California Assembly Bill 2660 sought to address a disturbing problem — a lack of clear and consistent data on dying children — with a straightforward solution: requiring officials to review and report such deaths. Not surprisingly, it sailed through the state Legislature without a single no vote from either party or chamber.
More surprisingly, Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed it. Also unexpected was his stated reason: hard-nosed dedication to fiscal austerity.
Sure, the governor supports the goal of figuring out why California’s kids are dying, he wrote in his veto message. It’s just, you know, the money.
While Newsom wrote that he agreed “with the intent of this bill,” he went on to deliver a green-eyeshade lecture about fiscal responsibility, admonishing legislators that given the finitude of the state’s recent revenue bonanza, “it is important to remain disciplined when it comes to spending.”
Newsom deployed the same rationale to veto a host of bills at the end of the latest legislative session. Almost as if the free-spending governor were suddenly possessed by the spirit of his proudly tightfisted predecessor, Jerry Brown, he tacked the same two paragraphs of bean-counting boilerplate onto a host of veto messages in recent weeks.
A casual observer might conclude that the bills in question would squander billions in pursuit of frivolous aims. But that’s certainly not the case with the measure to require every child’s death to be systematically investigated.
“It is hard to imagine a program that should be of a higher priority ... than accounting for California children who die,” Ed Howard, senior counsel at the University of San Diego Law School’s Children’s Advocacy Institute, wrote in a letter urging the governor to sign the bill in August. “Yet no part of the system by which we account for California children dying is working.”
Current law allows but does not require California counties to maintain interagency teams to review children’s deaths for signs of neglect and abuse, and it’s vague as to the state’s responsibility. The statewide child death review team lapsed over a decade ago, when its modest budget was eliminated amid the Great Recession, and officials can’t even say how many county teams are functioning. One 2017 legislative analysis estimated that 22 of the state’s 58 counties had death review teams in place; a more recent survey found that “based on the limited information available ... there could be up to 37 active” teams.
The state of the data on California child fatalities is, in short, “bizarre, chaotic and unreliable,” said Dr. Jeoffry Gordon, a retired family physician and member of a panel that advises state officials on child fatalities.
“Nobody in California can tell you how many children died of abuse or neglect in 2021,” Gordon said. He added, “We’re talking about murders here.”
AB 2660, by Democratic Assemblyman Brian Maienschein of San Diego, would have rectified that by requiring counties to maintain child death review teams and directing the state to fund both the statewide and local efforts.
As for the cost, the state team’s annual budget, when it had one, was just $150,000. Legislative analyses estimated that Maienschein’s bill could cost California agencies about $2 million and the counties up to $1.7 million that could be covered by the state — though the latter cost is hard to figure given that it’s not clear how many counties are doing the work. In any case, the expense would be minuscule in the context of the state’s $235 billion general fund budget.
“It’s not a huge amount of money,” Gordon said, “but it’s a huge tragedy that you’re finally going to get a handle on.”
The week after he vetoed the bill, Newsom could be found crowing about the $9.5 billion in election-season “inflation relief” the state is sending to households earning as much as half a million dollars a year. It rendered his performative parsimony with respect to the state’s most vulnerable that much more hollow.
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ABOUT THE WRITER
Josh Gohlke is Deputy California Opinion Editor for McClatchy and The Sacramento Bee.
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