Good Intentions Go Astray in State Budget Initiative

The infantilizing of the California politician is so powerful an impulse that it seems to have infected even the kind of good-government effort that deserves better.

I refer to a voter initiative being promoted by a coalition that includes the League of Women Voters, scads of local elected officials and a wide range of trade and state employee unions. The group hopes to get its imaginatively named Budget Accountability Act certified for next March’s statewide election.

The coalition’s proposal includes numerous laudable provisions. Its centerpiece is a reduction in the legislative majority needed to pass a budget to 55% instead of the current two-thirds. Supporters say this will undercut the power of small legislative groups -- in context, read “Republicans” -- to extract disproportionate and “unseemly” concessions from the majority in fiscal negotiations. (The word in quotes is from Trudy Schafer, the League of Women Voters advocacy chief.)

The measure would also require that more transparent information about the budget process be provided to the public, including the creation of a Web site tracking legislators’ votes. It would require the establishment of a “rainy day” reserve of up to 5% of the general fund to cover shortfalls during economic downturns.

All this is good.

The two-thirds threshold is a relic from a Depression-era initiative that imposed a supermajority requirement to pass a budget 5% larger than the previous year’s. Decades later, when each year’s budget routinely exceeded that mark, another initiative killed the 5% rule but kept the supermajority, which was again written into Proposition 13.

Now, California is one of only three states that require more than a simple legislative majority to adopt a budget, and the new measure’s supporters argue -- reasonably, I think -- that the supermajority rule contributes to annual stalemates in Sacramento and to budgets filled with more exotic mechanisms than the income tax code.

But their measure also includes what I would term a sop to the Neanderthal wing of the California electorate.

This is a provision that permanently docks the legislators’ and governor’s salaries, per diems and car allowances for every day past the constitutional deadline of June 15 that they fail to adopt a budget.

If this sounds to you like the “timeouts” you may have imposed on your kids when they misbehaved, I’m sure that’s no accident. Yet the flaw in this part of the plan goes beyond the way it treats our elected representatives as children; one is hard-pressed to deny that such treatment is, at some level, sometimes quite appropriate.

Rather, the problem is that it’s an incentive to behavior that undercuts the goal of the rest of the initiative, which is the adoption of a rational and sensible budget.

As an old hand at statehouse reporting, I can easily imagine the frenzy that would grip the Capitol as the June 15 deadline approached and the personal consequences of inaction bulk large on the horizon.

Will the leadership say, “We must set aside our differences and enact the responsible budget our constituents demand”? I don’t think so.

Will they dust off every unscrupulous stratagem they can find in order to get a budget hastily out the door and thus collect their paychecks and perks? As Mark Twain would say, that’s the way to bet.

The initiative’s backers seem to think that the docking provision is their trump card. “People are very enthusiastic about provisions such as the withholding of salary,” the League of Women Voters’ Schafer told me.

She described this feature as an indispensable part of the whole -- possibly the part that allows voters to see the measure as something other than a maneuver to make it easier to raise taxes, which is how the business lobby is tarring it.

“The fact that it works at all as a package,” she says, “is that given the other elements, you won’t see very many late budgets.”

One problem the Budget Accountability Act exposes is the folly of piecemeal political and fiscal reform in California. As the product of decades of fiddling via ballot resolutions and ill-considered constitutional amendments, the system is now so thoroughly, dysfunctionally complex that any attempt to mend it at one seam simply bursts a stitch somewhere else.

How would one reconcile this measure, for example, with a separate proposal being considered this week at the annual meeting of the League of California Cities? Cities and counties, irate at the Legislature’s penchant for balancing the state budget by seizing a larger share of their property tax revenues, want a rule that prohibits such arrogation without approval by two-thirds of the Legislature (plus a majority of the voters).

“Without that,” says Chris McKenzie, the league’s executive director, “the Legislature could reach into local treasuries in the heat of the night and take our money.”

He adds that he doesn’t believe his organization’s proposal necessarily conflicts with the budget initiative, but it’s interesting to note that the League of California Cities hasn’t yet taken an official position on that measure.

Under normal circumstances -- and I use the term “normal” advisedly -- any inherent conflict between the two would be ironed out via legislative compromise. These days, though, who knows?

Meanwhile, the initiative process itself, once seen as the people’s direct route to policy reform, is now simply another vehicle for special interests; a ballot initiative today is as likely to express the people’s will as Arnold Schwarzenegger is likely to function as the people’s governor. As a study commission convened by then-Assembly Speaker Bob Hertzberg reported last year: “The days of romanticizing the ‘citizens’ initiative process are over at the statewide level.”

Any doubts that this process will play out over the budget initiative can be dispelled by looking at the money already lined up for and against it.

The campaign in favor -- er, I mean the organization Californians for Budget Responsibility -- has drawn the bulk of its funds from public employee unions, with the teachers, Service Employees International Union and American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees most prominent on the list.

The opponents, who march under the banner of Californians Against Higher Taxes, describe themselves as “a coalition of taxpayers, consumers, businesses, retailers and ChevronTexaco.” By the end of June, they had raised more than half of their money from oil companies. (The curious inclusion of Chevron’s name on the coalition list comes from a state law requiring that any contributor of more than $50,000 be specifically identified.)

The oil companies, by the way, apparently funded the organization because they had hoped to push an initiative to raise the voting requirement for the enactment of new fees to the same two-thirds legislative vote required for conventional taxes. This was a response to the state Supreme Court’s 1997 Sinclair Paint decision, which held that levies such as environmental cleanup fees weren’t the same as taxes and could be imposed by a simple legislative majority.

They’ve since dropped the initiative idea, but they’re still determined to kill the budget measure by depicting it as a tax-raising device. Indeed, Californians should “expect massive tax increases” if the measure passes, according to one of their press releases.

This sort of sound-bite politicking will be the norm as long as our policy advocates peck at the shortcomings of the state’s political system one by one. Every narrow change imposed by voter initiative will only add another pothole to the road that the governor and Legislature must maneuver over to set the state on a sound fiscal foundation.

Isn’t it time for a single, comprehensive attempt at reform, or even -- dare I mention it? -- a constitutional convention? Admittedly, the latter might be overrun by lobbyists representing big money and special interests too, but at least we’d know they were all locked safely in one place.

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Golden State appears every Monday and Thursday. Michael Hiltzik can be reached at golden.state@latimes.com.