PLAN SHUTS PUBLIC OUT OF CRUCIAL DECISIONS.

Byline: Mark Ridley-Thomas 

WE all want better government, so there's plenty for Californians to like in Governor Schwarzenegger's California Performance Review and its proposed governmental reforms.

Obviously, money can be saved by eliminating duplication, rationalizing state licensing agencies, making sure that state employees are highly trained and through the computerization of basic records and state operations.

Perhaps these and hundreds of other good suggestions for better organization and efficiency were worth the five months that the team of 275 experts, public employees and consultants took to produce their encyclopedic report.

But to proponents of open governance, the CPR sometimes flaunts an agenda that runs counter to our basic political heritage. It's no coincidence that California's government, in the most varied and populous of states, has, for all its undeniable unwieldiness, so many avenues of public responsiveness.

We have initiatives and recalls, and we also have boards and panels that exist simply to hear what the public has to say on major issues that affect their lives.

However, it appears the CPR panel believes that less public input is better. If ``we the people'' have less to say, the CPR consensus runs, the government will somehow be more accountable and efficient. It's their thinly veiled assumption that too much democracy can be bad, so let's leave the big decisions to ``the big guy in the corner office.'' I've seen this movie before.

As a former Los Angeles City Council member, I recall then-Mayor Dick Riordan's attempts to ``reform'' Los Angeles a decade ago. His agenda was then, as Schwarzenegger's is now, to consolidate power and to concentrate it in the executive branch of government. In the final analysis it was a power grab.

Some of the CPR's ideas simply sound bizarre. For instance, putting the Department of Managed Care under a new Public Health agency that would also perform risk management, which could create dueling internal priorities on patient welfare vs. state costs. Taking child care from county agencies and handing over much of it to private, for-profit entities, as the CPR has proposed, could increase the tragic unaccountability of our battered child-welfare system.

But the panel's anti-populist agenda really shows in the matter of the Golden State's celebrated environmental panels - the Department of Fire and Forestry, the Air Resources Board and the Water Quality Board. To contain all these agencies, the CPR proposed a Department of Environmental Protection. This would build an opaque bureaucracy around the boards' vital functions, eliminating their dynamic public hearings that were the mainspring of state environmental reform for the past generation.

Does the CPR imply that the present system makes it too difficult to develop state environmental policy beyond the realm of public scrutiny? Apparently so, because the proposed changes shift the panels' accountability from the public to the executive. Of course, in a worst-case scenario, it would then be only too easy for a governor beholden to the utilities or other industries to regulate our environment in their favor - not ``we the people.''

Equally problematic is CPR's one-dimensional pro-business bias. The CPR holds that the best way to create jobs is through corporate tax breaks. Curiously, proponents of this approach offer no substantiation of how jobs would really be created. They were probably hard pressed in light of the MIC's performance over the last decade, plus the inconclusive data regarding the nearly 50 other corporate tax credits currently on the state's books. With jobs and the economy being the No. 1 concern of Californians, one would think that the CPR could do much better than that.

The Legislature, which must approve the CPR proposals, is already sending out warning signals about the review's most controversial ideas. Its members know that the major trend in regional government is toward more, not less, transparency. Consequently, the speaker of the Assembly has established a working group headed by the majority leader to thoroughly evaluate the merits of the CPR proposals.

The CPR panel - which reportedly had more input from industry than anyone else - seems to be bucking more open government by not only trying to consolidate agencies, but to erase their public faces. Were the governor to accomplish this, along with his unpopular proposal to turn the Legislature into a nest of part-time dilettantes, what would happen to our state's democracy? What would happen to the time-honored tradition of checks and balances?

With federal funding cuts for 88,000 police officers, 140,000 workers out of job training, 100,000 working families out of child care assistance and after-school programs, our state and local agencies will have to somehow cope with these problems resulting from scarce resources and tough decisions.

In such tense times, government officials, including our governor who took the helm last year with no experience, need the public's input more than ever. Cutting it back is not only anti-democratic, it erodes California's hard-won protections and distorts its heritage.