California lawmakers are weighing a bill that would hand over 4,301 acres of coastal state park land to a Native American tribe, and critics say legislators haven’t learned from past decisions made without fully examining the consequences.
Assembly Bill 2356, carried by Assemblymember James Ramos, a San Bernardino Democrat, would transfer Tolowa Dunes State Park in Del Norte County to the Tolowa Dee-ni Nation. The tribe describes the land as ancestral territory and says the transfer would right historical wrongs committed against California’s Indigenous people.
“AB 2356 returns the Center of the World to the Taa-laa-wa Dee-ni’ and fulfills the state’s commitment to demonstrate respect for its original governments and people, while honoring its commitment to redress the state’s historical depredations and wrongs against California Indian People, including the Nation,” says a document the tribe is circulating in support of the bill.
The bill arrives as California lawmakers face mounting scrutiny over a pattern of large-scale commitments that turn out to cost far more, or deliver far less, than advertised.
The clearest recent example involves Medi-Cal. Four years ago, Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a $97.5 billion state surplus and used that figure to justify expanding Medi-Cal coverage to undocumented immigrants of all ages, a move he called the fulfillment of a campaign promise.
“I campaigned on universal health care,” Newsom said. “We’re delivering that.”
The expansion took effect in 2024. By that point, Newsom and legislators already knew the surplus number was wrong, the product of what turned out to be a $165 billion error in revenue projections. The state was actually running multibillion-dollar annual deficits.
Costs kept climbing. In 2025, the administration disclosed that Medi-Cal spending was running $6.2 billion above projections, driven largely by higher-than-expected enrollment among newly eligible immigrants. Newsom and the Legislature responded by freezing new enrollments.
The $97.5 billion surplus figure had never appeared in a budget document. It came from Newsom directly. Legislators accepted it without challenge, and they didn’t press the administration on its cost estimates for the expansion either. CalMatters has reported on how that episode fits a broader pattern of far-reaching commitments made before consequences are fully examined.
Observers point to an even older failure: California’s electricity deregulation roughly three decades ago, which produced shortages, blackouts, and a PG&E bankruptcy filing. That decision also moved quickly, with lawmakers focused more on the appeal of the idea than on what could go wrong.
The Tolowa Dunes transfer raises its own set of unanswered questions. The park covers 4,301 acres of Del Norte County coastline, one of the most ecologically sensitive stretches in Northern California. What happens to public access if the land changes hands? Who pays for maintenance? What management obligations, if any, would the Tolowa Dee-ni Nation take on? The bill’s supporters haven’t offered detailed public answers to those questions yet.
The tribe’s case for the transfer carries real weight. California’s treatment of its Native American people during the 19th and early 20th centuries included state-sanctioned violence and the forced removal of communities from land they had occupied for generations. The Tolowa Dee-ni Nation’s connection to the Del Norte coast predates statehood by centuries, and the argument that the land should return to tribal stewardship draws on that history directly.
But the Medi-Cal experience shows what happens when the state’s political class treats the appeal of an idea as a substitute for due diligence. Newsom and legislators wanted to be the first in the country to achieve something close to universal coverage. The goal wasn’t wrong. The failure to stress-test the numbers before committing was.
With AB 2356, the Legislature has a choice about how to proceed. Ramos and the Tolowa Dee-ni Nation can make a compelling moral argument. What the bill still needs is a full accounting of costs, public access rights, land management responsibilities, and long-term environmental oversight before any vote. Del Norte County’s coastal land belongs to all Californians right now, in the sense that it’s publicly held and publicly managed. Transferring that status is a permanent change, not a budget line that can be frozen when enrollment runs over projections.
California has transferred land to tribes before, and those transfers have worked. The state has also rushed major decisions without doing the work, and the bills have landed on people who couldn’t afford them.