Something else I didn't mention here (because the aim of the piece was not to actually analyse the pros and cons of the proposition directly) is that in the initial draft form of the bill that details how money can be spent on building housing and treatment facilities, the bill text specified that the funding could only be used to fund voluntary facilities--that is, places where people could only be taken if they were willing to go.
At the last minute (on a Monday before the bill was voted on on a Thursday) the bill text was amended to strike out this clause, allowing the funds to be used to fund involuntary facilities as well. Given the kinds of contractors available in California, it seems to me that this will likely lead to most or almost all of the new facilities being involuntary facilities, which will be a massive expansion of the capacity of the state to involuntarily commit people (around 10,000 beds, roughly doubling the number of such beds in the state).
Another commentary on the actual proposition that I left out is that an analyst whose technical abilities I trust a lot in this area (an experienced CA mental health services executive) has said she believes the bill might not even be legal/constitutional; because it combines two bills into one proposition. I haven't looked into the rules surrounding the structure of ballot measures enough to verify this myself, and I haven't seen this argument made against it anywhere else.
Didn't stumble on this until after voting (and I hadn't heard about that last-minute change), but I'm glad someone Did The Analysis. Tried giving the legal fulltext an honest read myself, and...very quickly got lost in minute arcana that made it clear Prop 1 wasn't a simple Does What It Says On The Tin. And, for lack of a more accurate term, it sure seemed to include a lot of "woke" pedantry that could not possibly have any effect on the stated end result. Both are generally red flags for me; as you say, the real axis of effectiveness in CA is being able to steer the damn ship at all, and this doesn't look helpful in that regard.
It's true that a lot of the current mental health funding ends up opaquely spent, with little evaluation of efficacy. However, having had positive life-altering interactions with a few of the effective local ones in SF...there's definitely at least some baby in all that bathwater. (One of them was actually in danger of going bankrupt circa 2019-2020, and only got saved due to an infusion of said funding stream.) So even though The System is broken overall, defunding the few parts that do demonstrably work, in order to...do something vague and probably not too helpful...is too high a price to gamble, imo.
You need an editor to help you be more succinct. You make good points but you could get the message across more directly with a piece 50% as long and lose nothing of your message. And in fact you would gain in that you’d lose less readers who become disinterested due to the meandering, indirect writing style.
"Legislators don’t always have the firmest grasp of what policies they signed into law anyways. (They do process an awful lot of it, on an absurd number of topics. Imagine needing to make expert decisions on matters around engineering, medicine, education, urban planning, finance, and ecological management all in the same day!"
You mean so the legislators specialise in particular topics? It seems like even then, it's impossible for any given legislator to be an expert in all but a minority of the issues they deal with on those committees. They don't have the time (their schedules are packed); that's what their staffers are for, ideally, but the staffers still have to allocate their time across a wide range of topics, even within one topic area (e.g. mental health).
As one example, someone trying to write policy on e.g. mental health crisis care in California would need to be intimately familiar with Medicaid, health budgets, medical licensing, the healthcare workforce, aspects of design and architecture, some issues around transport, the different treatment modalities available and funded, and the landscape of organisations and institutions available to contribute. And that's just for making any policy, nevermind good policy (which ideally would also involve principles of process control engineering, statistics and data collection, deep knowledge of community demographics and cultures, and familiarity with the current science on crisis response).
Something else I didn't mention here (because the aim of the piece was not to actually analyse the pros and cons of the proposition directly) is that in the initial draft form of the bill that details how money can be spent on building housing and treatment facilities, the bill text specified that the funding could only be used to fund voluntary facilities--that is, places where people could only be taken if they were willing to go.
At the last minute (on a Monday before the bill was voted on on a Thursday) the bill text was amended to strike out this clause, allowing the funds to be used to fund involuntary facilities as well. Given the kinds of contractors available in California, it seems to me that this will likely lead to most or almost all of the new facilities being involuntary facilities, which will be a massive expansion of the capacity of the state to involuntarily commit people (around 10,000 beds, roughly doubling the number of such beds in the state).
Another commentary on the actual proposition that I left out is that an analyst whose technical abilities I trust a lot in this area (an experienced CA mental health services executive) has said she believes the bill might not even be legal/constitutional; because it combines two bills into one proposition. I haven't looked into the rules surrounding the structure of ballot measures enough to verify this myself, and I haven't seen this argument made against it anywhere else.
Didn't stumble on this until after voting (and I hadn't heard about that last-minute change), but I'm glad someone Did The Analysis. Tried giving the legal fulltext an honest read myself, and...very quickly got lost in minute arcana that made it clear Prop 1 wasn't a simple Does What It Says On The Tin. And, for lack of a more accurate term, it sure seemed to include a lot of "woke" pedantry that could not possibly have any effect on the stated end result. Both are generally red flags for me; as you say, the real axis of effectiveness in CA is being able to steer the damn ship at all, and this doesn't look helpful in that regard.
It's true that a lot of the current mental health funding ends up opaquely spent, with little evaluation of efficacy. However, having had positive life-altering interactions with a few of the effective local ones in SF...there's definitely at least some baby in all that bathwater. (One of them was actually in danger of going bankrupt circa 2019-2020, and only got saved due to an infusion of said funding stream.) So even though The System is broken overall, defunding the few parts that do demonstrably work, in order to...do something vague and probably not too helpful...is too high a price to gamble, imo.
You need an editor to help you be more succinct. You make good points but you could get the message across more directly with a piece 50% as long and lose nothing of your message. And in fact you would gain in that you’d lose less readers who become disinterested due to the meandering, indirect writing style.
If you have recommendations for a good editor, or a donor who would like to fund paying one, I would love those.
"Legislators don’t always have the firmest grasp of what policies they signed into law anyways. (They do process an awful lot of it, on an absurd number of topics. Imagine needing to make expert decisions on matters around engineering, medicine, education, urban planning, finance, and ecological management all in the same day!"
Isn't that what congressional committees are for?
You mean so the legislators specialise in particular topics? It seems like even then, it's impossible for any given legislator to be an expert in all but a minority of the issues they deal with on those committees. They don't have the time (their schedules are packed); that's what their staffers are for, ideally, but the staffers still have to allocate their time across a wide range of topics, even within one topic area (e.g. mental health).
As one example, someone trying to write policy on e.g. mental health crisis care in California would need to be intimately familiar with Medicaid, health budgets, medical licensing, the healthcare workforce, aspects of design and architecture, some issues around transport, the different treatment modalities available and funded, and the landscape of organisations and institutions available to contribute. And that's just for making any policy, nevermind good policy (which ideally would also involve principles of process control engineering, statistics and data collection, deep knowledge of community demographics and cultures, and familiarity with the current science on crisis response).