There are three candidates on the June 7 ballot for the newly drawn state Assembly District 79, which includes east San Diego, La Mesa, Lemon Grove, Spring Valley and part of El Cajon. The candidates are retired broker John Moore and project manager Corbin Sabol, both Republicans, and Assemblymember/doctor Akilah Weber, a Democrat. The top two vote-getters will advance to a Nov. 8 runoff election. The San Diego Union-Tribune Editorial Board sent each a 13-question survey and is publishing their responses here.
If you have comments or questions about the election or any of the candidates after reading this interview, please email Editorial and Opinion Director Matthew T. Hall at matthew.hall@sduniontribune.com.
Below are John Moore’s responses and a link to other responses.
Q: From wildfires to sea level rise, the climate emergency is increasingly affecting California. What immediate steps should California lawmakers be taking to address it?
A: Wildfires can be handled more directly. In Washington and Oregon a couple of summers ago there were many wildfires.
Law enforcement in each county captured several firebugs. They were caught, arrested and charged with arson. Some used delayed ignition devices which gave a few minutes for escape before the fire began.
In California, we think all wildfires are caused by downed power lines. It is very rare that we consider firebugs.
Meet the candidates for California State Assembly District 79
John Moore, Corbin Sabol and Akilah Weber are running for California State Assembly District 77
Q: The governor’s pleas to reduce water use have been widely met with indifference. What, if anything, should state lawmakers be doing to address drought conditions?
A: Researchers Mary Kang and Rob Jackson in their Stanford University study of 2016 showed that California has plenty of water.
In their groundbreaking discovery of the large aquifer in Central California, they measured 2,700 cubic kilometers of water underground.
Much of it is drinkable under California law. Some is brackish, needing filtering before drinking. Still, it is much cheaper to purify than seawater.
We don’t take advantage of our odd but regular rainfall cycle. It is divided between a long drought followed by a short deluge.
If we captured just part of the excess deluge in additional storage, we wouldn’t go through shortage crises in the drought cycle. There is plenty of water in the deluge to cover the consumption during the drought.
At 100 gallons per day per resident, assuming 39 million California residents, total individual water consumption per year is only about 5.25 million acre-feet. An acre-foot is equal to a football field with 1 foot of water evenly spread across the top which is equal to 326,000 gallons of water. Residential customers are our lowest consumers of water.
Q: What would you do to address the surging gas prices in California?
A: I would temporarily suspend the $1.20 in state taxes per gallon and discard the metered mileage tax on individual automobiles.
Q: How do you strike a balance between reducing the state’s dependency on fossil fuels and addressing energy affordability issues, including the high cost of gasoline?
A: “Fossil fuels” are a misnomer, according to Dmitri Mendeleev, the father of the periodic table of the elements. He made this observation long ago in the 1880s. It’s taken a century or more for word to reach the U.S.
It still hasn’t taken hold here or in lots of other parts of the world, though the Russians are convinced of it. Mendeleev thought that petroleum was the product of processes deep in the Earth under tremendous heat and pressure for eons.
John D. Rockefeller, president of Standard Oil and one of the wealthiest men in the world, needed an oil depletion allowance (sort of like depreciation expense on real estate). This way he could recover some of his losses on oil fields that had gone dry (empty).
In the early 1890s in New York, he held a big conference on oil and made mention that he wanted an academic paper proving that petroleum was the product of organic decay thus limited in supply and worthy of an oil depletion tax deduction, despite Mendeleev’s opinion to the contrary.
In the end, Rockefeller got his tax deduction, the cooperative academics got the cash they wanted, and Mendeleev turns in his grave. American geologist Thomas Gold carried the banner for Mendeleev in the 1950s through the 1970s but has since passed away, and we are still in a standoff on the issue.
Q: How would you bring down the high cost of housing, both for homeowners and renters?
A: It is estimated that almost half the cost of building homes in San Diego is from regulations. Cut the regulatory overhead by 50 percent. That will reduce total cost by 25 percent.
Q: Homelessness is growing dramatically across the state. How would you address it?
A: In San Diego, the homeless population is very small compared to the total county population of 3.3 million. Estimates of the homeless population vary from season to season but hover around 5,000 to 9,000. We should provide something on the order of military housing barracks for single men and separate single-family apartment barracks for women and children. Dining halls and medical facilities akin to military bases should also be added along with police or sheriff’s deputies offices and detention facilities for unruly residents.
Q: What, if anything, should the state do to make mass transit a viable option for commuters?
A: Horse-drawn buses and electric trolleys were the rage in the 1870s through the 1910s in American cities. Unfortunately, the trolley and bus nostalgia is just too expensive. Gone are those “good old days” when a trolley ride only cost a couple of cents.
Sometime in the late 1910s and 1920s, San Diego replaced its electric trolley cars and horse-drawn buses with all electric buses that ran on railroad tracks using overhead power lines. That lasted until the late 1940s when all the railroad buses, tracks and power lines were retired. The city’s new mass transit couldn’t beat the cost or convenience of a 1950s personal automobile.
Then about 20 years ago, big government, urban planning and 1890s nostalgia produced trains and bigger buses along with dozens of miles of rail and bridges through expensive already developed land with a price tag in the multi-billions of dollars for our millions of residents.
Then after building the “new nostalgia” transportation system a strange thing happened — no customers! It was the late 1940s problem repeating from the same competition, private transportation.
So this time use Uber, Lyft and self-driving vehicles. Put a minimum of three people in each vehicle, use a computer to plan a route that will take the minimum time to deliver all three to different destinations. Expensive trolley cars and buses will no longer require purchase and maintenance.
Well, maybe imagine trolley cars with food and beverages and music, while tourists circle through the grand vistas of San Diego. (Remember the customers!)
Q: How will you balance public health with economic and educational concerns going forward in this pandemic or the next one? What specific steps and strategies, from lockdowns to mask mandates, would you recommend or rule out if there is a new surge in deaths and hospitalizations?
A: The authority of the state to arbitrarily shut down and bankrupt private businesses is not clear and should never be used again. Even in World War II, this wasn’t necessary. Schools should never have been closed. Children are the least susceptible to the COVID-19 disease; however, the vaccine has led to some cases of myocarditis within a week of a male adolescent’s or young adult’s COVID-19 vaccination.
Q: California has the strictest gun laws in the nation yet has had some of the nation’s worst mass shootings this year. What more, if anything, should be done to reduce gun violence in California?
A: There are two parts to a gun crime, the gun and the criminal. To date, we have more laws punishing and restricting the gun than the criminal. Here we may use equity to solve the problem because there is an inequity in the number of laws against the gun compared to the number of laws against the criminal using the gun.
Q: California has adopted a number of criminal justice reforms in recent years. What would you change and why to ensure justice is equitable and effective?
A: This is an example of a very bad “reform”: Under Assembly Bill 1810, a defendant charged with a felony may have it dismissed if a mental health expert persuades a judge the offense resulted from a treatable mental disorder. San Diego County District Attorney Summer Stephen called it, “The most irresponsible legislation our state has ever seen.” A criminal convicted of a felony could avoid any prison time and be released into the public under a mental health professional’s supervision.
Such criminal justice “reforms” have led to a higher crime rate. Justice is based on the evidence and the fair judgment of the judge, jury and prosecutor. How is guilt or innocence determined to be “equitable”? Likewise, how is guilt or innocence “effective”?
If the evidence is tampered, then it may not be useful, and a determination of “guilty” once a person is convicted on tampered evidence can be reversed and innocence re-instated. Was the erroneous “guilty” verdict wrong? Yes. Was it equitable? No, it was just wrong. The guilty verdict was no more equitable than it was green or tall or overweight. It was just wrong, and innocence was re-established.
Likewise, an innocent verdict is not equitable nor is it well-dressed or maroon. It was just correct or not.
Q: What single change would you make to improve California’s K-12 public school systems?
A: Stop the politicizing. Go back to teaching, reading, writing, arithmetic, history, civics and trade schools.
Education should replace political indoctrination. Basic math, American and world history, reading, writing, civics, introductory science plus trade school options should be reintroduced. Sex ed should be left to the parents.
Q: Should taxes in California be increased? If so, which ones?
A: No, we are going into a recession, probably the worst since the 1930s. Lower taxes.
Q: What is the most important issue we have not raised and why?
A: Assembly Bill 2223. It is worse than abortion. I think it is infanticide. It should be rejected.
[Editor’s note: A fact check in the Sacramento Bee found the neither the language of this bill, nor the lawmaker’s stated intent, supports the allegation that AB 2223 would decriminalize infanticide.]
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