John Fensterwald
California Gov. Gavin Newsom, left, joins former state Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger at a March 2024 news conference.
Credit: Damian Dovarganes / AP Photo
Top Takeaways
- A lawsuit calls on the Alameda County Superior Court to declare unconstitutional the state system of doling out billions of dollars in state bond money to renovate schools.
- Lawyers for the state have not yet responded in Miliani R. v. State of California, and Newsom hasn’t commented.
- Lawsuit asserts state’s building aid formula favors wealthy districts with large tax bases.
Gov. Gavin Newsom faces a decision in his last year as governor similar to one former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger faced in his first year two decades ago: How to deal with a lawsuit demanding that the state fix unhealthy and inadequate school facilities?
In 2004, Schwarzenegger, a political novice, moved quickly and, within a half year of becoming governor, settled a lawsuit that his predecessor, Gray Davis, had dragged out in San Francisco County Superior Court for more than three years. The landmark agreement that Schwarzenegger and his aides negotiated in 2004 redefined the state’s oversight over school facility conditions.
Nearly a quarter-century later, with some schools in equally deplorable shape as they were back then, a lawsuit filed in late October calls on the Alameda County Superior Court to declare unconstitutional the state system of doling out billions of dollars in state bond money to renovate schools.
The lawsuit argues that, with few exceptions, the system of matching grants rewards students in property-rich districts that can afford to issue large facility bonds while ignoring deteriorating schools in property-poor districts that can’t afford to maximize matching state grants.
Lawyers for the state have not yet responded in Miliani R. v. State of California, and Newsom hasn’t commented. But as the case moves forward in 2026, the governor, while not directly named as a defendant, will stake out his administration’s position one way or the other.
The question is: Will he act like Schwarzenegger or Davis, ignoring an aid formula that Newsom has acknowledged needs to be changed?
Asked what advice he’d give to Newsom, Schwarzenegger, who is now a health advocate and fitness mentor, said in an interview, “I think it’s a good opportunity now to go and fix it again.”
A question of a constitutional right:
The more recent lawsuit has echoes of the 2000 class action lawsuit Eliezer Williams v. State of California, named after a sixth grade student at Luther Burbank Middle School in San Francisco, which, according to the lawsuit, was…
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