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Democratic lawmakers will oppose Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's plan to borrow $2 billion in transportation funds to balance the state budget, Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez said Thursday. Highway and transit projects would be delayed if the governor gets his way, and Nuñez, D-Los Angeles, called that an unacceptable burden on the middle class. "We've got to deal with the issue of folks spending more time on the roads and highways than at home with their families, and if we're going to be a first-class state we've got to make sure we keep up to speed with the improvement of our roads...

SACRAMENTO (AP) - Embattled Secretary of State Kevin Shelley should not be forced to testify before a legislative panel if he decides to resign his offices, Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez said Thursday. Shelley's appearance before the Joint Legislative Audit Committee was pushed back at least three weeks after independent counsels appointed by both parties said they needed more time to review the case. The reprieve also means that legislative leaders have more time to negotiate the possible conditions of Shelley's resignation, which has been rumored in the Capitol for weeks. Nunez, D-Los Angeles, said he did not think Shelley should...

SACRAMENTO, Calif. - Democratic officials from five states launched a nationwide campaign Wednesday to fight Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (news - web sites)'s plan to privatize California's public pension systems. California Treasurer Phil Angelides, who is leading the effort, called the Republican governor's proposal a major assault on the movement to reform corporate America following a wave of scandals. Angelides said Schwarzenegger's plan "is part of a concerted effort to break apart the powerful voices of public pension funds that have stood up for ordinary investors in corporate boardrooms." The attack came hours before President Bush (news - web sites) was...

SACRAMENTO (AP) - State transportation officials faced intense questioning Tuesday over their proposal to replace the eastern span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge with a structure that is less spectacular but presumably less expensive than the badly over-budget project currenty planned. Will Kempton, director of the California Department of Transportation, attempted to persuade skeptical lawmakers to scrap the approved design - a so-called single-tower suspension bridge - and instead complete the two-mile span with a towerless concrete skyway. "We need to get a seismically safe bridge built as soon as possible," Kempton told lawmakers at the Senate Transportation Committee...

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has set box office records and bodybuilding records. Now he has a campaign fund-raising record. The Republican governor pulled in $28.8 million from campaign donors last year, more than twice as much as former Gov. Gray Davis collected in his first year in office. Davis, the Democrat whom Schwarzenegger ousted in the 2003 recall election, still holds the single-year mark with a $29.1 million haul in 2002. Schwarzenegger didn't do it for his own possible re-election campaign in 2006 - those accounts had less than $700,000 in them at the end of 2004. Most of the cash...

SACRAMENTO - Buried amid thousands of pages collected by auditors investigating Secretary of State Kevin Shelley is a memo from a state consultant who attended a union-sponsored "Take Back the White House" rally. The consultant wrote that he "was there to represent the SOS office" at the April 3, 2004, event and a state investigator's note on the document indicates that one of Shelley's top deputies asked the consultant to go. Shelley aides have vigorously denied that the Secretary of State's office misused federal voter outreach funds to send consultants hired with the money to partisan political events. Shelley's spokeswoman...

State transportation secretary Sunne Wright McPeak returns to the Capitol today to explain her thinking on the Bay Bridge reconstruction, but this time she'll be armed with a report of her own. The 68-page report, released Monday, shows that a team of outside consultants agrees with her: The tower design for the new eastern span is responsible for just over half of the $2.5 billion-cost increase last year. It's backed up by five academics from around the country and is the most detailed support yet for McPeak's decision to scrap the tower for a skyway. "We're very hopeful this information...

SACRAMENTO — If this was a movie, this would be the scene where a bloodied but determined Arnold Schwarzenegger charges against impossible odds then, at the last minute, saves the day. But far less certain is the outcome of the actor-turned-governor's sudden, sweeping moves against powerful foes on myriad, complex fronts in the unscripted real world, say analysts and political players. Win, lose or draw, though, his bid to remake politics and state government — probably by going directly to voters this year on everything from state spending to changing lawmakers' district lines — will likely reverberate for decades, they...

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger rode an extraordinary wave of popularity in his first year, thanks to a blend of celebrity, political smarts, and a bit of rookie luck. But the so-called Governator now faces so much criticism that many wonder whether he might be a mere mortal after all. The Republican governor who negotiated tough agreements with Democrats, charmed legislators with visits to his smoking tent and met rapturous crowds at shopping malls across California has hit a sophomore slump, marked by a series of actions that his adversaries are calling naive and even hypocritical. His state...

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is threatening to call a special election if Democrats don't back his controversial budget proposals, but it could take an action-hero-like effort to get a package of initiatives qualified for an anticipated Nov. 8 election. Measures mimicking Schwarzenegger's proposals to change the way California pays its teachers, draws its political boundaries, designs its budget and pays for its workers' retirement already are creeping through the initiative process. But even the popular governor could have problems collecting the hundreds of thousands of signatures needed to qualify the various initiatives by the mid-April deadline. Schwarzenegger pledged Monday to leap...

Sacramento -- California campaign-finance regulators are investigating whether Secretary of State Kevin Shelley illegally accepted a political donation in his government office from a contributor seeking help with a tax problem, The Chronicle has learned. Investigators from the state Fair Political Practices Commission have met with at least one potential witness in the case, seeking details about a meeting in June 2003 between Shelley and the donor, and about how the campaign check was delivered, according to a person who was questioned. "They were clearly trying to dot their i's and cross their t's," said the person, who spoke on...

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said Friday he would enlist donors from across the country to fund a multimillion-dollar fight over California's public pension system and its voting districts — reforms being watched with keen interest on Wall Street and a bit of panic in Washington, D.C. The governor's comments signaled that his ambitions for 2005 could flood California with campaign contributions from lucrative new sources. And raising money on a national scale would allow Schwarzenegger, frequently mentioned as a presidential hopeful even though the Constitution bars foreign-born citizens from serving, to take a wider stage and expand his fundraising network. In...

If anyone still doubted it, this week's verbal jousting between Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and legislative leaders underscores the certainty that in seeking a sweeping overhaul of state government, the governor is igniting the mother of all California political battles, whose outcome will determine the course of political policy for years, perhaps decades, to come. Schwarzenegger castigated the Legislature for not moving quickly on the agenda he laid out in his State of the State speech three weeks ago, saying all he had heard since then was "a lot of excuses, a lot of complaints, a lot of finger-pointing." He's clearly...

SACRAMENTO (AP) - Secretary of State Kevin Shelley's expected appearance before an obscure legislative committee next week presents a rare spectacle in a state Capitol where few statewide elected officials have ever found themselves so engulfed in controversy. While many lawmakers have endured scandals and some seen the insides of prison walls, Shelley has few precedents as he prepares to testify before a committee that has traditionally concerned itself with auditing humdrum issues such as grazing fees and Medi-Cal overpayments. Though the 14-member Joint Legislative Audit Committee is also making headlines with its probe of cost overruns on the Bay...

Under threat of an initiative to scrap California's traditional public pensions, legislators and others are scrambling to craft bills to repair the system instead. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has endorsed the initiative to replace public pensions, which guarantee retirement income based on salary and years of service, with 401(k)-style investment accounts. Strong interests - especially public employee unions and their allies - oppose abandoning the existing system. Now, they're under the gun to fix it. In the recent past, proposals to rein in pension costs haven't gained much traction. This year, however, the initiative threat is leading to a bumper crop...

Schwarzenegger is ratcheting up the rhetoric against legislators, but Democrats are refusing to hew to his agenda. SACRAMENTO -- There's no more talk of friendly dinners at Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's Brentwood home, of lawmakers parading into the governor's smoking tent in the Capitol courtyard to bridge differences and end gridlock. The governor who once embraced the Legislature as a helpful "partner" now depicts it as a plodding hindrance. Schwarzenegger has made it clear that he has no appetite for the pragmatic concessions to the Legislature that defined his first year in office. Unless lawmakers pass his 2005 agenda within weeks,...

SACRAMENTO (AP) - Changing the bureaucracy of California's troubled youth and adult prison system would again make the state a national leader in imprisoning criminals and then rehabilitating them, representatives of the Schwarzenegger administration said Thursday. The corrections plan is the leading edge of Schwarzenegger's larger proposal to reorganize state government. Lawmakers, union leaders and inmate advocates said the proposal merely shuffles organizational chart boxes, and particularly objected to more closely affiliating the California Youth Authority with the adult Corrections Department. But the plan won general praise from members of the watchdog Little Hoover Commission. The prison plan and a...

California politicians love to gripe about how the state gets shorted by the federal government. Those complaints sound peculiar against the background of some recent news. Over the last three years, the state Department of Health Services has received about $100 million in federal funds to fight bioterrorism, and officials there can't seem to account for it. Where has the money gone? DHS officials can't seem to say. Department officials were unable to provide Bee science writer Edie Lau last week with a detailed breakdown of how the $100 million was spent. And this comes after two recent reports that...

Sacramento -- Legislative leaders agreed Wednesday to hire independent counsels to manage an investigation of embattled Secretary of State Kevin Shelley, who said through a spokesman that he did not plan to resign. Following the model established in the Legislature's investigation of former state Insurance Commissioner Charles Quackenbush, each party's members on the Joint Legislative Audit Committee will retain their own independent counsel. The agreement on ground rules and procedures came after the investigation got off to a rocky start, with many questioning why the committee chairwoman, Nicole Parra, D-Hanford (Kings County), had called Shelley to testify even before an...

SACRAMENTO (AP) - Overall support for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger remains high among voters, but he is losing his appeal among Democrats and independents, according to a poll released Thursday. The survey from the Public Policy Institute found 60 percent of Californians favor the way the Republican governor is doing his job, but 49 percent of Democrats disapprove. Six in 10 independent voters still give Schwarzenegger high marks - the same as last year - but the number of independents who disapprove of him has almost doubled, from 18 percent last year to 32 percent this year. The numbers may come...