Joel Wachs waxes on about term limits

California has had term limits in the Legislature since 1990. Boy, that’s really made a massive difference in the quality of governance, hasn’t it?

In Los Angeles, the rules now limit City Council member to three terms in their seats, and a consequence is that where once local legislators kept a weather eye for vacant jobs in Sacramento, now it’s the other way around: Sacramento legislators are looking to city seats as their next political berths.

All this is by way of getting to Joel Wachs, who did what no Angeleno -- at least not of any current generation -- is likely to do. Wachs served for 30 years as an L.A. City Council member, representing part of the San Fernando Valley. That made him the fourth-longest-serving council member ever.

That was before term limits, and when I talked to Wachs for my “Patt Morrison Asks” column this week, I was curious about what he thought of term limits. And like many of those who’ve been elected to office, he thinks it shortchanges voters, who, after all, are free to vote against incumbents anytime they like.

Before term limits, “you got the benefit of experience, of [officials] not constantly trying to leave for some other level of government because they’re termed out. On the other hand, there was frustration because the system made it very, very difficult to get rid of people who weren’t performing well. So term limits became the answer for that.”

Wachs said voters need to be on the qui vive and “support the people who perform well, no matter how long they’ve been there, and get rid of the people who don’t, even if they’ve been there a very short time.”

Wachs was crusading against mega-money in campaigns and in favor of public funding of them during the post-Watergate era. He’s much more worried about the big dough rolling in than about term limits.

He remembers spending $24,000 for his first primary and $25,000 to win his runoff. It wasn’t the money that did the trick, he said, but going door to door, “having your mother stand at the freeway and your dad at the market saying, ‘Vote for my son Joel.’ And ironically, we had a better turnout than you’re getting in some council races where there’s ungodly amounts of money.”

California’s term-limits law was the product of Republican frustration with being unable to get rid of the Democratic Assembly’s “speaker for life,” the wily Willie Brown. Since then, there have been rafts of leaders who can barely figure their way around a gavel before they have to move along.

Voters compromised in 2012, amending the rule that said someone could serve only six years in the Assembly and eight years in the state Senate. Voters shaved two years off term limits in exchange for an agreement that a person can now serve 12 years in the same legislative body without having to hopscotch around.

Think of all the money that will save voters, not having to change the legislators’ letterhead stationery so often.

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