- 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 18th, Riverside County Aheriff Chad Bianco answered live questions from members of the audience to address the issues shaping California's future.

- Thank you so much for being here tonight.

We are two weeks away from election day.

Can't come soon enough.

And tonight I am excited to be hosting KQED's second Town Hall with a top polling candidate.

Chad Bianco is Sheriff of Riverside County, a post he's held since 2019, following decades as a sheriff's deputy in the Inland Empire County.

He grew up in Utah and came to California in 1989.

He and his wife raised three children in Riverside, and he is now a grandfather.

A devout Christian, Bianco says public safety is the government's number one job, and he is running on a platform that is anti-tax, anti-regulation and pro-small government.

Please join me in welcoming Sheriff Chad Bianco.

Great to have you here, Sheriff.

Thank you so much.

- Good to see you.

- So here's a little bit about how this hour's gonna unfold.

We are going to give Sheriff Bianco a chance to say a bit about his vision for California, and then we'll get some questions from our audience.

We have tried to select a cross section of topics.

Audience members are gonna read their own questions, which we have not edited from KQED and Sheriff Bianco has not seen.

We'll give him a chance to respond and then I can ask some follow up questions before we move on.

Sound good?

- Very good.

- Alright.

Well, thanks again for coming up and being here tonight.

And I wanted to kind of start by asking you, you know, you, you and all the other candidates have been campaigning for months now, and I just wonder when you look forward, like if you were to win in November and are sworn in next January, what would be your day one priority?

- Well, it's 16 months, but I'm not counting and day one priority is immediately making our lives better.

I mean, there, there are so many things that are, are hampering that, that are making our lives difficult, and the majority of them are all regulatory.

So the regulatory environment is easy to fix as the governor, you can do it with a signature executive order type environment situation.

And so it would really be from there.

And I, I, I mean this sounds bad.

I mean, it's not the answer you want, but there are hundreds if not thousands of - How would you go about that though?

Like, would you have a team assessing them?

Would you?

- Oh, yes, we're doing that now.

Okay.

I mean, we know the big ones, the, it gets down into even the minutiae, but there are, there are big ones.

There are big ones in the oil industry.

There are big ones in the building industry, the housing industry, business regulations that are forcing businesses out of our state that not only take the business, but it takes workers to go chase those jobs.

And so that's really why no one leaves California because they want to leave California.

It's, they're, they're, they're forced or they believe they're put in a situation that they have to go somewhere else to make it easier for them to, to live.

- Is there like one you would just point out that you're like, that would be done?

I mean, the easiest is, would, would say the, the, the gasoline environment, the cost of gas.

Mm.

The, the cost of gas is killing everything.

It's driving the cost of goods and services up.

I mean, I have employees that call in sick because they can't put gas in their tank to get to work.

So it's, this is all across California.

So the number one driver of the cost of living is, it's arguably there's several, but arguably it could be the cost of gasoline.

And so we have to tackle that first.

There's, I mean, everyone wants to talk about the 60 cent tax, but there's over a dollar in regulatory fees.

Mm.

Those are the easy ones to eliminate.

Then we'll work on the tax, but there's, there's so many, so many different ones that it, it's gonna be hard to pick which one I do first.

Right.

So I'll pick right now just because you're asking me, we'll pick gasoline.

- Okay.

So this has been a very unsettled and large field for governor, but you and Steve Hilton have been the top polling Republicans.

I wonder why you see yourself as a better candidate than Mr.

Hilton.

What you think sets the two of you apart on the Republican side?

- Yeah.

I think ultimately it's history.

It's proof of concept.

I think that from me personally, what I'm tired of, of our politicians is just being told the same thing election after election after election, and nothing else changes.

They, they repeat the same thing every election.

Some of our politicians are running on the same platform every two years or every four years, and they've done nothing to address the issues that they told us they were going to fix.

So I think with me, I, when you look at the entire list of candidates, whether it's on the Democrat side or the Republican side, I'm the only one that has proof of concept of doing things right or going in a direction that is always best for Californians.

I don't, I've never made a decision based on politics, and I never will.

- So do you think Hilton, he, I mean he's never held elected office either, but you kind of see him as more of the same?

- Oh, absolutely.

He's a politician.

He's a career politician.

He did everything to convince us that he was not a career politician.

He wants to say he's a businessman, but there's no businesses.

It's, his life has been England politics.

And he was always behind the scene in England politics.

He's a, he's a, a, a strategist.

That's what his, his job description really was.

And he was the number two guy behind the prime minister.

So he, his, I mean his, to be very frank, - Please, - His for me is more dangerous than the other Democrats that are running because we have a, we have an example of what they'll do.

I mean, they've been in elected office and they've told us things that we can go back and say, well, you promised us this, but you did this instead.

Yeah.

Or you voted for this that was harmful to us, or you wouldn't support this, that would've helped.

But with him, he's always behind the scenes.

So he's never run for elected office.

He's never had an elected office that there's proof of concept with, and that really is what separates me.

- Yeah.

Well, as sheriff, obviously you oversee a large office, you have employees, you have a budget, and you know, one of the governor's biggest responsibilities is crafting a state budget.

Currently, the biggest ticket items is health and human services.

That's about 41% of spending.

K through 12 education is a little over a quarter, about 26%.

Obviously we can't go line by line through the whole state budget, but what would you seek to change in particular about those two areas since they are the biggest, you know, parts of spending?

- Yeah, we can't go line by line, but we should be, I mean, that, that's the problem.

Problem.

Well, not right here - Tonight, - We don't have time.

We're not gonna do it tonight.

But that is the governor's job.

It's the governor's budget.

So there, and it's going to be, it's gonna be very difficult after I take over because it takes months.

I've been doing budgets now, massive budgets, $1.3 billion is what my budget is.

And so we start the next year's budget, the year it ends.

So on June 30th of this year, when my budget ends, I start the next year's budget right then.

- Right.

- So you're building that budget for a long time.

So when I take over in January, I only have till June for that final budget, but he's already made it.

So it's basically going to be me going back into his budget and revamping it.

I'm not going to just push his budget through.

It's, it's, that's what's wrong with California.

The waste of fraud, the abuse that we're not going through and fixing and ending and stopping.

And then our priorities, the, the priorities of government have always been set in stone, or they should have been, we drifted from that a little bit.

And priorities are public safety, infrastructure, which is electricity, water, roadways, all of those things.

Education, and then everything else.

And we have not done that in California.

We've gone, as much as everyone wants to say that, you know, the biggest budget, biggest part of the budget is health and human services.

That's not supposed to be the biggest part of a government, and we have to fix that.

- Yeah.

So do you think then that government should not have a role in healthcare?

- No, I don't.

- Okay.

- I don't, every place that government has a role in healthcare, it fails.

There's not one place where we can say, oh, look, this government made it work.

They never do.

Governments that have a hold of healthcare for their constituents, for their residents, those residents are doing everything they can to get to America for healthcare because it's cheap.

Not only a little bit cheaper.

Sometimes if they have the money, it's cheaper.

If you pay cash, it's way cheaper than insurance, which is a proof that it's absolutely broken.

But when the government owns healthcare, you can never go to the doctor.

Your appointments are a year out, two years out, three years out.

And the proof of that is all of the people from Canada that come to our hospitals for healthcare or come to our doctors for healthcare, because you don't get it with your own government.

- I mean, we saw though a lot of spending that taxpayers had to pick up before, you know, the Affordable Care Act before the expansion of, of Medicare, because people just went into emergency rooms.

Right.

So, - But we can, I just wonder how you think about that.

We stop that.

So instead of stopping that - Stopping what?

- The people just going to emergency rooms, why are we allowing that?

I remember when I was kid, you have an emergency, - Right.

- But it's not an emergency.

- Okay.

- Emergencies are emergencies that you, you're a runny nose or a hurt finger is not an emergency.

I don't feel good is not an emergency.

But we've allowed, we've allowed that to overtake our, our hospital system.

- So Right.

So if somebody doesn't make enough money to, or have a job to get government or employer sponsored healthcare, and their child does, you know, fall out of a tree and break their arm - And you don't have health care.

Well, those have never though.

Well, that's an emergency.

Those have never been denied.

That's not what we're talking about.

I spend a lot of time in hospitals, a lot of time we, we take inmates and people that we arrest to hospitals constantly.

We, I actually have a, a semi jail.

Well, they get health care in jail.

inside, inside one of the hospitals.

Yeah.

Inside one of the hospitals.

And we, ours are emergencies that we take there and we are sitting in line with all of these people that are not emergencies, where we sit there for hours waiting for the doctors or nurses to get to our patients.

Our are the people that we've arrested and they can't because of the line of non-emergencies that are occupying our healthcare.

And I, and we're not just gonna talk about that.

It's, it's the entire industry.

We all know.

We have to know that medical is absolutely broken from, the biggest fact that medical is broken is that doctors are no longer responsible for the care for their patients.

The, the relationship between the doctor and the patient has gone, and that, that let's let us personally take care of you and what's best for you is gone.

Yeah.

And it's now made by insurance companies and it's made by other people outside the doctor.

So how is the majority of all of our money not going to the people treating the patient and not going to the patient?

It's like most other things that government gets too involved with administratively, that's where all the money goes.

So the administrative cost is why we can't get care.

It's why we can't afford care because there's too much administrative blood.

- So would you go after those costs?

- Oh, absolutely.

That's what we have to go after.

- Wouldn't that require regulations of a private industry?

- It requires laws, it requires enforcement of laws, it requires people getting arrested.

It requires investigations and money being taken back and fines being sanctions and all those kinds of things.

Absolutely.

It does.

Absolutely.

- All right.

I wanna invite our first audience member up to the mic to ask a question.

- Hello, my name is Jessica Alegria, and I am a product and a parent of the San Francisco Public School system.

Recently, several Bay Area counties have experienced teacher strikes and ongoing threats of school closures.

What is your plan to address the challenges facing California's public schools, including funding, enrollment, teacher retention, and student performance?

- Yeah, this is, that's a great question.

Especially being involved in it and probably knowing firsthand what some of the, the obstacles are.

One of the things that, it's, it's just mind boggles me right now is we're reading in the paper about teachers being laid off.

And this is kind of goes back to a little bit about the medical world.

Our education system is just as broken administratively.

And it's not broken at the teacher level.

It's not broken at the principal level.

It's broken above that.

It's broken from Sacramento down to the principal level where we don't have a money issue in our schools.

We give massive, massive amounts of money to our schools.

We're one of the most in the country per capita, per student that we spend on, on our kids.

But it's all going above the principal level where we're now in administrative issues where the, if we would, if we would address it from the top down, why do we have so many administrators?

There was a comparison between California and Florida school systems and we're bigger.

So they adjusted it for the, for, for that gap.

But what they found was Florida spends far less per capita per student, and they're having better outcomes.

But one of the big issues that's really jumps out is California has 30 times, 30 times more administrators than Florida has.

So if we would, instead of having an administrator, that is never going to get laid off.

It's only the teachers getting laid off.

How about we make more teachers, our teacher's classrooms are overcrowded.

They don't have the resources they have.

If we would rid ourselves of the bloat from principal and above and streamline that whole thing, then we would have far more money to give to where it's supposed to be going, which is the student and that relationship between the principal down, especially with the teachers and their kids.

So it, it's never in California, I mean, we're a massive, huge state.

We have never had a money problem.

We have a, we have a horrific spending problem and a lack of accountability problem.

- So do you think we need to cut school spending?

It sounds like you just want to sort of reshuffle how it's spent.

- I think we spend way too much.

I don't think we have to spend as much as we do.

I think it's spent in the wrong place.

I, we definitely don't need 30 times the administrators.

Right.

Every school district has a building.

Why?

No other state has that.

Why do they get their own building with their own staff that never do anything with kids.

That's not the role of the education system is to have an administrative building.

Yeah.

The the role is to educate our kids and put those resources towards our kids, and we have, we have to fix it.

We can't just keep going down the same path we've always been going because that's the way we do things thing.

It has to change.

We, we don't have the money to just say, give more to it.

Because when you do that, it's giving more to the whole thing.

And now that half that shouldn't be getting it is just getting more.

- I wonder though, like one of the hallmarks of our system here is it's pretty decentralized.

Like districts have a lot of power.

You elect school boards locally, they all do have their own administrations and you know, sort of well systems because of that.

Like, do you think that's working?

- How's that working for us?

- Well, - It's not working for us.

Yeah.

We're the worst in the country.

So what would that look like?

We're number 48 in the country.

So we're, we're basically the, the worst in the country almost.

So it's not working.

Why are we continuing down a path that of destruction if you know something's wrong?

Somebody's gotta have the strength and the courage to stop it and say we've been doing something way wrong.

And it's tons of things.

It's not only money, but it's how we educate, right?

I mean, we've, it is an absolute fact, absolute fact that kids have to learn to read before they're three, before third grade, and then they have to understand what they're reading before sixth grade.

And we're failing in that realm where the average of our high school kid graduation is reading at sixth grade level.

We're failing.

We know that phonics is a way for kids to learn how to read and everyone else is successful with it.

But we abandoned that years ago for a new way to teach.

That is wrong.

We have to, if you're going to, if we're going to be leaders, Leaders cannot be afraid to say we're doing, we're going the wrong direction.

We have to change and go back.

And we have to do things that work.

We have to pick things that work and we have to make changes.

And that's truly where we are.

We're just going down the same path of destruction.

And nobody has the guts or the courage to say, we have to go backwards because in the end, we're supposed to be serving our kids and we're not.

We're it, I don't want to hope I don't have to get into this argument, but we shouldn't be serving the teacher's union.

We shouldn't be serving the administrators.

We shouldn't be serving anyone or anything other than our kids.

That should be the number one goal.

And everybody else is secondary.

- Thank you, Sheriff.

All right, I would love to invite our second questioner up.

- Hello, my name is Breanna Barton-Shaw.

I'm a student at San Francisco State University, and I've been unhoused and housing insecure my entire life.

I've also been a student during that whole time.

How will you as governor address the growing student housing insecurity and its effect on our educated workforce?

- Yeah, that's a, it's a fantastic question because that's an anomaly and it's something new and it's a failure of our university systems.

It's our failure of our univer university systems, again, to meet the demands of our students.

That didn't exist when I went to college.

There was abundant housing on campus for students that wanted it.

And if you didn't want it, and if you could afford it, I guess then you could go off campus into off-campus housing.

And we don't have that anymore.

And it's extremely unfortunate that we have, again, you as the student are supposed to be the priority.

We, as the government educating you, are supposed to be giving you all of the twos and the tools and the availability to learn that includes the safety and security of a place to stay while you're being educated.

And California is a little bit unique in that there are more unhoused college students here because of the expense of rent and homes.

And we absolutely can address it, fix it immediately, and start allowing builders to actually build homes again, and apartment buildings even so we can have an abundance of housing.

So you're, you're not living in your car or you're not trying to find a place to stay.

And it's sad that I hear stories like yours that a school is actually allowing, because don't tell me that the school's not making money.

They're making money hand over fist.

It's just other people are making it while you're living in your car or trying to find a place to live.

And we are supposed to be serving you not the other way around.

It's not supposed to be administrators getting rich off of your tuition.

It's supposed to be managing those costs.

But we have an, we, we are supposed to be having an agreement that we will take care of you while we're educating you.

- You know, one thing that has sort of shifted over the past decade or two is an agreement on all sides of the aisles that, like the housing supply issue is part of the problem here.

It is.

What do you see the role as governor is in, you know, increasing housing production, making sure that things get built.

Because really that is largely the job of the private sector.

- It is.

And, but it's the job of the private sector being prevented from doing it now by government.

Yeah.

So talk about what you would do.

So it's not, it's not the government making it happen.

Yeah.

It's the government allowing it to happen.

Because right now they're not so in any state in the country, any state in the country, it takes 90 days to build a home.

California takes between three and five years - To permit a home?

- Whatever.

If I am, if I live in another, if I live in Arizona and I wanna walk in and say, I wanna buy that piece of property and build a house on it in 90 days, maybe three months, six months, I'll have a house in any state in the country.

They even do it in winter states during the winter.

But California, it takes three to five years to build a house.

That's why we can't afford it.

So I have friends that build one house at a time and communities at a time, and they both tell me the exact same story.

A absolute minimum of one third of the price of a home is strictly to recover the fees that they had to pay to build it.

- Like local fees?

- Every fees to the state, you have to cut a check for $157,000 to the state as soon as you want to start building a home.

So if you don't have that $157,000, you're not gonna build a home anyway.

And then when it takes five to six years, now the builder doesn't, especially a community, they don't have a hundred million dollars to cash out of something.

So they're borrowing it from a bank.

So to take five years to build that house, all that interest accrues on all of that money, we have to pay that back.

They're not absorbing it.

They shouldn't be expected to absorb it, it they would go bankrupt.

So it's, we don't, the reason why we do why we have a housing shortage is because the government, California state government has made it so expensive for a builder to build a home that we can't afford to buy that home from the builder.

So the builders are not building it.

The builders are only building particular homes now that are super expensive that people with a ton of money can buy because they can't build an inexpensive home that we can buy.

There's a very interesting statistic that only in 2012, only 14 years ago, 14 years ago, if you made a hundred thousand dollars, 76% of the homes for sale in California, you could purchase.

That a hundred thousand dollars today, 4%.

It doesn't exist.

There are, there are no homes, affordable homes for kids or first time buyers, or even some, you know, if you're only making a hundred say only making a hundred thousand dollars and you can't afford to buy a home that's not like that in any other state.

It's only California because of the regulatory environment.

And as the governor, I can remove that, those regulations, those those restrictions that are only meant to get money from you at the builder and prevent them from building, we have to remove.

Another issue with building is water.

We have to get to a point where we realize that California has never been in a drought, ever.

We have more money, or I mean, sorry, more water than we have than any other state in the country.

And the water that we get every single year, 70% of it is purposely routed to the ocean.

So we can't use.

The government mandates that, so now we can't build homes because of water.

There's not enough water.

Water is a massive, massive issue to expand growth.

And if the government is telling you, the state government is telling you we don't have water, then you don't get to expand.

They make it too expensive to build that house because you have to pay so much for lack of ability of water.

And it's not that, it's like, oh, if you want water, you're still not gonna have it, but you can pay five times the amount.

It, it's all about generating money, preventing the building.

It, it's a horrific spot that we're in, but it was, it's an agenda driven spot that we're in that can be removed with a stroke of a governor's pen.

The sad part is that we have to come to the realization.

You have to come to the realization and understand that if the current super majority and democrat governor wanted our lives to be better, it would be done today.

If they wanted gasoline cheaper, they are in charge of everything.

It could be done today.

When I, when I assume that office, one of the first things I guess I, if I would've thought I would've remembered, we back here, one of the first things that I'll do is cut your electric bill in half immediately.

Your electric bill is gonna be cut in half and probably more like two thirds.

You're only gonna be paying a third.

We're going to force the electric bill, the electric companies to lower them.

Do you know that the electric companies have absolutely no ability to raise your rates?

None.

They cannot raise your rates.

It's the state of California that raises your rates.

And then they give the profits to the electric companies.

Last year, the three big.

Well, the state Commission that approves the rate increase they ask for.

The CPUC.

But why are we doing it?

Why are we not saying cut them?

Mm.

There was a bill in the assembly last year that was going to lower your rates by one third and it didn't even get outta committee.

They can make it happen.

I, I'm, I'm telling you, you can, you, why is a public utility allowed to make shareholders $7 billion in profit that you paid for?

Why are we having to struggle with the highest electric bills in the entire country to make shareholders profit when we control the rates?

I'm telling you, minimum of half on day one.

And they have to do it.

It feels like some big government here to, to be forcing a private industry to do something differently.

- Actually, it feels more like big government making all of them pay quadruple the electric bill that anybody else in the rest of the country has to pay for.

It's the government that did it.

The, the person that wants to make money, if they're trying to make money for their shareholders of why would they not come and ask for more money every yeah, every year.

But why did the state say yes?

They can't afford their electric bill.

So why is the state saying yes?

- New CPUC?

All right.

Let's invite the next questioner please.

- So my name is Julian Flores.

I'm currently a political science student at Santa Clara University and care about rising housing costs in California, especially for young people such as myself.

How do you plan to fix both the rising cost of living in California as well as the current road conditions in which our state is ranked among the lowest in the nation?

- Yes.

So thank you for the question.

And I'll only correct that question by saying that the study that came out two weeks ago, we are the lowest, not some of, we are the lowest.

We have the worst roads in the entire country and we spend more money than anyone in the entire country.

And I'm gonna go back to the same building thing.

The, the same reason why it costs four times more to build a road in California than it does in any other state in the country, is because of the regulatory environment that the state has put construction in.

The infrastructure of our state is the role of government, and it's the number two role.

We all have to be safe.

That's why public safety is the number one role of the federal government and the state.

We all have to be safe.

But next is infrastructure, and infrastructure is our roadways.

It is our, the ability to have houses.

It is our bridges, it is our buildings, it is our hospitals, all of those things.

And we have, we have lost track of that.

We just don't do it anymore.

And then to tell you how easy it's going to be for the cost of living, the probably 60% between 60 and 70% of the cost of living.

The re what we see in our society here in California, which is houses, taxes, regulations on the regulatory environment that causes goods and services to be increased.

But most importantly, fuel is all driven by regulation in California that I can remove immediately.

So one of the, if the second responsibility of government is to provide us roadways, why did they come to us several years ago and say, we have to raise your taxes in with gas to pay for our roadways.

They were supposed to be doing that anyway and they weren't.

So they took that money that was supposed to be going to toward roads, put it somewhere else where it didn't belong, and then said, oh look, we don't have any money.

We need more tax on gas.

So we said, okay, well we have to, we have to get roads.

So we agree to it.

And then the increasing in gas comes up.

But as the governor, I can remove all the regulatory environment from that so we can build roads faster, which is cheaper.

Time equates to money.

We can drive down the cost of living by lowering the price of gasoline, which a minimum of a dollar is regulatory.

So we can take that off immediately.

61 cents is taxed that nobody else in the country has.

So we can remove that too.

That's gonna take the assembly doing that and the Senate doing that though.

But we're gonna fight for it so we can actually afford gas because gasoline is the number one driver of our cost of living.

So removing the envir, the, the regulations on our oil industry, we absolutely must stop buying oil from other countries.

We have more oil than we could ever use in California in a thousand lifetimes.

That that is absolutely proven.

It costs five times more to get the oil from other countries, bring it here, and then produce the gasoline for us to use, five times more.

And for any of you that are concerned about the environment, it's minimum of 10 times worse on the environment to buy it from third world countries who don't have regulations and then ship it halfway across the world on ships.

Just so we can refine it.

California has by far, by far the world's cleanest oil refineries and the world's cleanest oil drilling environment by far.

We need to start doing it ourself.

When we do do it ourself, we drive the cost of gas down, just like the states that have super cheap gas, Texas, the Dakotas, Wyoming, where where they use their own oil.

We could be doing the same thing.

The benefit of that is the state also generates revenue from that.

The state generates its revenue right now just from your income taxes.

So if we would generate revenue like other states do that, utilize natural resources, whether it's the responsible forest management with logging industry, the gasoline industry, stop buying it and making other countries rich, why aren't we making California rich?

We have a massive, massive world's biggest lithium deposit in Riverside County and Imperial County that if we utilized our own natural resources with lithium, that's all the rare earth elements that come with it.

Now we don't have to buy them from China.

We can sell 'em to the rest of the world and cut China out of it.

Now our state is fully funded by natural resources.

You pay no taxes.

That's how you lower the cost of living.

It would be great if the jobs that you had, you weren't paying in, you weren't paying any income tax.

I can guarantee you that every single Californian can spend their money better than California state government.

I guarantee you.

- Alright, I'm gonna move on to our next audience question.

Unfortunately, Rose Usher was unable to get here, but I'm gonna read it for you.

- Very good.

- My name is Rose Usher.

As a disabled senior, I'm really concerned about government fraud because it reduces the funding and availability of services that I need and rely on.

What are you going to do about, for example, senior housing fraud?

- There's the entire gamut of fraud from the, from every single dollar that goes from the governor's budget out, the finance from the state capital and into the hands of where it goes.

Absolutely has to be audited for fraud.

And we have to eliminate it.

We've never had a money problem.

We have a money spending problem and a money management problem of where it goes.

We are now learning our own finance department.

Our own state finance has said that we are the most corrupt government in the country as far as fraud, waste, and abuse is concerned because we do nothing to track fraud, fine fraud, stop fraud.

And we just keep letting it happen.

That has to be a priority.

That is supposed to be the priority of DOJ of California DOJ.

And they have not done that for decades.

Decades.

And that is why institutional fraud is now a way of making a living.

- Talk about what you would do as go as governor, like what does that look like?

Is that through the state DOJ?

I mean, you're obviously rom a law enforcement.

- State's, DOJ State, DOJ'S responsibility is to protect the state of California and its residents and particularly, - I mean, they have filed some cases, right?

Would you just expand that unit?

Like do you think it needs more resources?

What are we talking about here?

- It probably, it may need more resources.

It has to have the agenda to do it.

Mm.

We were, I I don't necessarily want to get into all of the specifics of DOJ, but they are failing us.

They have a massive budget.

They have massive personnel.

They have too many attorneys and not enough investigators.

This isn't about suing people.

Life should not be about suing people.

It should be about going and finding the fraud.

Attorneys have no ability to go find fraud.

So why are we not replacing attorneys with investigators to go make sure our money's being spent wisely?

When you, when you tell someone that they're, you have a a hundred million dollars going into a senior living or senior medical, whatever the case, whatever question you want to ask.

And we say we're, we're giving a hundred million dollars to that and 30 million of it is fraud, which that's probably a pretty good estimate.

It may even be more.

Wouldn't we best be served by finding the fraud and then the people that need that money, we can actually increase the money that we're giving them.

Right?

It, it's, it's very unfortunate where we are in California that we have got so comfortable in government that nobody is watching, nobody is watching.

And part of the problem with California is that for decades we have been, well, 16 for 16 years, we have been complete one party rule.

The Senate and the Assembly have both been controlled by the Democrat party and the governor has been Democrat.

If you go back in time further, it's been since 1956 and 1958, the Senate and the Assembly have always been controlled by Democrats.

- The Legislature.

And every once in a while a Republican governor comes in in between the Democrat governors.

Right.

And the problem with that is they're not watching themselves.

They're patting each other on the back.

They're, they're, they're, they're taking care of each other in their pet projects that they want.

And no one is holding them accountable.

That's not how our government was intended to be.

Our government was intended to be a bunch of people, ideally half coming together arguing out the issues that we have to come up with the best answer for everyone else.

And when there is fraud, it's like, why is there fraud?

We need to frame fraud.

You have, we have fraud going on in this program, but people have to be looking for it and calling it out.

And that doesn't happen now.

- Alright.

Alright.

I'd like to invite our next questioner at - Good Evening Sheriff.

My name is Reuben Halili and I am a retired engineer.

As governor, what will you do to assist homeowners in Calaveras County to obtain affordable homeowner insurance?

My policy was canceled years ago, and my only option is the very expensive California FAIR Plan.

- Yes.

It's certainly not fair that, that it is a, we need to change the name immediately.

Insurance is an interesting topic because insurance is one of those things that we must have all from private industry.

And unfortunately for homeowner's insurance though is the homeowner's insurance are, it's private entity and government cannot cause a private business to go bankrupt.

And so the insurance companies over the years have said that there, we, at one point, we had some of the lowest insurance rates in the entire country, and the increases that we would get once in a while were very low compared to other places.

And then the insurance companies, because of the losses that they were taking with massive wildfires recently, they said, we can't cover those losses.

And so what happened with all across the insurance board is just, there's way more than this.

But say you have 10 and seven of them leave now thi because they, they're not going to cover those losses.

They can't afford it with their business model.

They can't, we can't make them go bankrupt.

The other three have to raise their rates to cover everything because now they're responsible for everything.

And that's what we have right now is the, all of our insurance companies have left the state.

They no longer insure because of fire.

And I, I hate using this again, but it's government-caused because of regulations of our forest management and the, for the last five years, for the last five years, all of the major insurance companies went to the governor and said, if you're, if you do not change your environmental policies as it relates to forest management, you are going to lose cities.

You are going to lose massive amounts of properties and we can't cover them.

That's too much of a cost.

We're going to leave the state if you don't change these policies.

And he called their bluff.

- So you think that better forest management will lead to fewer wildfires, which would bring down insurance rates?

- Absolutely.

Well, what it's going to do is it's going to bring the insurance companies back into the state, and then now you have a larger pool offering plans.

They all want to be in the state.

We have 40, 30 million buildings here, probably 40 million buildings that need to be insured.

It's part of their business model is to come back into the state.

They left because of the environment.

The problem is, is that our fire agencies, Cal Fire and our city and local agencies are not allowed to create defensible space around our properties because of environmental activism.

And it's, they're, they're, they have to get a permit to do a burn that takes two and three years to get a permit.

When we know that, especially in California hills, the way our environment works, it's massively green.

It's beautiful for four months, three months, five months, and it grows so fast, but then it all dies.

And if you have several years of that building up, when those fires come, and we have to realize we don't, fires are not, new fires have been in California forever, and so has wind.

And when the perfect storm comes up and that fire happens with wind, it's not that there are more fires, it's the fires are more intense.

And when they're more intense, they can't be put out.

And that's why, that's why we lost the Palisades.

- Do you think then that the government should be taking a role in preventing new homes from being built in certain areas?

Absolutely not.

Why?

That's what they're doing now.

The government is purposely stopping or causing homes to not be built.

That's not the answer.

Only 4% of the land in California is occupied 4%.

We don't have a land problem.

We're never going to have a land problem in California.

You have a common sense problem, you think, - I mean, do you, but do you think that wildfire should be consideration when we're thinking about where new housing goes?

- Not if you're managing the terrain around it.

Okay.

If you're creating defensible space, if you're managing your forest, if you're fighting forest, I'll give you a perfect example of firefighting.

That only happens in Riverside County.

It doesn't happen in the rest of the state.

We have Cal fire, but we pay more.

And we call it Riverside County Fire.

It.

We own all the equipment, we own everything.

We just contract the personnel to come in and man it.

But we fight smoke.

We don't fight fires when we see smoke, if a deputy sees smoke, if a, if a, if anyone reports smoke or if the fire department is looking and see smoke, we put every amount of effort into getting rid of that fire before it turns into a fire.

Now we have fires, but they get put out quickly.

And we have the same mountain ranges that other people have.

And we don't lose cities, we don't lose massive amounts of property.

Sometimes you can't help a couple depending on where it starts.

I mean, we can't say we can.

Well, that's what's wild.

I mean, we can't say we can pr we can 20 years prevent everything.

20 years, one - Structure burning was a story.

- Now it's entire city is burning down to the ground.

- Yeah.

- Paradise entire.

So the the answer is creating an environment where we can create defensible space so when the fire does come, we can stop it before it hits our homes, our neighborhoods, our buildings, our businesses, whatever the case may be.

Because that's the issue that we have.

Now, if we, if you would ask the fire department, the fire department will tell you why we have these fires.

I've known this for 33 years.

Every time we have fires, sheriffs and the fire departments have to work together.

So we evacuate, they fight the fire, we protect, we do all of the things, but we're working hand in hand with them as you as I promoted.

Then I went from being on the line to in the command post.

So now you're sitting there for days on end with all of the leaders of fire saying, why are we having this?

Why is this happening?

So I've learned over 33 years that the fire department could prevent all of these fires.

Maybe not all, but they would prevent the loss of structures.

But it's the state government that is preventing it because of activism really in in environmental activism.

- All right.

Our final question, please.

- Hello, my name's Melissa.

I'm actually asking this question for my boyfriend.

He's outta town, couldn't make it tonight, but he's an owner operator of a 10 wheel big rig and he wants to know as governor, what would you do about the legal immigrants with commercial driver's license currently in California?

- Yeah.

We have to stop it.

We absolutely have to stop it.

We know we have to stop it.

It's against federal law.

And California is one of the, if not the only state that was not enforcing that.

And we see why there, there's a, there are reasons it's not racist.

It's not attacking someone from another country.

There are safety reasons why we issue commercial driver's licenses.

And California was skirting around that process of what and who was eligible to get those licenses.

And we have to stop it.

It's a safety issue.

It's a job issue also.

But we cannot, we cannot get around security and safety.

- Do you think, 'cause my understanding is that many of the folks who had these commercial licenses were, you know, not citizens, but were not here illegally.

They were asylum seekers.

They had temporary, you - Has nothing to do with illegal or not.

So - I'm just asking.

So it does, - It's the ability, you're not - Worried about whether somebody's a citizen.

That's whether that they have been through the training and all of those things.

It's, it's, are you, do you meet the requirements to get that license?

The federal government has very strict guidelines for commercial driver's licenses.

And they should, yeah.

It is driving a, a massive semi-truck that weighs 10 times more than your car has serious secure safety risks.

And you, it's not just, you can't just drive it like a car.

So they have very, very strict guidelines of who should get that license.

And California cannot skirt that.

And they did.

And we unfortunately saw drastic, drastic results and deaths.

- I wanna ask you, well, there are a couple other things we didn't have time for in some of these, but I I guess since we're on immigration, I, I wonder, like we talked about this before when I interviewed you.

What you do see as the state's role when it comes to cooperating with immigration enforcement, enforcing immigration law, how, like where do you draw those lines?

- This is very simple, very simple.

The system worked perfectly before 2017.

Absolutely perfectly.

I guarantee you none of you even heard about immigration until 2017 when the state made sanctuary state a law.

It has to be eliminated.

I'm currently suing the state.

There is a lawsuit going through the court system now.

We are going to win because it is unconstitutional.

It absolutely must be taken away because it makes us less safe.

It doesn't make me safer, it doesn't make you safer.

And it does nothing to prevent or keep safe people who are in this country illegally.

The state law was written and designed for one reason and one reason only.

And all you have to do is read it.

It was designed to keep people in jail who are in this country illegally.

It prevents me from turning them over to the federal government.

I have to release them back into your community.

That's all it did.

And when they were coming up with making that law, we told them, law enforcement leaders told them, if you do this, you are going to, right now immigration comes into the jail to get these criminals who are in our jail that are here illegally.

And they deport them.

If you take away our ability to work with them, you are going to force immigration, federal immigration into our communities where they never were.

They weren't going into our communities.

They weren't going into our, into our neighborhoods.

They weren't going to our homes.

But now when we release criminals, they go to their home and unfortunately we told them this was going to happen.

When they get to a home that has several people who are in the country illegally, and they find the person that they're really looking for, they're not going to ignore the other people who are there illegally, even if they weren't violating the law because they were in the country illegally also.

So other people were going to get wrapped up in it.

And that's what we see.

That is what we're seeing on the streets today.

And that is what happens only in sanctuary states.

So what should be happening is sheriffs who run jails should be cooperating fully with immigration officials to make sure that people are in our jail system in the country illegally are deported.

They have to go back.

- Do you have any critiques of the way the President has rolled out his deportation strategy?

- No.

No.

The only place it, the only place it looked bad was sanctuary states.

Places that are not sanctuary states have no issues with immigration.

The reality of of, of immigration is it's a federal responsibility.

It's a federal government's role.

It's in the constitution that the federal government is responsible for immigration enforcement.

Not local government, not local law enforcement, not your police officers and sheriff's deputies who are out driving black and whites on the street.

I've been doing this for 33 years, other than being inside the jail, never was I cooperating or working with immigration to deport people.

All we care about when we're handling calls are, are you a victim or are you a suspect?

How can we help you?

How are we going to keep you safe?

And when we arrest someone, they go into jail and we we find out they're here illegally, then they get turned over to the federal government and they get deported.

- The state.

I find that interesting 'cause I mean that was the original spirit of sanctuary policies in California, right.

Was police officers saying, we don't want to participate on raids.

It came outta LAPD in the 1980s.

- Yes.

Right.

That was It wasn't Yes.

Yes.

Not sanctuary policy.

Policy - Policy.

Yeah, that's what they called them.

- Well, we didn't call it, there was no such thing as sanctuary.

- So you've never, your deputies, you as a deputy have never participated in immigration actions yourself.

- Right?

Never.

I worked the jail and I did on patrol.

Never.

Yeah.

And I'll, I'll tell you why.

And, and we're adults here, so you're gonna have to listen to me.

Well, you have a mic too.

- My biggest fear and what we cannot have happen, cannot have happen is a 13-year-old girl being repeatedly raped and threatened with deportation of her or her family if she tells anyone.

And the problem with that is the majority of people who are coming from other countries, especially third world countries, have corrupt law enforcement.

So we have spent decades building relationships with those communities, getting inside those communities so we can keep them safe so they know that we're not them, not where they came from, and that we are here there to help them.

I have to make sure that that little girl knows that she can run to anybody in uniform and she is going to be safe and she's going to be protected.

And unfortunately, from the day President Trump won, law enforcement in this state has seen a drastic, drastic decrease in calls for service from what you would consider our immigrant communities.

They're not reporting crime anymore because the media, the politicians and everything else have now convinced them that deputies and police officers are the enemy and you have to avoid us.

And now we know they're being victimized and they're afraid to report it to us.

That is a failure of politicians.

That is not a failure of law enforcement.

And it's not a failure of the federal government.

It is a failure of our state government because they were all specifically told that the consequences of signing SB 54 into law were going to bring us to this day that this is what was going to happen.

And they basically said, we don't care.

Which to me means they wanted it to happen and we have to get rid of it.

We have to go back to where law enforcement can be law enforcement.

The federal government can do their thing, but sheriffs and prison wardens have to be able to cooperate to get those people who are victimizing us out of the country.

- All right, just a couple more minutes left.

I do wanna ask you about one of the issues that's driven some headlines around you this year, which was your office's investigation into last November's election.

You seized about 650,000 ballots to investigate a claim of a 45,000 vote miscount in last November's election.

Where does that investigation stand and, and like, what is the crime that you're investigating?

- The crime is election fraud.

Okay.

There's, there's several versions, specific specific sections of election fraud.

And so how this came about is just a review of the county's own records.

The registrar of voters, we vote by mail.

So every day that you return your ballots, they count how many ballots they received.

So the audit of that return every single day, the numbers were added up and it comes up to 611,000.

But when the yes and no votes are counted and tallied, it's 658,000.

So how did 611,000 ballots turn into 658,000 votes?

We don't know.

That's why we're doing an investigation.

So we go to the registrar and we try and figure it all out.

And they have absolutely no idea.

They're completely shocked.

They have no, no justification or reason why it happened.

And eventually he said, it's human error.

Well that's not acceptable.

And so the only way we can get to the bottom of it is to find out how many ballots there really are.

What was the human error?

If there was human error.

So the only way to determine that is to count how many ballots there are.

Not the votes, not what are they?

Yes and no votes.

This has nothing to do with the outcome.

With the outcome of the election.

It's why is there such a discrepancy that's like 10%, it's almost 10% of the vote.

It's big.

So we were supposed to count the ballots.

The judge agreed.

We went to a judge, we told him what we had, what we were looking for.

The judge agreed.

So we got the ballots, we were going to count them, we started to count them.

And the attorney general stopped it.

And here's the, here's the, the dishonesty from the Attorney General.

They want you to believe that I did something wrong.

We're just doing a lawful investigation.

There is absolutely nothing wrong of what I did.

Our investigators agreed.

The judge agreed, the DA agreed.

Then the judge agreed.

And then so we proceeded, what is happening in court is the Attorney General sent me an email at midnight ordering me to stop the investigation to stop the count.

Well, he can't do that.

He has no authority to do that.

So we just kept counting.

So then he went to court and said, I disobeyed his order.

And now the court has to decide whether or not the front of the - Court.

- Yes.

- Okay.

- So now it's in the court system, not for the merits of this case, because the merits of the case are very, very clear.

It's in the court system to determine if the attorney general can prevent me from conducting an investigation.

Alright.

And I hope everybody sees that answer is no.

But now we have to fight a court battle that'll go on for months and months.

- We'll be watching that.

I wanna give you about a minute for some closing remarks.

- Thank you.

I appreciate it.

Appreciate being here.

Thanks for being here.

I think that the biggest issue that we have is me, as a regular citizen of California.

I came here when I was 21 years old for a better life.

I came here for a California dream that was not available in the state that I grew up in a very, very tiny town.

Everyone knew you had to go somewhere else.

And I had already learned at 11 years old that California was going to be the place that I went to find my dream.

And I came here and I did.

I worked hard.

It was not easy, but I worked hard.

I found a, a beautiful beauty queen, California beauty queen wife married her.

We have fantastic kids and grandkids now.

And I realize now, after putting my blinders on and worrying about my family and worrying about my job and everything else, I wasn't paying attention to the government around me.

And all of a sudden my kids don't have the availability for the California dream.

They can't afford to buy a house.

They can't afford rent, they can't afford groceries, they can't afford gas.

Now I'm looking at my grandkids and it's like, I'm gonna lose my grandkids because my kids are gonna go to a different state with all of their friends to find their better way of life.

And I, I can't allow that.

California is the greatest state we have, and we have to just realize, we have to get to a point where common, we take emotion out of it, and common sense and reason comes into play.

And we realize that we didn't break our state.

California is not broken.

Our businesses are not broken.

Our people are not broken.

Our environ, our teachers are not broken.

Our cops are not broken.

What is broken that's causing our issues is a broken policy, a political policy that's been going on in California for decades.

And it's because we keep electing the same people or the same beliefs and agenda over and over and over, and we expect different results.

We can't do it anymore.

- Thank you, Sheriff Bianco, really appreciate you being here tonight.

- Thank you.

- We're gonna, yeah, we're gonna have another town hall event with Tom Steyer on May 26th.

To watch those, we'll be streaming them all online at youtube.com/KQEDLive.

And for more election resources and coverage, including our voter guide, you can visit kqed.org/voterguide.

We also interviewed all the governor candidates, including Sheriff Bianco on our "Political Breakdown" podcast.

Thanks to you guys for attending, and from everyone watching and listening at home, have a great night.