Slick Tape Made to Show to Folks Back Home : State Senate Works on Its Image

The state Senate, in an effort to improve its often negative image with the folks back home, has produced a slick videotape aimed at demonstrating how the Legislature works and encouraging constituents to get involved in the process.

The 28-minute tape, packaged in cassettes so that it can be played on a VCR in a senator’s district office, or shown to service clubs and schools, depicts in a somewhat idealized way how a citizen’s idea for a new law can become a legislative bill and make its way toward the statute books.

A copy of the video “There Ought to Be a Law,” which was shot in the Capitol by a Sacramento company using professional actors, has been given to each Senate member for use primarily in home districts as an aid in explaining how the Legislature operates.

No Senators Shown

Although no state senator plays even a cameo role in the production, most incumbents jumped at the opportunity to make their own introductions to the tapes that will be shown in their districts.

So far, response from senators has been minimal because they have been preoccupied with the recent elections, said Cliff Berg, executive officer of the Senate Rules Committee, who supervised the project.

Berg candidly conceded that the video represents an effort by the Senate to buff up its sometimes scuffed public image. “What the public reads (about the Senate) in the press quite often is negative,” he said.

The video stresses how a senator and his staff fashion a bill for a constituent whose car windshield was broken by a flying rock from a public road construction project. The constituent wants someone to pay the repair bill but he cannot establish who is liable. So, he appeals to his legislator for a new law.

“A legislator spends most of his time working on constituent work, helping them with their problems,” Berg said. “A huge number of bills are introduced at the behest of a constituent and maybe this is not shown as often as it should be to the public.”

The video, a technically accurate reflection of Senate procedures, is aimed at bolstering the legislator-as-a-constituent-helper aspect of lawmaking and encouraging Californians to involve themselves in the legislative process.

Although it features representatives of special interest lobbies at a committee hearing on the flying rock bill, the presentation deliberately ignores another major and highly controversial player in the process: money--in the form of election campaign contributions.

“Campaign contributions have nothing to do with an explanation of the legislative process,” Berg told a reporter. “They (senators) don’t expect campaign contributions when they introduce a bill for a constituent.

“The film is about how the public can contact their current state legislator and get something done. . . . It is not how a senator gets elected. Getting elected is not the purpose of the film.”

The project cost almost $80,000 and was financed almost entirely by Senate funds. The Center for California Studies at California State University, Sacramento, which collaborated on the project, spent about $5,000 from a grant it received from Exxon, said Anne Cowden, center director.

Replaces Pamphlet

Basically, the video is a modernized successor to a remarkably dull pamphlet that long has been handed out to Senate visitors. The pamphlet used stick figures and a diagram to demonstrate how a bill becomes law. Berg said repackaging the pamphlet in a format that “people can see and hear (gives them) a better understanding what the Legislature is about and why we need it.”

Lee Mellor, creative producer for Take One Productions, noted that it took seven days to shoot the video, including one devoted to taping introductions by individual senators so that the version of the tape shown in a district office will feature that district’s legislator.

“More than 35 (of the 40) senators signed up,” she said. “We offered four different introduction scripts and it took one full day to complete.”