Author: John Wildermuth

It looks as though there’s finally an agreement on plans to build an NFL stadium in the City of Industry, which means legislators and the governor won’t have to make good on their promise to push through a bill that would enable the developer to bypass state environmental rules and local lawsuits to get the project done.

This means billionaire developer Ed Roski Jr. will have the go-ahead to erect his $800 million, 75,000-seat stadium – and adjoining shopping and entertainment complex – and that state Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg won when he delayed consideration of the stadium bill in the final days of the legislative session and called for more negotiations.

This all still leaves one important question: Why in the name of John Muir was the state Legislature even involved in the regional environmental dustup?

The answer, unsurprisingly, is that money talks. And when that money flows into the pockets of politicians across the state, legislative magic can happen.

Will Carly Fiorina really be on the Republican ballot next June? Inquiring minds want to know.

Sure, the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard opened an exploratory committee in August to look at the possibility of seeking the GOP Senate nomination to challenge Democrat Barbara Boxer and, yeah, those “exploratory committees” are typically little more than a modesty patch for the actual campaign.

And Marty Wilson, the former aide to governors Pete Wilson and Arnold Schwarzenegger who’s serving as Fiorina’s consultant in that exploratory effort, swears up and down that he’s seen absolutely nothing to suggest that the businesswoman is anything less than completely committed to running and beating Boxer.

Still, with the news coming out in recent days, you gotta wonder.

There was a story by Mike Zapler of the San Jose Mercury-News a few weeks back about how HP, through a Dutch subsidiary, sold $120 million of the company’s products to Iran, despite a US ban on doing business with the country.

California Republicans have typically been huge fans of tax cuts, largely because slashing revenue makes government smaller. Call it Grover Norquist’s “drown it in the bathtub” argument.

But state Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner, a GOP candidate for governor, wants to leap back to the supply-side economics of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, calling for big-time cuts in California’s taxes because that will bring in even more money for the state.

Cutting the sales tax and corporate and personal income taxes by 10 percent, and slashing the capital gains tax in half, would unleash an economic boom in the state, Poizner told the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce Tuesday.

“A broad across-the-board tax cut to jumpstart the economy is the cornerstone of my sweeping economic reform plan to save California,” he said.

State Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg and Assembly Speaker Karen Bass, ended this year’s disappointing legislative session by channeling TV’s Maxwell Smart:

“Missed it by THIS much.”

That pretty much was Bass’ reaction when she said that the Assembly just ran out of time when it came to making deeper cuts in the state prison budget, despite her promise last month to come up with a bill that provided the $220 million missing from the Assembly’s “reform lite” version of the bill approved by the Senate.

Steinberg echoed that when he talked about why the Legislature couldn’t get a water deal done, even though Democrats, Republicans, environmentalists, agriculture interests and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger agreed that it was priority one this legislative year.

If the Legislature was waiting for the pressure of a deadline to spark some action on heavyweight issues like water, prison reform and energy policy, now’s the time.

On the last day of the 2009 legislative session, it’s agree now or hold your peace for another year.

For weeks, legislative leaders and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger have been talking about the desperate need for action on some of California’s most important problems. The governor even vowed this week not to sign any bills, telling the Legislature it “must act on the major issues facing our state” before considering any other issues.

That threat hasn’t stopped the Legislature from passing the usual session-end flood of bills, but it did focus attention on some of the major points of concern for the governor.

Hey, the legislative conference committee signed off on all five water bills Wednesday, but the Senate still didn’t do anything on the prison bill.

Is anyone listening out there? Hello? Hello?

Way back in the day, newspapers had a whole category of news that was dubbed DBI or “Dull, But Important.”

That included things like council meetings, planning and infrastructure concerns, budgets of all sorts and, yes, most of what comes out of the state capital every day.

The idea was that while readers might not care much about that stuff, it was important, dammit, and there was an obligation to put it in the paper with a screaming headline designed to convince people to pay attention.

Let’s call it the eat-your-vegetables style of journalism.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is waving his veto pen at the Legislature again, saying, in effect, “Pass the water package or the rest of the bills get it.”

Actually, water’s only part of it. A spokesman for Schwarzenegger said Tuesday that action has to be taken on “the major issues facing our state – water, prison, renewable portfolio standard, appointments – before we consider other issues.’’

Schwarzenegger asked legislators to pull back any bills nearing their signing deadline and warned that otherwise he would veto any of them that had to be acted on either Tuesday or today. That led Darrell Steinberg, the Democratic Senate leader, to quickly grab 43 bills back from the governor’s desk. They will be resubmitted this week, which will restart the signing clock for them.

It was a Republican, Assemblyman Paul Cook of Yucca Valley, who had the misfortune to be the governor’s object lesson. Schwarzenegger squashed his AB 264, an innocuous bill designating March 30 as “Wecome Home Vietnam Veterans Day” and made it clear this was just the beginning.

While the devil is always in the details, usually it’s a pretty good idea to at least provide those details.

That’s not always the way the state Legislature works, however.

Darrell Steinberg, Democratic leader of the state Senate, said Monday that this week’s conference committee report on a package of bills designed to preserve the Delta, provide water to all of California and end decades of fighting over how to deal with the state’s single most important resource won’t include a plan to pay for any of that.

That’s right, after months of often heated talks and three weeks of long hearings and closed-door meetings by the bipartisan, 14-member committee, the Legislature still can’t agree on a price tag for the huge water package.

Now that Tuesday night’s 10th CD primary election has put Democratic Lt. Gov. John Garamendi on the fast track to Washington, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is likely to find his phone ringing pretty regularly from now until Nov. 3.

The governor, you see, will get to appoint a new lieutenant governor if Garamendi wins his expected victory this November and there will be plenty of people with names to suggest.

Now the governor’s office, in true “keep moving, folks, nothing to see here” fashion, is declining any comment on a possible appointment, arguing, not unreasonably, that there’s still an election to be won first.

But while strange things can happen in politics, they usually don’t. And it doesn’t take a political genius to notice that four of the top five finishers in the Contra Costa County-area primary were Democrats and that they outpolled the GOP candidates nearly 2-to-1 in a district where Democrats have a 47 percent to 29 percent registration edge.