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Feb. 22, 2021 - Epoch Times
35:16
What is Happening to California Restaurants? | Noah Blöm
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You have the perspective of serving a little bit in the government and also building restaurant businesses.
We want to talk to you about how California has been dealing with restaurants.
It was frightening because everyone stopped coming out.
You went from having a busy restaurant to an empty restaurant, into the tune of from thousands a day to a couple hundred, which meant you were losing so much money you couldn't employ people.
What was the impact on your employees?
To forsake them just because we're dangerous or there's fear is just, it's not human, it's not American, it's not what we do.
So you mentioned that the health department is not doing the regular inspections, but there's all these mandates on restaurants.
So how's it, what's happening there?
Nothing lines up anymore.
The mandates from the state don't line up with what our county is trying to do to protect its citizens, and they don't line up with what the cities are doing to say, hey, we just want to make sure we survive.
Do you think this industry will get damaged significantly?
Yes, I think it already has.
And you just recently ran to join your city council.
Why did you do that?
There's only one way to make a change, and that's to be part of it.
I think the greatest part about Californians is that we choose to live here for a reason, and it's because we love it.
And we all need to stand up and fight if we're willing to fight.
And it'll inspire more to do so.
California restaurants are struggling to survive as a result of the state shutdowns.
My guest today is Noah Blom.
He's a restaurant owner and city council member in Newport Beach.
Today he discusses the uncertainty restaurant owners are facing and his perspective on how to overcome these challenges.
Welcome to California Insider.
Noah, it's great to have you.
Welcome.
It's a pleasure.
It's a pleasure to be here.
You have been in the restaurant space, hospitality space, and you serve on a city council in Newport Beach.
You have the perspective of serving a little bit in the government and also building restaurant businesses.
We want to talk to you about what happened to your space when the pandemic started and how California has been dealing with restaurants.
That's a great question.
Well, our restaurants are particular because we're in two different cities within the Orange County area.
So both were affected very differently for the pandemic, for the responses of local government.
I think in the beginning, this was local government focused.
You know, the cities dictated a lot of our response.
And really even before that, it was fear.
And even for ourselves, who have remained pretty strong through this entire process, the first week was...
It was frightening.
And it wasn't because we were afraid of everyone getting sick and having a problem on that level.
It was frightening because everyone stopped coming out.
And you went from having a busy restaurant to an empty restaurant, from thousands a day to a couple hundred, which meant you were losing so much money you couldn't employ people.
And so necessity started kicking in.
And fear always backs necessity because you have to make a choice.
And so early on in both of our restaurants, we had to let go of everybody.
And this was day three.
And I think had we not made that choice early on, we wouldn't be at the stage we are now where we were able to bring them all back.
And quickly.
More quickly than most.
The hard thing was is that during that stage when you're balancing fear for necessity, you don't want to make any of these decisions.
You've built these things your entire life.
They've become your income, your livelihood, your family.
But sometimes you cut off the gangrene because you have no option but to survive.
And that's how we felt.
And that's a weird feeling for something that And 2019 and the very beginning of 2020 had been the most profitable years for a lot in the hospitality industry.
So a full stop is detrimental, it's frightening, it's scary.
So out of 75 employees, we kept one.
We relegated everyone down to our Newport restaurant.
My wife and I Started doing what we used to do.
I went into the kitchens.
She worked the front.
And my director of operations ran everything in between.
And for every $500 we made above break even, we could bring one employee back.
And so we started doing it slowly.
And we never closed our Newport location.
We pretty much stayed in that one because it just felt like a safer place to be.
The local government was great.
The police were unbelievable.
They showed their support continuously.
They'd stop by and say thank you.
And then it was local community residents that really gave us the go ahead.
I think that's the interesting part with hospitality is that It's not about us.
It's never supposed to be about us.
We listen to the community at large because the community pays the bills.
And it's not a large transaction.
You're not courting a big investor.
You're courting everyone that walks through the door.
And everyone's $5 is the same.
And it was the community that got behind it quickly.
And so our Newport location was able to grow, prosper, and get busy.
Really busy.
Because it showed that the community wanted it.
And every time there was some new dictation from Sacramento, You could feel it.
Sales would drop.
People would get afraid again.
They'd go back into their houses.
We'd slow down.
You'd get nervous about being able to pay the staff and then the fear would start subsiding.
It was about this time in Mother's Day that we decided we would reopen Costa Mesa completely as well.
From a personal perspective and kind of an angry perspective at the time, you feel like when your business is stolen from you and there's no answers for it and there's no end in sight.
It does start building some emotion inside of you.
You're like, come on!
And so we opened the weekend before Mother's Day.
I figured if ever there was a time to test what the authorities were willing to do, it would be to drag mothers out of our restaurant on Mother's Day.
I thought that would be just perfect.
And amazingly, the police, Coast Mesa did show up and they were exemplary.
Wonderful.
Showed their support without being able to show their support.
Told us we were in violation and if we understood, we did.
And we kind of kept going from there.
And so from that point forward, we've never closed our restaurants.
We've kept them running.
And I think that's the message, is that entrepreneurship in this country is built on the strength of wanting to push forward.
And sometimes you have to fight against what you feel is unhealthy regulation.
And in this one, the unhealthy regulation was fear.
And so I think sometimes giving people hope brings more.
And so the way the government affected us, I think we worked with everybody.
You know, every agency came calling.
It wasn't like, you know, we flew under the radar.
Every government agency has called us and we sat across the table from them and we've been kind and courteous and told them we understand their position.
We hope they understand ours.
It hasn't been a fight.
There's never a threat of lawsuits.
And by the end, everyone leaves and they're happy about it.
And I think that's why I got into government.
That's why I'm so fresh into it, is that I love what the country stands for and sometimes I think we lose our way because we do so well.
What was the impact on your employees?
It was heartbreaking.
It was heartbreaking for us, it was heartbreaking for them.
I didn't know when they would come back.
I didn't know if they would come back.
And it's not like they all got to come back right away.
When we had to fire them all, I fired my chef of 10 years since I've been back in Orange County, who's come with me from a prep cook to now running all of my kitchens.
People whose families I employed both husbands and wives.
Fathers and sons.
And it's...
It's one of the hardest decisions you make in your entire life in this business.
You don't build a team to let them all go one day without any preconceived notion that that's going to happen.
They understood in the beginning because the fear was so palatable in the beginning and everyone thought they should just be home in the beginning.
When it got difficult and when it got really bad was after we were able to bring a lot of them back.
And for us, we approached it with the same advice I give everyone.
Be comfortable.
If you want to come back, you have a spot.
We love you.
You were a great member of our team.
You're part of our family.
If you want to come back, you can come back.
And for my serving staff, most of them didn't.
All my bartenders came back.
All of my kitchen team came back.
They felt more comfortable.
We ended up picking up new servers, new staff along the way, and people that did feel comfortable and felt like they were part of the mindset.
And actually, we've added a good amount of employees to our team now.
But it was the second round.
It was the second closures that were unacceptable.
We had made it through so much, the fear was not palatable.
People weren't afraid in the same way.
They were still protecting themselves.
We have a very open policy.
You do what you feel comfortable with.
We'll support it any way we can.
But there is a point where you're going to ask someone to do that again, without the fear, with the people wanting to come out, right before Christmas and the holidays.
It's inhumane.
We don't do that.
And that was the last straw, I think, for a lot of us, is that I'm not firing my staff again.
I'm not going through that.
I'm not affecting families.
I'm not destroying lives.
And that's what it was.
In March, everyone hunkered down and fought.
By November, December, it wasn't happening again.
There was just too much at stake.
Too many lives, and we had been through it too long.
So I... The employees have always been the most important part.
As my neighbors joke, I'm never home.
I don't spend any time there.
I sleep there sometimes.
I spend time with my staff.
I love my staff.
They know what I like.
They're very particular.
I spend 14 hours a day with most of them.
I've cooked side by side with every cook I have.
We've scrubbed floors and toilets together.
You do the work together.
They're part of you.
And to forsake them just because...
We're dangerous or there's fear.
It's not human.
It's not American.
It's not what we do.
And so I think those were some of the final straws when you start telling us that our family isn't important because we have to do what's right for everyone else and we don't even know that what's right for everyone else is real or Is saving anybody or is helping anybody?
We just know that we're told to do it?
Well, it starts making you question a lot more, and I think you appreciate a lot more the people that have given up so much to work with you.
Staff is the most important thing.
They're your family.
So tell me about how they were...
So there were these plans, like there were plans of outdoor dining and then there was a plan of takeout.
Tell me how this works.
I believe in the beginning, I'm going to try to get this one right, but outdoor dining wasn't a thing in the beginning.
And actually masks weren't a thing in the beginning either.
It was just you had to close and you could do takeout.
And so the takeout is an unutilizable policy.
It's a loss for any restaurant trying to do it.
If you're not set up for that model, you can't survive doing it.
Why is it a loss?
Because if you think about when a restaurant that does table service, that seats people, that runs through what their personnel, what their staff are built for, what they're trained for, they're not trained for that.
When you think Of your supplies, what you have in-house.
We have plates, roll-ups, napkins, silverware.
You don't have the storage and facilities to start bringing pallets of to-go boxes.
Plus, the costs associated with those are huge, and it's not your model.
You haven't figured those into a lower-cost, faster-move item.
Plus, the infrastructure's not there.
Your systems aren't built for a quick-serve model.
You can make adjustments, but every adjustment costs money, and it costs investment.
And at that point, you were already strapping people in so many ways.
To put it in perspective, our Costa Mesa restaurant does just shy of $20,000 a day.
When we did takeout, we would do $750 a day.
We have about a $7,000 break-even up there.
Running at nothing.
So justifying a loss of $6,000 to do takeout, you can do the math real quick.
A week gets tough.
You get real nervous by the end of that time.
So the model didn't work.
And so that's why you saw a lot of people close for the first takeout system.
Then more rules started coming in.
And so the close was the first thing.
And then the rules started coming through.
And I want to say...
I'm trying to remember.
Was it outdoor dining that was allowed first?
Or a percentage of indoor?
And then...
It's hard to remember.
Because the rules started...
You know, they would come out on a Friday.
Or a Monday morning.
And...
In our business, it takes about $150,000 to restart your machine.
I want to think we're all John Deere tractors, but some of us might be Lamborghinis.
If we drove it hard and put it in the garage for a while, it might not start up when you're done.
You might need a little maintenance there.
And that's been one of the difficult things that I think government doesn't understand.
And they should, because they do not operate on the fastest system.
They're a slow-moving grind.
Well, restaurants, even though we're quick, even though we can pivot, It takes a long time to employ 50 people or 75 people, depending on the size of your space.
It takes a long time to bring in product and then prepare the product.
And a lot of us, we don't buy it that day and make it.
It's like a three-, four-, five-day process to get it to where it needs to be.
And so mandates from on high with no plan, no, hey, this is what's happening, no forethought.
It's impossible.
And so when outdoor dining came, I think people were like, fine, whatever.
We'll do that.
We'll make it work.
And as the outdoor dining progressed to be the only thing we could do, you saw that we're in hospitality.
We want to make sure people are comfortable.
So it became heaters, carpet, tents.
And I think that started creating a whole new idea that what are we doing?
And for some spots, it's been fun.
I mean, to see your valet circle taken over and turned into like a little Cirque du Soleil show, it's amazing.
You know, I think, well done, well played.
Way to pivot, way to have some ingenuity.
It shows you're willing to fight.
But I don't understand how that could possibly be safer.
Then the system of what we build, what's inspected from both city and health department and the ABC, what they walk through, make suggestions, corrections, what we run through long processes and huge costs to do.
We put hand sinks everywhere, but somehow during this, closing bathrooms became safer.
Shutting down the ability to mop every day and sweep continuously became safer.
So all of a sudden now it's astroturf and tents that are the safest place people can eat.
And so I think it started whittling away at a lot of people's confidence in this building.
And then what, 25% became available and then it was taken away.
And then outdoor became illegal and then it was taken away.
And I think most people don't have any idea what's actually allowed anymore.
I think the silence from Sacramento over these last months, weeks now I guess, I don't know where he is, has been really difficult for a lot of us because what do you do?
So you either forge your own path or you fall behind.
Who's making these rules?
I think it's only one man right now in Sacramento making all these rules.
Do you think there's a department that actually...
Do you guys have a...
Is there a department in the California government that understands what you guys do?
There has to be multiple agencies that have a relationship with you guys, know your business, they're inspecting you guys.
I would love to think that was possible.
But, you know, everything is so segmented.
And how it's segmented is by the licensing that you need.
So I don't think they're there for the support role.
And I like that idea a lot.
But I think that comes into the lobbying side.
And restaurants have never been...
We've never been able to form those types of groups.
We've never been behind each other that way.
It's always been an extremely competitive business with high turnover rates.
So we've never organized the way some industries have.
And from Sacramento, there's not much that governs us.
I mean, we fall under OSHA standards, but, you know, those aren't really monitored because our health departments at our county agencies, those monitor if we're being safe and healthy and, you know, with their every two-month inspections.
And currently, there are no inspections for the health department, which is crazy.
It just doesn't seem like that's something that should have ever happened, especially when we're worried about health.
And So all the agencies that were doing their job are now trying And nothing negative about the health department.
They've done an exemplary job in Orange County.
They really have.
They've supported us non-stop.
They've let us know when we've had complaints about everything.
But their hands are tied right now.
And so the county governs the health department.
The state governs our alcohol license.
OSHA is its own thing to protect workers' safety.
Our business licenses are local.
So at that point, you know, the governance of restaurants has always been capitalism.
It's how we always ensured there's 95% of them failing continuously.
It's a hard run to be in.
And so when the guidance comes from somebody who has no hand in our business or has no ability to monitor what's actually going on, And there's no science behind anything, or there's no understanding, or there's nothing where he shows us to say, this, this is the reason, or this is why we're doing it, becomes really hard.
And so when you're waiting for guidance and you're waiting for information to disseminate from others, Where are you getting any of your information from?
I think even restaurateurs don't know where to look.
There's no website that says this is what you can and cannot do.
It's gone from brackets and tiers and Panatone color systems and it's gone up and down the game.
So at this point, I don't even think anyone knows what you're allowed to do.
Now, do you think these mandates were made because they would assume that people would meet each other at restaurants and then it could be big outbreaks because of these meetings?
I can always assume the thinking behind something.
But good policy doesn't come from assumption.
And I think that's where we're having a problem from the business side looking at the government side.
When the government side makes assumptions for us and what is going to happen because of us, we have a hard time with that.
We're willing to work hard.
We're willing to put money into things.
We're willing to build, you know, we'll build anything.
We'll try anything to make it work.
But we need some kind of guidance that's not just about the fact that people may get sick if they come to our restaurants.
And I always talk about restaurants in a really interesting way.
When you sit down at a booth in a restaurant, which most of our restaurants are booths, you don't really interact with very many people and the people you came with.
Maybe one person, your server, who stands at the table and talks to you from at least somewhat of a distance.
And so that's a one point of contact system.
You deal with one person.
There's not a lot of things in which you can go be part of something that is a one point of contact system.
So restaurants, because they're social by nature, they're not social for other groups.
They're social because of the people you came there with.
You're social with them.
You're not showing up and meeting different people.
It's not an intermingling of all sorts of groups.
I understand that clubs and bars might have some difficulty, but I also think that people in this country always should be able to make their own decisions.
They should be able to decide on their own freedom.
And yes, sometimes it gets frightening and scary, but that's okay.
It's supposed to be.
So you mentioned that the health department is not auditing, inspecting, doing the regular inspections, but there's all these mandates on restaurants.
So what's happening there?
That's correct.
The health department is not doing site visits.
And they used to do site visits with us every two to three months.
You know, they were unannounced.
They would show up, spend about an hour and a half wandering through the restaurant taking water temperatures, checking food temperatures, making sure you have sanitizing solutions, checking your dish machine, looking everywhere, making sure you're running a good operation.
And I think this one's interesting because the mandates didn't come from our health department.
They came from Sacramento.
And so the health department has no guidance on how to enforce these because their enforcement wing has nothing to do with shutting people down for being opened.
They're there for the health of people.
But because of the COVID protocols sent from the state, the state or the city officials, county officials aren't going out.
They're not showing up anymore because They've either been furloughed, which is the case with a lot of our ABC officers, which has been horrible.
I mean, we've lost almost 80% of them and they're barely hanging on.
And our health department, the same thing.
And for the public health, these officers came to our restaurants all the time to make sure we were doing a good job.
And now that's not happening.
And so now for the public health, no inspections happen.
And so, from our perspective, it's insane.
My health permit on my front window of one of my restaurants is so sun-bleached you can't read it anymore.
Because normally they're replaced every two to three months.
It's been over a year.
I think my last one was in January.
And that's frightening.
People want to know that they have that safety, and they feel like they should be safe.
But the hard thing is that a health department official going out to inspect a parking lot dining room We'll come out and say, you can't do this.
This doesn't follow the standards you said you would follow.
And that's why it's hard for us right now, is that nothing lines up anymore.
The mandates from the state don't line up with what our county is trying to do to protect its citizens, and they don't line up with what the cities are doing to say, hey, we just want to make sure that we survive.
Everyone's trying to survive now, and so I think they're willing to do what they have to do, but no one wants to.
And it's created a really different atmosphere for restaurants.
Now, do you think your colleagues that are in bigger cities who have restaurants and they were mandated to shut down, only take out only, do you think this industry will get damaged significantly?
Yes.
I think it already has.
I mean, I think Petit Trois in L.A. was closed, Ludovico.
And that is, that's devastating.
That's It's an amazing restaurant.
That's something that was part of the fabric of the area and you see it happening non-stop.
The cities are losing restaurants much faster than we are.
And that's because our local governments have backed us up.
They've actually worked with us.
They've fought for more local control and so there's always good things that come out of problems.
In the cities, though, I think it's hard because you're fighting against everyone.
You're fighting against the state.
You're fighting against your local government.
You're fighting against your own health department.
You're fighting against your county.
It makes it difficult.
You know, it's not just politically based.
It's that these people relied on a fabric, a network of the cities.
And that network was destroyed.
When people don't go to work every day, When they live in apartments throughout the city, when they enjoy their time.
I mean, I can speak to this from New York.
My apartment was not large.
I know that's shocking, but it was very, very small.
We didn't spend a lot of time in them.
We spent a lot of time going out, meeting friends, enjoying the world.
And even though we didn't make a lot of money, that was our social engagement.
That was how we experienced our city.
By cutting that out, by whittling that down, by getting rid of it, The infrastructure dies.
The ability for restaurants to fill their seats dies.
And so even if the mandates are lifted, it's not about mandates.
It's about people.
It's about people wanting to come back.
And the more fear our local government strikes in our residents, the longer it'll take them to feel comfortable to come back.
And that equates directly in how much money they'll spend, how hard they'll work, how much they'll go out.
And that shutters restaurants, not just during the pandemic, but after and continuously.
And it also disillusions so many people.
Maybe people that weren't quite ready to retire or would never have thought about selling their business now think, I'm not doing this anymore.
Or those young kids that got out of culinary school that had that dream are now looking at it thinking, there's no way.
And so it's generational and it's now.
And I think it'll go for a while.
And the cities will be the last to recover.
And it's not because they were the hardest hit.
It's because they evoked the most fear.
And fear stays with us a long more than sickness.
In the middle of all of this, there was a few lawsuits.
What are your thoughts on those?
I think there were some great assemblymen that brought a couple of bills that really helped us, and I think they paved the way for the San Diego lawsuit brought by a couple of restaurant owners and a couple of strip club owners, which is probably the biggest irony in all of that, is that The money and the strength of that didn't come from the restaurant industry.
It came from the strip club owners who united and were able to create enough money to create a lobby, and then they brought the restaurants in, which we thank them for that.
We're not good at lobbying.
I think we've mentioned that.
But the pressure is always important, and any time we put pressure on the governor, I think it at least moves something.
I think the recall has a lot to do with it right now, with why he's opening.
Because outdoor dining was open before the numbers were dropping.
I think they were still some of the highest points they had been for his numbers.
Now that they've dropped considerably, back to levels that were less than when we had 25% of indoor open, we're adjusting again.
So I think that right now, all of these pressures that have been put on him are weighing.
And This isn't a decision by any local municipality.
It's not a decision by the courts.
The courts can't lift anything because they've all been made as mandates, not laws, and so there's nothing to adjudicate.
So the best we can do is we can find fault with emergency order.
We can say that it has to be lifted, but the courts can't help us.
And so I think the pressure is always important, and I commend the restaurant groups that made this happen.
I think if anything comes out of this, hopefully we see some organization within our industry.
But right now, pressure is the only option.
We have to continuously apply pressure.
And so I'm thankful for it.
I think it has helped.
It's helped alleviate some of the fear that you're not alone doing it.
And I think a big difficulty for a lot in the hospitality world is that the ones that stay open, the ones that are pushing Most people don't know that others are doing it.
Most people don't know that there's restaurants all throughout this country that stayed open throughout, that kept going, that fought everything they could.
They just weren't covered in the same way as we have to close.
And I think that people would be really happy if they knew that.
They'd be really excited to say, okay, I wasn't alone.
There's a lot more people out there like me.
And I think that will help unify what it is we do.
It's funny, because all we ever have wanted to do, we can get into it for money.
It's hospitality.
God knows.
Everyone knows it doesn't actually make money.
But, you know, you can sit at a table and enjoy a glass of wine for free.
But we do it because we love it and we like people.
And we want to see them smile and be happy when they leave and have an enjoyable experience and celebrate their birthday.
And we want to throw a party and just hope people come.
And so to have become scapegoats of the pandemic has been really hard for a lot of people in this industry.
And I think I'm proud to see them uniting.
I'm proud to see lawsuits coming out.
And we'll do whatever we can to support those people.
And you just recently ran to join your city council.
Why did you do that?
There's a two-part reason why I ran for city council.
Number one was my son.
He's 16.
He was in a rowing program in Newport Harbor, which he did about four hours a day, and he went to Cronomar High School.
And when this first started, shutting down a 16-year-old's workout of four hours a day builds a lot of testosterone and creates a lot of angst within him.
And so we had him at the beach every day.
And it was when the orders came to close our beaches in Orange County that he came to me crying.
And at that point, you don't see a six-foot-tall, ripped kid crying and not feel like we just stole everything from him.
And I said, this is insane.
The city council can't say this is okay.
These are our beaches.
They're mandated by the Constitution of California, that we control them.
This isn't the governor's right.
And if we're not going to fight for it, we have to have people in that'll fight.
And so that was the impetus, the decision.
It was made early on in this.
We formed a group of restaurants, hoteliers, and country club owners that kind of all came together to just figure out what was going on.
We'd have conversations and meetings, usually at one of our restaurants, and try to disseminate information.
And what I realized is no one had any idea what was going on.
From multi-multi-million dollar properties that run great hotels to private country clubs to small restaurants, no one had any idea.
We were all waiting.
For the next alert, the next maybe.
And everyone was unsure.
They didn't know how to proceed.
And I thought, that's insane.
It's insane that all of these pillars of industry and all of these smaller players of industry have no idea what's happening.
And so I thought, well, there's only one way to make a change, and that's to be part of it.
And so I decided it was best if I could rile up the government from the inside.
As a result of this shutdown and the pandemic, a lot of people have been impacted in California, and they may be in the situation of not knowing what's going on.
What do you recommend to people?
You know, I always recommend one thing of people, and that's do what you feel comfortable with.
And it's the same advice I've given other restaurateurs, same advice I've given staff that's worked for us over the years, family and friends, and it's that You have to do what you feel comfortable with.
And some of us feel comfortable fighting for more.
And I think that if our comfortability to fight and to push forward and to stay open and to get involved in government and to inspire others makes more people feel comfortable, then that's how the tide changes.
I don't think my advice is worth anything if I'm not willing to do it first and let other people see me do it.
And so it's hard to give advice for a state this diverse and this amazing.
I've spent a lot of time up and down and throughout it.
I don't think what's right necessarily in Mammoth is what's right for us in Newport.
I think the greatest part about Californians is that we choose to live here for a reason and it's because we love it.
There's really not many other ones other than we love it here.
It's certainly an expensive place to live from every single way.
So why do we make that choice?
Because we want to.
And so right now we have to rely on our comfortability.
Because I don't want to make someone feel uncomfortable.
In the hospitality sector, it's not what we do.
We want to make them feel like they're always welcome.
And I think that's what I've learned about politics is that no matter what my leanings are, I bring hospitality to politics and I feel like I can make everyone feel more comfortable.
There's always a way we can talk about something and come to a better solution.
And we're not We're not separated in this state.
We just feel like we are.
And the ones that aren't comfortable now, that's okay.
They can take a moment and try to find it.
And the ones that are antsy and crazy, well, then they should stand up.
And they should push back and fight because they have the strength to do it.
And maybe it'll inspire others.
I think that whether it goes one way or the other, we just all, as Californians, need to realize we love it here.
We want to make it better.
And we all need to stand up and fight if we're willing to fight.
And it will inspire more to do so.
So that's the only advice I could give.
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