That — homelessness — is where Amy Bublak comes in.
You probably don’t know Bublak and likely haven’t heard of Turlock, the Central Valley town she serves as mayor. But in the hours leading up to his horrific budget performance, Newsom seemed to have a kind of 19th nervous breakdown. Attempting to explain his high-profile failure to eliminate homelessness despite spending billions, he blamed local officials.
“As a taxpayer, not just governor, I’m not interested in funding failure anymore,” Newsom told reporters. “I’m not. I won’t. Time to do your job. People are dying on their watch, dying on their watch. I don’t know — how do these people get reelected? Look at these encampments. They’re a disgrace. They’ve been there years and years and years and years. I’ve heard that same rhetoric for years. People are dying. Kids are being born.”
“It’s almost as if he hasn’t been either governor or lieutenant governor since 2012,” observed Red State reporter Jen Van Laar.
Newsom’s Scarlet-Faced Letter
Newsom reserved his most lethal ammo for Bublak in a letter that his office leaked to reporters. She first learned of the governor’s letter from a Politico reporter “30 or 40 minutes before I got it in my email.” Once she read it, “I thought, ‘This is crazy. This man who knows nothing about homelessness is going to talk to me, of all people,’” Bublak told National Review.
Newsom told Bublak in the letter, “It is imperative that the city reconsider its priorities and demonstrate the kind of collaborative, accountable, and solution-oriented leadership this crisis demands. Enough. Do your job.”
Bublak’s sin — the action that brought her to the governor’s attention — was her refusal to approve spending the symbolic sum of one dollar required to unlock a county homelessness grant of $267,000.
When reporters dutifully conveyer-belted the governor’s letter into the state’s largest news outlets, Newsom promoted their stories on X. “Truly a ridiculous lack of local leadership — an absolute moral failure,” he declared. “California has invested billions to combat homelessness. In Turlock, their only shelter is at risk over a single dollar. The state has done its part. Local leaders need to step up.”
Bublak explained that the state money — laundered through the county and then to We Care, a homeless shelter in Turlock — would come with no accountability.
People who live in actual homes near the We Care center have complained for months that the shelter’s residents, locked out of the facility during the day, relieve themselves in the neighborhood.
“Turlock City Council requested a simple, reasonable condition: that We Care expand access to bathroom facilities 24 hours a day,” Bublak said. “Despite multiple discussions where We Care appeared amenable to this condition, they refused to make the commitment. Instead, they chose to attend two council meetings and publicly attack the council majority, believing public pressure and threats would override thoughtful decision-making.
“While we respect the efforts of We Care in addressing homelessness, it became clear that a change in direction was needed,” Bublak continued. “We could not, in good conscience, support a grant that did not address core community concerns or deliver greater accountability.”
Bublak’s assertion of her constituents’ public-health concerns struck many in the media as lacking both compassion and an understanding of basic business sense. Headlines in her own hometown newspaper declared, “We Care shelter faces funding crisis as Turlock Council rejects $1 approval,” “Council sucker punches Turlock’s homeless population,” “We need a morality check on homelessness,” and “We Care may close following city council inaction.”
It’s unlikely that Newsom knows Bublak any better than you or I do. But like any good politician, he knows that punching down is generally risk-free. Officials in some of the state’s biggest cities — including those in Los Angeles — have more pointedly, even proudly, refused direct orders from Newsom to clean up homeless camps.
But they’re his political allies. Turlock is a relatively small city of 72,000 in a rural county that went for Trump over Harris by more than eleven points, and its Bublak is no ordinary California mayor.
A Brief Biography of the Mayor of Turlock, Calif.
Bublak grew up poor in Latrobe, a town of about 200 people in the Sierra Nevada foothills. “I literally went to a one-room school,” she said. She arrived in Turlock as a freshman at Stanislaus State, played basketball as a walk-on, threw shot put and javelin, and completed a master’s in urban government and public administration. She left to become an EMT in nearby Richmond, one of California’s most dangerous cities. There, she said, she “routinely dodged bullets” to help victims. In one case, she recalls trying to resuscitate a shooting victim — until the gang members who’d gunned him down targeted Bublak and her partner. “We were providing CPR and ultimately had to load and go” — loading their patient into an ambulance and continuing CPR on the run.
Police who watched her perform under pressure suggested she’d make a great cop. She took their advice and worked in the Richmond city police department for 13 years. Her time there sounds like an extension of her studies in public administration. “Most people in my interactions were living close to poverty or on the streets — real people just doing what was necessary to survive. I knew them by name, and they were supportive of my efforts to get criminals off the street.”
That experience “made this job of the mayor so much easier,” she said. “You’re always dealing with people who aren’t going to be happy with your decisions. You’re always dealing with problems and trying to solve them, and you don’t put a lot of emotion into your decisions. You look at things pragmatically and don’t get too excited.”
Those qualities brought her to the attention of then-U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr. She’s still not sure how Barr got her name. When his staff asked her to join the Presidential Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice, “I thought there must be some mistake,” she said. “I thought, ‘Are you sure? Me? Turlock?’ I mean, we’re hardly famous.”
“Hardly famous”: Newsom may now wish that were still the case. His ill-advised attempt to smack around a small-town mayor has made headlines, beneath which even friendly reporters can’t help mentioning Newsom’s own failures on homelessness.
The ‘A’ Word
If Newsom hates any word more than “Trump” or “Bublak,” it may be “accountability.” In 2004, as San Francisco’s newly elected mayor, Newsom rolled into office on a promise to end the city’s stubborn homelessness problem. Speaking to the city hall press corps shortly after inauguration, he eschewed humility. He called his election “a significant day in San Francisco,” one that marked the first steps toward “a goal and desire not to manage but to end homelessness. It’s brilliant in its simplicity, if we have the courage to change.”
Newsom’s approach to homeless people was apparently neither brilliant nor simple, but it was certainly expensive. Instead of getting people sober in shelters, Newsom proposed permanent housing that included support services. By 2010, when he left the mayor’s office for the lieutenant governor’s job, he had spent $1.5 billion on the problem while San Francisco’s homeless numbers actually climbed. In 2014, still serving as lieutenant governor, he was the only statewide official to endorse Proposition 47, the state ballot initiative that reduced many felonies to misdemeanors. Its passage created a business model for petty thieves, including people living on the streets. Homelessness sprawled.
“A lot of those that are addicted all of a sudden had an income opportunity to steal,” said Jim Palmer, then president of the Orange County Rescue Mission. “It was a way to fund addiction on an individual basis by users.”
As governor, Newsom has recapitulated his failures on a grand scale. Since his election in 2018, he has spent an eye-popping $24 billion to solve the problem. In that period, the state’s homeless population has grown 43 percent — from 130,000 homeless people in 2018 to more than 187,000 today. When state auditors said they couldn’t track the spending, frantic lawmakers rushed to Newsom’s desk a bill calling for annual audits of spending on homelessness. Newsom vetoed their proposal, saying, “I fully support efforts to increase accountability and the effectiveness of our state homelessness programs, but similar measures are already in place.”
If there is only one person to blame for the state’s homelessness crisis, it’s Newsom. And yet there was last week’s frantic press event, his almost hallucinogenic expressions of his passion and rage. It was almost as if he stood for every bewildered Californian looking for someone to blame.
“There’s no compassion in denying what the hell’s going on [on] the streets and sidewalks,” he said. Local officials are to blame, and they “need to step up. Enough of the rhetoric. I’m serious. Enough of the rhetoric. People are dying in this state. It is a disgrace. It is one of the principal reasons people are so angry. They don’t trust politicians. They don’t like what they see.”
Truer words you’ve never spoken, governor.
Will Swaim is president of the California Policy Center and co-host with David Bahnsen of National Review’s “Radio Free California” podcast.
This article originally appeared in NRO.
