Betty Yee wants to leverage experience as Controller to be California’s next Governor
I had the pleasure of sitting down in June for a conversation with California’s former Controller, Alameda resident Betty Yee. Born and raised in San Francisco, she has served California in various roles in the State Legislature, under State Senator Carole Midgen and then-Governor Gray Davis, and as a member of the State Board of Equalization. Yee studied at UC Berkeley and received a graduate degree from Golden Gate University. She currently serves as Vice Chair of the California Democratic Party.
Yee termed out after eight years as the state’s chief financial officer at the start of 2023. She announced her candidacy for California’s 2026 Governor’s race in April of this year. She was the second Democratic candidate to announce, following Lieutenant Governor Eleni Kounalakis’ announcement earlier that day. Other Democrats are expected to join the race, including another Alameda resident, California Attorney General Rob Bonta. Bonta has not yet publicly commented on the possibility.
Yee’s campaign website describes her as “…A tough, innovative, and fiercely independent fiscal watchdog who is on our side, delivering results. Taking on big life insurers, Betty compelled them to pay death benefits to surviving loved ones and held them accountable.” Yee claims in eight years as Controller, audits her office uncovered over $7.3 billion in wasted or disallowed allocations. Her listed priorities include economic equality, growing the economy, climate change, and housing affordability.
During our hour-long conversation, Yee touched on many of these issues and detailed her experience and vision for California. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Part 1 of “From CFO to CEO?” was published on July 25.
It’s a time to peel back some of these existing programs to see how they can better support the changes and the unforeseen circumstances that Californians are going to be experiencing.
Alameda was the first city in the state to meet the housing element. It’s going to be a big challenge throughout the state, getting all this housing built. And then once it’s built, how are you going to get it occupied when a 750-square-foot one-bedroom apartment rents for $3,000?
We’ve got to rethink housing in a lot of different ways. It’s definitely one of the top [reasons] why we’re losing people to other states, leaving California. There needs to be [new] ways of looking at housing assistance and some less typical ways.
I’m running into more people who are not interested in home ownership but want to have some stability with respect to renting a place they can afford—changing some of that paradigm. Every time we’ve had first-time home buyer assistance, they’ve never gone to the communities in most need. They’ve gone to people who, even though they may have had difficulty getting typical financing, they probably could have.
We were providing some sort of housing assistance during the pandemic. I would like to look at all these areas that we looked at during the pandemic to see if we were to make some of these things permanent, what would that look like? Who would bear that cost? Is it worth looking at reframing some of these programs—even the unemployment program—when you think about how we’re now in an era where people are going to be transitioning from job to job much more frequently. Is there a way to look at the unemployment fund being a fund for worker resilience, so that there’s no loss of livelihood as they are changing jobs?
It’s a time to peel back some of these existing programs to see how they can better support the changes and the unforeseen circumstances that Californians are going to be experiencing.
Housing [is] no exception. It’s going to take some intentionality. As expensive as it is, you do have to do the cost benefit analysis in terms of whether we want to keep hemorrhaging people and talent or whether we’re going to be looking at putting our marker down to be sure that we are keeping talent here in California and making our economy work for everybody. Housing is the top issue that drives people out.
If the pandemic showed us anything, it was ripping the Band-Aid off how fragile the foundation of our economy truly is, where we have one-third of our workers who are making $15 an hour.
How would you deal with Greg Abbott or Ron DeSantis and the tricks and the stunts they’ve been pulling? They’re going very aggressively after California, drawing a lot of business to their states.
I think we have to double down on housing. Look, California is still very attractive to people around the world, people around the country. The innovation that takes place here, the great diversity, we’re still making investments in our higher education institutions. This is a draw for a lot of people from a lot of places around the world. To continue to be a draw, we have to focus on those foundational issues that are going to help California continue to thrive and grow, where people can expect to raise a family here.
Housing, housing, housing. That’s going to be the issue. How do we look at that, particularly with the changing demographic, with respect to climate change? We need to be mindful that this is where people work. How do we look at that in terms of the community benefits that housing will derive for wherever housing is sited?
The state can be an equal partner with local governments. I’m very proud of Alameda and all the housing that we’re building. But as you said, we’re pricing people out at the same time. Perhaps the State can be more of a partner in terms of infrastructure improvements that can support housing developments.
And then on the other side of this is what people are earning. The 360 around this is looking at lowering the cost of housing, and also asking how we can uplift the earnings potential of Californians? If the pandemic showed us anything, it was ripping the Band-Aid off how fragile the foundation of our economy truly is, where we have one-third of our workers who are making $15 an hour.
How are you going to appeal to people who see you as having four strikes against you? You’re from the Bay Area, you’re liberal, you’re a woman, and you’re Asian. Is there any common ground that you can find and how will you get there?
Yes. I am running to look at how state government can deliver better for the people of California, regardless of political stripe. This is something I have seen for the past eight years as Controller—how we need to do better.
I’m starting a fellowship at USC in late August to lead a student discussion group on governance. I’ve been in public service for 38 years now, and when I think about governance, the biggest piece that’s missing is how we incorporate community engagement and participation in our decision-making. It doesn’t matter what level of government, that has to happen. People need to understand the ramifications of decisions on their lives.
We’re very good at doing things the way that we’ve always done. I don’t think we generally take a pause to see how we can do things better. I think the art of evaluating programs and their effectiveness, and whether we’ve been allocating resources efficiently, has gone out the door.
I will say from my role as the CFO of California for the past eight years, there was very little legislative interest—and, frankly, executive branch interest—in getting our financial statements out on time, because they felt like that was a bureaucratic exercise. [But] people want to invest in California, people want to be here. People want to understand that the state has integrity in our finances, so they don’t have to worry about higher taxes down the road. Those are the things that I think are important in terms of transparency.
It’s about how we can do better in terms of getting back to basics. It’s about getting back to implementing and delivering for the people of California. Everyone seems to kind of give up right after they put the programs in place, but we never go back and look at evaluating whether they’ve actually done the job or not.
I think I can inspire a team within the government, and more importantly, ask the public to hold us to strict accountability to be sure that we’re doing the job.
We’re planning for tomorrow, not just for more of what we had yesterday and today, and what we develop in terms of an economy is going to be sustained over time.
You bring up being the CFO of California, which is the fifth largest economy in the world…
The fourth largest economy now.
How does being CFO of an economy that large translate into making social policy? That’s a big step.
When I think about social policy here in California, I think our current governor has it right. It’s policy that hopefully has as an ultimate objective being sure that our economy is an inclusive one for everyone, and that it will be what I call future-proof. We’re planning for tomorrow, not just for more of what we had yesterday and today, and what we develop in terms of an economy is going to be sustained over time.
The intersection of climate change and the economy is very real. But there are also opportunities related to that. I believe we can get our young people engaged as the architects and solutions to climate change in real time, where we deploy our technology well, where we look at how we are going to uplift many of our more disproportionately affected communities that have the ability to make decisions about their own economic futures, and how we can support them so that they can come up with their own resilience plans. Also, an economy—given all the federal dollars that are coming to California—that I think has set the table for us to be sure that we’re creating quality jobs and that we are investing in particularly low-income and heavily impacted areas.
These are game-changing moments. I don’t believe California can screw it up. We should not be screwing it up. At the same time, what we need to do is to be very cognizant of the fact that what we have been doing in the past has not worked. I saw for a number of years before I left office how we had surpluses in our budget, and many of those surplus dollars were meant to deal with homelessness, with climate change, with a whole host of issues. But for the more family-support type of programs, I can’t say that we know what we got for those dollars. That’s a big debate right now in terms of the homelessness issue, with respect to climate—we don’t measure anything. The metrics can’t be the amount of dollars that you put out the door. It’s got to be that you have moved the needle on getting more people into situations where they’re able to sustain themselves over the long term.
What do you see as a nascent economy in California that’s going to become a major player? With all the interesting new areas of science and technology—and California has been a leader in so many of them—do you have any predictions?
In California, in terms of economic drivers, definitely climate technology. Biotechnology as well. To the extent that we are leaning in on all the impacts of climate change, we’re going to need to see how those impacts are being felt throughout the state. How we look at agriculture and our water issues, water technology. Much of what California will need to be a leader is sustainability, because we have this climate that, for the most part, is pretty attractive. I do think we can be a state of excellence for so many of these things. We can attract that kind of talent in an accelerated way, and bring these things to market so people can realize the benefits in their own lives much more quickly.
Do you think California is heading for a recession in the next couple of years?
It’s interesting because we continue to add jobs. This is the head scratcher, if you will, in terms of whether we are going to hit a recession or not. My sense is that Californians are experiencing the high cost of everything—food and gas has moderated somewhat, housing, energy—I do think that is a likelihood. How protracted that will be is the question, and I don’t know that anybody can determine that. You look at all the forecasters, whether it’s UCLA Anderson School or some of the other major forecasters, and they’ve been doing dual scenarios because nobody really knows.
How long have you lived in Alameda?
I’ve been in Alameda since the latter part of 2009. I’m a native of San Francisco. It really was a lifestyle change. I was serving on the Board of Equalization at that time, and the commute from San Francisco to Sacramento was quite strenuous. And I have to say it was a lifestyle change from a perspective that it cut 45 minutes off my commute each way. I’m very happy to be living in the East Bay and particularly in Alameda.
My mother still lives in San Francisco in the house I grew up in. I have four sisters and one brother. I’m the second oldest, first generation American and the first born here. My father came over at a very young age of 14 in 1933 and apprenticed in the laundry business in San Francisco, Chinatown, and then became naturalized by enlisting in the United States Army during World War II.
My mother is a great cook, a lot of homestyle Cantonese cooking. She is still trying to pass those down to us and it’s great fun. I’d love to preserve a lot of that culture, certainly the Chinese holidays and observances. We celebrate the changing of the seasons. We just celebrated what we call Dragon Boat Festival, where we make tamales wrapped in banana leaves and they are fantastic. Those kinds of things we are trying to preserve, between my sisters and me. But food [is important] for us. You cooked once and you had enough for an army because it had to last.
So how did you pick Alameda? Nobody ends up in Alameda by accident, you don’t pass through Alameda to get somewhere else. You come here for a reason, or something drags you here.
I like the seemingly slower pace. I also like the proximity to everything that is vibrant and urban about the Bay Area and Oakland, tremendously diverse. But I had known about Alameda when I was at Cal. I had a good friend who lived on the island of Alameda, so I had an opportunity to explore it at that time and I really was charmed by it. I love the diverse architecture, and I thought it might be a good place to be. I think politically it was probably a little bit more conservative than it is now, but there’s been a lot of changes here.
What do you love about Alameda?
I really appreciate seeing how we’ve had this whole history of a military presence here and how the island has transformed itself. I’m very, very proud of the fact that we’ve met our housing element, but we’re going to have to deal with the affordability issue. The fact that we have had units approved, you see construction all over the island, [I’m] very, very proud of that. It is an incredible transition.
I particularly like the sense of community. You know, I grew up in that. I feel like San Francisco has lost a bit of that, but it is something that I believe we can recreate again.
Who do you like to read? What are you reading now?
I like to read historical fiction, but also some historical accounts. There’s a great book if you like gardening, called Founding Gardeners, and it speaks to the founding fathers and the importance of horticulture, botany, and agriculture in their development as leaders of this country.
I’m a little bit of a homebody. [I like] to cook, I love having people over. Cooking is my therapy.
What do you do when you’re home in Alameda?
I love the fact that you can walk everywhere. You can be out of your car. My husband and I love walking. We are known to take lots of long walks. And I like staying home. I’m a little bit of a homebody. [I like] to cook, I love having people over. Cooking is my therapy. I like to experiment. I’m a little bit of a version of ‘Chopped.’ I see what’s around and I try to be creative about what to make. Lately it’s been some creative fusion ramen dishes. It’s fantastic. So, is it Korean, is it Vietnamese, is it Japanese? Well, all the above.
Adam Gillitt is the Publisher of the Alameda Post. Reach him at [email protected]. His writing is collected at AlamedaPost.com/Adam-Gillitt.
