New Senate President Pro-Tem Offers Ambitious Policy Agenda

Be careful what you wish for. Now that I have this opportunity, I recognize that when all of the congratulations (and people have been incredibly gracious) and all of the excitement and the good feeling about what I have achieved ends and we get on with business, there's only one thing that matters: what I, and we, as representative government, and specifically the Legislature, produce for the people and California. That's it. There will be another Pro Tem in six years, and business will move on, and I'll move on with whatever I'm going to do in my life.

Our challenge, and the only reason to do it, is because you believe that you can actually solve intractable problems and that you can move the state forward on issues that are crucial to our quality of life. I am sanguine, but I am an optimist. As long as I stay in public life, I will reject cynicism, because if you don't have a sense of optimism, if you don't have a sense of the possible, then give it to somebody who does...

...My policy touchstone is mental health because what it represents to me is the following: anything is possible in California. If you would have told me, back in 1997, that the only significant, major investment that the people of California made in a new initiative or program over the course of the next decade would be to alleviate untreated mental illness and to aggressively address the problem of homelessness in California, most people would have said, "What are you talking about? It's not a priority in this state, Darrell. Nice idea, but this probably won't fly." Well, we stuck with it, and in the end, the people of California said, "A promise matters." When the state shut down the hospitals 30 years ago and promised the improvement of community mental health treatment, people remember that. It's amazing; people who know little else about California's history remember that. People said that 40 years was long enough to wait, and we won. That's my touchstone. If we can do that, we can do anything.

The challenges of governance are great, because, frankly, we have a governance system in California that is not keeping up with America's pace. And you can point to a number of different things. You can point to term limits, you can point to redistricting, and you can point to our state budget system that requires a two-thirds super-majority vote to pass a budget in California. You can talk about the lack of ability of local governments to raise revenue to meet local needs in an effective way. Clearly, we have significant governance challenges.

We also have significant substantive challenges. One-hundred-fifty-thousand kids are dropping out of high school every year. What does that say to our economic future, much less the prospects of all of those kids who we aren't educating or training for the 21st century workforce?

Infrastructure. We know that we have huge infrastructure demands. We know it's great. We passed bonds in 2006, but we still have to do water; we can talk about that a little bit here today in an intelligent way and make sure that we are really deriving public benefit from public investment that we'll make.

We tried this year with health care. We know the cost of not addressing the health care crisis in California: a breakdown of our GP health care system and a huge problem for taxpayers-the people getting care on the back end, much less the health impact on adults and children who aren't getting the right kinds of preventive health care.

The challenge for me is merging the political challenges with the substantive challenges to try to create a new framework in California. I'm a great believer that you can't change the whole world, but you can surely change the state.

Let me give you an example. We have a budget problem in California, if you haven't heard, of $16 billion. The framework of the debates is a tired, old story. The governor, who I have great affection and respect for, comes out in his state address and says, "California has a spending problem." And Democrats then come out and say, "No, California has a revenue problem." We march along, holding our press conferences, and all of that down the line, and then we get to about July 1, July 15, August 1, and debate. Nobody agrees with the others' assumptions, so we end up putting Band-Aids on the problem. And the Band-Aids, by the way, are about to run out. I looked in the cupboard, and there are about two more Band-Aids. We've gone to the extent of our ability to borrow, etc.

I think the wrong questions are being asked in California. It's not whether we have a spending problem or a revenue problem-it's that we aren't having a debate in California about what we want and need in terms of quality of public services and how we go about paying for them. Everyone agrees we have a revenue system that is not consistent with the 21st century economy because we're so overly reliant on personal income tax. We know that sales tax, as an example, only applies to goods, that we're not consistent with the evolution of our economy from a manufacturing-based economy to a service-based economy.

We also know, as I said earlier, that the people may not trust us as state legislators. But how about trusting your local elected officials to be able to make decisions about where and how to raise the money to pay for local services?

So, we're going to have those debates. I'm going to be very aggressive and unafraid to take some risks about ideas that may or may not be popular in the moment, but at least will get us off the proverbial dime and force some discussion, even if it's uncomfortable.

But beyond that, how do we tackle excessive partisanship in order to get something done? My signature this year, as the leader of the Senate, when I take over-and I'm not waiting until I take over on this front; I've been working at it for a year and I'm going to continue working on it-is, how do we build an economy of high-wage jobs so that we have a tax base which gives us the cushion to be able to pay for all the things that I believe in and, I know, many of you believe in?

Now, that could be sort of a cliché, but let me be more specific. We've got two interesting movements going on in California right now-one that is, I think, ahead of the other. One is the emerging green economy. The state rightfully receives international acclaim for AB 32 and the promise to aggressively seek to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. There have been a lot of conferences and a lot of talk over recent months about how, whether you believe or don't believe in the market or believe in the dominance of the market or not, there are going to be incredible opportunities for emerging green industries. It's just a fact. There are going to be incredible opportunities.

At the same time, I look at this darn high school dropout rate, and I know that's not everything, but it is a window into what we so desperately need to do to change the way we educate young people to prepare them for a middle class job or better in California over the next number of decades. The governor has put some money into career/technical education. The L.A. Chamber has been very aggressive and assertive about trying to develop the notion of multiple pathways so that students who are in high school have the choice to go to college, but those who won't go to college have other opportunities to pursue paths that will lead to success.

The greatest opportunity for bipartisanship that's emerged in this state is green business. What would happen, for example, if we put this before California? We always talk about bonds. They're important. Infrastructure is important. What if we put a multi-billion-dollar bond before the people of California that said that we will invest in capital formation and other business start-up and ongoing costs for emerging green businesses if you, recipients of those funds, agree to go into California's high schools, especially those high schools that are more troubled and have higher rates of dropouts and lower rates of achievement, and begin integrating what you are doing into the education curriculum in California, and help educate, train, apprentice, provide after-school opportunities, and provide a career path for young people who may or may not go to college, because the choice should always be there. What would happen if we took career/technical education and actually brought it to scale with a multi-billion-dollar investment that combined all the energy around green to make sure that every young person has the chance for success in the state of California?

That's what my tenure will be about. That's what I'm going to be pushing. It's an example-not the only thing, but an example-of what I hope will be a different direction because, if you want the same results, a great philosopher said, keep doing what you're doing. If you're unhappy with the results, you better start thinking about doing something different. You can't be grandiose because you can't change everything all at once.

I am a practical idealist. It's not just about the best idea. It's about showing the people that the system actually can work and that we can move some real agendas forward that have real impact on people's lives...