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California Destiny Plan

California Destiny Plan

North Star

California Flourishing

Priorities

  • Cost of Living

  • Economy

  • Homelessness

  • Crime

  • Wildfire Prevention

  • Permit Reform

Thesis

Stasis is a myth. Civilizations either crumble or flourish. That leaves us with only one viable option if we seek to leave a better California, a better America, to our children and our children’s children. We must prosper. And prosperity isn’t partisan. Prosperity is about every single Californian having more. Our political class today encourages us to look to our left and right, to divide us, to make us believe the only way to salvation is through them. I want you to look to the stars. I want you to believe in the power of yourself, your family, your community. I want you to view the problems facing California as beautiful challenges waiting to be destroyed by your optimism and your force of will. “That’s just the way it is.” No. The way it is is whatever the brave among us want it to be. I’m running because I love America and I love California. I want to do right by the top 100%. We are all Americans. We are all Californians. Let’s all win.

Goals

Will every goal be achieved in my term? Probably not. But we need to aim high. We need to at least imagine what total and complete winning looks like or there is zero chance of attaining it.

  • Fastest growing state in the country by population. There is no clearer indication of winning than people flocking to California.

  • Largest economy in the world behind only the US of A.

  • Beat Texas. Beat New York. Beat Florida. Beat China. At everything.

  • Lowest cost of housing, gasoline, electricity, and water in the country.

  • Highest energy producing state in the country.

  • Most efficient ports in the world.

  • Easiest place in the world to start a business.

  • Lowest crime, wildfire, and homeless rate in the country.

  • Fastest election vote counting in the country.

  • Fastest permit approval process in the country for new housing, buildings, infrastructure, and factories.

  • Foster technology development and deployment on all fronts. Technology is the only way humans get more for less- raising our standard of living while lowering costs.

  • Significantly lower taxes to put more money back in taxpayer pockets. Accomplish more with less. California collects more in taxes per capita than any other state and for that we rank nowhere near the top in any metric that matters: crime, homelessness, education, or infrastructure. Our budget grew over 60% from 2019 to 2024- where are all these taxpayer dollars going?

The California Destiny Plan

I don’t have all the answers and I’m sure some of these policies below I will be convinced are not right for California. What I do have is a total willingness to do what I believe is right for you, my constituent. I have no allegiances to any party or special interest group. This gives me total leeway to do what I believe is right. And this stuff is not that complicated. In America we have 50 states all running beautiful policy experiments- we can look around and easily see what works. The answers to the test are right in front of us.

Permit Reform

  • Overhaul the California Environmental Protection Agency (CalEPA), California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), and California Coastal Commission (CCC) to issue permits an order of magnitude more quickly. Texas recently surpassed California in solar power generation with planned projects that will leave us in the dust. It’s not because they care about climate change, it’s because they encourage building.

  • Permit safe rainmaking weather modification technologies (cloud seeding) to address our water shortage. This technology has existed for decades.

  • Modern nuclear energy reactors are melt down proof and the safest and cleanest form of energy generation. Fast track the deployment of both small modular reactors and larger scale reactors.

  • Create regulatory clarity for fusion energy to attract this clean and holy grail energy technology to our state.

  • Repeal 1988 Proposition 103 which places undue burden on insurance companies to operate in the state. This prop greatly limits insurance companies from raising rates to match risk, prevents them from using advanced statistical models (they can only use old historical data) and also unlike any other state they are not allowed to pass on the cost of reinsurance to consumers. The result? Insurance companies leave the state and consumers are far worse off.

  • Fast track permitting for mining operations to ensure our clean energy transition and protect our critical industries. It is more humane, environmentally friendly, and supply chain resilient if we bring mining home.

Unions, Government Workers

  • Negotiate fair pay for California government employees to save taxpayers billions. Our government workers are the highest paid in the country. They make twice the amount of private sector employees- including more vacation and better benefits.

  • Negotiate fair pay with California Highway Patrol officers who have an average compensation of over $200,000, significantly higher than the average for the highest paid private sector job in the country. 

  • Overhaul our prison system to spend far less and create incentives that reward prisons when criminals do not return. California spends twice as much as the median state on corrections per prisoner. Negotiate fair pay with our prison guards to reign in spending. They handle a vital role but the taxpayers deserve a seat at the negotiating table and senior prisoner guard compensation exceeding $200k a year isn’t fair to the taxpayer and is totally out of bounds compared to other states.

  • Government pension systems (CalPERS and CalSTRS) must be overhauled to save taxpayers billions a year. Move from a defined benefit program to a defined contribution program which the private sector transitioned to decades ago.

  • Ban government unions. They are cartels that distort our politics and take the taxpayer for a ride. These government unions in CA collectively spend a billion a year on political contributions- spending more than anyone else. These are funded by taxpayer dollars and ensure that pro union politicians stay in power and bend over backwards to give the unions everything they want instead of working on behalf of the taxpayer. Our government workers should be paid and treated fairly, but the taxpayer deserves politicians who represent their interests as well.

  • Automate The Port of Los Angeles and the Port of Long Beach. Lowering the cost of all goods for Californians and all Americans.

Cheaper, Faster, Better Government

  • Overhaul the licensing racket which serves only to protect practitioners over consumers. Remove the need for occupational licenses for florists, barbers, hairdressers, and any other jobs that don’t pose a public safety risk. Fast track teacher, doctor, lawyer, nurse, plumber, and electrician certification. Related, allow bar reciprocity so lawyers licensed elsewhere can practice here. Also, lower the cost of dental care by allowing dental hygienists to work independently without a dental practice. 

  • California has the highest LLC fees in the country- bring this annual fee from $800 a year to $0. Business creation is the engine of the economy and disincentivizing it and punishing business owners with an extra fee every year is insulting.

  • Cancel the high speed rail project which is years behind schedule and billions over budget with no end in sight. The Bakersfield to Merced portion is projected to cost $35 billion- exceeding the estimated cost for the entire system from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Even in 2008, California’s own Legislative Analyst Office declared the plan deficient. A French company attempted to help California build the railway, but left to focus on North Africa which is “less politically dysfunctional.” This is not a joke.

  • If California goes over the annual budget for non emergency or non war reasons- dock the pay for every state assemblyman, state senator, governor, and anyone in a position managing a significant amount of taxpayer dollars. There is currently no incentive for our political leaders to manage our budget appropriately.

  • Introduce a sunset review process to remove or simplify regulations over time. Idaho started this process in 2019 and it has resulted in a much leaner and simplified regulatory environment.

  • Modernize our police forces with drones and cameras in high risk areas. Las Vegas PD has set the bar using these tactics and now has the highest murder solve rate in the country.

  • Increase trust in our elections by requiring an ID to vote. Couple this with reforms at the DMV to make it much faster to get a form of identification. Many nations including Canada, Germany, France require ID to vote and 81% of Americans support it as well.

  • Repeal the Private Attorneys General Act which outsources to lawyers the enforcement of California labor law. As a result, California businesses are drowning in frivolous lawsuits.

  • Modernize the Employment and Development Department (EDD) to move away from 1980s mainframes and into the 21st century to avoid billions of dollars in fraudulent unemployment claims and prevent the holdup of legitimate claims. The EDD sent out $31 billion in pandemic era fraudulent claims after cancelling fraud software that cost a mere $2m a year- less than 1% of the EDD budget. As a result, we defaulted on our $18 billion dollar loan from the federal government- one of only four states in the union to do so. Leaving California businesses with surprise end of year bills to cover the negligence.

  • Encourage the development of new cities to vastly increase opportunity for millions of current Californians and millions of new ones. The California Forever project is an ambitious plan to build a new city. Let’s foster this energy. Let’s develop the Presidio in SF, let’s flood the Salton Sea, let’s build Frontier Valley. Let’s build.

  • Cancel all lottery games. These serve as a regressive tax on the poor. The poorest in our communities are the ones most likely to throw their hard earned dollars away. Give Californians the dignity of true opportunity.

  • Undo AB 1346 which banned retailers in the state from selling gas powered lawn mowers, leaf blowers, and trimmers. This places an unnecessary burden on lawn care companies as the electric equivalents are far more expensive and do very little to address climate change. A UCLA study declared the wildfires of 2020 undid 18 years of all the greenhouse gas emission reductions we’ve made as a state. Leave lawn mowers alone.

  • Repeal AB 218 which greatly expands liability and statute of limitations for child sexual assault from government workers- bankrupting California’s cities. Santa Monica faces $120 million in damages and Los Angeles is facing $4 billion. Absolutely justice must be served but it needs to be reasonable and not hugely detrimental to our cities’ budgets.

  • Join 27 other states to pass a resolution for a balanced budget amendment to the constitution. The United States is careening towards bankruptcy, we must reign the central government in.

Homelessness 

  • Bring transparency to the homeless industrial complex so taxpayers can see clearly what they are getting for the billions being spent. California spends more than any other state on homelessness yet we have the most homeless. We are 11 percent of the population yet have 24 percent of the homeless population. A state audit showed $24 billion was spent on homelessness in 5 years with no tracking on how the money was spent or what the outcomes were. AB 2903 and AB 2570 were vetoed by Governor Newsom, both would have mandated much needed accountability and transparency in the system. Prop 1 passed in 2024 allocates billions towards beds for the homeless at a cost of $650k per bed. At that rate, it would cost $320b to solve the homeless problem. Cut the tap, fire everyone, full reset.

  • Enforce anti camping laws. In most cities it is illegal to camp on public property, let’s enforce the law.

  • California is the only state in the union that has passed a housing first law. Meaning that it is illegal to require sobriety checks or drug addiction treatment when offering housing to the homeless. We must give our addicts the dignity of encouragement to save themselves, not just throw taxpayer resources at them without any encouragement to get better.

  • Medicaid will not reimburse states for facilities treating mental illness if the facility has over 16 beds. A horrible policy, but fortunately states can apply for a Medicaid IMD waiver to get reimbursed for facilities with over 16 beds. Of course California has yet to apply for this waiver, but we absolutely should.

Wildfires

  • Take a small portion of California’s fire budget (the largest in the world) and allocate it towards yet to be invented high tech solutions that make wildfires a thing of the past.

  • Fast track prescribed burns of high risk forests to reduce wildfire risk. It takes an average of 4.7 years to get through environmental reviews. Surely we can move faster. This also applies to dense brush that poses high fire risk. Palisades brush clearing was postponed due to an environmental review- review that.

  • Fast track all water storage projects. Prop 1 was passed in 2014 to build several reservoirs and not a single one has been completed. Related, 117 million gallon Santa Ynez Reservoir which would have helped fight the Palisades fire had been out of commission for nearly a year when the fires broke out. The fire hydrants went dry. Inexcusable.

  • Allocate funding to put power lines underground in high risk areas to prevent wildfires.

  • Allow for commercial vehicles to be retrofitted as fire trucks to greatly lower costs and expand our firefighting capabilities. There is a fire truck cartel that controls the market leading to long lead times, higher prices, and trucks that remain out of service longer.

Housing and Cost of Living

  • Lower housing costs and rent costs by massively increasing supply by legalizing more types of buildings (e.g. single staircase) and fast tracking permitting. Austin and Minneapolis have seen their rents plummet as they have allowed more housing to be built.

  • Fast track higher density housing but also sprawl. Let people live where they want to live. Only 5% of our land is developed in CA, even just increasing that by 1% will lead to 10 million more units of housing. Let people live how they want to live. 

  • Ban Vehicle Miles Traveled rules which greatly impedes housing and new business to get built. 

  • In California there are a million housing units that have been approved but are currently blocked by lawsuits because anyone can sue to stop them due to private right of action. 70% of these lawsuits blocking housing are filed by unions to force union only labor on developers. Repeal private right of action from CEQA.

  • Significantly lower the cost of gasoline by lowering gas taxes (we have the highest in the country and to add insult to injury, they go up in line with inflation), encouraging oil production in the state (we import the bulk of it from the middle east which has much lower environmental standards), and keeping open the refineries that make the special cleaner burning California gas blend. High fuel costs disproportionately hurt the lower class as a larger percentage of their earnings go to fuel.

Economy

  • Allow staking of crypto assets by overturning the enforcement by the Department of Financial Protection and Innovation. Preventing staking does absolutely nothing to protect consumers and only serves to drive financial innovation out of our state.

  • Create a strategic Bitcoin reserve to protect California from the impending US debt crisis.  

  • Ensure California retains the highest concentration of aerospace talent in the world. America was the frontier, now it’s space. Ensure we are the conduit to the new world.

  • Ensure California remains the AI capital of the world. Avoid ham-fisted regulation that will stifle innovation and drive companies and tax revenue out of the state.

  • Expand workforce training grants to compensate employers for training workers in high demand fields. Double down on CMTC to expand California’s manufacturing prowess.

  • Leverage desalination, along with cloud seeding, to end water scarcity and ensure plenty of water for our farmers, businesses, and people.  

Education

  • Increase the amount of time it takes for teachers to receive tenure. It is currently only two years- after which firing even poorly performing teachers becomes extremely difficult.

  • 1 on 1 tutoring is the most powerful educational intervention you can do- we can now scale this type of instruction with AI- and it’s already started. Bring this to our public schools en masse to supercharge our teachers and give every child the opportunity to succeed.

  • Allow and encourage high achieving high schoolers to take college level courses and enter college early.

  • Some school districts are getting rid of advanced and honors classes. Let’s do the opposite. Ensure our high achieving students are able to push themselves to the limit.

  • Allow school districts to pay higher performing teachers more. Wisconsin did this with Act 10 leading to higher test scores and more teachers.

  • Compensate technical schools based on income outcomes for their students- incentivizing them to prepare students for the most in demand jobs. Texas leverages this model to great effect.

  • Replicate the “Mississippi Miracle” which leveraged evidence based policy reforms on literacy and development to bring the state from 49th in reading in 2013 to top 20 in 2023.

Who Am I

I am Dick Lucas- a born and bred Californian. Born in the early 90s and raised in Glendale where I attended Holy Redeemer elementary school. In 8th grade I got my start in politics with a run for school president. My mom was my campaign manager- we won. And I’m the first politician to say this, but I legitimately got nothing done. From there I attended Notre Dame High School in the Valley, Sherman Oaks, where my grades were good enough and I ran track and cross country. It was then when I became very interested in software and the wonderful power of the internet. I continued my running career at Boston College where I finally started to study computer science second semester sophomore year. I had delayed it because I thought computer science was something for “smart people.” That was a great lesson- all you need is will. I graduated in 2015 and went straight to work as a software developer building Android apps for early stage companies and Fortune 500s alike. It was during this time I fell in love with the power of technology and its singular ability to increase living standards and opportunity. Then in 2019, after hiking with my sister through our beautiful state on the Pacific Crest Trail, I cofounded a software business in 2019 where I have created jobs, managed teams, and built software used by millions of people. It was during this time, as a business owner and living in Venice and Santa Monica, that I felt first hand the failures of our government. So I poured hours and hours into reading about every single decision on my ballot and then published voter guides for my friends, family, and fellow Californians. This was when I realized the people actually in charge are below mediocre and have accomplished very little outside of winning an election. I married my wife in 2024 and we traveled to 29 countries on our honeymoon. That experience drilled into me the power of sane governance. It’s what pushed me over the edge to run for office. Today, I run my business from Santa Monica and my wife and I are expecting a baby girl. 

Why I’m Running

Competition is the most powerful force in the world for improving and maintaining a system. Without pressure- institutions die. Without competition- accountability ceases to exist. As I poured hours and hours into creating voter guides to educate my fellow Californians on their ballot a sad realization washed over me. Many of these elections were not competitive. Especially in the one party state of California, it was less an election and more an anointing by the powers that be. Elections run uncontested or contested by nominees with not even a functional website. As I researched, I was expecting at least to learn what our candidates believe. But their campaign statements and websites are full of word salad political speak that says nothing in particular- allowing them to hide. I was expecting at least some debate among the potential candidates so ideas could be tested and we the constituents could build an informed opinion. There is no debate in these local and state level elections. Why would there be? The incumbent has no reason to debate someone when there is no chance of the opposition winning. That changes. I’m running because the bar is truly lower than Badwater Basin. I’m running because I believe our political class needs to be challenged. I’m running because I know how to communicate, build teams, and execute on projects. I’m running because I’m sick of talking about the problems I see in America without offering an alternative. I’m running so I can inspire others to do the same. Let’s get it.

When I Win

It’s simple. I have a set of priorities and a list of policies that flow from that. I will work with anyone, regardless of party, to enact these policies. I will update you, my constituents, weekly on each and every one of them. Will I find a single fellow legislator who agrees with every single one of my policies? Certainly not. But I am sure every single one agrees with at least one of them, and that’s all that’s needed. As I learn, some of my policies will be modified and some I am sure I will be convinced are not in the best interest of our state. But I will iterate quickly, I will be open to being wrong, admitting it, then moving on. But I promise, unlike the status quo, I will keep you updated every step of the way. You will know exactly the moves I am making and exactly the obstacles I am facing in Sacramento. I assure you it will be an awesome time.