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2007 California Environmental Scorecard
Year In Review
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Temperatures Rising
It is not unusual for tensions to be running high in the legislature by the last weeks of the session. After eight months of votes, amendments, demands, threats and slights, it doesn’t take much for most legislators to want to even the score. In 2007 the tension started earlier and got worse than usual.
- Despite early expectations for an on-time budget, the legislature missed the July 1 constitutional deadline. Three weeks into July, the Assembly surprised everyone, especially the Senate, by passing a budget to the Senate and leaving town for the rest of the summer recess. The Senate, which in past years has left the Assembly holding the budget bag, rejected the Assembly budget and then failed to pass its own budget until late August, completely missing the summer recess. Things grew especially testy as Senate Republicans refused to cast any votes for the budget until their demands, including weakening of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), were met. In the end, Senate President pro Tem Don Perata crafted a bill that greatly limited any damage to CEQA, breaking the budget impasse.
- The appropriations committees in both houses can act as gatekeepers, especially in the last few weeks of session when they hear bills from the other house. Beneath the veneer of analyzing the fiscal impact of bills, “second-house approps” is a tool the Speaker and pro Tem use to control which bills go to the floor for a vote of the full house. Some bills will be held in second-house approps—and here’s where the blood pressure rises—as a way to punish the bill’s author for some past vote or disagreement; they also can be held as “hostages”: i.e. “we’ll let your bills out of our appropriations committee when you let our bills out of yours.” In 2007 the gamesmanship seemed downright common, with priority environmental bills held in second-house appropriations, especially in the Assembly, often for unknown or specious reasons.
Eleventh-hour tensions led to bad decisions on several important bills. AB 118 (Núñez) could have been measurably improved by amendments in the Senate, but the author flatly refused, leading the chairs of the two Senate policy committees that heard the bill to either abstain (Simitian) or vote no (Lowenthal) on a bill supported by many environmental organizations. AB 558 (Feuer), a very important chemicals policy reform bill that had been extensively negotiated by the author with the Administration, was unexpectedly defeated in Senate Appropriations Committee when two Democrats voted against the bill, one for reasons he acknowledged at the time were unrelated to the bill.
Next page: "A Successful Year for CLCV"
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