Despite a Blue Wave election, much damage has already been done.

Kevin Dayton is a policy wonk, by nature and by profession. He built a career out of keeping tabs on dozens of government agencies and updating his clients on issues that may matter to them.

In recent years, those local clients included the Salinas Valley Chamber of Commerce and Monterey Peninsula Chamber of Commerce and, until a few years ago, the Salinas City Center Improvement Association. (His work with the Monterey Peninsula Taxpayers Association was mostly in a volunteer capacity.)

Dayton has monitored a big range of government affairs issues. Then a confluence of those issues came down on him and his family, driving them away from California after 12 years in Monterey County.

Dayton lost one Sacramento-based client because they replaced his role with AI. “They said, ‘You do a great job but we think we can have a computer do it at one-tenth of the price,’” he says. (He doesn’t hold it against them: “Everyone’s got to watch the bottom line.” But, he adds, “To think a machine is going to do it all is just the wrong direction for civilization.”)

Dayton has long been tracking declining enrollment in K-12 schools – a symptom, he says, of the impossibly high cost of housing that makes the region out of reach for families with children – and his wife, Nancy, found herself in the crosshairs of that trend. She worked as a principal of a school in Santa Cruz County that closed, putting her out of a job.

The other factor was the impossibly high cost of health care. In October, the family – two adults and one child (their eldest is in college) – got a $4,100 monthly bill for insurance.

“That was a hard hit for us,” Dayton says. “Health insurance is just out of control here.”

His wife had already gotten a job at a school in Asheville, North Carolina and moved out there. Then Dayton got a call from a recruiter about an opening at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, which “advances the principles of free markets and limited government.” He moved to Midland, Michigan the first week of November for his new job.

On Tuesday, Nov. 17, the Monterey County Board of Supervisors is set to approve a resolution honoring Dayton’s contributions to this community. The resolution credits Dayton for “diligently reviewing public meeting agendas, participating in local government proceedings, and writing extensively on labor, water, housing and economic issues.” Ironically, it is those same issues that have driven him and his family out of the state.

“The middle is sort of ignored.”

“There’s a lot of rich people and a lot of poor people that serve them and not a lot of people in the middle,” Dayton says. “The middle is sort of ignored.”

In the realm of health insurance in particular, he understands why the federal government would act to end subsidies against middle-class families like his – they earn too much to need subsidies. They had previously benefited from Obamacare subsidies that made their health plan manageable. Then HR 1, or the “One Big, Beautiful Bill” ended those subsidies, sending their cost of insurance skyrocketing.

Meanwhile, as both people who are poor and middle-class watch their health insurance slip away, the bureaucracy needed to implement it is expanding. On Nov. 17, the County Department of Social Services is asking the Board of Supervisors to approve the pass-through of $7.1 million in state funding for administrative support to increase the number of eligibility specialists by 25 (up from 240), starting Nov. 30.

Annette Gallegos, assistant deputy director of the Department of Social Services, says these workers will be needed to help manage an estimated 47,000 enrollees, who in 2027 will be required to renew every six months. Another roughly 24,000 people will need their eligibility reassessed based on new requirements.

It’s the worst of all worlds: Driving away middle-class families that can no longer afford health care, and driving poor people off of Medi-Cal (and making it more cumbersome for everyone). Meanwhile, the bureaucracy needed to deliver bad news about eligibility is the only place seeing new growth.

The Blue Wave has arrived too late to solve this big pile of problems, even if the voters have spoken to say something we already knew is true: The costs of everything are just too damn high.

SARA RUBIN is the Weekly’s editor. Reach her at sara@montereycountynow.com.