Washed It!

Newly elected Assemblyman Jeff Gorell is on a mission, it just wasn’t the one he expected.

In March, the freshman Republican from Camarillo, a Navy reservist, will trade his business suit for combat fatigues and report for a year’s duty in Afghanistan. Never mind that he hasn’t yet hired a staff, opened an office or introduced legislation.

He’s still working out a more basic question: How will he run his office during his 12-month absence?

Gorell briefly considered asking the Legislature to pass an emergency bill allowing him to nominate a temporary replacement. When it became clear that would violate the state’s constitution, he decided instead to take a leave of absence, relying on staff and friendly Republican colleagues to attend to business in his Ventura County district.

The former prosecutor and college lecturer, 40, acknowledges it’s not the ideal way to launch a political career. But he’s accepted his pending deployment with the same earnestness that has made him widely appealing in his conservative-leaning 37th district.

“It’s a misfortune of timing,” said Gorell, a moderate who’s holding office for the first time. He easily defeated Democrat Ferial Masry for the district covering Camarillo, Thousand Oaks, Moorpark and Simi Valley. “I’m going to work really hard to prove that I will be the hardest-working legislator in the building. I’ll get as much done in 31/2 months as most do in 12.”

Gorell is the first legislator in California to be deployed for active duty since World War II, though legislators in other states have found themselves in the same predicament 51 times since Sept. 11, 2001, according to the chief clerk of the Assembly’s office.

Army Reservist Tom Umberg was absent from the final months of his 2004 campaign for the Assembly as he helped prosecute terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. But the Orange County Democrat was back home by the time his Assembly term began.

Federal and state laws mandate that Gorell can return to his job once his tour ends. But states are handling what to do in legislators’ absence in different ways. Texas and five other states allow for a temporary fill-in. Legislator-soldiers in Pennsylvania, on the other hand, have taken leaves of absence.

A California military code written during the Korean War mentions the option of a temporary replacement if the Legislature authorizes it. But the state has never taken that step, Gorell said, and after consulting with lawyers he determined it probably wouldn’t be legal because the state’s constitution says vacancies must be filled by special election.

Assembly Speaker John A. P

It wasn’t tough decisions on California’s ailing schools, or the prison crisis or the direction of healthcare reform that kept lawmakers locked in chambers for more than 20 hours before they finally passed the latest budget in state history Friday morning.

What bedeviled the process of approving the $125-billion spending plan was such matters as whether electronic highway billboards should have advertisements, whether a big political donor should be appointed to a state commission, whose name should adorn a disaster-relief bill, and whether the state needs a paid secretary of volunteerism.

The vote was supposed to be easy, a bipartisan election-year feint that pushed tough decisions into the future, papering over the deficit with clever accounting.

The budget lawmakers passed would keep state services at the status quo, with a freeze on school spending, modest trims to healthcare programs and some new money for universities.

It assumes billions of dollars in federal aid that most experts agree will never materialize and relies on loans and bookkeeping maneuvers such as transfers and funding shifts.

Yet the approval process became an all-night affair, with tens of millions of dollars in transportation spending lost because lawmakers had a spat over electronic billboards and DUI checkpoints.

Some Democrats disliked a provision to sell advertising space for soft drinks, automobiles or other products alongside the flashing alerts about abducted children and hazardous road conditions on the more than 700 state-owned electronic freeway billboards. The proposal was pushed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

“Who thinks it’s a good idea to give drivers one more reason to take their eyes off the road?” said Sen. Joe Simitian (D-Palo Alto). He chairs a budget subcommittee that initially rejected the plan, which was later reinserted into the budget by legislative leaders.

Sen. Gil Cedillo (D-Los Angeles) sought to make the multi-provision bill more palatable by adding a new measure. It addressed an element of alleged corruption in Bell, where the city was reported to be making money by towing the cars of sober immigrants from DUI checkpoints if they did not have proper ID.

Without a provision banning such a practice, Cedillo was refusing to vote for it and other parts of the budget, which was contained in 21 bills. Democrats added it. Some Republicans said the proposal could interfere with legitimate law-enforcement actions, and the bill failed to garner enough votes to pass. So the Senate killed the entire $112-million transportation bill.

Just after dawn, an impromptu hearing was needed to get a bill authorizing schools funding back on track. GOP senators were refusing to put up the votes for it, and the measure came up short. Senate leader Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) abruptly announced there would be a 120-second hearing, stopped business on the budget and conducted a confirmation proceeding that took just slightly longer.

Senators approved a Schwarzenegger nominee to the California Transportation Commission whom they had refused to confirm through the normal committee process. Steinberg, with a hint of sarcasm, declared the nominee, Fresno developer and GOP donor Darius Assemi, “eminently qualified.”

Sen. Jeff Denham (R-Atwater) spoke in praise of Assemi and changed his vote. The education bill passed.

Over in the Assembly, meanwhile, lawmakers were annoyed by a demand they said came from the governor. It called for the state to create a “Secretary of Volunteerism,” a paid post. The idea was heavily mocked in side conversations and during floor debates.

“I would like to volunteer to be the Wizard of Adjournment,” Assemblyman Roger Niello (R-Fair Oaks) said after 3:30 a.m., when the legislation finally passed the lower house

Ultimately, the full Legislature approved the post, with some lawmakers expressing worry that the governor might otherwise use his line-item veto authority to retaliate.

“This was the governor’s thing — or else his blue pencil came out,” said Sen. Fran Pavley (D-Agoura Hills).

Other last-minute side issues included a bid by Republicans to secure a tax break for online travel companies such as Orbitz and Expedia. It didn’t survive. A proposal to help San Diego use more redevelopment funds in a way that could help facilitate construction of a new NFL stadium made it to the governor’s desk.

Special tax breaks for a timber company, cable companies and software firms made it to the governor’s desk too. So did a provision that could help boost the bottom line of an ethanol company founded by former Secretary of State Bill Jones, an ally of and contributor to Schwarzenegger.

Not all of the bickering was partisan. Sen. Leland Yee of San Francisco, a Democrat, refused to vote with most of his caucus on many elements of the budget. He paid a price: Disaster-relief legislation that he wrote for families affected by the San Bruno explosion and fire was killed, and Democrats later moved to Schwarzenegger an identical measure without Yee’s name on it.

Lawmakers sweat the small stuff

California welfare recipients are able to use state-issued debit cards to withdraw cash on gaming floors in more than half of the casinos in the state, a Los Angeles Times review of records found.

The cards, provided by the Department of Social Services to help recipients feed and clothe their families, work in automated teller machines at 32 of 58 tribal casinos and 47 of 90 state-licensed poker rooms, the review found.

State officials said Wednesday they were working to determine how much money had been withdrawn from casino ATMs by people using the welfare debit cards.