State’s red heartland pins hopes on Trump
Blue-collar Kern County’s future may hinge on ability of president to lead battered economy back to prosperity
BAKERSFIELD — The November election is far from over in the Central Valley.
All along Highway 99, which cuts through California’s agricultural heartland, are Donald Trump’s weathered “Make America Great Again” campaign signs, many of them tied to the metal mesh farm wagons that haul crops from the fields.
Pasted to all those aging mini-billboards are newer notices reading, “Thanks for voting,” reminders of just who won the election. Here in the heart of Red State California, President Trump’s victory has been a ray of hope in communities where the recession lingers.
“We voted for ( John) McCain, we voted for (Mitt) Romney, but we weren’t happy with it,” said Cathy Abernathy, a Republican consultant in Bakersfield. “We didn’t have the faith in them we do in Trump.”
But the fundamental disagreements that made the 2016 election so divisive — and continue to roil the country into the third month of Trump’s presidency — are dotted all over the dusty landscape. For Kern County, how Trump’s presidency plays out could be a matter of economic life or death.
Years of drought and tumbling oil prices have hammered an area where agriculture and energy have been the keys to the economy for more than a century. With unemployment, home foreclosures and Medi-Cal numbers among the highest in the state, residents of solidly Republican Kern County are looking to anything that can lead them back to prosperity.
Darrell Feil is co-owner of Abate-a-Weed in Bakersfield, which clears weeds and pests from oil field facilities and other property and sells outdoor power equipment like high-end mowers. Feil has helped build it into a far bigger company than the one his father opened in 1965 in an old Laundromat on the outskirts of town, but he’s been feeling the financial pinch.
“We want to create more jobs, but we haven’t been able to,” Feil said, standing in his company’s showroom. “We’ve had to put a freeze on hiring and pay increases, and we haven’t had to do that before. (My partner and) I have taken cuts.”
Like many here, Feil viewed Trump as someone who could bring an end to the bad times, even if no one was exactly sure how.
“People looked at Trump as someone who pretty much speaks his mind, who seems pretty authentic. I feel he understands business,” Feil said. The new president “has rough edges, there’s no doubt about that. But you see what he’s doing — cutting back the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency), building pipelines — and you like that.”
Not everyone in the Central Valley is a Trump fan. All around Kern County are signs and electronic billboards warning of the potential costs of the changes in Medicaid — known in California as Medi-Cal — the president and congressional Republicans have pushed as part of their failed — for now — effort to replace the Affordable Care Act.
Posted along Highway 99 and in some of Bakersfield’s poorest areas, the signs’ focus is California’s health care program for low-income people, which would have suffered a significant funding cut under the GOP plan: “Let’s Put Kern County First. MediCal cuts = 4,000 Jobs Lost.”
Others serve as bleak reminders of the financial woes the recession has brought to the Central Valley’s hard-hit farming communities:
“51% Merced County Residents Have MediCal.”
“45% Madera County Covered by Medi-Cal.”
“50% Fresno County Covered by Medi-Cal.”
“55% Tulare County Residents Have MediCal.”
“We’re trying to remind people what’s at stake,” said Anthony Wright, executive director of Health Access California, the consumer advocacy group behind the campaign. “We want to tell people that even if you’re not on Medi-Cal, it’s a critical part of the health care system in your community.”
But pushing back against the new president can be a hard sell in Kern County, where Trump pulled 53 percent of the presidential vote, the fourth-highest figure in the state, and Rep. Kevin McCarthy, a top GOP leader in Congress, represents most of the county. Combine that with a stalled local economy that’s showing few signs of recovery and a Democratic-run state government many locals view as the enemy, and it’s no surprise that change, any change, is seen as a step toward a better future.
Trump, for instance, has argued that boosting domestic oil and gas production will mean more jobs for the energy industry, although it’s unclear what effect that change would have on the falling oil prices that get much of the blame for the local job losses.
In Kern, the numbers are shocking. Domestic crude oil from Chevron’s sprawling Kern River oil field sold for $90 a barrel in 2014 before plummeting to $44 in 2015 and recovering only slightly to $50 by last week. Those prices have shut down some 8,000 wells and put thousands of people out of work.
Those oil jobs are hard to replace, and it’s unclear if Trump’s energy policies will bring them back.
“You’re seeing some of the best and brightest moving out of our community because it was their jobs that were keeping them there,” said Rob England, field organizer for the Kern, Inyo and Mono Counties Central Labor Council, located in Bakersfield. “And those were good-paying jobs, where people with no higher education could move into the middle class.
“It’s the reverse America Dream for many of those workers, which is really sad.”
In agriculture, Kern’s other big economic driver, the years-long drought forced both the state and federal governments to cut back on water deliveries, leaving farmers to watch their fields go fallow.
Jason Giannelli is a farm manager for TenStar Farming. He’s 31, grew up in Kern County and is a fourth-generation farmer. Standing on a dirt road with his preschool daughter, Cecily, he watched as the sprinklers watered one of his company’s onion fields in the late afternoon.
“When you only get 20 percent of your (water) allocation, it’s tough,” said Giannelli, who started working on his family’s farm when he was 8 years old. “It’s hard to leave your ground fallow, but when you don’t have the water, there’s not much else to do.” Kern County Supervisor Leticia Perez is a Democrat and no fan of Trump and his policies. But the former public defender has seen up close how the struggles in oil and agriculture have affected the entire county and can understand the desire for change.
“Everywhere you go, whether it’s a Punjabi convenience store or a Republican’s farm, people are very worried,” she said. “There are fewer jobs with more fallow fields, and we’re unsure of what’s coming next from the Legislature. People here really feel under siege.”
Ralph Martinez also knows how Kern County’s agonizingly slow recovery has hurt its poorest residents. As development director for the nonprofit Community Action Partnership of Kern, he’s seen the number of clients skyrocket for the food banks, employment services and other programs the partnership runs.
“When we take the food bank out in the evenings to small communities in the county, we may have 500 or 600 people line up,” Martinez said. “At the fairgrounds in Bakersfield, there were people waiting for blocks.”
The county is in no position to pick up the slack, since eight of Kern County’s largest taxpayers are energy companies, which together used to account for nearly a third of the county’s revenue.
“Now it’s less than 10 percent, and there’s no way to replace that money,” Perez said. “We have a revenue crisis. About half the population qualifies for public aid.”
But compared with the human price tag, money may be the least of the county’s costs.
Perez said she was at the airport when she met a man in his late 30s who now was working only sporadically after years in the local oil industry.
“He was leaving his wife and day-old baby at home to go to Nebraska, where he heard there was some windmill work available,” she said. “He told me, ‘I don’t need the roller coaster ride’ of the oil business.”
Trump has been quick to talk of his plans to get energy workers, especially in the coal industry, back to work. But it’s the alternative energy side that’s growing, with the solar industry employing 374,000 workers to coal’s fewer than 70,000 and the wind turbine industry, like that windmill work in Nebraska, adding another 102,000, according to a 2016 report by the Department of Energy.
If that oil worker getting on a plane to Nebraska and his family move to the Midwest, they will be part of a disturbing trend. From 2011 to 2016, roughly 7,350 more people left Kern County than moved in, making it the only one of California’s 11 largest counties with a negative migration pattern.
For Kern County residents, the antipathy often shown to oil production by environmentalists and out-of-towners is yet another example of the gulf between the Central Valley counties that produce much of California’s food and energy and the populous coastal communities that consume it.
“The oil industry is our greatest source of jobs and revenue, but it’s under perpetual assault and uncertainty,” Perez said.
And when it comes to water and Kern County’s agriculture, she said, politicians and environmentalists “look at us as the bad guys, and we argue that we’re feeding the world.”
Like a lot of farmers, Giannelli blames many of the county’s problems on what he calls a “regulatory drought,” with environmental rules pushed through Sacramento by the population-rich coastal cities whose residents’ only connection with agriculture is often the produce aisle at Safeway.
That’s an attitude tailor-made for Trump, who promised last year “to end this war on the American farmer” and to “get rid of a lot of those regulations that don't mean anything except cost you a lot of money and a lot of time.”
That day can’t come soon enough for Feil, the Abate-a-Weed owner. He said it’s almost a fulltime job making sure his mowing and land-clearing crews are up to date with their certifications and meet all the rules for using pesticides and machinery.
“It’s not like it’s one big bill,” he said. “It’s like that medieval torture where you keep adding one more rock until eventually you’re squashed.”
Farmers complain that recent state laws boosting the minimum wage and applying overtime rules to farmworkers will send their costs skyrocketing. Others argue that California’s tough emission standards and environmental regulations not only
affect the oil wells and farm machinery, but also limit the amount of water available to raise crops.
With Trump in the White House and local Republicans like McCarthy and Rep. Devin Nunes of Tulare in congressional leadership roles, Kern County is looking to Washington for help — and it’s starting to come.
Trump vowed in a debate last year to cut the Environmental Protection Agency until there were only “little tidbits left,” and he’s moving to make good on that promise. The president has called for slashing the EPA’s budget by nearly a third and cutting its workforce by more than 20 percent.
On Tuesday, Trump visited the EPA to sign a series of executive orders overturning climate protection rules, including one regulating methane emissions from oil and gas operations. That came less than a week after California’s Air Resources Board approved what were billed as the country’s toughest rules on methane emission. That’s the kind of action from Trump that plenty of Kern County residents were hoping to see.
Abernathy, the Republican consultant, said she met Trump in August at a farmer-oriented fundraiser in Tulare.
“The first thing he said was ‘I’m going to get you your water,’ ” she said. “You knew what Trump stood for. You didn’t see the other candidates with the same resolve to push things back.”
Trump is going to get plenty of pushback elsewhere in California, where Democratic leaders argue that any shortrange economic gains that looser environmental rules might provide aren’t worth the longterm damage to the country’s air, water and farmland.
Gov. Jerry Brown has called Trump’s moves to gut the rules aimed at climate change “a colossal mistake,” and has vowed to fight them in court.
But in Kern County, even Supervisor Perez, an unsuccessful Democratic candidate for state Senate in 2013, argues that Brown and the state government need to work more closely with oil and agriculture interests.
“We’re concerned about the environment, especially the air and the water,” she said. “But it’s best when we all have positions at the table, not with one group being demonized.”
Economic uncertainty is far from the only concern in Kern County. Trump’s call for stricter immigration rules, more deportations and a wall on the Mexican border add to fears in a county where more than half the residents are of Latino origin an dun document government ed residents play a crucial economic role in fields, orchards and vineyards.
Among undocumented residents, “there’s a great fear that if they go out, they might not be coming home,” said Fatima Hernandez, programs director for the United Farm Workers Foundation. “They’re strategizing about the best time to go out shopping. They’re not sending their kids to school.”
Even immigrants with legal status are worried.
“There’s also a large group of people, legal residents, who typically go back home (to Mexico) after the harvest to visit family,” said Armando Elenes, a vice president of the United Farm Workers union. “Many are opting not to go and staying here. Even if I am a legal resident ... and not affected by the travel ban, I worry that if I leave the country, the might not let me back in, even with my green card.”
Drought-induced cutbacks in agriculture have also hit the immigrant community hard. Fewer crops mean less need for farmworkers. And for undocumented workers, a bad economy is even tougher, Hernandez said.
“You don’t qualify for most government programs ... so families are going hungry,” she said. “They depend on food banks, which are also facing problems with more clients and fewer donations. People are losing their homes and multiple families are staying under one roof.”
But even when people are eligible for government benefits, it’s hard to persuade them to apply, Hernandez said. It’s been doubly difficult, she added, since Trump has called for making immigrants who use public benefits, even if they receive them for their children born in the United States, subject to deportation.
Just how Trump’s changes to immigration policy and enforcement will play out here and across the country is not yet clear.
But even with the new president’s pro-growth and anti-regulation campaign promises holding the prospect of better, more prosperous times for Kern County, local residents know that Washington, D.C., is still a lot farther away than Sacramento. And it’s far more likely that a Democratic president will replace Trump in four or eight years than the Republican Party will somehow rise to power in California.
“We have a lot of education to do,” said Republican Assemblyman Vince Fong of Bakersfield. “We have to remind people that while a lot of state and federal regulations hurt us in the Central Valley, they will also have an impact throughout the state,” whether it’s in gas prices or the cost of food.
That’s not easy to do in a part of the state that’s always taken pride in its independent ways and its willingness to hang on to a rural, blue-collar style of life that much of California has abandoned.
“We try to get the growers to understand they need to increase their political presence. But they prefer to hope for the future, which is what farmers have always done,” said Beatris Espericueta Sanders, executive director of the Kern County Farm Bureau. “But it’s never been more important to get actual farmers with plaid shirts and cowboy boots at the table.”
“You knew what Trump stood for. You didn’t see the other candidates with the same resolve to push things back.” Cathy Abernathy, Republican consultant