Editorial: Grading Sacramento: Jerry Brown, a very good governor

Since retaking the governor’s office in 2010 after a 28-year timeout, Jerry Brown has demonstrated the value of experience and maturity. He has been a solid leader, steering California out of turmoil and directing the attention of lawmakers and voters toward the issues that should top the state’s agenda: fiscal stability, water security, economic growth, environmental leadership and sustainability, a manageable criminal justice system, better schools, a rejiggering of the state-local relationship. His position in California history would be secure based on longevity in office alone, but in addition, he has been a very good governor.

But a great one? Not quite yet. Too many of his achievements remain untested and too many of his initiatives have yet to see completion. In 2012, for example, he used his remarkable political wizardry to persuade Californians to tax themselves to bail out their state government. But was it wizardry more of the marketing than the economic variety? It could still prove to be so if, as Brown leaves office at the end of his current and final term, those Proposition 30 taxes expire with a budget as structurally unsound as the one in place when he took office. A great governor does not provide order and prosperity only for the brief period he is in office and leave things to fall apart once he’s gone. He makes improvements that will outlast him.

Brown is partway there, in large part due to his achievements of 2014 in sound budgeting, in water and in criminal justice.

It is ironic, perhaps, that many of those achievements were merely twists on efforts by his unlikely predecessor, Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. A decade ago, Schwarzenegger proposed and voters adopted, in the form of Proposition 58, a supposedly tough budget reserve to provide a reservoir of cash saved up during years of plenty. It was to meant to address the state’s fundamental challenge: National economic boom years become California super-booms, leading to unsustainable spending, while national recessions turn into California meltdowns in the form of plunging credit ratings, panicked raids on special funds, attempted shutdowns or sell-offs of state assets like buildings and parks, and political uprisings of the type that led to Schwarzenegger’s bizarre victory in the recall of Gov. Gray Davis.

The fund proved unequal to the task, and voters rejected tougher reserve plans. Last year, though, Brown brokered some key changes and, more important, put his own political magic to work, getting Democratic as well as Republican voters to sign on to Proposition 2. Winning approval of the so-called rainy-day fund was an important political feat, but we won’t know how well it will actually work until the economy tanks again, revenues dry up and lawmakers fight over budget cuts.

Brown’s Proposition 1, last year’s water bond, was a trimmed-down version of a measure pulled together during Schwarzenegger’s tenure but repeatedly postponed due to a seemingly perpetual quandary: Getting the political buy-in from all factions necessary to secure passage meant larding up the bond so much that it was unaffordable. This time the worsening drought supplied a sense of urgency, but Brown once again brought his own political skills to bear, hiding his hand until late in the process, then laying out his terms and pressing lawmakers to send voters a package — and campaigning hard to get it passed. His tactics worked, and the state now has money for a variety of needed water projects ranging from dams or other storage to recycling and efficiency.

But Proposition 1 exhibits the reverse side of Schwarzenegger’s bond quandary: It’s far too small to accomplish much and can be considered only a tiny down payment on the water projects California must roll out over the coming decades. Brown’s most productive contribution to water policy may be in lower-profile actions, such as his appointment of former Environmental Protection Agency administrator Felicia Marcus to head the State Water Resources Control Board at precisely the moment the state needed a stronger, savvier board, and his deftness in steering the state on a middle course between complacency and panic to press for conservation in the midst of the drought.

The biggest water project of all — a bypass of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, to bring Sacramento River water directly to the California Aqueduct and the cities it serves without it first running through the delta — confounded Schwarzenegger and every governor who came before him, including Brown’s father, Gov. Edmund G. “Pat” Brown, the architect of the California Water Project. Voters rejected Jerry Brown’s earlier attempt, the so-called peripheral canal, in 1982, and just a few months later rejected Brown himself in his quest for a U.S. Senate seat. So to get the job done this time, Brown may need an extra dose of political wizardry, coupled with a solid, repeated explanation to Californians why the project is the proper way to go.

So far, he is falling short. His most memorable argument for the delta project came in a comment he made to opponents in May: “Shut up.” We need something a little more solid.

Likewise, with the high-speed rail project he proposed in the 1980s, and that Schwarzenegger promoted and voters approved in 2008, Brown has not been at his best when trying to talk Californians out of some buyer’s remorse. “My inclination is not to spend a thing,” Brown said at a high-speed rail event. “But on the other hand, I like trains.”

OK, governor, sure: funny, witty, iconoclastic. But seriously, when will you remind us why we need to build this train?

Brown has critics in some younger Democrats who see him less as a master strategist who hides his cards than as an elder, or even elderly, statesman who remains so checked out of daily legislative matters that he fumbles his own priorities. That’s what led to this year’s climate bill being weaker than it might have been, one argument goes, and to a special session on transportation that has produced nothing. But it may be that Democrats are simply frustrated with a man who, although technically one of them, has always been a party unto himself and follows a political instinct that so far has served him, and the state, well.

Brown often seems at his best when he’s standing alone, or nearly so. He got lawmakers to accept his plan for criminal justice realignment, giving counties responsibility for many of the state’s felons, but had few people applauding him during the early months while observers waited to see whether crime would increase. It didn’t.

He also is adept at dealing with policy wonks, a skill that produced the groundbreaking “local control funding formula” that gives schools a measure of independence and flexibility and drives substantially more money to schools that serve low-income students.

His greatest achievement so far may be his reduction of the state prison population, ending, at least for now, federal court pressure and putting the state on the path to a wiser and more effective use of its limited prison space.

With Brown at the helm, the state has an unconventional but responsible adult in charge who may or may not get his important work done before he leaves office for the last time in January 2019, and may or may not leave behind him an articulable and workable philosophy of government or vision for the future. Californians should root for him to become a grade-A governor, because in doing so, they would be rooting for a brighter future for their state.