Dear Senator,
A man retires and the mail thins out. I’m sending one the other way.
In October 2023 you carried SB 650 across the finish line. When the Governor signed it, the fifty-fifty raffle for Major League sports stopped being an experiment and became permanent law. A quiet piece of work, the kind of fix that keeps a thing alive after the people who started it have moved on. The Giants Community Fund has served more than a hundred and fifty thousand kids on the strength of those proceeds. That math began on your desk.
The other raffle program, the one for the small nonprofits, is the reverse picture. It has a ninety-percent-to-charity rule that sounds generous until you try to run one. You can’t pay the printer. You can’t pay the software. You can’t pay a person to count the tickets, not if ninety cents is already spoken for. The program died the slow way, the way a field goes back to brush when nobody’s working it. The state hasn’t counted a receipt on it since 2003. Two hundred thousand California nonprofits, and a rule that stops them at the gate.
The fix isn’t complicated, and it’s already sitting on your shelf. Take the fifty-fifty frame you made permanent for the sports teams and hand it to the rest. Same split. Same oversight. Same transparency. If it’s good enough for the Dodgers, it’s good enough for the food bank. They just got a workable rule, and it’s time the rest had one too.
The technology has caught up to the idea. When the old ninety-percent law was written, tracking a raffle meant a shoebox and a paper ledger, and the worry was money going missing on the way to the cause. That worry was reasonable then. It’s not reasonable now. Every ticket can be numbered, every dollar traced from buyer to beneficiary in real time, on a phone, for pennies. The accounting problem that justified the old rule has been solved by engineers who never heard of it.
I’m writing to ask for your help. The effort is called 50/50 For All: one rule, every California charity, nothing fancy. Lend it your name. Lend it your voice. Give me a few introductions to the people who worked with you on SB 650. Your colleagues still in the building will read a letter from you differently than they will read one from me.
A legacy isn’t the bill you passed. It’s the bill that came next because yours worked. You built the door; I’m trying to widen it.
Retirement has its own rhythms, and I don’t want to intrude on them. If this finds you at the right time, I’d be grateful for a conversation.
With respect and with thanks,
Shane Clary