Dan Walters: California Legislature has a new opportunity ... but only if it mends its ways

Polls tell us that the vast majority of Californians believe their Legislature is ineffective and at least semi-corrupt.

The 120 men and women who serve in the Legislature don't like being held in such low esteem.

However, their poor image is enhanced when a legislator is arrested for drunken driving or nailed for sexual harassment, or when their leaders hand out fat raises to their staffers and deny media access to their financial records – to name but a few recent imbroglios.

The public might be more tolerant of such hijinks if lawmakers were also doing their jobs – i.e., dealing with the many policy issues that confront such a large and fractious state. But year after year, the schools and the roads deteriorate, the state budget goes unbalanced, the water supply becomes more precarious and the economy stagnates.

Meanwhile, the Capitol emits legislation that is either petty or slavishly responds to well-heeled special interests.

The Legislature reconvenes today, which means it has another chance to either reinforce its low standing or improve its image, but those annual opportunities may be running out. One of the many ballot measures kicking around this year would end California's 45-year experiment with a full-time, professional Legislature and return it to part-time status.

Were the Legislature so inclined, there's no shortage of pithy issues that it could address this year, beginning with the chronically unbalanced state budget.

With revenues running behind last summer's rosy expectations, the budget is probably in the red already, even with a billion dollars of "trigger" spending cuts, and a deficit in the range of $12 billion to $13 billion looms for fiscal year 2012-13.

Gov. Jerry Brown and Democrats hope that voters will pass some new taxes next fall. They probably will fashion a 2012-13 budget that assumes their enactment. Even that assumption, however, would require some deeper spending cuts – or more gimmicks.

Brown says that if Democrats want voters to raise taxes, they must establish credibility by reforming a public pension system he calls "unsustainable." But the public employee unions on which Democrats depend for support oppose any but superficial changes.

A water bond scheduled for the November ballot could be doomed unless legislators heed Brown's warnings that it must be slenderized and stripped of its pork, such as a quarter-billion-dollar bailout for billionaire Warren Buffett's utility company, or a park in the district of former Assembly Speaker Karen Bass.

Another tough decision is whether to give the proposed north-south bullet train project an injection of state bond funds, or pull the plug, as most voters in a recent statewide poll prefer.

Those are merely a few of the issues that the Legislature could resolve – but only if it mends its laggard ways.