BILL ANALYSIS �
AB 1437
Page 1
Date of Hearing: April 26, 2012
ASSEMBLY COMMITTEE ON RULES
Nancy Skinner, Chair
AB 1437 (Morrell) - As Introduced: January 4, 2012
SUBJECT : State Budget.
SUMMARY : Requires that the budget bill and budget trailer bills be
published on a website for at least three days before a vote on the
bills can be taken in either house.
EXISTING LAW: Under the California Constitution, the budget bill
must be adopted on or before June 15th. The California Constitution
provides that bills must be read three times and, notwithstanding
the budget bill, can only contain a single subject.
FISCAL EFFECT : Unknown
COMMENTS : This bill attempts to improve public access to
information about the California budget process by putting
budget-related bills in print electronically for three days at the
very end of the budget process.
This bill involves a trade-off in terms of the public participation
in the budget process and the Legislature's ability to deliver a
balanced budget within constitutionally prescribed timeframes. In
addition, it would likely make the budget process ultimately less
open by forcing the use of extensive clean up bills and follow up
trailer bills to fully adopt the necessary components of the budget
package.
In the last few decades, the final budget package has depended very
significantly on California's revenue collections in April which are
used to project the Governor's May Revision of the budget. While
the May Revision was originally used as a technical update to the
budget, in recent history the Revision's impact has been profound,
frequently leading to major changes to the proposed framework of the
budget-sometimes to reflect unexpected shortfalls, other times to
reflect better than expected fiscal conditions. As a result, most
of the legislative budget process prior to May Revision is often
tentative because it is impossible to ensure that the budget is
balanced before the May projections. In addition, the
Administration has at times used the May Revision as an opportunity
to introduce new policy proposals as part of the budget package.
AB 1437
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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 work
product.
Because the budget process is based on a finite schedule, there is
no way 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.
Budget bills often have elements that need to be fixed or changed
before the final vote. Additionally, underlying this bill is an
assumption that budget bills and all budget-related bills will be
perfect and will have the needed votes to pass. But often, budget
bills have elements that need to be fixed or changed before the
final vote. Under the provisions of this bill, every time such a
change was made, a new three-day "waiting period" would begin.
Given this dynamic, while the language would be available for three
days, it would be hard to make changes without potentially derailing
the entire budget timeline. It would also lead to additional bills
after the budget was passed to clean up errors that used to be fixed
AB 1437
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during the current process.
The current system does seek to ensure as much openness as it can
within the limits of the constitutionally mandated timelines.
California's Legislature holds well over 100 hearings on the budget
each year in the full committees and eleven subcommittees for both
the Assembly and Senate. The language contained in the budget
package is derived from actions taken in these open and public
meetings. However, because of the Constitution's single subject
rule, the contents of this budget process must be sorted and placed
into numerous trailer bills after both houses have agreed upon a
budget package. For the last two budget cycles, the practice of the
Assembly Budget Committee was to have bills in print at least 24
hours before the vote on the floor. Almost every bill met this
practice last year in the three different budget packages and 56
bills, adopted in 2011-12.
RELATED LEGISLATION
AB 1730 (Olsen) would require all bill be available electronically
on a publically-accessible internet site at least 72 hours before a
vote in either house. This bill also allows this provision to be
suspended with a two-thirds vote.
REGISTERED SUPPORT / OPPOSITION :
Support
CalTax
Loma Linda Chamber of Commerce
Opposition
None on file
Analysis Prepared by : Christian Griffith / BUDGET / (916)
319-2099