Newcomers Find Making Law Is No Easy Task

It’s easy on the campaign trail, where it’s all about talk: More money for education? You bet! Reform HMOs? Absolutely! Taxes? Definitely too high.

But now the election is over and it’s time for state legislators to deliver, to make laws that will, presumably, fulfill promises to voters.

Legislation is the guts of the lawmaker’s job, the formal expression of his or her philosophy. It is why most politicians ran for office and it’s what they’re judged on when the time comes to run again.

But for freshmen, crafting a bill package can be agonizing. How do they decide which bills to pursue? How do they sort through the blizzard of pitches from constituents, lobbyists and opinionated friends and still find time to bring their own ideas to life?

“It’s fun,” said Charlene Zettel (R-Poway), one of 27 first-year Assembly members, “but it’s also frustrating, because you have to restrain yourself. You can’t do it all.”

For one thing, there are limits. Assembly members are permitted 30 bills per two-year session, and choosing which ideas to run with and which to reject dominates their lives early in the legislative year.

Some of it is obvious. If your district includes neighborhoods suffering from blight, it follows that you would advocate tougher code enforcement, as Long Beach Democrat Alan Lowenthal is doing with AB 1382.

Some of it comes from the heart. If you feel passionately about drugs in schools, as Zettel does, it makes sense to write a bill to expel students found in possession of narcotics, as her AB 438 would do.

Assemblyman Herb Wesson found inspiration for a bill right in his own home. While walking around his Ladera Heights house one day, he noticed a red light on the wall: “I thought it was a sniper on the roof,” the Democrat recalled.

It was his teenage son, playing with a laser pointer. After Wesson saw another laser prankster distract a college basketball player during a crucial game, his staff investigated and found that the gadgets can also cause traffic wrecks and harm the eyes.

Thus was born AB 293, which would ban sales of such lasers to minors and make it a crime to use one in a threatening way.

A member’s previous profession can be a gold mine for bill ideas. Take Lowenthal, who arrived in Sacramento with a wish list of proposals left over from his days as a Long Beach councilman. His job as a psychology professor at Cal State Long Beach was inspirational as well, spawning a bill encouraging undergraduates to mentor high school youths.

Zettel formerly served as a school board member, so she is pushing bills to double fines for traffic violations in school zones and to crack down on truancy.

Lobbyists Hunt for Bill Authors

Still, it is a rare member whose legislation is purely a self-portrait. Most lawmakers also carry “sponsored bills,” the product of pleas for help from a lobbyist or organization.

Many such pleas are worthy proposals that result in sound public policy. Some, however, are narrowly drawn, in some cases helping only a handful of people or businesses, or a single program in a legislator’s district.

In February, as the deadline for bill introductions neared, the Capitol’s halls teemed with lobbyists hunting desperately for someone--anyone!--to author legislation granting their particular wish.

One assemblywoman, Helen Thomson (D-Davis), got so weary of the pitching that she posted a sign on her office door: “No mas,” it said.

“You’re just bombarded,” marveled Zettel, echoing the thoughts of other freshmen enduring the experience for the first time. “You’re racing through 50, 100 pages of bill proposals in an hour’s time. It’s a blur.”

Inside Room 4139 in the Capitol, Lowenthal’s staff scrambled to shield their boss from overload, developing a form asking lobbyists to describe their proposals, list their fiscal impact and reveal what sort of opposition or support might pop up. Staffers then sorted through the forms and presented the most appealing ideas to Lowenthal for a final decision.

As chairman of a committee--Housing and Community Development--as well as a select panel on ports, Lowenthal tried to keep his bill load modest to leave time for other duties. He wound up with 13 bills, but was tempted by dozens more.

“I have strengths and weaknesses, and one weakness is I don’t like to say ‘No,’ ” he said. “A lot of these proposals sound great, so I really agonized over turning them down.”

At least one bill rejection was agonizing for personal reasons. Pitched by a group that included friends and political supporters, the proposal looked promising at first. But after some research, Lowenthal found that it would have benefited only this small group--which he declined to identify--so he declined.

“They didn’t take it very well,” he said, “but I couldn’t bring myself to carry legislation that helped so few people.”

Like Lowenthal, Wesson is a committee chairman and was the target of a boatload of pitches. Calling the process “a hoot,” he noted that “all these proposals sound perfectly nice on the surface, but when you scratch a little, you usually find some negatives underneath.”

Wesson took on a hefty load--19 bills. They range from a $10-million proposal to help at-risk youths get general equivalency degrees and training in the home-building trades, to another seeking tax credits for movie studios that hire welfare recipients reentering the work force.

To help shape his legislative package, Wesson visited racetracks, Indian casinos, wineries and other businesses related to his Governmental Organization Committee. Several bills grew out of the fact-finding trip, including one that seeks to expand satellite wagering.

Although some would dub it a special interest bill, Wesson says it aims to protect jobs in the horse racing industry, which is suffering from a declining fan base.

“There are about 50,000 people in California who make their living through that industry, and it’s an industry that’s struggling,” he said. “It’s important to do whatever we can to help sustain the industry and protect those jobs.”

As they choose which issues to champion, legislators must sidestep innumerable land mines. Controversial bills--on gun control, for example--can trigger enormous opposition, draining staff time while offering iffy odds for success.

Freshmen, in particular, are often advised to steer clear of such bills: During your first year in the Capitol, do you want to take on a big fight?

Then there are the perennial bills that find their way into the Legislature year in, year out, but invariably wind up dead. If you’re new in town, you lack institutional memory, so it’s easy to fall into a trap.

One such bill was peddled to Lowenthal. Pitched by local fire departments, it sounded reasonable enough--a proposal to require that fire extinguishers in public buildings be inspected every six years instead of annually.

But some veterans on Lowenthal’s staff recognized the bill as a loser. Every time it’s introduced, they recalled, opponents bring in a burn victim--often a child--as emotional evidence that the bill is a bad idea. And every time, it goes down. Lowenthal took a pass.

Freshmen also must beware of internal politics--the chance that another, perhaps more senior or well-connected legislator wants to carry a bill similar to the one you’ve got in mind.

“There’s a sense of ownership to these issues,” one staffer said. “Especially with term limits, people are staking out their turf quickly. Step on toes and it can get ugly.”

Minority Party Bills a Tough Sell

For Republicans, the perils of legislating are more plentiful--and more obvious: As the party out of power, many of their bills--especially those that cost money--are doomed from day one.

“We try not to get too attached to our bills,” said GOP Assemblyman Abel Maldonado of Santa Maria, “because something bad is likely to happen--they’ll get killed, get amended or get hijacked by a Democrat.”

Zettel has already had a taste of such treatment. Last month, she presented her first bill in committee--a measure to review the grounds for firing a teacher. After nervously summarizing her proposal in a carefully prepared speech, Zettel said: “I would . . . respectfully ask for your aye vote.”

Instead of aye votes, she was pounced on by the teachers union and members of the committee--including a Democrat who insisted that existing law is adequate.

It soon became clear that the bill was going nowhere as written, so Zettel withdrew it: “There might be a weak pulse left in this one, but it’s pretty thready,” she later joked.

To insulate her other bills from a similar fate, Zettel is trying to attract Democratic co-authors--a move that can at least help them get a respectful look in committee. Her bill to intensify reading programs in grades eight through 11 has lured two Democratic co-authors.

Despite the grim odds, the Assembly’s GOP leader, Rod Pacheco of Riverside, encourages Republicans to be brave with their proposals and fight the good fight.

“You do have to work harder to line up support, but in some ways that’s more satisfying than just knowing you’ve got an automatic free ride,” Pacheco said. And sometimes, he added, strange things happen.

When he introduced several crime bills as a freshman in 1997, Pacheco said, a senior GOP member told him he was wasting his time because they would never escape the Public Safety Committee.

“I decided to stick with them, and I worked and worked and some of them actually passed and became law,” Pacheco recalled. “Anything can happen around here. You never know.”

Times staff writer Amy Pyle contributed to this report.