he that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom

[calimac]

Some clown named Tim Draper wants to break apart California. He's preparing to gather signatures for a ballot initiative to separate it into not two, but six states. His own website has nothing but a crude map and contact info, but people have undertaken to analyze and to critique the proposal, both of them getting his map wrong. (See the video at the end of the second article for getting the map wrong differently.)

While I wouldn't be opposed to the idea of splitting California into two states, which the legislature actually passed around 1860 and Congress failed to act on because it was distracted by some war, six is too many. Politically it would balkanize the region as the East Coast is. I ran the proposal against the 2010 US census and got these figures, with a note on what each state's population ranking would be among the 55 states:

West California (LA and central coast): 11,335,455 (7th)
South California (San Diego and inland empire): 10,504,924 (8th)
Silicon Valley (SF and Monterey bays): 6,597,332 (15th)
Central California (San Joaquin Valley, south Sierras, Owens Valley): 4,124,776 (29th)
North California (north bay, Sacramento, central Sierras, Tahoe): 3,763,648 (31st)
Jefferson (far north): 927,821 (49th)

The two most populous would be mid-level powerhouses politically, between Ohio and Michigan in population, Silicon Valley would be between Washington and Massachusetts, the next two would bracket Kentucky, Oregon, and Oklahoma, and the state of Jefferson would be a vacant hole with only one member of Congress, with a population between Montana's and Delaware's, far less than any other state west of Wyoming. The proposal would produce a lot more senators, but not much else.

The poverty of the Central and Jefferson states, described in the first article, and their lack of infrastructure (only one UC campus, and that small and new, between them, and just two state university campuses in Jefferson, for instance, both very much at odds with what the political ethos of the state would be) are other issues.

I want to focus on two other things:

1. The boundaries are stupid.
I give four examples.
First, "North California" makes no sense as a separate political entity. It wanders from a coastal region, containing a full 20% of the state's population with only three one-lane winding highways connecting it to its interior, to disparate urban valley and mountainous regions, each of the three far more akin to areas immediately outside its boundaries than to each other.
Second, putting the Owens Valley in Central California instead of in South, where the rest of the state's desert goes. Really the Owens Valley would be happier in Nevada, but south is the only other direction in California it can conveniently reach. During the winter, the direct passes over the Sierras are closed, and you'd have to go around, almost out of the state, to reach its population centers.
Third, splitting the LA urban area right down the middle between West and South. Wherever in the US there's a major urban area split between two states, it's a headache. Why create another one?
Fourth, same thing goes with running a border down San Francisco Bay. That'd make five (not four, five) toll bridges interstate, and it's already enough of a nuisance with them crossing county lines.

2. Most of the names are stupid.
"North California" isn't in the north. "West California" mostly isn't in the west. "North California" and "South California" have the same initials as North and South Carolina. "West California" has the initials W.C. "Silicon Valley" as a name for the entire region is stupid beyond belief. Both ends of the state would revolt against this fetishization of one aspect of part of its center. Call it Baylands, if you must, as it's focused on two big bays.

If the signature-gatherers find me, I'm not signing this one, and I'm not voting for it, either.

Comments

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

As a San Diegan, I certainly wouldn't go for a proposal that included San Diego in a smaller subset of California that also included Los Angeles. Los Angeles is already too overwhelming a political force in the full-sized state. That's the big problem in nearly every proposal for breaking up California. I suppose it could be avoided by making Los Angeles an independent city-state—but it would insane for Los Angeles to go for a proposal that would put virtually its entire water supply under the control of a different state government.

It really looks to me as if the primary divide in California politics is West and East: high-tech coastal cities versus agriculture and maybe a little mining and lumbering. But East California would have a ridiculously small population. Besides, the boundary lines would often have to run through counties; here in San Diego county, La Jolla is West Californian, but El Cajon and Santee are East Californian, for example.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

El Cajon and Santee, really? They're part of the undivided San Diego urban metropolis. I'd put the dividing line west of Julian, to be sure, but even Ramona is now part of creeping urbanization.

In the Bay Area, we have four north-south strings of urban development, separated by mountains or water: the coast (Bolinas-Pacifica-Half Moon Bay-Santa Cruz), the Peninsula in the narrower sense (East Marin-San Francisco to San Jose), the East Bay in the narrower sense (Berkeley, Oakland, etc.), and the 680 corridor (Benicia, Concord, Livermore, et al). All of those are part of the west in your west-east divide, and even Central Valley towns like Tracy and Manteca, historically part of the East, through urbanization are becoming part of the Bay Area overspill; changing demographic and political patterns in San Joaquin and Stanislaus counties show this.

[mithriltabby]

I think it’s just an attempt to shift the balance of power in the Senate.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Probably not only that. There are a lot of rural Californians whose concerns and beliefs are very different from those of people in Los Angeles, San Diego, or the Bay Area, who feel disenfranchised in the state government.

[mithriltabby]

I think those are people who could be persuaded to vote for it as long as no one tells them what will happen when the urban tax base goes away and water transfers go across newly drawn state lines, but I don’t think that’s the motivation behind the bill.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

I think you underestimate the prevalence of negative feelings toward the urbanized parts of states from the nonurban populations. Colorado has been having a secession movement with similar roots. Of course the desire for two more Republican senators helps motivate support for it, but it's building on more localist sentiments.

[mithriltabby]

I don’t dispute that there are people who feel that way; I just think Tim Draper is using them rather than sharing their feelings.

[nellorat.livejournal.com]

This is the first I've heard of this. Interesting.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

If we were going to do the realignment, Inyo, Mono, Alpine, Lassen, and Modoc counties ought to be annexed to Nevada. Jefferson, if we must actually create another West Virginia, we should include the southern Oregon counties with which the area has more in common.

Alpine county has the interstate problem already: There are no banks in the county, so the county government in Markleeville (which is required by state law to use banks chartered in California) has to drive a huge distance around through Carson City and Lake Tahoe to get to a California-chartered bank. (This information is about 20 years old and might have been superseded.)

The only reason the boundary between Nevada and California is where it is anyway is because it was relatively easy to draw on a map (although not so easy to survey, it turns out, including the challenge of locating the corner where the vertical and diagonal boundaries intersect, which is in the middle of what was at the time marked as Lake Bigler on the map) and because the state constitutional convention wanted to keep all of the gold in California, so they picked a line somewhat east of the crest of the Sierra Nevada. The Sierra crest might have been a right pain to survey, but it would have been a more logical geographical boundary and create fewer edge-case problems given how few people would be living on the boundary.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

What is now Lassen and, I think, most of Modoc were included in the boundaries of Nevada as it was first drawn, provided that California (which was already a state) consented to give them up. It didn't. Consequently the county that Nevada had overpresumptively created in that territory disappeared, except for a thin strip that was east of the state line. Useless in itself, the strip was annexed to Washoe County to put it somewhere, and that's why Washoe has that weird northward extension.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

I didn't know that! I wondered why there was that odd bit, which makes Washoe a very strange county, with an urban south and an intensely rural, almost uninhabited part.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Here's a map from before the annexation.

[eddyerrol.livejournal.com]

My hometown is Eureka (in the "far north"), although I live in the Portland area now. I wouldn't be thrilled (and neither would most of the residents, I'll warrant) with that area going from being a part of one of the most populous and wealthiest states, to becoming one of the most sparsely populated and poorest.