California: While the Cat's Away

Just two hours after Ronald Reagan and California Lieutenant Governor Bob Finch left for Miami Beach, a Democratic state senator began raising some dust back home. Senator Hugh M. Burns, president pro tem of the California senate and Acting Governor in the absence of the top two executive officers, invoked an obscure article of the state constitution and abruptly ordered the legislature to adjourn.

The act was unprecedented in California history, but apparently legal. The constitution states that a Governor may adjourn the state legislature when senate and assembly are in disagreement over adjournment. There was indeed disagreement. Senators had been pushing for adjournment for weeks, while Assembly Speaker Jesse Unruh had been desperately seeking to keep his chamber in session. There is still plenty of unfinished business: Reagan's own program to reduce California's high property taxes, a $100 million school financing bill, increased workmen's compensation and disability benefits. The most important item: a $144 million deficit that is holding up completion of San Francisco's troubled Bay Area Rapid Transit System.

The adjournment order provides for the legislature to reconvene briefly in September to reconsider any vetoed legislation, but it prohibits enactment of any new legislation. Unruh, no friend of Fellow Democrat Burns, called assemblymen to meet in defiance of the order. Despite a Republican boycott, the Democrats managed to pass two bills whose legality is thus automatically in question. Since one of the bills benefits workers injured on their jobs, Unruh expects labor unions to try to prove their validity in court.

Governor Reagan, of course, may well call a special session of the legislature to expedite San Francisco's long-awaited BART system. Various measures have been suggested for overcoming its steep construction deficit: higher Bay Bridge tolls, additional vehicle registration or sales taxes, diversion of highway funds from the three bay counties to be served by BART. But thus far, parochial interests or lobbyists have stymied every solution. The delay has prevented BART from opening bids on the new cars for the system. That may in turn delay the opening of BART, scheduled for 1970, until well into 1971.