California lawmakers have advanced a bill that would create a genealogy office to determine who is eligible for reparations handouts.

The bill, SB 1403, passed the Senate Judiciary Committee last week in a 8-1 vote, The California Globe reported. If it becomes law, it would establish the California American Freedmen Affairs Agency, which would carry out recommendations from the state’s reparations task force.

It would also create a Genealogy Office and an Office of Legal Affairs to “determine how an individual’s status as a descendant would be confirmed” and “require proof of an individual’s descendant status to be a qualifying criteria for benefits authorized by the state for descendants,” according to the bill.

CALIFORNIA GOVERNMENT INTRODUCES NATION’S FIRST SERIES OF REPARATIONS BILLS, AFTER YEARS OF DELIBERATING

The bill defines a descendant as “descendants of an African American chattel enslaved person in the United States” or “descendants of a free Black person living in the United States prior to the end of the 19th century.”

SB1403’s author, Sate Sen. Steven Bradford, said the bill was about recognizing California’s past “grave injustices” towards African Americans while creating a more “equitable future.”

“This agency will be the necessary foundation for the implementation and success of reparations,” he said ahead of the committee vote. 

The “commonsense measure” was “long overdue for California and the nation,” he added.

The legislation is part of the reparations package state lawmakers introduced in February after years of deliberation on how to best provide restitution and support for Black communities across the state following historical mistreatment. The bills are intended to be just the first legislative actions in an effort that will likely span years.

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California State Democratic Sen. Steven Bradford authored the new bill creating a genealogy office to determine eligibility for reparations benefits. (Media News Group/Long Beach Press-Telegram)

California’s reparations plan drew backlash after its task force recommended compensating qualifying Black residents up to $1 million in cash payments from the state, along with other benefits such as eliminating child support debt and free tuition to public colleges. 

The cash proposal was dropped from the package introduced this year.

Bradford previously dismissed concerns about the financial costs and political will to deliver some of the task force’s costly recommendations, telling NPR that these could “be easily provided.”

A majority of Californians, however, are opposed to cash payments for descendants of enslaved people, Fox News Digital previously reported.

A University of California, Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll found that 59% of voters oppose cash reparations, with 44% saying they were “strongly opposed.” Only 28% said they supported the idea.

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Fox News’ Ashley Carnahan and Lawrence Richard contributed to this report.

A property in California that sold for $86 million in 2019, has been acquired by a new owner for $64 million dollars less.

The building, at 410 Townsend street in San Francisco, was bought for just $22 million, SFGATE reported this week, in what could be an illustration of how the city is still battling against an underwhelming office real estate sector.

The property boasts 78,000 square feet and four floors and had been a home for tech firms in the area, said the website.

San Franscico’s office market is still struggling to recover from the COVID shock when lockdowns and stay-at-home orders led to a significant rise in home working. There were vacancy rates of about 22 percent at the end of the first quarter of 2024, according to real estate firm CBRE’s analysis.

But the new owners of the 410 Townsend street property believe the market is about to rebound.

“It’s our opinion that this is the start of the recovery for the San Francisco real estate market and 410 Townsend provides us with the opportunity to acquire a best-in-class creative brick and beam office asset well below replacement cost and where the asset traded in 2013 and 2019,” Albert Pura, senior director of one of the buyers, New York Life Real Estate Investors, told SFGATE.

But San Francisco’s office space real estate fightback is still in the early stages. CBRE’s analysis showed that the city ended the first quarter of this year with what they described as negative 387,000 square feet of net absorption

It was “the seventh consecutive quarter of occupancy losses,” the analysis said.

Homes have been hit hard too.

The data did show some interest in offices from research and development tenants, whose demand was up by about 56 percent. But even then, the nature of their interest pointed to some softness in the overall market.

“The increase in tenant demand is largely driven by tenants who need to make decisions about their space as their leases are coming to term. Many companies are seeking to reduce the size of their current space, which portends further occupancy losses,” CBRE’s report warned.

“The software and internet industry continued to lead demand along the Peninsula contributing to about 51.3 percent of the active requirements.”

CBRE’s says its report looks at the office building market of at least 10,000 square feet and collects its information “through telephone canvassing, third-party vendors, and listings received from owners, tenants and members of the commercial real estate brokerage community.”

To calculate the amount of paraquat applied per user in California, EWG downloaded 2021 statewide pesticide use reporting data from the state Department of Pesticide Regulation’s website.

EWG analyzed records related to paraquat use from the dataset and identified – by county, site and crop – which farms were granted permission to use the weedkiller.

EWG also contacted the state county agriculture commissioners in the counties of Butte, Colusa, Contra Costa, Fresno, Kern, Kings, Madera, Merced, Monterey, Riverside, San Joaquin, Santa Barbara, Shasta, Siskiyou, Stanislaus, Sutter, Tehama, Tulare and Yolo to request county-level 2021 pesticide use reporting data. 

Using this information, EWG studied the number of each individual farm for the largest 2021 paraquat users, then matched the user to the statewide paraquat use data.