Dan Walters: By the numbers, Capitol has become less relevant to California

Sacramento Bee ^ | 10/14/5 | Dan Walters

[SmithL]

Peter Detwiler may have too much spare time on his hands, but thanks to him, we are being given new evidence that California's legislative process is badly broken.

Detwiler, a veteran legislative staffer, has compiled data on legislative output for the past four decades, dating back to Ronald Reagan's first year as governor, revealing that over time, the Legislature's production of bills has been dropping dramatically, and growing proportions of measures are being rejected by governors.

In theory, the Legislature and the governor exist to address issues arising out of the state's changing economic and social circumstances. If, for example, an expanding population uses an increasing number of automobiles, it creates an issue: Should the roadway network be expanded to handle the traffic, or should transportation demand should be met by non-automotive systems?

Clearly, California, with its high levels of immigration-driven population growth and staggering economic change, has no shortage of gut-level political issues. And the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978, which slashed local government and school district property taxes, had the consequence of shifting more responsibility to the state to deal with those issues.

One measure of the state government's response is how much work the Legislature and the governor produce. While quality cannot be reduced to numbers, quantity is a useful measure, one that research by Detwiler and his associates has created.

During Republican Reagan's eight years and the two-term governorships of successors Jerry Brown, a Democrat, and George Deukmejian, a Republican, the Legislature routinely passed more than 1,500 bills a year, occasionally topping 2,000. Gubernatorial vetoes were fairly uncommon, indicating that the two branches of government were operating in sync.

Democrats controlled the Legislature for all of Deukmejian's eight years (1983-1991), but he signed the most bills (12,530) of all six governors covered

[SmithL]

He makes that sound like it's a bad thing.

[proxy_user]

I would say it is. It is the job of the state legislatures to address important matters.

If they don't do it, the Federal government, the courts, and mobs of rioters will all try to move into the vacated area.

[My2Cents]

over time, the Legislature's production of bills has been dropping dramatically

Calif. has a full-time legislature that sits around and does nothing 9 months out of a 10 month legislative session. Then as deadlines approach, there's a flurry of activity. Legislators live to 1) raise money for the next campaign, and 2) pass legislation. But when you're supposedly working on bills "full-time," eventually, you run out of problems that truly need fixing. Thousands of bills get introduced each year. Does anyone truly believe that more than a handful of these bills are actually necessary?