How to Speed Up a Late, Not So Great Legislature

Let’s kick the legislators hard in the rear--specifically their wallets--and prod them into passing future budgets on time.

It’s an old idea whose time has come.

Dock the lawmakers one day’s pay for each day they fail to pass a budget after July 1, the start of the state fiscal year. Actually, the California Constitution requires the Legislature to pass a budget by June 15. We can grant a two-week grace period, but no more of this dillydallying for several weeks into the summer.

Private vendors can’t get paid. Schools and local governments can’t plan. It’s arrogant and irresponsible. The only people who feel excused from obeying the law, it seems, are the politicians who make the law.

Never thought I’d come to this. For many years, I considered proposals to dock legislators’ pay unfair, draconian and demagogic. I basically agreed with Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren, the Republican gubernatorial nominee, who declared during a recent campaign debate:

“I’m not sure you need an artificial means of forcing adults to act like adults. What you need is some political courage. And one of the things you need to do [as governor] is make it very, very clear that your goal is to have a budget on time. . . . I will put [on] the pressure. . . . That’s the way to do it. . . . I mean, there are some wealthy people [in] the Legislature, it wouldn’t mean a doggone thing to them [if] they didn’t get paid.”

Perhaps. But it would mean a bunch to their many colleagues who--like most people--live paycheck to paycheck. These middle-class lawmakers likely would be browbeating any recalcitrant rich guys and plotting coups against their dilatory leaders.

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These days, I agree with that other prominent Sacramento Republican, Gov. Pete Wilson, who says: “You know, it’s a ham-handed tactic to dock their pay. . . . It is an unseemly kind of compulsion. [But] if it works, I’m all for it.”

The governor adds: “I think it would [work]. These guys hate to miss per diem [expense money--$119 a day, tax-free]. They certainly aren’t going to want to miss their salary.”

Their annual pay now is $78,624, roughly $215 per day. Next year, it climbs to $99,000, highest in the country. For that, they should get their work done on time.

On this, Lt. Gov. Gray Davis, the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, is allied with Wilson. “We’re sent [to the Capitol] to do the work of the people,” he asserted during the debate. “When people don’t work, they’re not paid. That same rule should apply to those of us in Sacramento.”

Davis promised, if elected, to fight for a constitutional amendment to dock both the governor and the legislators a day’s pay for each day they miss the budget deadline. “I almost fell off my chair,” said Sen. Quentin L. Kopp (I-San Francisco), who has been pushing such proposals for years. “I found that part of the debate amusing. [Davis] has never communicated that to me.”

As for Lungren’s comment that adults should act like adults, Kopp notes: “Adults are sanctioned if they violate the law. As attorney general, he should know that.”

Kopp has been trying to raise money for a ballot initiative. But punishing legislators in the pocketbook is not something that the usual bankrollers of initiatives--the special interests--want to touch.

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Finally last week, 36 days into the fiscal year, legislative leaders and the governor cut a budget deal. But there’s still no budget. The houses will begin voting today. It’s the eighth time this decade that the Legislature has failed to pass a budget by July 1.

“I mean, really, this is nonsense,” Wilson told me. “They waste six months. The budget is arguably the most important thing the Legislature does.”

One lame excuse by the Legislature is that a budget can’t be completed until the governor revises revenue estimates in May. That’s true, but there’s no reason a budget couldn’t already be framed and then merely revised. The governor sends his budget to the Legislature in January.

“We probably do start too late,” says rookie Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa (D-Los Angeles). “I’m going to look into that.”

Inexperience caused by term limits contributes to the tardiness. So does California’s unique requirement that a budget be passed by a two-thirds vote--a burden Kopp also would scrap with his initiative.

But the biggest obstacle to timely budgets is the common Capitol attitude articulated by Lungren in the debate: “There’s one thing worse than a late budget--it’s a bad budget. . . . This siren song that any budget is better than a late budget is wrong.”

Sorry. A late budget is bad government. And those responsible should be hit where it hurts.