A busy day in NorCal as the Guv visited Redding this afternoon, an event put together in conjunction with Rotary Club and Redding Chamber Of Commerce.  I wasn’t there as we had Ag Committee this aft, but the reports were that the Guv talked approx 90% about the budget, the need to curtail spending and amend the budget process, essentially driving the points made in State of the State and the Budget release press conference.  Those conservative points played well with the very fiscally wise north state audience.  The Q & A wasn’t too rocky for the Guv but one restaurateur that I know wondered with the employer health care tax and mandates on menus, etc. "when will it end?"  Also, a question about dumb gun control law solutions in search of a problem.  [I love my constituents.]

Earlier, the No On Prop 93 Trojan Horse visited Chico in my home county of Butte.  Now we didn’t have any Greeks such as Fabian Nunezethenes or Don Peratapoulos leap out and attack the Chico City council chambers or such, but we [Butte County supervisor Curt Josiassen, the FR’s own Brandon Powers who is a No On 93 staffer, and myself] did talk to the press gathered about the flawed Prop 93 measure.  The big wooden horse will be touring statewide to get the other side of the issue out to voters about how this measure works such as:

-Prop 93 is being sold as being less time for legislators, [which is the only reason why it polled as well as it did at its peak polling] except for…

-80% of Assembly members never go on to the Senate and therefore would be out after 6 years currently, their time would double to 12 under Prop. 93, effectively longer terms for 80% from here on out.

-We have this neato "transitional term" provision written to serve only those safely in office now, resulting in up to 18 years for many current legislators.   [What is it a transition from and to for Californians whose name doesn’t begin with "Honorable" something?"]

-We have the last minute rewrite and resubmission to the A.G. of the proposition to make sure that one senator would also be eligible for that transitional term and not excluded.

-We didn’t even get the redistricting reform promised by and through the legislature after Prop 77 redistricting was opposed and defeated for being "OK, just not the right way, we’ll do it correctly after the special election"  Much talk for a while was of a compromise idea of linking it together with term limits [still wrong in my view.  yeah, let’s only get a fix for a corrupt redistricting process by rewarding with longer terms?] as a package of reform.

-We wonder why we have three $90 million elections this year instead of consolidating legislative races into one early primary to get the "presidential candidates to pay attention to us."   This on the heels of the legislature a couple years ago moving the March primary back to the original June tradition because it was "just too long" between the March primary and the November election in California.  Shazam, lookit that.  We have a February election we can ask the voters about, ahem, shortening terms and we can then transition onto the June primary ballot.  It’s a beautiful thing isn’t it?  

No wonder the public doesn’t have any faith in government.  When legislators write this stuff to benefit any individual, or party, for a short term or long term gain, and the public figures it out, which they will, we pay a huge price in trust and deservedly reap the harvest of "they’re all the same down there in Sacramento."  There are honest ways to change term limits, ones that wouldn’t benefit sitting legislators, if the public were clamoring for it.  [All the clamoring is in about a six block radius of the Capitol]  If we don’t have enough faith in our message or candidates that we have to contort truth and what’s right to fit today’s ends, that’s a pretty #@%#@ sad state of affairs.  No On 93.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 16th, 2008 at 12:00 am and is filed under Blog Posts.