League of California Cities executive director Chris McKenzie pumped his organization’s ballot initiative at last night’s meeting of the Contra Costa Mayors Conference.

McKenzie predicts the league will submit the required 1.1 million signatures ahead of the late April deadline and points out why he thinks it will pass muster with voters in November.

McKenzie’s best line of the night was when he compared the Legislature to 1944 existentialist existentialist play by Jean-Paul Sartre called “No Exit” and “Waiting for Godot,” atheater of the absurd play by Samuel Beckett.

We all laughed. We instinctively knew it was an insult. But some of us admitted to each afterward that we only had a vague knowledge of either “No Exit” or “Waiting for Godot.” (Yes, I googled the titles.)

Check out the video.

George Lakoff

UC-Berkeley Professor George Lakoff, expert in cognitive linguistics and author of “Don’t Think of Elephant!” is the featured guest at a Sunday event to raise money for a ballot measure that calls for reducing the California Legislature’s budget adoption threshold from two-thirds to a simple majority.

State Sen. Loni Hancock, D-Berkeley, is hosting the event in Oakland on Sunday from 4-6 p.m. Click here for the invite.

Hancock authored SCA5, a bill that would place before voters in 2010 the opportunity to alter the threshold. If she is unable to secure passage of the measure in Sacramento, proponents plan to circulate the petition and gather the requisite number of signatures to place the question on the ballot using the initiative petition process.

The folks advocating for the change hope that voters’ unhappiness with the recent, drawn-out budget fight in Sacramento will see fit to make the reform. But opponents are expected to wage all-out war against the effort.

California is one of a handful of states with a two-thirds requirement to pass a budget. Critics say it allows a few members of the minority party to hold the budget hostage while advocates say it serves as a check on out-of-control spending.

Lakoff is an expert in what he calls framing, or the way advocates and their foes describe their positions and how those choices tap into the public’s attitudes about everything from taxes to political parties.  Lakoff has said that while Republicans have mastered the art of framing, Democrats have fallen behind. But several years ago, Democratic Party leaders sought help in framing their messages from his book, “Don’t Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate.”

A new report from the California Fair Political Practices Commission shows that politicians seeking state office have collected a staggering $1 billion in campaign dollars since voters capped contribution levels in 2000.

It’s either an argument for public financing of campaigns or the complete abandonment of restrictions that don’t seem to be stopping the flow of special-interest money into politics.

Here’s what the FPPC had to say a few minutes ago:

A new report released today by the state’s campaign finance watchdog revealed that politicians vying for legislative and statewide office raised more than $1 billion since voters capped the size of direct campaign contributions.

The Fair Political Practices Commission’s report, “The Billion Dollar Money Train,” illustrates how officeholders and candidates use a variety of means to legally circumvent contribution limits enacted by Proposition 34 in November of 2000.

“The $1,006,638,463 directly raised by officeholders and candidates works out to $344,503 per day or $14,354 per hour, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year,” emphasized FPPC Chairman Ross Johnson, “and this doesn’t even include the more than $110 million spent on their behalf in so-called ‘Independent Expenditures!’”

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Contra Costa Registrar of Voters Steve Weir

Contra Costa Registrar of Voters Steve Weir has compiled some dismal turnout data for special elections in California.

The most recent congressional special election was in April 2008 to replace the late Rep. Tom Lantos: Overall turnout was about 25 percent but turnout on election day was less than 7 percent.

Weir is among a growing number of election officials who would like Legislature to pass a law that would allow counties the option to hold mail-only elections if turnout is expected to be low. It costs a fortune to put on a precinct-based election where so few people show up at the polls, and money is especially tight in county coffers these days.

Contra Costa faces the prospect of two or more special elections this year in addition to the May 19 statewide election. An election to replace Rep. Ellen Tauscher, D-Alamo, will likely occur sometime this summer and if voters select someone who occupied a legislative seat, a subsequent special election will be needed to replace him or her.

Here is what Weir found:

SD 26 March 24, 2009                7.91% turn out, 3.3% turn out at the polls         May 19, 2009*                Scheduled

CD 12 April 8, 2008                25.9% turn out, 6.9% turn out at the polls

June 3, 2008*                No Data Posted.

AD 55 December 11, 2007        11.56% turn out, 5.64% turn out at the polls

February 5, 2008*        43.29% turn out (vote by mail data not available)

CD 37 June 26, 2007                12.35% turn out, 7.12% turn out at the polls
August 21, 2007                9.02% turn out, 4.04% turn out at the polls

AD 39 May 15, 2007                14.27% turn out, 10.24% turn out at the polls
No Runoff

CD 50 April 11, 2006                38.86% turn out, 18.20% turn out at the polls
June 6, 2006*                41.04% turn out, 17.67 % turn out at the polls

SD 35 April 11, 2006                19.14% turn out, 14.14% turn out at the polls
June 6, 2006*                28.18% turn out, 12.13% turn out at the polls

CD 48 October 4, 2005                22.80% turn out, 8.3% turn out at the polls
December 6, 2005        25.70% turn out, 8.,89% turn out at the polls

AD 53 March 8, 2005                17.69% turn out, 11.09% turn out at the polls
No Runoff

CD 05 March 8, 2005                27.72% turn out, 12.34% turn out at the polls
No Runoff

CD 32 April 10, 2001                35.25% turn out, vote by mail results not available
June 5, 2001                37.60% turn out, vote by mail results not available

The New America Foundation, a Washington, D.C. think tank with an office in Sacramento, is touting a bill in California that would allow the state to automatically register to vote all residents who fill out a form at the Department of Motor Vehicles or file a state tax return.

AB30 passed out of an Assembly elections committee yesterday.

Lawmakers also gave the nod to a related bill, AB106, would preregister all 16-year-olds in the hopes it will foster more interest in politics prior to automatic registration at age 18.

There has been considerable debate over the years over how to increase voter participation but it remains an open question as to whether an automatic registration process will translate into actual voting.

Here’s the press release from the New America Foundation:

Sacramento, CA–The New America Foundation applauded the advancement of two bills designed to increase the number of Californians who are registered to vote.  The bills, AB 30 (Price) and AB 106 (Price), were approved yesterday by the Assembly Committee on Elections and Redistricting by a solid 5-1 vote. If passed, the bills would make great strides toward bringing California closer to 100 percent voter registration.

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After sitting through a daylong presentation put on by coalition of business leaders and government reform groups in Sacramento, it seems increasingly likely that voters will see on the ballot in 2010 two measures that would lead to the California Constitutional Convention since 1879.

What is a Constitutional Convention? It’s a group of people charged with developing recommendations for amendments to the state’s Constitution, all of which must be ratified by the voters. How those members are chosen and the scope of their work is still up in the air.

Californians may not realize it but they frequently amend their Constitution through the initiative process.

As the Bay Area Council and its partners — the Center for Governmental Studies, Common Cause, Courage Campaign and League of Women Voters and others — envision it, this convention would focus primarily on governance reforms designed to help resolve some of the state’s intractable problems.

This is scary stuff to people who fear that well-intentioned reforms could carry unintended consequences and leave the state in shambles.

But most of the crowd gathered in Sacramento today seemed to feel that the state is already in shambles thanks, in large part, to voter-approved initiatives that carved out dollars for everything from education to public safety to roads but left state leaders with decision-making authority only over 7 percent of the budget.

Potential reform topics include … Read the rest of this entry »

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.

I am in Sacramento today at what’s being billed as a summit of reformers interested in convening a California Constitutional convention.

The event centers around the question: Has California become ungovernable?

Countless examples suggest that it may be true: Major structural budget problems, water, healthcare and prisons, just to name a few. Competing interest groups coupled with partisan gridlock and the sheer size of the problems has conspired to

Ideas include stripping the two-thirds vote threshold to pass a budget, instant run-off for state officeholders, open primaries, unicameral or parliamentary-style legislature, ending term limits, along with campaign finance and initiative reforms.

I’ll be here all day and I’ll report back later on some of the more interesting ideas and who wants to do what.

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.

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The Center for Governmental Studies, led by the highly capable Bob Stern, has written a very interesting editorial published in the Los Angeles Times about recommended reforms of California’s initiative process.

I recommend reading this editorial. Here are the first few paragraphs:

By Robert M. Stern and Tracy Westen
November 10, 2008

Here are some things you should know about ballot initiatives in California.

In all of the 1960s, there were only nine statewide initiatives placed on the ballot. In the 1970s, that number rose to 22. In the 1980s, Californians were asked to vote on 46; then, in the 1990s, it climbed to 61. So far in this decade, there already have been 63 — and there’s still a year to go, with a possible special election in June.

That’s a record every decade — and a sevenfold increase over 50 years.

Here’s something else: Supporters and opponents of these initiatives are spending more and more money to ensure that their side wins: $9 million in 1976, $127 million in 1978 (the year of Proposition 13), $140 million in 1996, $280 million in 2004 and $330 million in 2006 — a 37-fold increase in 30 years.

This money comes from individuals, corporations and unions, but increasingly it comes in large chunks — very large chunks. In the 1990 elections, for example, one-third of all contributions for initiatives were given in amounts of $1 million or more. In 2006, it jumped from one-third to two-thirds. One person — real estate heir and Hollywood producer Stephen Bing — gave more than $46 million of his own money to support the (unsuccessful) 2006 initiative to impose oil depletion taxes.