FROM SACRAMENTO — Here's an idea from out of left field for how to finally end California's losing streak with state budgets. It is called "baseball arbitration."
Many suggestions for reforming Sacramento's embarrassing budget process are being batted around, but none is as wild as this one.
"Whatever you call this idea, please don't call it 'reform,' " requests the author, veteran Democratic political consultant Richie Ross, who thinks that many so-called reforms -- starting with campaign finance -- have mucked up Sacramento. He's right.
Ross has been a Sacramento political player for 35 years -- he was Assembly Speaker Willie Brown's chief of staff -- and is a lifelong, rabid baseball fan. He calls his idea simply "baseball arbitration."
It's patterned after major league baseball's salary arbitration rule -- a rule, incidentally, saved by then-U.S. District Judge Sonia Sotomayor, President Obama's new Supreme Court nominee, when she issued an injunction ending a long players' strike in 1995.
Under the rule, certain players are eligible for salary arbitration if they and their team bosses cannot agree on a contract. Each side submits an offer and the arbitrator chooses the one he considers the most fair. There's no middle ground.
Ross thinks California should adopt an arbitration rule for budgeting. Democrats and Republicans shouldn't even try to compromise, he says. "Compromise is just another word for bartering."
He'd require each party to propose a two-year budget. "Republicans never have written a complete budget, they just potshot the Democrats' plan," Ross says. "Democrats complain about Republicans not raising taxes and hold fire drills."
In Ross' game plan, each party's budget would be submitted to the arbitrator. And the arbitrator would be the electorate. Whichever budget got the most votes would go into effect.
The fiscal year would begin Dec. 1, instead of July 1. And a new budget would be voted on every two years in the November general election.
Legislators would be running for reelection on the same ballot as their budget proposal, Ross notes. There would be "consequences" for lawmakers who backed gimmicky, red-ink-stained budgets, he believes, and that would ultimately "moderate behavior." Soon, he predicts, the parties' budgets "would start looking pretty similar" to win the voters' approval.
