5 questions for Toks Omishakin

With help from Alex Nieves and Blanca Begert

TOKS ON TAXES: California State Transportation Secretary Toks Omishakin has a slow-burning problem.

Omishakin, who’s been overseeing Caltrans, the California Transportation Commission, the Department of Motor Vehicles, the High-Speed Rail Authority and other transportation boards and commissions since 2022, is thinking about how the state’s shift to electric vehicles will chip away at gas tax revenue — a primary source of state transportation funding.

We interviewed him on Tuesday as part of our live event on California’s transportation funding picture. Some excerpts, edited for length and clarity:

How urgent of an issue is the dwindling gas tax, from your perspective?

Instead of urgent, I would say it’s critically important that we start to really see what the future’s going to be related to this issue. We’re hitting the ball out of the park when it comes to the ZEV transition. But the other side to that coin is we’re using a model that’s been around since 1919, since World War I ended. That was when Oregon, for the first time of any state, put in place a one-cent sales tax.

We are not at a place where we’re losing gas tax funding yet. Some people say that we are, but we’re not, and I think in large part, it’s due to SB 1 and how it was indexed.

Talk about the road charge pilot project that’s going to start in August. What are you hoping to find out from that?

What we’re trying to do on this one is see how the revenue collection process is really going to work. It’s likely going to be our last pilot, because this will be the fourth one. Now we’ll be able to hand over that information to the Legislature if they decide at some point they want to possibly move in this direction.

Is this going to happen on your administration’s watch, or in whose lap is this potato going to land?

We’re in the fact-finding, testing and piloting stage still, but to our credit, what we don’t want to do is be caught flat-footed on this issue. We want to maintain a forward-looking outlook on it. There are 20 other states in the country that are going through a very similar process, some actually a little bit farther ahead. The timing of when it happens, that’s yet to be determined.

How much are we actually trying to reduce driving as a result of our state policies? How is the implementation of your Climate Action Plan for Transportation Infrastructure going, after we’ve had some very high-profile debates recently over approving highway expansions?

From a CAPTI standpoint, I think we’re well ahead of schedule. In July 2021 it had roughly a five-year horizon to get a lot of things done. As of this month, we’re going to be probably 95 percent done with most of the goals that we identified.

When it comes to specific projects, I can’t talk about those because there’s a lot of cloud and potential litigation surrounding some of those projects. But the life cycle of a typical project, a major project, usually is between 12 to 15 years. So you can imagine projects that are finally moving forward today, how far potentially they date back.

Philosophies change over time. We’re way ahead of where we were a decade ago in the state as it relates to our positioning on making sure that projects have a multimodal, sort of climate-friendly outlook, and so it’s sometimes hard to just do a 180 pivot. Our job is to make sure that regardless of how long the project has been in the queue, in the pipeline, that we’re making the right adjustments as much as we possibly can. Are the projects perfect? No, they’re not. But are we making the adjustments from a policy standpoint, from a funding standpoint, to align? Absolutely.

What is your response to last year’s whistleblower allegation that Caltrans is piecemealing highway expansion projects to get them through CEQA?

I can’t touch issues like that because there’s a lot surrounding it, including potential or probably existing litigation. But what we’re doing in departments like Caltrans is working.

When I came on board, Gov. [Gavin] Newsom hired me specifically because of this issue, because he wanted someone to run Caltrans that had an outlook that was focused on multimodal investments. How do you make the shift from sort of a highway-centric organization to one that’s multimodal in nature? There were people who came before me who were working on that. The team that I work with, we completely shifted into a different higher gear on this, and even though I’m in this role, I’ve continued to pay attention to make sure that we as a state continue to head in that multimodal vision and direction for California. — DK

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CHASE THESE ARROWS: A new effort in Congress to regulate recycling labels for consumer products could put a nation-leading California law in the crosshairs just as it prepares to get off the ground, we reported today.

Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) is working on draft legislation to create national rules for when beverage containers, food service products and packaging can lay claim to being compostable, recyclable or reusable.

The packaging industry supports the concept, which is meant to crack down on misleading uses of the iconic “chasing arrows” symbol — but only if the bill preempts California’s 2021 “truth in labeling” law, SB 343.

The American Institute for Packaging and the Environment, which counts Amazon, Exxon, 3M and the American Chemistry Council among its members, wrote to Merkley’s office last week that it wants to avoid a patchwork approach in which different states enact different labeling standards — a dynamic the group said would make it “practically impossible” to establish compliance and would fuel “consumer confusion and mistrust.”

The industry push is sounding alarm bells in California.

“The only people that are trying to preempt SB 343 are folks that have effectively been lying to their customers for years, claiming that their material is recyclable,” the law’s author, state Sen. Ben Allen, said in an interview. “I encourage our federal friends to use SB 343 as a model to ensure that consumers clearly know what packaging is recyclable and what isn’t.”

Environmentalists are up in arms, too. “There’s no way I will support a bill that preempts California,” said Heidi Sanborn, founding director of the National Stewardship Action Council and the California Product Stewardship Council.

A spokesperson for Merkley stressed that the draft bill is in very early stages and didn’t respond to questions about whether he supports preempting California’s law. Merkley told POLITICO in a statement that “there is clearly bipartisan appetite in Congress to provide consumers with clear and accurate labeling” and that his draft legislation is designed to increase recycling of packaging and “keep waste out of our environment.”

Meanwhile, CalRecycle is implementing SB 343 — companies will need to start meeting minimum recycling thresholds next year in order to keep using the “chasing arrows” symbol — and Allen has a bill this session, SB 1231, that would tweak compliance deadlines and let companies that are on the right track petition CalRecycle to still use the label. — JW

PENCILS (ALMOST) DOWN: There’s no final climate bond language yet ahead of Monday’s deadline. That means state lawmakers will be working over the weekend.

(A legislative minutiae reminder: Legislation has to be in print for at least 72 hours before it’s eligible to receive a floor vote, thanks to 2016’s Prop. 54.) Because of that, lawmakers will have to release final bond language by the end of the day Monday in order to hold a vote by the June 27 deadline to place initiatives on the November ballot.

Assemblymember Eduardo Garcia, author of his chamber’s bond proposal, said in an interview Thursday that he hopes lawmakers can get it in well under the wire but that the two houses are still negotiating over a number of big areas.

“We have some areas in the water section, fire section, agricultural sections that still require some discussions to try to get closer to one another’s priorities,” he said. “Some work in the energy section as well.”

Groups involved in negotiations say Newsom’s office has offered little insight into his priorities in a climate funding measure, leaving the door open for questions about this level of support. (Newsom’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

Garcia said lawmakers are taking into account Newsom’s past priorities on issues like water infrastructure as they fill the $10 billion frame they’ve agreed on.

“We’re hopeful that the final product, if and when it gets to the governor’s desk, will be something that he can support,” he said. — AN

— The Supreme Court ruled against a Rio Grande settlement authored by Texas, New Mexico and Colorado. That could strengthen the federal government’s position in negotiations over other waterways, including the Colorado.

— In an era of wildfire mitigation, cities are ditching juniper trees.

— A new study shows how regional interventions to reflect the sun’s rays in California could inadvertently intensify heatwaves in Europe.

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