Sadly, nothing much has changed in California and the Salinas Valley since 1952, when John Steinbeck wrote those words for the opening chapters of his novel, “East of Eden.”

As a result, the atmospheric rivers drenching the state have been a decidedly mixed blessing.

The rainfall means for the first time in more than two years, the majority of California is no longer in a severe drought. The Sierra snowpack is at 226% of average for this time of year, the largest we’ve seen in more than two decades. Reservoirs are filling at a rapid rate. If the rains continue, it might be possible for Gov. Gavin Newsom to lift the state’s voluntary water restrictions and even consider declaring an end to the drought. That’s the good news.

Then there’s the bad news, starting of course with the deaths of 17 Californians, the forced evacuation of entire communities and the flooding and mudslides that damaged countless roads, bridges, homes and businesses.

Beyond the immediate devastation is the temptation to think the onslaught of storms has ended the drought — that we can return to our old, bad habits such as greening up lawns, taking long showers and slowing water-conservation efforts. Nothing could be further from the truth.

No rain is in the forecast after Monday. We need to remember that California had a series of major storms in December 2021 only to experience an extended dry period in January, February and March.

Even if we do get enough rain this year to end the drought, it doesn’t change the fact that climate change is exacerbating an ongoing water crisis that should rank as one of the state’s highest priorities. And that California isn’t doing nearly enough to ensure the state can meet its future residential, business and agricultural water needs.

In November 2014, voters overwhelmingly approved Proposition 1, believing the $7.5 billion bond measure would significantly upgrade water-storage efforts. Building water storage is admittedly a complex, lengthy process. But of the four Northern California storage projects identified by the state in 2018 for funding, only two — the Los Vaqueros Reservoir expansion and the Harvest Water Program — should definitely continue moving forward. Of the other two, the Pacheco Dam project simply doesn’t pencil out, and Sites Reservoir remains highly questionable.

Los Vaqueros is far and away the best project. The Contra Costa Water District would raise the height of the dam in eastern Contra Costa County by 55 feet to 273 feet. That would expand the reservoir’s capacity from 160,000 acre-feet to 275,000, providing enough water when full for the annual needs of 1.4 million people in the Bay Area. The expansion is scheduled to be completed by 2030.

The Harvest Water Program, formerly known as the South County Ag Program, is a recycling project that would provide 50,000 acre-feet of recycled waste water a year to farmers for irrigation, reducing groundwater pumping in Sacramento County.

The Pacheco Dam project had merit until the price tag nearly doubled a year ago to $2.5 billion. The project called for a 319-foot dam to be built north of Highway 152 near Henry Coe State Park, east of Morgan Hill. It would hold up to 144,000 acre-feet of water, replacing the current earthen dam that holds only 5,500 acre-feet of water.

Building Pacheco would cost $18,800 per acre-foot of water. Compare that to the cost of $8,300 per acre-foot of water of raising the height of Los Vaqueros. There are cheaper ways of storing water, including, for example, constructing new groundwater storage banks in the Central Valley.

Planners in 2020 scaled back the cost and size of the Sites Reservoir project in the west side of the Sacramento Valley amid questions about its environmental suitability, how much water it would actually deliver and who would fund it. Those questions still exist.

California needs to face up to the fact that most of the best sites for dams are already taken and seek other means for storing water.

As Steinbeck would remind us, there is a price to be paid for ignoring our water challenges.

The Alameda County Registrar of Voters said Wednesday that a programming error in the tally system for ranked-choice voting changed the outcome of the District 4 Oakland Unified School Board race. Mike Hutchinson was informed Wednesday that he had defeated Nick Resnick, who previously had been declared the winner.

Ranked-choice voting has being used successfully in two states and 53 cities. A learning curve should be expected when utilizing a new system. It’s important to note that the error impacted only a single race in the four Alameda County cities — Albany, Berkeley, Oakland and San Leandro — that use ranked-choice voting.

The beauty of ranked-choice voting is that it strengthens the principle of majority rule and discourages negative campaigning, because candidates need to appeal to a wider range of voters.

The Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors should make the switch in January when it is expected to consider the issue. Santa Clara County voters approved the systems change when they backed Measure F in 1998, but the county’s voting machines didn’t have the ability to implement the system.

Better yet, the Legislature should initiate an effort to make California the third state to adopt ranked-choice voting statewide.

Ranked-choice voting works like this: Instead of making a choice for just one candidate, voters rank candidates in order of preference. Voters know that if their first choice doesn’t win, their vote automatically counts for their next choice. The candidate with more than half the first-place votes wins. If no candidate has more than 50%, the ballots for the candidate in last place are reallocated to voters’ second choices. The process continues until a candidate secures a majority and is declared the winner.

In the Oakland Unified School Board race, the election reform group Fair Voice discovered some ballots in which voters had not marked a first choice on the ballot but marked ranking of candidates elsewhere on the ballot. Alameda County mistakenly programmed the Dominion voting machines used for the election to simply discard those ballots. But under the rules governing the Berkeley, Oakland and San Leandro races, if no candidate was selected as a first choice, the next choice on the ballot should be counted as the first choice. Any subsequent choices should be moved up, accordingly. When the suspended ballots were properly counted, the only outcome that changed was the Oakland race.

Ranked-choice voting is not complicated. Voters like it because it saves the cost of a primary election while also giving them much greater say in who is elected. Under the current system, a candidate can win with only 20%-30% of the vote, meaning a majority of voters did not choose the winner. Ranked-choice voting diminishes the chances of extremist candidates who appeal to a small slice of voters. It also encourages voters to research every candidate on the ballot.

Those are advantages that every California voter should support.

There are recounts ongoing in all three races. There should be. But the candidates and their backers have had to pay to make sure the results are right. That’s morally wrong.

Election integrity should not be determined by candidate wealth. Yet the state’s elitist election laws only provide for recounts if a member of the public foots the bill.

It’s time to change that. Recounts in razor-thin elections should be automatic and publicly funded. State lawmakers should end payment requirements that favor affluent candidates.

We have seen repeatedly just how close elections can be. In 2000, after the U.S. Supreme Court intervened, the infamous presidential recount debacle in Florida ended with George W. Bush beating Al Gore by 537 votes out of almost 6 million cast, a margin of 0.009%.

In California, we saw a repeat in the 2014 open primary for state controller in which Betty Yee edged out a fellow Democrat for the critical second-place slot by 481 votes, about 1/100th of 1 percent of the ballots cast in the race. This year, in a state Senate race in the southern Central Valley, Democrat Melissa Hurtado beat Republican David Shepard by 20 votes out of 136,894 ballots cast, a margin of 0.015%.

In such tight races, making sure there are no errors should be essential. That’s why 22 states and Washington, D.C., have automatic recounts for close outcomes. Among those states, the most common recount trigger is a vote margin of 0.5% or less.

California has a recount provision in exceptionally close races, but it only applies to statewide races and is at the option of the governor — a formula ripe for political abuse.

While our election counting systems are very good, they are not perfect. We need to acknowledge that and ensure there are safeguards. Which is why Santa Clara County, as an outlier in the state, has an automatic recount policy for local races within the county in which the margin of victory is either less than 0.25% or less than 25 votes. It’s a reasonable threshold.

The Santa Clara County recounts have presented startling examples of why they are needed statewide. In a 2016 San Jose City Council race, the automatic recount narrowed the margin of victory from 36 votes to 12. In the 2018 race for three seats on the San Jose-based Orchard School District board, the automatic recount changed the winner of the third seat.

As more cities and school districts, facing threats of voting-rights litigation, shift from at-large elections to selection by districts, the number of narrow races is going to increase. Indeed, the three Bay Area cities awaiting the outcomes of ongoing recounts — Richmond, Sunnyvale and Antioch — have all in recent years migrated to district elections.

While the Santa Clara County automatic-recount system is better than nothing, it doesn’t go far enough. That’s because there are two parts to a recount, the actual manual tabulating of the votes and the resolution of disputes over which ballots should be included. Santa Clara County’s policy doesn’t address the latter.

There are legitimate disputes in every election over, for example, voter intent when a ballot is not clearly marked or voter eligibility when a signature doesn’t match the election office records. The means for resolving those disputes are spelled out in state laws that affect recounts.

But Santa Clara County’s recount policy only addresses the manual tabulation. Consequently, the Sunnyvale race, for which the ballots already have been recounted under the county policy, is now subject to another recount under state law. But under the state law, the candidate must foot the bill.

It’s time for California lawmakers to ensure that every close race is automatically reviewed under state recount rules and to drop the payment requirement. Democracy should not depend on a candidate’s ability to pay.

Sadly, the outlook for 2023 doesn’t look much better. But the industry’s long-term future looks considerably brighter, thanks in large part to the efforts of an unlikely source — Congress.

That’s right.

Democrats and Republicans put aside their differences and worked together this year to craft what is the biggest science and technology investment in a generation. The Chips and Science Act provides $52.7 billion in grants for U.S. semiconductor production and research and another $24 billion in tax credits for chip plants. The legislation is designed to bring chip manufacturing back to the United States, reducing our reliance on foreign production and easing our supply-chain challenges.

As much as the investment is a game-changer for chip companies and the firms they supply, it’s the $100 billion National Science Foundation funding that likely will have the bigger impact on the tech industry’s long-term future.

Tech’s cyclical nature is well documented. During the down years, it’s essential that research and development efforts fuel innovative breakthroughs that keep us ahead of our global competitors and lead to the “next big thing” in tech.

Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Santa Clara, played a major role in pushing the bill through Congress. He expects the investment to impact research in Artificial Intelligence, quantum computing, plant-based and food-technology alternatives to animal proteins, electronics manufacturing and synthetic biology. The United States hasn’t made this level of investment in technology since the 1950s and 1960s. That funding led to the lunar landing, the internet and the global positioning system (GPS).

Two weeks later, Democrats and Republicans collaborated again on the Inflation Reduction Act, providing more than $30 billion to advance manufacturing of solar panels and components, wind turbines, power inverters and batteries for electric vehicles.

And last week Congress quietly passed another Khanna-led, bipartisan tech bill that is designed to protect encryption systems and valuable data from powerful, rapidly emerging quantum computers. Tech experts have long feared that quantum computers carry the capacity to cause serious data breaches of individuals’ personal financial data and crucial business and government systems.

With Republicans gaining control of the House of Representatives in 2023, it may prove more challenging to pass meaningful tech legislation in Congress. But Khanna is working with Florida Sen. Mario Rubio on a bill designed to further manufacturing in the United States.

The legislation would provide $20 billion over the next 10 years for loan guarantees and securities-backed financing designed to specifically encourage manufacturing plants that would address potential supply-chain challenges.

Federal investment alone won’t secure the tech industry’s future. But significant research and development support has a proven track record of creating innovative products that spur the region and the nation’s economy.

It begs the question of how long California’s governor will fail to address the state’s water challenges before an even worse disaster strikes.

Yes, after three years of drought, recent storms have left the Sierra snowpack at more than 200% of average for this time of year. But heavy snowfall a year ago led to a series of dry months that only exacerbated the drought.

Climate-change forecasts project that the state’s water supply will be cut by an additional 10% by 2040. Despite that warning, California continues to overpromise its ability to deliver water to Central Valley farmers while doing far too little to identify new sources of water or conserve its available supply.

Small, rural towns are finding it increasingly difficult to find water to meet their basic needs. And the California Department of Water resources reports that more than 1,200 California wells have run dry this year, a nearly 50% increase over the same period last year.

Meanwhile the state’s reservoirs remain at frighteningly low levels.

Doug Obegi, a senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, notes that water storage at Oroville Dam is nearly 100,000 acre feet lower than the same time last year. If the State Water Project’s proposed water allotments for next year stand, it would likely result in water elevations behind Oroville Dam dropping below the level where the project can produce power, resulting in the loss of hydropower production from August to December next year.

Yet no California governor has taken sufficient steps to solve the problem.

In 2007, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger announced a plan for twin tunnels under the Delta that would export water south. Gov. Jerry Brown spent eight years trying to muster the support to make the $25 billion proposal a reality. In 2019, Gov. Gavin Newsom pronounced the Delta twin-tunnels project dead but called instead for a cheaper, smaller, single-tunnel approach to address California’s water needs. Comments on the Delta tunnel draft environmental report are due Friday.

The earliest the Delta project could be completed is 2040. The latest cost estimate for the single-tunnel project is $16 billion. Digging projects are notorious for massive cost overruns. Boston’s Big Dig ballooned from $2.6 billion to nearly $15 billion before it was completed — eight years behind schedule.

The state has never conducted a long-promised comprehensive cost-benefit analysis of the tunnel project — most likely because it has never shown to pencil out. Nor will Newsom’s proposal add a drop of additional water to California’s supply or protect the health of the Delta, the largest estuary in the United States west of the Mississippi.

California should learn from its housing failures. Let’s stop spending money on a losing proposition and instead shift our strategy to directly address what is rapidly becoming a deepening emergency.

And the state Public Utilities Commission needs to go back to the drawing board and design a rate plan that ensures solar customers aren’t subsidized by less-wealthy electricity ratepayers.

In 2013, Gov. Jerry Brown signed AB 327 into law, requiring that any rate plan for solar rooftop customers must assure the sustainable growth of the industry. That made sense a decade ago. It doesn’t today.

Rooftop solar still has a key role to play in fighting climate change. But solar no longer deserves a thumb on the scale in California’s effort to find the most efficient green-energy solutions. It’s past time for state lawmakers to allow wind, geothermal and other renewable energy sources a chance to compete on a level playing field.

Meanwhile, that unfair advantage in state law is at the heart of the PUC’s disappointing effort to craft fair rates and rules for the state’s rooftop solar incentive program — known as Net Energy Metering. The NEM rules have not been updated since 2016. The PUC is scheduled to vote Thursday on its latest proposal, which would determine the size of the credits customers receive on their utility bills when their rooftop solar systems generate more energy than they consume.

The PUC’s proposal wouldn’t impact current customers. New solar customers would save an average $100 a month on their electricity bills. Those that also have battery storage would save at least $136 a month on average.

The new proposal would extend the payback period for covering the capital costs of rooftop solar systems to an estimated nine years. But it is still too generous for solar customers and pushes too much of the fixed cost for the state’s electrical grid onto other ratepayers.

To say that neither the rooftop solar industry nor the state’s three largest utilities are happy with the PUC proposal is an understatement. But that both sides are screaming bloody murder doesn’t make it a reasonable compromise.

We understand that rooftop solar companies want to maximize profits and secure their long-term future. But utilities are right when they argue that rooftop solar owners don’t pay enough of the fixed costs for maintaining the grid, an inequity that would continue under the proposed plan. The burden of paying for power distribution, wildfire mitigation and investing in new technologies would continue to disproportionately fall to the rest of the electricity consumers.

It would perpetuate a regressive subsidy that unfairly burdens the poor. California’s estimated 1.5 million rooftop solar customers, who produce more than 11% of the state’s total electricity production, are disproportionately wealthy.

A Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory study found that about half of the state’s solar adopters are in the highest 20% of earners, while only 4% come from the lowest 20%. The PUC says that more than $4 billion in costs was passed on to non-solar customers in 2021.

The PUC needs to go back to the drawing board and design a plan that ensures that all customers fairly share the burden of utilities’ fixed costs.

At stake is the political direction of the Bay Area’s largest city for at least the next two years. Districts 8 and 10 together represent roughly 200,000 residents. The voters there should decide who fills the two seats — not a handful of councilmembers seeking to push a labor-driven agenda.

Let’s be clear. This isn’t about saving taxpayer money. There should be no price tag on democracy. This is all about whether labor has the votes to thwart newly elected Mayor Matt Mahan’s priorities.

District 8 and District 10 voters already gave an indication of their intent when they backed Mahan over labor-stalwart Cindy Chavez in the mayor’s race. Hundreds of residents also made their desire for a special election known Monday when they packed the City Council chambers demanding an election.

The council consists of the mayor and 10 members elected by district. Two of the district seats will be vacant because Mahan will give up his to become mayor, and Sylvia Arenas has been elected to the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors.

The new council — minus the two vacant positions — will consist of five labor-backed members. If the new council appoints a labor-backed candidate to fill even one of the vacant seats, it would give labor control of the council for the next two years.

If that’s what the voters want, so be it. But that should be the voters’ decision. For labor members from outside the two council districts to force their choices on the residents there is outrageous.

If the new council is concerned about District 8 and District 10 residents not having representation on the council until a special election could be held, the council could appoint interim members who would serve until the election is held and who would agree not to run for office.

The last five times the City Council faced this issue it opted for letting voters decide. In the latest example, in 2015, the council opted for a special election following the resignation of former District 4 Councilmember Kansen Chu, who was elected to the state Assembly in 2014. The council appointed Margie Matthews in January 2015 to serve in an interim role in District 4 until Manh Nguyen won election on June 23.

The council took similar approaches in 2007, 2005, 2001 and 1995.

The last time the City Council appointed someone to fill a vacant seat was in 1994, when Councilmember Kathy Cole was recalled. The council chose Alice Woody to serve out the term until 1997. But the council only made that choice because the city charter required that the council fill the opening rather than hold a special election.

The City Council unanimously agreed that the charter should be changed to make elections an option, arguing that voters should make these choices. We agreed, saying a charter revision should be proposed for the November 1994 ballot and that “voters would be crazy not to approve it.” San Jose voters did just that, by nearly a 2-to-1 margin.

The concept is simple. Let the voters decide. Any other approach is undemocratic.

Since the earliest days of our republic, local newspapers have been critical to keeping the public informed about what’s going on in their communities and holding the powerful accountable.

That hasn’t changed in the digital age, with local news publishers adapting with the times by creating apps, newsletters, podcasts and websites to distribute the work of their newsrooms.

But what has changed over the past two decades is the growing power and influence of a handful of technology companies over who gets paid for the hard work of local journalists distributed on their platforms.

According to the California News Publishers Association, “for every dollar made in digital advertising, the platforms take as much as 70% of the revenue, leaving publishers with a scant 30%.”

We think it’s time for local news publishers to be able to negotiate, collectively, over that distribution of digital-advertising revenue. Polling by Schoen Cooperman Research has confirmed that majorities of Americans across the political spectrum agree with this commonsense idea.

That’s what the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA) would make possible by providing an antitrust exemption for news publishers and broadcasters for the purposes of jointly negotiating fairer terms with Big Tech companies such as Google and Meta.

On Monday, Meta, the company behind Facebook, engaged in cynical fear-mongering against the law by announcing that passage of the JCPA could prompt the company to halt the distribution of news content on Facebook.

Don’t fall for it.

The company said the same thing about a similar law passed in Australia last year that requires social media giants to compensate news publishers for news content distributed on their platforms. They even briefly blocked the sharing of news content before reversing themselves.

The Australian government, according to Reuters, has since declared the law a success that “enabled news businesses to, in particular, employ additional journalists and make other valuable investments to assist their operations.”

In the United States, the JCPA would benefit local publishers exclusively and impose severe penalties if the tech platforms do not negotiate with them in good faith. The bill has a limited scope of six years to address a broken marketplace, while the broader competitive landscape is fixed through other legislation and the courts.

The JCPA would also incentivize publishers to hire more journalists and protect our constitutional freedoms of speech and the press. The bill’s scope is limited to compensation and would not allow for negotiations around display of news content — it would serve only to ensure fair compensation for local news outlets. The JCPA has strict transparency requirements on the terms of each agreement reached between tech platforms and journalism providers and would establish clarity in how news outlets spend the funds they receive.

Local news publishers in the United States deserve the opportunity to negotiate for fair compensation from Big Tech companies profiting from their work. The Journalism Competition and Preservation Act should be approved and signed into law.

At issue is how upcoming vacancies in two of the City Council’s 10 districts, two of the city’s most politically moderate districts, will be filled — by council appointment or by a special election. At stake is the political balance of the council and the political direction of the city.

San Jose voters should pick their representatives, not the labor-backed members of the City Council who don’t live in, represent or share the same political leanings as the two districts. The last five times the council has had a vacancy, dating back to 1995, voters have picked the replacement. That’s what fairness and democratic principles demand.

What makes this year unusual — and the council decision on the replacement process even more consequential — is that for the first time since 2006 there are two vacancies coming up at the same time. That’s because of the election of District 10 Councilman Matt Mahan to be the city’s new mayor and District 8 Councilwoman Sylvia Arenas to the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors.

In the Nov. 8 election, voters in both districts signaled their desire for moderate city leadership by backing Mahan for mayor over labor-stalwart Cindy Chavez. Our analysis of precinct results shows that Mahan won 52% of the vote in District 8 and 63% of the vote in District 10. It would be a gross injustice for the labor-majority on the council to ignore those results and disenfranchise voters in the two districts by filling the vacancies in lieu of an election.

The city charter gives the council the option to choose either path. At a special council meeting called for 5 p.m. Monday, we will find out whether the council will do the honorable thing or run roughshod over the voters’ will. Make no mistake, with a current 6-5 majority on the council, the progressive labor faction has the votes to do the latter.

We’re not talking about someone filling out a few weeks or months remaining in a term. We’re talking about representation for two seats through the end of 2024, along with incumbency advantage in the next election. And we’re talking about determination of the balance of power on the council.

Those are decisions voters should make, not elected officials from outside the two districts. Yet we’re already hearing arguments from some for the council filling the vacancies. They warn of low voter turnout in special elections and somehow conclude that no voter turnout would be better.

They also cite the cost of the special election and a possible runoff. The debate over cost was exacerbated by a memo issued Nov. 21 by City Clerk Toni Taber putting the price tag, if there were runoffs in both elections, at $7.6 million to $11.4 million.

But Taber’s analysis originally didn’t consider the possibility of a much-cheaper, all-mail election without costly polling stations in which ballots would be returned by postal service or to drop-off locations. It’s a no-brainer solution, especially considering that 93% of San Jose voters in the last election mailed or dropped off their ballots. Saving the expense of most polling locations would cut the cost in half, according to Taber’s revised analysis and Shannon Bushey, the county registrar of voters who would administer the elections.

Of course, no one likes spending millions of taxpayer dollars. But we’re talking about the election of representatives to help manage a $6 billion annual city budget. Spending less than one-tenth of 1% of one year’s annual budget on an election is a small price for democracy.

Finally, there’s the timing issue. We’re troubled by Taber’s timeline, which at first anticipated the elections and runoffs could stretch the process until September. She now says that conducting the balloting by mail would shave two weeks off the schedule. We think there’s more room to tighten the schedule while complying with election laws.

In the meantime, if the council can unite behind interim appointees for the two seats, that’s an option worth consideration. But anyone selected should have the backing of the full council and pledge not to run in the special election. The goal should be to find placeholder appointees who would not be politically polarizing or ambitious.

And the ultimate goal should be to let the voters pick the replacements. At a time when our elections systems are under attack across the nation, we should be doing everything possible at the local level to preserve our democratic traditions.

Both tragedies haunted the Bay Area for years. Both were preventable. But prevention hinges on an aggressive and comprehensive fire-inspection program. Sadly, years later, city Fire Department officials still didn’t seem to get that.

The good news is that there’s a relatively new chief in town. Reginald Freeman has made changes in his leadership team over the past 1½ years, and he insists that the lax practices of the past will not continue. We hope not.

Especially after a new report by Oakland’s independent city auditor, Courtney Ruby, finds that, as of September, nine of the department’s 19 fire inspectors and fire-inspector supervisors lacked the required certification for the job. Four of those nine never had the certification, and the other five had allowed certification to lapse. These are critical workers whom residents depend on to prevent conflagrations.

Freeman says the inspectors had completed the necessary training, but the required certification paperwork had not been completed. They have been given until the end of the year to complete it or they will be terminated, he said.

Equally disturbing, the fire department last year misled the auditor about the certifications. After receiving a whistleblower complaint, the Auditor’s Office was first told in August 2021 that all employees were current in their certifications. But when Ruby received another complaint, she initiated her own investigation, which led to this month’s report.

Such deceit or sloppiness from the Fire Department cannot be tolerated — especially when people’s lives are on the line. Freeman says the assistant chief who provided the inaccurate information has since retired.

Freeman also says that since he became chief in April 2021, the Fire Prevention Bureau has been reorganized, a new fire marshal has been hired, and the department is now on pace to complete all of its state-mandated inspections in 2022 and 95% compliance for the vegetation-management-inspection program in the hills for two consecutive years.

Those numbers are a marked improvement from the past. But only if the inspections are being conducted by people with proper certification. The certifications are essential to ensure that inspectors are properly trained and up-to-date on fire-prevention strategies. They’re not optional. And certainly not in Oakland, which has an ugly history of falsified and botched inspections that pre-dates the Ghost Ship fire.

The new report is not the first time the city has called out certification deficiencies. A 2020 audit found the Fire Prevention Bureau had no central tracking of individual inspectors’ training and certifications.

Freeman promises that, six years after Ghost Ship and three decades after the Oakland hills fire, the Oakland Fire Department is now changing. The past “lack of performance and lack of accountability is utterly unacceptable,” he said.

We hope so. Lives depend on it.