PD Editorial: A capital idea: Allowing time to read the bills

H.L. Richardson, a longtime California state senator, wrote an amusing memoir called “What makes you think we read the bills?”

There’s new reason to wonder this week as local governments scramble to meet a deadline that surprised the state legislators who imposed it.

The mystery deadline appeared in one of the most closely watched bills of the year - one of three making up a regulatory framework for California’s unwieldy medical marijuana industry.

The bills were the product of negotiations involving representatives of law enforcement, local government and pot growers, among others, and they address licensing and distribution, quality control, agricultural standards and a mechanism for mitigating environmental damage. The landmark legislation also allows local governments to impose their own regulations, including an outright ban on growing and selling marijuana.

But no one seems to know how a March 1 deadline for imposing local regulations got added to the bill. Assemblyman Jim Wood, a Healdsburg Democrat and one of the primary authors, said he will introduce legislation to fix the problem when lawmakers return to Sacramento in January.

Some local governments are racing to enact regulations just in case Wood’s follow-up bill doesn’t pass.

This doesn’t appear to be a case of chicanery.

It’s worse than that. It’s business as usual in Sacramento.

Agreements are reached, legislation gets rushed through without enough time for careful scrutiny of the contents, and problems are discovered later, then addressed down the line. There’s even a name for the follow-up measures. They’re called cleanup bills.

The “vote first, sort it out later” approach is most evident as the state budget is completed and again in the final few days of the legislative session. Bills that have passed through committees and floor debates are gutted and rewritten with new subject matter. The new bills are pushed through to the governor’s desk, often without committee hearings or any thorough vetting.

Besides the recurring problem of errors made in haste, the public gets shut out of the process.

None of that is allowed in local government, where cities, counties and school districts must comply with the Ralph M. Brown Act, the state’s open-meeting law.

Among other things, local officials must post meeting agendas 72 hours in advance, and they are prohibited from voting on nearly anything unless the public has had 72 hours for review and an opportunity to comment.

California lawmakers have long resisted any such restrictions on themselves, contending that they would hamstring efforts to broker deals on difficult issues and make it impossible to deal with emergencies.

But the open meeting law for local government accounts for emergencies. And it would be hard to identify any emergency that justifies most of the last-minute, gut-and-amend bills passed in Sacramento.

Assembly Constitutional Amendment 1, sponsored by Assembly GOP Leader Kristen Olsen of Modesto, is the latest attempt to extend the Brown Act’s rules to state legislators. It didn’t even get a committee hearing in 2015.

Maybe state lawmakers can rectify that mistake in 2016.