Member Since: 5/10/2012
Posts: 10,996
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California to be split into 6 states?
Quote:
Lots of folks believe California is ungovernable. Venture capitalist Tim Draper has a solution: Six Californias, including one called Silicon Valley.
Draper, a maverick tech investor who once poured $20 million into a statewide school voucher initiative, on Monday laid out his case for a proposed ballot measure that, if passed by voters, would demand Congress slice and dice the nation's most populous state.
"We're simply too big and bloated," Draper declared in a news conference from Draper University of Heroes, the San Mateo school for aspiring startup CEOs he opened earlier this year.
Veteran political observers were quick and unanimous in assessing the plan's odds of success at zero. At the same time, they said Draper's modest proposal could spark discussion about how to fix the state's manifold problems, such as bursting prisons and jockeying over water rights.
"The sheer size of California raises questions about representation and accountability. A single state Senate district has more people than all of South Dakota," said John J. Pitney, a political science professor at Claremont McKenna College, east of Los Angeles.
But even though it seems dangerous to bet against a quirky idea catching fire with voters in a state that recalled its governor and replaced him with Arnold Schwarzenegger, Pitney noted that Congressional Democrats would never go along with creating four new Senate seats in California's deeply conservative inland and southern counties. Article IV of the U.S. Constitution reserves for Congress the right to admit new states into the Union.
Draper, who recently dialed back his role at Draper Fisher Jurvetson to focus on his new university and other efforts, suggested that Congress might react to his plan more with "indifference" than resistance.
He argued that the status quo in Sacramento, which regularly features budget gridlock and statehouse gamesmanship, "is not cutting it for our schools, our businesses, our infrastructure or our people."
Dan Schnur, a former Republican political strategist who now runs the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at the University of Southern California, noted that although Draper's 2000 voucher initiative went down in flames, "it also helped force a much broader conversation about school reform. This could very well end up promoting a conversation about rerouting power from the state to local governments."
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More provided in the link below:
http://www.mercurynews.com/business/...fornias-ballot
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