Author: Joel Fox

Former governor Pete Wilson doesn’t think many of the governance reforms circulating from commissions, think tanks and good government groups are necessary if the legislature would just follow the law.

While opposing the idea of a constitutional convention at an Orange County town hall meeting Wednesday, Wilson argued that the constitution requires that the legislature provide a balanced budget. If legislators don’t comply, the former governor argues a writ of mandamus issued by a court would bring a wayward legislature into line. A writ of mandamus allows a court to demand a government officer or agency to perform a mandatory or purely ministerial duties correctly.

Wilson declared deficit spending must be averted at all costs. He explained to avoid deficit spending he went along with the legislative Democrats to raise taxes during the first year of his governorship when Republican legislators would not support his effort to cut education, the largest portion of the budget.

I went to Orange County yesterday to see if the reaction to a constitutional convention was similar there to what I witnessed in Sacramento a few months ago.

The Sacramento event filled a hotel ballroom with hundreds of people and the support for constitutional change was strong. It was also clear that the reforms most favored by the majority in that room would be those making it easier to raise taxes and pass the budget.

The Orange County crowd, a bit smaller in numbers to Sacramento, also brought out people who agreed California governance was a mess and needed reform. However, what to fix and how to fix it took on a different hue.

Color it orange, shading toward red.

By now, most readers of this site are aware of the campaign kicked off by the Nevada Development Authority to lure California businesses across the state line. The Nevada ads faced counter advertising, which sang the praises of California. The Golden State commercials were created for and paid by Assemblyman Jose Solorio (D-Santa Ana).

But, while Nevada has grounds to belittle the business environment in California, this effort to lure businesses could backfire if California, in turn, goes after Nevada’s main prize – its gambling empire.

This idea of hitting Nevada where it hurts came to me after reading a column by Los Angeles Times sportswriter, Kurt Streeter. He argued that California should allow gambling through sports books and use the fees to help pay down the state debt. Legalize it and tax it, Streeter says.

An old adage is that business wants certainty. That reality was certainly on display at the workshop set up by the Commission on the 21st Century yesterday in San Francisco. Witnesses and commissioners tried to determine the effects of the newly hatched Business Nets Receipts Tax (BNRT) cooked up by the commission as a major cog in their plan to re-do California’s tax system.

Fear is not a word promoters of a tax plan want associated with that plan. But, concern of what affect the BNRT would have on small business permeated the testimony. The BNRT is a form of a value-added tax, which is a general tax applied at each point of the exchange of goods and services from the primary production to final consumption.

To be fair, the commission has not set forth its final plan, yet, and that led to the uncertainty that many business people feel. Experts and laymen alike are trying to calculate the impact of the brand new tax program.

Last month, vacationing on Cape Cod, I drove around the corner of a street in Hyannis Port near the ocean and coming down the street was a golf cart with Senator Ted Kennedy as a passenger. I quickly pointed him out to the others in my car and we pulled over to watch as the golf cart left the road and headed onto a pier, taking Kennedy to view his beloved ocean.

As a Massachusetts native and someone who is involved in politics as a passion and as a livelihood, I constantly felt Kennedy’s presence. I spoke to him only one time, after college, while looking for work in Washington, D.C., and coming across him in the halls of a Senate Office building. Quick hellos were exchanged.

A couple of years before, spending a week on Martha’s Vineyard with teammates from my college cross-country team in pre-season training, I took a break, jumped on a bicycle and traveled to Chappaquiddick. I followed the dirt roads on the island that Kennedy said confused him in the dark a month earlier, which lead to the tragic death of the woman in his car, Mary Jo Kopechne. And, I remember thinking at the time … in the dark … could be.

The guys over at Calbuzz did some insightful analysis on California Forward’s discussion of restricting fees as part of a compromise to reduce the state budget vote from two-thirds to majority.

There is a simple reason that members of the business community are demanding a higher vote requirement to pass certain fees in return for a majority vote budget. If the budget vote is reduced to a majority, and fees, which smell like taxes, look like taxes, and quack like taxes, can be levied at a majority vote, the door will be open to mischief.

The majority party, by a simple majority vote, could approve a budget and fund the budget with a series of fees that they claim have a nexus to services. For example, a fee could be raised on alcohol and fund health care because it would be argued excessive alcohol use could cause health problems.

Baseball has been called a game of inches because if the ball moves an inch or so one way or another a hit could become an out, a ball a strike, or a fair ball, foul. Policy decision-making falls into the same near-miss construct at times when politics plays its hand.

Consider the heated debate on prison reform in the state legislature. The recent budget deal called for cutting $1.2 billion from prisons to help balance the state budget. The legislators and governor agreed they would address how they would cut that money sometime after the budget document was signed.

That sometime occurred last week — but there was no resolution. The proposal to release about 27,000 prisoners into different custody arrangements, create a public safety commission to reconsider sentencing policy, and change the rules on certain prison terms barely squeaked by the state senate and stalled, for the time being, in the assembly.

One wonders what the outcome would have been if a few political circumstances were different.

If delegates chosen for a constitutional convention need schooling in how California’s governance system works, how will they be educated? That question came to mind Tuesday while watching the Joint Legislative Hearing on Constitutional and Budget Reform chaired by Senator Loni Hancock.

The hearing reviewed past efforts at constitutional reform, heard about current reform proposals, particularly the efforts to promote a constitutional convention and reforms fostered by the California Forward group funded by foundations, then heard from a panel of like-minded observers of government (who appeared to agree it should be easier to pass the budget and raise taxes).

For years, we’ve heard that regulations overly burden small business. But, how much does regulation really cost small business? To answer that question, in 2006 Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a bill that mandated a study on the cost of regulation on small business in California. AB 2330, authored by Assemblyman Juan Arambula (I-Fresno), required the Office of the Small Business Advocate to commission a study on the cost of state regulations on small businesses and report back to the Legislature by October 1, 2007.

That was not a typo: October 2007. It’s August 2009, so where’s the study?

The study has been completed. It was finished and delivered in December 2008 due to a delay in awarding the contract because of a vacancy in the Small Business Advocate’s office. The report was done by Sanjay Varshney, the Dean of Business Administration at Cal State, Sacramento and Dennis Tootelian, Director of the Center for Small Business at the same school.

So where is it?