Joint Panel Hopes to Smooth Out California Government

SAN FRANCISCO - A joint state Senate committee is scheduled to meet Tuesday to listen to ideas to make California government work more effectively.

The Committee on Elections, Reapportionment, and Constitutional Amendments will meet with the Senate Select Committee on Constitutional Reform for the informational hearing.

The Sacramento hearing comes three weeks after the latest version of the state budget was adopted, the third time in less than a year that lawmakers and the governor, facing declining revenues, have spent weeks negotiating over tens of billions of dollars of budget adjustments to produce results that nobody seems very happy with.

"I am calling this hearing because it is clear that we must modernize the way California is governed," elections committee chair Loni Hancock, D-Berkeley, said in a news release announcing the hearing. "If anything has demonstrated this need, it is certainly the disastrous budget process we have just gone through. Increasingly inexperienced legislators are dealing with increasingly complex challenges and a dysfunctional governance system."

Several high-profile efforts to reform the state's governance, budget, and tax systems are underway and representatives from two of them are expected to testify.

They include Jim Wunderman of the Bay Area Council, a business group that has been promoting the idea of a constitutional convention to redraw the state's governing documents, and Fred Silva, a state budget expert with California Forward.

California Forward launched almost 18 months ago with great fanfare - and deep-pockets financing from the likes of the James Irvine Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation - with plans to develop a bipartisan reform plan.

Last week, California Forward made its formal proposal outlining what it believes should be done to repair the state government.

The plan includes a two-year budget, requirements that funding be identified to enact new programs, that one-time revenues be used for one-time expenditures rather than ongoing programs and that term-limit laws be modified slightly to allow lawmakers to serve 12 years in one house, rather than the current limit of six years in the Assembly and eight in the Senate. It also called for eliminating the two-thirds legislative vote requirement to adopt a budget - while keeping the two-thirds requirement for new taxes.

Other experts expected to testify Tuesday include Brenda Erickson of the National Conference of State Legislatures, and Michael Cohen of California's Legislative Analyst's Office.

"This will be an opportunity to learn about what other states are doing and what proposals may be put forward," Hancock said.

The committee's initial roster of witnesses did not include anyone from another ongoing high-profile effort to change the state's tax system, though it will soon get its day in the sun.

The blue-ribbon Commission on the 21st Century Economy, appointed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and legislative leaders, was directed to propose a complete overhaul of the state's tax system.

The panel, which has been struggling to overcome some ideological left/right philosophical differences among its members, is scheduled to deliver its recommendations by Sept. 20. Schwarzenegger has pledged to call lawmakers into a special session to consider those recommendations.

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