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What’s happened or is happening to California, the vision that lured families and businesses for centuries? Since 2005, the California Policy Center says it’s identified 237 companies that have left California. There have been more since that report.

I started noticing move-outs about 13 years ago when Ron Mittelstaedt moved his Folsom-based company, Waste Connections, to Texas, taking his over-100 employees with him. (Mittelstaedt was a 2003 Comstock’s cover story.)  He cited California’s high costs and red tape as reasons for his exodus.

Ever since, our state has been losing companies and population left and right. (California was the state with the largest net loss of one-way U-Haul customers in 2024.) A number of Silicon Valley companies have left The Golden State — Chevron, Charles Schwab, Realtor.com, Tesla, Hewlett Packard, Palantir Technologies and Oracle are some of the heavyweights that have decamped, mostly for Texas. More recently, SpaceX and X (formerly Twitter) have announced plans to move to Texas. That’s an unconscionable number, thousands actually, of jobs we’ve lost. If there’s a common thread, it’s the high cost of living, regulatory challenges and difficulty running a business in California.

Statistics have the power to become self-destructive prophecies — meaning, if it feels as though we’re losing our luster, that could be enough to make it happen. So, technology is taking a hit, and I fear the agricultural industry being in jeopardy too as it becomes harder to farm, to get sufficient water, to produce healthy crops, etc. This could be tragic — not just for our own economy, but because California feeds much of the world.

I’m also concerned that the state is losing market share of one of its premium industries: motion pictures. Film producers moved here nearly 100 years ago because of our climate. But in the past decade, there’s been a decampment from California to other cities and states that offer incentives in the forms of cash, tax breaks and easy access to filming permits.

The prospect and reality of companies moving out of this state unnerves me. Other than being a Gavin-come-lately to trying to keep motion pictures here, what is our governor doing to turn this particular Titanic around, or does he even want to? Is he running the state or running for president? Maybe he has no interest in making California great for business again.

All of this said, I still think we’re pretty great, and so do many of you. We have our natural resources and countless amenities. But it is indeed becoming harder and harder for business to function here — we all recognize that, no matter which level of government we’re dealing with. In addition to onerous restrictions, regulations and litigation lovers, we have an extremely high cost of construction here — and trying to finance it is horribly and needlessly challenging. Environmental compliance is difficult. So is starting a new business and making it pencil out. In addition, getting people to embrace returning to the workplace is, yes, difficult.

In a nutshell, we pay more taxes and have worse outcomes than almost any other state and in almost every category — from education to manufacturing, to infrastructure. Will the state ever admit that or figure out how that can be turned around?

So when I dream my Midsummer Night’s Dream, here are some of the things I long for: a robust California where businesses thrive, where the quality of life excels, where every able-bodied person in the state is employed (and glad to be), wanting to contribute to the betterment of our state. I want a government that is honorable in its dealings, that cuts out the voluminous red tape we all have to live with; elected leaders who’d prefer to volunteer their services rather than make a living (and a lifetime) out of their service, elected leaders who truly work for and not against the people who elected them.

I also want a state that is willing to remove the insanity we’ve all grown to dislike so much. I want us to be the California that’s once again the envy of every other state, in a country every other country would like to become.

Maybe I belong to another era. Is it really a dream to want us to acknowledge that moving forward also means looking back at what made us great and trying to recapture that? It’s not too late for us to wake up.

What do you think?

Winnie Comstock-Carlson
President and Publisher

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