Trying to Reinvent State Government : Reform: Commission created to streamline bureaucracy urges a single-house Legislature and targets Prop. 13. But legislators, voters must approve changes.

As William Hauck labored to explain a plan to modernize California’s bewildering maze of 7,000 separate governments, he blurted to reporters: “The easiest answer is to declare there are no more local governments and start over again.”

Well, why not?

After all, Hauck is the chairman of the 23-member California Constitution Revision Commission. And this prestigious group has been charged by the governor and the Legislature with the job of hacking through decades of accumulated governmental underbrush at the state and local levels.

Earlier this month, the commissioners began to prune in earnest. They want to give California a one-house Legislature. They want the governor and lieutenant governor to run as a team. They think it’s a dumb idea to have an elected state treasurer, insurance commissioner and superintendent of public instruction.

And, for those weary of endless budget battles, they propose to cut off the paychecks of the governor and legislators if they can’t agree on a balanced budget on time.

The overall goal is to make government at all levels in California more logical and rational, bring it closer to the people, give programs the funding they need and hold elected officials and bureaucrats accountable for their actions.

Ideally, an official would be able to show a citizen on a simple chart that his or her tax dollar goes in here and a dollar’s worth of this service comes out there.

All the opinion polls show that people are fed up with governmental inaction, murky decision-making, political conflict, delays and failure to provide the services they think are most needed. That would seem to provide an environment for beginning all over again.

Alas, Hauck explains, all of the proposals still have to be approved by the current Legislature if they are to be put on the November, 1996, ballot. And this is where the wheels of idealism screech against the macadam of political reality.

“If you take 7,000 units of local government and multiply by the number of people employed by those units of government, or who serve them, or who are dependent on them for their livelihood, you quickly understand why change is so difficult,” Hauck said.

“It works for them now. It may be imperfect, but it works. What’s the old adage? You live with the devil you know?”

In fact, all those affected agencies and their dependents would begin lobbying the Legislature to keep reform from getting on the ballot for a vote of the people, Hauck said. What the commission has sought to do is to use incentives and trade-offs to achieve some of the same goals without incurring the wrath of powerful special interest groups.

An irony is that many of the most offensive and restrictive impediments have been written into law by the voters.

Venting their frustration with Sacramento’s inaction, they have approved a variety of ballot initiatives over the last three decades that have cut taxes, raised taxes, tried to cut government spending for some things while compelling more spending for schools, and dictated precisely what parkland the state would purchase and for how much.

Most notable of all is Proposition 13, the 1978 tax revolt measure that virtually cut in half the main source of revenue for cities and counties: the property tax. Proposition 13 also clamped strict prohibitions against raising other taxes to make up for the loss of property tax revenues.

Now, after a year of toil, the commission has developed a preliminary set of recommendations that shies from a total junking of the present system, but still dares to propose the first major breech in Proposition 13. That alone is expected to draw considerable opposition from those who consider Proposition 13 the key to controlling taxation in California.

Hauck knows the challenge, saying, “It’s always been true, and I guess it always will be, that initiating change in any environment is the hardest thing you can do--just flat-out hardest. Defeating change is the easiest. . . . [But] we’ve got to initiate change in California if we’re going to revitalize our institutions.”

Assemblyman Phillip Isenberg (D-Sacramento), a commission member, said: “We’ve got a system of government on the state and local level where no one is responsible for anything. No accountability can be placed with any single elected official or collective bodies of people because power is spread so diffusely.”

The result: The public becomes increasingly disenchanted with all elected officials at all levels of government.

Against that backdrop, the commission was created by the Legislature in 1993 to undertake only the third formal rewrite of the state Constitution since California entered the Union in 1850. After months of hearing testimony from experts and ordinary citizens, and being flooded with academic papers, the commission spent two days in Sacramento earlier this month drafting a set of preliminary recommendations.

The commission is sending the report to the governor and Legislature for reaction and will hold a series of hearings this fall to get public input. It will draft a final proposal to be formally considered by the Legislature next winter and spring. Whatever the Legislature chooses to approve--a two-thirds vote is required--would go on the November, 1996, general election ballot.

The proposals run the gamut from relatively minor tinkering to what some consider radical reordering of government--switching from the traditional two-house Legislature to a unicameral body, for example, and making elected officials such as the state treasurer and state superintendent of public instruction appointees of the governor.

The commission also would directly attack some sacred cows by making it easier for school districts and local governments--but not the state--to raise taxes, with an approving vote of the people. Such proposals, if they survive in the final document, would result in the first significant easing of the local government finance strictures imposed by passage of Proposition 13, the property tax revolt initiative.

The Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn., a legacy of the late Proposition 13 co-author, can be expected to oppose any significant change in the initiative measure, which now exists as Article 13-A of the state Constitution.

“I’m not ready to take any potshots yet,” said Joel Fox, director of the Jarvis association. But he noted: “Ours is the only organization in the state of California formed for the specific purpose of protecting one article of the California Constitution.”

The plan also would make it easier for various local governments, including school districts, to consolidate into new “charter communities” that would have broad powers and enhanced taxing authority.

But if people are frustrated with inaction in government, they also are wary of any dramatic changes in government structure or a speedup in the conduct of the public’s business.

Some observers see the potential for that skepticism to weigh in against the proposal that has drawn the most public attention: the single-house Legislature. Nebraska now is the only state to use the unicameral model.

In pondering a unicameral Legislature, the commission faces a paradox as old as democracy itself, said one close observer of the group’s work.

“It is,” said former Assemblyman Tom McClintock, “the riddle of reconciling our desire for vigor, accountability, expediency and action in the conduct of our public affairs with the often conflicting desire for caution, consensus and deliberation.”

McClintock, a conservative Republican who now directs the Golden State Center for Policy Studies at the Claremont Institute, said the federal Founding Fathers grappled with the same question at the Constitutional Convention in 1787.

They recognized that one house could be dominated by a powerful leader and decided to diminish that possibility by going for two, the House and Senate, McClintock said.

“The founders understood that the process of enacting laws called for caution, sobriety, deliberation and wisdom,” McClintock said. “They recognized that laws should not be passed precipitously and that where consensus does not exist, it is better to defer action--or in the current jargon, gridlock--than to act unwisely or unjustly.”

But Hauck, of Sacramento, argued that the motivation behind a unicameral Legislature was not to speed up the legislative process, but to bring state government closer and make it more responsive to the people.

With a single 121-member state Senate, each senator would represent only about 268,000 people, compared with the existing 400,000 for an assemblyman and 800,000 for a state senator.

“That’s a world of difference,” said Hauck, who once was a Democratic legislative aide and later an adviser to Republican Gov. Pete Wilson.

There are plenty of ways to build into a unicameral process the sorts of checks and balances that now exist in the traditional two-house Legislature, Hauck said. Those are among the many details yet to be worked out by the commission.

Linda R. Cohen, a professor of economics at UC Irvine, said the functioning of state and local government is critical to the state’s economic future.

“What we hear is that government should get smaller, or just get out of the way,” she said. “In fact, the public sector is terribly important to the functioning of the economy.”

The commission plan would roll back part of the last major constitutional revision approved by voters in 1966, to create a full-time legislature. Annual legislative sessions would be limited to six months each.

Richard Carpenter, a member of the revision commission in the 1960s, said the challenge facing the Hauck group is far more daunting.

“This is a very bold approach,” said Carpenter, who was executive director of the California League of Cities for nearly 20 years and now is a member of the state Personnel Board. “I think this is the greatest opportunity for cleaning up some of the problems in Sacramento.”

Carpenter said he believes there is a chance voters would approve the revision if the plan could win approval in the Legislature.

Mark DiCamillo of the Field Poll said the proposed revision is so broad that it could be attacked on many fronts by various special interests in a general election campaign. But he added that the public is so disenchanted with government, many of the suggested reforms would appeal to voters.

“It really becomes a judgment call as to, first, what gets communicated to the public?” DiCamillo said. “How is it framed? What do they think they are voting on? And do the pluses outweigh the minuses?”

Hauck said the state has no choice. It must begin changing the way it does the people’s business.

“To not change,” he said, “is just to wither away.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Proposed Revisions to State Constitution

Major preliminary recommendations of the California Constitution Revision Commission:

EXECUTIVE

* Candidates for governor and lieutenant governor would run as a ticket.

* The governor would retain all powers of the office when traveling outside the state.

* Offices of superintendent of public instruction, state treasurer and insurance commissioner would be made appointive rather than elective.

LEGISLATURE

* One-house legislature known as the Senate would have 121 members elected to a maximum of three four-year terms.

* Sessions would be limited to six months out of the year.

* Lawmakers would not be able to raise campaign funds while the Legislature is in session.

BUDGET

* California would budget for two years at a time.

* The budget would have to be balanced as adopted, not just when introduced.

* Budget could pass the Legislature by a majority vote rather than the present two-thirds.

* State would be required to maintain a reserve fund equal to 3% of the budget for emergencies and unexpected revenue losses.

* The governor and legislators would forfeit their pay and expenses for any period after June 30 in which a new state budget has not been adopted.

EDUCATION

* Education from kindergarten through 12th grade would have a statewide funding guarantee via a per-pupil block grant.

* Unified school districts would have additional taxing authority, if voters approve.

* Local school boards would be granted more power to make decisions on educational programs.

LOCAL GOVERNMENTS

* The relationship between the state and local governments would be realigned and state-mandated programs reviewed.

* Cities and counties would get more home-rule powers.

* Agencies and governments within a county could consolidate their functions under new “charter community” provisions. They would get enhanced taxing and spending authority, if voters approve.

VOTER INITIATIVES

* A voter initiative that has qualified for the ballot would not be sent to the voters if the Legislature passed a measure that was “substantially the same, and furthers the purposes” of the initiative.

* Initiative constitutional amendments would be placed only on the November general election ballot.