Local Legislators Tally Wins, Losses of ‘97-’98 Session

In the afterglow of a session of tax cuts, spending increases and bipartisan deals with the governor, local legislators savored their victories Tuesday while pronouncing 1998 a very good year in Sacramento and for the San Fernando Valley.

And as for the bills that got away, several lawmakers fell back on the old saw about waiting for next year.

“I’m fighting to repress the pain,” state Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Los Angeles) said of his losing effort to let a board of Valley appointees, not the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, decide some Valley transit priorities. Hayden said he will take up MTA-reform next year.

The Valley booty from the just-concluded legislative session includes: construction of sound walls in Toluca Lake to block freeway noise, $1 million for a community center in the Calabasas-Agoura Hills area, and $346,000 for College of the Canyons in Santa Clarita.

Sparked by the investigation into suspicious deaths at Glendale Adventist Hospital, a measure by Assemblyman Scott Wildman (D-Los Angeles) that would tighten state regulation of respiratory therapists cleared the Legislature. The sudden closing of a bankrupt Reseda nursing home, with no notice to its senior residents who were unceremoniously carted out the door, prompted legislation by Assemblyman Robert Hertzberg (D-Sherman Oaks) to prevent recurrences.

In the nature of small but significant progress, Hayden won approval for four more laser machines to remove tattoos. That will make six in the state, one of which he hopes to put in the Valley. Hayden said 500 people, most of them ex-gang members, are on the waiting list for the two now in operation.

And so it went in the 1998 session, which adjourned Monday after midnight, after spending nearly $1 billion and considering about 100 bills in its final hours. Gov. Pete Wilson, in his waning days in office, has 30 days to sign or veto legislation.

The governor’s last chance to burnish a legacy and the state’s healthy bank balance combined to create the feverish activity in the 1998 session.

“We were cookin’ on all four burners, as my grandma used to say,” said Assembly Speaker Pro Tem Sheila Kuehl (D-Santa Monica), whose district includes the West Valley, Calabasas and Agoura Hills. “I’m very proud of what came out of our Legislature this year.”

As part of the Assembly Democratic leadership, Kuehl and Hertzberg participated in the $9.2-billion school bond issue deal, while shepherding their own, smaller scale bills through the process.

As the self-described “go to guy” assigned by Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa (D-Los Angeles) to close deals, Hertzberg said some of the major legislative efforts were hammered out in his office.

“It’s fantastic to be involved at that level of policy,” Hertzberg said Tuesday.

In 17 days, Hertzberg bulldozed through a bill extending the deadline for collecting signatures to trigger a study of Valley secession.

One Hertzberg bill would prevent local governments from dividing communities when drawing legislative districts. That bill arose from the situation in Van Nuys, which is now divided among five City Council districts. Another Hertzberg measure sought by district residents would make it easier to prosecute commercial interests who illegally plaster fliers on city utility poles.

Kuehl said the measure she’s most proud of--and which was the most difficult to get through the Legislature--would regulate shipment of high-level nuclear waste. Kuehl cited a measure to enforce storm water runoff regulations among her most significant accomplishments.

The $1 million set aside for the Calabasas-Agoura Hills community center was Kuehl’s coup. She attributes her success to her increased knowledge of the intricacies of the budget process.

Wildman pushed through money to build a sound wall that was promised Toluca Lake residents when the 134 Freeway was built 30 years ago. It was put in the pipeline 10 years ago, dropped by the Legislature in 1997 and is now back on course. “It was a great accomplishment,” Wildman said.

No accomplishment was greater, Wildman said, than the bipartisan effort assuring education as the state’s top priority: “It’s a new direction, I’d say, and it took the new bipartisan Legislature to send it that way.”

Although a tougher year for Republicans, Assemblyman George Runner (R-Lancaster) had his own victory in education funding with a measure that equalized appropriation levels for the state’s 71 community college districts. That would bring several hundred thousand dollars to schools in his district, he said.

An earlier Runner bill to equalize funding in stages was vetoed by Wilson. So, Runner said he changed tack in a bill to achieve the goal in one $35-million act. That gives Wilson a chance to proclaim himself the governor who “equalized community college funding across California once and for all,” Runner said.

The Lancaster Republican’s most painful loss was his failed plan to keep children out of kindergarten who don’t turn 5 until the fall. Runner said his measure was opposed by state Supt. of Schools Delaine Eastin and other legislators who wouldn’t go for the bill unless he agreed to fund a universal preschool program, which was unacceptable to him.

State Sen. Herschel Rosenthal’s final year as a legislator was fruitful, two staff members said.

The Los Angeles Democrat secured passage of a key measure providing money for a treatment program to counties to deal with mentally-ill people caught in the revolving door between homelessness and jail.

Noting the Los Angeles County Jail is considered the nation’s largest mental health facility, Rosenthal senior consultant Dan Flynn said of the bill, “It’s probably the most important thing done since we started letting people out of mental institutions.”

One of Rosenthal’s more important bills, however, is one that disappeared along with the problem it sought to correct--an ugly stretch of Chandler Boulevard in Valley Village controlled by the MTA. The bill was withdrawn after a deal was struck with lease-holding billboard companies that advertised on the woebegone two-mile-long piece of land.

And on the last night of session, Rosenthal secured $200,000 to landscape the area. “The MTA doesn’t even know about it yet,” Flynn said.