The Caucus to Watch as California’s Legislative Session Closes

Watch one group this session more closely than any party or rising star: the Problem Solvers Caucus. It is a bipartisan, bicameral bench of 26 legislators, many of them children and grandchildren of immigrants, who cross party lines to govern. Its four co-chairs are all Latino, split evenly between the parties and the chambers: Assemblymembers Anamarie Ávila Farías (D-Martinez), David Alvarez (D-San Diego), and Juan Alanis (R-Modesto), plus Senator Suzette Valladares (R-Santa Clarita).

Latino voters are the fastest-growing bloc in California politics, and they are walking away from rigid partisan labels. The caucus’s makeup tracks that shift. It represents the whole state, not any single community.

Mike Madrid, the leading expert on Latino political trends and author of The Latino Century, documents the reason: Latinos are not realigning to one party. They are dealigning from both, and they now form the fastest-growing bloc of independent voters in California. “It’s a dealignment, it’s not a realignment,” he said. This caucus is what that shift looks like when it reaches the Capitol. It arrives as California remakes its leadership in the image of the state itself: a Latino U.S. senator, the leaders of both legislative chambers, and the frontrunner in the governor’s race. The caucus captures a singular moment in California’s political history.

The record backs it up. Over several years, these 26 legislators have built a run of bipartisan wins on affordability, housing, public safety, energy reliability, and regulatory accountability. The bill that grabs the headlines, one of the biggest affordability fixes in years, is just one example. The real story is the caucus itself, and the coalition it keeps proving is possible.

Sacramento has trained Californians to expect a familiar disappointment. Two parties treat every issue as a loyalty test. Lawmakers answer to special-interest scorecards that reward the party line over solving problems. Press conferences settle nothing. And a cost-of-living crisis everyone calls real goes unfixed. Gas costs more here than anywhere in the country, affordable housing is scarce, and the Capitol’s usual answer is another hearing. The Problem Solvers Caucus measures success by outcomes, not by the approval of advocacy groups. Its record proves the point, not any single bill.

What Californians Are Asking For

Ask Californians what keeps them up at night and you get the same answer every time: the cost of living. When the Public Policy Institute of California asked which single issue matters most to the state, cost of living topped everything else. By July the message to the state’s next leaders was nearly unanimous: 96% of likely voters called affordability and the cost of living important to their November vote, most of them very important.

PPIC’s May 2026 survey found that majorities of Californians say higher gas prices have hit their finances, and more than half say recent price increases have caused real hardship at home. The fact is undeniable: California ranks among the most expensive states in the country to live in. Berkeley’s IGS Poll found the same, with cost of living topping voters’ concerns at 36% and housing affordability right behind at 29%. UC Berkeley’s Citrin Center found it again in its March 2026 poll with POLITICO: cost of living led as the single most important issue at 40%, more than double any other concern, and 70% of voters said the state handles their top issue not well at all.

This is exactly the electorate the Problem Solvers Caucus was built for: one that keeps saying affordability is the priority, and keeps waiting for Sacramento to act like it.

Who’s Behind It

The California Problem Solvers Caucus launched in 2020 as a bipartisan, bicameral group drawing members from both parties and both houses. It now counts 26 members. Its slogan: “people over party.”

The structure forces real work over performance. Members meet in person every other week to hear from experts and hash out policy, add rapid-response Zoom sessions during legislative crunch periods, and hold longer summits on major issues. The four co-chairs split leadership evenly across party and chamber.

The caucus puts affordability at the core of its mission and argues that prosperity and affordability are not competing priorities but inseparable ones. It measures policy by results, not intentions. That is the standard it set for itself, and its own tally of accomplishments runs well past a single bill.

Co-chair Anamarie Ávila Farías (D-Martinez) makes the case as clearly as anyone. She sits down with stakeholders on all sides and builds a real legislative record: not just a gas bill, but a string of wins across energy, housing, and public safety. Voters keep saying they want more independent, results-first legislators like her. A KPBS analysis of legislative voting records counted her among the Legislature’s rare mavericks and found she cast more “no” votes against her own party than any other Democrat in the chamber last year. The caucus’s growing list of bipartisan wins shows what that looks like in practice.

A Track Record, Not a Talking Point

The caucus’s own accounting of its work lays out a broad pattern of bipartisan wins on affordability and accountability:

• Cap-and-trade cost containment. The caucus adopted bipartisan cap-and-trade policy principles ahead of the program’s 2025 reauthorization and says its advocacy shaped affordability provisions in the final extension, which now runs through 2045.
• Sharper regulatory scrutiny. The caucus developed 20 recommendations to expand the state’s Standardized Regulatory Impact Analysis process, pushing agencies to show the cost impact of new rules on businesses and consumers before adopting them.
• A five-bill retail theft package. In 2024, the caucus endorsed legislation cracking down on repeat retail theft offenders and aiding cargo-theft investigations, work that dovetailed with Speaker Rivas’s own retail theft agenda.
• Restoring floodplain funding. When the 2023-24 state budget cut flood management dollars, the caucus led a bipartisan push that restored the funding.
• A bipartisan immigration framework. The caucus forged shared principles on border security, due process, and legal status for essential workers, an attempt to find common ground on one of Sacramento’s most polarizing issues.
• Protecting energy reliability. The caucus says it helped safeguard the state’s power supply during the clean-energy transition by building support for extending operations at the Diablo Canyon Power Plant, secured via SB 846 in 2022.

Those wins carry Republican fingerprints as much as Democratic ones. Senator Suzette Valladares of Santa Clarita, one of the caucus’s two Republican co-chairs, built her own agenda around the cost of living. She rolled out an affordability legislative package she framed as “lowering costs, increasing transparency, and putting money back in the pockets of those who earn it,” and warned that “with the highest cost of living in the nation, Californians are working harder than ever, yet falling further behind.” Assemblymember Juan Alanis of Modesto, a former law enforcement officer from the agriculture-rich Central Valley and the fourth co-chair, describes the job plainly: “I have found I am very good at building bridges and finding reasonable consensus on major issues.” The same instinct drives every item on the list: two parties deciding that lowering costs for Californians beat scoring points off each other.

Climate Goals and Affordability, Not One or the Other

The caucus’s approach to California’s cornerstone climate program shows how it works. It refuses to treat environmental goals and consumer costs as opposites and insists on balancing them by design. In August 2025 it released four principles for reauthorizing the state’s cap-and-trade program. They center on protecting affordability while extending the program through 2045, and argue that free allowances and offsets “ease cost pressures on food, fuel, utilities, building materials and other consumer needs” while keeping jobs in the state.

“A clean extension of California’s Cap and Trade program isn’t good enough. We need to make changes that reduce Californians’ cost of living,” said co-chair David Alvarez. “We can do Cap and Trade and accomplish our climate goals in a way that attracts other governments to match our policies, but it must be cost effective.” Co-chair Suzette Valladares put the same balance plainly: “California’s climate policies should prioritize affordability and market principles while addressing environmental concerns.”

The approach carried into implementation. The caucus sent the California Air Resources Board a bipartisan, bicameral letter on the proposed cap-and-invest amendments and pressed CARB to “uphold its core statutory mandate: reducing greenhouse gas emissions in a way that is cost-effective, affordable, and protective of California ratepayers and workers.” Valladares warned that “the regulations being considered will directly impact the cost of gas, electricity, and everyday goods.” When CARB adopted its updates that May, the board described the changes as balancing “legislative direction, affordability, jobs and near-term economic concerns while also ensuring emissions reductions.”

The Receipt Everyone Points To: AB 30

The clearest proof of the model is also the newest. For eight years, California’s Air Resources Board refused to legalize E15, a cheaper gasoline blend sold in nearly every other state. In 2025 the caucus did it in a single bill. Governor Newsom signed it that October. AB 30 is projected to save California drivers roughly 20 cents a gallon, about $2.7 billion a year statewide, according to a study by UC Berkeley and the U.S. Naval Academy. Republicans and Democrats, Assembly and Senate, authored and coauthored it together, the kind of cross-party coalition Sacramento almost never produces.

Alvarez, who wrote the bill, called the win proof of the whole approach. “AB 30 is an example of how we can solve problems thoughtfully in California,” he said when Newsom signed it. “By authorizing the sale and use of E15 gasoline, we can reduce the cost of gas and maintain our commitment to a cleaner environment. I thank Governor Newsom and Speaker Rivas for their focus on affordability this year, and I look forward to working together on more solutions that improve the lives of Californians.”

AB 30 was not the finish line. Since it passed, the caucus has kept pressing on affordability. It insists that CARB’s regulators answer to working families instead of chasing revenue, so the cost of the state’s climate program stops landing on ordinary people’s gas and utility bills, and it keeps sounding the alarm on California’s fuel supply risks and rising prices. The same instinct produced AB 30 in the first place.

Working With Leadership

The caucus’s work reinforces what California’s legislative leaders are already pushing for. Speaker Robert Rivas, who grew up in farmworker housing on the Central Coast, has made affordability the defining mission of his speakership. He told the Assembly that lawmakers “must chart a new path forward” and that “it begins by focusing on affordability,” with more housing and lower energy costs at the center. The Problem Solvers Caucus works the same ground.

The overlap is specific. Rivas made lowering housing costs and stabilizing energy prices signature goals, including “preventing gas price spikes.” The caucus’s AB 30 delivered cheaper gasoline, and co-chair Ávila Farías’s housing bills target the cost of building homes. Rivas championed “the strongest retail theft and property crime laws in a generation.” The caucus backed a five-bill retail theft package in 2024. In his end-of-session address, Rivas called extending cap-and-trade “balancing ambition with affordability,” the exact balance the caucus’s own cap-and-trade principles were built to strike.

The alignment reaches the Senate. President pro Tempore Monique Limón, the first Latina to lead the chamber and, like Ávila Farías, the granddaughter of a Bracero Program farmworker, said her caucus “will continue to prioritize issues that our communities prioritize,” and named cost of living, housing affordability, health care, education, and child care. The Problem Solvers Caucus organizes its agenda around the same pressures. On the issues that define both leaders’ tenures, the caucus helps deliver.

The Co-Chair Making the Case

The caucus has a face for this argument: Ávila Farías. She is independent enough to work with the other side and disciplined enough to measure success by results, not press releases. Her path to the Assembly explains why. In her first run for the seat, in 2024, rival Democrats backed by some of the state’s biggest institutional players outspent her. One opponent carried the endorsement of the California Labor Federation and the Working Families Party and outraised her nearly three to one. Another was, in the words of the local paper covering the race, “backed by Big Oil, Business, Beer & Builders.” Ávila Farías advanced past both in a crowded four-way primary and won the general election. She kept that independent streak in Sacramento. A KPBS analysis of legislative voting records named her one of the Legislature’s rare mavericks and found she cast more “no” votes against her own party than any other Democrat in the chamber last year, a claim first reported by CalMatters. She isn’t the only one in that same analysis. The same CalMatters Digital Democracy review ranks co-chair Juan Alanis right behind the Legislature’s single most independent voter, finding he has broken from the majority of his own Republican colleagues 7% of the time. Two of the caucus’s four co-chairs showing up in the same independent-voting rankings is not a coincidence. It is the same instinct behind the caucus itself: represent the district first.

Ávila Farías is the granddaughter of Mexican immigrants who came to the U.S. through the Bracero Program. Her father died when she was three, and her single mother raised her in Martinez. She became one of the first in her family to earn an advanced degree, taking her bachelor’s and master’s from the University of San Francisco. Voters elected her to the Martinez City Council in 2012, the first Latina to serve on that body. She went on to the Contra Costa County Board of Education and the California Housing Finance Agency Board under both Governor Brown and Governor Newsom, a resume built almost entirely on local and regional public service before she reached Sacramento.

Now representing Assembly District 15 in Contra Costa and the East Bay, Ávila Farías co-chairs the Assembly’s Select Committee on Housing Finance and Affordability. Her legislative agenda reads like the caucus’s affordability mission translated into bill numbers. AB 874 would waive most impact and development fees for projects that reserve at least 49% of units as affordable housing. AB 722 funds housing and employment programs for people leaving incarceration. The Reducing California’s High Cost of Living Act (AB 1232) would require state agencies to weigh the cost-of-living impact of new regulations before adopting them. Together they form a housing and affordability agenda that mirrors, and helped build, the caucus’s own “results, not intentions” standard.

“Making California more affordable is how we make families thrive,” she said of the state budget, which she argued should be “all about giving people more financial breathing room without losing sight of long-term financial stability.” On housing, she is blunt about the scale of the gap: “We can’t afford to leave any housing solutions on the sidelines. California built 115,000 new homes in 2023, but only 20,000 were affordable.”

The Bottom Line

The takeaway is bigger than any single bill. In a Capitol built around loyalty tests and special-interest scorecards, these legislators put Californians ahead of the interests that grade them. They came to Sacramento to solve problems, not protect the status quo, and they do it by actually being bipartisan and bicameral instead of just saying the words. Two parties, two chambers, one standard: results over intentions, Californians over party. AB 30 is the receipt everyone points to, but the real story is the model behind it: four Latino co-chairs balanced across party and chamber, building a record on affordability, housing, public safety, and regulatory accountability at the very moment California’s leadership comes to look like them. This caucus puts constituents ahead of the interests that usually drive Sacramento, and it hands other lawmakers a template to follow. These public servants answer to their constituents, not to the machine. They came to represent the working families who sent them, and to deliver. That is the leadership Californians keep saying they want. It is also the leadership we should stand behind. If we want a government that puts Californians first, we should back the public servants who already do.