With a “Big Five” meeting said by inside sources to be on tap this morning, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger still has some chance to salvage something of his Big Bang Bond infrastructure package for placement on California’s June ballot, as the game moves deeper into overtime, with virtually no time left to make the ballot. (The so-called Big Five is Capitol parlance for the governor and the Democratic and Republican leaders in the state Senate and Assembly.) We’ll soon see if getting a deal is a matter of meeting Republican demands for more water storage, perhaps even a dam, and somewhat less spending on green projects, as Sunday’s word had it, is enough. Or if changing term limits really is part of the trick. Or if much deeper concessions on environmental regulation, labor law, and the Assembly Republicans’ supposed line-in-the-sand for pay-as-you-go programs are in the deal. We don’t know for sure because only a few do, and the storyline keeps shifting on the making of this gigantic program. Which may not end up being that gigantic.
Whether anything happens or whether this is simply more Capitol wheel-spinning, more than a week of behind closed door 11th hour negotiations on what has been proclaimed for months to be the biggest public policy matter before California state government has made it clear that all the secrecy and last minute planning are a poor substitute for openness and deliberativeness. And that this is another example of the risks of the former action superstar’s grandiloquent politics.
He shoots for the moon but frequently fails to clear the trees at the end of the runway.
We’ve seen it a number of times, with the prisons, the performance review, public employee contracts, Indian casino tribes, etc. We certainly saw it with the “Year of Reform” agenda, a talked-about-for-months, grandly billed set of special election initiatives that turned out when they finally emerged to be thoroughly undercooked and mostly unvetted. Those that did not fall away were shot down after a wasted year. Starting out by making the Big Bang Bonds sound even bigger than they actually are, with a shifting and inevitably slapped together plan, was guaranteed to deeply alarm Republican legislators, some of whose support will always be needed so long as California’s Constitution requires a two-thirds vote of both houses of the Legislature.
Perhaps a better approach to this clearly unplanned-in-advance “Year of Building,” even now, since there is always the November ballot, is to determine the very basic agenda that most everyone can agree to, then move out from there, testing the envelope of possibility as you go until it is time to close. Not a new idea, admittedly, just a sound one.
This entry was posted on Monday, March 13th, 2006 at 6:39 am
Their raison d'etre is succinctly summed up as, "Pay Up, Sucka!"