Frittering Away our Common Goals : Legislature: California’s lawmakers pass too many frivolous or pathetically narrow bills. Lack of strategic planning is the problem.

In Southern California, a savings and loan institution collapsed and thousands of people lost their life savings. In Northern California, a freeway overpass collapsed and dozens of people lost their lives. A variety of factors contributed to these disasters, but the lack of strategic planning in the California Legislature may also have played a part.

Simply stated, strategic planning involves three tasks: choosing goals, determining priorities and following a course of action that leads toward the goals. How well is the Legislature performing these tasks?

Choosing goals is relatively easy, as they must reflect the electorate. No legislator who wants to be reelected would actively oppose education, health care, police and fire protection, a clean environment, or the opportunity to prosper; no politician would be likely to support a tax increase without abundant justification. We hold these values, in California as elsewhere, to be self-evident.

But the second task of strategic planning, determining priorities, seems to represent a problem for the Legislature. In the state budget, as in most household budgets, there is never enough money for everything. Depending on personal philosophy and party affiliation--not to mention campaign contributions--legislators differ significantly in how they believe competing interests should be reconciled. It is a complex task, given the diversity of California, to balance the concerns of groups and individuals with the good of the state as a whole. But it is precisely this that we pay our state lawmakers to do, in a forum that encourages them to share their views.

The Legislature has a monumental amount of information at its disposal to assist in establishing priorities. More than 1,000 reports were sent to each house during the 1987-88 session. The legislative counsel prepares opinions and analyses of proposed bills, the legislative analyst advises on their fiscal impact, and each house has its own office of research. As bills pass through committees, testimony is given by experts from within and without state government.

Rather than use this information to set priorities, the Legislature often seems to disregard both expert opinion and the dictates of common sense. Lawmakers introduce bills piecemeal, apparently in reaction to pressure from potential supporters or recent crises, and without regard to how each bill may affect the achievement of other goals.

While problems were brewing with Lincoln Savings & Loan, the Legislature, at the behest of the savings industry and its state overseers, exempted directors of federal savings and loan associations from liability for monetary damages to the S&Ls; or their stockholders. Clearly this law protects the few at the risk of the many. On the subject of freeways, they increased the fine for littering from $500 to $1,000, requiring an enormous expenditure for changing signs. Yet the warnings about the deterioration of the state’s infrastructure, sounded in a 1984 report to the Assembly committee on policy research management, appear to have gone largely unheeded.

Then there are the laws for which counties must pay, to the point that Northern California’s Butte County has threatened to file bankruptcy unless the state provides financial aid to carry out the mandated programs. It is questionable whether legislators would give these programs priority if the money came out of the state budget, yet laws that render counties insolvent won’t lead the state to its goals.

The Legislature cannot succeed at the third task of strategic planning, following an appropriate course of action, when it has failed to establish priorities. But it should not be too much to ask that they avoid obvious dead ends. Many of each session’s bills are of little value, and the $7,000 estimated cost for introducing each one could be better used for other purposes. For example, the 1989 session produced a law requiring the director of food and agriculture to review a federal timetable, an action that might simply have been requested; another established legal standards for light eggnog; a third requires the governor to issue an annual proclamation of Dec. 7 as Pearl Harbor Day. Last year, both the Senate and the Assembly considered a bill adopting the banana slug as the official state mollusk.

California’s future is being forged, in many cases irrevocably, by the decisions of today. To the extent that the Legislature is leading the state anywhere, it appears to be away from our commonly agreed goals rather than toward them.