During council statements on Dec. 2, 2025, Mayor North sharply criticized state legislation and changes to cap-and-trade funding that he said prioritize high-speed rail over other programs.

Mayor North said the governor signed multiple bills near the end of the legislative session, and he identified one measure as "Senate Bill 237," which he said codified Kern County's countywide environmental review and has implications for permitting. He then focused on separate actions that he said extended cap-and-trade funding and guaranteed larger annual allocations to the high-speed rail project. "He turned that into a guaranteed $1,000,000,000 a year," the mayor said, arguing that the shift would deprive other programs—water projects and environmental efforts—of funding.

The mayor framed the change as a policy choice with distributional consequences: he said programs that once received portions of cap-and-trade funding would ‘‘take a bath’’ while high-speed rail received a larger guaranteed share. The mayor did not present staff reports or fiscal estimates from city staff during his remarks and did not identify any immediate local budget action tied to this critique; his comments were made during council statements rather than during a formal agenda item.

No council action on the state measures was taken at the meeting. The remarks were part of the council's nonaction statements period and do not constitute a city-level policy change. The mayor's comments, as delivered, were assertions about state-level funding decisions; no response from a state official or written fiscal analysis appeared on the meeting record.