Historic summit seeks change in state-local government relations 

An unprecedented summit drew approximately 500 local elected government officials from all over California to Sacramento last month for two days of strategic talks on reforming state-local government relations and financing.

School board and city council members joined county supervisors in roughly equal numbers to discuss “Rebuilding California—from the Ground Up,” the name of a burgeoning campaign to reinvigorate California’s system of governance and restore efficiency, transparency and accountability. The summit and the campaign were organized by the Cities, Counties and Schools Partnership, a 12-year-old collaboration of CSBA, the League of California Cities and the California State Association of Counties.

“This is a historic gathering,” marking the first time that hundreds of local elected officials came together to discuss their common interests, CCS chair Rich Gordon said in his opening remarks. “There is no more important time for us to gather, and no more important subject to discuss,” Gordon continued, given the drastic toll the state budget crisis is exacting on local governments.

Paraphrasing the rallying cry made famous in the 1976 movie “Network,” CSBA President-elect Frank Pugh said in his introductory remarks that the goal of the summit was to take the spirit of “We’re mad as hell, and we’re not going to take it anymore!” and figure out what local governments are going to do about it.

“This is about as bad as I’ve ever seen it” in two decades as a local school board member, Pugh added, with schools already cut nearly $12 billion since last September. Legislative leaders and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger dug still deeper into education funding in the budget deal they reached just two days after the local government summit ended.

Possible solutions were outlined by speakers from California Forward, a nonpartisan group that has proposed a constitutional revision commission, and the Bay Area Council, a business group that favors a constitutional convention to rewrite California’s most basic governing document. Also addressing the summit was state Board of Equalization member Bill Leonard, who counseled caution in the search for remedies.

Consensus reached on reform principles

Much of the discussion at the summit focused on a set of principles that the CCS Partnership’s Joint Task Force on State Budget and Fiscal Reform drafted in a series of meetings earlier this year. Groups of approximately 25 participants each met for more than three hours on the second day, zeroing in on just a few priorities among more than two dozen suggested reform options.

School board trustees, city council members and county supervisors engaged in lively discussions of various strategies, benefits and obstacles. Each participant cast three votes to signal personal preferences for goals the CCS Partnership should pursue. The top results:

• protect local revenue sources from diversion or borrowing by the state
• reform state term limits
• reduce the two-thirds majority required for local taxes
• require that new funding sources be identified for any new state programs

Protection of local revenue sources attracted more than half of all the votes cast, making it the overwhelming consensus of participants. The other three received between 13-22 percent of all votes cast, outpolling other principles such as reducing the two-thirds requirement for passing state budgets and taxes, instituting performance-based budgeting for the state government, and changing state mandate procedures.

“Two deal with local control issues very closely,” CSBA President-elect Pugh observed of the top four principles, while the other two “would help the state overcome its problems.”

“There is a strong interest in allowing local governments to look at an increase in revenues or taxes from their constituents,” Pugh said, speaking after the summit. Local constituents feel that local governments “can justify what they want to do, and they can be accountable,” Pugh added, citing recurrent trends in polling. “We can be trusted.”

Pugh, who represented CSBA at the summit while President Paula S. Campbell dealt with a death in the family, stressed that the weekend’s gathering was only one step in what must be a sustained, grassroots mobilization for fundamental change in state-local relationships.

“The momentum is there. We need to keep it going,” Pugh said. “We can’t let the skeptics win on this. There’s too much invested.”