Mayor and city manager attend state constitutional convention summit

Sonoma Mayor Ken Brown and City Manager Linda Kelly attended the California Constitutional Convention Summit, sponsored by the Bay Area Council and held on Tuesday in Sacramento. The heart of the summit was discussing the state’s unwieldy constitution and the process of going about fixing it, namely, calling a constitutional convention.
“It was like being at the Boston tea party, except there were way more lawyers,” said Brown. “I’m afraid that it’s going to get too complicated and people should take a page from the Bear Flag Revolt. A small group of people changed the course of history. They need a little bit more of that.”
The last and only California State Constitutional Convention was held in 1879 and produced the current state constitution, which has since undergone numerous amendments. Under the current constitution, it takes a two-thirds vote of the state legislature to call a constitutional convention. However, legal researchers for the council said that voters can take matters into their own hands with a ballot initiative. The majority of voters would have to approve an amendment to the current constitution that would allow voters to bypass the legislature and call for a convention directly.
Lieutenant Governor John Garamendi and Sacramento Bee columnist Dan Walters addressed the group of some 400 participants in the daylong session.
Walters said that, “California is the most complex and diverse democratic society in the history of the planet,” yet noted the state is governed by a document that was not meant for the size and complexity of what the state has become. Former and current senators and assembly members, along with the League of Women Voters, California Forward and other concerned groups, discussed reforms needed to make the governing system work at the state level and to bypass partisan gridlock to enable budget reform. Participants focused on the need to eliminate the two-thirds vote for the state budget to pass, the elimination of term limits in the state legislature and reform of the initiative process.
“The diversity of participants and the seriousness of how this issue is being dealt with gave me hope that concerted efforts toward state budget reform could result in an improved system,” said Kelly. “Mayors in attendance at the event spoke of how local elected officials can help preserve and promote trust in the democratic process at all levels of government, including the State.”
The Bay Area Council is a business-sponsored, public-policy advocacy organization for the nine-county Bay Area. In promoting the event on its Web site, the council said,
“Prisons overflow, our water system teeters on collapse, our once proud schools are criminally poor, our financing system is bankrupt, our democracy produces ideologically-extreme legislators that can pass neither budget nor reforms, and we have no recourse in the system to right these wrongs. Drastic times call for drastic measures. We believe it is our duty to declare that our California government is not only broken, it has become destructive to our future. It is time to repair our system of governance.”
The Bay Area Council is seeking to gather more input on the concept of a Constitutional Convention and to develop support for holding a convention in the near future.