Birth of a Budget Impasse

The California Legislature returns from vacation Monday to face a monster in its midst -- a budget shortfall that could reach $35 billion or more over the next 15 months. The only way legislators can slay the creature is to pass a budget with enough program cuts and new revenue to make up the difference. No one is betting that they’re capable of it. Welcome to the land of term limits.

There are multiple reasons for the impasse, but many public policy experts see the problem as a legacy of the nation’s most restrictive legislative term limits law, adopted by California voters in 1990 with the passage of Proposition 140.

Larry N. Gerston of San Jose State University, co-author of the popular text “California Politics and Government,” believes that the anti-tax authors of the measure meant to throw a wrench into state government’s gears by creating constant turnover in the Legislature accompanied by lack of budgeting experience. “Why shouldn’t we expect disaster?” Gerston said.

The problem is exacerbated by a redistricting plan that almost guarantees gridlock on big policy issues, especially the most critical ones dealing with spending and taxes. No longer is there a majority of experienced moderates of both parties willing to engage in give and take on tough issues. Now the factions exchange trash talk and issue ultimatums. Nor is there any real air of crisis in Sacramento. The only outrage seems to come from special interests pleading to be spared from the budget cutting.

Not all of this is the fault of term limits, nor does it reflect on the intentions of the majority of lawmakers, who are hard-working and certainly more diverse than before limits. But the six-year limit in the Assembly has crippled that body’s effectiveness and weakened the pivotal job of speaker. There is no one in the 80-member Assembly who was present during the budget crisis of the early 1990s. The Senate, with its eight-year limit and its corps of termed-out Assembly members, is more experienced and stable but still lacks the institutional memory and professional policy staff it once had.

Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a onetime legislative aide and now a senior scholar of policy planning and development at USC, predicted in 1992 that term limits would make it difficult to avert a budget disaster and restore public confidence in government. Jeffe said of two former Assembly speakers, “Can you imagine Jesse Unruh or Willie Brown letting [the budget impasse] go this far?”

Further, term limits failed to remove “the grip of vested interests” on the Legislature, as promised by proponents in the 1990 ballot pamphlet. New Assembly members hold campaign fund-raisers in Sacramento while they’re still finding their own offices. Some begin running for the state Senate the day they arrive in Sacramento. And just as leaders develop experience, they’re gone.

The Proposition 140 pledge to clear out the Legislature’s “web of special favors and patronage” now seems laughable. Start with Assembly Speaker Herb Wesson, who quietly hired former Assembly members as special consultants with handsome salaries and dubious job descriptions. (Wesson canceled the contracts after coming under heavy criticism.)

Legislators think that any call for easing or doing away with term limits, as two states have done, would be political suicide. A confusing legislative-sponsored measure to ease limits was thumped by voters in 2002. Government reform experts shrug and say it may be years before change comes.

That need not be. The budget debacle shows that term limits have failed to deliver on their proponents’ sunny promises. The debate on a remedy should begin now. What the people created, the people can fix.