SECTION 1.

 The Legislature finds and declares all of the following:

(a) For nearly 30 years, California’s local conservation corps have provided California’s disenfranchised young adults a safety net and career pathway through alternative education and workforce development programs. These programs and services include hands-on paid work experience and training, leadership development, mentoring and life skills development, high school diploma completion, transitional services, and job readiness training.

(b) The Orange County Conservation Corps (OCCC) has established a track record of providing these services and pursuing its mission while meeting the highest standards for accountability and performance. Over the last 29 years, OCCC has serviced over 9,000 young adults throughout Orange County. In 2020 alone, OCCC corpsmembers worked over 87,205 paid on-the-job training hours and OCCC facilitated the successful transition of more than 150 corpsmembers into competitive employment or postsecondary education. On a yearly basis, OCCC works with 34 local public agencies to complete at least 25 conservation projects throughout the region that provide training opportunities for the corpsmembers.

(c) With 840 miles of shoreline, more residents than any other state in the union, and as the world’s fifth largest economy, California is inextricably linked to the Pacific Ocean and the world’s oceans in general.

(d) The reality and impacts of climate change on California are clear and constitute a crisis, including all of the following:

(1) Much of California’s coast has seen the rate of temperature change increase by 2.5–3.5 degrees per century.

(2) Sea levels have risen in the last two decades to nearly double that of the last century.

(3) Sea level around the City of San Francisco has risen by six inches just since 1950. Its speed of rise has accelerated over the last 10 years and is now rising by about one inch every 10 years. This effect is accelerating; it is projected that the City of San Francisco will repeat the six inches of sea level rise it experienced from 1977 to 2016, a span of 39 years, in just 2017 to 2033, a span of 16 years.

(4) The top 100 meters of ocean has warmed more than 0.6 degrees Fahrenheit since 1969.

(5) Ocean surface water acidity has increased by about 30 percent since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

(6) In total, climate change, and specifically its effect on the ocean, puts California’s residents and their way of life at significant hazard, including hazards related to built infrastructure, coastal erosion, tourism, coastal wetlands, beaches, and drinking water.

(e) An organization with the training, conservational, and organizational capacities of the OCCC could significantly advance California’s climate resiliency and ocean conservation goals by giving young people the opportunity to engage in structured and focused ocean conservation work, addressing in part the state’s needs in climate resilience, ocean conservation, workforce development, criminal justice, environmental justice, and the support of civic and volunteer service.

SEC. 3.

 The sum of twelve million dollars ($12,000,000) is hereby appropriated from the General Fund to the Orange County Conservation Corps for purposes of establishing and implementing the California Ocean Corps pursuant to Chapter 4.2 (commencing with Section 14414) of Division 12 of the Public Resources Code. Notwithstanding any other law, these funds are available for encumbrance until January 1, 2027.

SEC. 4.

 The Legislature finds and declares that a special statute is necessary and that a general statute cannot be made applicable within the meaning of Section 16 of Article IV of the California Constitution because the recent oil spill off the coast of the County of Orange has created an urgent need of assistance in the recovery and conservation of the coast in that region.