Huber rolls up sleeves to get rid of government waste

One of Democratic Assemblywoman Alyson Huber's New Year's resolutions: for California's bloated bureaucracy to lose some weight.

The first-term lawmaker, whose district includes portions of north Stockton, Lodi and the Delta, said she will soon introduce a bill targeting the hundreds of boards and commissions throughout state government in hopes of weeding out waste.

Under proposed "sunset" legislation state panels would not exist indefinitely but, rather, be required to undergo periodic reviews to ensure they have met their goals. The idea is that if those boards haven't accomplished anything by then, they're dead.

Huber said she's still working out details but plans to introduce a bill when the Legislature reconvenes this week.

"We should look back," Huber said during a December meeting with The Record's editorial board. "In an ideal world, each committee would do this themselves."

Huber said sunset legislation would put deadline pressure on committees, often created by lawmakers to investigate different areas of policymaking, to be more efficient and focused.

During her first term, Huber has gone after state bureaucracy. She co-authored a bill last year that abolished the California Integrated Waste Management Board, a panel seen by critics as a costly and cushy dumping ground for termed-out lawmakers.

In October, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed a Huber bill that would have required the state to audit the workload of members of the Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board plus one other board by June 1. After that, two boards or commissions would have been audited annually under the legislation. In her pitch for her new idea, Huber points to other states, such as Texas, Colorado and Florida, that for years have used sunset reviews.

Hank Brown, a former U.S. senator who was a prime sponsor of Colorado's sunset legislation while serving in that state's Senate, said the regular reviews have provided mixed results.

"It worked out different than I think a lot of us, or least I, had hoped," said Brown, an outgoing political science professor and former president of the University of Colorado. "Not a total failure by any means, but my personal hope was that we'd get rid of a lot of the boards and commissions." Instead, he said, lobbying activity increased when an entity was up for renewal, and few were eliminated. But, he said, "there were some positive things. It did make commissions a little more responsive, knowing they had to justify themselves."

California's Legislature already has a Joint Committee on Boards, Commissions and Consumer Protection, but no members have been appointed to it since 2006, and it has not reviewed any agencies since then. Its scope also was limited to a few dozen licensing boards and commissions.

Huber said that in casual Capitol conversations, her expanded idea has bipartisan support. "It's a win-win for everybody," she said.

Not everyone's on board, however. Lodi Republican Jack Sieglock, who is running for her seat this year, said there are higher fiscal priorities.

He said he believes that while inefficient agencies should be cut sooner rather than later, he said they'd only make a small dent in California's anticipated multibillion-dollar mess.

"I think very simply, the state Legislature needs to take action. They should know at this point which boards and commissions should be eliminated or not," he said. "If they want to get serious about making cuts ... they really need to dig in and take a look at other things."

Excerpted from www.recordnet.com