Blog

Oct 17, 2023

ROADMAP 2035: A conversation with CPUC Commissioner John Reynolds

CAPITOL WEEKLY PODCAST This Special Episode of the Capitol Weekly Podcast was

CAPITOL WEEKLY PODCAST This Special Episode of the Capitol Weekly Podcast was recorded live at Capitol Weekly's conference examining California's climate goals: ROADMAP 2035: Cars, Carbon and Climate Change – How Do We Meet California's Zero Emissions Goals? which was held in Sacramento at the California Endowment Conference Center on Thursday, May 25, 2023

This is This is the Keynote, a conversation between California Public Utilities Commissioner John Reynolds and Capitol Weekly editor Rich Ehisen.

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Rich Ehisen: All right everybody. Well, welcome. Please keep enjoying your lunches, but do know we’re going to start with our keynote Q&A here of note two because in the program, you’ll notice that it says we’re going to be sitting here with Alice Busching Reynolds, who is the president of the California Public Utilities Commission. You may have noticed this is not Alice Busching Reynolds. If you have any concerns about the importance of the subject today, just know that Ms. Reynolds was called away by the governor to go talk about some very similar topics that he's going to be talking about today. So another commissioner here, John Reynolds, was gracious enough to step in and come talk to you today too. So commissioner Reynolds, thank you very much for being here. Really appreciate it.

John Reynolds: Thank you so much for having me. You have got the other Reynolds today.

Rich Ehisen: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Dual Reynolds. I like that. Well, this is pretty much everything I was going to hit her with, with maybe a few little ancillary things. But let's start out with the most basic thing, because the PUC has noted that it is addressing this issue with short-term, mid-term and long-term thinking. Can you maybe give me a little bit of an example of each of those?

JR: Absolutely. As we look at transportation electrification, a really critical challenge that we’re approaching is timely energization of charging sites. So, in the short term, we’ve adopted a rule that we will have a 125-day timeline for energization of charging sites. And we have a prospect to consider further rules and further tightening in that timeline. But we’ve got that interim 125 days, which really provides additional certainty to charging site operators. In the middle term. We’ve got a proceeding we call it the High DER proceeding, the high Distributed Energy Resources proceeding. And that's looking at how we go about doing distribution capacity planning, making sure that utilities are capacity planning to account for the electric vehicle load we’re going to face in the future. Finally, in the longer term, we’ve now adopted a freight infrastructure planning framework.

We know that when we look at medium duty, heavy duty vehicles, we’re going to have some substantial capacity needs to support those vehicles when they electrify. And in order to do that, we’ve got a framework in place. We’re going to do a really hard look at how we can support those vehicle loads and do it in a different way than we’ve done distribution capacity planning in the past. Historically, we’ve done just in time, capacity planning, which has worked for relatively flat loads. But when we’re in a world where we want to see more large loads come on the system, we know we’re going to need to do some advanced planning and make sure that we’re ready to handle those loads as they come online.

RE: Well, let's stay on that last bit for just one more question here, because as you heard it in the first two panels, I think there's a lot of concern about the capacity of the grid to handle this massive influx of electric vehicles. Tell me a little bit about what the thinking is for when that time comes. And I’m not… I’m sure nobody thinks, on January 1st, 2035, suddenly an extra 15 million cars are going to plug in and need to be charged with the grid. But still, it is a concern as to the capacity and the ability to handle that. Please address that concern a little bit.

JR: Absolutely. And when we look at the plans and forecasts that the Energy Commission has put forth. They are looking at over 55,000 megawatts in 2035 a record for California. We know we’ve gotta be prepared for that. We know there's going to be a substantial scaling of electric vehicle load in the future and we are in the process now of getting ready for exactly that. When you imagine completely unmanaged charging, if everybody comes home at 5:00 PM plugs in their EV to a L2 High Current charger, that's going to be a substantial draw on the grid. And it creates potential challenges for sure.

But we have a real opportunity here and that's how do we manage charging better than everyone coming in and charging on a high current device at the same time, if we can encourage people to charge at times of day when we have high renewables, something like workplace charging, if people are spending the day recharging their vehicles, they’re using lots of renewables when we’ve got just abundant solar and we’re reducing the need for more infrastructure investment to support higher Peaks. That's a tremendous opportunity in and of itself.

ROADMAP 2035, Keynote. CPUC Commisssioner John Reynolds in conversation with Rich Ehisen, Capitol Weekly. Photo by Scott Duncan, Capitol Weekly

I’ve heard some really interesting and promising ideas like leveraging school buses, electric school buses as large batteries during the summer when they’re not in operation as a transportation service. If you can have a school bus that is plugged into the grid during the summer when we have some of our highest loads or hottest days, you’ve got an emergency resource of essentially available that can reduce your need for other resources. And that's a fabulous opportunity. And I think we’re also in the midst of exploring vehicle to grid opportunities. And when we can start seeing EVs as a grid resource, it unlocks even further opportunity for us. We have pilots approved for utilities that are looking at vehicle to great opportunities and some of the needs there. I think we’ll learn a lot and it will really inform how we can move forward with that in the future.

RE: Which begs the question, I mean it sounds like, there's no model to follow here really, so I don't want to say making it up as you go, that's not what I mean, but I mean, it's requiring a lot of on the ground real-time innovative thinking, correct?

JR: Absolutely.

[laughter]

RE: Well, now California… You guys have a plan to exponentially expand all these chargers? I know the PUC adopted, I think it was a billion dollar EV charging development program with 70% of that aimed at medium and heavy duty trucks or vehicles, because we know that's where the bulk of the emissions are coming from. 30% is the breakdown for the rest. Tell me a little bit more about that program, if you will.

"We’re going to see a lot of private dollars continue moving into EV charging. We’ve seen lots of announcements from major automakers about the investments that they’re making into EV charging networks." – John Reynolds

JR: Of course. So that is a five-year program, a five-year investment plan. And as you mentioned, it's 70% medium duty, heavy duty and 30% light duty. It's also focused on equity communities. And I think that all of this is really important because there's a lot of private investment coming into the electric vehicle charging space right now. The automakers as they’re releasing new EVs, they want customers to love these cars. They want customers to buy these cars. They know customers have to get over the hump. They need to have a charging network available. We want to focus on investing ratepayer funds for utilities on areas that may be less served by those private dollars.

So we’re looking at equity communities, we’re looking at opportunities like multi-unit dwelling, apartment charging. And then on that heavy duty, medium duty side, it's a substantial focus of the funds. It also has a major equity component. When you look at communities near major freight traffic routes, those communities have some of the worst air quality in the state. And the concomitant and the health impacts that residents are facing can really be alleviated by zero emissions vehicles moving that freight.

RE: Do we right now have any, even a guesstimate of how many Chargers, charging stations we’re going to need?

JR: I can't tell you how many we’re going to need. What I can tell you is it's probably going to look a little bit different than a gas station network. And private industry automotive sector is going to want their customers to love that product. We’re going to see a lot of private dollars continue moving into EV charging. We’ve seen lots of announcements from major automakers about the investments that they’re making into EV charging networks. They want their customers to feel very comfortable with their automobiles. They want customers to come back again and buy their next EV from the same company. So they’ll, I think, we will see that investment continue, and I think the markets are going to give us a lot of signals about how many charging stations are going to be necessary for customers to electrify.

RE: Along those same lines, will the PUC have any role in regulating public charging rates? And on the rate question, also the ancillary impact of all electric costs right now, because clearly they’re not. It's not silos.

JR: Absolutely. So we are not in the business of regulating third party public charging stations. We are in the business of regulating utility rates. So where utilities are charging stations for the power that they use to fill cars. Yes, we absolutely have a role in setting those utility rates. Those are certainly going to have an impact down the stream on any public charging networks that are third party owned that provide service directly to customers. And that's important, but our focus will be on making sure that we’ve got the right rates in place for the utilities.

RE: As we noted in the earlier panels we’re not operating alone here. There are other states that are… Several other states that are working hand in hand with us on this. The EU certainly is, the federal government. How is California working with all of these other jurisdictions? Give me some examples of ways that we are working with them and maybe ways that we would like to work with them that are not being realized yet.

JR: I’ll give you more of a PUC focused answer here. We’ve got a number of forums where we engage with our counterparts from other states and from other countries. Just recently, California hosted the Western State PUCs, where we had lots of discussions about the energy future and we’re leading the way in electrifying transportation. But there are lots of other states that are really focused on this as well. And thinking about what does the future look like, is there… We saw this in… RPS as an example, California led with RPS goals. Many other states subsequently adopted them, and we’re all sharing from the same playbook. How do you get from a traditional base load grid to something that's much cleaner, that has more intermittent renewables that get integrated into the grid?

JR: And I think the same thing is happening in the electric vehicle space. Where we’re adopting policies to lead the way. We’re sharing our knowledge with other states. We’re learning from them about challenges that they’re facing. Everybody has got a somewhat unique system and some unique needs. And I think we’re going to continue sharing in those forums and learning from our partners in other states to see what some of the best practices are going to be that emerge in this space.

RE: And how about the EU, which I know that they are a part of this too. And the EU seems to be leading a lot of things that California is picking up on in particular. I’m thinking of data privacy and other things.

JR: Yeah.

"It has long been really an axiom in the power sector that the cheapest electron is the one that we don't use." – John Reynolds

RE: Is there anything particular in the EU that we’re seeing that looks like a great idea here?

JR: In the TE space, I think it's really valuable for more goals to be adopted in jurisdictions around the world because I think the industry will respond when they see clear signals from the EU, from California, from other parts of the US. They’re going to invest in vehicle fleets of the future, and they’re going to invest in getting customers on board with those fleets. And so I think we’re all intertwined, and I think each of our work will contribute to the same end goal, which is a cleaner transportation sector in the future.

ROADMAP 2035, Keynote. CPUC Commisssioner John Reynolds in conversation with Rich Ehisen, Capitol Weekly. Photo by Scott Duncan, Capitol Weekly

RE: Along those lines, California has also been a leader on almost all of these things, particularly in energy conservation for quite a long time. Are there conservation or efficiency measures that we could be doing that would help make better use of the power that we have right now?

JR: Absolutely. It has long been really an axiom in the power sector that the cheapest electron is the one that we don't use. We’ve as a state have led energy efficiency as a key component of how we reduce the need for investment in the grid and can deliver the same services to customers. And in fact, we’ve done a tremendous job of keeping load growth per capita relatively flat while other parts of the country have seen very substantial growth in per capita load. We have a little bit of a transition now where we’re looking to electrify more and more parts of people's lives. When we look at transportation electrification, building electrification, we can expect some per capital load usage to increase. But maintaining efficiency is still really important to cost controls for long-term infrastructure investments.

JR: If every customer goes out and gets a high-current L2 charger at home, they’re probably overbuilding for their needs and they’re probably drawing a lot more electricity than… That's going to require a lot more investment in the grid to support it. If customers can be encouraged to right size their investments in home charging, we can really maintain efficiency in the transportation sector as it electrifies. And that's really important to cost controls for the long-term infrastructure.

RE: There has been a lot of criticism that maybe that as fast as we’re moving, it may not be fast enough because of the urgency of the problem. And that's something that was brought up a lot in earlier panels. All these things we talk about challenges and obstructions and everything, by far the biggest challenge is dealing with climate change. So maybe we’re not moving fast enough. Others, of course might think we’re moving too fast. That we’re not going to be as efficient as we could be for that reason. Why can't we move faster on some of these transitions?

JR: It's a great question. And I can't agree enough that the climate imperative is urgent, and I think all of my colleagues are aligned. I think it's something that the California government is really focused on. If we take a step back 10, 15 years, some of the goals that we have now adopted and that we are day-to-day marching towards implementing would have been unthinkable at that time. And I think today we are taking the steps to reduce the emissions of the transportation sector. And the speed at which we do that has already really quickened, I mean, the legislature set goals for how many EVs would be sold in California. The governor then issued an executive order in 2020, with still, stricter targets. And then the ARBs advanced claims fleet rule in 2021 really gives us a very clear indication of where to go. And we’ve seen that kind of acceleration in the space. We’re in execution mode as an agency, in making sure that we’re developing plans that are going to support the transportation load of the future.

RE: I’m a child of the ‘70s. Cars are California. California is car culture to its core. All of these other challenges aside, I’m curious about how you go about changing… I’m going to use a phrase here that is, again, of my generation, the hearts and minds of Californians to truly adapt to these changes. Because I mean, all of these things we’re talking about, so I live in Davis. There are multiple households around me that have the chargers you’re talking about, there are many others who don't. I’m just curious about what is it going to take to get people to buy into all of this and come along willingly and to not wait until the last nanosecond to go get that EV and to take advantage of the programs that are being offered, et cetera et cetera. Because that would seem to make this whole process a lot easier if you get more buy-in than resistance.

JR: Absolutely. And the policy wonk in me wants to say we make EV's total cost of ownership competitive with internal combustion engine vehicles. We’ve, done our job, but I appreciate that it… There is actually a really important aspect of customer adoption that is culture and the desirability of really of these vehicles. And… Well, I have great ambitions for the regulators and the policy folks. I think the industry is going to be doing a lot of heavy lifting here. As we’ve seen more and more different car models filling different segments, offered fully electric, we’re going to see an adaptation of car culture. We’ve seen so many subcultures develop over the last many decades. We’re going to see that continue to happen. We’re not talking about getting rid of the car, we’re talking about electrifying it.

JR: If you want a vehicle with a lot of towing capacity and an open button. There are models on the market for you. If you want an SUV that has a very comfortable ride, there are EVs on the market for you. If you want a high performance vehicle, there are EVs on the market for you. And I think it's going to be really important that there continue to be affordable EVs on the market where the total cost of ownership, especially the purchase price as well, are cost competitive with internal combustion engines. And I’m really excited for continued development in the automotive industry in this space.

RE: We were talking about challenges earlier. Some of them related to the availability of materials for batteries and things like that, that are not in the scope for PUC, but what are some of the other challenges that maybe we haven't talked about here that you’re also game planning for but maybe we haven't been talking about here today?

JR: It's a good question. I think when we look at the supply of lithium, we’ve obviously got outside of the PUC some really exciting things happening in California's development of Lithium Valley as a source of supply. I think there's also some really exciting technological opportunities. When you think about the automotive sector and the internal combustion engine that's been running it. You have over 100 years of innovation on that platform. You’ve had investment in reducing costs in increasing the efficiency of transforming fuel into propulsion.

ROADMAP 2035, Keynote. CPUC Commisssioner John Reynolds in conversation with Rich Ehisen, Capitol Weekly. Photo by Scott Duncan, Capitol Weekly

JR: And we’re really at the dawn of the age of using batteries for that same purpose. And I think we’re going to see continued investment and innovation there. Just a few weeks ago, I was down at Stanford for their Energy Solutions week and heard about a lot of engineering research into a wide range of different energy technologies, including some really fascinating research into methods to rejuvenate lithium batteries that have degraded over time after multiple cycles, mini cycles of recharging. And I think we’ll see this in other kinds of technological innovations in this space that really dramatically expand the desirability associated with these vehicles because more and more capabilities will be unlocked over time.

RE: Are we seeing those same kinds of possible advancements for that mid and heavy duty market that we’re talking about? Because again, I mean that's the one that's really going to be the tail of the tape here of success or not. Correct?

JR: I think we’re going to see it. I think the market opportunity is there. I think we are increasingly getting the policy landscape firm depth to execute and implement and be ready. And I think the battery innovations that we’re already going to start seeing in the light-duty space, we’ll see similar innovations follow in the medium-duty, heavy-duty space. And I think the size of the medium-duty, heavy-duty market is going to encourage more and more investment that can similarly produce costs, increase efficiency, manage operations in ways that we’ll look back in 20 years and reflect on just how different the landscape for moving freight look now than it looks then.

RE: Nobody can predict catastrophic changes. But we might, as we sit here now and we’re going through all the debt ceiling issues, possible recession, who knows about war or any other thing. I’m not asking you to solve all those right now.

[laughter]

RE: But the planning, I guess for something major that could hold all this up. Okay. Please tell me a little bit more about the planning. I know you talked a little bit about the long-term planning, but maybe I didn't ask you about that, the real mitigation for some really significant thing that could throw a roadblock into all of this. And the reason I ask is because it seems all of these interconnected, the agencies, private industry, academia, technology, everything is counting on there not being any major hiccups. So what about major hiccups, right? How prepared are we to deal with that as a possibility?

JR: It's a great question and had you asked me this question five years ago, there's no way that I could have predicted that we would manage the global pandemic that is COVID and the changes to our society that resulted from that reflects… Were reflected in what we have to do as agencies doing our own work. We’re not a public health agency, but we were dramatically impacted as an agency. Our workforce was impacted, the way that we do our work day-to-day was impacted and we adapted, we changed and we keep functioning, we keep developing new policies, we keep overseeing utilities. I think maybe a little more, not quite such a big disruption, but we also went through tremendous supply chain challenges. And those impacted the development of energy resources here in the State.

JR: A lot of work went into unblocking the supply chain challenges and monitoring what was happening on the ground so that we understood the landscape and were prepared to deal with things not going according to plan. I think we’ve built these playbooks so that we know who to talk to. We’ve got our agency partners, we have our contacts in industry. We’re going to keep adapting to a situation as it exists. This is the, I think it is as Kipp said, it's the day-to-day, week to week, month to month implementation work of regulatory agencies and our sister agencies in the energy space.

RE: Well, along those lines. Your government has not always been known for being super adaptable, shall we say and a lot of times, especially in the technology fields. The technology is moving far faster than the ability of most lawmakers certainly to understand how it actually works and maybe even some of the agencies if it's outside of their very specific purview. I guess, how confident are you there with the role that the private sector is playing in all this not just to create the technologies but to also work well with government to make sure that those technologies are metered out in a way that is advantageous for the consumer and the public?

JR: Yeah. I think it's going to be an iterative process. At the PUC we’re originally the railroad commission. We’re a 100 year old agency founded on 100 year old processes. As we’ve moved into different sectors we’ve adapted our processes to meet the needs that customers have for investor and utility water service or gas service or electricity service. In the more recent past, we have adapted our processes and rules for TNCs like Uber and Lyft or for autonomous vehicles.

JR: I think we get ourselves ready to deal with new technological and new customer challenges as they occur and as they land on our desk. And we are responsible for them and we’re going to keep doing that. And I think increasing communication and collaboration among the energy agencies has been tremendously beneficial in having a really unified planning approach to the energy sector. I think that we’re going to keep building on these partnerships and remain as nimble as we can, adapt some processes when we need to and we identify some gaps. Because I think we all recognize that the need for execution is there and we’re committed to finding the path to make it happen.

RE: Yeah, because, as you noted, the plate is pretty full already for the PUC before the mandate came down and my guess is this won't be the last mandate that we see coming down on this issue. And then of course and there's other ones, there's other goals, other deadlines depending on the industry and that kind of a thing. So it sounds like you’re pretty confident though the PUC will be able to hold up its end of regulating all of this.

JR: I think we are really focused on it. I feel very good about the policy development we’ve already had and our continued ability to oversee the utilities to support this transition. I think we as an agency really appreciate the contribution of the transportation sector to GHG emissions in the state. And we’re really committed to doing our part to facilitate a zero emissions future for transportation.

RE: Do you want to take some questions?

JR: Yeah.

RE: If you’ve got a question throw your hand up. I see one in the back. Right over here. We can, and a couple them here, so. Yeah, absolutely.

"If you don't have affordability, you don't have reliability, you’re not going to enable electrification." – John Reynolds

Question: So first I want to say that the CPC has a big job and I want to really honor and appreciate everything that you do. I’d like to bring it down just a little bit to the grittier level. When we’re looking at the power grid, we know that there are already strains on it and those strains are real. And that was part of a lot of the dialogue and the challenge with the net metering conversation and as all of these pushes to electrification move forward it's going to continue to put a burden on low income communities and low income neighborhoods where those costs are rolling down.

Scott Wetch mentioned the cost shift earlier. These are real things and as we’re moving to electrification that adds an increased burden. We’re looking at the underground in question and that is an increased burden. And I just want to know how the CPC is looking at this as a holistic thing, especially as our state is dealing with the highest level of homeless and unhoused and as utility costs force people out of their houses and onto their streets. We’ve got this balance of trying to solve a problem that is continuing to be exacerbated. Can you speak to that please?

JR: Yes. And there's a lot there. So I’ll touch on a couple of different things. First, I’ll acknowledge that utility bills come from the same household budget as everything else. With the inflationary pressures that Californians are facing with the high cost of housing in a lot of parts of the state adding a utility bill, particularly a rising utility bill to those costs, puts a real strain on California families.

Broadly speaking, we have an affordability proceeding within the PUC where we’re looking at new affordability metrics so that we can evaluate the impact of our decisions on Californians and really have more clear and consistent guidelines around what we’re looking at, what we’re talking about when we talk about affordability. And we have more precision around different types of customers and the impact that a utility bill has on them.

Within the transportation space specifically, and I talked a little bit about the importance of efficiency in customer charging options, when we have a reduction in customer needs to a reduction in the sort of size of the customer charging option, we can reduce the long-term investment in infrastructure while also adding new electric load. And if you can have more electric load with the same amount of infrastructure, you actually are declining the cost for electricity, you’re spreading it across a bigger pool, and importantly, if that electricity is going to be cheaper than the gasoline that a customer would’ve been using to charge their car and to power their car in the past, you can actually look at reducing the burden on customers from their total energy usage.

ROADMAP 2035, Keynote. CPUC Commisssioner John Reynolds in conversation with Rich Ehisen, Capitol Weekly. Photo by Scott Duncan, Capitol Weekly

And I think that's really important and a tremendous opportunity for us. You mentioned also the strain on the grid. I think it's important to note that we have been very focused on reliability as an agency. We’ve had several historic procurement orders in the past two years, I think a total of 18,000 megawatts have been ordered by our agency through the integrated resource planning process to the load serving entities throughout the state to put more power resources on the grid. We know that if you don't have affordability, you don't have reliability, you’re not going to enable electrification.

Question: Hi. John Lare with EcoEngineers. You talk about capacity, reliability and infrastructure. I think those are the three keys to making sure that the system and you’re going to reach the goals and it's going to be one in which the entire state and the population will get behind. I was wondering though, it's not off-center, but nuclear power is one of the options out there that could really supply the types of energy increases that you need. And there's been a lot of development lately. It was virtually ignored in SB 350.

But now besides the big base load plants, they now have things like modular units, and I just read the other day they have what is essentially a portable nuclear generator that they can literally put on a truck, bust it over someplace, set it up, run it, turn it down, and send it someplace else. Is the PUC considering the nuclear options at all in terms of building out the infrastructure and reaching the Zev goals?

JR: I appreciate the question. As you’re well aware with, the legislature did pass a bill last year for a process to consider extending life of Diablo Canyon. I appreciate that you’re talking about modular reactors and other future technology. What I will share with you is that we’ve got an integrated resources planning process that's designed to help us reach our climate goals at the lowest cost possible. We have a preferred portfolio that comes out of that plan, and that's what we’re really targeting, what we’re directing load serving entities to procure towards. The nuclear option, that kind of scared me for a second.

[laughter]

Question: I do have a another question. So, the PUC currently regulates a wide variety of utilities and even within the electrical sector you regulate SMUD, PG&E, Edison, et cetera, and they have different approaches to the way that they run their organizations. Can you speak to the difficulties of overseeing all of these different utilities who are going to approach this massive increase in electrification differently, and any concerns that people should be aware of or anything you feel like you’ve learned from doing this through the last decades, but I feel like that, we could see a very different implementation from one company to the next, and I’m just wondering if you could speak to the challenges there.

JR: Yeah, gladly. I think I’ll first note that we don't generally oversee the publicly owned utilities, but we do oversee a variety of different privately owned utilities from PG&E, SoCal Edison, San Diego Gas Electric of course, to smaller, what we often call multi-jurisdictional utilities that have operations in those states like PacifiCorp. I think there's both a challenge and an opportunity when it comes to overseeing different companies that potentially will have different implementation plans and different needs on their systems. We will see opportunities for these utilities to learn from each other when we have pilots so that these utilities implement, sometimes they implement them differently. Sometimes they design them very differently.

And we might learn that one approach has some value that the other could really learn and benefit from as we move to a larger scale implementation framework. I think the challenge of having different utilities is that we’ve gotta understand where there's a difference in the characteristics of the system that each utility has versus a difference in the choices that are made.

And it's important to tailor the choices to the system. If a particular utility has limited capacity in a particular area, they may have a different investment need than another utility that should be reflected, and we need to have the flexibility to allow for that. But we also have the opportunity to learn from different approaches and figure out how to draw out those lessons and apply them more broadly. Is there anybody else?

RE: Any other questions? All right. Well, I think we can break. Thank you, Commissioner Reynolds, who stepped in at the very last minute, I should say the very, very last minute to fill in for President Reynolds. And so I guess we’ll take about a 15 minute break and we’ll go ahead and get with our third panel in just a moment. Thank you again.

JR: Thank you.

Thanks to our ROADMAP 2035 sponsors:

THE TRIBAL ALLIANCE OF SOVEREIGN INDIAN NATIONS, WESTERN STATES PETROLEUM ASSOCIATION, KP PUBLIC AFFAIRS, PERRY COMMUNICATIONS, CAPITOL ADVOCACY, LUCAS PUBLIC AFFAIRS, THE WEIDEMAN GROUP and CALIFORNIA PROFESSIONAL FIREFIGHTERS

Want to see more stories like this? Sign up for The Roundup, the free daily newsletter about California politics from the editors of Capitol Weekly. Stay up to date on the news you need to know.

Sign up below, then look for a confirmation email in your inbox.