His reasons are his own, and we can only speculate as to what they are. All we can say for sure is that the Governor has set an arbitrary policy that will add thousands of additional cars to California's roadways.
The policy is a return to office (RTO) mandate that requires all California state workers to work onsite at least 4 days per week without operational need. Many state workers have worked effectively from home 5 days per week for over four years, and in so doing have defrayed significant costs to California's taxpayers and the environment.
Until the RTO mandate, 37% of state employees worked primarily from home.1 Gavin's return-to-office mandate will force an estimated 90,000 state workers on the roads throughout California; that means we can expect over 30,000 more cars in Sacramento and over 7,000 in Los Angeles during peak commuting hours.2
California is already failing to meet its climate goals,3 and over 25% of the most polluted cities in the country are located in California.4
From 2021-2023, state telework policies prevented nearly 400,000 metric tons of carbon from being released into the atmosphere due to daily commutes.5
Based on the most recent month of Department of General Services' Tracking Telework data, the Governor's mandate for state workers to report to office locations at least 4 days per week is estimated to create a minimum of about 178,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions over the course of a year.
Gavin failed to conduct an environmental impact assessment for the RTO policy as required by the California Environmental Quality Act.6 If he effectively ends telework for state workers by requiring employees to report to the office 5 days per week, the annual estimated CO2 emitted as a result of the policy could near 250 million metric tons.
Given the urgency of the climate emergency, we need to take as many measures as possible to prevent catastrophic climate change. Telework is one of many necessary tools in our toolkit to ward off climate change. California can't afford RTO.
Absent an operational reason to take 100% telework off the table for state employees, we can only assume that Gavin must love traffic, pollution, carbon emissions, and wasting everyone's time and money—or, at least, he must care more about making traffic worse than he does about meeting California's ambitious climate goals.
Sadly, Gavin doubled down on his dysfunctional relationship with traffic. After the telework bill (AB 1729) passed both the assembly and senate,17 Gavin vetoed the bill in September. The bill would have re-established the DGS Telework Dashboard to highlight annual savings attributable to telework,1 and would have given departments and agencies the authority to set telework policy based on operational need.
Short of a veto override, legistlative approaches to implement common-sense telework flexibility will be delayed until the next legislative session. Although Article IV, Sec. 10(a) of the California constitution grants the legislature to override a Governor’s veto with a 2/3 voting majority,18 the California legislature has chosen not to exercise this power since 1979.19 This practice grants the executive more power than it is constitutionally entitled to. If you think the people of California deserve to be governed according to the state constitution, contact your legislators to express your disappointment and ask them to use the power granted to them in the state constitution to keep the executive in check.
There's no way to know whether an intervention can change Gavin's feelings about traffic. All we can do is try. Tell Gavin to break up with traffic!
