Sacramento’s Great Fall--a Post-Mortem

There was a time, Sacramento graybeards tell us, when California government was pretty good--progressive, competent, mature. It built great freeways and universities, passed budgets on time, behaved itself. This golden period lasted roughly from World War II to the 1978 passage of Proposition 13, and perhaps was best personified by A. Alan Post.

For three decades Post served as legislative analyst. His job was to warn politicians when promises and plans exceeded the state’s fiscal means. He was in the middle of all the big scraps, from the Peripheral Canal to welfare reform, yet managed to emerge with his reputation as a straight shooter intact. At his retirement 15 years ago, Post was described as Sacramento’s “financial conscience.”

A few weeks ago I went looking for Post to ask where it all had gone off track. Now 78, Post serves on a dozen or so advisory panels, all aimed generally at putting state government back together, and I caught up with him at a hearing on community colleges. A thin man, with sharp features and white hair, Post wore a white shirt and gray herringbone suit. As I came through the door, he was describing a need to put “governance issues in context with the decision-making process.” Government talk, from the quintessential government man.

Afterward, we sat down and for openers I asked if California is as messed up as everyone seems to believe. He assured me it is, and we went from there.

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“What we used to have in California,” Post said, “was the model. We had a good, wonderfully resilient state. We had a budget and governance system that was a model. We had a master plan for higher education that was a model all over the world. We have lost a good part of that.”

State government, in Post’s view, has stood for a long time on a slowly rotting foundation. Proposition 13 cut local taxes, and forced the state to carry burdens that had belonged to counties and cities. In the spirit of Jarvis-Gann, state incomes taxes were reduced, shrinking the pie. Along the way, through initiatives and special-interest legislation, more and more of the state budget was locked up for specific purposes--highway improvement, schools and the like--and thus placed off limits to the governor and Legislature. None of this mattered much until the recession hit, and then the house crumbled.

“We have put ourselves in a box,” Post said. “We have no longer got control of the fiscal system in the hands of the governor and the Legislature. They can no longer act with flexibility to develop options and act upon them. And we have seriously eroded the capacity of local government to carry out its functions.”

The implicit “we” in this, of course, is California voters, and Post acknowledged that the government pretty much had asked for it: “The Legislature and the governor became highly political, and they did a lousy job of dealing with issues. And they also became engrossed in an enormous way with raising campaign funds, to the neglect of their public responsibilities. There were scandals. We have had people going to prison. We have had terribly unfortunate statements from people that are felt to be arrogant.”

Post believes that a complete overhaul of state and local government is now needed. He wants it all on the table: Do we need counties? Are there ways other than prisons to punish criminals? “We will have to look at everything,” Post said. “Our welfare system, our higher education system, our correction system, our elementary school system. And we will have to change them, change them to be more realistic in terms of what needs to be done.”

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Such a rebuilding would require Sacramento politicians to act with courage and cooperation not seen since the days of A. Alan Post. And even if the collective will was there, a still greater problem lurks, the central paradox of the mess Post describes.

The short history of Sacramento’s fall is that state officials forfeited trust, and as punishment were stripped of their power. From Proposition 13 to term limits, Californians have been sending a consistent message to Sacramento: We no longer trust you to run the government. We will tell you how much to spend on public education and highways, tell you how many aides you can hire, how long you can stay on the job, and on and on.

As a consequence, Sacramento does not maintain enough power to repair its whopping structural problems. It no longer has access even to most of its own budget. This is a problem. Unless we trust state government to give it the tools to do its job, it can never fix itself--which means more political nastiness, more stalemates, more IOUs, more loss of trust, more decline. Yes, Sacramento has gotten itself into quite a fix. I wonder how it will get itself out.