Ethics violation lodged against former CalRecycle director

Los Angeles Times

04-03-2025

For lawmakers and lobbyists who worked on ensuring the passage of California's landmark plastic waste law, Rachel Wagoner's abrupt career shift was nothing short of jaw dropping.
The former director of CalRecycle — who oversaw, wrote and promoted the single-use plastic legislation known as SB 54 — is now the executive director of the Circular Action Alliance, a coalition of plastic and packaging companies determined to delay, if not derail, the law.
And it's not clear her pivot is legal.
On Feb. 19, an anonymous whistleblower submitted a formal complaint to California's Fair Political Practices Commission, asking the agency to investigate Wagoner on the grounds that she violated a 'switching sides' ban that prevents former regulators from receiving compensation to work against the state on matters they once oversaw.
'It's pretty egregious,' said Sean McMorris, transparency, ethics and accountability program manager for California Common Cause, a political watchdog group. 'I don't know how else to say it, regardless of whether any laws were broken or not, the public's going to look at that and say, 'What's going on here? This is pretty suspicious.''
Others say Wagoner was instrumental in pushing for regulations and language she is now calling problematic.
'It certainly raises a lot of concerns,' said Sen. Ben Allen (D-Santa Monica), who authored and sponsored the original legislation.
Wagoner did not respond to questions from The Times, but in an email exchange from Feb. 12, she did said she was proud of the time she worked for the state government and feels privileged to have been asked to advise companies and to provide 'information on SB 54 and California environmental and regulatory laws and processes.'
She said she does not advocate for the companies she represents in her new role — which include some of the world's largest producers and distributors of plastic packaging, including Amazon, Coca-Cola, Conagra, Procter & Gamble and Target. She said she just provides them with information.
Larine Urbina, a spokesperson for the coalition, said the state's political practices commission had not reached out to her organization, and therefore 'it wouldn't be appropriate for me to comment at this time.'
SB 54, the plastic waste law Wagoner helped craft, was designed to reduce single-use plastics and packaging and shift the responsibility of plastic waste to the companies that manufacturer, market or sell those products — and away from the consumer and local jurisdictions. That can be done either by reducing the amount of single-use plastics these companies create and sell, or by manufacturing products that can be recycled or composted.
According to one state analysis, 2.9 million tons of single-use plastic and 171.4 billion single-use plastic components were sold, offered for sale or distributed during 2023 in California.
Single-use plastics and plastic waste more broadly are considered a growing environmental and health problem. In recent decades, the accumulation of plastic waste has overwhelmed waterways and oceans, sickening marine life and threatening human health.
While the bill was signed into law in 2022, regulations designed to govern it had not yet been finalized.
For the past two years, stakeholders representing plastic manufacturers and producers, packaging companies, environmental groups and waste haulers have hashed out and negotiated proposed regulations — debating such things as the definition of 'producer,' or where on food service items the words 'reusable' or 'refillable' must be displayed.
Throughout this period, CalRecycle — which was led by Wagoner until March 2024 — helped guide the discussions and incorporated feedback into several proposed drafts of those rules.
For instance, in early June 2022, as the stakeholders were hammering out the first set of regulations, it became apparent that someone — the state or the industry — would periodically need to assess the state's waste infrastructure to ensure material was getting to where it needed to go and was being properly disposed of according to the law. The industry is responsible for meeting those targets — which include, among other requirements, that 65% of all single-use plastic packaging in the state is recycled by 2032.
The stakeholders had initially agreed this costly, time- and personnel-intensive evaluation should be conducted by the industry. This would allow the industry to evaluate the assessment as it was being conducted and be responsible for it. But according to sources, Wagoner — who was director of the state agency — decided that responsibility should fall to CalRecycle. Several drafts of the proposed rules and changes were shared with The Times.
Now, Wagoner and her industry coalition are complaining that the state is taking too long to do the assessment — which is expected to be completed in January 2026 — and, as a result, she said, it is compromising the ability of her organization to develop a program to meet their targets, which they need to have finalized by April 2026.
'This timeline is challenging even under ideal conditions,' she said in a Feb. 12 email. 'The planning process will have to start without this required data and will be difficult to complete because of this delay.'
In addition, Wagoner's critics say she oversaw regulation changes that some experts say would have potentially opened the door for certain kinds of chemical recycling technologies — technologies that superheat plastics and turn them into fuel or other kinds of plastics — including one from Eastman Chemical Co., a company that Wagoner began consulting for a few months after she stepped down from CalRecycle. The changes in the regulations — which included wording about hazardous materials — have since been corrected and addressed.
On Feb. 7, Eastman Chemical ran a sponsored ad in the Sacramento Bee heralding the benefits of recycling technologies. They also spent $177,500 in the fourth quarter lobbying CalRecycle on the SB 54 regulations.
The Circular Action Alliance and other industry-friendly groups, such as the California Chamber of Commerce, have also been actively lobbying the governor's office since mid-December, urging Newsom to delay finalization.
In a Dec. 15 letter to Newsom, the Chamber claimed the new law would cost California consumers more than $300 per year, a number that he said came from the state's own economic analysis. A Times review of that analysis shows just the opposite, however.
The state's economists said they anticipated an increase in personal income — starting with a $3 bump in 2024 and climbing to $131 by 2032.
In 2020, Wagoner was picked by Newsom to run CalRecycle. Prior to that, she had worked in the governor's office as a senior legislative strategist alongside Ann Patterson — who until Friday was Newsom's Cabinet secretary. Patterson stepped down soon after her husband, Nathan Barankin, became the governor's chief of staff.
Wagoner served as CalRecycle director through March 2024, when she resigned, she said, for personal reasons. She became the executive director of the Circular Action Alliance on Dec. 4, after consulting for Eastman Chemical for several months.
The Fair Political Practices Commission has not yet determined whether they will conduct an investigation or not. According to a Feb. 25 letter addressed to Wagoner, the former CalRecycle director has until March 11 to provide the agency with information to support her case, at which time, the agency will decide how to proceed.
'What happened may not be illegal, and I am not a lawyer, but I don't think the public believes this is how it should work in California,' said Heidi Sanborn, founding Director of the California Product Stewardship Council.