SALINAS CALIFORNIAN

Lawmakers look back at busy '07

Nov 23, 2007
Lawmakers look back at busy '07
By JAKE HENSHAW
The Salinas Californian Capitol Bureau

SACRAMENTO - Although they succeeded with bills this year to save water, recognize stillbirths, improve conditions in pet stores and bring Middle Eastern horse racing to California, Salinas-area lawmakers say they have some unfinished business to pursue in 2008.

The four-member legislative delegation hadn't achieved all their goals regarding youth-violence prevention, green buildings and health-care bills.

"It was a good year, just in terms of the learning curve," said Assemblywoman Anna Caballero, D-Salinas.

The first-year lawmaker saw success in the Legislature with bills to set new standards for pet stores, to teach school dropouts how to read job ads and to help Soledad take control of a nearby prison waste-treatment plant.

But the governor vetoed the dropout reading bill and signed the Soledad bill with a message that doesn't quite get the job done for the city, in Caballero's view.

"What the governor said is he would prefer a lease" of the prison waste treatment plant, she said, "and what I was looking for was a sale."

Caballero also stalled out in the Legislature with complicated bills on housing, hazardous-waste funding and emergency medical services.

"In some cases, I bit off more than I could chew," Caballero said.

Still, the governor signed eight of her bills, and she's far from discouraged about the one he vetoed or the ones that are still pending in the Legislature and can be acted on next year.

Focusing on the familiar

"We are going to go back and rework those bills and try again," Caballero said.

In particular, she said she is going to focus primarily on areas that she knows from her experience as a local elected official and activist, such as housing, local finances and youth-violence prevention.

"What I learned is that I really need to work in the areas that I know well," said Caballero, who'd been mayor of Salinas for eight years.

Veteran Assemblyman John Laird, D-Santa Cruz, had 15 bills signed into law, covering a range of topics from civil rights protections for state licensed professionals like doctors to needle exchanges to combat HIV to high efficiency toilets.

He also had a successful bill that requires local water agencies to carry out water-conservation steps before they can get more state money.

Civil rights a priority

The civil rights bill, which extended the broadest nondiscrimination standards in any one state law to cover everyone, is the fourth that Laird has successfully proposed. But he said there still may be some work to do in the insurance field.

Laird also lost his bid this year to have the state set green-building standards for residences.

The governor signed three of the four bills that Sen. Jeff Denham, R-Merced, was able to get through to the Legislature.

They would extend the life of a law that allows students to attend schools nearest their parents' job, refine details of veterinarian's licenses and allow Californians to bet on the Dubai Cup horse race.

"This will allow us to have satellite wagering on the richest race in the world," Denham said of the Dubai Cup.

The governor vetoed his bill to help Soledad get the prison waste treatment plant, so he teamed up with Caballero to get her bill enacted.

This has been a multi-year project, and both legislators said they still are trying to help meet the needs of the city, which has a short-term lease for the plant now where it also treats prison effluent.

Denham said he abandoned legislation to improve organ donations after work with the Department of Motor Vehicles led to better notice and signups.

He also dropped a bill to expand a rural crime task force from a couple of areas including the Central Coast to much of the state after concerns that it could end up cutting existing programs.

Denham said he'll continue working on that next year.

Sen. Abel Maldonado, R-Santa Maria, said earlier this year one of his most important achievements of 2008 was enactment of his bill authorizing the issuance of certificates of stillbirth to interested parents.

He had seven bills signed all together, including measures to help fund poor students' participation in outdoor residential science programs and to provide relief for farm workers who lost work during the January freeze.

Both he and Caballero had separate bills aimed at improving food safety in the wake of the E. coli outbreak in spinach last year. The governor in part addressed the issue administratively with direction for research.

But Caballero said she'll be following up on this issue, especially her proposal for a research program at the University of California, Davis, to include consumers, small farmers and others, such as cattlemen as advisers.