It’s time to put Gavin Newsom out of his misery and
eliminate, once and for all, the lieutenant governor’s job.
Eliminate as in abolish, eradicate, dump, erase, wipe out,
vote away, strike from the Constitution. The voters don’t care about it, the
state doesn’t need it, and it’s nothing but a source of frustration to
ambitious politicians like Newsom, people who got into government with the idea
of doing something to make California a better place.
That’s not something anyone can do from the lieutenant
governor’s office.
Recent press releases from Newsom’s office have marked the
celebration of International Olympic Day at the state capitol, congratulated
Butte College on its "grid positive" energy status, thanked the New York state
Legislature for legalizing same-sex marriage and backed legal efforts to
restore same-sex marriage in California.
If those are the highlights, think what the rest of his days
must be like. Unceasing boredom, not overwork, is the occupational hazard for a
lieutenant governor.
Newsom still spends a lot of time in San Francisco, where in
recent days he has turned up at a city playground where Coca-Cola was donating
$250,000 for park and recreation projects, urged Mayor Ed Lee to quickly decide
whether he will run for a full term as mayor this November and vowed to fight
efforts by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to hamstring his "Care, Not
Cash" homeless program, which in 2003 helped catapult him into the mayor’s job.
It wouldn’t surprise anyone if Newsom already was looking
back to his years as San Francisco’s mayor with more than a bit of nostalgia
for the time when he had a staff of 37, a city budget of $6.5 billion and
plenty of power and perqs.
As lieutenant governor, his annual budget is a little more
than $1 million, with a listed staff of 8.6 positions.
It’s hard to feel too sorry for Newsom, who wasn’t drafted
into the lieutenant governor’s office. Instead, it was kind of a consolation
prize for the term-limited mayor, a political spot for him to land when he
dropped out of the 2010 governor’s race.
This isn’t anything against Newsom, who by all accounts is
doing everything he can to turn his office into a center of action on issues like
the state’s economic future.
That’s the sad part, really. Even Newsom’s detractors have
to admit that he’s a policy wonk, overflowing with ideas of how to deal with
the problems facing the state its cities. As San Francisco’s mayor, he could
push to turn those ideas into reality and make decisions that had dramatic
effects on the city’s nearly 800,000 residents.
As lieutenant governor, not so much.
Take, for example, the economic development plan Newsom
intends to roll out this month. At a speech to the Public Policy Institute of
California in May, he talked about how he’d worked with big-name think tanks
and others to come up with a blueprint for the state’s future that’s designed
to boost job growth and attract more businesses to the state.
If Gov. Jerry Brown were putting out a similar plan, it
would be front-page news for weeks as he tried to push it through the
Legislature.
But as lieutenant governor, Newsom likely would have to set
his hair on fire to get much attention for his proposal.
So why have a lieutenant governor at all? Even Newsom admits
that some of the boards he sits on are little more than make work and it
wouldn’t be that difficult for the governor to make an additional appointment
to replace him on the boards that aren’t, like the UC regents, the state
college trustees and the Coastal Commission.
As for an acting governor when the boss leaves the state,
well, Darrell Steinberg, the state Senate pro tem and third in the line of
succession, handled the job perfectly well when the state was without a
lieutenant governor in 2009 after Democrat John Garamendi fled the office to
take a seat in Congress.
And it’s not as though any governor will miss his purported
number two. Gov. Gray Davis and Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante barely spoke during
Davis’ final months in office and they were both Democrats. GOP Gov. Arnold
Schwarzenegger ignored Garamendi, except when he was trying to cut the
Democrat’s budget. And during his first time around back in the 1970s, Jerry
Brown went to court in a futile effort to block Republican Lt. Gov. Mike Curb
from vetoing bills, issuing executive orders and making appointments when Brown
was out of the state.
It’s not as though California hasn’t axed elected officials
and their offices before. When was the last time anyone voted for the clerk of
the Supreme Court, the surveyor general, the state printer or the railroad
commission, all statewide offices until the early 1900s?
So what’s needed is a constitutional amendment that gives
voters a chance to send the lieutenant governor after the surveyor general into
the mists of California history. It would save the state a few bucks and force
decent politicians to find a job where they have a better chance to do
something for the state and its people.
Back in 2009, Mike Genest, then the state finance director,
explained why Schwarzenegger’s spending plan trimmed Garamendi’s budget by 60
percent and eliminated 20 of the lieutenant governor’s 29 staff members.
"We had to look at what was necessary in government and the
lieutenant governor’s duties had a lower priority," he said.
He was right then and he would be right now. California
doesn’t need a lieutenant governor.
John Wildermuth is a
longtime writer on California politics.