The Brief

California Republicans have an unusual shot of claiming an upset victory in the governor’s race this year — but to win, neither of their candidates can get too far ahead of the other just yet.

With eight major Democratic candidates splitting the liberal vote, both Republican candidates, former Fox News host Steve Hilton and Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, could come in first and second in the June 2 primary and move on to the November ballot.

That would shut out Democratic general election candidates, an extraordinary event that pollsters and strategists of both parties agree is the only viable chance for a Republican to become governor. Registered Democrats outnumber Republicans nearly two-to-one in California and the GOP hasn’t won a statewide race in two decades.

Both Republicans can only advance to November if they split the Republican vote essentially evenly, giving each enough to surpass their Democratic opponents. That’s thanks to California’s top-two primary system, in which the two candidates with the most votes advance to the general election regardless of their party.

Democrats insist it won’t happen, though they face mounting pressure over the risk in a year when the party is hoping to turn out liberal voters for U.S. House races in November.

And neither Republican is strategizing to shut the Democrats out. Instead of trying to keep the other alive through the primary, Hilton and Bianco are running campaigns like any other candidate: seeking to defeat each other. Hilton has spent the past few months attempting to consolidate Republican support by attacking Bianco, who has been happy to return the ire.

“There’s an amazing irony there, that they need to beat each other but they both need to succeed at the same time,” GOP strategist Rob Stutzman said. “It cuts against human nature and cuts against the way you put together campaigns.”

An intra-Republican primary

Despite very different backgrounds, Hilton and Bianco are running on similar policies.

Hilton is a British political strategist who’s written extensively about populism, reducing bureaucracy and decentralizing power, and Bianco is a bombastic local sheriff who is pushing the boundaries of police authority over elections.

Both are pushing a deregulation agenda, railing against Democratic-backed environmental policies they blame for raising the state’s cost of living. Their targets include the landmark California Environmental Quality Act, which requires environmental reviews for new construction.

Both Republicans also want to reverse prison closures, boost oil production to lower gas prices and reduce or eliminate the 61-cents-a-gallon gas tax.

Hilton wants to shield the first $100,000 of earnings from the state income tax (a goal Democrat Katie Porter shares) and significantly lower taxes on higher earners by cutting 18% of the state budget, including areas he claims are fraudulent or wasteful such as using cannabis tax revenue to support substance abuse programs. Bianco also wants to cut, and bring in oil revenues to eliminate the income tax entirely.

Hilton, one of the race’s top fundraisers, has raised more than $6.6 million so far, exceeding Bianco’s haul by more than $2 million. The two are second and third to Democratic former Rep. Katie Porter in the total number of campaign donors — one measure of popular support.

Polls show they remain neck-and-neck at or near the top of the pack, with one survey released last week by the California Democratic Party showing Hilton and Bianco statistically tied with 16% and 14%, respectively. To be competitive, they each need to win over independent and undecided voters, some of whom lean Republican and most of whom are fixated on the state’s cost of living crisis. The California Republican Party is slated to take an endorsement vote at its convention next weekend.

Each has tried to outrank the other on conservative credentials.

Hilton has attacked Bianco for having “too much baggage” related to liberal causes, pointing to a video showing the sheriff kneeling during the 2020 Black Lives Matters protests, as many police officers did then to de-escalate crowds, and later describing his actions as praying. Under Trump, the FBI this year fired several agents who had done the same.

“It’s a question of character and honesty and judgment,” Hilton said in an interview.

Bianco pointed to the two Republicans’ continued tie in the polls as proof Hilton can’t carry the party. He’s called Hilton, who worked for the conservative U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron, “a fraud amongst Republicans” in part because a political crowdfunding startup Hilton co-founded in 2013, Crowdpac, later rebranded to exclusively support Democrats.

And each has aimed to align himself with Trump without saying the president’s name directly. While both are vocal fans of the president, nearly three-quarters of California voters disapprove of him, and Democratic voters in particular are motivated this year to vote against the president’s agenda. Hilton and Bianco have both blasted Democrats for linking the gubernatorial race to Trump.

Hilton, who once called for an audit into Trump’s loss in the 2020 election, is promoting “CalDOGE,” a program to look into reports of fraud and waste in California government. It’s a nod to Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency that slashed federal spending and employment last year. So far, as part of the project, Hilton has held press conferences criticizing state grants to nonprofits with advocacy wings that support liberal causes, like stricter environmental laws and holding voter registration drives; he’s vowed to cut them as governor.

Bianco, who endorsed Trump’s 2024 re-election by saying America should “put a felon in the White House,” told KTLA last fall if he had the president’s support he’d downplay it on the campaign trail. Asked last week if he’s seeking the president’s approval, he said he instead wants “the endorsement of every single person in this country.”

“You have an entire Democrat field trying to label me as Donald Trump, and the reason why is because they have absolutely nothing to run on,” he said in an interview.

He has embarked on an unprecedented effort in Riverside County to recount ballots from last year’s special election based on what local elections officials say is inaccurate and flawed raw ballot data, a move that mirrors the Trump administration’s seizure of 2020 ballots in Georgia. But Bianco has insisted it’s not political. The investigation, he said this week, is on hold amid legal challenges.

Who is Bianco?

Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco speaks with the press after announcing his bid for governor at Avila’s Historic 1929 Event Center in Riverside on Feb. 17, 2025.

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Gina Ferazzi

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Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

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The ballot seizure is one of the many ways Bianco has courted controversy as county sheriff, a seat to which he was first elected in 2018 with hefty campaign contributions from the union that represents sheriff’s deputies.

The three-decade law enforcement officer and one-time member of the far-right militia group Oath Keepers gained attention in 2020 for fighting state orders to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, refusing to enforce masking or stay-at-home rules or to mandate vaccination for deputies. He also opposes school vaccination laws.

He’s often criticized the state’s sanctuary law that limits police cooperation with federal immigration agents, simultaneously insisting he’ll do everything he legally can to help immigration agents but clarifying to Riverside County residents that deputies do not enforce immigration laws and take reports of crimes from anyone. He’s presided over a spike in deaths in county jails that he’s attributed to fentanyl and suicides, though the state attorney general’s office has opened an investigation.

He has ties to an evangelical pastor in Temecula who helps elect Christian conservatives and is pushing to increase the influence of Christianity in government.

His pitch to voters is that he’s an outsider — and he’s prone to using hyperbole to prove it, calling environmental activists who sue to stop development “terrorists,” promising to “completely destroy special interests” and saying if elected he’d “take a nuclear bomb” to the decisions made in California government.

He’s running, he said, to offer a change from the “crime and corruption” he says has defined state politics and claims he’s the only candidate with strong executive experience (though several Democratic opponents have led state or federal agencies, or major cities.)

He’s endorsed by several law enforcement groups, some of which have also jointly endorsed a Democrat, and funded by campaign contributions from dozens of officers and police chiefs, various business owners and the powerful Peace Office Research Association of California, a special interest with outsize influence at the Capitol. The law enforcement association extends to his title as Riverside sheriff on the ballot, which will give him an edge over Hilton, GOP strategists say.

“Every other person in this race is nothing but a career politician,” he said. “We're over career politicians, millionaires, billionaires, bright, shiny objects and career politicians and strategists. California is sick of that.”

Who is Hilton?

Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton speaks at a press conference outside the California attorney general’s office in Sacramento on Aug. 5, 2025. Hilton announced legal action to stop Gov. Gavin Newsom and Attorney General Rob Bonta from pursuing mid-decade redistricting.

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Fred Greaves

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CalMatters

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Hilton, meanwhile, is making lofty promises like $3-a-gallon gas and halving electricity bills, and says he has experience from London to achieve such cuts.

The son of Hungarian immigrants to Britain, Hilton got his start in the Conservative Party there before moving to the private sector and returning to politics as Cameron’s director of strategy from 2010 to 2012.

The British press noted Hilton’s penchant for casual dress and credited him as the ideological force pushing the party to loosen workplace regulations, cut welfare, shrink the size of government, lower taxes and withdraw from the European Union. Hilton was disillusioned with Cameron’s progress, the Washington Post reported, when he left his team after two years to join his wife, tech executive Rachel Whetstone, in California and take a sabbatical at Stanford. The couple still maintain several properties in central London.

“The government has lost its ultimate radical,” The Economist declared of his departure from 10 Downing Street in 2012. “In his visceral disdain for the state, reverence for local communities and commitment to enterprise, he might be the most deeply conservative figure at the very top of this government.”

Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton speaks at a press conference outside the California attorney general’s office in Sacramento on Aug. 5, 2025. Hilton announced legal action to stop Gov. Gavin Newsom and Attorney General Rob Bonta from pursuing mid-decade redistricting. Photo by Fred Greaves for CalMatters He founded Crowdpac in 2013 with two partners, a Stanford professor and a Google executive, with the stated goal of getting more people engaged in politics by using software to match their views with candidates they could support financially. The platform, he highlighted at the time, was used by a Black Lives Matter leader to crowdfund a run for Baltimore mayor and by anti-Trump Republicans hoping for a Paul Ryan presidential run. In 2015, he wrote a column in the Guardian supporting a higher minimum wage in Britain and walking back his own prior campaigns against one.

Years later, Hilton left the platform when Crowdpac, having mostly been used by Democrats, stopped helping Republican candidates in what executives called “a stand against Trumpism.” It later shut down and relaunched again as a Democrats-only platform. By then, Hilton had already endorsed Trump for president in 2016 and landed a weekly Fox News show, which ran from 2017 to 2023. He’s now returned fully to his conservative roots, pushing to “massively reduce spending” and regulation the same way he did in the U.K.

“I have a very clear message of change that's practical and positive and not ideological,” he told CalMatters.

Hilton has raised the third most in the race, behind Democrats Tom Steyer, a self-funding billionaire, and San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, who has pulled in millions of dollars primarily from Silicon Valley. Hilton has put $200,000 of his own money into his campaign, and counts among his supporters Uber, Fox Corp. mogul Rupert Murdoch and tech executives who have also supported Democrats: Google founder Sergey Brin and Ripple executive Chris Larsen.

Will Democrats really be shut out of the race?

Experts say a Democratic shutout is unlikely, unless the field remains entrenched.

“It depends upon those two Republican candidates who are splitting the Republican vote fairly evenly right now, doing that, and then having more than a half a dozen Democrats with no one that is a leading favorite, which is what we've seen so far,” said Mark Baldassare, director of polling at the Public Policy Institute of California. “But one thing I would say is it’s still early.”

Democratic Party Chair Rusty Hicks has also used that reasoning. He has started an incremental public pressure campaign to prompt lower-polling Democratic candidates to drop out, but the candidates have resisted so far.

Hilton, too, dismissed analyses that both Republicans must advance for either to have a shot of winning the seat, calling it a hypothetical exercise from GOP strategists.

“They don’t know what they’re talking about, I mean these are the kinds of people who have been losing for 20 years,” he said. “The idea that the Democratic Party is just going to concede California is obviously ridiculous. … It’s going to be a Republican against a Democrat.”

Bianco said he’s running against Hilton, whom he called a “career strategist,” as much as any of the Democrats. He said he hasn’t thought too much about who his opponent would be in a general election.

“It really doesn’t bother me,” he said. “I’m not doing this for Republicans. I’m not doing it for Democrats, independents, anything like that.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

California’s first-in-the-nation fast food council — created to give workers a voice on wages, safety and working conditions — has not met in over a year and has no chairperson.

Now the workers the council was built to protect, organized by the Service Employees International Union, are taking their concerns directly to the state, demanding that Gov. Gavin Newsom appoint a chairperson so the council can do its work, as required by law.

Luna Mondragon, who works at a Carl’s Jr. in Milpitas, told CalMatters through a translator that she started out as a cook but has done many other duties in her five years there. After she joined the fast food workers union, she said she began speaking up, especially when she started to experience aches and pains from her job. Since then, she said she has been retaliated against, including with fewer shifts.

“If we don’t have our health we can’t accomplish anything,” she said, her voice choked with emotion. “It’s so important for them to appoint a chair. We need the council.”

The council was created as part of a 2023 compromise that also set a $20 minimum wage for fast food workers. It has the power to set standards on wages, health, safety and working conditions — and to raise the minimum wage annually for hundreds of thousands of fast food workers at chains with 60 or more locations nationwide.

The council — composed of four members representing the businesses, four members representing labor and a chairperson who’s an “unaffiliated” member of the public — must, under state law, hold at least two meetings a year, though the law does not specify who should enforce this provision.

The council only held those meetings in 2024; last year it held two subcommittee meetings, the latest in February 2025. Shortly after, the council’s chairperson, Nick Hardeman, resigned when Newsom appointed him to a different state position. When reached by CalMatters, Hardeman said he did not want to speak on the record about a council he has not chaired in a while.

In 2022, the Legislature raised fast food workers’ minimum wage to $22 an hour. The industry fought back, gathering signatures to repeal the law. Workers across the state went on strike. In late 2023, the SEIU and the industry reached a last-minute compromise: Workers dropped a ballot fight in exchange for a $20 minimum wage and the establishment of the council. The SEIU-affiliated California Fast Food Workers Union launched the following year — lacking the collective bargaining rights of a traditional union but acting as an advocacy and membership group for workers.

Tara Gallegos, a spokesperson for the governor, would not answer questions about the council, instead referring CalMatters to the state’s Labor & Workforce Development Agency. Crystal Young, a spokesperson for the agency, confirmed that there is no chairperson and the council’s meetings are on hold. The council’s four-person staff continues to respond to inquiries and prepare for future meetings, she said.

On April 16, marking about two years since the council’s first meeting, workers delivered a 96-page book to the governor’s office, describing more than 100 complaints filed with CalOSHA, the state labor department and different city agencies since the council’s formation, alleging wage theft and poor working conditions. The union estimates there are about 630,000 fast food workers in the state, about 75% of whom are people of color and 20% of whom are immigrants.

“Employers feel newly empowered to threaten us with calling ICE when we ask questions about paid sick leave or [workers’ compensation] or report health and safety hazards,” Angelica Hernandez, a McDonald’s worker who is a member of the fast food council, said in the book.

Rich Reinis, a member of the council who represents employers and is a former franchise owner, said he has no knowledge of when meetings will resume and is waiting. In his view, the council should have been discussing “fire and ICE.” The phrase refers to the effects of last year’s L.A. County fires on the fast food industry and its workers, some of whom lost their homes, and what businesses and workers need to know about immigration enforcement.

Reinis also wants the council to order a study of the wage increase’s effects on prices and employment. Competing studies by UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz have reached opposite conclusions, and the question of affordability remains unresolved, he said.

A Los Angeles Times columnist who analyzed the competing studies concluded the debate over the wage's effects is likely to continue. Hernandez, the councilmember, rejected the industry's claims the wage increase has hurt business. “The sky didn’t fall on the California fast food industry,” she said.

The council is also required to submit a performance review to the Legislature every three years — a deadline approaching without a single full meeting in the past year. Before he resigned, Hardeman, the former chairperson, said it was hard for the council to reach decisions.

“The staff will have to write a report without having any meetings,” Reinis said. “How the hell are we supposed to do that?”

Chris Holden, the former California assemblymember who authored the law that raised the workers’ wages and created the council, told CalMatters the council was “groundbreaking” and “needs to address the challenges that were the genesis of the council in the first place.” He said he hopes the governor is doing his due diligence to identify a new chairperson.

“I want to tell [the governor] to finish the job he started,” Julieta Garcia, a cook at a Pizza Hut in Los Angeles, told CalMatters through a translator. “Leave a good legacy for this generation and the future generation, so you can be recognized as a leader who gave fast food workers a chance.”

Young, the Labor & Workforce Development Agency spokesperson who was speaking on the governor’s behalf, confirmed that Newsom’s office received the workers’ book.

The governor's office has not said when — or whether — Newsom plans to appoint a chairperson to the council.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

Nearly 20 years after founding a successful environmental and safety consulting services company, Robin Thorne said she still gets checked for being a Black woman in the construction industry.

“I've had situations where people, they don't even make eye contact, and then the male has to step back to say, 'She's running the show,'" she said.

Robin Thorne (in pink jacket) founded DemoChicks to help women of color land jobs in construction industries.

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Courtesy DemoChicks

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Thorne runs CTI Environmental, a multi-million dollar company that was contracted by the Army Corps of Engineers to do debris removal after the L.A. fires.

She’s been an engineer for decades and knows fewer than one of four workers in architecture, construction and engineering industries who are women — and much fewer are women of color.

That proportion is low considering 47% of the U.S. labor force are women.

That's why she’s organized a “Women in STEM Signing Day” at Long Beach City College on Saturday, May 30. The event’s meant to create the type of excitement normally associated with young people signing up for college sports teams.

She wants younger women to tap into their drive to succeed

There were far fewer women in these jobs when Thorne was growing up in Philadelphia, but she didn’t let roadblocks, including those in her personal life — like being a single mom on public assistance — stop her.

DemoChicks helps give young women of color exposure to construction-related jobs.

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Courtesy DemoChicks

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“When I thought about being an engineer, I didn't think about it being male-dominated. I just knew I wanted to be an engineer,” she said.

She added that some women do give up on similar dreams or fail to find the spark that allows them to see themselves doing these jobs. That’s why Thorne started DemoChicks seven years ago. She wants young women to see her and think “engineer,” as well as connect with women who are already working in these industries.

Mentorship, examples, and money

The organization is called DemoChicks because demolition is one of the jobs that keeps Thorne’s company busy. More women are entering architecture, construction and engineering jobs than before, but the percentage of women in each industry is still low:

15% in engineering
26% in architecture
11% in construction

These are mostly stable jobs with good entry-level wages, jobs such as safety coordinators, project managers, project engineers and construction managers.

Beyond giving teen girls IRL examples of women in construction industry jobs, DemoChicks supports their academic efforts, which often means helping them out meet college expenses. DemoChicks gave out $1,000 scholarships to eight women last year (35 applied).

A third generation Latina truck driver from South LA

One of those scholarship recipients in 2024 was Ana Terrazas. She recalled growing up in South L.A., not as a latch key kid, but as a truck cab kid.

Ana Terrazas as a teen at her mother's construction job. Terrazas now works for a large construction company as a project engineer.

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Courtesy Ana Terrazas

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 ”My mother… was a truck driver,” Terrazas said, driving belly dump trailers on construction sites. Terrazas would help her mother change tires and lend a hand with any mechanical repairs. Her grandfather was a truck driver too.

“Since then I've always been obsessed with job sites, and also the superintendent, the one that would tell everybody where to go, how to do their job, and organize everything,” Terrazas said.

Two years ago she was working hard to finish her two majors — civil engineering and construction management — to earn her bachelor’s degree from Cal Poly Pomona. She applied for and was awarded a $1,500 scholarship from DemoChicks. That help, she said, had a big effect.

DemoChicks founder Robin Thorne, right, presents Ana Terrazas with a scholarship.

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Courtesy Ana Terrazas

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“I didn't have to take as many hours of work to be able to focus more on my studies and also in my internship during that time,” Terrazas said.

The internship, at Swinerton, a nationwide construction company that's more than 100 years old, turned into full time work as a project engineer.

Terrazas paid it forward earlier this year, inviting Thorne and a dozen DemoChicks to a Swinerton work site during Women in Construction Week. She urged the women to tap into their drive to succeed and lean on people like her for help.

“As long as they're driven and this is what they want, there shouldn't be a reason for them to not be able to get a job here,” Terrazas said.

With LACMA’s new David Geffen Galleries just steps away, it may be easy to forget that we have the richest Ice Age fossil site on Earth right here with the La Brea Tar Pits.

But the museum and research facilities at the tar pits are also scheduled for a multimillion dollar renovation.

Built in 1977, the George C. Page Museum at the tar pits has a special place in the hearts of Angelenos who’ve ever taken a field trip to see its massive mastodon skeletons or dire wolf skulls. Or have maybe shed a tear at the sculptures of the mammoth family in distress in the Lake Pit out front.

All that stuff is staying, museum educator Kay Lai told LAist, but new interactive exhibits will allow visitors to better understand the science that’s happening in their own backyard.

A rendering of the new outdoor amphitheater at the La Brea Tar Pits.

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Courtesy the Natural History Museums of Los Angeles County

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The transformation

“This museum, as beloved as it is, definitely needs that refresh,” Lai said. “And I’m really excited for the next generation of kids that gets to grow up and make new memories here with this new space.”

Lai said the museum refresh will include a new focus on Zed — the 80% complete Columbian mammoth found here — and other notable animals they’ve unearthed over the decades. The mammoth’s bones will be reassembled and Zed will “stand tall for the first time since the Ice Age,” according to the museum’s website.

“We’re able to focus on the very first saber-toothed cat fossils that we’ve ever discovered ... As well as some of our Ice Age survivors ... like Pebbles the Puma ... Pebbles would have been the ancestor of some of the mountain lions that still live in Los Angeles today, including P-22 that passed away a couple years ago,” Lai said.

Then there’s the fish bowl: you know, the fossil lab with windows where you can watch researchers at work?

An even better fish bowl

“So we’ll still have the fish bowl, but it’s going to be much more interactive and there’ll be much more discussion of what’s going on inside the fossil lab,” said Regan Dunn, assistant deputy director and curator at the new Samuel Oschin Global Center for Ice Age Research.

A digital rendering of the new fish bowl at the Samuel Oschin Global Center for Ice Age Research.

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Courtesy the Natural History Museums of Los Angeles County

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Dunn explained that the area where they store their collections of fossils and other specimens is getting major updates too.

“Super valuable, millions of specimens, will be in upgraded systems where there’s climate control. There’ll be enclosed cabinets and be under much better maintenance. And also allow for much more research to happen,” she said.

The La Brea Tar Pits are still very much an active paleontological research site. Dunn said any time a hole goes in the ground in the Hancock Park area, a new discovery is made.

With new outdoor classrooms and a 1-kilometer pedestrian pathway that will take visitors past excavation sites, the idea is to make the research going on here more visible to the public.

Your last chance to visit the tar pits before its two-year transformation is July 6.

A digital rendering showing the aerial view of the updated La Brea Tar Pits grounds.

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Courtesy the Natural History Museums of Los Angeles County

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This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.

In the face of the nation's highest gas prices, California lawmakers approved a bill to ease restrictions on E85 conversion kits — devices that let conventional gasoline cars run on a cheaper, mostly ethanol fuel blend.

Assembly Bill 2046, dubbed the “Access to Affordable Gas Act” by its author, Assemblymember Rhodesia Ransom, a Stockton Democrat, advanced through the Assembly on a 59-0 vote with no debate or opposition.

The measure is the latest example of Sacramento lawmakers scrambling to respond to gas costs that have soared amid the Iran-Israel war, which has rattled global oil markets and pushed California pump prices above $6 a gallon. It now heads to the California state Senate and would need Gov. Gavin Newsom’s approval before it becomes law.

“Californians consistently pay more at the pump than drivers from other states, and gas prices are once again climbing across the state,” Ransom said on the Assembly floor Thursday. “For commuters and working families, [the proposal] offers a practical way to save money.”

If approved in its current form, the measure would exempt manufacturers of E85 converter kits from an approval process by the state’s primary climate regulator, the California Air Resources Board, which requires companies to demonstrate the devices do not increase a vehicle's emissions. The bill would leave in place a separate federal certification process run by the Environmental Protection Agency.

“Members in Sacramento are looking for ways to try to reduce costs — or appear to reduce costs of driving — and so this is a way to do that,” said Aaron Smith, a UC Berkeley economist and fuels expert.

The converter kits, which cost between $800 to $1,250, according to a legislative analysis of the bill, would let drivers convert their cars to run on both gasoline and E85 fuel.

E85 is a blend of up to 85% ethanol and 15% gasoline; the share of ethanol typically is between 55% and 85%, said Smith, the Berkeley expert.

Jeff Wilkerson, government affairs manager for Pearson Fuels, the largest E85 fuel provider in the state and a bill supporter, said E85 — much of which is made from Midwest corn — is largely insulated from overseas oil shocks that drive California gas prices. The ethanol blend has sold for $2 or more less per gallon than gasoline during recent price spikes.

While E85 is typically priced lower than gasoline and can reduce petroleum dependence and carbon emissions, it delivers 20% to 30% fewer miles per gallon, according to the air board, meaning drivers only save money when E85 is priced at least 20% to 30% below gasoline.

About 1.3 million vehicles in California can currently use the fuel, which is sold at about 640 stations statewide — just 3% of the state’s more than 15,000 fuel pumps, according to the bill analysis.

Ransom said more E85 pumps would be built if the state loosened restrictions and encouraged demand for the fuel blend. She stressed that her bill would present E85 as an alternative.

“For some people, it may not be a wise choice, but at least now it’s going to be a choice,” she said.

Environmentally, the fuel is rated cleaner than regular gasoline by California's Low Carbon Fuel Standard. But that rating has critics. Smith, the Berkeley economist, said the benefits of ethanol are likely overstated. Official numbers likely understate emissions from land use as rising corn demand for ethanol pushes farmers to clear forested land.

The state’s own certification record offers a cautionary tale. Lindsay Buckley, a spokesperson for the board, said the agency has received only five applications from companies for E85 conversion kits since 2008 and that none has cleared the certification process, which is designed to ensure modified vehicles still meet their original emissions standards. Supporters of the proposal argue the board moves slowly and its regulations are burdensome.

But loosening that standard carries its own risk, cautioned Aaron Kurz, senior consultant on the Assembly Transportation Committee, especially now.

As the federal government has stripped scientific expertise from regulatory decisions, he wrote in his analysis, “this committee should consider if the state should cede authority over an inherently scientific process and set a precedent for transferring approval authority to the federal government.”