Sacramento: June 2008 Archives

Maria Garcia hardly slept on the bus that left Los Angeles at midnight and brought her and more than 150 LAUSD employees to the state Capitol on Tuesday morning. Justine Agulia in the Daily News.

But once there, the Los Angeles Unified School District security monitor made sure her voice was heard, urging legislators to avoid deep slashes to the district's budget, which could mean the loss of her job.

As a mother of three with a husband who's found very little work in the construction business lately, she doesn't know how she'd survive if her job were cut.

"If I don't work, I can't feed my family," said Garcia, 46, an employee at Richard E. Byrd Middle School in Sun Valley. "I've been on the job for eight years and without my steady job, I really don't know what I'd do."

As part of her job as a special-education assistant at Byrd Middle School in Sun Valley, Desiree Young knows what it's like to change diapers every day.Justine Agulia in the Daily News.

But recently her focus has shifted, knowing similar jobs could disappear thanks to massive budget cuts that would cripple the school system she has believed in for nearly two decades.

"I just can't sit back," said Young, 40. "I've been doing this for 18 years, long hard years. This is not good for the kids. They're the ones who'll end up shortchanged in a big way."

Midnight Monday, Young was set to board a bus with several hundred people - 45 she personally rounded up - to Sacramento, where she vowed to give Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger some advice about cutting the Los Angeles Unified School District's budget.

Over the last two months, Sen. Alex Padilla, D Los Angeles, guided a controversial bill through the Senate committee process, with some help from Republicans and moderate Democrats. But Senate leader Don Perata intervened, citing a breech in senatorial decorum, and exiled the bill to legislative purgatory. Capitol Weekly.

The story of SB 1389 ultimately shows the power the Pro Tem has over the Senate. It is also a story about Padilla, a former president of the Los Angeles City Council and Sacramento freshman, who was tagged as a rising star even before he took office. The bill's Senate journey also raises issues of what some Senate observers say is an evolving set of rules of etiquette in the post term-limits era.

Senate sources say Perata killed the bill because its passage violated a fundamental rule of the Senate - defer to the committee chairmen. Padilla says he was in constant communication with the heads of both committees that heard the bill - Senate Energy Chairwoman Christine Kehoe, D-San Diego, and Appropriations Chairman Tom Torlakson, D-Antioch - and that any breach of etiquette was accidental.

The leader of the California State Assembly has warned legislators that they may not cast "ghost votes" on bills when they are not in the chamber. S.F. Chronicle.

Speaker Karen Bass, D-Baldwin Vista (Los Angeles County), told Democratic lawmakers at a caucus Tuesday that they may cast electronic votes for other members only when they are present on the Assembly chamber's green carpet but simply away from their desks.

"We are going to enforce the existing policy, which means that there will be no voting when a member is off the floor," Bass said in an interview later Tuesday.

The commission that sets state elected officials' salaries imposed a pay freeze Tuesday, but rejected an attempt to cut most legislators' wages 10 percent to help balance the state budget. AP in the Daily News.

Some commissioners, however, suggested that lawmakers and other elected officials should voluntarily give up some of their pay to help erase the state's red ink.

"We should send a message to our elected (officials) that we are concerned and that we do strongly recommend that they take a pay decrease so they can voluntarily share in this deficit like everyone else," said commissioner Kathy Sands, a former mayor of Auburn.

The Los Angeles City Council is canceling its Friday meeting in Van Nuys so its members can attend the celebration of Assembly Speaker Karen Bass, being sworn in to her new post at a Los Angeles ceremony.
Bass, the first African-American woman speaker, is hosting the event at Los Angeles Trade Tech to allow her constituents to be part of the celebration.

A state law proposed by Assemblyman Felipe Fuentes that would limit L.A.'s ability to control land use was sponsored by a developer whose Tujunga project would benefit from the legislation.Kerry Cavanaugh in the Daily News.

The move has infuriated Los Angeles City Council members, who voted last month to oppose the state intervention in local land-use decisions.

This week, some members said they are appalled that the bill appears designed to aid a particular developer.

Rep. Laura Richardson lost her Sacramento home in a foreclosure auction two weeks ago and left behind nearly $9,000 in unpaid property taxes. Gene Maddaus in the Daily Breeze.

Richardson, D-Long Beach, appears to have made only a few payments on the house, which she bought in January 2007 for $535,000.

After buying the home, Richardson hardly had time to live in it. Three months later, Rep. Juanita Millender-McDonald died and Richardson - then a freshman member of the state Assembly - launched a campaign to replace her in Congress.