Thread: 1 million undocumented immigrants could live and work in Cal

1 million undocumented immigrants could live and work in California under newly introduced measure

By JIM SANDERS
McClatchy Newspapers

Published: Friday, Dec. 2, 2011 - 12:00 am

SACRAMENTO, Calif -- SACRAMENTO, Calif.-Nearly 1 million undocumented immigrants could live and work openly in California with little or no fear of deportation under an initiative unveiled Friday by a state legislator and others.

Assemblyman Felipe Fuentes, a Democrat, is helping to spearhead the measure, called the California Opportunity and Prosperity Act.

The proposal was filed Friday with the state Attorney General's Office, marking a first step toward a drive to collect the 504,760 voter signatures needed to qualify for the ballot.

Fuentes called the measure a "moderate, common-sense approach" necessitated by the federal government's inability to pass comprehensive immigration reform.

"I hope this shows Washington, D.C., that if they fail to act, California will take the lead on this critical issue," Fuentes said in a written statement.

Supporters say the initiative could generate up to $325 million in new tax revenue from undocumented workers that could assist education, public safety and other state programs.

Regardless whether Californians would support such a measure, implementation would depend upon the federal government agreeing not to prosecute participants at the state's request.

Assemblyman Tim Donnelly, a Republican, blasted the proposal as an attempt to sidestep immigration law. He predicted that it wouldn't have a "snowball's chance in hell" of winning voter approval.

"There's a proper process for coming to this country," Donnelly said of undocumented immigrants. "Why don't you respect that?"

The proposed initiative would apply to illegal immigrants who have lived in California for four years, have no felony convictions, are not suspected terrorists, pay a fee to administer the program, and can speak English or are learning it.

Since federal law makes it illegal to hire an undocumented immigrant, the program calls for the state to seek exceptions from the federal government that would provide a "safe harbor" for participants or people who hire them.

As job opportunities improve for the undocumented immigrants, so will California's tax coffers, proponents say.

Proponents touted the measure as continuing California's tradition of enacting trail-blazing policy in areas ranging from environmental protection to medicinal marijuana.

John Cruz, a proponent of the measure and former appointments secretary for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, said it makes sense to allow undocumented, longtime California residents to "fully contribute to society by becoming taxpayers as well."

Donnelly countered that the federal government is not likely to carve out exceptions for a select group of illegal immigrants.

"It essentially asks the federal government not to enforce the law," Donnelly said.

The names of the initiative's financial backers were not released Friday. It was not known how much money, if any, the group had collected for a signature-gathering drive.

http://www.sacbee.com/2011/12/02/409640 ... rants.html

RELATED

Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR): Illegal Immigration Costs Federal and Local Taxpayers $113 Billion a Year

(Washington, D.C July 6, 2010) A new study released today by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) estimates that illegal immigration now costs federal and local taxpayers $113 billion a year. The report, The Fiscal Burden of Illegal Immigration on U.S. Taxpayers, is the most comprehensive analysis of how much the estimated 13 million illegal aliens and their U.S.-born children cost federal, state and local governments.


http://www.libnot.com/2010/07/17/federa ... on-a-year/

What bull! Those jobs belong to the American citizens and no one else. period! We have said it a thousand times, stop the jobs and freebies to illegal immigrants and they will self deport. We are not going to take this lying down.

Originally Posted by Kiara

What bull! Those jobs belong to the American citizens and no one else. period! We have said it a thousand times, stop the jobs and freebies to illegal immigrants and they will self deport. We are not going to take this lying down.

============================================

On average, a new Interstate concrete paved highway mile cost $1 million dollars.

How many new miles of Interstate and local concrete paved roads would $113 Billion a Year create?

The numbers are completely mind-numbing.

Hello
that what they are doing Now get your head Out of the sand
wake the hell up

No amnesty or Dream Act
the company that hire them should get fine . & Deport them all
Obama was in Pa it did not help at all
my friends see line of Pa on food line it so sad . & the illegal
immigrants . are on this line The SB
No amnesty or Dream Act

"

I hope this shows Washington, D.C., that if they fail to act, California will take the lead on this critical issue," Fuentes said in a written statement.

It appears the reconquista is coming to a close in CA now that the ethnic Mexicans have infiltrated the government.

It will be interesting to see if DOJ sues them.

About Fuentes:

The Worst Legislator in California

San Fernando Valley Assemblyman Felipe Fuentes takes Sacramento bill-peddling to a new low
By David Futch Thursday, Nov 11 2010



So you thought it worked like this: A kid grows up dreaming of making the world just a little bit better. So like San Fernando state Assemblyman Felipe Fuentes, he learns how to blow-dry his hair and runs for office, promising he'll write new laws, better laws. He'll write the laws that will erase misery, obliterate oppression — laws that make the whole world sing.

That's what you thought, isn't it?

Silly you.

The truth is, in California, lawmakers like Fuentes don't actually make laws. They make deals.

It's easy to become confused. In Sacramento, a legislator who introduces a bill is called the "author." In reality, Fuentes and many of his colleagues didn't so much as lift a pencil. Or if he did, he handed it over to the PAC men and women, corporate executives or lobbyists who really did write the law before they went shopping for a legislator to carry it through the Capitol. And in Sacramento-speak, those special-interest folks who ghostwrite California's laws are called "sponsors."

But the worst thing about this system? Hands-down, it's the universality of it all.

Everybody is ghostwriting the laws. The Sierra Club. The teachers unions. Anheuser-Busch. The California Manufacturers Association. The city of Los Angeles. The California Retailers Association. Doesn't matter if they're from the right or the left. Everybody's in on it.

"Outside special interests have an inordinate impact on the bill-making process in Sacramento," says James Lee, who was former Gov. Pete Wilson's spokesman.

Talk about understatements.

The practice of letting special interests dictate the laws that legislators pass — right down to the very words and phrases — dates back to at least the 1940s in California. But now the practice has exploded to almost unprecedented levels.

Led by reporter Karen de Sa, in July, the San Jose Mercury News published a groundbreaking analysis of the 2007-08 legislative session, the most recent complete two-year session, and found that more than 1,800 bills — about 39 percent — were "sponsored" or actually written by special interests.

That's 702 laws ghostwritten and custom-designed specifically by the groups who benefited from them, then slapped with the name of one or another of California's 120 state legislators and introduced in the state Senate and Assembly as legitimate bills.

To top it off, the isolated Sacramento press corps rarely blows the whistle to alert the public about who is really writing California laws. When de Sa started working on her newspaper's online database, which any member of the public can use to look up the most compromised of the state's legislators, Capitol workers — including reporters — "would say, 'Sponsored bills? Well, duh. It's the way things are done,' " de Sa says. "I've never worked in the Capitol. But people in the Capitol who work there and who cover the Capitol have become far too jaded and accustomed to lobbyists pushing bills. Some of the [legislative] staff does work for lobbyists and the lobbyists become de facto legislators. [Legislative staff and the media] have accepted as routine what we as outsiders would think is a shockingly unethical way of doing business."

It didn't bother the politicians, either: An astonishing 60 percent of the ghostwritten laws put forth by legislators are passed by their colleagues in the Legislature.

The corporate sponsorship of legislation is so commonplace, in fact, that former assemblyman and current congressman Tom McClintock, Republican from California's 4th District, made news during his tenure in Sacramento for his refusal to front bills ghostwritten by special interests.

He made news because the squeaky-clean McClintock was the only one to simply refuse.

And then there's Felipe Fuentes.

The north San Fernando Valley's Assembly rep is a standout example of how lawmaking in Sacramento has devolved into something quite apart from lawmaking as people normally understand it.

The 39-year-old Democrat who represents Sylmar, Pacoima, Lakeview Terrace and Arleta in the California Assembly was listed as the "author" of 24 proposed bills in the 2007-08 legislative sessions. Yet despite all his bustle, Fuentes could easily win a nomination as the worst legislator in California — quite an achievement in a 120-member body with a 10 percent approval rating — because 10 of his laws were ghostwritten by special-interest groups.

Fuentes has the friendly demeanor of a politician hot on the campaign trail. On Election Day, he was out confidently campaigning for "another good Democrat," he says.

And he has a lot of confidence in the Sacramento system, which he insists isn't broken. "We have a robust process in the sunshine," he says, noting that organizational "sponsorship" of every bill is duly noted by the secretary of state, even if the public has no idea it's going on. "There isn't any one way to create good legislation."

But he lets special-interest groups write his laws. Then he puts his name on them.

Wasn't he elected to do the job he's letting the ghostwriters do?

His confidence wavers ever so slightly. "Well, off the record," he says in a rush, not giving a reporter the chance to say there's no such off-the-record deal in place, "it's not a yes or no answer, whether making laws this way is good or bad.

There's nothing wrong with generating ideas from different sources," he says. "I'm not an attorney and I'm not the best writer and I depend on the city people," meaning the Los Angeles city officials and civil bureaucrats who are actually writing the bills on which Fuentes puts his name. "There isn't a monopoly on good ideas. I'll take them from anyone."

Indeed, Fuentes has carried water for pretty much any special-interest group you can think of, including the Independent Automobile Dealers Association of California, Workers' Compensation Pharmacy Alliance, the California Medical Association, the Personal Insurance Federation of California and Symantec Corporation.

But perhaps his pièce de résistance is the one that got away: He put his name on a stinker of a law known as Assembly Bill 2531, which was ghostwritten by Los Angeles' powerful Community Redevelopment Agency.

See, the CRA is a semi-autonomous city department that siphons off a portion of property taxes and uses those monies to redevelop "blighted" city neighborhoods. It does that by giving loans to owners — usually development companies who rehabilitate property or tear down existing buildings to erect apartment complexes, hotels or office towers.

It sounds pretty, but AB 2531 also had the potential to displace thousands of minority and poor L.A. residents — and wipe out huge swaths of nonblighted Los Angeles — through a land grab disguised as redevelopment.

The CRA has the power to declare eminent domain over blighted areas. According to the original wording of AB 2531 that Fuentes put his name on, "blight" would be expanded to a radical new definition: those unhealthy neighborhoods with "high incidences of obesity, diabetes and other diseases which are affected by poor access to fresh food" or places where there are "high incidences of asthma, lung cancer and other respiratory diseases which are affected by air pollution or the presence of contaminated properties," and, lastly, areas "that suffer from a lack of parks and open space."

And that made Bob Blue, an engineer and former Hollywood Studio District Neighborhood Council member, really mad. Because AB 2531 laid out a whole new definition of blight.

Neighborhoods with limited open space and parks, or a lack of fresh vegetables, with an elevated incidence of diabetes or obesity, or with high incidents of lung problems, were now "blighted" and at risk.

Echo Park, Hollywood, Boyle Heights, Venice, South Central, Mid-City, Pacoima, Van Nuys.

Much of park-poor, asthma-suffering, overweight Los Angeles, in fact.

About 24 percent of the residents on the city's Eastside are obese, as are 30 percent of those who live in South Los Angeles. In West Los Angeles, just 11 percent are obese. According to the county Department of Public Health and the local chapter of the American Diabetes Association, in 2007, the diabetes rate among African Americans increased to 11.4 percent in L.A.; 12.8 percent of L.A. Latinos have the chronic disease. By comparison, 5.7 percent of whites in L.A. County have diabetes.

Oh, and "blight" also would include public housing in L.A. that's more than 50 years old — pretty much drawing a bead on several projects built before 1960, which are home to some of the city's poorest, and many of its most fiercely antiredevelopment, Latino and black residents.

"Currently, you have to prove an area is blighted, and that takes about two years to do so," Blue says. Fuentes' law, dreamed up by the insiders at Los Angeles' redevelopment wing, "would have circumvented the process and eased the definition of 'blighted.' "

It also would have allowed developers first dibs on land condemned by the CRA and the city — while providing those developers with favorable loan terms, Blue says.

Ziggy Kruse, a legal researcher and CityWatchLA blogger who previously blew the whistle on a negligent Hollywood redeveloper, CIM Group — taping an embarrassing video that forced CIM Group to tear down a festering old motel filled with rotting garbage — joined Blue in begging Schwarzenegger to veto the bill.

Says Kruse: "The CRA tries to get its hands on whatever land it wants. There are a couple of obese city councilmen whose neighborhoods could be condemned and land taken if this bill had become law."

She leaves it to voters to figure out who they are.

Kruse and Blue say Assemblyman Fuentes pushed the bill because it's what Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa wants — and Fuentes, who clearly has political ambitions beyond 2012, when he'll hit his Assembly term limit, wants Villaraigosa's support when he makes a move to gain Richard Alarcon's seat on the L.A City Council.

Fuentes was a deputy mayor under James Hahn, assigned to duties in the San Fernando Valley, in 2001. Then he became chief of staff to then–Los Angeles City Council President Alex Padilla, now a state senator and Fuentes' current protector in Sacramento.

Some Democratic Assembly members in Sacramento, says one legislator who insists upon remaining anonymous, believe that Fuentes sent the tip to L.A. District Attorney Steve Cooley's office that launched the investigation of where Councilman Alarcon really lives.

Fuentes, his colleague says, is nakedly ambitious to grab Alarcon's City Council seat early — before Alarcon reaches his term limit in 2013 — and he openly hates Alarcon.

In January, Fuentes introduced Assembly Bill 1676 on behalf of a wildly self-interested special-interest group made up of one: Felipe Fuentes. The retroactive law would have "immediately" forced from office any local politician caught living outside his voting district. Two days later, Councilman Richard Alarcon suddenly made the evening news — an investigation had been launched into allegations he was living in Sun Valley, not part of his district. Alarcon's defense was that squatters had taken over his dilapidated, slumlike tract home. He and his wife currently face felony voter-fraud charges arising from the probe.

Fuentes' ambitious reputation for bringing highly conflicted, ghostwritten bills to the Assembly floor — more than almost any of the other 119 legislators, although the Mercury News database reveals that several Los Angeles–area assemblymen are among the worst — has become an inside joke in Sacramento.

When Fuentes introduces a new bill in the august Assembly chambers, there's so much scorn for him that his own Democratic Assembly colleagues quietly chant "Bwop, bwop, bwop," making a sound like a police cruiser headed to a crime scene. Their message: Trouble is on the way.

Trouble indeed, says Blue, who finds it ironic that Fuentes, a Latino, would throw his support to a land-grab law that could displace Los Angeles Latinos in much the same way the CRA was infamously created in 1948 — to "redevelop" a historic Latino community called Chavez Ravine.

The city planners promised they would build new, better homes at Chavez Ravine. Instead, they built Dodger Stadium.

"Fuentes didn't write" AB 2531, Blue says. "He introduced the bill because of his relationship with the city."

Blue and Kruse learned of AB 2531 just before it got to the governor's desk. The two organized a letter-writing campaign and fired off scores of e-mail alerts to stop the nonsense — and the governor vetoed Fuentes' bizarre expansion of "blight."

Nobody knows if the two Hollywood activists stopped the governor, or if Schwarzenegger was waiting with his veto pen.

Since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled five years ago in Kelo vs. City of New London that the state of Connecticut could seize a working-class neighborhood to build a mall, 43 states have enacted laws to protect communities from blatant land grabs.

Fuentes was trying to roll back California's not very protective law, making it far easier to declare minority and working-class neighborhoods blighted — thus joining 19 states that have nearly unlimited definitions of "blight."

The Democrat-controlled California Legislature backed Fuentes up.

The governator told the Legislature he killed the bill because "redevelopment funds are to be used solely for the purpose of eliminating blight.  ... This bill would authorize the use of redevelopment funds for projects that are not necessarily blighted, as well as for projects outside the redevelopment area, and as such would violate the primary purpose of redevelopment law."

Fuentes defends AB 2531 by saying anything that benefits L.A. is a good deal, and the new law was poised to fulfill some dreams. For whom, he wouldn't say.

Legislating Sacramento-style means the public has to put up with the good, the bad and the ugly of lawmaking, Fuentes implies.

"If you're doing something for big business like a tobacco company, then it's wrong" to put his name on bills he didn't write, Fuentes says. "But if you're doing it for L.A., as in the case of this bill, it's good for redevelopment. I did this [AB 2531] in collaboration with the city."

Fuentes called it a good and simple bill that, instead of addressing the bricks-and-mortar issue of redevelopment, would have changed the way the CRA in Los Angeles spends its money, letting the funds go to "incubate small businesses, promote green jobs and technology and provide job training."

"If there was ever a time to move money around through development, it's now," Fuentes says. "I'm not trying to figure out how to create Disneyland. I'm interested in redevelopment."

Fuentes insists the bill "doesn't say anything about taking land or displacing people."

No, but then, he didn't write a word of it.

"When there's money involved, the process is corrupt," Blue says. "Many people greased the wheel to get this bill going, including bond lawyers, developers and Felipe Fuentes."

Villaraigosa did not respond to L.A. Weekly's request for an interview. But he blessed AB 2531 when he signed off on the City Council's legislative wish list last February.

The law was backed by the Los Angeles City Council, 15 people who vote as a unanimous block 99.993 percent of the time, usually taking their cue from Villaraigosa — even on wildly controversial ideas such as this one. Voting yes were Alarcon, Janice Hahn, Paul Koretz, Jan Perry, Ed Reyes, Bill Rosendahl, Dennis Zine and four City Council members running for re-election in 2011: Tony Cardenas, Tom LaBonge, Bernard C. Parks and Herb Wesson. Four were absent: Eric Garcetti, Jose Huizar, Paul Krekorian and Greig Smith.

CRA Chief Deputy Jim Dantona says there's nothing wrong with Fuentes' legislative tactics.

"Fuentes saw it, liked it and so he attached his name and presented it," Dantona says. "With this bill we were trying to get money spread out through the city instead of just targeting our redevelopment projects."

Although the CRA is powerful and wealthy, controlling a $586 million annual budget, Dantona complains: "We can't get businesses money for equipment or capital improvement if they're half a street over, the next block over or a mile away from a project area."

It's quite inconvenient, in fact. It's utterly illegal.



Earlier this month, Fuentes won re-election handily to his second — and final — Assembly term, with 79 percent of the vote, in a gerrymandered district where he could not lose. He was helped by $462,108.50 that flowed to his campaign from organizations representing the banking giant JPMorgan Chase & Co. PAC of Chicago and California police. If he later sponsors a bill written by people from among those organizations, what will that say?

Fuentes explains, "I don't just put my name on a bill and present it. All these bills I presented, I authored. I don't take pen to paper myself. I rely on committee staff, consultants and legislative counsel. My strength is taking ideas and making them better. I'd be wary of a legislator who took pen to paper by themselves. You need a lot of folks."

That's political-speak for justifying Sacramento's unwritten pay-to-play system, says California Voter Foundation founder and president Kim Alexander, a fourth-generation Angeleno whose first foray into Sacramento politics came in 1989.

Twenty-one years later, Alexander says, the link between money and legislative power is stronger than ever.

"A lot of people are surprised by this kind of access," she says. "I don't know how to answer whether it's corruption or not. Or whether it's right or wrong. The legislative process is dependent on money to fuel it. The fact is you can't get a bill passed without money, and there is no power without it. ... It frustrates the public. If you don't have money, you don't have a voice."

But James Lee, the former Wilson press secretary who now runs Lee Strategy Group in L.A., says you can't lay all the blame on Fuentes and his cohorts. The nature of the lawmaking game in Sacramento was turned topsy-turvy 18 years ago, Lee says, when voters approved term limits.

"Term limits have had a profound effect on sausage-making in the legislature," Lee says. "If in, say, six years you introduce hundreds of bills, you're seen as someone who can get things done."

Fuentes gets things done, all right.

Back in July, the Mercury News wrote, "Beginning in 2007, Fuentes introduced 10 bills that had been crafted and pushed by those lobbyists — one of the highest totals of any legislator. ... In the years since, he has reaped tens of thousands of dollars in campaign money from bill sponsors, won re-election and snagged plum appointments to Assembly committees."

Legislators who front for the ghostwriters pass themselves off as high-achieving lawmakers — an image that's allowed to stand by the mostly silent Sacramento press corps. But behind the scenes, these private groups are authoring intricate laws about themselves. "Entire regulatory issues are put up for sale," Lee says.

Fuentes' prolific bill-fronting is fueled by yet another problem, according to Lee. With a 66 percent supermajority needed to pass a budget, he notes, stalemates are "brutal, brutal." To get 27 out of 40 votes in the Senate and 54 votes from the Assembly, he says, legislators will take help from any organization with enough staff to provide it.

On Nov. 2, voters passed Proposition 25 and did away with the supermajority to pass a California budget. Now, the Democrats in Sacramento can pass a budget with a simple majority vote, taking away one of the key pressure points.

But Fuentes doesn't plan to tone it down. He'll keep putting his name on California laws ghostwritten by special-interest groups from whom he takes big sums of money.

As long as he and the groups involved both report the donations, even if those links are publicized only by the occasional digging of a journalist like Karen de Sa, he says he's doing right by serving and protecting his constituents.

There's no irony in his voice as Fuentes paraphrases the slogan of a major U.S. corporation: "There's no monopoly on good ideas," he says. "I'm like 3M. I can take things and make them better."

http://www.laweekly.com/2010-11-11/news ... alifornia/

$20,000 buys California laws: Felipe Fuentes, Charles Calderon, dozens of legislators take cash from special interests who ghost-write laws
By Jill Stewart Mon., Dec. 20 2010 at 12:16 PM

We've already reported that Los Angeles' State Assemblyman Felipe Fuentes is "The Worst Legislator in California," putting his name on laws that are actually ghostwritten by corporations, unions -- and anyone else Fuentes thinks he can squeeze for campaign help.


Assembly Felipe Fuentes: is he selling California laws?

San Jose Mercury News reporter Karen de Sa, who unveiled an explosion in the sleazy Sacramento practice of "sponsored bills," has a new scoop. She reports that Fuentes, State Sen. Assemblyman Charles Calderon and others are essentially selling California laws. They've reaped an average $25,000 $20,000 from firms, unions and others who they allow to write the wording of scads of state laws. Felipe, Calderon & Co. put their names on those laws. More sick facts here:

As de Sa reports (her scoops are being ignored by most of the way-too-entrenched reporters in the Sacramento press corps):

The legislators who introduced the most private-interest-sponsored legislation -- Assembly members who introduced 10 or more bills, senators who introduced seven or more -- received, on average, more than $20,000 from private interest [ghost writers] whose bills they carried.
Did you elect one of these legislators?

SEE ARTICLE BELOW:

Assemblyman Charles Calderon is among the worst

​The worst, de Sa reports, are Fuentes, Calderon, Ed Hernandez, Leland Yee, Bill Emmerson, Lou Correa, Gloria Negrete-McLeod and Mary Hayashi.

But there are dozens more.

Only two of the 120 California state legislators didn't take the trip down the road of slime this past year, Chuck DeVore and Mike Gatto.

De Sa says legislators openly defend the practice of letting special interest groups write customized laws -- about themselves.

God. Here's the streeeetttttcccccched logic the legislators have mind-numbingly concocted for their sad behavior:

Proposed legislation goes to the Office of Legislative Counsel to be formally "drafted." And sponsors are barred from talking to Legislative Counsel staff, absent a waiver from the legislator introducing the bill. But those protections turned out not to be the safeguard that critics envision.
Waivers are freely granted, and legislative counsel staff tell of many instances in which llobbyists, with legislators' approval, negotiated language directly [with California's Legislative Counsel], leaving legislators and their staff out of the give-and-take.

The slime season of Sacramento bills written by groups who profit from them includes:


California legislator Bill Emmerson, up there with the worst

​-- Bill Emmerson put his name on a law really written by a lobbyist to create a special NASCAR license plate. Some of the money raised from vanity plates, instead of going to devastated state coffers, would funnel to "a charity of NASCAR's choice -- or even to NASCAR drivers."

-- Calderon took $12,000 from the mobile home industry, and introduced a bill -- written by mobile-home park owners -- letting them double fees they charge to new mobile home owners in parks with rent control. Calderon, busted by de Sa, is now saying he wrote the words. The bill was killed by extensive criticism.

And get this: California legislators bend over backward to approve the ghostwritten laws over the laws actually written by their fellow legislators. It's all about the money.

De Sa writes (our own notes are in brackets):

More than half of the sponsored [or ghost-written] bills that were introduced the most recent session became law, compared with 21 percent of non-sponsored bills, the review found.
But that discrepancy reflected the Legislature's preference for [ghost-written] bills -- 69 percent of all sponsored bills made their way to Schwarzenegger's desk in the 2009-10 session, but only 30 percent of all bills [written by legislators themselves].

Is anyone up for cleaning house in Sacramento and just starting over from scratch?
http://blogs.laweekly.com/informer/2010 ... a_laws.php


How our laws in California are really made
By Karen de Sá

SACRAMENTO — Imagine: At a time when California is lurching from crisis to crisis, a legislator has an idea to make life better. He puts together a bill, gathers support and shepherds it into law.

If only Sacramento worked like that. Instead, it often works like this:

A lobbyist has an idea to make life better — but only for his client. The lobbyist writes the bill, shops for a willing lawmaker to introduce it and lines up the support. The legislator? He has to do little more than show up and vote.

This is the path of the "sponsored bill," a method of lawmaking little noticed outside California's capital but long favored on the inside. In many states lobbyists influence legislators; in

California, they have — quite baldly — taken center stage in lawmaking.

Although lawmakers in recent years have routinely failed to grapple with health care, the state budget and other matters of public interest, they've managed to do the bidding of the private interests who tout sponsored bills at an impressive clip.

A Mercury News analysis found that in 2007-08, the most recent complete two-year legislative session, more than 1,800 bills — about 39 percent of the total — were sponsored by outside interests. And those sponsored bills made up 60 percent of the legislation that was passed into law.

This is how plumbing manufacturers ensured that industry-friendly labs — and not state regulators — would conduct the testing that determines whether drinking faucets sold in California are lead-free. This is how a Los Angeles County billionaire crushed a legal challenge over whether his plans for a new football stadium violated the state's long-standing environmental protection law.

Recalling his first encounters with lobbyists seeking legislative backing for their bills, former Assemblyman Joe Canciamilla said, "It's like being in a Middle Eastern bazaar. You are surrounded by hawkers saying, 'Take this one, no, take this one, no, I've got a better one over here.' The openness of that — the 'oh yeah, that's the way things are done' attitude — was the most shocking."

Legislators, continued Pittsburg funeral home director Canciamilla, "are supposed to be the buffer between the interest groups and the public — and that buffer no longer exists. Now, they're a direct conduit."

The Mercury News analysis, the first ever undertaken of sponsored bills in California, revealed:

Sponsored bills swamp the Legislature. They amounted to 42 percent of the bills introduced in the Assembly and a third of the Senate bills.


Profit-seeking bills abound. While advocacy groups, trade associations and government agencies also sponsor legislation, more than 500 of the sponsored bills introduced in the 2007-08 session came from private industries and industry trade groups, often seeking to increase market share, repel regulations or limit lawsuits.

Sponsored bills succeed. Almost half of the 1,883 bills that were sponsored in the last session became law; about one in five of the 2,982 bills that had no listed sponsor became law.

Everybody does it. Out of 122 legislators who served at least partial terms in 2007-08, just one — Sen. Tom McClintock, R-Thousand Oaks — refused to introduce any sponsored bills. Democrats introduced more sponsored bills than Republicans, but Republicans introduced a larger percentage of bills sponsored by private interests.

Lobbyists have long been known in California as the Third House, referring to their entrenched status alongside the Legislature's two official houses, the Assembly and Senate. But through interviews with current and former legislators and aides, as well as lobbyists and outside government experts, the Mercury News documented a changed pattern: Today, lobbyists function almost as a shadow legislature, pulling the strings at every turn for short-term lawmakers who have become accustomed to letting private interests monopolize the public debate. At the center of this reality is the sponsored bill.

"You don't learn this in American civics class," said Derek Cressman, a regional director for the nonpartisan group Common Cause. "You don't learn that some interest group drafts this and gives it to a legislator along with a contribution and says, 'We would like a law introduced.' "

Cressman said the result is that "organizations with deep financial pockets can present their issues to the Legislature, and those that don't are in essence invisible."

James Wedick goes further. Now retired, Wedick was the lead undercover FBI agent who established a phony shrimp processing company in California in 1985, then documented lawmakers taking bribes to support a sponsored bill crafted to help his fake business.

The FBI's sting operation known as Shrimpscam landed five legislators in prison but — he concedes — had little long-term effect. "It's been going on forever and it lends itself to corrupting the whole process," Wedick said of sponsored bills. "The whole process has been hijacked."

Maneuvers at midnight
Here's one example of how sponsored bills hijack the process of lawmaking — allowing private agendas to overwhelm the public interest.

In 2007, the Legislature took up a bill to authorize the spending of a $2.8 billion affordable housing bond approved in a voter referendum. The bill initially sought to ensure that projects would be efficient and geographically diverse, and that they would reduce homelessness.

But at the urging of a lobbyist for the sports and entertainment giant Anschutz Entertainment Group, a different, sponsored version of the bill suddenly appeared — amid a flurry of bills on the last days of the legislative session. Several legislators whose names were attached to the bill dropped off, leaving only Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez, D-Los Angeles, as legislative backer of the amended bill. It cleared the Senate after midnight, and the Assembly at 3:26 a.m.

Hugh Bower, the lead staff member of the Assembly Committee on Housing and Community Development, was stunned when the bill came up that night; he had been told the issue was dead. There was such chaos, Bower recalls, that one committee member still thought the next day that the amended bill had died.

What was Anschutz's interest? Its version of the bill allowed some affordable housing funds to be used for parks, landscaping and fancy sidewalks in the neighborhood around the company-owned Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles.

Anschutz insisted its changes would let any "Business Improvement District" — a specially created association of property owners and government agencies — apply for the funds. But only the district near the Staples Center did, receiving the maximum award of $30 million, according to state housing officials.

Christine Minnehan, director of legislative advocacy for the Western Center on Law and Poverty, lamented the award, saying many affordable housing projects were awarded less than half that amount. She called the outcome "a theft of public funds, and a deception of the voters."

A California tradition

For as long as anyone now in Sacramento can remember, the California Legislature has identified outside parties pushing bills.

Legislative historians asked by the Mercury News to research the practice say it dates to at least the 1940s.

Officials in some other states, told of California's practice, greeted it as an admirable form of public disclosure.

In Mississippi "there is no mention of groups who support the bill, even if they drafted the bill and requested a legislator to sponsor it," said Barbara Powell, lobbyist for Common Cause Mississippi. Jane Pinsky, director of the North Carolina Coalition for Lobbying & Government Reform, said, "We really have no transparency on who is behind legislation in North Carolina."

But in California, it is quite clear that full disclosure has reinforced the system of sponsorship, legitimizing the influence of special interests.

Where other states, and the U.S. Congress, use the term "sponsor" to mean the legislators who carry the bill, in California the term refers to the outside party; the legislator who introduces the bill is called the "author."

"Author is really a misnomer because the real author is the special interest group," said Keith Richman, a health care executive and former Republican assemblyman from Granada Hills. "Essentially, the legislators are simply prostituting."

Many legislators say they take only ideas and guidance from sponsors, but maintain control over the bill. "Our job is to be deliberative and have our legislative hat on so we can make good judgments," insisted Sen. Leland Yee, D-San Francisco, one of the leading authors of privately sponsored bills.

But dozens of interviews inside and outside the capital reveal that legislators have often surrendered their role.

Lobbyists working on behalf of sponsors craft original bill language.

They write fact sheets for legislators and their staff.

They even write the speeches lawmakers deliver on the floor extolling bills. "It's common knowledge that the floor statements are written by lobbyists," said lobbyist Jackson Gualco, previously a special assistant to former Assembly Speaker Willie Brown. "Some staff members change it, other times it's word for word."

Lobbyists solicit votes, suggest and evaluate amendments, and seek to win support from the governor's office.

When the legislator who introduced the bill goes to committee hearings to present and defend the proposed legislation, the lobbyists and sponsors typically sit alongside, and often commandeer the proceedings.

The legislator "may get a question that he's not prepared for because he's not as knowledgeable about the issue as I am," said one lobbyist who represents many private interests. "I may nudge his knee a bit or lift my left hand up on the table rather than having him answer a question incorrectly."

Commonly, the lobbyist added, he lets the legislator know "I'd like to answer the questions."


Help for the 49ers

The Mercury News analysis identified outside sponsors for 39 percent of bills introduced in the last session. But that does not capture the complete number.

Official disclosure of the sponsors is left to the legislative committees and their staffs. Most committee analyses explicitly list the sponsors, but some, like the Senate Local Government Committee, do not. And sometimes — even when a bill clearly benefits a private party — legislators describe the ideas as their own.

That was the case with Senate Bill 43, introduced last July by Sen. Elaine Alquist, D-Santa Clara, to assist the San Francisco 49ers in their effort to build a $937 million publicly subsidized football stadium in Santa Clara.

The team was frustrated that the city's charter required them to put the contract to build the stadium out for competitive bid. Alquist's bill exempted the stadium from the bid mandate.

Alquist said she came up with the idea herself. That surprised some local officials: "It's hard for me to believe the 49ers didn't go in and ask for this bill," said Santa Clara Councilman William Kennedy, a stadium opponent. What's more, city staff said the team had mentioned during negotiations that it might turn to the Legislature for help.

"I have no idea what the 49ers said to people at City Hall," Alquist said, explaining that she simply wanted to help expedite the process. "I had nothing to do with that."

Whatever the bill's origin, the 49ers became the driving force. The team spent $73,779 on lobbyists who schmoozed the governor and the Legislature on the bill, according to reports filed with the secretary of state. The bill sailed through both houses, although legislative staffers cautioned of "a bad precedent," noting that 125-year-old "competitive bidding requirements exist to prevent favoritism, corruption and waste of public money."

Bills for profit

Outside sponsorship breeds success; sponsored bills are far more likely than bills without sponsors to become law.

The Mercury News analysis shows that success was especially likely when the bills were sponsored by businesses and industry groups. Almost half of those bills ended up signed by the governor — a far higher percentage than bills that had no sponsor.

For the 2007-08 legislative session, 177 of the 347 bills sponsored by private interests that were introduced in the Assembly — 51 percent — were passed into law. In contrast, 326 of 1,793 bills introduced in the Assembly that had no sponsor — or 18 percent — became law.

On the Senate side, the disparity was modestly smaller. About 43 percent of the bills introduced on behalf of private-interest sponsors in the last session became law; 24 percent of Senate bills that were introduced without a sponsor became law.

Peter Detwiler, who as the longtime staff director of the Senate Local Government Committee is one of Sacramento's most seasoned bill analysts, said the findings demonstrate the power outsiders have gained as legislators arrive in office facing a ticking clock on their terms in office.

"In a term-limited legislative environment, the attention goes to those who can focus attention narrowly on a topic or interest," Detwiler said.

Private vs. public

The narrow purpose of a sponsored bill is rarely a secret in the Capitol; the committee analyses make sure of that.

Those analyses, written by legislative staff, often bluntly note that the legislation has a private rather than public benefit. And while at times those warnings help to defeat the bills, other times the legislators approve them — and insist they have done the right thing.

Consider these examples from the 2007-08 session.

When the PowerFlare Corporation of Atherton sponsored a bill to require that electronic roadside beacons replace all standard flares now in use by the state Highway Patrol, the bill was pitched as a way to enhance motorists' safety. But the bill analysis noted that it would "significantly increase demand for electronic beacons, which are manufactured by the sponsor of the bill," and that the cost to the taxpayers of replacing flares with beacons would be high. The bill died in committee.

When MySpace sponsored a bill bolstering its ability to prevent individuals with certain criminal records from using its site, it extolled the legislation as a way to keep children safe from sexual predators on the Internet. But nestled in the bill was a provision that would have given the online social networking site broad immunity from lawsuits as a result of its efforts to restrict access.

A committee analyst wrote that the bill "raises troubling issues of manipulation of the legislative process to protect the financial and business interests of corporate entities, under the thin guise of providing additional tools to law enforcement." The bill passed the Assembly, but later died in the Senate.

And when the Plumbing Manufacturers Institute sponsored a bill giving labs reliant on industry funding the authority to test drinking faucets and fountains, it promised the system would better protect Californians from lead in their drinking water. But a committee consultant characterized the plumbing group's intention as "a not-so-subtle process for subverting what legislators thought they were enacting" — a way to protect the public from a harmful substance.

Despite protests from more than 50 public health and consumer organizations, the bill was signed into law in September 2008.

Sen. Ron Calderon, D-Montebello, who introduced the bill, said in an interview that he has "no concerns" with the industry overseeing testing. "As a matter of fact, I believe the problem with regulatory boards in general is that they don't recruit or appoint enough people from the industry that they regulate."

Calderon received $13,900 from the institute and member faucet makers during the 2007-08 term.

Some observers argue these private interest bills do, ultimately, benefit at least a portion of the public. Thad Kousser, associate professor of political science at UC San Diego, said legislators who introduce sponsored bills on behalf of industries are doing exactly what they are sent to Sacramento to do: represent the interests of their district. "What better way," he asked, to help "the employers of their constituents?"

But former state senator McClintock, the sole legislator who did not introduce a single sponsored bill in the last session, argues that constituents' interests have little to do with it. McClintock, now a congressman, said: "It's a general rule that sponsors are bureaucracies seeking more power, or companies seeking more money."

In a system where more bills fail than succeed, critics complain that many of the proposed laws are harmful even when they fail because they further clog an overloaded Legislature.

Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg said in a speech this session that the state has become a "bill factory," with too many unnecessary bills proposed and too little analysis of the impact of bills already passed. Treasurer Bill Lockyer, a former legislator, put it more bluntly at one recent hearing: "There's too much junk."

Everyone's a sponsor

As the influence of lobbyists has grown, plenty of groups, in addition to private companies and industry organizations, have taken up sponsoring bills.

Unions do it. Government agencies do it. Environmental groups do it. "We sponsor bills and I'm very proud of them," said Sierra Club California director Bill Magavern. The Sierra Club, for instance, was co-sponsor of a bill that revamped the process for recycling and disposing of mercury-tainted thermostats.

"There's nothing wrong with sponsored bills conceptually," said Assemblyman Jared Huffman, D-San Rafael, who introduced 25 sponsored bills last session, seven of them sponsored by private interests. "There are lots of sponsors from the Sierra Club to the oil and gas industry — and everyone in between who think up good ideas and bring them to legislators every year."

Huffman is one of many legislators who argue that not all sponsored bills are created evil. But even if liberals might applaud sponsored environmental legislation, and conservatives might cheer bills from the California District Attorneys Association, government experts say these efforts have the same problems as the more brazen pursuits of the Anschutz Entertainment Group.

Lawmaking is supposed to involve a balancing of competing interests in the public good: Make the regulation tight enough to protect the environment, for example, but not so tight that it squelches economic activity. But when an interest group writes a bill, there is no such balance. Only its interest is represented.

"It's undemocratic to have interest groups writing legislation," said Dorie Apollonio, assistant professor at UC San Francisco's School of Pharmacy and an expert on influence peddling. "If we're unhappy with what legislators are doing, we throw the bums out," she said, in contrast to lobbyists who do not answer to the public.

But in Sacramento today, some legislators say they've become dependent upon the role assumed by lobbyists.

When state Sen. Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, carried a bill last year to ban the use of toxic flame retardants in children's products, he faced opposition from the powerful American Chemical Council. The help of bill sponsor Friends of the Earth was critical, he said.

"The chemical industry lobbyists can be in 10 member offices simultaneously while I'm going to offices one at a time," he said. "So a lot of it comes down to math — a good sponsor is of value."

Other legislators depend on sponsors for technical support as well as political skills.

And so the Sierra Club's Magavern finds himself crafting bill language, providing legislators' talking points and cajoling support for votes — not out of preference, but out of necessity.

"There still are some staffers that do some of that, but that number has declined," Magavern added. "More and more, sponsors are expected to do most of the work."
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