The Legislature really dropped the ball with its version of the gas-tax-swap deal, state Treasurer Bill Lockyer told Alameda County officials today, and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger was right to promise a veto.

Lockyer addressed the county Board of Supervisors Budget Workgroup, with attendees including supervisors Keith Carson, Alice Lai-Bitker and Gail Steele; County Administrator Susan Muranishi; and dozens of county department heads and staffers, local nonprofit officials and other stakeholders.

Schwarzenegger’s version of the gas-tax-swap deal would’ve saved a lot of money, but the changes and compromises it underwent while wending its way through the Legislature reduced the General Fund savings to a fraction of what they had been, he said.

“Why do all this complicated shifting around if the net result is confusion,” Lockyer later elucidated outside the budget session. “It didn’t make sense to change everything around and have lawsuits about it … for a very modest net result.”

Lockyer said he also agrees with the governor’s pitch for a sales-tax exemption for green tech manufacturing equipment.

Inside the budget session, Lockyer had delivered a somewhat sobering assessment of the state’s fiscal situation – and so, the outlook for cities and counties – in the months to come.

Cash flow is fine now, he said, but if the Legislature and Schwarzenegger can’t reach a budget deal early in the summer, the state’s payments of gas tax funds, mental-health tax funds and other monies to cities, counties and school districts “almost inevitably” could be deferred for up to two months, to the tune of billions of dollars.

And Sacramento is counting on “unrealistically high” estimates of federal aid to help balance its books, meaning lawmakers and the governor will have to scramble to backfill an even bigger hole when that money from Washington doesn’t materialize.

Lockyer said he intends to sell about $14 billion worth of general obligation bonds this year to pay for infrastructure projects, and as much as $10 million (depending on when we have a budget deal) in short-term borrowing this summer to tide us through our annual cash-flow issues.

He said California gets a bad rap from bond-rating agencies, not because there’s any real risk of default – he’s constitutionally empowered to service the state’s debts no matter what the Legislature does or doesn’t do – but rather because of the widespread perception of legislative gridlock Sacramento exudes year after year, a perception unlikely to be dispelled so long as the state constitution requires two-thirds votes of the Legislature for all budget and tax bills. But with no significant chance of changing that any time soon and no chance of reforming Proposition 13 to allow for reassessment of commercial property, California will keep having to find ways to muddle through, he said.

Oakland mayoral candidate and former state Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata’s Hope 2010 ballot measure committee in the past week has moved another $70,000 ($20,000 last Wednesday and $50,000 yesterday) into Californians for a Cure, the committee formed by the American Cancer Society, the American Lung Association, the American Heart Association and cancer research doctors to push the proposed tobacco-tax-for-cancer-research measure Perata helped put forth. That’s atop $40,000 last month and $150,000 in November. The proponents have until May 17 to collect the 433,971 valid signatures of regsistered voters required to put the measure on November’s ballot.

In other news, Oakland A’s co-owner and Los Angeles-based real-estate developer Lew Wolff is among several Bay Area-connected notables who’ve ponied up in the past week for the campaign supporting Proposition 14, the “top-two primary” ballot measure leveraged onto this June’s ballot by state Sen. Abel Maldonado, R-Santa Maria – now Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s nominee for lieutenant governor – as part of the deal he struck for his vote on the state budget last year.

Wolff gave $5,000 on Friday. Other recent contributions include $10,000 last Wednesday from Denise Watkins, a Pleasanton education activist and wife of former Seagate CEO Bill Watkins; $5,000 last Wednesday from former state Controller and 2006 Democratic gubernatorial candidate Steve Westly; $5,000 last Wednesday from Symantec Corp. Chairman John Thompson of Woodside; and $10,000 on Monday from Aart De Geus, Chairman and CEO of Mountain View-based Synopsys Inc. Though not from the Bay Area, the $20,000 that the California Chamber of Commerce gave yesterday ain’t chicken feed, either.

Oakland mayoral candidate and former state Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata’s Hope 2010 ballot measure committee gave $20,000 last Thursday to Californians for a Cure, the committee formed by the American Cancer Society, the American Lung Association, the American Heart Association and cancer research doctors to push the tobacco-tax-for-cancer-research measure Perata helped put forth.

Hope 2010 reported having $721,835 in the bank at 2009’s end, but as reported earlier, the committee has been spending directly to promote the measure (and, though he’d surely say it’s not the intent, to get his name into Oakland voters’ mailboxes).

And the alcohol industry is anteing up big time for the Stop Hidden Taxes ballot measure committee, formed by the California Chamber of Commerce and the California Taxpayers’ Association both to oppose a proposed ballot measure to lower the Legislative vote threshold for budget bills from two-thirds to a simple majority, and to support the chamber’s proposed measure to increase the Legislative vote threshold for state levies and charges (including alcohol levies!) from a simple majority to two-thirds.

The past week has seen contributions of $25,000 from the San Francisco-based Wine Institute (above the $25,000 it gave earlier this month); $20,000 from beer giant Crown Imports LLC of Chicago; $20,000 from the California Beer & Beverage Distributors Issues PAC; and $25,000 from MillerCoors of Milwaukee. The Wine Institute’s $25,000 had just come in as contributions of $2,500 each from Cline Cellars in Sonoma; J Vineyards & Winery in Healdsburg; Jordan Vineyard & Winery in Healdsburg; Kunde Estate Winery & Vineyards in Kenwood; Newton Vineyard in St. Helena; Pax Wine Cellars in Santa Rosa; Ridge Vineyards/Lytton Springs in Healdsburg; Rombauer Vineyards in St. Helena; Sonoma Wine Company in Graton; and ZWine Company LLC in Napa.

At a news conference this morning in Sacramento on the results of state-funded medical-marijuana research, former state Sen. John Vasconcellos, D-Santa Clara, recounted an interesting tale about how the legislation to fund that research was passed.

Vasconcellos started drafting such a bill after California voters had approved Proposition 215 in 1996 to enact the state’s medical-marijuana law; he said it was a bipartisan effort from the get-go, with his staff working alongside then-Attorney General and Republican gubernatorial candidate Dan Lungren’s staff to come up with something that worked for everyone.

But when he eventually brought the legislation forward in 1999, it required a 2/3 vote because it involved an $8.7 million appropriation for the research, he said. He had 23 votes lined up in the state Senate, and four additional Republicans — Jim Brulte, John Lewis, Tim Leslie and someone else he couldn’t remember today (looks from the roll call as if it had to be David Kelley, Bruce McPherson or Cathie Wright) — willing to sign on, but none of them wanted to be the 27th and final vote that tipped the bill over into passage.

So, Vasconcellos said, the four Republican Senators agreed to all say “aye” in unison so that none of them (or, I suppose, all of them) would be the final vote.

State Sen. Abel Maldonado’s drive toward confirmation, which got hung up by Assembly Democrats on Thursday and reset for another 90 days by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Friday, hasn’t helped him land a lot of contributions to his campaign for that office.

After Schwarzenegger nominated him in late November to fill the rest of former Lt. Gov. John Garamendi’s term, Maldonado, R-Santa Maria, announced his intent to seek election to a full term of his own in June’s GOP primary and November’s general election. Of course, now that the governor has withdrawn and re-submitted his nomination, it seems he’ll have to simultaneously convince the Assembly to support him and convince the public to vote for him in the primary.

“Abel Maldonado for Lt. Governor 2010” qualified as a committee Jan. 19, according to records filed with the Secretary of State’s office, even as Maldonado and Schwarzenegger were starting to ramp up public awareness and pressure on the Legislature in advance of this week’s votes. Yet the committee has received only three major contributions totaling $23,400 so far: $6,500 from Michael Fox of M.E. Fox & Co. Inc. in San Jose on Jan. 19; $11,900 from the California Professional Firefighters PAC on Feb. 1; and $5,000 from former Assemblyman and former Santa Barbara County Supervisor Brooks Firestone of Solvang on Feb. 1.

Maldonado’s state Senate campaign account showed $9,106 cash on hand at the end of 2009, and no major contributions since then.

Not that his GOP primary rival, state Sen. Sam Aanestad, R-Grass Valley, has been making bank, either. Aanestad’s campaign committee reported $97,499 cash on hand as of the end of 2009, but he’d put in $50,000 from his own pocket in December and the only major contribution since then has been $5,000 from The Dentists Insurance Co. this Thursday.

The money is bigger on the other side of the aisle. Democratic primary candidate state Sen. Dean Florez, D-Shafter, reported $957,381 cash on hand at the end of 2009, while Democratic primary candidate Janice Hahn, a Los Angeles City Council member, reported $341,341 cash on hand; neither has raised many big contributions since.

It’s still at least theoretically possible for Assembly Democrats to beat Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger at his own game and reject state Sen. Abel Maldonado as lieutenant governor.

The Assembly voted 37-35 yesterday on confirming Maldonado, R-Santa Maria, as lieutenant governor. Assembly Democrats contend this is a rejection, as Maldonado didn’t get 41 votes to confirm. Schwarzenegger and Maldonado interpret the state constitution otherwise, arguing that the Assembly must act by majority either to confirm or reject Maldonado, or else Maldonado can just be sworn in 90 days after his nomination.

This no doubt has the California Supreme Court’s justices rubbing their temples in anticipation of a possible intervention so politically charged that it’s sure to leave everyone unhappy.

But that need not necessarily come to pass. The governor’s office confirmed to me today that under this interpretation, the Assembly could vote again between now and Feb. 21 – the 90-day mark – to either confirm or reject Maldonado with 41 votes. And seven Assembly members didn’t vote yesterday.

One will remain on the sidelines no matter what. Republican U.S. Senate candidate and Assemblyman Chuck DeVore, R-Irvine, was on the campaign trail yesterday and absent from the vote, but issued a statement saying he would have abstained anyway. (Ed. note at 4:10 p.m.: Trevino informs me DeVore “actually was present on the Assembly floor for the morning vote. He was only gone for the afternoon session. Doesn’t affect his purposeful abstention, though.”)

“One year ago, I resigned as Assembly Minority Whip because I would not support the budget deal that led to the failed Proposition 1A — which would have been the largest state tax increase in American history. Senator Maldonado, by contrast, played a decisive role in putting 1A before the people. I won’t reward bad behavior with high office. It is in that spirit that I abstained from this vote.”

Today, campaign spokesman Joshua Trevino told me DeVore will abstain if there’s a re-vote.

“As he just told E.J. Schultz at the Fresno Bee (via Twitter), the GOP Assembly caucus has decided to support Maldonado. If Chuck votes no, it will be more a hit at them than the nominee per se. An abstention registers disapproval of the nomination without expressing direct disapproval of his fellow Republicans. It also serves as a de facto no when the affirmations are tallied.”

Two Assembly Democrats – Dave Jones, D-Sacramento, and Mary Salas, D-Chula Vista – opposed Maldonado in an earlier round of voting, but didn’t vote in the final tally. Let’s assume, for argument’s sake, that they would again oppose Maldonado in a re-vote. That would make it 37-37 – still four votes shy of a majority to confirm or reject.

Three Assembly Democrats – Hector De La Torre, D-South Gate; Kevin de Leon, D-Los Angeles; and Ed Hernandez, D-West Covina – were present but didn’t vote. Assemblywoman Wilmer Carter, D-Rialto, was absent.

I queried all four about what they would do if there’s a re-vote. Carter spokeswoman Ellen Braunstein responded to my query just before noon: “I haven’t been able to contact the Assemblymember yet, and will wait for her response.”

But, perhaps unsurprisingly, none of the other three have responded yet. Perhaps they were busy having their heads knocked together by Assembly Speaker Karen Bass, Speaker-elect John Perez and/or California Democratic Party Chairman John Burton, all of whom might like to see them fall into the party line to sink Maldonado once and for all.

Although many expect former Assemblywoman Wilma Chan to seek and probably win the Alameda County Board of Supervisors Distrct 3 seat (to which incumbent and former Chan aide Alice Lai-Bitker won’t seek re-election), it doesn’t mean the field will be clear: Alameda City Councilwoman Lena Tam filed a candidate intention statement for the seat Jan. 25. District 3 includes the cities of Alameda and San Leandro; the San Lorenzo, Ashland and Hillcrest Knolls unincorporated areas; and Oakland’s Fruitvale, San Antonio and Chinatown districts.

The Democratic primary race for the 20th Assembly District seat (from which incumbent Alberto Torrico is term-limited out, and running for Attorney General) seems pretty evenly matched, moneywise. Fremont City Councilman Bob Wieckowski reported raising $50,810 and spending $13,132.81 in the latter half of 2009, leaving him with $95,672 cash on hand and $7,905 in debt ($87,767 unencumbered) at year’s end. Ohlone College Trustee Garrett Yee reported raising $70,864 and spending $42,663 in the latter half of 2009, leaving him with $126,660 cash on hand and $53,188 ($73,472 unencumbered) at year’s end. But there isn’t much happening on the Republican side: GOP candidate Adnan Shahab reported raising $1,455 – of which $1,350 seemed to come from him and his family – and spending $1,232 in the latter half of 2009, leaving him with $223 cash on hand and no debt at year’s end.

If Republican Jeff Wald of Fremont is going to give incumbent state Sen. Ellen Corbett, D-San Leandro, a run for her money this November, he’d better start finding some money of his own. Wald reported having raised $400 and spent $225.50 in the latter half of 2009, leaving him $174.50 cash on hand at year’s end; the 48-year-old computer network specialist, who challenged but lost to Torrico in 2008, received $100 from Sondra Wald of Henderson, Nev., and $300 from himself. Meanwhile, Corbett raised $80,505 in the latter half of 2009, leaving her with $227,368 cash on hand and $2,179 in debts at year’s end.

Three candidates have emerged so far for the one vacant Alameda County Superior Court seat on June’s ballot. Administrative Law Judge Victoria Kolakowski of Oakland, who ran unsuccessfully for a Superior Court seat in 2008, filed a new candidate intention statement Jan. 29. Criminal defense attorney and former prosecutor Louis Goodman of Hayward has filed papers as well. And Deputy District Attorney John Creighton confirmed to me this afternoon that he’s running; the 25-year veteran of the DA’s office was in the headlines for a while about a year ago as he handled the early phases of prosecuting Johannes Mehserle, the former BART Police officer charged with murder in the death of Oscar Grant.

Alameda County Supervisor Nate Miley isn’t up for re-election to a fourth term in his District 4 seat until 2012, but that didn’t stop him from raising $26,362 in the latter half of 2009. Of that amount, $1,000 is came from the “canna-business” sector supporting medical marijuana and total legalization: $500 from Tax Cannabis, the committee supporting the legalization measure expected to be on this November’s ballot; $250 from the Oakland Cannabis Buyers Cooperative, now known as the Patient ID Center; $200 from the Berkeley Patients Group; and $50 from medical marijuana attorney/activist Robert Raich of Oakland. And as in the past, Miley has kept some of his campaign spending in the family, paying $2,000 to his son, Chris, of Alameda.

My friend Bob Gammon of the East Bay Express had an interesting piece today about how former state Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata seems to be benefitting from some – ahem – synergy between a statewide ballot measure he’s pushing and his Oakland mayoral bid.

I’d noticed it too: a mailer went out recently urging support for the ballot measure, which would raise tobacco taxes to fund cancer research. It went addressed to “Dear Fellow Oakland Voter.” And it went out with Perata’s photo and name all over it.

Gammon, the duke of Perata-watchers from waaay back, notes:

Perata’s use of the cancer-measure committee’s funds in this manner makes little sense unless his true aim is to boost his mayoral campaign, experts say. Indeed, the cancer-research initiative, which would raise taxes on cigarettes, hasn’t even qualified for the ballot yet. Doug Heller, executive director of the Los Angeles-based nonprofit Consumer Watchdog, which keeps close tabs on the state’s initiative process, noted that the proposition will probably face potent opposition from Big Tobacco because it proposes to raise California cigarette taxes by $1 a pack. In other words, it’s foolhardy, Heller said, to spend money now on a local mailer when the tobacco industry will spend millions in the summer and fall attempting to kill the initiative. “Every dollar will be precious in this campaign,” Heller said.

Campaign finance reports also indicate that Perata is muddying the waters between the cancer-research measure and his mayoral campaign in ways that raise legal and ethical questions. Under California law, it is illegal for a candidate to use funds from a statewide ballot-measure committee with no contribution limits to support a campaign for an office that does have donation limits. Nonetheless, Perata has hired at least three consultants to work on both campaigns, raising questions as to whether they are being paid by the cancer-research committee to work on his mayoral campaign, in violation of state law.

I talked this evening with Perata spokesman Jason Kinney.

“I don’t know about the number (of mailers), but I know it went to all voters in the November 2008 election in Oakland,” he told me, saying they’re “the people he (Perata) knows best” after representing them for so long in the Legislature and, before that, on the Alameda County Board of Supervisors.

Perata has done the same – targeting Oakland first with mailings urging support for certain statewide ballot measures – in the past, Kinney noted. He said the Bay Area tends to be both a rich hunting ground for the petition signatures needed to put a measure on the ballot, and also a place packed with liberal voters more likely to support tax increases for what they see as just causes.

Of course, he wasn’t running a concurrent campaign for Oakland mayor when he was stumping for those other measures. And he hadn’t paid his longtime political lieutenant, Oakland City Councilman Ignacio de la Fuente, a hefty consulting fee on those earlier measures, either.

Kinney said Gammon’s story was “fairly insulting to Don personally” because funding cancer research long has been a cause “near and dear to his heart” – both his parents died of cancer, and he and several staffers are survivors.

So when it came time to raise awareness for this measure, “he started in Oakland, where his base is,” Kinney said. Future mailers will go elsewhere around the Bay Area, he added, and will be handed out at farmers’ markets, churches and other public gathering places across the region.

Perata always has been a grandmaster both at raising a lot of money and at shuffling it among his many committees and causes, yet a years-long FBI probe turned up no criminal activity and Fair Political Practice Commission investigations have brought nothing more than the occasional slap on the wrist or outright dismissal. He knows how to use the system to his advantage.

How Oakland voters feel about that remains to be seen.

A gander at Bay Area state lawmakers’ cash on hand at the end of 2009 reveals that two are way ahead of the pack.

In the East Bay, Assemblywoman Mary Hayashi, D-Castro Valley, had $367,751.57 in her campaign coffers at last year’s end, more than twice the amount of any other Bay Area Assembly member seeking re-election in 2010; the next-closest is Tom Ammiano, D-San Francisco, at $182,390.30.

It looks like the bulk of Hayashi’s contributions have come from labor unions and health-care-related interest groups – not surprising, given she chairs to the Assembly Business and Professions Committee. Still, that’s a lot of heft for someone who’s unlikely to face a primary election challenge, and who represents an overwhelmingly Democratic district.

There were unsubstantiated rumors last year that Hayashi might mount a primary challenge to state Sen. Ellen Corbett, D-San Leandro (who had a hefty $2207,368.04 in the bank at year’s end), but she has filed no such notice of intent with the Secretary of State’s office. Then again, I don’t see that she has an Assembly re-election Web site up. Then again again, she probably doesn’t need one yet.

But the Bay Area’s biggest pot o’ gold belongs to state Sen. Leland Yee, D-San Francisco, who had $1,058,674.86 in the bank at 2009’s end. Beyond Chron has an interesting rundown on where a good chunk of that money is coming from, and why.

Although Yee is seeking re-election this year, he’s also rumored to be preparing for a San Francisco mayoral run in 2011. If so, he could end up needing a lot of cash in a crowded race against Supervisor Bevan Dufty, City Attorney Dennis Herrera and Assessor Phil Ting, and possibly Public Defender Jeff Adachi and District Attorney Kamala Harris, too (if Harris doesn’t prevail in this year’s state Attorney General’s race, as she’s hoping).

The region’s barest cupboard is that of state Sen. Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, who had $19,296.47 in the bank at year’s end. But he’s not up for re-election until 2012, so he has plenty of time to beef up the bankroll.

UPDATE @ 11:36 A.M. FRIDAY 2/12: Yee takes umbrage at Beyond Chron’s characterization of his votes. From a letter he sent to Beyond Chron:

The author attacked my voting record on 7 different health care bills that came before me in the State Senate. Regrettably, the author was in such a rush to play “gotcha politics,” talk about “flip-flopping” and “blue-dog Democrats”, that he never called or contacted my office to get the facts.

The result is all too familiar: on 5 of the 7 bills in question, the author was simply dead wrong on the facts. While accidents happen, it is hard to believe that anyone who was writing a hit piece as vitriolic as this one would just accidentally get over 70% of their facts wrong.

Yee said four of the votes at issue were held on the same day, on which he was absent to attend his daughter’s wedding. Beyond Chron called a fifth, on a bill to create a public, single-payer health care system, a flip-flop on Yee’s part, but Yee said the bill had been gutted and amended into something entirely different in the year between his votes.

State Sen. Leland Yee, D-San Francisco introduced a bill today that would stop doorstep delivery of white-pages telephone directories in California unless a customer opts in to receive it.

The California Public Utilities Commission since 1995 has included telephone directory delivery as part of the universal service all telephone companies must provide; the rationale was that providing free white pages would minimize calls to directory assistance and promote distribution of advertising.

“The requirement that phone companies must deliver the white pages comes from an era before the internet and other means of obtaining phone numbers,” Yee said in a news release today. “At a time when Californians are looking for ways to reduce our carbon footprint, we should give them that choice, particularly when very few customers still use the white pages.”

Under Yee’s SB 920, telephone companies would have to get a customer’s consent before a white page directory could be delivered; the bill doesn’t specify how, but Yee envisions a check-off box on the monthly bill or a toll-free number for customers to call. Cleveland and Miami have adopted similar local laws.

The Product Stewardship Institute says telephone books represent 660,000 tons of waste per year, with local governments bearing the costs to recycle or otherwise dispose of them. Yee cites a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency report which says not publishing a phone book reduces greenhouse gases by about three times as much as recycling.

Yee’s bill is backed by Californians Against Waste, as well as by Phonebook Free SF, a grassroots effort to push a similar policy in San Francisco.