Prop. 140 Forces Exodus of Experts From Legislature : Ballot measure: Top Assembly, Senate staffers leaving because of voter initiative. Experience also lost.

Waves of budget cutting, required by passage of Proposition 140 last November, swept over the California Legislature last week, carrying away many of its most talented staff members.

By Friday, more than 650 of the 2,500 consultants, lawyers, secretaries and others who work for the Legislature had left, helped on their way by severance pay or “golden handshake” pension credits.

Included were many of the most experienced and capable staffers for key Assembly and Senate committees, “in many ways, the core of this place,” said state Sen. Becky Morgan (R-Los Altos Hills).

This leaves a smaller, younger, less experienced staff to cope not only with a heavy workload but with lobbyists, many of whom are vastly more experienced. In some cases, the new lobbyists are the old Assembly and Senate consultants.

The Assembly Ways and Means Committee, which handles more bills than any committee in either house, has lost its experts on public schools, social services, taxation, local government and toxic problems.

The number of consultants to the Senate Education Committee has been reduced from four to one. Bill Whiteneck, the survivor, was presented with a “Lone Ranger” mask by his departing colleagues.

Once there were five people, scattered among several Assembly and Senate committees, who were experts on school finance. Now there is one.

The chief parliamentarian in each house, R. Brian Kidney in the Assembly and Darryl White in the Senate, both are retiring.

“The players have gone, now even the referees are leaving,” one legislator said.

In the Capitol building last week, old friends hugged and wept as they said goodby. A job-placement service in the basement had received more than 300 applications by mid-week, ranging from secretaries and clerical workers to well-paid professionals. A sign outside the sixth-floor cafeteria announced a meeting about “job-search strategies.”

“There’s a lot of sadness,” said Ray LeBov, who is leaving after 12 years as a consultant for the Assembly Judiciary Committee. “Most of these people were really dedicated to what they were doing. They’re going to miss being here. They’re going to miss the excitement of being involved in public policy.”

For some, especially single mothers working as relatively low-paid clerks and secretaries, there is more than sadness; there is desperation.

“A lot of the people who work here are not $75,000-a-year consultants,” said Jerry McFetridge, chief of staff for Assemblyman Richard E. Floyd (D-Carson). “A lot of them live right on the margin and now they’re being tossed into a very tough job market, in the midst of a recession.”

All of this has happened because last November, by a 52%-48% margin, California voters approved Proposition 140. The measure imposed term limits on lawmakers, eliminated their pensions and required a 40% cut in the Legislature’s $165-million budget.

The 80-member Assembly will absorb 58.8% of the cuts, the 40-member Senate 41.2%. Although the reductions need not be made until July 1, both houses quickly decided to offer “golden handshake” incentives, to encourage people to leave.

Thursday was the deadline for employees with at least two years’ service to accept five months’ severance pay or two years of credit on their retirement plans. Some staffers were encouraged to leave. For the others, the only alternative to taking the “golden handshake” was waiting to see whether their positions ultimately would be cut.

Legislative leaders hoped for 350 to 400 voluntary departures. Instead, they got more than 650.

Even so, “in order to meet our full goal, we’ll have to make mandatory layoffs” before the July 1 deadline, said Cliff Berg, executive officer of the Senate Rules Committee, which is handling the issue in that house. Berg said the Senate is still $700,000 short of its goal.

Some well-paid staff members collected $30,000 or more in severance pay, then moved immediately to new jobs.

Paul Holmes, a well-respected consultant on educational finance for the Senate Budget Committee, has joined a prominent Sacramento educational lobbying firm, as have several other former Assembly and Senate staffers. After 21 years of state service, Holmes made the move with some trepidation.

“I’ve always had the luxury of being what I considered to be objective about educational proposals,” Holmes said. “I’ve never had to be too concerned about the outcome. I go into this (lobbying) with mixed emotions.”

Some are returning to old Civil Service jobs in state government.

Judy Smith, who has been the Assembly Ways and Means Committee expert on taxation and local government matters for eight years, will go back to the Department of Finance as a program analyst, at a lower wage than she now earns but with five months’ severance and five months’ accumulated vacation pay as consolation. She and others can do this because the Proposition 140 budget cuts apply only to the Legislature, not the remaining state bureaucracy.

Smith “is one of those talented people that nobody outside the Capitol has ever heard of, but she is the kind of person who makes the place work,” said veteran Sacramento lobbyist John Mockler.

Smith said she did not mind working 60 hours or more a week for the high-pressure Ways and Means Committee, which handles the state budget and every Assembly bill that involves spending, but she decided to leave because “nothing is more important to me than doing a good professional job and it seemed to me, with these cutbacks, we weren’t going to have enough people left to do quality work.”

Some have criticized the “golden handshakes” for being too lucrative.

“(Assembly Speaker) Willie Brown didn’t count on the severance deal being so attractive that they ended up losing people they didn’t want to lose,” said Assemblyman Tom McClintock (R-Thousand Oaks).

But Ken Cooley, former chief consultant for the Assembly Finance and Insurance Committee and now an attorney for State Farm Insurance Companies, said the severance and retirement deals were justified.

“The public seems to think everybody over there is a bunch of slugs, but I saw a tremendous amount of dedication and talent,” said Cooley, who sought neither severance nor retirement credit when he left. “An awful lot of people put a tremendous amount of their life in there. They deserve what they were given.”

Left to handle staff reduction as they saw fit, some legislators did it expertly and with compassion, while others acted like British mill owners in the early days of the Industrial Revolution.

“There are proven ways to do this. You deal with people individually but make sure all are treated fairly,” said Assemblywoman Delaine Eastin (D-Union City), who has a business background. “You have the best information available, you offer counseling and so on. We did none of that. . . . Some of my colleagues were frozen by this; they just didn’t know how to handle it.”

In the Senate, unlike the Assembly, individual members had to approve the “golden handshake” deals and several refused to do so because they would have lost the job slot permanently.

“It’s a question of keeping a balanced staff,” said State Sen. Henry J. Mello (D-Watsonville). “Every time you give severance or a ‘golden handshake,’ you lose a position. My attitude has been, ‘if you want to leave, you can leave--my doors are unlocked--but you can’t leave with severance.’ ”

As a result of the varied ways the cuts were handled, many veteran staff members left with bruised feelings and with considerable confusion.

Apart from personal trauma, what will be the consequences of this sudden departure of more than one-quarter of the legislative staff, including some of its ablest operatives?

One will be the loss of what political scientists call “institutional memory”: What happened the last time this kind of legislation was proposed? Why was one amendment included, another dropped? Why did the comprehensive tax-reform legislation passed in 1987 contain certain tax credits but not others?

Another result will be the “loss of people with what football coaches like to call ‘fire in the belly,’ ” said Bill Whiteneck, the remaining consultant for the Senate Education Committee--”people who are willing to devote themselves to a particular policy area for a period of years.”

In addition, Whiteneck said, the “sheer numbers will make it impossible to provide in-depth analysis” of policy issues and analysis of whether particular bills advance or impede these long-range goals.

Some fear the increased influence of lobbyists, who will have to provide much of the information that once came from legislative staff members.

“I’ll probably be registering as a lobbyist myself, but I don’t like the fact that members are going to be more dependent on lobbyists for their information,” said Cooley, the former Assembly Finance and Insurance Committee consultant. “That will create many opportunities for abuse.”

For example, Eastin, new chairwoman of the Assembly Education Committee, has a capable staff, but its combined experience with education legislation is only a few years. Meanwhile, the lobbying firm of Murdoch Mockler & Associates, which focuses on educational issues, probably has 100 years of such experience.

It is on this basis that legislative leaders in both houses are hoping to challenge the staff cuts and all of Proposition 140. They expect to argue in court that the loss of key legislative staff members upsets the balance of power that has existed among the governor’s office, the courts and the Legislature. Such a challenge could take years to resolve, however.

Meanwhile, there is also concern that many of the departed staff members were more concerned with policy than politics and are now paying for it, while many of those remaining devote much of their time to fund-raising and other political activities.

“The ‘new breed’ of consultant is more political, more oriented to individual legislators and less to matters of substantive policy,” said a departing staffer who requested anonymity.

Not all the good people have left. Whiteneck, well regarded by Democrats and Republicans, has 32 years of state service and could have retired with a comfortable pension, but chose to remain with the Senate Education Committee.

“To me, it boils down to what you want to do,” he said. “I still have a few ideas I would like to float. I have the good luck to work for a good committee and an able, conscientious chairman (Sen. Gary K. Hart of Santa Barbara), so I’ll stay.”

But the prospect of reduced job satisfaction, combined with family and health considerations and other factors, has led many able staff members to depart. It remains to be seen how well the new, leaner, younger legislative staff will fare.

“Some of us were hanging on because the work we were doing was important and sometimes it was exciting and we had some support and there were a few members who really cared,” said Linda Bond, a 16-year veteran who has just left the Senate Education Committee. “But now I think there’s a sense that all of that is collapsing, that the whole institution is collapsing and we’ve given all we have to give.”