The leader of California’s first-in-the-nation recovery task force said Wednesday it will not take a position on how much the state should compensate black residents, who economists estimate owe more than $800 billion for decades of overpolicing, a disproportionate amount. incarceration and housing discrimination.

The $800 billion is more than 2.5 times California’s $300 billion annual budget and does not include the recommended $1 million per older black resident for health disparities that have shortened their average lifespan. Nor does the figure count toward compensating people for property wrongly taken by the government or devaluing black businesses, two other damages the task force says perpetuate.

All forms of discrimination should be considered reparations,” Thomas Craemer, a professor of public policy at the University of Connecticut, told the panel on Wednesday. .

Black residents are not allowed to receive

cash

payments at any time, or ever, due to the legislature and government of the state. Gavin Newsom will ultimately decide whether reparations should be made. The task force faces a July 1 deadline to recommend the forms of compensation to be awarded and who should receive it, along with other remedies to repair the damage.

But the panel chair, Kamilah Moore, said on Wednesday it would be up to the state legislature to award a restitution amount based on the methodology recommended by economists and approved by the task force on Wednesday.

The task force is pretty much done with the compensation component. Our task was to create a methodology for calculating different forms of compensation that matches our findings, she said in an email.

For those who support reparations, the staggering $800 billion estimate underscores the long-term damage black Americans have suffered, even in a state that has never officially sanctioned slavery.

Several people commenting publicly on Wednesday spoke of the urgent need to pay black Americans for all that has been taken from them.

My family came from the South because they were running for their lives, they were afraid of being lynched just to vote,” says Sacramento-based Charlton Curry, who discusses reparations on his “Big C Sports” podcast.

Cash payments are necessary. Speaking of money, he said, noting that whites benefited from free land from the US government through the Homestead Act of 1862, and that Japanese Americans imprisoned during World War II and Jewish victims of the Holocaust have received reparations.

Critics attribute their defiance in part to the fact that California was never a slave state and say current taxpayers should not be responsible for damages related to events that occurred hundreds of years ago.

Bob Woodson, a prominent black conservative, calls reparations impractical, controversial and counterproductive.

No amount of money could ever atone for the evils of slavery, and it is insulting to suggest that it could, he said in an email to the Associated Press, adding that black communities depended on faith and family to keep communities thriving. build after slavery. Some of these communities only started to fall apart after we lost sight of these values, which are also key to the recovery of these communities.

Financial recourse is only part of the package being considered. Other proposals include paying jail time

working-class prisoners

Market value for their labor, establishing free wellness centers and planting more trees in black communities, banning bail, and adopting a K-12 Black studies curriculum.

Reparations negotiations have stalled at the federal level, but the idea has flourished in California as well as U.S. cities and counties after the murder of George Floyd, a black man, by

in the hands of

The Minneapolis Police Department. Newsom signed legislation in 2020 establishing the Reparations Task Force.

A San Francisco advisory committee has recommended $5 million payouts, as well as a guaranteed income of at least $97,000 and personal debt forgiveness for eligible individuals. Regulators expressed general support, but did not approve specific proposals. They will address the issue later this year.

US

Vice President Kamala Harris said on Wednesday from Ghana that she and President

joe

Biden supports a reparations inquiry, but the president has so far evaded calls from lawyers to create a federal commission.

California’s $800 billion estimate includes $246 billion in compensation

eligible

Black Californians whose neighborhoods were subjected to aggressive policing and prosecution in the war on drugs from 1970 to 2020. That would translate to nearly $125,000 for each eligible person, the advisers wrote.

Figures are approximate, based on modeling and population estimates. The economists also took in $569 billion to make up for the discriminatory practice of redlining

real estate transactions housing loans

. That would work out to about $223,000 per eligible resident from 1933 to 1977. The $569 billion is considered a maximum and assumes all 2.5 million Californians who identify as black are eligible.

But they won’t all be. People must meet residency and other requirements for monetary compensation. They must also be descendants of enslaved and freed black people in the US from the 19th century onward, excluding black immigrants.

The task force also approved methodologies for black business devaluation and unjust property taking on Wednesday. Those methodologies don’t have numbers because of a lack of data.

AP White House writer Chris Megerian in Accra, Ghana, contributed to this report.