Commentary - Secrecy abounds on state budget, major bills
https://www.elkgrovenews.net/2019/05/secrecy-abounds-on-state-budget-major.html
By Dan Walters |
CALmatters Columnist |
Fair warning: By reading this you will be plunging into the Legislature’s
almost impenetrably arcane thicket of internal procedures.
To begin at the beginning, for decades the state budget was written in
secret by the chairmen of the Legislature’s two fiscal committees, Assembly
Ways and Means and Senate Finance.
This clandestine process exploded in the 1970s during a larger battle over
control of the state Senate and for more than a decade the state budget was
fashioned more or less in public.
Eventually, however, the big decisions again moved behind closed doors and
into private negotiations among what came to be known as the “Big 5” – the
governor and the partisan leaders of both houses. More recently, Republican
leaders have been excluded because the vote margin for budgets dropped from
two-thirds to simple majorities and the GOP now has only a quarter of the
Legislature’s seats. So now a “Big 3” makes the multi-billion-dollar decisions.
When the budget was handled largely by the Legislature’s two fiscal
committees, they delayed action on legislation that would add money to the
current budget, placing those bills in a “suspense file” until the financial
parameters of the upcoming budget were settled – which made perfect sense.
By and by, however, legislative leaders divided the process, creating
“budget committees” in both houses to work on the overall spending plan and
“appropriations committees” whose sole function was to handle non-budget
legislation with financial impacts, however slight.
However, it quickly morphed into a new way of conducting the public’s
business in private. The appropriations committees became vehicles for
deciding, without leaving fingerprints, which bills would advance to
legislative floors and which would be buried.
Those chairing the appropriations committees would simply read the numbers
of bills to be held or released for floor votes without explanation and it’s
been obvious that the secret decisions had little or nothing to do with fiscal
impacts and everything to do with political considerations of some kind.
This month’s version involved 721 Assembly bills and 355 in the Senate.
Overall, nearly 70 percent were given the green light and the others simply
died without explanation.
Not surprisingly, bills by the dominant Democrats generally fared better
than those by the powerless Republicans and those being carried by the chairs
of the two appropriations committees were especially blessed.
Lorena Gonzalez, a San Diego Democrat who heads the Assembly Appropriations
Committee, released 15 of her own 16 bills to the floor – the most of any
member, according to calculations by lobbyist Chris Micheli, who charts
legislative data as a hobby.
The demise of one bill in Senate Appropriations was especially noteworthy –
and inexplicable.
Its chairman, Anthony Portantino, axed Senate
Bill 50, one of the year’s most important measures. It would set aside
local zoning laws to allow high-density housing in “jobs-rich” and
“transit-rich” communities, aimed at overcoming “not-in-my-backyard” opposition
to housing projects, especially in affluent, cloistered cities.
Democrat Portantino happens to represent one of those cities, La Canada
Flintridge, and to deepen the mystery, Senate President Pro Term Toni Atkins, a
San Diego Democrat, said afterward that she had nothing to do with the action
and would have voted for SB 50, carried by Sen. Scott Wiener, a San Francisco
Democrat.
So now we have a made-in-secret budget and secretive decisions on important
legislation outside the budget, making it virtually impossible to hold anyone
accountable for what does and does not happen. It’s just like the bad old days.
CALmatters is a public interest
journalism venture committed to explaining how California’s state Capitol works
and why it matters. For more stories by Dan Walters, go to calmatters.org/commentary
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