Los Angeles: A long-shot effort to break California into six separate states got a boost on Wednesday when the billionaire venture capitalist behind the proposal said he had gathered enough signatures to place it on the ballot in two years.
Timothy Draper, a founder of a Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm that has invested in Twitter, Skype and Tesla, among other companies, has been agitating for months for a ballot initiative to chop the most populous US state into smaller entities.
“It’s important because it will help us create a more responsive, more innovative and more local government, and that ultimately will end up being better for all of Californians,” said Roger Salazar, a spokesman for the campaign. “The idea... is to create six states with responsive local governments — states that are more representative and accountable to their constituents.”
Salazar said that the campaign had gathered more than the roughly 808,000 signatures needed to place the measure on the November, 2016 ballot. Draper and other supporters filed the signatures with California Secretary of State Debra Bowen.
But the plan has raised bipartisan hackles across the state, and opponents say it stands little chance of gaining voter approval. If it does win the support of voters, it must still be passed by Congress, which opponents say is also unlikely.
“This is a colossal and divisive waste of time, energy, and money that will hurt the California brand,” said Steven Maviglio, a Democratic political strategist who has formed the group OneCalifornia with GOP strategist Joe Rodota to fight Draper’s plan. “It has zero chance of passage. But what it does is scare investment away... at a time when the Governor is leading us to an economic comeback.”
Draper’s plan would split the world’s eighth-largest economy along geographic lines.
One state, to be called Silicon Valley, would include the tech hub along with the San Francisco Bay Area. Jefferson, named after the third US president, would encompass the northernmost region. The state capital of Sacramento would be in North California, while South California would be made up of San Diego and the eastern suburbs of Los Angeles.
Los Angeles itself would be part of a state called West California.
Proponents say the division would help create a more business-friendly environment, solve the state’s water issues, and ease traffic congestion.
Draper told Newsweek he has more than enough signatures to get the measure in front of voters in 2016. “We needed to come up with 808,000,” he said. “We ended up with 1.3 million.”
Of course, putting the proposal up for vote in no way ensures that it will pass. A December 2013 Field Poll survey found that 59 per cent of California voters oppose the idea of splitting up their state, although Field Poll Director Mark DiCamillo told Newsweek in an email that “the Field Poll has not yet conducted any polling about Tim Draper’s proposal to divide California into six states.”
Draper’s plan has also drawn the ire of at least one Silicon Valley critic. “This entire plan is really about creating Silicon Valley as its own state. Therefore Silicon Valley gets to be a state called ‘Silicon Valley,’ and it gets to make its politics and its money more dense, and everyone in the idyllic dream of Silicon Valley gets to be happy,” wrote Philip Bump in The Washington Post.
Despite the opposition, Draper is optimistic. “At first there is always a resistance to change, and then slowly it moves forward. I’ve been through that many times with startups. Believe it or not, nobody wanted to have an electric car about two years ago, and now they’re the greatest thing, and we all get out in front of them. And this is the same kind of thing,” he told Newsweek.
So where did this idea come from?
“We now spend the most and get the least,” Draper told Time. “We spend among the most for education and we’re 46th in education. We spend among the most for prisons, and we are among the highest recidivism rates... So the status quo is failing. And there have been some very good people running California, governing California. So it must be systemic. At best, the system seems to be on a spiral down. At worst it’s a monopoly, and in a monopoly, they can charge whatever they want and provide whatever service they want. In a competitive environment, people get good service and they pay fair prices.
But he says the biggest argument for six Californias is its people are not well-represented.
“The people down south are very concerned with things like immigration law and the people way up north are frustrated by taxation without representation. And the people in coastal California are frustrated because of water rights. And the people in Silicon Valley are frustrated because the government doesn’t keep up with technology. And in Los Angeles, their issues revolve around copyright law. Each region has its own interest, and I think California is ungovernable because they can’t balance all those interests. I’m looking at Six Californias as a way of giving California a refresh and allowing those states to both cooperate and compete with each other.”
So why six states, rather than four or five or seven?
“Well, seven is a question,” he said. “We did consider five and we did consider more than six. We felt that we needed at least enough states so there could be this cooperative, competitive environment where each of the states could watch and benefit from the actions of the others and each could compete for their constituents and their counties. A lot of people have asked me why not two or three? My belief is with two or three you’d end up with the same kind of environment, where you’d end up with two monopolies or three monopolies.”
