Senate Standing Committee on Rules

The Senate Committee on Rules will come to order. Before we begin today's agenda, I'd like to establish quorum. Can we please call the roll?

[Roll call]. Quorum.

All right, a quorum has been established. If there are no objections, I'd like to take up first on today's agenda, Governor's Appointments not required to appear, starting with Item 2C, the appointment of Debra Garnes--thank you so much--as a member of the Alfred E. Alquist Seismic Safety Commission. And we have a motion by Vice Chair Grove. Can we please call the roll?

[Roll call]. Five to zero.

All right. That appointment is approved with five/zero. The next item is Governor's Appointment not required to appear, Item 2D, Davis Rabbitt for the Alfred E. Alquist Seismic Safety Commission. I'll entertain a motion.

So, so moved, but with a comment, Madam Chair--Madam Pro Tem. I just want to make sure that, again, you're innocent until proven guilty, but there is a complaint by the SEIU on this individual for violation of labor union contracts and stuff. So I just want to make sure that was done, but I think he's very well-qualified for the position, so so moved.

All right. Thank you, Vice Chair Grove. With that, we will call the vote.

[Roll call]. Five to zero.

All right, that motion-- that is approved, five to zero. The next item for the Governor's Appointment not required to appear is Item 2E, Cindy Silva for the Alfred E. Alquist Seismic Safety Commission. I'll entertain a motion.

So moved.

All right. By Vice Chair Grove, made the motion. Can we please call the roll?

[Roll call]. Five to zero.

All right. That is five to zero. That is approved. The next item is for Governor's Appointments not required to appear; that is Item 2F, Vincent Wells for the Alfred E. Alquist Seismic Safety Commission.

So moved.

Thank you very much. We have a motion by Vice Chair Grove. Can we please call the roll?

[Roll call]. Five to zero.

All right, thank you. That item is approved, five to zero. Last item for the Governor's Appointments not required to appear, Item 2G, Lee Herrick as California Poet Laureate. I'll enter--

So moved.

Thank you very much. Senator Grove has made the motion. Can we please call the roll?

[Roll call]. Five to zero.

All right, that is five/zero. Next, I'd like to take up items--sorry. And that-- thank you--that item is approved, five/zero. Next, I'd like to take up Item 3, Reference of Bills to Committees. I'll entertain a motion.

So moved.

Thank you very much, Vice Chair Grove. Can we please call the roll?

[Roll call]. Five to zero.

All right. That is five/zero. And our final item, before we turn to Governor Appointees, are Items 4 through 9, floor acknowledgments. I'll entertain a motion.

So moved.

Thank you very much, Vice Chair Grove. Can we please call the roll?

[Roll call]. Five to zero.

All right, that is five/zero. Now we will return to Governor's Appointees required to appear. We're going to begin with Item 1A, the appointment of Trista Gonzalez as director for the Department of Tax and Fee Administration. Ms. Gonzalez, please come forward.

You will have the opportunity to provide one to two minutes for your opening testimony to this committee. In your opening, you're welcome to introduce any guest. We will be keeping time and record here of your opening and we'll give you a prompt when it is time to close. Director Gonzalez, you may begin.

Is this on?

It's on.

Okay. Good afternoon, Madam Pro Tem and members of the committee. My name is Trista Gonzalez, and I'm honored and grateful to be here today. I'd like to thank all of you and your staff for the time and effort you took to prepare for this hearing and to consider my appointment as director of the Department of Tax and Fee Administration. I'd also like to thank Governor Newsom for my appointment and Secretary Maduros for his support throughout this process.

Many thanks also to my friends and family who are here in person and online, especially my parents, husband, son, daughter, and brother who are here with me today, and another daughter joining remotely. I'd also like to thank the talented team at CDTFA, some of whom also are here today.

I've spent my entire 33-year career serving the people of California through Tax Administration. I started with the Board of Equalization as an entry-level tax auditor and worked my way up through several positions.

In my eight years with CDTFA, I've had the honor to work with then Director Maduros to build a brand new department from the ground up, which has been exciting and rewarding. I'm extremely proud of what we have all built together, a department that values its team members, constantly strives to improve the taxpayer experience, and where we are reminded every day of the difference we make in the lives of Californians.

All of those things motivate me to keep getting better. CDTFA administers state and local sales and use taxes among several other tax and fee programs.

The dollars we collect build roads, libraries, and parks, support public education, local police and fire departments, and assist those who are in need. Let me-- assist those who are in need by funding essential health and human service programs, among many other things.

It is important to me to appreciate our taxpayers who make these things possible by using their dollars wisely and to respect their time by making tax compliance easier. I'm excited to report that our costs were approximately 65 cents for every $100 collected in the last fiscal year, but there is still more to do and I'm looking forward to continuing this progress alongside our incredible team.

In this position, I get to remind our team members of why their job matters and also that their feedback and ideas are valued. Efficiency and innovation start with the people doing the work, and we do everything we can to foster and encourage that mindset. I would be grateful for the opportunity to continue this important work. Thank you for considering my confirmation, and I'm happy to answer your questions.

Thank you very much, Director. We're going to turn it now to committee members to see if there are any questions or comments. Seeing-- okay. All right. Okay. I was--

I just wasn't--

Senator Laird.

--that's all. Thank you. I appreciate the chance to talk to you, and I'm-- and that we met, and I just have to ask you the one question that really surprised you, but we'll do it in front of everybody. If you do get a call from a legislator, you'll return it, right?

Yes, I will return it. Absolutely.

Okay. Just, you might think that's a weird question, but there are some that don't, so--

And we're happy to help.

Appreciate that. And then we talked a little bit about the lithium extraction tax and the fact that you have to set this up without there being lithium extraction yet going on. Could you talk about sort of how you've done it and how that would work?

So we've established it within our system, so when the extraction begins, taxpayers will be able to register. To date, there are zero taxpayers registered for that tax, but it is established and ready to go.

Okay, great. And then the other thing I wanted to ask you is, you've had this unique career where you've essentially been with the agency the whole time. It just became a new agency a few years ago. And I was gonna ask, sort of, what has it been like to set up the culture of a new agency? Did you sort of do things that you learned that you didn't want to do out of the historic practices? What has that been like?

You know, it's been a remarkable experience. So it's been almost nine years now. Can you imagine that? It's been a lot more years than it seems like. But I think that-- you know, we had a lot of the folks from the Board of Equalization came over to CDTFA, and I just think we started really focusing on our team members and we had the opportunity to get things a lot more consistent than maybe they had been and be a little bit more team member-focused.

And so establishing that culture, we started really listening to feedback, we did a number of engagement surveys, and really support-- made a very big focus to support our team. I think that is what we did to develop the culture from the get-go, and that now, almost nine years in, so many of our folks, there's just fewer and fewer old BOE team members now. Many of them have started as CDTFA, so we're probably starting to lose some of that legacy historical knowledge.

And is there something you really learned that might be instructive for us that, okay, we're going to do things differently. Is there something that sticks out from that?

Oh, man. Is there something that sticks out? You know, I think maybe just really giving it time to get things reestablished, and people in the places, and you know, to form, you know, new processes and look for ways to be efficient.

Actually, you know, folks coming in or even our own team members giving them the opportunity to look at things a little bit differently, I think that has been helpful along the way, especially to set up something new, and I think, too, just to offer that safe space for the team members to let them know that we're going to get through this together and really give them the opportunity to have a say in the new department.

And maybe a last question. One of the things about the Board of Equalization is there were four of the five-- well, everybody was elected, but four were elected from districts. And you report up the chain, but not to a group of elected officials. Has there been an issue with accountability because you had elected officials at the former place and that's not the case now?

You know, we still report up through, you know, the Secretary, and then, you know, to the Governor, so I think that we still try to be as transparent as possible. I definitely field taxpayer questions, taxpayer representative questions, and try to work through issues where I can help them and put them in touch.

We have a very robust Taxpayer Rights Advocate Office that is fielding a number of complaints, calls, helping taxpayers every single day that I think maybe some of the calls that previously would go to board members for assistance are now just being transferred to other folks within the department.

Okay. Great. Well, thank you very much. I appreciate the response.

Thank you, Senator. Thank you, Senator Laird. Vice Chair Grove.

Thank you. Thank you, Madam Pro Tem. That is a natural question that we ask, you know, are you going to be responsive to legislators? Because a lot of times, even though we ask the questions on Rules, we have our caucus, we announce who's coming up, and can you ask them this question and this question and this about their issue? So just a testimony before we get started, I had no idea you were before us today.

And last Thursday at 5:31 p.m., I got a panic phone call from a constituent. I called staff and I said, who's in charge of this? And they gave me your cell phone number, and I called you at 5:31 at night. You were still at the office on a Thursday night.

You took my call, even though I'm sure you didn't have my cell phone number in your contact list because you said, hello. I just know you didn't have my contact, so you didn't know it was me. And by 10:17 the next morning, you had solved this constituent's problem, you saved 80 people their jobs, they had a grand opening that was extraordinarily successful with almost 300 people in attendance, and this was their fifth location, I think, for what they do.

And without you doing that and being responsive, it would have been a disaster. And so you do return calls. We listen to a lot of people that come before us and they talk the talk, but they don't walk the walk, but you definitely walk the walk, and I just want to thank you for that.

I had questions about lithium, obviously, that my client-- or that my colleague asked, because, you know, we have the boron mine out there and we have lithium in our district that we just found a couple of years ago, so I appreciate the information on that.

I don't need to know about how you treat small business, how you react to small business, because when I was sharing with another small business, they said, wow, I heard they made a big announcement that you pulled this off.

I go, it wasn't me, it was, like, that Director Gonzalez. And he goes, oh, we worked with her in the past, too, and she was awesome. So I had conversations with several people there, and a lot of those small businesses had already worked with your office and your team.

And to me, that just shows leadership, that if your team member will solve a problem and not create an obstacle like government tends to do, but that you'll solve a problem, that's because of the leadership that you provide. And so I want to tell you, thank you, and like I said, I didn't know you were going to be before us.

I also had questions about firearm taxes, but I talked to some of my gun owners after I found out you were going to be here on many--my gun retailers--and they're like, yeah, CDTF has been amazing.

They give us direction and guidance on how to implement this new program. So your people always pick up the phone compared to the call I got today that says, I've left seven messages, three emails, and no one will call me back and I have to navigate this. Not with your department. So just thank you for your leadership, and I don't have any questions and I look forward to making the nomination to take you to the floor.

Thank you so much for those kind words, and I would be remiss not to also thank my team who really delivered to help your constituent and our taxpayer, and I'm so glad that their opening was such a success.

Senator Reyes.

We all love to hear these success stories. I thank my colleague for sharing that with us. We know who to call. I wanted to ask some questions on online retail space. You've had nine years, as you've mentioned, you had the Supreme Court decision in 2018, South Dakota versus Wayfair. What do you find is the most common reason your department may fail to collect sales tax owed to them on online retail space?

Thank you for the question. Gosh. Most likely, if somebody is making sales online and they fail to collect the tax, there's two things. Number one, they may not have an obligation to collect the tax. The Wayfair decision did institute a threshold, but the Legislature passed AB 147, which made the threshold a little bit different for Californians.

So it's $500,000 in a calendar year. So a small online business may not collect the tax if they don't meet that economic threshold, but those that are required to, we do our best to really reach out and communicate the obligation. We find those businesses through all sorts of different avenues.

Sometimes they're from audits, they're from audits of different retailers, or they're from leads, or they're just from phone calls that we field with people asking the questions if they have the obligation or not. So that's generally the approach we take when we come across them.

We send them questionnaires, they can fill--you know, reply with information, and then if they meet that $500 economic threshold, we help them get registered.

Well, that takes care of the second question about specifically what you do to reach out to make sure that they are in compliance. Thank you so much.

And some of them, if I can just add, often sell through online marketplaces, so they don't have the obligation to register with us if their sales are exclusively through an online marketplace because that marketplace would be responsible for collecting the tax on the sales to the California customers.

Wonderful. Thank you. Thank you, Madam PT.

Thank you. Thank you to the members. So thank you for this. I have two questions, one related to when things-- when we have some, maybe, you know, illegal or other activity, can you just speak a little bit to how you try to course-correct and also your role with, particularly, law enforcement? And this is not an institutional perspective. This is, you know, from a perspective from the constituents who may not be compliant.

So yes, we have a criminal investigation group that works hand-in-hand with law enforcement. We also have an inspections team that goes out, and they predominantly inspect for cigarette and tobacco taxes, but they're also in the cannabis space as well, so they work really closely with local law enforcement. And I think those collaborations have been very successful when we see illegal businesses that we try to get them into compliance with our tax laws.

Thank you. And do you happen--I mean, I guess at some point--do you happen to just know what we've been able to get from those moments? Like how much are we bringing to California by going after the underground and the illicit activity?

I have some information, if I can look at my notes, on cigarette and tobacco and cannabis. Hang on just a second.

And then while you're looking at that, my next question is going to be, as you look at 2026, what are going to be your top two priorities for our constituents in California? But go ahead. Look at your--

So for Fiscal Year 24-25, this is all cigarette and tobacco. We conducted just under 3,000 inspections which resulted in 581 seizures, 237 civil citations, and 67 misdemeanors for a combined retail value of--shoot--about just under $7 million. And that also includes flavor-banned products.

In the cannabis space, we have done many audits, observations, seizures. We have about $16 million in Fiscal Year 24-25 of cannabis seizures. That would be the product that we see. So we definitely-- you know, law enforcement works hand-in-hand with us in those scenarios.

Thank you. And then--

Does that kind of give you an idea?

Thank you. That does. That does, and I think it's something relevant, certainly. I represent a district and a county that was very forward in their approach to cultivation of cannabis, and so I think we're still asking ourselves what worked, what didn't work, and where the trend is going for our state in terms of some of the illicit activity that you tend to see in parts of the state. Even where there is legal activity, you also see some of the illicit activity. So the next piece is on, just, your priorities for 2026 for the department.

So my priorities, a couple of things. Number one is obviously to continue to, as efficiently as possible, collect the taxes that are due under the law. We're always looking for ways to make it easier for taxpayers to comply and for our team to work smarter.

So we do have some initiatives that are on the cusp, as far as trying to make it easier for small businesses that I'm excited about that we hope that will come to fruition. Just really easy filing mechanisms for them.

And then, I think, secondly, I think it's just continuing with our team morale and getting the most out of our team as we can. They're so talented and so amazing, and I think, just, as we can continue to foster that good morale and strong culture, I think it just will be very beneficial to the state.

Thank you. So with that, we're going to now open it up to public comments, so we will take public comments on this appointment, if there are any. We just ask individuals of the public to please come forward, come to the microphone, identify your name, your position, and your affiliation.

Good afternoon, Madam Pro Tem and members. Kate Bell, on behalf of the tax consulting firm, Ryan LLC, in strong support. Thank you.

Good afternoon, Chair and members. Jennifer Tannehill with Aaron Read and Associates, on behalf of the California Society of Enrolled Agents. We've enjoyed a great working relationship with Trista Gonzalez over the years and looking forward to that continuing. So urge support for her confirmation. Thanks.

Great. Thank you. If there are any members here of the public who are in opposition, I will ask you to please come forward at this time. All right. Seeing none, we're going to bring it back one last time, and we have no additional questions or comments. Vice Chair Grove.

Thank you, Madam Pro Tem. I move that we send Director Gonzalez to the full floor for a Senate vote.

Thank you very much to our Vice Chair, Grove. We are going to go ahead and call the roll.

[Roll call]. Five to zero.

Great. That appointment has been approved to move to the full Senate for confirmation. Congratulations, Director Gonzalez.

Thank you.

Thank you.

All right, so now we're going to turn to governor's appointees required to appear. Item 1B, the appointment of Erin McGuire, JD, and his Executive Director, Board of State and Community Corrections. Welcome. You will have one to two minutes for your opening testimony here for this Committee.

And we encourage you to introduce any of your guests that are here with you in those one to two minutes, and you may begin when you are ready.

Thank you very much, Madam Chair, Members of the Rules Committee, thank you for the opportunity to appear here today. I'm honored by the appointment by Governor Newsom, and grateful to the Committee for considering my nomination. As you indicated, I need to keep this short, so I will do so.

I want to thank several people whose support made it possible for me to be here. First, to my wife, Jen, who is unable to be here today but should be watching. My children, Maddie and AB, who chose school over their father's confirmation hearing. That's okay.

My parents, who I believe are watching from their home in Southern California, hope the link worked. Board Chair Linda Penner and former Executive Director Katie Howard, that welcomed me to the BSCC 10 years ago. My executive management team, many of whom are here, including the recently confirmed, our first in‑custody‑death Director, Allison Ganter.

And also thank you to our Board Secretary, Joanna Gonzalez, who has helped keep me on task this past year. Also, thanks to the Governor's office staff. In particular, special thanks to Sam Diaz, who has shepherded many BSCC appointments over the years, including my own. Just briefly about myself, been working in state government approximately 22 years.

I've been with the BSCC the last 10 years, first as General Counsel, then as Chief Deputy Director and General Counsel. During the last several years, the board has been tasked with an increasing level of responsibility.

We've doubled our inspection staff, allowing our successful move from what was a biennial inspection cycle to conducting annual inspections of local detention facilities.

Our Grant's Division has grown from administering a small number of state and federal grants of around $50 million annually to managing a portfolio of hundreds of millions of dollars, including managing the Prop 47 grant, the California Violence Intervention and Prevention Program grant program, local mitigation grants associated with Proposition 64, and also the Adult Reentry Grant Program.

More recently, we're in the process of standing up the In‑Custody Death Review Division, so that we can bring additional transparency and be able to make meaningful recommendations to local agencies to reduce preventable deaths in custody. I am honored and humbled to have been selected to lead the BSEC during this period of increasing responsibility.

I'm very proud of the work our agency has done, and of our staff, recognizing that we still have continued work to do, a lot of work left to do. And I look forward to answering any questions that you may have.

Great, thank you. So, we're going to bring it back to the Members. Questions or comments? All right, Vice Chair Grove, thank you.

Welcome to Rules Committee. Have a lot of questions for you—no, I'm teasing. Look, I don't know who those three ladies right there are behind you, but they were like, "It's a joke."

Thankfully, they were your physician to deal with the cardiac arrest.

No. In your BCP, you state that many of these organizations are high‑risk due to the limited infrastructure capacity, and that many lack established administrative infrastructures with traditional fiscal controls. And I know that the board is requesting 11 permanent positions to provide technical guidance for community‑based organizations.

I'm concerned that, given that request, the risk profile is probably greater than that. Am I assuming correctly or not?

Well, we're—I mean, so I just want to preface this with we've been allowed to take administrative costs up to 5%, and we've never reached that 5%. So, I just want to make sure it's not additional General Fund that we're requesting to establish these positions.

So you already had those dollars, you just haven't access.

Correct. So, but recognizing that we have, over the years that we've administered and grown, grown the grants division—some of which was one‑time funding—but with increased workload, our staff has been stretched to the point where we do need to get.

Get additional staff to make sure that we are ensuring that those dollars are spent appropriately for allowable costs. In particular, we've noticed, in the private sector, and than the nonprofit sector, there are some additional challenges there.

Not to say that a lot of money is being spent inappropriately, and we've worked very hard with those groups to give them technical assistance so that they are reporting things correctly. But that does require some additional staff, so that is why we're seeking those positions.

Okay. And since you brought up the grants, I know that there's 50% of the BSCC grants that are awarded to community‑based organizations.

Is there stuff, or are there protocols or standard operating procedures in place right now, so that you can measure—number one, guarantee or at least minimize fraud and things like that—and ensure that services are being delivered to the outlined community based on the grant that they applied for, and that services are really going directly to the individual who needs it.

Yeah. And we have multiple steps, and I'm happy to go through those in terms of, you know, ensuring that both when we are awarding grants, that we are awarding to people who are going to deliver those services.

So, and we take many steps, and we build our RFPs in order to make sure that the money is going to the right place. So, we have sort of a pre‑screening process and an eligibility process to make sure that people are registered with the Secretary of State's office.

They're registered with the Attorney General's Office of Charitable Trusts. We verify that. We make sure that we get documentation from the board of directors, if it's a nonprofit, indicating that the Executive Director has authority to enter into a binding agreement with us.

We have our grantee orientations to make sure that people know what they're signing up for when they're getting a grant with the BSCC.

That we have certain expectations that they have to report to us on either a quarterly or a monthly basis, that they provide the supporting documentation that they need to provide to us, that they understand that they are spending their dollars on allowable grant funds, which are outlined in our 83‑page grant guide in terms of establishing exactly what these dollars can be spent on and what appropriate uses are there for.

And over a period of time, as the grant is getting stood up and services are being delivered, we do provide the opportunity for our field representatives to go out to do site visits to verify that services are, in fact, taking place during the course of the grant. We have analysts that are doing desk reviews.

We have some audit staff for some of the more challenging cases that we might have to, to make sure that the grant dollars are being spent appropriately. And then we have, at the conclusion of these grant periods, we have our grantees doing, providing us quarterly progress reports; they're doing a local evaluation report.

We are requiring compliance audits at the back end to make sure that the grant dollars that were spent during the service period were spent on appropriate and allowable expenses.

And then if there's any concerns, then take action to make sure that either we reduce the amount that we are reimbursing to that grantee to align with what is allowable, or seeking, in very extreme cases, recovery of those dollars back to the state.

Thank you. That was, thank you very much for that. You mentioned audit. So how often do you audit these grant awardees? And I guess my question is that, are your audits for your department public to us or to the public, I guess?

The audits that we have done are not public audits. We have, in some cases, and I would have to look, we do have the compliance audits that our grantees do do themselves, some of which may be available public. I have to check with our staff on that.

But you're, when you guys do an audit for one of these grantees that you mentioned you might have problems with, those audits are not public.

No.

Are they released to us as the legislative body?

Not that I'm aware of.

Okay. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Vice Chair Grove. We're going to go with Senator Laird, then. Senator Reyes.

Thank you. I was just assaulted by Senator Grove.

He's used to it.

Yes. You mentioned in your opening statement the in‑custody death review, and I know we had audit that was bipartisan in its request through the Joint Legislative Audit Committee of some particular practices in San Diego that I think were part of the reason for this bill being enacted. It had a San Diego author.

So I'm asking, what's a status update on the implementation of SB519, and maybe if you can throw into it what what's been accomplished to date and what remains to be done, and what kind of challenges are you meeting in standing it up?

Sure. Happy to take that question. Well, as you may recall, we recently got our director appointed and confirmed through the Senate confirmation process. We are still actively hiring up our division as we speak. The funding for our division was bifurcated, so we had some funding released in ’24.

And then another bit of increased funding to hire staff was just released in ’25. So again, sort of standing up the division slowly. We've been collecting the reports of in‑custody death from local agencies. So, we're establishing, as a death occurs in a local agency, they're now required to report to our agency.

So, we're establishing that connection to get that information. Our staff is following up to get completed information once it's available, in terms of making sure that local investigations are complete, which can take a long time. So that, that has taken some time.

And then most recently, what we experienced as we've been requesting information and documents to review is, we've had some challenges gaining information from local agencies.

In particular, we had one agency that indicated that they would not comply and send us information, that they would treat us as if our division was a member of the public and would treat any request for information as a Public Records Act request.

That resulted in us getting information that was redacted and which would not have enabled us to do the work that the Legislature wanted us to do and wants us to do. Working with the Governor's Office and the Legislature.

We did get some additional trailer bill language that was adopted by the Legislature at the very end of session this last session, which has made it much more clear on the authority of our division to get records from local agencies, and so that they're not redacted.

We're in the process of following up with those agencies to get that information. And again, we hope to be doing those reviews soon.

And my follow‑up question was going to be that. So, let me ask, now that the trailer bill language has been adopted, do you feel like you have the statutory authority to access what you think you need to do an in‑death, in‑custody death review of a local agency?

I believe, I believe so. We are in some conversations with legal counsel of some local agencies right now that that still have some questions about that authority, but we hope to resolve those.

I think, given the adoption of the additional bill and the adoption of the trailer bill language, the Legislature is in favor of you having access. So, if there is a continued problem and it requires some statutory relief, I am sure we would like to know to make sure that that happens.

Thank you, Senator. We will be in touch if we have additional concerns.

Perfect. Then I don't have to ask you if you'll be in touch.

And then on the other subject I want to ask, you brushed up against it in previous things, but when you are, when you are looking to improve conditions in local detention facilities, to what extent do you think the activities that you do translate to improvements in conditions of local detention facilities, and can you actually make an assessment about whether that's happening — that things are improved because of what you're doing?

And in terms of the, in terms of our grant programs or in terms of our?

No, I think it's the outcome of the conditions that are in the local.

Oh sure. Well, so one of the other charges of the of our board is to establish the minimum standards for local detention facilities.

And so, in terms of maintaining and then improving conditions in those facilities, you know, we have a process that we've established. We look at our regulations on a regular basis to see if there's improvements that can be made in order to lift and improve the minimum standards.

We've been charged with trying to elevate those standards to maybe closer to best practices, and we've been able to do that. And in terms of our follow‑up and what we do, based on those changes in regulations, we have our inspectors go out and inspect to make sure that those facilities are meeting those minimum standards.

So, we've been pleased. We've iterated on those regulations for many years. We've made improvements to those minimum standards. And we see that, in some ways, in our local detention facilities, because they are meeting compliance with those new regulations.

And then with 58 counties, the smallest one being 1,250 people, the large one, the largest one in the millions and millions.

Do you have trouble with your standards having to be one‑size‑fits‑all in different conditions that exist in different places, like making sure you can truly assess, assess that they're meeting the standards or improving, or...

It can be a challenge because there are differences in the resources available for counties to be able to do those minimum standards.

We've tried to, in some ways, recognize that we've, you know, in some cases, there's been some flexibility allowed where maybe, in terms of like an intake screening, you can do it via telehealth as opposed to having an on‑site person.

So, we've, we've tried to have some flexibility in that without, without trying to lower the standards for, for, for counties either. We don't, we don't, we've, we've grappled with it over the years in terms of saying, well, we want, we want counties to meet this minimum baseline.

And there are counties that sometimes are able to go above and beyond that because they are resourced and able to do that. But it is a challenge to—but we want to try to set the bar as high as we can to get everyone, everyone there.

Well, you know, the state used to have a program for the smaller counties for sheriffs. I can't remember what it was called — something like the smaller county sheriff subsidy program.

Rural County sheriffs.

That's it, Rural County. And it got, it got folded into something else.

But it came from a situation like this, where we were putting standards on small counties and they didn't have the fiscal ability to meet them without some assistance. Are you identifying that as an issue here?

That sometimes you find that it's not as much they don't know the right thing to do, but they don't have the adequate resources to do what you say they should do.

It can be a mixture. We've seen some very talented sheriffs in small counties that do stretch and do some pretty incredible things with limited resources. There have been situations where—and I'll give you an example of sort of a medium‑sized county—where we found them out of compliance for staffing issues.

And we actually had invited the sheriff to come and explain why he wasn't able to staff the facility appropriately. He went to the Board of Supervisors with that and was able to get some increase in funding, which enabled him to get some staffing.

Wasn't a sheriff that was in the district of one of the five of us, was it?

It was not.

In case we needed further communication.

But that is an example, and we have seen that example where counties are able to use our findings in some ways to say, especially if they're under‑resourced, we need to fix this. This is a liability issue.

The Board of State and Community Corrections has found us out of compliance for this, and we need some assistance to fix that. And that has happened in cases. It doesn't, doesn't happen in every case. Sometimes there's been long‑standing issues, and it takes a little bit more than that.

But you know, we look at—our efforts are to bring facilities up to our standards, and we, we have staff that assist in ways to provide technical assistance to try different things, because we do want counties to meet those standards.

Okay, thank you. I really appreciate your response to the questions and just hope you'll stay in touch on that one issue if you need more statutory authority. Thank you very much. Thank you, Senator.

Thank you. And we're going to go to Senator Reyes.

Thank you so much. In looking at what it is that this board was established for—statewide leadership for California's adult and juvenile justice systems—there are things that need to be done, and some of it may be easy, like some of the smaller counties where it isn't, there isn't much work to be done.

But then we have the larger counties, or the counties now related to my questions, with the most deaths. We have Los Angeles, we have San Bernardino, we have Riverside, we have Orange, with more deaths than many of the other counties.

And I would imagine that those counties deserve and do receive more attention to try to fix the problem, I assume, is that correct?

Certainly.

In 2020, there was a report about egregious mistreatment cases, insufficient accountability, frustration that the BSCC had limited actual enforcement powers, and a number of things because there was no teeth to what was being requested of them.

The state auditor’s report in ’21 criticized the board for failing to enforce its own rules and standards, specifically on mental health, mental health checks, and in‑cell wellness checks of inmates. I thank you for taking the time to meet with me before, and I know we talked about deaths related to fentanyl and deaths.

The number of deaths going down, as deaths in the state go down because of fentanyl. But for those that I mentioned that have the most deaths—San Bernardino, for instance, 1.5 per thousand individuals: Louisiana, 1.6 per thousand individuals. My colleague talked about the San Diego author Atkins Bill, SB519, for the state program to review investigations.

And I appreciate your candor in telling us, well, once redacted, we can't do a thing about it. I also appreciate that there was a trade liberal language that was put in to say, you can't do that: provide the information so that we can. Then you can, u can then, see that report.

My first question is who will review your report when it is completed?

So, we plan to have the recommendations that we will be providing be public. So, when we are reviewing the investigations of the deaths, those reviews will, will be public. We may have to redact some of the information on our site as well, depending on what's included in those reports.

But that information will be publicly available. That's part of the transparency. That is part of the legislation.

In addition to the investigation that is done, that is reported to you, if you see something, if you read something that you feel needs a secondary level of investigation, is that something you're authorized to do?

It is. There's a, there's a, there's a portion of SB519 which gives the option to go before the board and to seek additional authority to do a deeper dive, a further investigation. If there are concerns about, maybe, the completeness of the investigation that occurred at the local level.

What will you do next to make sure that the agencies actually comply, timely comply?

I'd rather not discuss that. Of the different options that we might have in order to bring the locals into cooperation, to—. Sure.

Let me ask you a different way. Is compliance important to you?

Absolutely.

And if, do you have, even if you don't share with us exactly what you're going to do, do you have next steps? Do you have a plan B, and a plan C, and a plan D, or what, what is your plan? Without telling us the details of your plan, because this is extremely important.

If we have deaths in our jails, it's something that has to be, it has to be reported, it has to be investigated. And you're tasked with preparing that report so something can be done. So, without sharing what you would do, do you have a plan B, plan C, plan D? That would be my question.

Yes. Very good.

Very good.

And failing those plans, at the invitation of Senator Laird, we will come back to you.

Very good. Promises made, promises kept senator. Obviously, when you make your recommendations, ideally, they will implement your recommendations. If they do not implement your recommendations, you can ask them to appear, ask the manager to appear before you. Is that one of the options that you're looking at?

That's certainly further down the line. But yes, that's again part of SB519. And the idea would be to, again, please explain to us why you haven't implemented your recommendations. And yes, we would absolutely do that.

My second to my last question. If you find unsafe conditions, as were found in LA, one of the options you have available to you, the power you have, is to shut it down. Is that correct?

We have authority for juvenile facilities. If a facility is out of compliance and is unsuitable, then yes, we have the authority to notice a facility that it is unsuitable.

Is that something you will consider if you find a facility is unsuitable and the conditions are unsafe?

We will and we have. And that's what we've done in Los Angeles.

And my last question is, why do you want this job?

Thank you, Senator. I enjoy this job. I've been with this agency for 10 years. I work with an amazing team of executives, amazing staff who care about this work and want to see it done well. I'm very proud of the work that we do, and I'm happy to lead this organization.

Thank you. Thank you, Madam Pitti.

Thank you. And. Oh, yeah. Okay.

So, Senator, I just want to follow up on a couple of things, kind of in line with what Senator Grove was asking, but also Senator Reyes, you know, on accountability. Senator Grove asked about audits on the CBOs, the Community Based organizations, and thank you for answering those questions.

I want to just kind of go one step further. If you find a challenge with your internal audits, have you had a situation where you've had to refer any of these grantees to the Department of Justice for further investigation and, or potential prosecution?

We have been directed by our board to do that. We haven't specifically needed to do that. Okay, that's, that's good.

And I appreciate that, you know, as some fraud is being highlighted in, particularly in LA right now, but I'm sure it's not contained to LA, in other departments and other state programs.

You know, one of the things I'm particularly sensitive to is that all of our heads of offices are keeping that in mind, and we're fleshing that out as it comes up. So, thank you. I appreciate that answer.

Thank you, Senator.

Thank you very much Senator Jones. I want to follow up and kind of just build on some of the questions that you've already received, and so I appreciate hearing some of the answers. But the juvenile facilities were brought up, and you mentioned it as a situation where you would potentially consider the recommendation for closure.

There was a lot of awareness and attention on Los Angeles County Juvenile Facility and the substandard conditions. And I'm wondering if you can speak a little bit to the lessons learned and how we move forward.

I think that there was a lot of public attention on it, but there was a lot of legislative attention on it as well that has generated a series of bills to try to course correct. So, from your perspective, what are some of the lessons learned?

And certainly, I think the Legislature is looking or has looked at course corrections. But I'm curious what you think the course corrections are from your lens.

Los Angeles has been a very challenging circumstance. It continues to be a very challenging circumstance. You know, the Attorney General's office entered into a stipulated judgment and settlement with the county of Los Angeles five years ago.

We've been rigorously inspecting the juvenile facilities going back almost about as long as we found two of the facilities, two of the juvenile halls, as unsuitable. In 2023, they moved, they closed those two facilities, and reopened another facility called Los Padrinos, which is where most of the predisposition youth currently are.

And what the lesson learned so far is that hasn't fixed the problem. You know, the facilities, the brick and mortar, wasn't the problem of what's been going on in LA. It had been predominantly a lack of staffing.

They've, you know, through our inspections, through our interventions, taken additional emergency steps, including trying to pull field staff into the facility to try to bolster staffing. The challenge with that is those people that are being pulled from the field are not trained as juvenile correctional officers.

They receive some training after the fact, but they don't want to be there necessarily. And that has still led to additional and ongoing problems with those facilities. Lack of programs, recreation, exercise. They still have trouble even doing well. Staffing and programs and recreation exercises are the main things that have been troubling them. So, it's been a real challenge.

The juvenile bench has been reengaged. There is ongoing litigation that we are. That we are participating in that as much as we are continuing to provide inspection, our inspection reports to the court, and they're currently involved in a depopulation plan that is trying to lower the population at Los Padrinos so that it matches up with their ability to staff that facility. And that's ongoing.

So, our commitment has been and continues to be that we will continue to be in those Los Angeles facilities. We are trying to give assistance where we can and advice for them to improve and meet our minimum standards. But it's been a real challenge. And the Attorney General is back in active litigation again.

There are court hearings this month, there are court hearings next month to try to get potentially additional court orders in place to try to resolve some of the issues down there. So, the commitment from the board is that we're going to continue to be engaged in this process and hopefully improve the conditions for the youth in LA.

Thank you. When we as legislators, but also when members of the public learn and hear about these, there is a little bit of an erosion in the trust of, like, is our system working? What are you doing, and how are you leading in this space to create more public trust?

And what does that look like and what does that feel like to you.

And the Department in particular on this issue or sort of more...?

More broadly, I think this is an example of something that has generated, I think, mistrust from the community in terms of what is happening. Right. This is supposed to be a place where we're helping youth course correct themselves, to be able to come back and be active and proactive members of our community.

I think that's what the dreams and hopes are. And then we see things like this happen, and you have a pause, like, wait, if the institution itself is flawed, then, you know, the expectations we might have of those who have been part of the system might also not be accurate expectations.

And so, the public starts to just, right, feel like, how do we put our trust in it, and how do we rebuild the trust? And certainly, I think the Legislature also recognizes that we have a role to play in reevaluating our laws and our systems in place to improve that trust for the community.

While this is an example, this isn't the only thing. I'm asking to speak, just broadly speaking, like, how do you deal with it? How do you think about, how do you react to that?

Sure. And understandably. And we hear, we hear those criticisms, we hear those frustrations. Obviously, our board meets publicly, and we hear public comment also expressing those frustrations.

And we hear that, and we try, to the extent we can, to explain our thought processes. We try to show exactly what we are doing and explain to the public. We, we take this charge seriously. And, in fact, the board again has acted; we've moved to close down these facilities.

And they have in some cases, and then again, they've been shuffling some of this population around. And again, we understand and hear some of that frustration. We are open to call us, talk to us, we will listen to you.

And we hear that. We have different voices on our board in terms of, broadly, the regulations‑making process impacting those juvenile facilities. Just this week, we had very robust conversations both with advocates and with policymakers and facility managers in the Juvenile Regulations Revisions process.

We have surveyed youth and interviewed youth and have had feedback in that process to try to improve the minimum standards in order to again improve the conditions in the juvenile facilities. And that's, that's part of the process. And having that input is important to us.

Yes. Senator Reyes.

Just a follow up question. In your response to why this, why we're not moving forward or why we had such a problem, you specifically talked about lack of staffing. Wasn't abusive staffing also a big issue?

Yes.

Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. So, with that, what we will do is we're going to move next to public comment. And so, we'll start with any members of the public who are here in support. We ask that you please come to the microphone, that you state your name, your affiliation, and your support.

Sir. Darby Kernan on behalf of Amity Foundation Health, right 360, and Westcare. They're nonprofit reentry providers. We've worked with the BSCC in many capacities. I've had the opportunity to work with Aaron McGuire over the last 15 years in various capacities as well. We support his nomination and his appointment to this position. Thank you.

Thank you. Good afternoon. Jamie Minor.

On behalf of Giffords, we've had the pleasure of working with BSCC over the past few years with the allocation of millions of dollars to the California Violence Intervention Program, which is a huge‑priority program for GPRS and something we are, we believe, is one of the most valuable tools we have to reduce gun violence in our state.

And under the leadership of Mr. Maguire, we've seen a very productive process. Again, millions of dollars extended. Extended. And it's been very fruitful, and I think our state will continue to see the benefits. So, we just thank you for your partnership on that program and look forward to continuing to work with you.

Thank you. Any additional members of the public who might be here in opposition, please come forward at this moment. All right. Seeing none. Any final comments or questions? All right, we have Senator Grove

Just a motion to move the comre to the full Senate floor.

Thank you very much. So we have. Thank you for being here with us today.

We have Senator Grove, who has made the motion. So, we'll go ahead and call the roll.

[Roll Call]. Lemon, aye. Limón, aye. Grove. Grove, aye. Jones, aye. Jones, aye. Laird. Laird, aye. Reyes. Reyes, aye.

Five to zero. All right. The appointment has been approved to move to the full Senate for confirmation with five votes in favor.

Congratulations, Mr. Mcguire. Thank you. Thank you. So this is the end of our agenda. And this concludes our agenda. I want to thank anyone who is here today to provide support and also all those who provided testing public comment testimony today. With that, we will go ahead and adjourn.