Legislators Try a New Pork Recipe

With little fanfare, a Capitol tradition quietly died Tuesday: the spectacle of lawmakers showing up at the budget committee’s opening meeting and groveling for pork for folks back home.

For decades, the Senate-Assembly budget conference committee set aside its first day of hearings on new budgets to listen to--and sometimes snicker at--the pleas on what came to be known as Members’ Day. But no more.

The conference committee convened Tuesday and set about its task: resolving differences between the Senate and Assembly versions of the 1999-2000 budget.

“It was an anachronism,” Senate Budget Committee Chairman Steve Peace (D-El Cajon) said recently of Members’ Day, grousing that it slowed down the budget process.

Legislators will still get money for their pet projects. But the process has changed. Now they are expected to ask for pork in letters to the budget conference committee.

And they did, filling three bloated binders.

By Tuesday, committee members had winnowed the three binders to a 6-inch-high stack of pleas. There are requests for swimming pools, restrooms at parks, playground equipment, trains, boat docks and lots of museums. The Los Angeles delegation is pushing for more money for the Hollywood Entertainment Museum, the Museum of Tolerance and the Skirball Museum.

Money for pet projects is tucked throughout the Senate and Assembly versions of the budget. No one has calculated the cost of all the requests. But with a $4.3-billion surplus, this budget season’s feeding is especially frenzied.

In recent weeks, Senate and Assembly budget subcommittees fattened the surplus by deleting $335 million that Gov. Gray Davis had earmarked for a new state prison in Delano.

Davis is sure to try to restore the prison funding. But for now, lawmakers have reallocated it--where is not especially clear.

Some budgeteers say it reverted to the state’s emergency reserve. Sen. Richard Polanco (D-Los Angeles), who chairs a subcommittee that oversees prison spending, said much of it has been diverted to proposed alternatives to prisons, such as prevention programs, and for health and mental health care for the poor. But certainly, some of the money has been redirected to swimming pools, parks and museums.

Polanco submitted no fewer than 60 written spending requests, seeking everything from $1 million for a Los Angeles police museum to $200,000 for commemorative seals at the Capitol honoring California’s Native American, Spanish and Mexican heritages.

When lawmakers decide how to vote on the budget this summer, one factor will be the amount of pork each can expect to get. The requests represent lawmakers’ efforts to prove that they are fulfilling their constituents’ wishes.

Consider Sen. Betty Karnette (D-Long Beach). She sought $30,000 for Carmelitos Community Garden in Long Beach, $100,000 to reopen a firefighters museum in Long Beach, $150,000 to improve a park in Artesia, $35,000 for a community building and $75,000 for playground equipment at a park in Signal Hill, among other things. She underscored each request with this statement: “This is an important community issue in my district.”