Upstate California is the name of a marketing campaign which seeks to promote business in the northernmost 20 counties of California. [1] Roughly the upper half of Northern California, the "upstate" designation encompasses primarily rural areas which contain 4.5% of California's population. Outside of public relations, this area is often referred to as far Northern California.
The northernmost counties of California have had longstanding concerns about representation in California's government. Partition and secessionist movements have occasionally arisen in the region, often packaged with proposals to split California into multiple states. A 1941 movement to combine the northernmost counties of California and southernmost counties of Oregon into the State of Jefferson fell apart, as it was announced the day before the December 7 attack on Pearl Harbor which led to the US entry into World War II. In the early 1990s, California State Assemblyman Stan Statham led an unsuccessful effort to split the northern counties into a new state. [2]
The term "Upstate California" was coined by Robert Berry, a marketing development specialist hired by a group of the northernmost counties of California. The name "Upstate California" was intended to draw upon the popular recognition of Upstate New York as a distinct region. [3] The Upstate California campaign did not want to partition California to create a separate state or geopolitical entity. Instead the group wanted to encourage business investment in California's sparsely populated northernmost counties which were felt to be too often ignored within the Northern California designation—the population centers of the San Francisco Bay Area and the Sacramento metropolitan area received the most attention. The Upstate California promotional campaign officially began on September 10, 2001. [4]
The Sacramento River is the principal river of Northern California in the United States and is the largest river in California. Rising in the Klamath Mountains, the river flows south for 400 miles (640 km) before reaching the Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta and San Francisco Bay. The river drains about 26,500 square miles (69,000 km2) in 19 California counties, mostly within the fertile agricultural region bounded by the Coast Ranges and Sierra Nevada known as the Sacramento Valley, but also extending as far as the volcanic plateaus of Northeastern California. Historically, its watershed has reached as far north as south-central Oregon where the now, primarily, endorheic (closed) Goose Lake rarely experiences southerly outflow into the Pit River, the most northerly tributary of the Sacramento.
Northern California is a geographic and cultural region that generally comprises the northern portion of the U.S. state of California. Spanning the state's northernmost 48 counties, its main population centers include the San Francisco Bay Area, the Greater Sacramento area, the Redding, California area south of the Cascade Range, and the Metropolitan Fresno area. Northern California also contains redwood forests, along with most of the Sierra Nevada, including Yosemite Valley and part of Lake Tahoe, Mount Shasta, and most of the Central Valley, one of the world's most productive agricultural regions.
The State of Jefferson is a proposed U.S. state that would span the contiguous, mostly rural area of southern Oregon and northern California, where several attempts to separate from Oregon and California, respectively, have taken place.
Interstate 280 (I-280) is a 57.5-mile-long (92.5 km) major north–south auxiliary Interstate Highway in the San Francisco Bay Area of Northern California. It runs from I-680 and US 101 in San Jose to King and Fifth Streets in San Francisco, running just to the west of the larger cities of San Francisco Peninsula for most of its route.
The term upstate may refer to the northerly portions of several U.S. states. On the east coast, upstate generally refers to places away from the Atlantic Ocean. It also can refer to parts of states that have a higher elevation, away from sea level. These regions tend to be rural; exceptions include Delaware and Illinois.
State Route 99 (SR 99), commonly known as Highway 99 or, simply, as 99, is a north–south state highway in the U.S. state of California, stretching almost the entire length of the Central Valley. From its southern end at Interstate 5 (I-5) near Wheeler Ridge to its northern end at SR 36 near Red Bluff, SR 99 goes through the densely populated eastern parts of the valley. Cities served include Bakersfield, Delano, Tulare, Visalia, Kingsburg, Selma, Fresno, Madera, Merced, Turlock, Modesto, Manteca, Stockton, Sacramento, Yuba City, and Chico.
State Route 160 is a state highway in the U.S. state of California consisting of two sections. The longer, southern, section is a scenic highway through the alluvial plain of the Sacramento River, linking SR 4 in Antioch with Sacramento via the Antioch Bridge. The northern section, separated from the southern by Sacramento city streets, is the North Sacramento Freeway, running from the 16th Street Bridge over the American River to Interstate 80 Business towards Roseville.
Area codes 415 and 628 are telephone area codes in the North American Numbering Plan (NANP) for the city of San Francisco and its northern suburbs in Marin County, and the northeast corner of San Mateo County. Area code 415 was one of the eighty-six original North American area codes established in 1947, but modified in geographic configuration later. Area code 628 was assigned in 2015 to form an overlay in that numbering plan area in mitigation of central office prefix exhaustion.
State Route 275 is a short unsigned state highway in the U.S. state of California that is defined to be the length of the Tower Bridge between West Sacramento and Downtown Sacramento.
California's major urban areas normally are thought of as two large megalopolises: one in Northern California and one in Southern California, separated from each other by approximately 382 miles or 615 km, with sparsely inhabited (relatively) Central Coast, Central Valley, and Transverse Ranges in between. Other ideas conceive of a single megalopolis encompassing both North and South, or a division of Coastal California vs. Inland California. These regional concepts are usually based on geographic, cultural, political, and environmental differences, rather than transportation and infrastructure connectivity and boundaries.
Central California is generally thought of as the middle third of the state, north of Southern California, which includes Los Angeles, and south of Northern California, which includes San Francisco. It includes the northern portion of the San Joaquin Valley, part of the Central Coast, the central hills of the California Coast Ranges and the foothills and mountain areas of the central Sierra Nevada.
Interstate 80 (I-80) is a transcontinental Interstate Highway in the United States, stretching from San Francisco, California, to Teaneck, New Jersey. The segment of I-80 in California runs east from San Francisco across the Bay Bridge to Oakland, where it turns north and crosses the Carquinez Bridge before turning back northeast through the Sacramento Valley. I-80 then traverses the Sierra Nevada, cresting at Donner Summit, before crossing into the state of Nevada within the Truckee River Canyon. The speed limit is at most 65 miles per hour (105 km/h) along the entire route instead of the state's maximum of 70 mph (110 km/h) as most of the route is in either urban areas or mountainous terrain. I-80 has portions designated as the Eastshore Freeway and Alan S. Hart Freeway.
Cordelia Slough is a 10.8-mile-long (17.4 km) tidal watercourse which discharges to the Suisun Slough, which in turn empties into Grizzly Bay in Solano County, California. The Suisun Slough, fed by the Green Valley Creek and Red Top Creek, provides a productive habitat for a diversity of aquatic flora and fauna. In particular steelhead migrate up Cordelia Slough to spawn in its two tributaries.
Interstate 5 (I-5) is a major north–south route of the Interstate Highway System in the United States, stretching from the Mexican border at the San Ysidro crossing to the Canadian border near Blaine, Washington. From San Ysidro, the segment of I-5 in California runs north across the length of the state, and crosses into Oregon south of the Medford-Ashland metropolitan area. It is the more important and most-used of the two major north–south routes on the Pacific Coast, the other being U.S. Route 101 (US 101), which is primarily coastal. I-5 is known colloquially as "the 5" to Southern California residents and "5" to Northern California residents due to varieties in California English. The highway connects to the Mexican Federal Highway 1 (Fed. 1) in the south.
The Greater Sacramento area refers to a metropolitan region in Northern California comprising either the U.S. Census Bureau defined Sacramento–Roseville–Arden-Arcade metropolitan statistical area or the larger Sacramento–Roseville combined statistical area, the latter of which consists of seven counties, namely Sacramento, Yolo, El Dorado, Placer, Sutter, Yuba, and Nevada counties.
Andrew Bruce Dolich is an American sports executive, and currently operates a sports consultancy, Dolich & Associates, in Los Altos, California. Dolich has more than five decades of experience in the professional sports industry, including executive positions in the NFL, NBA, NHL and MLB.
Metropolitan Fresno, officially Fresno–Madera, CA CSA, is a metropolitan area in the San Joaquin Valley, in the United States, consisting of Fresno and Madera counties. It is the third-largest metropolitan region in Northern California, behind the San Francisco Bay Area and Greater Sacramento. It is also the 49th-largest CSA in the U.S. as of 2010 census.
Martis Valley is a geographic area of 70 square miles (180 km2) in the United States, extending northward from the North Shore of Lake Tahoe, California, to the west of the California-Nevada border. It is located in Placer and Nevada Counties and is bisected by Martis Creek which flows north to the Truckee River.
California, the most populous state in the United States and third largest in area after Alaska and Texas, has been the subject of more than 220 proposals to divide it into multiple states since its admission to the United States in 1850, including at least 27 significant proposals in the first 150 years of statehood. In addition, there have been some calls for the secession of multiple states or large regions in the American West which often include parts of Northern California.
The 2018 California lieutenant gubernatorial election was held on November 6, 2018, to elect the Lieutenant Governor of California. Incumbent Democratic Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom was ineligible to run for reelection due to term limits and ran for Governor of California instead. Democrats Eleni Kounalakis and Ed Hernandez faced each other in the general election, as no Republican finished in the top two positions of the nonpartisan blanket primary that was held on June 5, 2018.