In California, the leaves are brown and the sky is grey

Stirred by The Mamas & The Papas’ ode to the Golden State, my mom followed her “California dream,” leaving her childhood home in Ohio for San Francisco after graduating college. She, like many baby boomers, saw boundless opportunity in the west coast’s biggest state: cheap real estate, outstanding public schools, a booming economy. My dad, having spent four years at the University of California Berkeley, had no intention to ever leave California.

Thirty years later, however, the state once brimming with opportunity has warped into something unrecognizable. Unemployment is soaring, the pre-collegiate public school system is one of the worst in the nation, and Sacramento is so paralyzed that it is the only state government to have not yet passed a budget this year—as it has failed to do 18 of the past 22 years.

What went wrong? California politicians are blamed mercilessly, but the structure in which these politicians operate is the root of the problem. A New Yorker article from August 24, 2009, “The States We’re In” said that California is “ungovernable.”

A drastic solution has been suggested for the November 2010 ballot: a Constitutional Convention to rewrite the state’s constitution. In my opinion, this argument is promising. California is trapped in a maze of dead-ends and constraints created by its own framework, and the only way to fix this is by addressing certain key flaws in the way the state is run.

Most infamous are California’s “ballot propositions,” a system of referendums and initiatives that amend the constitution. The Economist described the ballot proposition system as “the crack cocaine of democracy” on July 9th. More than 500 amendments have made the Constitution an unwieldy and often self-contradictory 110 pages, and made it one of the longest constitutions in the world. Propositions are frequently worded with bewildering double negatives; the average voter is rarely informed enough to make wise or far-seeing decisions on these referendums.

The results have been paralyzing: the legislature is in control of only seven percent of its budget (that is, if it passes one)—the rest of the money having already been directed by past propositions—and special interests have an easier time passing initiatives through the people of California than sitting down with politicians. Propositions have tied California’s legislative process in a straitjacket.

Proposition 13 is the champion of propositions-gone-wrong. A cap on property taxes passed in 1978, Prop 13 was a solution to short-term interests with unintended long-term consequences.  Public schools, whose funding comes from property taxes, suffered ruinously. As an attendee of public schools, I was asked every year by my teachers to supply the classroom with basic needs such as paper and pencils, because the school could not purchase these things itself. Art and music programs were cut. The library had no new books and couldn’t afford to be open for more than a few hours a day. My middle school couldn’t afford physical education uniforms, lockers, or functioning computers. For a while, I was so depressed and disgusted by my schools that I thought college would be the same way and promised myself I would never go. I did not follow through on this, but too many of my friends did. The consequences of a broken public school system reach far beyond cancelled music classes—over the years reducing the quality and quantity of the state’s educated workforce.

Not only did Prop 13 decimate public schools, it also dictated that all budgets and taxes require a two-thirds majority to be passed. In a state whose gerrymandered districts produce anything but moderate politicians, a two-thirds majority is near impossible. Because of this requirement, the California legislature is perpetually stuck in the trenches, trying in vain to pass the budget, without devoting significant time to any other issue.

And there are other issues—dire issues. California’s unemployment rate has climbed to 12.2 percent, two and a half points higher than the national average. Due to intrusive business regulations and politically imposed “greenery taken to silly extremes,” Chief Executive Magazine (as quoted in the same Economist article), has ranked California the worst state for business, four years running.
The climate for jobs could hardly be worse. After my dad lost his job when the crisis worsened, my mom tried to find work. Shortly after finally finding a job, my mom had to be let go because of financial hardship in her employer’s household—a kind of domino effect, rampant across the state. When combined with California’s unaffordably high cost of living, the job crisis has caused people to leave the state in droves—a statement released in December 2008 from the California Department of Commerce reported that for the fourth year in a row, more residents moved to other states from California than into California from other states. And as long as the state government remains mired in passing a budget, it can do little to turn these trends around.

Legislative inertia and economic catastrophe have destroyed any hope in my mind that California can be saved within the current system. I am not calling for today’s Constitution to be completely thrown away, but I do think that a Constitutional Convention, with clear goals and ideas for change, is our best chance to restore the luster to the now-grimy Golden State.