For a long time this summer, California Forward’s info sheet regarding their proposals for reform included a line about “providing certainty regarding passage of fees”:
Clarify the circumstances in which the Legislature and the Governor can impose fees without a two-thirds majority vote to those areas with a clear and justifiable nexus to the service provided.
In other words, they wanted to reverse the Sinclair Paints decision that ruled the Legislature can impose fees by majority vote, given certain conditions, replacing it with a 2/3rds vote to raise a fee.
CA Forward and its staff got a LOT of pushback from progressive groups over this. And by October, that plank had disappeared from their info sheet.
But it’s still in their proposal, and is included in the first of two initiatives they filed and intend to place on the November 2010 ballot. I’d caught this over a week ago, but hadn’t yet written about it, so the scoop goes to Calbuzz:
But the process people – the folks who believe that passing a budget by majority vote is crucial to governing and would give the majority party a modicum of more running room – were so eager to make it possible to pass budgets that they were willing to trade off a right recognized by the courts in Sinclair Paint vs. Board of Equalization, 15 Cal.4th at 881….
Fred Keeley, Cal Forward’s most avid pro-tax liberal, says he’s thinks giving up the majority vote on fees that replace taxes in exchange for a majority vote on the budget is a good deal. And Bob Hertzberg, the former Assembly Speaker and co-chairman of Cal Forward, thinks it’s not even a close call.
In other words, California Forward’s Democratic members believed that it was worth reinforcing the undemocratic rule-by-minority regarding revenues, which is by far the number one thing state government most desperately needs, in order to get support for majority vote on the budget. Fantastic. They’ve just repeated the same process that goes on inside the Capitol inside their own conference room.
The repeal of Sinclair Paint is just one part of the problems with CA Forward’s agenda. The initiative includes “government efficiency” language that mandates the legislature “examine every program at least once every 10 years, looking for ways to improve efficiency and reduce waste.” It also would create a “process” to use “spikes” in revenue to pay down debt, instead of using it to fund other worthy programs.
When you include all that with the reinforcement of minority rule on revenues and majority rule on the budget, which would have the practical effect of making Democrats solely responsible for making budget cuts without the ability to raise revenues, the California Forward proposal certainly seems designed to produce a state that offers fewer public services and further straitjackets progressives’ ability to reverse the decline and restore the California Dream.
To be clear, Robert, as we told the folks at Calbuzz, thanks for giving California Forward’s reform plan the attention it deserves.
As Calbuzz pointed out yesterday, Sinclair Paint proved to be highly controversial. Frankly, we never found the kind of common-sense reform to this policy that would have allowed us to include it in the Best Practices Budget Accountability Act.
Our plan leaves Sinclair in place – and with it the ability to impose new fees by majority vote. Our plan requires a two-thirds majority for fees that would replace existing revenues – forestalling the raise-a-fee, lower-a-tax, raise-another-tax and call it all even gamesmanship.
Jim Mayer
Fred Silva
cafwd-action.org