Lawmakers Push to Revive Economic Strategy Panel

With California facing a $10-billion budget shortfall, state lawmakers are wondering why Gov. Gray Davis never got around to appointing anyone to the state’s Economic Strategy Panel.

The Legislature established the panel in 1993 to hold public hearings on the state’s economy and its prospects for prosperity, as well as to spot emerging industries.

But the group last met at a retreat in December 1998.

Davis is supposed to appoint eight of the panel’s 14 members. Now in the final year of his first term, he hasn’t filled any of the positions, even as the state has fallen on economic hard times.

State Sen. John Vasconcellos, the Santa Clara Democrat who heads the Senate Select Committee on Economic Development, and his Assembly counterpart, Sarah Reyes (D-Fresno), held a joint hearing Monday to push things along.

They invited economists, educators and bureaucrats to address the need for long-range economic planning in California.

Vasconcellos described California as “woefully” without a plan, and in an interview suggested he got tired of waiting for Davis to fill the panel. “I’ve asked him a dozen times,” Vasconcellos said. “Finally it became clear I could no longer just ask.”

Alfonso Salazar, with California’s Technology, Trade & Commerce Agency, said seven of the eight appointments are before the governor and he described the appointments as imminent. Salazar’s agency is mandated to operate the panel and his boss, Secretary Lon Hatamiya, is supposed to head the group.

Doug Henton, president of Collaborative Economics, a consulting firm, and author of several studies on the Silicon Valley economy, called for the strategy panel to begin meeting so that the state won’t be caught off-guard the next time it runs into trouble.

“We should never be sitting here wondering again why we have a budget deficit,” Henton said. “We could have anticipated the bubble was going to break.”

Nick Bollman, chairman of the Speaker’s Commission on Regionalism, also recommended that the panel be revitalized. California, he said, is a state of regions, and state government needs to be in a position to respond to the regions’ different needs.