by Daniel Blackburn

In the best of worlds hope may indeed spring eternal, but the hairball of reality keeps clogging Ted W. Lieu’s lawmaking efforts.
The second-term South Bay assemblyman’s ambitious legislative agenda has encountered Olympian hurdles since his 2005 election to the 53rd District. Nevertheless, the setbacks somehow have not yet blunted Lieu’s outward enthusiasm for the future of his favorite programs. He remains blissfully undeterred.
On a recent session day Lieu (D-Torrance) was hustling between two committee hearing rooms, listening somberly to testimony in one and preparing to present one of his bills in the other. In transit between both seats he talked to a succession of staff, lobbyists and others following the progress of a particular piece of proposed law. It can be a very, very hectic place, Lieu agreed, this restored state capitol building in which he and his contemporaries toil.
Busy, but not always gratifying. For example, of 24 bills introduced by Lieu during his freshman term, only six were signed into law, all non-controversial and virtually cost-free. Score for this term: So far, zip. Money, it turns out, is the primary consideration in these days of bleeding budgets, and its relative shortage in state coffers is a factor that in the final analysis may shape Lieu’s legislative career far more than the best of his efforts and intentions.
“There’s a little bit of frustration” about his lawmaking success ratio, he allowed between committee appearances, “but I have learned. One thing you get to do as a legislator is introduce bills, and we can push issues, highlight certain issues the public isn’t thinking about.”
He now has a clearer view, too, of the way things get done in Sacramento, which is laboriously.
“It is hard, because you are dealing with 120 members of the legislature and the governor,” he noted. “But I do believe I’ve got a lot of my goals through. In terms of areas like the environment, I’ve been able to push issues and to get some bills signed, so that has been satisfying. Sometimes it takes three or four years to get a bill signed. It does take some time. But just the ability to push an issue forward into the public agenda -- I do find that rewarding,” he said.
His early successes can be enumerated quickly. One Lieu bill signed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger will start the wheels inching toward greener (more energy-efficient) upgrades in state buildings. Another will extend a sunset provision allowing alternative fuel vehicles to use the carpool lane on California freeways. The rest of his bag contained mostly minor revisions and clarifications to existing statutes.
The governor torpedoed three of Lieu’s bills, vetoing measures that would: 1. include “bullying and bias” in the Department of Education’s annual drug and alcohol survey; 2. prohibit the sale of ultrasound machines to anyone but “licensed medical professionals” and 3. allow school districts to provide instruction in personal finances.
That last veto, attributed to a lack of funding, took Lieu off guard, but he said he remains committed to the objective of student education in the art of personal finance. One particular committee assignment may prove valuable in this endeavor. Lieu expressed both delight and bewilderment in his appointment to chair the Assembly’s Banking and Finance Committee during the first few months of his initial term. An aberration of term limits, the out-of-the-gate appointment of Lieu to head B&F is a reflection on the very fluid status quo in the California legislature, he believes.
“I’m actually the chair,” he marveled, “which is strange. That would never happen in Congress, where you’d have to be there 15-20 years to get a chairmanship. Because of term limits (in this state) legislators are given an enormous amount of responsibility very quickly. That’s just the way the system has worked it out.”
He also expressed content with other committee appointments of special interest to him personally. Lieu has assignments on the important Appropriations, Veterans Affairs, and Water, Parks and Wildlife committees.
But whatever his early committee appointment successes, he didn’t find an easy path for a pair of the biggest pieces of legislation he has hauled to date.
Asked by the South Bay Council of Governments (SBCOG) to carry a bill increasing the number of board members on the Southern California Air Quality Management District from 12 to 13, Lieu ran into stiff opposition. After what he described as “particularly rancorous” hearings with the district in opposition, that effort stalled in committee because of what Lieu described as a “buddy relationship between the chairman of AQMD and [certain] senators.”
Lieu, always learning, now has included the bigger-board provision into a current-session Senate bill with renewed hopes of success.
He also was forced to drop, with little fanfare, an attempt promoted by the American Medical Association to prohibit physician participation in state-conducted executions. And a plan to limit payday loans for military personnel failed to get off the Senate floor.
During the current session, he scrubbed a plan to bestow powers of arrest on Redondo Beach Fire Department employees serving as Harbor Patrol officers. This measure was the brainchild of Redondo Beach city officials who eventually decided to abandon the effort after it was questioned in a Senate committee.
“During my first year, everything was a crisis,” said Lieu. “I’d get butterflies in my stomach. If one of my bills didn’t do well, I’d be upset about it. Now I’m a lot more relaxed. Sometimes you don’t get a bill through the first time so you can bring it again and you might get it the second time.”
He can only hope his Metro Green Line bill enjoys such a resurgence.
The crown pearl of Lieu’s tenure to date was AB 889, a measure that would have created a new public entity that would oversee the extension of the Green Line of the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) from El Segundo to Los Angeles International Airport.
This mile-long spur was not constructed as part of the 1994 Green Line project, partly because the area‘s aviation and aerospace industries were in critical decline at the time. As a result, the light-rail transportation system now lacks a vital component for South Bay commuters headed for the airport.
Lieu is the latest in a string of lawmakers carrying some kind of enabling legislation for construction of the LAX connection, and to date all have failed for the same reason: no dough.
As recently as May, Lieu was excited by the prospects of success for his Green Line connection legislation, as intoned in a press release in which he said the bill “continues to surge ahead.”
The bill was enjoying “an amazing amount of momentum,” he gushed. It had bipartisan support and the heavyweight lobby backing of a group called “the Green Line Coalition,” including Congresswoman Jane Harman and Los Angeles County Supervisor Don Knabe. It passed its early committee tests with nary a no vote.
And eventually AB 889 arrived at the doorstep of the Assembly’s money committee, Appropriations. Dead? Maybe not, but undeniably comatose. The bill’s ambitious reach doomed it.
Lieu’s chief of staff, David Ford, told reporters after the committee pulled the plug on the bill that Los Angeles County’s shrinking pool of transit dollars contributed to the outcome. Funding, he said, will be the most important component in the Green Line spur’s future.
“Yes, the Green line bill was held in Appropriations,” said the assemblyman about the committee of which he’s a member. “So I will reintroduce it. There were some concerns about the scope of bill, some financial issues,” he added, acknowledging the same obstacle that other enabling bills and similar efforts in the past have encountered before withering on the vine: No money, honey.
“Now,” said Lieu, “we have narrowed [the bill’s language] to where it will be just the Green Line stub to the airport and we should get that through.” (Pause.) “You would think.”
Because AB 899 didn’t make it to the Upper House, co-sponsor Sen. Jenny Oropeza (D-Carson) had no opportunity to work her particular magic.
These days, Lieu is more disposed to talk of the future rather than dwell on early disappointments. He’s got greener state cars and buildings, better financial education for youth, and Southern California sewer systems on his mind at present.
His new agenda includes a move against what Lieu considers “one of the biggest threats facing us today” -- global warming. And that takes him to greenhouse gases.
“Buildings account for about 40 percent of greenhouse gas emissions,” said Lieu. “If we can just make buildings more efficient in power consumption, then we can do a lot toward eliminating greenhouse gases.”
By making significant, but relatively inexpensive and easy, changes in building construction practices and materials, both public and private buildings now contributing to the overall effect of global warming can be improved, he said. While altering the public psyche about vehicles and new fuels might be a difficult assignment, Lieu figures building concept changes should be an accessible goal.
“We have the ability right now to go green. It’s almost like getting the low-hanging fruit… let’s just get that. So this is among my main interests.”
He also wants to stiffen existing law regarding emergency notification and reporting of sewage spills by government agencies, and to establish a “financial literacy initiative” to offer teaching materials to California teachers.
“We know from studies that California high school grads only score 52 percent out of 100 on literacy, and then we send them into the working world or on to college, and they have no clue as to how to manage finances.“
A bill he is shepherding to accomplish this is stalled in a Senate committee, but Lieu remains upbeat about its chances because “the time is right.”
“Our schools, our society… we haven’t adjusted to what I call ‘the new financial order.’ If we could just educate the consumer, I think it would solve a lot of financial problems. California likes to think of itself as progressive. But in the world of finance we are in the Dark Ages.”
For all of his lofty ambitions, there remains precious little time for Lieu to cultivate the right political connections to advance his agenda. Term limits, which helped him get an early chairmanship, also creates a sense of urgency among lawmakers to pass their pet bills sooner rather than later, and sometimes creates problems.
“Term limits does cause institutional pressure to make one want to do something dramatic. Last year there was a bill being lobbied in my office, and the author was basing his bill on some things that were done in Europe. The European law was taking effect this year, so lobbyists opposing the bill wanted to wait and see the results of that. I said two words to them: ‘term limits.’ That bill’s author needed to get it done right now. So you do have some perverse incentives.”
Lieu quickly noticed something else about the legislature, also: Because of term limits, he contended, “staff and lobbyists who have been here for 10, 20, 30 years to have more influence than a legislator who has only been here six years… because they can just wait you out if they don’t like something.”
But term limits has resulted in what he called the most diverse legislature in the world.
Diverse, yes, but also painfully slow, with a rapidly-changing roster, little money for projects, and a very tough approval process for all but the most benign of proposals -- that’s today’s California legislature.
And for this lawmaker whose plans are not small, the clock is ticking at an accelerated pace, his allotted time for collecting an Assembly paycheck and climbing his chosen mountains already half over.
Daniel Blackburn can be reached at djblackburn@charter.net. ER