Posted on 04/08/2004 5:27:49 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
SACRAMENTO (AP) - They earn $99,000 a year to eye 5,000 bills and resolutions on every subject from transit to stem cell research to Bob Hope Day. But now Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is sparking a bigger fire beneath their seats, saying California lawmakers should work part-time like their 7,300 colleagues in most other states.
Some analysts say the governor's suggestion is worthy of new debate 38 years after Californians created one of the nation's few full-time legislatures.
"I came around to supporting it at the time," recalls former Assembly Speaker Robert T. Monagan, now 83. "But as it turned out it's not a very good idea."
Monagan, who ruled the 80-member Assembly in 1968 and 1969 while representing San Joaquin County, said lawmakers should spend more time at home than in the Capitol "listening to lobbyists all the time."
Voters in 1966 approved Proposition 1A to launch a full-time, better-staffed Legislature in a state that then held 19 million people. That was the year they also elected movie actor Ronald Reagan as the state's 33rd governor. Reagan supported the idea of a full-time lawmaking body, then a brainchild of Assembly Speaker Jesse Unruh who envisioned and helped build a "professional" Legislature.
Replacing a system where lawmakers met at most 120 days a year and earned $6,000, the new full-time Legislature with its beefed up staffs and higher salaries became hailed by the early 1970s as a model for other states and the nation's best lawmaking body.
California, with a population of more than 35 million today, is one of four full-time legislatures, joining Michigan, New York and Pennsylvania.
"California's really unique in that our constituency is enormous," said Sen. Debra Bowen, D-Marina del Rey, who defended the Legislature's full-time status. "I represent about 850,000 people. That's more than live in the whole state of Wyoming."
But the Legislature's reputation has slipped over three decades. Budgets have been late every year since 1986.
"It certainly is not regarded as the model today," said Bob Stern, president of the Los Angeles-based Center for Governmental Studies, a nonpartisan think tank that studies campaign finance.
In a Public Policy Institute of California poll last September, likely voters ranked the Legislature's job performance below even that of Gov. Gray Davis. The poll showed that only 21 percent of likely voters believed the Legislature could be trusted to do what is right just about always or most of the time.
Stern suggested that Schwarzenegger is using his popularity with voters to subtly threaten the 80-member state Assembly and 40-member Senate.
"He could pass an initiative," Stern said. "He could get 60 percent. It would pass easily."
Yet voters reached Thursday expressed uncertainty about Schwarzenegger's idea.
"I'm not sure," said Lulu Rangwala, owner of Printworks in San Jose. "I'm not much of a Legislature person, but I would say whatever can make our budget less is good."
Riverside voter Greg Roubinek said, "I might be in favor of considering that."
Roubinek, owner of Riverside Stamp and Coin, said, "I can see trying to break up the system that's developed that's exploiting the average guy. It might bring in some fresh air."
Schwarzenegger said the Legislature wastes too much time and dreams up "strange bills." Stern criticized a lawmaking process that waits until deadlines to "pass and defeat thousands of bills in the last two weeks of the session."
Stern said he would rather see lawmakers keep their full-time pay, meet at most six months a year in Sacramento and hold more committee hearings around the state. Monagan, too, recalled an older system of "interim hearings" where "you actually went where the problems are. You could look and see where they were."
Nearly 40 states have legislatures that work two-thirds of the year or less.
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On the Net:
ARRAY(0x894fadc)http://www.legislature.ca.gov
National Conference of State Legislatures: http://www.ncsl.org
"I came around to supporting it at the time," recalls former Assembly Speaker Robert T. Monagan, now 83. "But as it turned out it's not a very good idea."
Monagan, who ruled the 80-member Assembly in 1968 and 1969 while representing San Joaquin County, said lawmakers should spend more time at home than in the Capitol "listening to lobbyists all the time."
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