California is facing a crisis. Our state’s broken governance system has left us with a $20 billion debt and facing down the possibility of bankruptcy. Repairing California requires real action and substantive reform, like calling for a state Constitutional Convention.

This is truly a grassroots, citizen-led movement to fix our state by calling for the first Constitutional Convention in California since 1878. After years of leaving our state beholden to special interest groups and the dysfunctional initiative process, California’s Constitution has become incapable of serving the people of our state.

In order to spread our campaign’s message and generate support for this people’s movement, we will be holding our first Leadership Forum this Wednesday.

Date: February 10

Location: Santa Clara County Convention Center, 5001 Great American Parkway, Santa Clara in Meeting Room #209.



Members of the Convention Movement will be on hand to speak about the process of calling a state Constitutional Convention as well as address some of the major issues that have contributed to California’s decline. This is a great opportunity to come and learn more about this truly historic campaign.

We are all undoubtedly aware that California needs help to become great again. And as Californians, we want to do whatever we can to accomplish this. Our movement will take a big step on Wednesday evening and we hope to see you there.  

(more thoughts on changes to the constitution. – promoted by Brian Leubitz)

If we are going to have a constitutional convention, I do not think we should be timid in our ideas for reforming and restructuring the state.  I know many want to limit the convention because they fear there will be ideas adopted which do not fit into a progressive ideology,  But I don’t think we should approach this with fear, but with a real view for a total restructuring of the state government.  I believe we should think outside the box, even way outside the box and be willing to not only look at reforming such things as the 2/3’s vote requirement, but go for the guts of how this state is run.

If we think outside the box, we can get some real reform, not just piecemeal tinkering.

Here are some of my thoughts.

1. A unicameral legislature.  Since the one-man, one-vote ruling of the US Supreme Court, the two houses are superfluous.  They do not even do well as checking each other.  They are simply two places to have the same argument.  A single house with 100 members or so is adequate.

2. Eliminate counties.  Those services which counties provide such as children services, health services, etc. can be provided by regional agencies, similar to transportation agencies.  Law enforcement and emergency services can be done through joint power authorities. The courts should be run by the state.  For municipal services (land use, building codes, etc.) in unincorporated areas can be handled by municipal service districts.

3. With the exception of school districts, eliminate all special districts.  Few, if any of them, are supported by local property taxes anymore, but are mainly funded by fees.  This has untethered them from local voters/property owners.  Let the state or regional agencies handle them.

4. Significantly reduce the power of Sacramento in the operations of local school districts.  Let the school districts run far more autonomously, like cities do.  The Education Code should read more like the provisions of the government code that relate to cities.

5. Require all school districts to be K-12 districts.

6. Change community colleges from local districts and make them a statewide system, like the UC’s and the Cal States.  This is more in keeping with the 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education.

7. Return the initiative and referendum process to its original intent by simply making it illegal to pay or compensate anyone in any way to gather signatures.

8. No matter what is done to the sales tax after the Parsky Commission proposals are debated, eliminate the municipal share of the sales tax or the NBRT tax (assuming the cities would get part of this if it is adopted and the sales tax eliminated).  Give the cities a share of the income tax paid to employees in their jurisdictions.  Right now the billions spend each year by redevelopment agencies is sued primarily to subsidize retailers to get the sales tax.  If the cities get a share of the income tax, these billions will be spent subsidizing jobs and employment.  

9. Eliminate all previously approved voter budget directives from the Constitution.  Prohibit the ability of the voters to include such directives in the Constitution in the future.

(cross-posted from Orange County Progressive)

It’s exciting to follow the news about a proposed Constitutional Convention that might make California and all of its government agencies more governable.

In the process, there’s encouraging talk about eliminating counties, or redrawing the lines, so that Orange County might follow its namesake citrus groves into history.

It’s really frustrating at times watching what goes on in Orange County and being puzzled by how our county government has bollixed things up. For example, our County Parks have been hamstrung for years as their revenue has been redirected to paying off bankruptcy bonds. As a result, thousands of acres of open space preserved by development agreements may end up managed by an unaccountable conservancy under control of Irvine Company directors.

Orange County still maintains a planning department despite a shrinking area of responsibility where the vast majority of us live in 34 cities, an oft-sued bureaucracy that couldn’t plan its own budget in a department that changes its name frequently.

Our libraries, traffic control systems, street names, water and sewer departments,planning, et cetera are a crazy quilt of competing and overlapping jurisdictions where agencies like SARFPA, SARWQCB, OCCOG and SCAG operate far outside the coverage resources of our hapless local media outlets.

As part of the legacy of low OC taxes before Prop 13, our county government receives a much lower share of property tax than other counties, an item that Lou Correa helped rectify when he had veto power over the state budget.

There’s a great background piece about how the idea for rewriting the Constitution came from the business community.

A thin LA Times story doesn’t offer much detail and a Chronicle piece focuses on the 2/3 budget rule

The best coverage came from outside the traditional media, including some great posts at Blockbuster Democracy Blog and the live feed from Robert Cruickshank with a tremendous follow-up this morning at Calitics.

This is truly significant news for us all, if a coalition of business, progressives, and good government advocates can design an initiative that will call a Constitutional Convention, figure out a way to elect delegates who will produce a new framework for organizing and financing government, and bring that back to the people of California.

We all know that the system’s broken, but we need a Big Fix instead of one more failed crapola budget deal that pushes problems down the road another year, and increases future problems so we can avoid facing them for another year.

And it’s time to take a close look at why we maintain a structure of counties that were originally constructed based on how far a man could ride a horse in a day.

My diary from Sunday, Getting That Next Vote On the Budget, got a lot of discussion, although a bit to my surprise, not the discussion I was expecting.

My goal was to get people to discuss how best to get the state’s annual budget passed. What we got, instead, was a pretty passionate debate about the wisdom of using the state constitution’s recall mechanism as a tactic for doing this.

By the end of the discussion, I realized that there’s a meta-discussion to be had about this: why is it that some of us feel that this was about the only tactic available, and why some of us felt that certain tactics should not be used.  This is not that different an argument from what you hear about impeachment of Bush, Cheney and others.  Since the budget needs to pass out annually, this is indeed odd.

I think the underlying question (meta-question for you meta-people) is how our system of government in California — our constitution, in the broad, British sense of the word — is so completely busted.  And that the actual legal framework — the 100+ page document that makes up California’s written constitution — has become unworkable.

What do we do about this?

I make this distinction between our unwritten constitution and the actual document because the American constitutional tradition makes the question of how we govern ourselves clearer, by assuming that the system of government can be specified in a document, and less clear, because it assumes that what is not found in the document is not truly part of the system.

But this use of written constitutions was an American innovation, made by the colonial governments as they broke from British rule.  They broke with the British definition of a constitution, as it had been developed in the previous 200 years of English history, as Parliament gradually mastered the ultimate in Unitary Executives, the Tudor and Stewart monarchs.

Here’s the definition that English theorists (who our Founders knew very well) came up with:

A contrast is sometimes made between written and unwritten constitutions. Britain, it is said, has an unwritten constitution. But the distinction is overdrawn. Britain is unusual in that there is no single document which can be called the formal constitution. The constitution in Britain is scattered through hundreds of Acts of Parliament and judicial rulings. But the description of Britain as having an unwritten constitution usually focuses on another attribute-the importance of conventions. Some of Britain’s most important constitutional rules are constitutional conventions. There is a convention that the monarch acts on the advice of his or her ministers: there is no direct legal compulsion on the monarch to do this, but he or she invariably does. By convention, a government clearly defeated on a vote of confidence in the House of Commons either resigns or holds a general election.

To understand what’s gone wrong with our system in California, this broader view of a constitution is essential, since it leads us to ask: who actually rules, who are the stakeholders, and what restraints, both legal and customary, are we operating under.  The written constitution exists in that context, but is only a piece of it.

A good document can help, and current document limits the perogatives of both the executive and the legislature, and not necessarily in favor of the people.  I’d argue strongly, for example, that corporations and their lobbyists are as much of our system of government — our constitution in the large — as the nobility was in England.

The great constitutional trend in England and Britain was taking first the monarchy, and then, the nobility, and making them subordinate to popular will.

The great constitutional trend in the United States since after US Civil War has been to take the legislatures and the executives, and increasingly make them subordinate to the will of a new nobility, one based upon corporate assets and corporate institutions.

I think that this is the underlying problem with the California Constitution: corporate money has used the initiative system to gradually strangle the ability of the legislature to represent popular will, starting with Proposition 13 in 1978, and continuing to limits like this 2/3 requirement for passing a budget today.  This weakness of the legislature cannot be fixed within the current constitutional framework.  We will need to radically change the framework to fix the mess we are in.

What kind of change do we need here? It’s clear that the reforms of 100 years ago, from during the Progressive Era, have run their course, and no longer serve either the purposes or even the constituencies that Hiram Johnston and others intended.  These reforms, which were intended to master, even then, corporate interests like the great railroads, have now been co-opted by the railroad executive’s spiritual heirs, our modern, 21^st century robber barons.

How do we best understand this problem?  How do we best fix it?