Direct access not dead in California

Direct access not dead in California - despite reports

The California Assembly Committee on Appropriations has been reported as killing Keith Stuart Richman's Assembly Bill 1704 bill to extend direct access.
     It's the core/non-core market bill to reopen C&I competition.
     Initial reports sounded as if the bill had been killed but in reality it was transferred to the suspense file.
     The suspense file is used to bury all bills that are controversial.
     The leadership then meets in secret and moves those bills it wants moved. By going to suspense members were spared having to vote on a difficult issue -- difficult in this case because the governor wants the Richman bill and the Democratic leadership doesn't.
     Almost nothing dies in the first year.
     There wasn't any Custer's Last Stand, one observer said.
     And that's important because of the Great War.
     Gov Arnold Schwarzenegger has been blocked by the intransigent Democratic leadership and a newly united labor movement.
     The atmosphere is caustic as Democrats and labor fear the governor's popularity and his potential to rein in the big spending party.
     Now it's not the nurses, teachers, the pipe trades telling their own parochial stories. It's a united labor movement that marched on the capital en masse opposing the governor's call for a special election.
     One big threat is the pending proposal that union members would have to sign to allow unions to use dues for political purposes.
     AB 1704 thus was caught up in the charged atmosphere and was simply put aside without a vote.
     Earlier the leadership called the governor and asked if he wanted the bill.
     The governor's office had said "yes" and an accommodation was made to get it out of the policy committee.
     What happened in the Assembly Committee on Appropriations didn't get that accommodation because of the deterioration in the atmosphere.
     BOTTOMLINE: Putting AB 1704 into the suspense file may be the impetus for the governor to turn to the PUC to reopen the market. Given the charged atmosphere, Schwarzenegger may decide that's actually too risky. It's a tough call.
     Originally published in Restructuring Today on May 31, 2005