Blog

Growing up, my family always had a very big Thanksgiving gathering. For many years, my siblings, their spouses and all the kids would gather round the table to celebrate.

This is a guest blog from Caroline Beteta, the president & CEO of Visit California, the state’s privately funded nonprofit tourism board.

After nine consecutive years of growth, California’s travel and tourism economy continues to surge. Visitors pumped more than $140 billion in travel spending in counties across California last year, stimulating business development and providing Californians with more than one million jobs.

There’s a noticeable change in Sacramento when the Legislature is in recess. Traffic is lighter, parking is easier and lines at popular lunch spots are shorter. While it’s been more than a month since the end of session and two weeks since the Governor’s bill-signing deadline, CSAC remains hard at work advocating on its key priorities of homelessness, In- Home Supportive Services and wildfires.

California’s 58 counties provide nearly all state and many municipal services to help Californians improve their daily lives. From public health to homelessness supportive services; foster care, behavioral health and substance use disorder treatment to public safety; housing and land use to emergency services and more; California’s counties are driven to serve.

Counties play an important role on the front lines of California’s criminal justice system. For the last five years, a handful of counties have accessed support for their criminal justice programs through participation in our Results First Initiative. This initiative has been critical in laying the foundation for the work of CSAC’s Support Hub for Criminal Justice Programming (The Hub) to empower counties to continue prioritizing data-driven and evidence-based policymaking.

One of CSAC’s core activities is giving California’s counties opportunities to talk with each other about the issues that matter most to them, but it can be easy for CSAC staff to forget that we can benefit from that same type of opportunity.

Genealogy is a pretty big deal in my family. My mother’s family arrived in this country before the American Revolution. Thanks to the very first census record in 1790 and other sources, we’ve traced our lineage to Martin Van Buren, the eighth U.S. President, and later records helped map our family connection to Norman Jay Coleman, the first U.S. Secretary of Agriculture.

Willie Nelson wrote a popular song titled “On the Road Again.” For me, being on the road again and seeing county programs in action is one of the most rewarding parts of working at CSAC. But it’s when we have an opportunity to meet the residents who are benefiting from county services that we receive true and personal insight into how vital these services are in the lives of so many vulnerable people.

Cyberattacks on local government agencies are occurring with alarming frequency, and counties need to have a communications strategy in place when the inevitable happens.

Local agencies are a popular target for cyberattacks, since many have not established rigorous safeguards. Imagine what could happen if a cyberattacker seizes control of your data and systems, whether it’s theft and public release of information or a ransomware hostage situation.