Will thousands of Californians be flooded out?
It was late Friday morning when muddy, brown water started rushing onto Michelle Hackett's Salinas Valley farms.
On one side of her family's Riverview Farms cannabis business, a countymandated retention pond overflowed. Next door, a farm abandoned by another grower — one of dozens of cannabis businesses to shut down in Monterey County in recent years — spawned another small river headed straight for Hackett and her skeleton crew.
“The water completely stopped and backed up,” Hackett said. “I thought, `Holy s***, this is going to flood our greenhouses.'”
Cannabis businesses like Hackett's — along with thousands of undocumented farmworkers and the area's unhoused residents — fear they'll be left to fend for themselves as yet another winter storm batters California's Central Coast, local officials and advocates say.
Cannabis businesses and undocumented workers by law are ineligible for federally funded programs such as unemployment or aid from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Now, after days of wind, rain and flooding displaced hundreds of people in Monterey County alone, details are lacking about how state officials would respond to calls to direct state funds and other disaster relief to these communities in the region known as America's salad bowl.
California has stepped into the breach before, offering some support to undocumented workers during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, and to some cannabis farmers whose crops were damaged in wildfires.
It's an issue complicated by competing political priorities and a projected $24 billion state budget deficit for the coming year.
As Gov. Gavin Newsom plans to visit flooded regions today, including the inundated farmworker town of Pajaro, many officials and advocates said they hope to hear how the state will help. A few lawmakers said they're exploring legislative options.
“I think we need to step up our efforts to help those who are undocumented and can't earn a paycheck because of the current rains and floods,” said Assemblymember Miguel Santiago, a Democrat representing Los Angeles.
He is co-sponsoring Senate Bill 227 to provide unemployment benefits to undocumented Californians. About 6 in 10 farmworkers are not eligible for unemployment benefits, according to studies.
Santiago said the current situation is frustrating because he has advocated for years for more safety net programs that could have helped families hurt by the flooding. If such legislation was in place, he said, “we'd be able to have a place where we could go get people some financial relief.”
Assemblymember Robert Rivas of Salinas, chosen by his fellow Democrats to be the next Assembly Speaker, noted in a statement to Calmatters that undocumented workers typically don't qualify for federal assistance funds for emergency housing, home repairs, personal property loss, funeral expenses and other aid.
“My office, in collaboration with other legislative offices, is exploring immediate legislative and budget action to provide relief for these vulnerable communities,” Rivas said, noting that the workers also had been ineligible for many COVID-19 relief programs.
The state began filling some of that gap during the pandemic. Undocumented workers were eligible for $1,700 in state funds: a $500 COVID-19 Disaster Relief prepaid card and $1,200 from the Golden State Stimulus Fund.
Tuesday afternoon, groups of people remained in tents along the flooded Pajaro River. Despite large federal and state housing budgets, many of those people don't have homes.
Many farmworker families in the flooded region are undocumented, from indigenous groups, and don't speak either English or Spanish well, said Eloy Ortiz, a board member for the Watsonville-based Center for Farmworker Families.
That complicates attempts to apply for assistance on behalf of the legal residents in their household. Some were rejected when they applied for aid in January, Ortiz said.
“The folks who have been flooded out, if it were a normal year, they'd be starting to go back to the fields to work right now,” Ortiz said. “And now they will probably not be able to go back for months.”
More than 20,000 acres of agricultural land in Monterey County will likely sit fallow because of stormwater contamination, noted Monterey County Supervisor Luis Alejo, a former Assembly member from Watsonville, in a tweet.
“These are low-income Latino families, and the start of the harvest season for strawberries, raspberries and other crops is in March. Now farmworkers will be out of work,” he wrote Tuesday.
“I urge our state leaders to provide aid in the state budget for undocumented flood victims who do not qualify for FEMA assistance & additional relief for farmworkers who will be out of work due to flooded ag fields and not qualifying for unemployment insurance,” he wrote.