Dan Walters: California faces moment of decision

By Dan Walters - dwalters@sacbee.com

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The state's perpetual budget mess has certainly fueled interest in – and perhaps even passion for – fundamentally overhauling California's dysfunctional government.

Efforts by California Forward to incrementally reform the Capitol and the more frontal assault by the Bay Area Council via a constitutional convention are drawing enormous interest in the political media, in academe and among statewide and local civic organizations.

Conferences on governmental restructuring are being staged several times each month around the state, during which the somewhat competing approaches by the two organizations are debated, along with what kind of reforms should be pursued, ranging as widely as creating a parliamentary-style government.

Call The Bee's Dan Walters, (916) 321-1195. Back columns, www.sacbee.com/walters.

California Forward, a bipartisan group with strong support from leading California foundations, says it will formally present a list of constitutional amendments to the Legislature very soon, pressing lawmakers to place them on the 2010 ballot.

However, critics of that approach, with good reason, question whether the Legislature, beset by ideological division and special-interest influence, would be any more capable of self-reform than it is of balancing the deficit- ridden state budget.

The Bay Area Council, a consortium of corporate executives, wants to place two initiatives on the November 2010 ballot, one that would allow voters to directly call a constitutional convention, bypassing the Legislature, and a second that would call a convention and specify its makeup and scope.

The council, however, is running into problems in writing the second measure – questions about whether the convention's activities could be limited and fears, especially among those on the political right, that the convention would be enticed to do away with constitutional provisions that conservatives cherish, such as Proposition 13's limits on property taxes or the two-thirds vote requirements for raising taxes and passing state budgets.

Simply put, the efforts to make California more governable are colliding with the same societal conflicts that now interact with the state's ponderous and self-contradictory governmental structure to render it functionally ungovernable.

While there is wide agreement along the ideological spectrum that there is something fundamentally amiss in California's public policy process – as demonstrated by the budget imbroglio and stalemates on water, education and other important issues – there is also a widespread fear of the unknown.

To be fair, we can't know what we can't know. And we can't know what the process of reform, once unleashed, will generate, or whether it will even generate anything worthy of our consideration.

The alternative to risking the unknown, however, is to continue down a path that cannot lead to anything but decline and decay. It's time to take a chance for the same reasons that the nation's founders took a chance 233 years ago: The status quo is unworkable and intolerable.