How do we fix California’s dysfunctional government?

The Legislature is not able to pass a budget on time and, despite high tax rates, California’s schools are starving for funding, roads and highways are decaying, the water system is rife with problems, and state prisons are overcrowded.

UC Davis experts say the ultimate power to change the political system is with the people of California.

And the timing may just be right.

A.G. Block, director of the public affairs program at the UC Center Sacramento, points out that a new poll by the Public Policy Institute of California indicates public sentiment may be changing on the Legislature’s two-thirds voting requirement to approve budgets and tax increases, which been blamed for the current paralysis.

Taken in mid-January, the poll shows a majority of Californians support allowing a 55 percent majority of state legislators to pass an annual budget, said Block, who, as an editor at the nonpartisan California Journal covered state government and politics for 23 years.

Previous polls never showed such a level of support, he added. So, this shift gives hope that citizens could one day approve a ballot initiative to reform legislative budget voting.

“The Legislature itself won’t make the change because it would require Republican support,” he said. “Without the two-thirds vote, Republicans would be as relevant as an oar on a jet ski.”

He notes that California is one of only three U.S. states — Arkansas and Rhode Island are the other two — that require a two-thirds super majority to pass a budget.

“It is no coincidence that those three also are considered among the worst states when it comes to managing money through the budget process,” Block said.

He notes the weighty issues confronting California — legislative term limits, primary elections and budgetary constraints such as Proposition 98 (K-14 education), Proposition 49 (after-school programs), three-strikes sentencing laws, and other initiative-driven formulae that mandate how the state funds a myriad of programs.

What is the reality of change on these fronts? Progress, Block said, will require a practical outlook.

“There is no ‘ideal world.’ There is only the real world, and that’s where changes have to occur,” he said.

Robert Huckfeldt, professor and chair of political science, said redistricting reform would make lawmakers more accountable to voters.

‘Mostly irrelevant’ Legislature

“We need more legislative districts with competitive general elections, and that is what the newly adopted redistricting measure may be able to achieve,” said Huckfeldt, a specialist in public opinion, participation and voting in national elections.

There is progress to report. In November, California voters approved Proposition 11, removing the power to draw up districts from the Legislature and giving it to a 14-member citizens commission. But the first election under this new system is not until 2012. Still, it is a good opening for bigger reforms.

“It is not necessary or even advisable that every legislative district meets this ideal,” he said, “but is important that a subset of legislative districts produce a block of legislators who create networks of interaction and cooperation across the partisan divide.”

As presently constituted, he said, the Legislature is “mostly irrelevant with foreordained outcomes” based on the candidates who win their party’s primary elections.

Like Block, Huckfeldt also believes the people of California need to get involved. “Citizens who value representative government should also value accountability, and thus they should object to a two-thirds rule that compromises that accountability.”

Frustration over California’s government has motivated the Bay Area Council to propose a constitutional convention to rectify systemic problems with the way the state operates. The state has not held one since 1879.

Such a historical perspective is valuable to solving California’s current predicament, said history professor Louis Warren, an expert on California and the American West.

As he explained, the two-thirds majority provision for all state budget increases beyond 5 percent appeared in California’s constitution in 1933. Then, the state was struggling to cover a huge budget deficit brought on by massive increases in spending aimed at lessening the impacts of Great Depression.

“In part, the idea was to persuade voters to give more tax power to the legislature by reassuring them that big spending increases would only happen when there was overwhelming consensus,” Warren said.

Unlike today, there was usually not a drawn-out budget fight in the California of yesteryear. “Democrats and Republicans generally horse-traded until they got budgets they could live with,” he added.

But the ability to reach a two-thirds consensus was coming apart by the 1970s, Warren said. By the 1980s and 1990s, it became nearly impossible with the “no new taxes” pledge of movement conservatives. As a result, bills have piled up and investment in the state has been stifled.

As a historian, Warren wonders how California’s leaders will reassure voters about how the state will approach the challenges of the future.

“Once again, we face a tremendous fiscal crisis that seems likely to require bold new steps to address,” he said.

To read the poll: www.ppic.org.