ago, which is a cap on how fast they can raise your rent.

We were seeing price gouging by landlords and I will absolutely fight that tooth and nail.

So now they're capped as to how much they can raise your rent from year to year.

That's really important.

It may not, we may need to even lower that cap a little bit so that people are not experiencing rent going up 20% in a year.

But I also think we have to think about different kinds of leases.

So you've been a renter a long time, I bet your lease is one year long.

Am I correct?

- It's month to month - Now.

It's month to month.

But a lot of people don't wanna have to worry that at the end of the year it goes away.

So college students, why can't they get four year leases?

'cause they're gonna need to rent for four years.

Many of them off campus in our universities.

Seniors, who are on fixed incomes, need leases that have fixed prices.

And there are ways to do that with the government backstopping those longer term leases that don't create some of the supply problems.

So I said this to a progressive group, like the problem with rent control is only one thing that it doesn't work to solve the housing market.

And but that is a really big problem.

And so one of the things that's happened in California is we're frozen in this tension between people who say things like, just let rich people build and the little gold will fall on the ground.

And we can also make that, that's nuts.

That doesn't work.

You can't just turn developers loose and hope for the best, but you also can't double down on something that we have 50 years of evidence doesn't work and we're not coming up with all of the solutions because we're in this loggerhead between rent control and no rent control.

And the truth is it's this direction rather than continuing to have that same fight over and over and over again.

- Great.

Thanks for that question.

Let's get another one now from Akhil Kandkur.

- Well thank you Ms.

Porter.

So Iranian war has begun on February 28th and the bad news is this is for everyone, including the gas prices going higher.

It is not so good for everyone, including not for those who are worth it or we will lose money for that.

So I have a question for you Ms.

Porter.

So how we work to lower gas prices during the Iranian War?

- Yep.

So unfortunately the governor does not have a wand that they can wave and make Donald Trump go away.

If only I feel like Gavin would've waved it around several times.

I think he did wave it actually.

- Yeah, he did.

It just didn't work.

But he, he tried.

And so there's no magic way to end this war, although I think we should end it.

And I think it is unlawful and unauthorized at this Congress has not approved this action.

So we've seen the Presidential incursion once again into what should be a Congressional legislative power.

But in the meantime, your point is exactly right.

What do we do with the consequences of this?

So one of the things we've thought about sometimes in the past is providing short term tax relief.

Tax credits are always kind of complicated to give people.

But there are ways that you can design tax relief, tax relief to help people who have a lot of gas expenses.

The problem is it comes later and you've gotta fill that tank today.

So we have to make sure that we're not seeing any price gouging.

That what we're seeing at the pump is not being artificially inflated.

That nobody's taking advantage of this war to hike up prices.

But the long-term struggle for our gas prices, why California gas costs more are two things.

One, taxes are higher here and I opposed the gas tax increase in 2018.

Some of you might not know that 'cause every other Democrat just said sure.

And I said no, because gas taxes hurt those who are low income the most, they're really regressive.

They hurt people who have long commutes.

And those are by and large people who are low income people who have older cars with worse mileage.

So we do have to, I think, stop imposing gas taxes as a way of funding our infrastructure.

Infrastructure benefits, all of us.

And we should fund it out of the general fund.

And the other thing is just thinking about what can we, the other reason California gas prices cost a lot is 'cause we have our own special fuel blend.

And by the way, that's why we've made so much progress on smog and air pollution and respiratory disease.

And that's not something that we should be giving up or going backwards on because what we cannot afford is to go back to the, the air pollution that was killing Californians that was causing respiratory disease.

So in the short term, there's a lot of bumps and pains here.

And means that the governor has to be willing to use the other levers they can to help bring down, bring down costs.

- I want to try to keep us on time here and this is a complicated question, but you know, the governor has held a couple of special sessions of the legislature, including one to deal with price spikes and shortages and they created the legislature and the governor, something called the Division of Petroleum Market Oversight, which was supposed to deal with these price spikes and someone who knows a thing or two about oversight, I think that might be your your license plate.

- Yeah.

- Has it accomplished anything?

- So I think they've done some looking and I mean here's the real problem.

'cause I wrote a letter for example, when I was in Congress, I wrote a letter on oversight I looked into on energy prices in California.

I asked them to do an investigation.

They didn't find anything.

I did a lot of research on this.

I was gonna do a big staff report on gas prices.

And what we concluded is we couldn't really find anything.

Here's the problem.

Gas is controlled by a essentially a cartel.

So essentially controlled by oil and monopoly companies.

And you're just not gonna have good price competition when you have that kind of market structure.

It's one of the reasons we have to move toward green energy because it breaks up that kind of price.

So we're dealing with an international cartel that is setting the price of the barrel of a barrel of oil and then it comes here and it's refined by only a handful of companies and then there's only a handful of, you know, right.

And that we just kind of stuck in that.

So I, I don't think that there's necessarily as nefarious of an oversight explanation.

I think this felt made people feel like, see, see, I created a government department.

But then what?

Yeah.

And so I think the real answer here is to think about how do we bring down the cost that we can bring down so things that we can't control as much like international affairs and like the price of a barrel of oil, we're better able to withstand.

Families need more buffer to withstand those kinds of things.

We're in the most unstable federal government that we have seen and most unreliable federal partner.

So for families in California already to be at the breaking point on the budget means when anything gets yanked away from us, healthcare, right, gas prices go up.

We just don't have any way to make it meet.

And that's part of the reason families sometimes leave California because they want to have that little bit of extra to help them withstand all that's coming at us in today's economy.

- Thank you.

Okay, we have another question here from San Francisco resident Tom Tripp.

- Hi Tom Tripp, San Francisco resident.

How do you envision regulating AI to mitigate the risks, particularly the inherent concentration of power in AI companies to ensure the technology benefits everyone and doesn't just increase wealth inequality and decrease our quality of life?

- Yep.

So the first and most important thing to understand about AI, which I just am shocked that I'm not hearing candidates willing to say is the following.

AI is a choice.

It's a choice.

It is not inevitable that AI penetrate every aspect of our lives.

It's a policy choice that our next governor needs to make with the people of California.

There are examples of AI deployment, including some that are gonna have job displacement that I think are worth it because AI is going to be much better, for example, at reading and detecting certain kinds of tumors than the human eye can be.

And we're gonna save lives become of it because of it.

There are other deployments of AI that I just don't want, I don't want to watch AI robots perform on a stage.

I want humans to do it.

I don't want AI to, to pray with me.

I want that to be a faith leader.

I don't want AI to teach kindergarten to my kids.

And so we really have to approach it all from this decision point.

And technology companies have worked really hard to convince us all, including our government leaders, particularly here in California, that if they can do it technologically it must occur.

And that is not right.

Remember gene editing and Dolly the sheep?

Yeah.

And we were all gonna end up being clones of Dolly the sheep.

Do you remember how the fear about that moment?

But we made a collective decision that that's not how we wanted to use gene editing, right?

We made decisions about nuclear power, nuclear weapons, about what we wanted to allow, right?

That kept us safe.

It's the same thing with AI.

So that is the most important thing to understand.

The second most important thing to know about AI is anybody who can't answer this question with a high degree of competency should not get your vote.

Because we only have a year to two before we are gonna suffer a lot of job disruption and job loss because of AI.

So when people say like, I know you know I've been, you know, I have 50 years of experience, great.

Not with AI you don't, right.

You think asking Claude is like I'm calling my uncle.

Right?

We need to really be moving quickly on this.

We have already on the job piece waited too long in my opinion.

So when I talk to labor unions about this that are very worried about job displacement, what they often want is a pause.

Let's stop the AI for three years, for five years, for seven years.

How do you do that though?

It's like free market.

- Yeah, well you can, you can ban certain things.

So like self-driving cars, we've made choices about having and not having self-driving cars.

And some jurisdictions have said yes and some have said no.

We could have rules about big rig semis and whether we want the school buses, does anybody want an AI driven school bus?

Right?

We should think about these questions so we can make choices about that.

The problem right now is when you ask people, well what happens at the end of the ban at the end of three years, then what?

They don't have an answer.

So I actually felt really, and I cannot believe I'm saying this, but hey we're like ballots are in your hands.

I'm just gonna be stone cold honest with you people.

I was so happy today at something that OpenAI said, which I, not things you thought I was gonna be saying, but I have been saying to people that if we do AI right, it can mean a four day work week.

And so many people have said no, no, we could never have nice things in America.

Well sorry, is that okay?

You can have, you can have nice things in America, but you have to aim at them.

You have to decide you want them even OpenAI thinks that you can have a four day work week, But we have government leaders who don't think that, who have said that it's pie in the sky to imagine that we wouldn't have to have people working two jobs and three jobs just to make ends meet.

That's the potential of AI.

- And you think a state can regulate it as instead of nationally?

Absolutely.

Look, Californians, California governors and California gubernatorial candidates cannot have it both ways.

They try because they're men, but they cannot have it both ways.

They, they cannot pat themselves on the back and say we're the fourth largest economy in the world and then turn around and say, what could we do?

We're only in all the fourth largest economy in the world.

Like we're the fourth largest economy in the world.

Act like it.

Imagine a better world with AI that is so hard for Californians to do right now.

It's hard for me to do my kids.

I mean I had an argument with one of my teenage sons the other day about the B minus, the ever-present C minus in Latin.

It's just always there.

Every, every week I get the alert from the school.

Did you make them take Latin?

My son does.

My middle son, my oldest son takes Chinese and my daughter takes Spanish so I'm, you know, - Multicultural - Spreading it around in the family.

But he said, mom, I just the C minus in Latin, like who cares?

Who cares about Latin?

And I said, you do because you enrolled in it.

And then he said, besides my job, will just go to a clanker, will just go to a robot.

And so Californians, including my own son, has a kind of dystopian, it's going to be horrible view of AI.

Don't vote - for the sake of my own children - don't vote for a candidate that cannot envision and imagine and do battle with the biggest, most powerful entities in the world to get us a vision of AI that is better than the life we have today.

That is what you all deserve.

Do not settle for anything less than that when you cast your ballot.

- Okay, we have another question here from somebody who I believe works at the University of California.

- As do I.

- That's right.

UC Irvine.

- Thank you.

My name is Yishen Li, I'm a scientist at the University of California working for them.

My question is, California is at the forefront of climate impacts.

I'm thinking intensifying wildfires, droughts, coastal and inland flooding and more so as a future fourth largest economy in the world.

What would be your vision for tackling climate change?

Both the cost and the impacts.

Especially at a time when the federal government is really retreating on this front.

- Yeah.

- So we cannot afford to go backwards on climate.

That's the real truth right now there are a lot of people, a lot of big oil companies, a lot of vested interests, politicians who take money from big oil who want you to believe that it's a trade off between your being able to put food on the table and take care of your family and being able to breathe clean air.

But let me be really clear with you, polluted water, dirty air, those things are very, very expensive.

Wildfires are devastatingly expensive.

Sea level rise.

The extinguish, the extinguish of species.

Like this is what we cannot afford.

So California has to stay the course.

We are a world leader on climate change.

We need to stay that course.

Now we do not have a good partner in the federal government so we're gonna have to do some things differently and in a different order maybe 'cause some of the things we can do more ourselves, some of the things we need a little bit more federal partnership for.

But we cannot stop.

We just have to keep going.

We have made so much progress and we have seen over and over again if California doesn't lead on this, we will not see other countries and other states step up and do it.

So I think there's no choice here.

What we cannot afford is to go backwards and we are seeing some real, real willingness in among the Democratic Party to go backwards on climate.

And I think it's a huge mistake.

China is investing so much more in green energy than we are and they are not doing it because like they love panda bears and we don't like bald eagle.

Like what?

No, they're doing it because they know the economy that's gonna have the manufacturing jobs of the future, the ability to grow food in the future, the ability to have enough water to support its population in the future is going to be the economy that addresses climate change and its consequences.

- Quick question.

California has generated more than $30 billion through its cap and trade program now cap and invest, Governor Newsom has chosen to spend a lot of that on high-speed rail and also Cal Fire operating costs.

Would you use that money differently?

- So Cal Fire operating costs are a good investment and we have to hold the utility companies to continue doing all of the wildfire mitigation work that they put off for years and years.

Now they are doing it now and we are all paying for it in our rates, which is very painful.

But we don't want them to stop doing that.

That is important to reduce that risk of wildfire.

Cal Fire, we need a year-round wildfire fighting force.

And so we have had to make investments in that.

That piece I think has been worth it.

And I think the, the alternative is catastrophically expensive.

High-speed rail is one of the most frustrating topics in the entire world.

Not just in California politics in the entire world because high-speed rail represents this future that we all decided we wanted.

We came together and we voted and we decided we want this thing and then we don't have it and we don't have it and we don't have it.

And that failure to imagine that government can go do stuff is really, really dangerous.

And so it's affecting our willingness to go do things on climate change.

It's affecting our ability to imagine a better different educational system.

Well but, but we didn't do HighSpeed Rail, we didn't get high-speed rail done yet.

So your next governor's gonna have to take a hard look at this and here are the choices, Scott.

You either figure out a way to do it much faster or you pull the plug.

Do taking 50 years to build a little chunk of it, isn't it?

So we either have to go much faster, we have to really decide this is it.

This is what we're gonna put our chips down on or we have to say no we're done.

We're not gonna keep doing that.

And I don't have all of the pieces to look at that.

And by the way, we are finally actually building high-speed rail.

I mean visibly building it.

You can actually go see track and even a couple years ago there was nothing to go see.

So we are making progress but we gotta figure out like are we gonna go from where Fresno South?

Are we gonna go from Fresno north?

We we can't just keep inching this out.

- Just quickly would you use continue using the cap and trade money cap investment?

- So there's controversy about that.

One of the problems we're facing is that a lot of the strategies that are taking carbon out right now, like transit are really, really underfunded and need more resources including investments in microtransit.

So I don't have a magic wand to think about that we're stretching that cap and invest money and putting it into a lot of different places.

But I will say that I do think that transit that is up and running and moving people now and quick and locally deployable local transit and microtransit is probably dollar for dollar gonna give California taxpayers more payoff for reducing pollution and better quality of life.

A lot faster than the transformational potential of high-speed rail.

But the truth is we can't afford it 'cause we took so long.

'cause every year the cost of doing it goes up.

Yeah.

- Okay.

We've got another question now from Juliette Suarez.

- I can really relax because you've asked about the worst possible topic because it's just, as a taxpayer it's just so frustrating.

Like people don't wanna build high-speed rail, they wanna ride high-speed rail, - But nobody wants be the - Governor who pulled the plug.

We can't.

That's right.

- Especially men.

- That's right.

It's, I mean look, there's a lot of ego built into this rail, right?

I mean we've seen this before.

- Thank you.

Thank you Ms.

Porter.

My name is Juliette Suarez.

I'm a clinical social worker at the UCSF Trauma Recovery Center and I serve patients at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital.

And I'm also a union representative for UPTE, the University Professional and Technical Employees.

And so my colleague was tragically fatally stabbed while working at the UCSF Ward 86 HIV Clinic last December.

As one of the state's largest employers, the University of California enjoys a significant level of autonomy that it uses to be less responsive to its workers and elected officials.

As governor, what would you do to make the UC more accountable to its workers and workplace safety?

- Yep.

So for those of you who don't know about this situation, it's, it's incredibly tragic and it reflects how dangerous so many workplaces have become.

The other part about that story is the lack of transparency, the lack of accountability, the lack of investigation about what happened is a, is a really important piece of this.

When we make mistakes, we have to learn from them.

And what we've seen here is an unwillingness to step up and take responsibility for what happened.

So look, the University of California is one of our greatest treasures.

I really believe that.

I came to this state because of the University of California.

I've chosen to stay in this state because of the University of California.

But that doesn't mean that the system gets to run itself.

We have to make choices.

And there's often, I feel like you mentioned the creation of the petroleum oversight muckety muck.

There's often an, I've seen this in in general in executive branches, you see it not just in governors, but mayors and and others.

They say, well I created a commission and I appointed some people.

And like now that's their problem as if you didn't pick all the people on the commission.

So the governor picks a lot of the regents and it's pretty clear that we do not have enough voices of labor on that, on the regents.

We do not have enough student voices on that, on the regents.

We do not have enough young voices on the regents.

And it's become kind of a place that you put some of your donor buddies.

And I will take a different approach to this and I will take that across the board on all of my appointments.

One of the things about my campaign is that it's powered by small dollar donors.

Over a hundred thousand people have given to my governor's campaign.

And so our average contribution's like 42 bucks.

Compare that to the other campaigns.

1,800, 6,000.

Tom Steyer's, I don't know, like a hundred million 'cause it's mostly him.

We have to think about how to put voices on there that are gonna be consistent with our values.

And too often they're voices that are just about kind of, this is like a nice thing to give people.

It's like, oh, you're retiring.

Have a certificate suitable for framing in a position on the regents that we can't do that.

And so I've had conversations with your colleagues over and over again.

I've seen the struggles on our campuses to unionize how hard that was.

You wanna see someone who worked hard to, really struggled to get recognized, forget other corporations.

The University resisted that.

And so we have to live our values at the University.

That means paying a living wage.

It means recognizing the right to bargain.

It means having a level of oversight and transparency that is consistent with our values because those are the things that made the UC system really great in the first place.

- Last audience question.

- Thank you Ms.

Porter.

My name's Julienne Fisher.

I'm a member of SEIU 2015.

I've been an in-home caregiver that's in-home support services for the last seven years.

San Francisco is currently in a $900, $900 million dollar deficit.

And every day San Franciscans must carry this burden.

Do you support our union's efforts to make corporations pay their fair share by passing Proposition D to tax companies with significant worker to CEO pay disparities to protect essential services for our workers?

- Yes, I do.

And I think worker and CEO pay is that gap, which is, remember the questioning I did with Jamie Diamond?

Some of you might remember me saying to him, you get 26 million or 13 million or whatever bajillion dollars a year and you've never thought about how your employees can't make ends meet.

He kept saying, I've never thought I'd have to think about it.

I'd have to think about it.

Cause he never had.

So worker pay.

And that gap between CEO and worker pay is probably one of the most visible symbols of where our economy has gone wrong.

Where we have lost mobility and opportunity for working people to do better.

And so I do think we have to really focus on that.

I will say that I think it's bigger than any one city taking action.

San Francisco may or may not pass this.

That doesn't solve this worker pay problem everywhere else.

We've got it.

And so I do think this is an area where you really have to think about what does a fair economy look like?

And I, I think we just have really important questions to answer about that.

- You're, you're against the net assets tax, the so-called billionaire taxes.

Yeah.

So let's talk about that.

So she asked about the San Francisco tax, about CEO worker pay.

On the billionaire tax, I oppose it.

And I want to tell you why.

I, billionaires and I are not, I'm not one, there's a starting point, not a billionaire, but I've also had no problem holding really wealthy, powerful people to account.

And I think that the wealthy people should pay more.

We have that in California and we need to re-look at it because what it's meant to be wealthy.

And then there's the ultra wealthy and then there's the super, they keep inventing new terms for these people, right?

We have to revisit that tax structure in light of the extreme wealth that we're seeing.

This billionaire's tax falls short on the good idea checklist.

And let me tell you why it's a onetime tax, but as far as I can tell, if you're a billionaire, you get to be rich for the rest of your life.

So I don't know why we would do a one time tax when billionaires get to be rich forever.

The second thing is like, what about half billionaires?

They don't have two nickels to rub together to help us.

We ought to think about them too.

The third piece of it is, is it's one time in that it it, we don't have any one-time revenue problems, right?

So we ongoing schools, you don't have to fund schools once.

You don't have to fund healthcare once.

We don't have to fund in-home services, social services once.

We have to fund them over and over and over again.

And a one-time tax kind of repeats California's problem, which is that we get a little money and we spend it and then we dig the hole a little deeper.

And so that's another problem with it.

The last problem is 90% of the money or more would be locked into healthcare.

Healthcare is incredibly important.

I wish we had longer so we could talk more about healthcare, but we've got an unreliable being kind here, showing my demure temperament.

We have an unreliable partner in the White House and the reality is we don't know what he's gonna cut tomorrow.

So if he cuts things like food assistance, right?

food banks, like we may have to divert some of our money there.

So I don't think locking it all into one thing.

So yes to taxing the ultra wealthy, but no to doing it in a wrong way.

Because once we pass this, we won't get another crack for a long time.

And we don't.

We need to get this right for Californians.

It's really, really important to our economy to do this.

Right.

- Well I really wanna thank you for being here tonight, Katie Porter, thank you all for your questions.

And we we're gonna have, we're gonna have some other Town Hall events in the coming weeks with some of the other candidates and we'll be streaming them live.

And you can also go onto to YouTube and watch them at youtube.com/kqedlive.

And for more election information, including our brand new voter guide, which published today, you can go to kqed.org/voterguide.

You can listen to all of our interviews on political breakdown with all the candidates and so much more.

So thank you all so much for coming.

Thanks for your interest in the election.

And don't forget to vote.