A real estate developer is hoping San Bernardino County residents are so sick of Sacramento that they will vote to leave California entirely, and turn the county into a new state, possibly called “Empire.”
“With the way things are in California right now, I don’t know if there’s any hope for California,” Rancho Cucamonga developer Jeff Burum said Tuesday, July 26.
At the Board of Supervisors meeting Tuesday, Burum asked officials to put an advisory measure on the Nov. 8 ballot.
“Do you support having the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors and all federal and state elected officials representing citizens within San Bernardino County to seek the approval of Congress and the State Legislature to form a State Separate from California,” Burum’s proposed measure reads.
If successful, Empire would be the first new state since Hawaii was established in 1959, and the first carved out of another state since West Virginia left Virginia in 1863.
Burum said California state officials are ineffective and disconnected from the needs of Inland Empire residents.
“They’re not serious about the issues,” he said after the meeting. “They’re not trying to change anything. They’re just playing politics, trying to look good, sound good, so they can get reelected.”
Frustrated by the obstacles to getting houses built in particular, Burum said he wanted to do something.
“I don’t like to be one of these guys who sit around on a country club patio and complain about the way things are, unless you want to do something about it,” he said.
And “doing something,” in this case, means washing his hands of the Golden State, which he says treats inland California “like a slum,” putting prisons in the region but not, say, the infrastructure needed to build more houses.
“I think that California has become so large that it’s impractical to save the entire state. We’re the highest tax state in the entire union,” Burum said. “You’d think that, with that, we’d have the highest level of services, but we don’t.”
If voters in San Bernardino County go for the proposed ballot measure, Burum thinks more might join them.
“I’m sure that other counties that are being left behind in terms of entitlements might want to join in,” he said.
The details of how Empire would be organized and run haven’t been worked out and it’s not clear how much public support there is for the idea. Burum said he will be doing polling on the issue “very shortly.”
But on Tuesday, a number of local officials praised the idea at the Board of Supervisors meeting, including Fontana Mayor Acquanetta Warren.
“We cannot continue to beg, and crawl and (grovel) … to get resources for our county,” she said. “We have millions of citizens that have needs.”
Upland Mayor Bill Velto blasted California’s unfunded mandates on local governments.
“I’m frustrated, too. I’m frustrated with the state of California,” said Board of Supervisors Chairman Curt Hagman, the former Republican leader in the state Assembly, although he stopped short of endorsing the proposal. “It’s becoming, more and more, ‘one size fits all’ for the greatest state in the nation.”
This would hardly be the first time Californians wanted to subdivide the state or secede from it entirely:
- In 1941, northern California counties sought to form the state of Jefferson, joining with rural southern Oregon counties. The idea resurfaced during the pandemic, as conservative northern rural counties chafed against coronavirus restrictions.
- In 1965, the California State Senate actually voted to divide the state in two, using the Tehachapi Mountains as the dividing line. But the idea never made it out of committee in the Assembly.
- In 1992, the Assembly approved a bill that would allow counties to vote to split California into three states: a North, Central and South California. The idea died in the Senate.
- The 2003 “CaliFOURnia” proposal, which mostly existed in the form of letters to the editor, would have created four states with the Inland Empire being grouped together with Orange, San Diego and Imperial counties.
- There was a 2009 proposal to make coastal California, running from Los Angeles County up through the Bay Area, into its own county.
- In 2011, former Riverside County Supervisor Jeff Stone wanted to cluster Riverside, San Bernardino, Imperial, San Diego, Orange, Kings, Kern, Fresno, Tulare, Inyo, Madera, Mariposa and Mono counties into a new “South California.”
- In 2013, venture capitalist Tim Draper backed a ballot initiative to split California into six states, with the Inland Empire again being grouped with Orange, San Diego and Imperial counties. The initiative failed to qualify for the ballot.
- In 2018, Draper was back with the Cal 3 proposal, which would have split California into three states. This time, the proposal did qualify for the ballot, but the state Supreme Court pulled the measure so its legality could be studied.
“It’s almost inevitable that some parts of a state will think that other parts are getting all the money and respect,” Jack Pitney, Claremont McKenna College professor of American politics, wrote in an email.
“I was born, raised, and educated in Upstate New York, where it is an article of faith that New York City dominates the state government,” Pitney added. “Upstaters have sometimes thought about breaking up, but as is usually the case with such movements, the costs outweigh the benefits. At this point, I doubt that people in Sacramento are too worried, but we’ll see if the movement gets traction.”
But even if San Bernardino County voters approved secession, the hard part would be yet to come.
“There are infinitesimally small odds of a secession movement gaining traction,” Marcia Godwin, a professor of public administration at the University of La Verne, wrote in an email. The state Legislature would have to approve secession, then Congress would have to act.
“Even if such a movement went that far, U.S. senators have no reason to support diluting their influence by giving the most populous state additional senators,” Godwin wrote. “Even California’s own senators are likely to avoid antagonizing their colleagues. Odds in the House of Representatives don’t appear to be much better, as there are both resource and partisan considerations that would come into play.”
Burum agrees, acknowledging that getting the state Legislature and Congress to approve turning San Bernardino County into its own state “will be the biggest lift of them all.”
Should the Board of Supervisors favor referring the matter to voters on Nov. 8, it’ll need to move quick and take up the issue at its Aug. 9 meeting to meet the deadline for inclusion on the ballot.
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