“We have a chance to fix this once and for all” Posted on March 25th
Making their pitch for the six measures on the May 19 special election ballot, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and four state lawmakers visited the Times editorial board Tuesday.
With the governor were Assembly Speaker Karen Bass of Los Angeles and Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg of Sacramento, both Democrats; Assembly GOP Caucus leader Mike Villines of Clovis; and immediate past Senate Republican caucus leader Dave Cogdill of Modesto. Cogdill’s fellow Republican senators ousted him from his leadership post on Feb. 18 rather than back his support for the deal that created the state’s current spending plan and shaped the special election.
Here is a partial transcript of the introductory remarks from the five. We’ll post more of the discussion — our questions and their answers — later this week.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger: Again, thank you very much for your time, and I want to thank my friends, the legislative leaders, for being here today with us. This is without a doubt I think the first time in history that you see the Big Five together and all in sync. I don’t think that you will remember any time in the past. So, obviously this is very important to all of us, which is that to make those various different initiatives pass, the six of them that will be on the ballot May 19.
I think that we have done an extraordinary job together working over a period of several months working on this budget and these various different initiatives. But that’s always half of the job, because the other half is obviously making it pass by the people. And it’s no different than our infrastructure initiatives in 2006, where it was a bipartisan kind of an effort, the Democrats and the Republicans went up and down the state and they joined together in fund-raising activities, joined together also in campaigning for the initiatives. And because of that the people of California felt comfortable that both parties are working together and they won with overwhelming majority.
We hope this is the same case here. I think that budget reform is extremely important for the state of California because we didn’t have it in place for so long – for decades. Every governor has gone through a huge … crisis, if it is from Pat Brown to Ronald Reagan to Deukmejian, Pete Wilson, Gray Davis and now myself, where you always run out of money because the economy is going down, because we don’t have a rainy day fund, because we always spend too much money when the revenues go up. So I think here we have a chance to fix this once and for all and have a rainy day fund for the first time in 60 years. I think that it’s very important that these initiatives pass and we’re basically here to just talk to you about it, answer your questions and get you to endorse the initiatives, because endorsements from major papers, especially the L.A. Times, is extremely important in supporting it to make it pass. {I’m going to] open it up, if my colleagues want to say something about any of that please feel free….