Well, I am at the airport in Sacramento, ready to head out.  I ended up leaving the Capitol a little later than I had planned so that I could make a quick stop-by to visit FR friend Adam Mendelsohn, the Governor’s Communications Director.  I’d last been in the spacial CD digs in the ‘Horseshoe’ (the Governor’s Executive Offices are called that because they are, in fact, shaped like a horseshoe!). 
 
Anyways, it was a busy couple of days in the Capitol – with lots of meetings, where I was diligently working to make and maintain all of those contacts that help me to stay ‘plugged in’ to the latest news.
 
We’ll be writing more about it, but it was certainly a strange time to be in the Capitol.  The dominant issue going on were the negotiations on the Governor’s Strategic Infrastructure Bond Plan.   We’ve been talking a lot about that plan on this site.
 
So what is the latest?  Well, I was actually saying hello to Senate Republican Leader Dick Ackerman around 2pm when he headed into a round of negotiations, which apparently ended without a meeting of the minds.  I guess the negotiators re-engaged around 6 p.m. 
 
The last conversation that I had with some Assembly Republicans (and I spoke with most of them over the last couple of days) led me to believe that there is still a long way to go.
 
I think that one of the challenges in the negotiations is that most people don’t realize that the Republican position on infrastucture funding really starts out taking a big chucnk out of general fund dollars going forward to cover all infrastructure needs.  So the fact that Republicans are willing to discuss a major bond program at all, represents a significant concession from their natural inclinations.  Part of the challenge is that the Democrats have loaded up the proposals with massive amounts of non-infrastructure, as well as lots of tough-to-swallow provisions, including having the bond measure authorize billions of funding that would then be allocated later on a MAJORITY vote of the legislature.
 
Anyways, it’s unclear where things will end up, but that’s the latest that I know!

Oh yeah – as a funny aside, when Assembly Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy and his successor (in a month) George Plescia were walking with Democrat Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez over to their mid-afternoon round of negotiations, McCarthy saw me and introduced me to the Speaker as the guy who produces the FlashReport.  The Speaker gave me funny look and say, "Ahh, so YOU’RE THE ONE WHO DOES THE FLASHREPORT" – then broke a big smile.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 14th, 2006 at 12:00 am and is filed under Blog Posts.