UC Online & the Politics Behind It

A real estate agent in Laguna has filed an initiative calling for creation of something called UC Online. Here in an excerpt:

...The purpose of this measure is, without impacting the tax payer: to further the public's right to access publicly owned postsecondary knowledge; to further the public's right to access publicly owned postsecondary accredited degree programs; to minimize the cost of that access; to create a high quality, fully accredited, publically accessible, free/low cost online university, known as the University of California Online, to facilitate that access; to create an online university that will authorize UC, CSU, and CCC students to access impacted classes and finish their UC, CSU, and CCC degrees, respectively, online; to create a new path for students to earn credit for and possibly enroll into UC; to encourage the use of open educational resources; to require that tuition at the new university include course books and materials; to lower the costs of all UCO, UC, CSU, and CCC books- by creating large buyers of books (UCO and the UCO Bookstore) better able to negotiate lower book prices; to require tuition charged to students at the new university reflect actual costs and expenses, only; to require fully transparent tuition cost accounting at the new university; and, to authorize full funding of the University of California Online... 

Source: https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/initiatives/pdfs/17-0025%20%28UC%20Online%29_0.pdf

Before you get too excited, note that it costs only $2,000 to file an initiative. If you really want to get it on the ballot, you need to hire signature-gathering firms which will probably run you $2 million. And if you get it on the ballot, you'll need to finance a campaign for it. So this is a snowball-in-hell in terms of its chances of going anywhere. But why is it being pushed?

Mr. Roberts is one of several Democrats hoping to unseat Republican Congressman Dana Rohrbacher. Apart from the changing demographics in Orange County, which are making Rohrbacher vulnerable, Rohrbacher has been doing bizarre things such as meeting with Julian Assange and claiming to have proof that the Russians didn't give Clinton's emails to Wikileaks. Rohrbacher, even before, was known for a soft spot for Putin.

See: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/rohrabacher-rendez-vous-trump-info-assange

Sometimes folks file initiatives hoping to be noticed. In this case, other than yours truly, no one seems to have noticed, at least so far.