American Thought Leaders - I Talked to 50 California Mayors. What They Told Me Was Surprising | Elaine Culotti

Episode Date: February 21, 2026

“What’s important for people to know is that the majority of California is actually not to the far left. We’re a very purple state,” says Elaine Culotti, a self-made entrepreneur, star of Discovery’s reality TV series “Undercover Billionaire,” and founder of the Mayors Matter project.On a mission to understand the root causes of California’s challenges, Culotti recently went on a state-wide tour and talked to 50 out of California’s almost 500 mayors as well as countless regular Californians on the way.“I’ve talked to people from Humboldt County, which is the very top of California, to Chula Vista, all the way into the Central Valley ... to Santa Monica and Pacific Palisades. ... And it does not matter if you have an R or a D,” Culotti said.The fifty mayors she spoke to—on both sides of the aisle—have two overarching priorities for their cities: security and economic development, Culotti said.But no matter how hard they try, they find it difficult to achieve either one. Why? Because of Sacramento, Culotti said.Most taxpayer money goes to the state government with its over half a million employees, Culotti noted. The cities receive little money but lots of crippling orders from Sacramento, and fraud at the state level is rampant, she said.When California’s top politicians “are pushing downstream what’s called unfunded mandates onto people, you create war in those city halls. You create war with those mayors because they are saying, ‘No, no, stop oppressing us with your mandates. We don’t want to do it,’” Culotti said.“We’re all being boiled to death by Sacramento,” she said.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Here you've got this massive drop shipping enterprise across America ruining Main Street. And across California, you have e-commerce eating up all these small Main Street. Why is this what we're selling in California? In today's episode, I sit down with Elaine Collotti, owner and founder of Mayors Matter, empowering mayors for a stronger California. 18 trillion dollars of new business will come into the United States over the course of the next 10 years because of what Trump has set up. Zero is coming to California.

What's really driving this problem? The mayors in most cities that I have spoken to are not about the fact that they're Democratic or Republican. They want safe streets and they want economic development. What they want is the pursuit of happiness. Sacramento ruins California. Power-hungry, politicians ruin California. We've lost the plot.

What do we do here? This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Yanya Kellogg. Elaine Kalati, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Jan, thank you. I've been trying to get on your show for quite some time. Well, you know, but you do have a really interesting project that you've gotten yourselves involved in, among many, this Mayors Matters project. And you call it a crisis, but let's call it a political disconnect between California and D.C. And you view that as a problem as a very committed, California. Tell me what's going on. I think it's not a big secret that California is the

farthest left state in the union. And I think it's just like people commonly think, if I say to someone in DC, I'm from California, they don't shut the door, but they're like, oh gosh, how are you doing? And what's important, I think, for people to know is that the majority of California is actually not to the far left. We're a very purple state. I've talked to people from Humboldt County, which is the very top of California, to Chula Vista, all the way, you know, into the kind of El Centros slash Central Valley and all of that area, to Santa Monica and Pacific Palisades where, so I've covered it all, and it does not matter if you have an R or a D in a lot of cases. there's really two priorities in California and we don't focus on them and what I

decided to do was document that because I wait wait wait what are the two priorities well they they should be listed at the end but only because I think that there's a story that I want people to believe when I tell you that the majority of California is not blue, blue, or red, red. And I always say to Republicans in DC, when they say, how are we going to take back California? I remind people that that's, what are you taking it back from? I mean, California belongs to California.

You don't have a right on either side to take back California. We're a very easygoing bunch of people. We're not in other people's business. And the group at the top that has the limelight, which would be like the Newsom administration, for example, don't represent all of California. And it's frustrating. And I think Californians want what everybody wants in America.

For example, when you're a young mom and you're taking your kids to school, you don't want to worry about getting in your car, or taking your child to the bus. And when you put your kid on the bus or you put your child in the car and you get them out of the school, you don't want to worry about them

crossing the road or going into the school or what could happen in the school. We all want safety in our streets and we all want safety in our homes and we want our kids to be safe, right? And so if you interrupt the safety of that relationship

between a mom and a child, you aren't interrupting something between red, blue, and people. You are interrupting your instinct to protect your child. And we've done a really good job at making Los Angeles an unsafe place by letting the rules fall by the wayside if they don't optically fall in line with the representation that California is trying to make at the top. And that is that we support everyone, even if they're not. they're bad or even if they're dangerous or even if they are not supporting us back. They turn the other cheek to the point that we've lost the plot.

And most Californians and even left, left, left Democrats, any color, any race, any age group will tell you, we need safe streets. And when you have 40 million people, it's a big thing to have safe streets. You have to spend all your time on it. You can't let your foot off of that gas pedal. So that is our biggest issue, is the safety and crime and homelessness and dirt and filth and everything else. And it all comes under this one bucket. You also mentioned, though, you said what happens in the schools?

And so, for example, what I think of is there's, you know, kind of this historic legal case that just happened in New York where a detransitioner was kind of fooled by gender ideology into having, you know, mastectomy basically done as a minor got a settlement, financial settlement. So there's sort of a shift, significant shift happening around this gender stuff. in California seems to be heavily doubling down on this. It strikes me at something that probably is also in that realm that most Californians aren't really into. Well, the paradigm of the California hippie, you know, the, my body, my choice, I want to eat what I want to eat, the anti-vaxxer, the, you know, flower children of, you know, know, San Francisco and the, you know, women's rights, gay rights, minority rights, civil rights.

California has paved the way for that. So when you take the goodwill of people that represent, you know, fairness for everybody, and you try to manipulate it by creating a dangerous situation under the guise of fairness for everybody, eventually you get caught. And I think that people in California, while maybe slower to the table, because we want to be really fair and we want to be well educated and we want to understand their hip to it. Californians know that they've been gaslit, but they've been gaslit from the top down, not from the bottom up. And that's about power. We just had debates for the gubernatorial race. And, you know, there were six, I think, Democrats and one Republican.

Now, how does that happen? Like, there's a lot more running. Well, they're going to pick it by who has the most, you know, people watching. Well, that doesn't mean anything. It means nothing because you don't want to elevate somebody that has good ideas. That's what it comes down to. And if you don't fund or elevate someone that has good ideas, then they don't get the limelight, and then people don't get to hear good ideas.

And you can easily manipulate the support that you gather from simply blocking people. people that have good ideas. You're saying the media here is manipulating who, what ideas get to be seen by the popular, by the voters. It is the job of media to manipulate you. That is their single biggest. It's not my job. I understand that there are truth-telling shows, but you know, it's not entertainment

tonight either. There you go. Right? So a lie can get around the globe one time by the time the truth gets its pants on. It's just this idea that the spin doctors, you know, and we're spinning California. I do a lot of interviewing, you know, I've been doing this daily signal thing. I've had like, I've done, I just filmed undercover billionaire for discovery. I've done a lot of, you know, hardcore California research.

And what I have found is that the people that I talk to are very different than the faces of California that we put forth as our representation. And that's just, that's not lost on me. And that's also leadership you're talking about because this is indeed the whole project of this mayor's matter, right? Correct. Which is finding leadership, but apparently not the top leadership, but leadership that has this diverse set of use. Well, in a city. Or is it not a diverse, just different from what we're told. It's two things.

So, you know, the first, as we discussed, is about the safety issues. But the second is really important. And I think this is like fundamentally why we're here. And that's that I haven't talked to a single leader who's, if not first, certainly second, most important need for their city, municipality town is, are you ready? You're never going to believe it. Economic development. How about we make some money? How about we work?

How about we create a better environment in our, you know, small town of 200,000 people than we, you know, we, you know, we make some money. then we, you know, why isn't that our priority? So just if I may jump in, right, sort of the stereotype that I have, okay, about California, is that a lot of that money that's kind of in the system from taxpayers goes to overhead. That's the stereotype I have. Is that right? About how expensive we are to operate, California? Correct. Correct. Yeah, it's crazy.

So, I mean, people don't, aren't ready for what, for how bloated California is. the world isn't ready for it. We're starting to get an idea about how government has, across the United States, has kind of, you know, gone off the tracks a little bit in terms of its size, its mass. And I think Republicans, I'm using my right hand, I don't know if this comes backwards sometimes it is, but Republicans on the right generally prefer a smaller government, and they're more sort of fiscally responsible and worried about how much money we're spending. And then Democrats, I think, prefer a larger government and are socially very concerned about how people that are underserved or certainly, you know, less privileged are supported by that government.

And these two paradigms, you know, were designed and should be working together. They should be, we should be watching a budget and we should be watching out for the people that are cut out. And instead what has happened is these two boxers have gone to their corners. And their corners have their posse and their fight coaches saying, you've got to win, you got to say this, you got to do that, you got to do this, you got to say that, you got to do this. And the whole swath in the middle is like, I don't know if I agree with that or I don't know if I agree with that. And I can certainly tell you as not a political person, just as a hard,

working taxpayer entrepreneur, my party left me a long time ago. And when we have massive races going across the U.S., the Republican Party and the Democratic Party do not come forward as a group, so as a GOP or a DNC and support good ideas in the middle. They would rather support a bad idea on their team than a good idea in the middle. And that's terrible. And in the middle, you have things that are not as interesting. So you don't have transgender ideology and you don't have, you know, ice. Okay, let's just put them in their corners. In the middle, you have safety in your streets. You have better education in schools. You have economic. development. You have, you know, parks and recreation. You have the pursuit of happiness. You have,

you know, going to the gym and enjoying the beach. In the middle, you have lifestyle. I'm not sure, like, I entirely agree with you because we've had tons of surveys. I mean, like, this has been replicated any times that show that this, the illegal immigration is a core issue for voters. I mean, across, even, even some Democratic voters, I mean, that makes it a, I don't think it's, I don't know if it's 80, but it's one of the, but it's one of the, big issues that basically got this, you know, majority election for President Trump in his agenda through, right? Well, okay, so I'll make the illegal immigration argument for you in a really realistic,

like what's happening today in the world in my opinion. I want to hear the rest. I'm just saying that this is obviously was a big issue for voters. It is a huge issue, but there's a very big difference in my opinion. and I'm not alone, there's a very big difference in slow illegal immigration over three decades in California, four decades, where people come in and seek to become American citizens through the process and then just don't do it. They just stop doing it. Or they're there for amnesty, or they've come in on a child's, there's a lot of reasons that they come to America.

There's a very big difference between that and opening the border. which a lot of people have said, and I agree, because I've done the math and I've looked, right? During the Biden administration, we kind of gave up and opened the border, and we let people flow in unchecked. Prior to that, you had maybe a million people a year, not 20 million people. So you have a very big disconnect in who came in over. And all countries have immigration, legal and illegal. And our country is the greatest biggest hug for people that want to come into our country and start a life.

We are a country of immigrants. We cannot now say that we're not. And we also have great programs for immigrants, including visas and work programs and school and college degree, anything. But we corrupt them. We corrupt them through media. We corrupt them through actually utilizing them in a way they were not meant to be utilized. What I always say is the road to have.

hell is paved with good intentions. And when you open your border, you corrupt people that have been here working to become American citizens that have not had any luck. And remember that immigration reform is a dirty word on the left and the right. And the main reason for that historically has been weight managing wages. If you have a certain group of people, they cannot get a fair wage, then that would keep wages lower. If they were paid, quote unquote, under the table or if they are scabs in a union dispute and they go to work, there's a million reasons why illegal immigration and illegal workers keep wages low. And it doesn't matter if it's the far right, the Coke Industries of the world, or if it's the far left and the Walmarts

of the world, if you have a lot of employees solving the immigration problem and putting immigrants to work is something that you look at as maybe it's going to change our how much we pay people. So it's never been like people don't come forward and go, can we just have an Ali, Ali, um, come free for all the people in California that have been living here for 30 years that have large work forces and employees and let's get them work permits and let's get them to work. And then we'll work on getting them legalized when they can put the oxygen mask on themselves. We don't do that. In fact, there's many cases where we invite someone in and we say you're here for seven years before you're going to be able to get your citizenship and you're not allowed to work for

seven years. That doesn't work either. And California is kind of the nucleus and granddaddy of that. And when I say that it is not a huge focus, illegal immigration in town by town, if you left it alone and ICE didn't show up and you didn't open the borders, California has gotten along perfectly fine with all of the people that live there. Except that there was, you know, I just had Peter Schweitzer on the show where he demonstrates all sorts of ways in which immigration has been actually weaponized

as a kind of weapon against America, so to speak, even with a whole lot of well-meaning people coming through, through these surges, right, especially in the recent years. So this is just a reality, right? I mean, again, I'm not trying to kind of divert from your... I believe you that these two issues are the core issues, But actually the immigration issue fits into that because part of this weaponization was sending people deliberately sending people who are criminals to this country, right, to kind of clean out your country and, you know, make them create this instability and lack of safety and so forth in this country. Well, I mean, you know, I've got three kids in California and I have a nine-year gap between my two older kids and my youngest.

And in nine years in education in California, my youngest is a full, you know, liberal, borderline socialist, you know, student of USC. Okay. Now, other kids went to USC. You know, my kids, they're not. In the last seven to eight years, what we've done in universities to students is, we've weaponized the university system to create these ideas that young kids would never have gotten from their parents at home. But I have to look back to when I was a child, right, I grew up a military brat.

My dad had his ideas about the U.S. Air Force and traveling all over the world. And we all had our woodstock. And if you don't want kids to explore things like social. then you can't have people preaching socialism in school. But we don't stop that. Universities are free learning, and you saw when they had all of the big top leaders of all the Ivy League schools

talking about what was happening in school when they were pushing Jewish people around over the Palestinian thing, people were saying, look, I was injured, and they're all saying, well, what does that mean? And everybody was pretending like, don't, nothing to see here. When in actuality, they were,

intimidating people, they were creating unsafe environments, and they weren't willing to stick up for the fact that they might have, you know, gone too far. And I see that with my kids in real time. And I say, don't you dare get involved in that Palestinian fight at the statue at school. It's dangerous and something could happen. Please don't go. And my kids are like, what do you mean? I go to USC. I'm going to go to everything. And then I have to rely on the university to keep my kids safe, right? When what they're doing isn't anything different than what we did in the 1960s and 70s and every time we've rebelled and we've been anti-war and we've been, you know, anti-everything, there's always going to be agitators. There's always going to be paid protesters.

There's always going to be a lie being told to keep certain people in power. And the job, I think, of the media, unfortunately, is to tell the truth. And we don't. And I'm excited. And I'm accepting of the fact that my child is exploring. But what I'm not accepting of is taking down books, changing history, and rewriting history. Because then they don't have any way to reference what's true. They can't go back and look and they can't read about it and they can't really educate themselves. And then I feel like the onus is on people like you and people like me that go out and say, wait a minute, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Okay, that doesn't work. And here's all of the references to historically why socialism is a very tough, tall reach in California or in America because we are a capital society. And we work. And we create a reward system for those who work hard. And if you try to mix that with a social system, you're going to have conflict and you're going to have a lot of failure. And you're going to have a lot of failure. you're also going to have a lot of people that won't agree with you. But you go ahead and you can

explore, but don't forget to read the history. And the history can tell the truth. And if you take that down and you rewrite history, you did an injustice because we are a young country. We're the newest country. We're like a beautiful tapestry and a project and we're a startup. America is a startup. And so we're going to make a lot of mistakes. And I feel like, you know, you're going to make a lot of mistakes. And I feel like, you know, can't we be allowed to fumble a little bit? And has our government at top level on the Republican and on the Democratic side fumbled a little bit? The Trump administration is not in a conversation with California. There's zero conversation.

We're completely left out of it in California. And this does not seem to bother Californians. the comments on the debate and there were news reporters saying the person that's going to win the governorship is going to be the person who stands up to Trump and I said that does not represent me like why is this what we're selling in California 18 trillion dollars of new business will come into the United States over the course of the next 10 years because of what Trump has set up zero is coming to California.

We're not even in the discussion. In fact, we lost $2 trillion because of billionaires' tax and just bad decisions on the left. And the left is in charge, so they have to bear the responsibility of the bad decisions. So if California loses money, if California loses taxpayers and they leave, if California has high crime,

if California has terrible immigration laws and sanctuary cities that can't afford, it's California because we have allowed this group of people to run our state. It's, I'm not sticking up for Democrats. I'm sticking up for you make your bed. And I saw the debates last night and it's about to repeat itself and it was really upsetting to me because I've interviewed all these mayors in California and they don't want to repeat of this. And it doesn't matter if they're Democratic or Republican. They want better governance. They want control of their cities. They don't want unfunded mandates. They don't want

SB 7-9. They want when you vote in a bill, Prop 36, the crime bill, they want it funded. What happens generally with almost all of the mayors is that they have a history in the town that they either grew up or were born in that town and they've been through, it's all of the changes in California over a long period of time, from being born there to going to high school there, having friends there, maybe going away, going to college, and then coming back. But the U.S. have a lot of them that have started businesses in California, are entrepreneurial people that are really smart that landed in Silicon Valley or landed in a farming industry. And they are invested. Their political aspirations, for the most part, with most mayors that I've interviewed,

the governorship or Secretary of State or going to D.C. but truly trying to make the place that they live the best that it can be and that is a very different political aspiration or job than Sacramento. It's not, yes, they need their assembly people, which is why I was so passionate about no on Prop 50 because when Prop 50 was being rattled around and they were remapping in California. Just very briefly, what is that for those that might not be initiated? Prop 50 was the redistricting bill in California to redistrict certain districts to a more Democratic Assembly legislation and taking away the power of smaller districts that had

a fairly good-sized Republican stronghold. And it didn't matter that they were Republicans. let's not pay any attention to the fact that there might be some Republicans in California. Let's take the last of their power away. The imbalance of it was frustrating to me. Why do you not want to have Republicans in California? Maybe we should ask that question. What's wrong with that?

And that's where the mayors in most cities that I have spoken to, whether they're Democratic or Republican, are not about the fact that they're Democratic or Republican. They're bipartisan people trying to have the best citizens. city possible. And they recognize that no matter who is in Sacramento, is Sacramento isn't working for them, they are affected negatively. And they're focused on safety and economic development as the core principles. That's right. And yes, immigration matters. Across the board, basically. But across the board, they want safe streets and they want economic development. What they want is the pursuit of happiness,

which is why we're all here. And you lose that when you watch the news. You're like, oh, it's all over. It's doom and gloom. And we're not having fun. And I just can't, I live in California. We have a good time. Tell me, you know, so this is a good moment. Tell me just a little bit, you know, quick version. You've done a lot of interesting things.

A little bit about your background and, you know, how you came to be, you know, doing this, this year's project. When you're young, you're most impressionable. And my father was in the military. Terry, he was an Air Force pilot. He flew F-100s and F-1-11s, and we lived in Germany and England, and he met my mom, my mom's English, and raised three kids. And when he retired, he moved to Colorado and went to work for Jepson, which is a company that's very involved in aviation, really great company.

And, you know, I had a few years of high school there and then eventually moved to Arizona and then California. Being said, when we were young, occasionally, when we would come to America, we would go to California. My Aunt Joyce lived in San Diego. Her husband was a ship diesel mechanic owner of a big, huge company. And they did very well, and they had lots of things. They had like three-wheelers and jet skis, and they would go to the desert, and they would go out in the water.

And when I was young, I thought to myself, when I grow up, I'm going to live in California. Because California is the place that you have all of these things. that I don't have when, you know, I just didn't, and you're impressionable when you're young. And I was in love with California, all my life, in love. And as soon as I could get to California, I did. And in 1991, I moved. I followed a boy, got married, had three kids, and raised my family in California, and started all my businesses in California, and I built a life for myself.

And I've been all over California, and I've watched California. I was there when they had the Rodney King riots. My brother was in law school at the time. I've been through, you know, the terrible 9-11. I've been through the beginning of the computer and the fax machine and the iPhone and the telephone. I had a phone with an antenna on it. I would drive around Los Angeles. For anybody from L.A., you guys are going to appreciate this.

We used to have this thing called the Thomas Guide, which was how you would find. you would line up the number with the letter to find where you were going on the lap of your car with a shick and you'd roll your window down to find your way around the maze of LA. So before navigation, I lived in California when you went to the airport to pick someone up. No one had a cell phone and everyone was driving really slowly looking for the person they were picking up. It's just I would go to the beach and play volleyball and drive with the top down and my dog was off the leash and and run in the morning. It's an amazing place. And if you take politics out of California, if you take Sacramento out of California, it's perfect. It's an amazing place.

Sacramento ruins California. Power, hungry, politicians ruin California. They also spend all the money. You know, you have roughly, what is it, 525,000 or 550,000 employees that are direct employees. $275,000 roughly, are not in Sacramento. Those are the cities and the city councils and the board of supervisors and fire department and the

police department and all these people that require tax dollars to function. And if you pay a mayor of a city $800 a month and they're working 70 hours a week, you've lost the plot. And that is our system. There's no money that goes to these cities. And then you come along with really good ideas for changing laws that might, like a tax bill, okay? There was a tax bill called the Bradley Burns tax bill.

This is a really good example of how California needs to listen to people that are in the middle. The Bradley Burns tax bill said, if you're going to charge 10% tax to California, right that money goes sales tax goes right to Sacramento then Sacramento is supposed to divvy it up so an origin tax would send 1% of that 10% back to you know Brea or Fullerton or serritos or wherever you want to pick wherever that sale happened that money would go back and that 20 million dollars a year of 1% tax to the origin of that place would go to you know their Christmas light program and cleaning up their streets and making retail storefronts look nice and all the things that a city would need for having a retail center. Okay? That's what Bradley Burns was about and it was a

great idea. Amazon comes along and 2019 you have really large online sales happening. In fact, there was a wayfar versus somebody or other lawsuit where you, Jan, want to, you know, mow your lawn tomorrow and your lawnmower, it's not working, right? You're like, oh, shoot. And you get in your car and you drive to Home Depot and you're going to get a lawnmower and mow your lawn on Saturday. And you see the lawnmower and it's $179 at your local Home Depot. Okay? And you go on your phone and Amazon Prime has it for $159, then they'll deliver it in the morning. You know, maybe you buy some, you know, I don't know, a gas can or something else, but you leave Home Depot. And in the morning, your lawnmower arrives and you put the gas in it and you mow your lawn and you don't think anything more about it.

But what really happened is Home Depot didn't get that sale. Bradley Burns did not apply and that 1% sales tax did not come back to your city of origin. Instead, Amazon sent that sales tax to Sacramento and they kept it. Okay? Sacramento kept it. And your town lost that. So they're incentivized. They're incentivized to support this kind of. e-commerce or whatever because they're going to collect that 1% and not the local community. Fascinating.

And then it grows over the course of five years during COVID. And then you start putting fulfillment centers in towns like a small town that doesn't have any retail. And that town that doesn't have any retail gets all of the sales from all the towns all over because that's the fulfillment center. So now you've got to go and you're in a fight with small towns that have made deals with Amazon and made deals with large companies that do drop shipping. And here you've got this massive drop shipping enterprise across America ruining Main Street. And there's wear and tear on those roads. There's trucking.

There's boxing and trash. There's drivers that, you know, are not from the local area. And the retail stores lose all the sales and get none of the sales tax back to the city. And I say, why don't we fix that? someone says, well, you're going to get a lot of pushback because, you know, these guys are the ones that write the big checks to the big politicians. And these guys are the ones that go to smaller towns that don't have any sales and say, let us put a fulfillment center here. And guess how much money you're going to make on that fulfillment center? And the whole thing gets out of balance.

And again, I say it again, you know, a good intention paves the road directly to hell. And across California, you have e-commerce eating up all these small main streets. And the heart of California is small business. It is the most important thing is the SBA and letting people have the American dream by starting a small business and letting them have a, you know, Scotch tape store as they used to make fun of on Saturday Night Live. I don't know if you're old enough to remember that, but it was, you know, it's, it doesn't matter what your business idea is. You should have the right to have it and for it to be successful. And in California, with the constraints from Sacramento,

homeless people can sleep in the front door of your business, and you are not allowed to touch them. Do you know that it is okay for a person to defecate in the middle of the median of your street if they are 200 feet away from a bathroom? Yet, if your dog does, you have to pick it up. But a person does not have to pick up behind themselves. We've lost the plot.

We have lost the plot. We have to enforce rules. And also not have them stacked in such a way that, you know, the big business benefits disproportionately. That's kind of what you're saying here, that there's a lot of things that are sort of disincentivizing the small businesses. Sure. I mean, look what it's done to farming. Right. I mean, you can point to all the same industry.

Which is something you didn't mention, but you have some experience with that as well. Well, I have a small farm in California. And farming is not, wow, it's a really tough business. Real farming is a very, very hard business. You literally have to work from six to six without batting an eye. And on bad weather days, it's four to seven, four to nine. And you, if you're a small farm, which is defined under, you know, 200 acres in California, you're composting 25% of what you grow,

it's 75% more to move anything, you're completely buried by big business, big ag. And guys like Bobby Kennedy and people like that are really looking at this and really trying. But farming is kind of, I think, a window into what's happening to Main Street as well. And we need small business because we need to be social. Humans are social beings.

And sitting at home and getting your Amazon packages delivered, it's not a social experience. It's also where the new ideas will come from. And this is, you know, you were talking about kind of the spirit. You said the pursuit, you alluded to the pursuit of happiness, right, and life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. From that, all of that springs innovation, at least in my view, in my view of America and the thing that I love about it.

People coming, getting together and coming up with great new ways to do things. But it can't happen at mass scale at the beginning. It has to get tested and honed at a small scale first. I think. I just feel as though we can't keep gorging ourselves on chocolate. I mean, the new Green Deal ideas are, they're so unattainable when you start to force people. And you start to really, like, bend the, you know, the freedoms of people to make something, you know, work that's not working.

Well, you know, you create these false economies, right? because you over-incentivize things which don't can't make it on their own. Do you know I looked at something? Right. Yeah. Do you know that we haven't cited people for dumping trash in California since 2020 or since COVID? Okay, so we used to have littering laws, right? Right, you see the signs on the highways.

Yeah, don't litter. So I was looking for litter citations because I noticed how dirty California is. I'm like, are we not, I just randomly said something there. I'm like, hey, you guys, have we like not been citing for littering? Because how is it so dirty, right? We haven't been. And yet we're, you know, we're so worried about the air, but we're throwing trash on the ground. It's just, if you just cleaned up California, it would just be like a better place to start.

I hate a dirty room, you know? I can't stand leaving dishes in the sink. And we have so many dishes in the sink, we have to go use the neighbor's sink. It's just too big to clean up. And we had the fires, and we put all of our toxic debris and local landfill. And with all these lawsuits, we're only half-clean. up and we're still fighting about whether or not we should have electric cars 100% in California by 20, 35. It's insane. You're taking away a leaf blowers electric or gas leaf blower.

I miss the sound of the gas leaf blower. I'm so used to it, right? And they're out there with a little electric trying to plug it in. In California, we have rolling blackouts. We don't have a power grid to support this. You know, they tell you, you buy a Tesla, you get to go in the carpool lane. They're taking that away. Now they're going to charge us. Have you heard the latest? They're going to try to charge you by the mile. Oh, and your Tesla that you bought that you can barely charge and you don't get the free carpool lane anymore,

you're also going to pay mileage tax because it's for road taxes. This is, it's gas lining. We need a restart. We need somebody that's talking to mayors. What do we do here? There seems to be a few steps and starting. what's the small thing and what's the big thing? So I think that overall, if you look at California as a state, you have 40 million people

in California roughly. I think it's closer to 42, but that's just because we can't really count them. 40 million people, only 17.5 million people pay taxes in California, which is less than half. You got this weird business plan. business plan, let's call it a business plan, that if you had in a free market, no one would lend you money if they thought that you were 50% dependent on a one customer. It's not a good business plan. It doesn't work. And then we slowly with bad business plans over the years,

and this is that Gavin Newsom's responsible. I'm not going against him and saying mean things about Gavin because I know a lot of people like him, but I don't because it's a big job to manage California fiscally. And there are plenty of mayors that manage the emotional side and the social side and the pursuit of happiness side of the people that believe in them and their city councils and their neighborhoods. But when you have somebody at the top pushing downstream what's called unfunded mandates onto those people, you create war in those city halls. You create war with those mayors because they are saying, no, no, no, stop oppressing us with your mandates. We don't want to do it. And then city council is pushed into it,

and everybody gets pushed into it, and then the citizens rebel, which is very much what has happened in Los Angeles with Mayor Karen Bass. So you have a bad business plan. And then you say, why don't we do the 2026 billionaires tax reform? And we're going to go through the one customer that's paying all the bills. We're going to dig in their underwear drawer and see if we can extract an additional $100 million. And we're going to use that for unfunded Medicare and Medi-Cal for illegal aliens. And then you expect that not to backfire. Well, it did.

One trillion just walked. about $66 billion of the general fund. The total amount they were trying to get was $100 billion. And they haven't even, because it's retro, they've already lost half of what they were hoping to gain. The worst part is they've lost it in perpetuity. It cost 5% to move. 5% is what they want of the $2 trillion in assets

that belong to basically 200 guys. They've already lost the point. lot. And so I say as a new governor coming into California, do you really want to inherit that business plan anyway? I just, I don't think so. Like, get rid of all of it. And let's start over and let's create 47% of the general fund in small business. And let's put together, you know, a great American credit union that's funded by billionaires as a loan. Let's raise $500 billion. and let's do California SBA. But we won't call it that.

And we'll invest in California because that's the problem. And that's what happened in the Palisades. You think the Palisades fires is repairable? With what money? With what money? And Los Angeles is 4 million people. I've literally visited 50 cities and talked to all of these mayors

and the sweet spot is 250,000. For population size. For population size. When you grow to this massive size and you have one mayor who's responsible for four million people. And yes, the palisades burned and it is terrible. But you're talking about 25,000 people? She has four million people, of which, by the way, 22% are on food services in Los Angeles. She has her hands full.

And she's a servant of the people. And we have people that walk around that say Karen Bass burned my house. down. This is what people wear. This person, Karen Bassburn in my house down, it's so upsetting to me because we've made people so mad. And you know why we've made people so mad? Because we make such terrible decisions in Sacramento. And then we take all of the money and we don't return it to the cities so that they can advocate for themselves. In Los Angeles, police, fire, and EMT are responsible for 3,300 people each, each person. In Sunnyvale, there are responsible

responsible for 300 people. We've made it unmanageable. And then we say, you're the problem. And Sacramento's the problem, and they have all the money. And then if you don't comply, it becomes an unfunded mandate, and then they send into your town developers and builders and people that have funded them into office, and they repay the favors, and there they are, and you can't do any,

and they jump the Rubicon. They don't have to go through the regular process of the regular process of planning and permitting, and they get away with pushing this on towns, and nobody speaks up for these people. And then last night you have this, you know, group of people that are going to run California and all saying exactly the same thing, and one Republican. And I'm sure they're all very fine people, but if you don't cut the head off the snake, you know, it's a really huge problem. And, and I, I think that we have so many good people and hard workers in California and they can't,

like, look, I'm telling you right now, I pay so much tax. It's so shocking and I get so little back. I can't get anything paid for in the palisites that burned down. Insurance companies are broke, roads are broken, and there's no help. Trump says I'm going to come in and everyone's like, oh, gosh, no. Why not? You want us to give another $35 billion to Sacramento? No, give it to the fire victims.

Let them create their own de-annex. Make the city smaller. Create a pilot city. Allow them to advocate for themselves. So as we finish up, I mean, really what I'm hearing is, from your kind of assessment, your solution is to bring cities back to this sort of sweet spot size of, say, of 250,000, and let them govern themselves without those. these top-down mandates that create the wars within the cities?

A thousand percent. Okay. That's the first thing you have to do. And you have to do an audit. You know, what's happening in Minnesota is truly shocking. And, you know, I just had Oz on Dr. Oz about hospice fraud in California and just what some massive percentage of the national health care. spend is actually right in LA, just in the LA region.

I think it was like 18%. Something, we have to verify that, but it's huge. So there's all of that, but let's, this is very interesting. This scale, reduce the scale that speaks to me. I see a lot of problems when you get into very large scales. That's kind of been a theme in this show actually over the years. The smaller scale is going to be, there's going to be less. It's so much easier to steal when it's big.

Right. And if we don't think that's happening, you know, guys, come on. Minnesota's just the tip of the iceberg. It really is. California has been, you know, the fraud in California is tremendous. And the problem is we've set up these systems that a lot of people don't, most people don't know what like a May talk or a say talk is, which is really interesting to me because I'm in construction. So I have like a beginning, a middle, in an end.

We have a schedule of values. You know, I'm a manager of not. just money but actual work product. What do you have when you're done? You have to have an end. And so if you have an institution like FEMA, FEMA has a job to do in an emergency, but they're a readiness group, right? So they're like an army. They're ready. When the hurricane happens or the earthquake or the fires, they arrive on scene and they're not getting organized. They're already organized. So they have this thing called a Maytock, which is a mandatory award task, you know, outside contract or something like that. But that's how they hire like, you know, a person to remove the debris or, you know, a person to hand out water or whatever, they have a May talk.

And the May talk involves companies that do the accounting and the distribution of money. So across the land, and I mean the United States, we have a lot of these companies that would fall into this sort of Maytock style thing. which are NGOs, special interest, and nonprofit. Okay, these are groups that get the money from the government to perform a task. And yes, it's nonprofit. It's not no, there are no barriers here. There's a whole, like, thing on, and I don't want to say, you know, like, I'm not going to name names, but let's just say large foundations or large charities that have,

94 and 96% administration cost. Now, if you have an administration cost at that high, then you're only spending, you know, 4 to 6% on the Band-Aids if you're in the Band-Aid business. And this is not sustainable because these are taxpayer dollars that pay for these foundations to house people or to get people into drug programs or to, you know, whatever, to build a road, to build a ship, to build an airplane. It does not matter if your job is to distribute the money and watch the checkbook, and you've been given that honor, and you spend 95% of that money managing your foundation, we will never get ahead.

And that is where we are today. That's where we are. And inside of those good actors that are just operating ineffectively are also criminal actors. because they know that no one's watching. And, you know, crime is always in the shadows. It's too big to watch, and you have to stop it. And the scale, again, sort of reducing the scale, will just sort of naturally create a much better window

into all of this type of functioning. A final quick thought as we finish? Yeah. If you were to take the management of 250,000 people under a city council and a mayor and a group of city advocates. And the money were, the federal money and the state money were flipped, where five to seven to ten percent remained with the state, and the majority of the money went to the city,

and those responsible city members could spend that money in their city the way that they had planned to spend it. We would have a successful governing body in California, but it's flipped. they get less than 5%. Sometimes they don't get any, certainly in sales tax. And I think it's upside down.

It's upside down world. Well, Elaine Kulati, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. Thank you, Yon, for having me. I hope I get invited back on my next Mayor's Matter tour in a different state. Thank you all for joining Elaine Kuladi and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Janja Kellek.