BILL ANALYSIS Ó
ACA 1
Page 1
Date of Hearing: May 7, 2015
ASSEMBLY COMMITTEE ON BUDGET
Shirley Weber, Chair
ACA 1
(Olsen) - As Introduced December 1, 2014
SUBJECT: Legislative procedure.
SUMMARY: Imposes a requirement in the State Constitution to
require bills to be in print for 72 hours prior to adoption by
either house. Specifically, this bill:
1)Prohibits either house from passing a bill unless it has been
made available in print and on the internet for 72 hours prior
to the vote.
2)Provides an exception for urgency bills related to a declared
emergency, as specified in the Constitution.
3)Allows bills to be heard by committees after the contents of
the bill have been available on the internet for 15 days.
EXISTING LAW: Prohibits any bill (other than the budget bill)
ACA 1
Page 2
from being heard or acted on by a committee or off the floor in
either house until the 31st day after being introduced unless
the house dispenses with this requirement by a roll call vote
with three fourths of the members concurring.
FISCAL EFFECT: Possible impacts of the measure are discussed
below.
COMMENTS: The stated goal of this measure is to enhance
transparency by requiring all final legislation to be in print
for 72 hours prior to floor action in either house of the
Legislature. According to the author, "?the citizens of
California deserve a transparent government and legislative
body. They should be given the opportunity to review all bills
for at least 72 hours before they are voted on. And legislators
should be given adequate time to analyze a bill before a vote in
order to make a sound decision."
Most bills considered by the Legislature are, under current law,
in print for at least 72 hours prior a vote. This measure would
impose a strict no-exceptions policy that would require all
bills to be in print for this time period, except during a
declared disaster. This more rigid policy, if adopted, would
meet part of the author's stated goal, while it may severely
limit the flexibility of the Legislature to craft difficult
compromises, take amendments to respond to citizens, or make
technical fixes such as adopting chaptering amendments or
striking an urgency clause from a bill.
Bills considered by the Legislature that are in print in final
form for less than 72 hours are conventionally driven by three
scenarios: the bill is part of a hard fought, complicated
compromise; the bill is part of the budget package or; the bill
has technical problems and needs to be amended prior to final
floor action.
ACA 1
Page 3
One example of the need for flexibility is the difficult
bipartisan political compromise necessary to tackle California's
profound drought. AB 1471, which created Proposition 1, the
2014 Water Package required weeks of negotiation to develop and
was adopted on the last possible day for the measure to be
included on the November 2014 ballot. As a result, the bill was
amended in the Senate, concurred by the Assembly, and signed by
the Governor all on the same day. Thus, the bill language was
only been in print for a few hours prior to adoption.
Proposition 1 was adopted by 67.1 percent of voters and is the
centerpiece of the State's response to the drought.
The urgent need to act regarding the drought continued in the
recent effort to appropriate funds authorized by Proposition 1.
In order to get needed projects underway, the Legislature
adopted the 2015 water package in two bills, AB 91 and AB 92 in
March of this year. Both of these bills were amended two days
prior to the vote, which in turn means that the bill was in
print for only one day.
Another example was the February 2009 budget package, which was
recognized as an example of historic, courageous action that
saved the state from fiscal insolvency. That budget agreement
was being updated and technically corrected up through the final
hours prior to the vote, including, the insertion of SCA 4
(Maldonado), which created the Open Primary. This agreement was
not in print for 72 hours, but it was credited with saving the
state from insolvency and earned the four Legislative Leaders
the prestigious Profiles in Courage Award by the John F Kennedy
Library Foundation in 2010.
This measure would also make the small technical changes at the
end of session more difficult to accommodate. These include a
common practice of eliminating an urgency clause from a measure,
ACA 1
Page 4
to allow a measure to be adopted with only a majority vote. In
addition, bills often amend the same sections of code and
technical changes are necessary so that the measures don't
chapter out the provisions of a different bill. Under the
provision of this measure, either of these changes would trigger
a 72-hour in-print requirement, which will mean it will add
complexity to the final days of each legislative session.
This measure would also severely narrow and hamstring the annual
budget process. The passage of Proposition 25 in November of
2010 sent a clear signal to the Legislature that the passage of
a budget on time is a top budget priority for the public; the
measure even included financial penalties for members of the
Legislature if the budget was not passed by the deadline.
California's Constitution requires that the Legislature adopt
the budget on or before June 15th of each year, giving the
Legislature slightly more than four weeks from when it receives
the May Revision on May 14th to when it must enact the budget.
This bill would require about ten percent of that time-period to
be set aside for the bills to be in print on the floor at the
end of the process.
How would the Legislature accommodate this loss of time?
Because the current May -June process is already compacted, it
is difficult to envision how the process would accommodate this
requirement. Should the time to analyze and hear the May
Revision proposals be shortened by three days, reducing the
chance for the public to participate in crafting of the budget
and requiring members to vote on provisions with less
information? Or should the Senate and the Assembly have three
less days to reconcile their respective budgets into one unified
version of a budget package? Perhaps the drafting process could
be shortened for the trailer bills and the over 800-page budget
bill, but that would further tax the hundreds of staff in
Department of Finance, Legislative Counsel, as well as the
Legislature and the Administration that develop the final budget
package, potentially resulting in significant errors in their
ACA 1
Page 5
work product.
Because the budget process is based on a finite schedule, there
is not room to accommodate this print requirement without
undermining the quality of the process and the budget
legislation. Therefore, these costs should be considered when
weighing the merits of this bill.
California's legislative work is more transparent now than at
any point in history. This year marks the twentieth anniversary
of AB 1624 (Bowen), which required any legislative bill,
analysis, history, and voters to be made available via the
internet. Prior to the enactment of this bill, this information
was only available through the Capitol Bill Room and various
small publications that charged a fee to provide this
information. Today anyone with access to the internet can see
the latest version of a bill, for free, at any time in a system
that is updated daily.
Therefore, while this measure has the admirable goal of
increasing transparency, California has a relatively transparent
legislative process and a long history of important agreements
that were quickly passed. Moreover, adding new time
requirements may actually strengthen special interests ability
to upset legislative agreements and harm the already condensed
budget process.
The provisions contained in this measure were also contained in
Proposition 31 of November 2012, which was rejected by voters
with 39.5 percentage of the electorate voting in favor of the
measure.
ACA 1
Page 6
REGISTERED SUPPORT / OPPOSITION:
Support
California Newspaper Publishers Association
California Tax Payers Association
Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association
League of California Cities
Opposition
None on File
Analysis Prepared by:Christian Griffith/ Budget/ 916-319-2099
ACA 1
Page 7