It’s been more than two years since Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration exempted state prisons and other correctional facilities from heat illness prevention rules for indoor workplaces across California, citing concerns over potentially billions of dollars in costs to the state.
Now, with only a few months left in Newsom’s term, his administration has refused to make public the cost estimate on which it based a decision that has faced criticism from workplace safety advocates, employee unions and business groups.
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While drafting heat safety rules to protect more than 1 million indoor workers, state officials initially projected that implementation would cost state prisons less than $1 million in the first year and less than $500,000 each year after. Then, late in the rulemaking process in 2024, the Department of Finance said it had received revised estimates from the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation showing it would actually cost billions of dollars.
When the state Occupational Safety and Health Standards Board adopted the standards, it exempted state prisons and other correctional facilities, where nurses, guards and working incarcerated people remain unprotected. The state is now developing a weaker set of rules for correctional facilities that wouldn’t take effect until indoor temperatures are five degrees hotter than in the rules for other workplaces.
But the lack of any public accounting on the multibillion-dollar estimate behind the administration’s controversial decision has frustrated researchers and advocates who say the public has a right to know the financial basis for the state’s two-tiered approach to protecting workers from health risks from extreme heat that are growing more dangerous because of climate change.
Capital & Main asked the Newsom administration for details about the billions in estimated costs and the decision to exempt prisons from the earlier standard. Newsom’s office referred questions to CDCR, which declined Capital & Main’s interview requests, as did the Department of Finance and Cal/OSHA.
In response to written questions about the cost estimate amount, what analysis was done of the estimate and why the last-minute estimates from CDCR differed from earlier numbers, the Department of Finance had the same response to multiple questions: “We have no additional information to provide at this time.”
The Department of Finance also refused to provide the cost estimate in response to a California Public Records Act request from Capital & Main. While the department had responsive documents, staff counsel Shelly Renner wrote, it would not provide them because they are subject to “the deliberative process privilege as it relates to budgetary decision-making, budgetary issues, and policy development because the public interest served by not disclosing these records clearly outweighs the public interest served by their disclosure.”
That exemption the department relied on to keep its estimate secret requires an agency, if challenged in court, to prove the public interest served by not disclosing the records is greater than the public interest in disclosing the records, not merely state that they believe that to be true, said David Loy, legal director at the First Amendment Coalition.
Loy said he was particularly skeptical that this exception applies when asking for facts and figures such as a cost estimate, rather than the details of a deliberative “debate about how the costs and benefits should be balanced.”
In Laura Stock’s time on the Occupational Safety and Health Standards Board before Gov. Newsom removed from her post in 2024, cost came up with “every single regulation, and almost always employers, whether they’re private employers or whether they’re state employers, object to regulations on the basis of cost,” she said.
Capital & Main filed an additional Public Records Act request for the cost estimate from CDCR, but the department also declined to provide the records, citing “deliberative process privilege.”
Bharat Venkat, director of the UCLA Heat Lab, has also submitted repeated public records requests to CDCR asking for a breakdown of the cost estimates only to see them denied.
Venkat said that if CDCR is going to keep referencing a cost of “billions of dollars” as a barrier to cooling state prisons, it should also be open to providing evidence of that figure and a cost breakdown so there can be some discussion of a potential solution.
“We know that people inside prisons are going to experience incredibly dangerous temperatures, and so something has to happen, and if you just keep saying it’s too expensive, it doesn’t really address the issue,” he said.
”If you’re going to claim something’s too expensive,” Venkat added, “you have to show us the numbers and actually make those transparent.”
