Sen. Bob Hertzberg chose, appropriately, the first weekday of Sunshine Week to announce his bill that would shed much more light on California’s political campaign money.
Hertzberg, D-Van Nuys, on Monday touted his Senate Bill 1349, which would drag Cal-Access — the state’s system that allows the public to check up on lobbyists and campaign donors and recipients — out of the digital dark ages of the turn of the century, where it’s been stuck.
The clunky, hard-to-use and frustrating Cal-Access system, set up 15 years ago and improved but little since, would be an embarrassment in any state. But it’s especially so in the state that’s home to Silicon Beach and Silicon Valley.
Hertzberg, chair of the Senate Committee on Governance and Finance, is calling for $13.5 million to make Cal-Access a modern-day database that allows citizens to keep track of the donations their representatives receive and spend.
The move to modernize — well, replace, really — Cal-Access has the full support of Secretary of State Alex Padilla, an MIT grad in mechanical engineering who had the misfortune to inherit the relic of a system when he took office last year. Padilla has pledged to modernize his office, and updating this important database would go a long way toward that end.
SB 1349 is also backed by California Common Cause, the California League of Women Voters and the California Business Roundtable, among others.
Significantly, appearing with Hertzberg at his Monday press conference was Jim Heerwagen, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and good-government advocate, who announced he was ending the collection of signatures to get his Voters’ Right to Know Act initiative on the November ballot. Heerwagen’s initiative would have replaced the Cal-Access system, among other reforms, but he is satisfied that Hertzberg’s bill will take care of that.
SB 1349 directs that the new database use a unique ID for donors, allowing the public to see aggregated contributions from the same source. The system is to be timely and user-friendly, and to accommodate future compatibility with local campaign finance data.
Lenny Mendonca, co-chair of the good-government group California Forward’s Leadership Council, thanked Heerwagen for aligning the principles of his initiative with Hertzberg’s bill.
“We are also pleased and proud to point out that the new initiative process designed two years ago in the Ballot Initiative Transparency Act has worked exactly as designed to align legislative solutions with important issues raised by citizens,” Mendonca wrote.
That 2014 act, SB 1253 by Darrell Steinberg, allows the Legislature to hold hearings on proposed ballot measures in hopes that lawmakers can solve the problem the initiative addresses and the measure need not appear on voters’ ballots.
Another bill, AB 1200, by Assemblyman Richard Gordon, D-Los Altos, would turn another piece of Heerwagen’s initiative into state law. Gordon’s legislation would establish that those who try to influence state governmental procurement would be considered lobbyists under the Political Reform Act, requiring them to make lobbying disclosures. The bill has passed both houses and is back in the Assembly for consideration of Senate amendments.
SB 1349 and AB 1200 both deserve swift passage, so that they can begin shedding more light on money’s influence in state government.
Los Angeles News Group
