SACRAMENTO -- There is a pair of bills on Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's desk that puts him on the spot:
They would cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars, including a hike in the "car tax" that Schwarzenegger vilified in his first campaign for office. And signing them would belie his self-styled image as a reformer who won't stand for business as usual in the Capitol, because they were forged in classic under-the-radar deal-making.
The measures as passed were not publicly debated. They received little vetting by policy experts. They were not fully written until the clock had almost run out on lawmakers preparing to adjourn and get out of town last month. And key provisions were shaped by a small group of big campaign contributors.
The bills could raise taxes on consumers to fund subsidies available to oil companies and would lay the groundwork for a controversial expansion of ferry service in the Bay Area.
The causes were advanced by key donors to Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez (D-Los Angeles) and Senate leader Don Perata (D-Oakland), who pushed the proposals through.
"They do these things at the last minute, so nobody knows about them and there is nobody to say, 'Hold on here. Wait a minute,' " said Robert Fellmeth, Price professor of public interest law at the University of San Diego. "When you are in the dark, bad things happen."
The two measures were not the only donor-driven bills to gain sudden late momentum. A last-minute bill that would allow Anschutz Entertainment Group, a major political contributor and owner of Staples Center, to tap millions of dollars in public money also sits on the governor's desk. And a surprise bid by the politically powerful prison guards union to win a backdoor pay hike -- a raise it has failed to achieve through collective bargaining -- nearly squeaked by.
Nunez and Perata denied jamming pet programs through the Legislature in the dead of night. The leaders said the rushed rewrites of the bills they championed were common-sense compromises to build support among stakeholders.
"We had to take amendments to satisfy concerns that the administration had," Nunez said.
Perata said he thought all relevant parties had been told by the nonprofit business group Bay Area Council, a proponent of the measure, about the last-minute changes in his ferry bill: "I just assumed the Bay Area Council had been doing all that work."
Opponents of the measures are dubious.
