The death of the bill

Sixteen state legislators converged to hear the future of hundreds of state bills Aug. 11 — marking the a semi-annual event.

Less than half of the bills, not including SB 1432, passed by the end of the afternoon.

Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, D-San Diego, chairs the Assembly Appropriations Committee, which ensures that the state can pay for bills before the bills become law. She placed SB 1432 on the “suspense file,” where bills costing more than $150,000 are put aside for further consideration.

“The chair [of the Education Committee] had no problem with the bill,” Huff said. “We included a lot of different things I wouldn’t have [included], but we had to get it out of committee.”

Huff added amendments that required Districts of Choice to report additional data to the state. The change pushed the total annual state cost to over $150,000, which the state would use to accommodate a new staff position in the California Department of Education.

OPUSD employee Cliff Moore, who has been advocating the bill in Sacramento, said he thought backdoor conversations occurred to force the bill into the Appropriations Committee.

“We believe that the $150,000 financial impact of the bill was an amount that could have easily been underneath the threshold,” Moore said.

The DOC bill never left the suspense file, and was never brought up for a vote.

As chair of the Assembly Committee on Education,  Gonzalez can stop any bill from passing her committee — and with SB 1432, she did.

By Aug. 11, the bill was “dead.” By Aug. 12, Districts of Choice had begun emailing the news to their students.

“[Gonzalez] killed it without any explanation — and it certainly wasn’t a fiscal issue, as we have been learning,” Huff said.

A bill can be held in the Assembly Appropriations Committee without any explanation or reasoning, according to assemblywoman Jacqui Irwin, D-Thousand Oaks, who represents Ventura County.

“We never really know why bills are stuck in Appropriations,” Irwin said.

In the past, the speaker of the assembly has had the ability to overrule any chair’s decision to suspend a bill. This ability changed with the election of Anthony Rendon to the speaker’s position in March, Huff said.

“The reality is that the speaker is about empowering the different chairs of the committees,”  Irwin said. “There isn’t a way to go around the Assembly Appropriations chair or speaker.”

With executive power granted to the Gonzalez as the chair, the current bill cannot move forward, Huff said.

In a joint statement by Gonzalez and assemblywoman Ling Ling Chang, R-Diamond Bar, on Facebook Aug. 29, the legislators promised to work together on a solution before July 2017.

“We believe that education should not be a partisan issue and will work together to make sure our schools are working for all kids,” Chang wrote.