From left to right: KSSU Station Manager Luna Diaz Contreras, current Insight guest host Andrew Garcia, and ASI Student Services Coordinator Hector Hernandez.CapRadio/Esmerelda Garcia

California is home to the largest insurance market in the country—one that’s become increasingly strained amid an affordability crisis, increasing wildfire risks, and insurance companies pulling back from writing policies in the state.

The job of regulating this complicated market falls to California’s Insurance Commissioner.

This November, for the first time, voters will choose between two Democrats, State Senator Ben Allen, and Jane Kim, a former San Francisco supervisor and director of the California Working Families Party.

Kim placed first in the June primary and is pitching a progressive vision for taking on the insurance industry and expanding coverage.

Vicki Gonzalez spoke with Kim about her plans to overhaul California’s insurance landscape if elected.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Interview highlights

Your campaign website leads with Jane Kim endorsed by Bernie Sanders. Why is that important for voters to see right off the top? 

I think that it's an indicator of the type of politics that I engage in. I'm really proud to have the endorsement of Senator Bernie Sanders and also our Lieutenant Governor, Controller and California Labor Federation and our teachers and our nurses. 

I've dedicated my career to fighting for everyday Californians and working families. And I want to transform this under the radar, under leveraged office to be a powerful champion and platform for working families.

Speaking of endorsements, your opponent in this race, Ben Allen has been endorsed by the California Democratic Party as well as both senators Adam Schiff and Alex Padilla. Do you see that as a disadvantage heading into a general election between two Democratic candidates? 

Well, I came in first place out of 11 candidates winning over 2.3 million votes. So, we're really proud to be leading across the state of California by eight points from our second place opponent and we're leading in 52 out of 58 counties including Sacramento. 

And I believe that our message of taking on the insurance industry and fighting for everyday Californians resonated because everyone is tired of being fleeced by the insurance industry. It is a $3.3 trillion industry that this office regulates and it has zero federal oversight. And this industry is doing quite well.

Its top 10 CEOs made $391 million. And we want to see a lot more accountability on the product that we were required to have to drive to work or to school, to qualify for a mortgage to buy a first home, to open a business or even a nonprofit of any kind. We have to make insurance affordable and available. Otherwise, we're shutting everyday Californians out of our economy and that's what's already happening. The premiums are too high. They're canceling our coverage and even if we have insurance, they fight our claims every step of the way.

One of your big proposals is creating a Natural Disaster Insurance for All program, how would it be funded? Especially given California's shaky overall budget situation?

It would be funded the same way the private insurance market is, which is our premium dollars. We are already paying more and more every year to the insurance industry. I believe we should claw back those funds and we should use it to actually drive down risk. 

So the insurance industry prices your risk. They don't actually use any of the revenue to prevent it from happening. In countries like New Zealand, France, Spain, even Canada where they have single-payer auto insurance, they use a portion of the premiums and the returns from those premiums to invest in prevention: safer roads, floodproofing and fireproofing communities so that claims aren't filed in the future.

The only way to make insurance more affordable and more available is to invest in prevention. And what I'm proposing is that we use some of that revenue we're already spending and using it to drive down prevention. But this program would be staged, it wouldn't happen all in one fell swoop.

A lot of people have been dropped from coverage. How could you help protect those consumers?

The insurance industry's response to the climate crisis where we now have a billion dollar storm every three weeks is to raise premiums on the homeowners that they consider actually to be less risky. Then they cancel coverage on all the homes that they view as high risk. So, the homes with pre-existing conditions, they dump them into the FAIR Plan. And then they fight our claims every step of the way. This framework is not working for consumers, but it is generating more profits for the insurance industry. 

So [there’s] a lot of things that we can do to better regulate this market. One, I want them to pay you interest every day they deny, delay, or underpay a valid claim. And I want to set a minimum of our premium dollars that they actually have to spend back in paying claims. Currently the [government] requires through Obamacare that $0.85 for every dollar we spend on premiums comes back in the form of health care. We don't have that floor for home and auto. In fact, we get roughly $0.48 on every dollar we spend on premiums back in the form of claims. So, I would like to set a floor ratio here of maybe $0.65 or $0.75 per your dollar, to ensure that insurers are in the business that they say that they're in.

And finally, California is the largest insurance market in the country. It is the fourth largest insurance market in the world. No insurance company can truly exist without California. They need our market for the revenue. And as long as they want to be licensed to do business here, we have to set fair rules that level the playing field for consumers.

The state’s insurer of last resort, the FAIR Plan, has become increasingly strained over the past several years. As of March, it had grown to over 600,000 policies, an increase of 152% since September of 2022. It has warned about its ability to keep paying claims and is set to raise rates nearly 30% on average starting in October.

What changes could you make as commissioner to fix or alleviate the pressure of the FAIR Plan? 

So the FAIR Plan was introduced in 1968 as a civil rights initiative. It was meant to address redlining because insurers refused to insure Black communities, Latino communities and Asian-American communities.

So, the state made a public mandate that private insurance create a FAIR Plan. So, it is not a public state program. It's run by the 15 insurance companies. And they have a nine-person governing board, all made up of insurance companies. We don't know who sits on it. We don't know when they meet. We have zero insight into their financial models and how they make the decisions around risk and pricing. So, I want to reform that.

We will audit the FAIR Plan’s governing committee because right now nobody knows who is making those decisions or why. And we have to make these governing boards transparent and I think that we should have consumer advocates, [a] representative from the Governor's Office and Department of Insurance on this plan as well. Florida's FAIR Plan very interestingly is public and nonprofit. So, we have a lot of work to do to make the FAIR Plan actually more fair.

These overhauls that you're proposing are ambitious and they have sparked some criticism.

The San Francisco Chronicle's editorial board endorsed your opponent and said that “Kim is rash and could reverse progress being made and cause the market to implode.”

Given that the insurance landscape in California is fragile, what do you say to the argument that it's maybe not ready for big attempted reforms? 

They're distracting from the current set of conditions that every voter's aware of. The current system is a failure. It is a disaster, currently. 

The premiums are too high, they're canceling our coverage, and even if you have insurance, they fight our claims every step of the way. Magical thinking is believing that we can keep doing what we're doing as we have for the last 10 years and somehow get a different set of results. And I'm running to fight for ideas that will actually solve the problem. And if the biggest critique of this campaign is that I want too much for California, that is a critique that I will take.

But we have to put every idea on the table and explore and investigate those options and try to make it work. Because again, the current status quo is not an option. And I think that our message for that very reason resonated across the state of California because people are tired of the current framework. 

We have reached out to State Senator Ben Allen, Kim’s opponent and we’re working to schedule an interview in the near future.

The Trump administration recently released proposed changes to the 2030 Census that would, among other things, exclude immigrants without permanent legal status from the count.

The proposal would also remove race and ethnicity questions, which the census has asked in various forms since the first count in 1790. The administration argued these changes would better align with the constitutional mandate to count individuals based on their “usual residence.” 

If approved, the proposal is expected to face legal challenges. But some experts are concerned that the debate itself could make it harder  to get an accurate count.  The once-per-decade survey determines everything from how many U.S. House seats each state gets to federal funding for local communities. 

Matt Barreto is a professor at UCLA and director of the university’s voting rights project. He worked on research that was part of the legal fight over a citizenship question proposed by the first Trump administration for the 2020 census.

The question would have asked every person in the country whether they are a U.S. citizen.

Barreto found that requiring people to answer a citizenship question led to a major drop-off in responses among Latino and immigrant households. 

“People are not going to want to fill out a government form telling the government where they live and the names of household members who are not U.S. citizens while you have a president who is actively running a massive deportation regime,” he said. 

And Barreto said his team still noticed a drop off even after a federal judge in 2019 blocked the question from appearing on the 2020 Census because some mixed-status households still left people off their census responses out of fear. 

“They didn’t want to put down a name of someone who may not have status, and what that does is it harms the count,” he said. “It means that we’re not actually getting a true count. We already saw some of that evidence in 2020. 

“Had the citizenship question been on there, it would have been massively worse. California would have lost at least two if not three congressional districts back in 2020 and more federal funding.” 

Barreto is referring to California's representation in the U.S. House. The state lost a seat for the first time after the 2020 Census, dropping its total from 53 to 52. 

The Trump administration’s current proposal goes beyond asking people about their citizenship. Barreto said the administration wants to use government databases to identify noncitizens and undocumented immigrants and remove them from the population count. 

The proposal is also reviving a fight California already had with the first Trump administration over the census.

Xavier Becerra was California’s attorney general during the fight over the 2020 citizenship question. He told CapRadio earlier this month the current proposal is part of the same broader strategy to exclude people from the count.

“It’s the same Trump strategy,” Becerra said. “He’s trying to exclude people from the count [and] he knows he’s in violation of the Constitution. We proved it the first time.” 

Becerra is now the Democratic candidate for governor. If elected, he said he would challenge the administration’s proposal. 

“If Donald Trump tries to do these things while I’m governor, he’s going to find that he’s going to see some of the same results he saw when I was Attorney General,” he said. 

If approved, those exclusions could have serious consequences for states like California, where population growth has slowed nearly to a halt. 

Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Hilton in 2019 defended Trump’s effort to add the citizenship question to the census, saying: "Surely it's reasonable to ask people if they are citizens," according to a Scripps News article.  

Gubernatorial candidates Democrat Xavier Becerra (left) and Republican Steve Hilton during a homeownership gubernatorial forum Thursday, March 5, 2026, in downtown Sacramento.(Gerardo Zavala/CapRadio)

Since 2022, Auburn's Flock cameras have done their work quietly, mounted near the edges of town, reading the license plates of passing cars. Many residents had no idea they were there. On Monday night, more than 100 of them packed a room at City Hall, filling every seat and lining the walls.

Nearly three hours later, the message from most who spoke was hard to miss: They trust the local police. They do not trust Flock.

The fight in Auburn is less about the city’s dozen cameras than it is about the company behind them and the vast, searchable network they feed. Flock Safety operates automated license plate readers, or ALPRs, that log where and when a car passes and pool that information into a database other agencies can search. The systems have drawn backlash across the country, and closer to home. Grass Valley suspended its program over the summer, and Folsom is dropping Flock while keeping other plate-reading tools.

For the Auburn Police Department, the cameras are a force multiplier. Chief Bryan Morrison spent about 45 minutes making that case, describing the readers as an investigative tool, not a dragnet. The cameras photograph plates and vehicles, he said, not drivers, and officers can search the data only with a documented reason, and no warrant.

"ALPR technology is not a replacement for police officers," Morrison said. "It is one of many tools that can provide vehicle-related information and investigative leads while allowing existing personnel to make use of available resources efficiently."

He pointed to cases the cameras helped crack, from a parental abduction that ended with a child returned to her mother, to a fatal shooting outside a sandwich shop that a neighboring agency solved within minutes. Since Auburn adopted the system, Morrison said, it has factored into roughly 230 investigations, sometimes by clearing people rather than catching them.

Data concerns

Most of the residents’ concerns came down to a single question: Where does the data go? Morrison said a recent audit found Auburn's camera data had been searched by federal and out-of-state agencies, which a state law known as SB 34 does not allow. Morrison said the sharing was inadvertent, traced to old behind-the-scenes settings, and that the department has since shut it off. "That, I can tell you, was absolutely 100% unintentional," he said.

To activist group DeFlock Auburn, that was the whole point. One switched-off setting, they argued, doesn't change what the system is built to do.

"Auburn didn't buy a tool that watches for a stolen car at one intersection," said Kurtis Ostrom, a member of the group. It "built one node in a system that lets thousands of outside agencies look up where any of us have been."

Jared Lovell, who helped organize DeFlock Auburn, drew the line carefully. "It's not a referendum on APD," he said. "It's a referendum on the company, and who they're sharing the data with."

Speaker after speaker came back to the same worry, that a tool residents were told is limited today could become something else tomorrow.

"I don't distrust the police. I think the police we have in Auburn are pretty good people," said Sadie Stubber, a 17-year-old senior at Placer High School. "But they're still people, and things change. Just because they're not doing that right now doesn't mean they won't do that later."

For others, it came down to consent. Mike Davis, who has lived in Auburn for 30 years, said residents were never asked. "No one asked us if it would be OK to spend our tax dollars to construct a warrantless tracking system of cameras that log where we travel," he said. He wants the council to cancel the contract and require a public vote before the city adopts any new surveillance technology.

Of the dozens who spoke, only a handful defended the cameras, and they did so over scattered boos. At one point, Councilmember Alice Dowdin Calvillo asked the audience to hold its applause and use "jazz hands" instead, to keep the meeting moving.

Harley Don said he read through DeFlock Auburn’s website, worked out its claims and came away unconvinced. "It's a very valuable tool to help keep the residents of not just Auburn but Placer County safe," he said.

Scott Bergenstock is an Auburn resident and reserve police officer. He spoke at the meeting as a private citizen and argued the fix for misuse is oversight, not removal. "The answer to concerns about misuse isn't to eliminate the technology," he said. "It's to establish strong rules for how it's used."

Mayor Kelley Davis said the point of the night was to get everyone in the same room. "I liked hearing from both sides," she said. "It's given me a lot to think about."

She stopped short of saying what comes next. Any proposal to change the contract would return at a future, publicly noticed meeting. For now, the cameras stay active and so does the question of how much surveillance a small town is willing to accept in the name of public safety.

Before becoming a state senator, Angelique Ashby spent more than a decade as a Sacramento city councilmember. During that time, Ashby says she tried to unite the city and county as the local governments tackled the region’s homelessness crisis, often independently.

Now, she has successfully passed a state law, Senate Bill 802, requiring them to do it. It requires Sacramento County and the cities of Sacramento, Elk Grove, Rancho Cordova, Citrus Heights and Folsom to create a regional board on housing and homelessness by Jan. 1, 2028. Los Angeles has a similar city-county model, but Sacramento’s goes further by requiring several cities and the county to participate.

The board would consist of elected officials from all municipalities and would require them to hold public meetings. Ashby has argued that Sacramento-area governments have spent years discussing better coordination without creating a structured way to make it happen.

“I believe deeply that Sacramento’s best days are ahead of us,” Ashby wrote after the bill was signed. “But until we really work together as a region on our toughest and most persistent issues we cannot expect to see the results that this community so deeply deserves.”

The signing of the bill puts a cap on nearly two years of back-and-forth over the proposal.  Elected leaders from the county and several cities involved raised concerns about state overreach. Some leaders from smaller cities also noted their communities aren’t facing a homelessness crisis on the same scale as Sacramento.

Sacramento Mayor Kevin McCarty, who opposed an earlier version of the bill, said the final language of the law is something he now looks forward to working on. In 2024, then-Assemblymember McCarty authored a similar bill, though it ultimately failed to pass. 

McCarty said Sacramento is already working on implementation of Ashby’s bill and expects a more formal regional body to begin meeting later this year, well before the Jan. 1, 2028 deadline.

“The final version was a fair compromise,” McCarty told CapRadio. He said the law still requires local governments to work together while allowing cities and the county to keep control over their own resources and local decisions.

While Sacramento County and its cities do already work together in an informal way without a board, they have largely tackled homelessness through their own programs and budgets. Now they will be required to work more like a team to make decisions about how homelessness resources operate.

Sacramento Councilmember Caity Maple said this type of coordination is what’s been missing.

“We don't have that for homelessness, and that's been a huge issue for us over the years in terms of our ability to share resources and share decisions,” Maple said.

Under the law, the newly created board would take over functions of things like the region's Point-in-Time Count and help coordinate shelter and housing programs.

Newsom wrote in his signing message that homelessness “does not stop at jurisdictional boundaries.” He added that the law creates a firm timeline while allowing local officials to work out the final governance structure.

Ashby introduced the bill in February 2025. It passed the state Senate that May, but quickly drew resistance from local leaders. In July 2025, mayors from Sacramento, Elk Grove, Folsom and Rancho Cordova publicly opposed the proposal. County supervisors also raised concerns.

Former Folsom Mayor Sarah Aquino said at the time she had been blindsided by the bill. After the pushback, Ashby paused the bill that summer and gave local governments more time to work on their own regional approach.

“If the bill is supposed to be about collaboration, well then we need to make sure we're collaborating and everybody has a seat at the table,” Aquino said.

Ashby argued that the years of back-and-forth demonstrate why a binding regional structure is needed.

“They don't have to listen to me, they could do it themselves, and they've had over 20 years to pull it together,” Ashby told CapRadio in April.

Some homelessness advocates still remain skeptical that changing who oversees the system will lead to more people getting housed. The last formal count estimated there are about 7,500 people experiencing homelessness in Sacramento County.

Niki Jones with the Sacramento Regional Coalition to End Homelessness said she worries the transition could disrupt existing programs and people already waiting for services.

“This is rearranging the chairs on the deck of the Titanic,” Jones said. “Unless we're doing fundamental policy change about the way people get housed, no amount of bureaucratic rearranging is going to solve homelessness.”

Jones said she would judge the new authority by whether more people ultimately get housed and fewer people fall into homelessness.

Faye Wilson Kennedy with the Sacramento Poor People’s Campaign said she is more open to trying a regional approach, but wants community organizations and people experiencing homelessness to have a meaningful role.

Kennedy said success should be measured by whether people move from temporary shelter into permanent housing and have access to services that help them remain housed.

“If we really want this to work, we have to make sure everyone has an equal voice at the table,” Kennedy said.

Tara Jeane is the president and Area 1 Trustee in the Sacramento City Unified School District.Photo courtesy of Tara Jeane

Former CapRadio General Manager Jun Reina will not return to court until early next year on felony charges connected to his time at the public radio station.

Sacramento County Judge David Bonilla granted a request last week for the former executive’s next court date to be set in early January 2027.

This will be nearly one year after prosecutors accused Reina of embezzlement, grand theft and forgery, and more than three years after CapRadio’s financial crisis began. The former general manager has not yet entered a plea.

Reina has made a handful of brief court appearances since being charged by the Sacramento County District Attorney’s Office, all of which have been continuations with little other discussion. 

Reina’s attorney Mary Ann Bird did not respond to a request for comment about the latest continuance, and the DA’s office told CapRadio it does not comment on pending cases.

The process has left lingering questions for former employees who worked under Reina about how his case is proceeding. 

“I’m very disappointed that it was continued again,” former donor services coordinator Patti Stoltz said outside the Sacramento County Main Jail courtroom where Reina made his brief appearance on Sept. 17. “I know that we were all hoping that something would happen with the case.”

Mark Reichel is a Sacramento-area defense attorney unaffiliated with Reina’s case. He spoke with CapRadio Senior Producer Sarit Laschinsky about how financial crime cases typically play out in court, and what a potential defense might look like.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Reina was first charged in January 2026, and his next court hearing is scheduled for early next year. Why is this process taking so long?

First of all, when it's a financial crime, there's a lot of paperwork. Sometimes the defense will hire an outside accountant to do a forensic review of everything. They may have seized computers or cell phones, and the prosecution usually takes about a month to get all that stuff to the defense. Then the defense has to break it down, organize it, and go through it. Lawyers [also] have a lot of other cases. 

Additionally it can be a defense strategy to try to delay things. What you’ve got to do is have your client establish their good behavior. You say “this happened [at] a certain time, and now here we are two years later and look what they’ve done in the meantime.”

Additionally California does have a very flexible mental health diversion program. I don't know if that's what they're applying for, playing with, or looking at, but when the defense says “I want to apply for this mental health diversion,” if you can prove that there was a mental health condition that directly caused the conduct and the crime, and that you have a treatment plan that will prevent that from happening again, then you make this motion to the court.

All in all for a case that came in February, to still be looking at it in September is not that out of the question. I’d imagine it is running out of gas now, and something’s going to have to happen the next time. They’re either going to have a change of plea, with a person that accepts a plea agreement, or they’re going to have to set the matter for a prelim and then for a trial.

Is that why Reina has not entered a plea yet?

When you enter a plea, that starts what’s called the “speedy trial clock.” If you’re saying give us some time, we’re considering taking a deal, we’re considering exploring something like a plea agreement or mental health diversion, they’ll say “I don’t want to enter a plea and start the speedy trial clock." That happens quite often. But at some point, you’ve run out of time. I think they’ve probably given him enough time to consider a plea offer they’ve made, and the clock is ticking on that I imagine.

Reina is accused of felony embezzlement, grand theft and forgery, and misappropriating more than $1 million in CapRadio funding. Do these types of cases usually result in a plea agreement?

They rarely go to trial, and they do usually result in a plea agreement. In California under the law, we sentence you based on how much money was embezzled. So $100,000 gives you a certain sentence, $700,000 gives you a higher sentence. This case involves a million dollars in embezzlement; if you go to trial, you’re going to get that sentence.

But the nature of a plea agreement is you save the resources of the court and the DA's office, law enforcement, victims and everyone. They’ll say, “if you plead guilty now, we’ll give you a reduced deal.” You can plead guilty and you’ll only get the sentence for, let’s say, $300,000. In these types of financial cases, there's a strong incentive to take a plea bargain because you know if you go to trial and lose, it's a sure thing what you're going to get because of these enhancements for the loss amount. 

In some cases you can still turn to the judge at sentencing and say, "give me a break, have some mercy." But if you get convicted of some of these embezzlement cases, the judge's hands are somewhat tied because the law requires them to sentence you based on how much was embezzled.

Former CapRadio general manager Jun Reina appears in Sacramento Superior Court on Monday, Feb. 2, 2026. His arraignment on felony counts of embezzlement, grand theft and forgery was postponed until April 1.Renée C. Byer/The Sacramento Bee

Do cases like Reina’s usually result in imprisonment, given the nature of the charges?

Yes. With these numbers that you're talking about this does result in jail time — often prison time, actually — if they're found guilty, even if it's a first offense. 

Additionally, in California, several years back we passed Marsy's Law. And Marsy's Law changes things for the victims. As we all know, it's an adversarial system. On one side you’ve got the prosecution and on the other side you’ve got the defense, and then in the middle is the judge. Marsy’s Law now makes a victim a party to the case, so the victim can be represented. The victim can make a motion with the judge to be heard.

If they think the plea offered to the defendant is too lenient, they can object to the prosecution and to the judge. If they think it’s too harsh… the victim can say “we think that’s too harsh.” Usually you can contact the DA’s office and say “we’re the victims, we’d like to be heard on this… we would like to assert our Marsy’s Law rights.” 

Would the victims in this case be individual employees, or CapRadio itself as an organization? 

It would be CapRadio; the business itself would be the victim, and they're entitled to have representation under Marsy's Law. The DA’s office is duty-bound to listen to them, to respect them, to talk about their wishes to the court and consider that when handling the case.

Could CapRadio be speaking to the prosecutor or judge at this stage under Marsy’s Law? 

Yes. Definitely to the prosecutors, and you can also talk to the judge about agreeing to continue it or not, and whether or not you think you need something to happen in the case.

We’ve reported that Reina’s charges are “wobblers,” and can be considered felonies or misdemeanors. Can you talk about how that works in court, and whether these might get downgraded? 

The prosecution can agree to reduce it down to a misdemeanor for someone [in] a plea agreement. [Or] after a prelim, a defense attorney may ask the judge — over the prosecution's objection — to move it down to a misdemeanor. The defense, at any time, can ask the judge — even after a trial — to move it down.

Usually in cases like this, if it's a small amount and if it's short in duration, that helps them turn it into a misdemeanor. But if it's over a long period of time, if the amounts are particularly large, if there’s sophisticated means and they went through a lot of trouble to try to disguise it… if they abuse the position of trust, the judge will look at those things and say “I’m going to deny the request.” I don’t see this one [moving] from a felony to a misdemeanor.

What might Reina’s potential defense be if this goes to trial?

The only defense would be that they had the consent of the entity that they were working for, to use the money however they wanted. That they were never specifically prohibited from doing it this way, that they never made false statements or false entries, that everything was above board or something.

Disclosure: This story was reported and written by Senior Producer Sarit Laschinsky. It was edited by Editor Sally Longenecker.

Following NPR’s protocol for reporting on itself, no CapRadio corporate official or news executive reviewed this story before it was posted or broadcast.

You can read our independent ongoing coverage of financial issues at Capital Public Radio here.

Editor’s note: CapRadio is licensed to Sacramento State, which is also an underwriter.