The California Republican Party entered the TV ad wars over the state budget today with buys in the Los Angeles, Fresno and Sacramento markets.

The party either didn’t have the cash or chose not to bother with educating television viewers in the Bay Area. But I wouldn’t want you to feel left out.

Here are the ads:

A pair of open-government groups have settled their lawsuit against the state Office of Legislative Counsel now that a machine-readable database of lawmakers’ voting records has been made available.

The California First Amendment Coalition and MAPLight.org – a Berkeley-based nonpartisan nonprofit research group that exposes connections between money and politics – said the database became available not long after they filed their lawsuit in December in Sacramento County Superior Court.

“It shouldn’t take a lawsuit for the government to realize its data belongs to the people,” MAPLight.org executive director Daniel Newman said in a news release. “In this new era of highlighting transparency, we hope this settlement serves as an example to city and state governments across the country to provide public access to public information.”

California Legislative data, including how lawmakers vote, legislation in progress, and laws, used to be available to the public only in a plain-text format on the California Legislative Information website. It could be viewed and printed, but provided access to only one bill at a time, making analysis difficult. CFAC and MAPLight.org had asked for copies of the electronic database used to create the Web site, but the Office of the Legislative Counsel had refused their requests.

Now the website offers a “structured database” containing data on lawmakers’ votes in a machine-readable format. As part of the settlement agreement, which is effective today, CFAC and MAPLight.org agreed to dismiss their lawsuit and agreed that they will not re-file any similar suit so long as the Legislative Counsel maintains this structured database at the same functional level at which it exists today.

The settlement agreement also provides that the Office of the Legislative Counsel will release another database, known as the “Inquire” database that MAPLight.org and CFAC seek to review. The agreement also stipulates that the Office of the Legislative Counsel will pay $65,000 towards MAPLight.org’s and CFAC’s attorney’s fees.

“No longer can legislators use the complexity of the legislative process, and the sheer volume of bills and votes, to hide the favors they are doing for special interests that fund their elections,” said CFAC executive director Peter Scheer. “The more voters know about the influence of money on their elected representatives, the less tolerant they will be.”

MAPLight.org plans to use the structured database to create a new government transparency website, MAPLight.org California, modeled after a MAPLight.org Congress website providing transparency tools including a Money and Votes database showing connections between campaign donations and legislative votes.

Danville Mayor Newell Arnerich

Danville Mayor Newell Arnerich says he will run for the state Senate if Sen. Mark DeSaulnier, D-Concord, is elected to the 10th Congressional District.

The 14-year-veteran of the Danville Town Council and an owner of an architectural firm spent the weekend at the California Democratic Party convention in Sacramento talking with party leaders — Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, DeSaulnier and Assemblyman Tom Torlakson, D-Antioch — about his prospects and came away enthused.

It was his wife who told him he ought to run for the Legislature, he said. Janis teaches school in Orinda and she urged him to try and help fix a dysfunctional state budgeting process mired in partisan muck.

The Legislature’s failure to solve the state’s fiscal problems incrementally in prior years has led to massive and nearly unmanageable deficits that are pushing businesses out of California and hurting education, he said.

“I believe the opportunity for change is over the next 24 months and the voters are looking for it,” Arnerich said. ”

Arnerich is the first declared candidate for the District 7 Senate seat, should it become open.

Former Assemblyman Joe Canciamilla of Pittsburg is also looking at the race and Assemblywoman Joan Buchanan, D-Alamo, may well have an interest in the Senate post if she is unsuccessful in her 10th Congressional District campaign.

Tom Torlakson

Dynamic former state Superintendent of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin roundly endorsed veteran Contra Costa legislator Tom Torlakson, who held his superintendent campaign kick-off luncheon in Concord today.

Eastin lit up the hall at the Crown Plaza in Concord with her direct and unequivocal style, prompting not a few people to ask at its conclusion, “Where can I vote for her?”

Between glowing commentary about Torlakson’s candidacy, she blasted the Legislature and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger for what she called immoral cuts to education in recent budget decisions. And she vowed to vote against several of the measures on the May 19 special election ballot that she says will hurt education.

“The Legislature doesn’t have the stones to raise taxes on cigars … but they could steal from Prop. 98,” Eastin said.

But Eastin has clearly granted Torlakson, a California assemblyman and former state senator, an exception to her ire.

Eastin, an ardent women’s rights activist, even made it a point to say why she was endorsing Torlakson over his chief opponent, Los Angeles state Sen. Gloria Romero.

“All things being equal, I will endorse the woman,” Eastin said. “But Tom is the right person for this job.”

In an interesting sidenote, Eastin delivered her passionate and pointed speech right in front of the table where two potential congressional challengers sat: Sen. Mark DeSaulnier and Assemblywoman Joan Buchanan.

But unlike the superintendent’s race, Eastin made it clear she would endorse Buchanan. She has already offered to help with the assemblywoman’s campaign, should Buchanan decide to run.

A new poll released a few minutes ago at the California Constitutional Convention Summit in Sacramento shows that 82 percent of voters believe the state is on the wrong track.

It is the highest level of unhappiness since the Bay Area Council began doing the survey in 2002. (The council is the chief sponsor of the summit.) Pollsters conducted the telephone poll of 800 voters between Feb. 3-5 and it has an error rate of plus or minus 3.5 percent.

Just 11 percent though the state was on the right track. (Who are these people, anyway? Did they take this survey while they were on the beach in Hawaii?)

Reasons for the gloom cited included the budget deficit, gridlock in Sacramento, bureaucracy, poor schools and high taxes.

Disapproval ratings for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Legislature are in the tank, too, at 60 and 71 percent respectively. (For comparison purposes, Obama’s disapproval rating was 17 percent.)

The chief purpose of the poll, though, was to gather public opinion on whether state should convene a Constitutional Convention, a group that would examine some or part of the state Constitution and place reforms before voters.

Most voters have never heard of it. It was 1879 when California last convened such a group.

But after a series of explanations about what a convention could accomplish, about half the respondents said they would support it.

In an interesting side note, the poll found that 67 percent of those asked supported an open primary in theory. The poll was taken before the Legislature placed an open primary measure on the June 2010 ballot.

With the California Senate still deadlocked over a budget, the Tri-Valley Democratic Club passed a resolution this week to support a petition campaign that would end the state’s requirement for two-thirds vote of the Legislature to pass a budget.

Democrats in the Senate need only one more Republican vote to pass a budget deal that calls for a mix of $42 billion in new taxes and spending cuts. Eliminate the two-thirds requirement and Democrats have plenty of votes in both the Senate and the Assembly to pass a budget without a single Republican vote.

Republicans, of course, oppose it. But many Democrats believe the answer to the annual budget stalemate — which has been exacerbated by the recession — is to ask voters to strip that threshhold from the law. There is ample talk that Democrats and their allies in the labor community will seek to put such a ballot measure before voters in the November 2009 election.

Read on for the Tri-Valley Democrats’ resolution: Read the rest of this entry »

Sen. Mark DeSaulnier

As state senators prepare to go into a budget session this afternoon — one that that will turn into a slumber party unless at least one Republican votes for the budget — Sen. Mark DeSaulnier, D-Concord, sent out a gloomy e-mail alert.

From the sounds of it, he will need a sleeping bag, a toothbrush and, dare we suggest, earplugs.

Here is DeSaulnier’s alert:

Dear Friends and Neighbors:

Since the afternoon of Valentine’s Day and through the President’s Weekend holiday, my Senate colleagues and I have been on the Senate floor debating the best way to move our state forward. Over the last 5 months we have seen what can, without dramatics, be called the implosion of our national financial markets, the collapse of the American Dream of homeownership and the strife of precipitous middle and working-class job losses.

As the leading state in the nation, California must turn itself around and begin to work toward financial solvency. The road to economic recovery begins TODAY with this budget vote. As we speak, 276 more crucial infrastructure investments are being shut down. TODAY, The Governor has called for layoffs of 10,000 Californians. Read the rest of this entry »

Sunne Wright McPeak

California’s increasingly precarious financial predicament will require major reforms of a wide variety, agreed  state leaders and former elected officials who spoke to the Contra Costa Council this morning during its annual CCUSA conference in Concord.

They blamed — not in equal parts — term limits, the two-thirds voting threshhold for budgets and taxes, campaign finance reform, partisan primaries, polemic politics in Sacramento and the Legislature’s inability to focus on solutions that work.

Ex=Business, Transportatoin and Housing Secretary Sunne Wright McPeak even went so far as to diss her former boss, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, calling his decision to roll back the vehicle license fee a terrible one that has helped contribute to at least $6 billion of the state’s structural deficit. McPeak has in the past been very circumspect in her comments about the governor and the three years she worked for him.

Asked how she woudl fix the $41 billion state budget gap, McPeak told the audience she would take three years in order to avoid irreparable damage to schools and social services. But she would hike the sales tax for two or three years and reinstate the vehicle license fee and permanently dedicate it to city and county governments.

McPeak called it a distraction to focus on the two-thirds requirement in the legislature to pass a budget or a tax hike.

“I don’t want ot get to a bad budget faster,” she said.

Instead, McPeak said she would shift the state’s full attention to growing the economy as a means to restore public funds in conjunction with a full analysis of existing state programs’ effectiveness.

Willie Brown

Former Assembly Speaker and San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown’s reform ideas included an end to term limits and called it absurd that the two-thirds voting requirements have been imposed by a majority vote given the fact that these rules would never receive a two-thirds vote.

As for campaign finance, he called for a repeal of much of what he referred to as “so-called” reforms.

“In my time in public office, there were no such things as independent expenditures, he said. ” I was the independent expenditure. The public is entitled ot know who gave money and how much and how it was spent. These modern campaign reforms are bullshit. It conceals what is really happening and never really know the source of the money.”

Click through to next page for recommendations offered by anothe speaker, former Assemblyman Joe Canciamilla of Pittsburg.

Read the rest of this entry »

Contra Costa County Supervisor Susan Bonilla has had a change of heart and says she will run for state Assembly in 2010 after all.

Bonilla had said she would not seek the office despite widespread expectation that she wanted the job. Her teen-aged daughter will be a senior in high school in 2010 and Bonilla worried that a campaign would take too much time away from her family.

“I have my family’s full support and I feel that as a former teacher, mayor and a county supervisor, I have experience to bring to Sacramento,” Bonilla said.

Bonilla must have figured out what most parents know: Teenagers don’t really want you around.  (That was a joke, people. I raised four children.)

Bonilla says she will not actively start the campaign until later in the year. She has plenty on her plate at the county these days, with massive budget short-falls and labor negotiations.

But she goes into the campaign with a huge advantage: The endorsements of state Sen. Mark DeSaulnier, D-Concord, and Assemblyman Tom Torlakson, D-Antioch.

She has been viewed as the heir apparent for some time and when she took her name out of contention, numerous folks called up Torlakson and DeSaulnier. The met the two legislators for coffee and the big sell: Martinez Councilmen Mark Ross and Mike Menesini, Pittsburg Councilman Sal Evola and Antioch Councilman Brian Kalinowski. (Contra Costa superintendent of schools Joe Ovick had considered it but recently changed his mind.)

This is a significant election. The person who wins in 2010 has a strong chance to serve in public office for 12 years. If Bonilla were to win the the Assembly seat and remain for six years, she would term out at the same time that DeSaulnier will finish his two terms in the Senate. That puts her in a prime position to run for the open Senate seat.

Sen. Mark DeSaulnier, D-Concord

Freshman state Sen. Mark DeSaulnier, D-Concord, has snagged a seat on the powerful Appropriations Committee, the choke point for almost every piece of legislation to move through the legislative house.

He will also serve as chairman of Labor and Industrial Relations Committee and the State Administration, General Government & Judicial Budget Sub-Committee.

In addition, he was named vice chairman of the Elections, Reapportionment & Constitutional Amendments Committee and will sit as a member of the Health Committee and the Transportation and Housing Committee.

Read more for the full committee assignment list released this afternoon from state Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg’s office: Read the rest of this entry »