ORANGE COUNTY IN BANKRUPTCY : Speaker Agrees to Speed Up O.C. Recovery Bills

With time running short for Orange County’s bankruptcy recovery efforts, the county got a surprising boost Thursday as Assembly Speaker Willie Brown agreed to push forward half a dozen key bills for a floor debate next week instead of waiting until later this month.

Orange County officials said the Assembly leader agreed to the earlier hearing date after meeting Thursday morning with county lobbyist Dennis Carpenter.

“It’s good news,” Supervisor Marian Bergeson said. “I think the urgency is recognized.” The recovery legislation, which had been expected to reach the Assembly floor May 25 at the earliest, is now set to be heard next Thursday.

Sen. Lucy Killea (I-San Diego), chairwoman of a Senate committee on the bankruptcy, said she met with Brown, and the Speaker told her the hearing date on the Assembly floor had been moved up.

“They’re aiming for next Thursday,” Killea said. “It’ll be tight, so if they can’t make it by then they’ll wait until the following week.”

Brown could not be reached for comment.

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The rescheduling is fortuitous for Orange County on both the political and practical fronts.

Politically, the earlier hearing date means the bills could avoid getting caught in the escalating struggle between Republicans and Democrats over leadership of the Assembly.

The leadership fight is expected to explode after a May 16 recall election for Assemblyman Paul Horcher, a renegade Republican who bolted the party and cast the crucial vote in January that allowed Brown to retain the speakership despite the GOP gaining a slim majority in the November election.

“The Assembly is a much more politically volatile arena than the Senate,” said Paul Nussbaum, an adviser to Orange County Chief Executive Officer William J. Popejoy. “We’re concerned about being a Ping-Pong ball between the two parties.”

From a practical standpoint, passage of the legislative package next week would give the county an extra two weeks to tie up details as it gears up to refinance more than $1 billion in bonds that come due this summer.

“The sooner this legislation can be pushed through, the less chance we’ll get caught in too tight a time frame,” Nussbaum said. “There are some real deadlines as far as lining up financing. We don’t want to hit a brick wall.”

But a Thursday hearing on the Assembly floor will require some deft maneuvering.

Two of the more important bills in the Orange County package--a measure to boost revenue by allowing other counties to dump trash in Orange County landfills and a bill that cements a key financing scheme--have yet to be heard in the Senate.

Even then, the Assembly remains a far less hospitable environment for the Orange County legislation than the Senate, which debated and passed more than a dozen bankruptcy measures earlier this week.

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While most officials in Sacramento and at the county offices in Santa Ana don’t believe the Assembly is out to kill the Orange County package, many expressed a belief that Democrat lawmakers would shackle the recovery legislation to the approval by Orange County voters of Measure R, the half-cent sales tax increase on the June 27 ballot.

“My hope is that other agendas don’t play out at the expense of Orange County’s legislative package,” said Bergeson, who spent 16 years in the Capitol as a state lawmaker. “ . . . My hope is we will see this resolved, that the Assembly will rise to the occasion and give us the support that we need.”