Assembly Speaker John Perez is a product of his environment. He spent his entire adult life working full time for labor unions (most recently the United Food and Commercial Workers) before being 
elected to the legislature (he never even lived in his Assembly District until he moved there to run). If you look at his voting record, he votes the left-wing/union position 100% of the time.
As the Speaker, Perez should be focused exclusively on figuring out how to resolve California’s short-term and long-term state budget mess, right? Wrong. (Apparently).
While I won’t criticize him for his odd habit of collecting ducks (seriously), it seems like every legislative session he introduces a bizarre, obscure piece of legislation about which he becomes obsessive. Last session, Perez was totally immersed in passing AB 2383, the “Carpet Product Stewardship Act” – which hoisted a nickel per square yard fee in all carpeting sold, to go towards recycling. No one could really figure out why he was so obsessed with this particular obscure bill – but word is that the signing of it by the Governor even came up in final budget negotiations (as you might expect with a Perez priority bill, no Republicans ended up voting for it – well, except Sam Blakeslee, if want to count him). The only theory is that perhaps he was trying to help out a local business in his district – LA Fiber Company – the largest carpet recycling company in California.
These days, Ron Greitzer, the President of LA Fiber must really think of Perez as a fair weather friend. You see, the 2011 “obscure, obsession bill” by the Speaker is one that would unincorporate the busy-friendly city of Vernon – the city which LA Fiber calls home.
If you haven’t heard of Vernon before, don’t feel bad. It’s a relatively obscure city of around five square miles on edge of Perez’s district. It has only around a hundred residents. But it boasts 1,800 businesses, 50,000 workers, and it happens to own its own electricity plant. So Vernon businesses enjoy low taxes, limited regulation and cheap electricity – not too shabby.
That said, Vernon has had its share of problems and corruption. These are best summed up from this excerpt by John Howard in an article in Capitol Weekly…
Howard also says in his piece,
These are significant issues, no doubt. I don’t think anyone would have raised an eyebrow if Perez 
had introduced a bill to institute reforms for the city – but of course his bill seeks to make every street map of LA obsolete by “undoing” the city all together, in his best impression of Egyptian Pharoah Ramses II.
I actually first heard about this issue at all because of a story I read in the Los Angeles Times where LA was looking at trying to annex Vernon – apparently it’s power plant makes “taking over” the city a very lucrative endeavor for the City of the Angels.
Aside from the money for LA (whose Mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa, is a close ally and mentor to Perez) angle, one struggles to come up with the reason for why Perez has chose this topic obscurica to make his sword to fall upon this legislative session.
I predict that by the time this bill is ushered through all of its various committees and passes out of the Assembly, it will be on a party-line vote as it becomes clear that the real apparent impact of its 
passage is to whack 1,800 businesses with rubber hose (including Farmer John, the makers of the infamous Dodger Dog!), and while the motive behind the bill is unclear, the fact that this is the “sweetheart bill” of a Speaker whose leadership wipes out literally every substantive bill authored by a Republican, good will is non-existent.
I’m not the first columnist to write about Perez’s quixotic quest to wipe Vernon out of existence – a great many have done so, and tried to figure out why he is tilting at this particular windmill. That said, none have really put their finger on it. But Sacramento Bee columnist Dan Morain made this observation to close out a column he penned a couple of weeks ago…
I couldn’t agree more.