PASADENA – A couple of weeks into the very public feud between Assemblyman Anthony Portantino, D-La Canada Flintridge, and the leadership of his party, details of how the state Assembly doles out operating funds to lawmakers each year remain a tightly guarded secret.
Accused of overspending to maintain his offices in the capitol and the district after he cast the lone Democrat vote against the state budget, Portantino fired off a public records act request for the budgets of all 80 members of the state Assembly,
As of Tuesday, the Rules Committee, which controls access to that information, had not responded.
“I just think it’s outrageous that they won’t disclose … what the state Assembly is spending its money on,” Portantino said. “We spent all this legislative session focusing on Bell and Vernon and here we are … operating in deeper and darker secrets.”
The Rules Committee on July 14 denied a Star-News Legislative Open Records Act (LORA) request seeking the spending records of all 52 Democrats in the state Assembly. The denial issued by Rules Committee Administrator John Waldie said the state open records act exempts certain materials, including correspondence and legislative memos from disclosure by the legislature.
A similar exemption in the law was cited by the Assembly when it refused to release lawmakers’ appointment calendars.
Star-News requests for projected expenditures from 33 Assembly Democrats were mostly forwarded to Rules – or ignored.
Lawmakers also declined to answer questions about the underlying issue or say whether they think that information should be made public.
Jim Ewert, legal counsel for the California Newspaper Publishers Association, characterized Waldie’s response to requests for spending records as puzzling.
“It is tortured logic to assert the correspondence exemption … allows the Rules Committee to withhold pretty basic budget information,” Ewert said.
How much the legislature spends is “the sort of basic information taxpayers are entitled to,” Ewert said. “There’s no public policy served” by withholding the records.”
Details of of how the Speaker’s office chooses to allocate its annual line-item appropriation of public funds for office budgets – this year over $140 million – is notoriously secret.
Bob Stern, of the Center for Governmental Studies, said the issue is not about an inability to summon the information – but an unwillingness to share it with the public.
“It’s so easy now to break it down by number – it just takes a push of a computer button and they could spit it out for you, but I don’t think they want to,” Stern said.
“They’re under some pledge not to reveal this … like the calendars. So you see how secretive they are.”
A legislative staffer, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation, said it is the Speaker John Perez’s “prerogative” to divvy up funds. And, for that reason, budget details are kept under wraps.
The staffer said “no one is talking” because of the rift between Portantino and Perez over the budget.
Additionally, the staffer said releasing spending records could violate employee privacy rights.
“We also have a lot of delicate information regarding employees – who is on maternity leave, who is on leave without pay… a lot of sensitive information you do not want to disclose to the public,” the staffer said.
Portantino called the idea that there is sensitive information in the documents detailing budget allocations a “bogus, fabricated argument.”
While acknowledging he hadn’t discussed the matter with any colleagues, he said, “it sounds like the leadership is sending out its edict – which is what they’ve done in other situations. They send out their edict for everyone to lock step and not release the information.”
Waldie said Monday he didn’t see any reason why the legislative legal counsel would break with a history of denying similar records requests – public pressure or not.
“We just comply with the law; we don’t comply with the wind,” Waldie said.
Nonetheless, Portantino said he is optimistic the Assembly leadership will release this year’s and last year’s budgets, and rescind their contention that his office was over-budget.
Skinner and Perez have said Portantino was told as recently as April that he needed to bring his budget into compliance after it was found he overspent by nearly $88,000.
His current deficit is projected at $67,179.
“I have no ability to … appropriate money. So by definition I can’t be over budget,” Portantino asserted last week. “They have every right to say this year your budget is lower but they don’t have a right to say therefore I caused the overage.”
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