Assembly Local Government Committee, Assembly Municipal and County Government Committee

Committee History

Since the California legislature was first organized, there has been an Assembly committee concerned with the affairs of local governments. The earliest committee, the Assembly Counties and County Boundaries Committee, focused on the boundaries and divisions of counties and the salaries of county officials. By the 1880s, the Assembly added the Assembly County and Township Committee and the Municipal Corporations Committee. The Counties and County Boundaries and the County and Township Government Committees ceased operation after 1911. Apparently to replace both, the Assembly created the County Government Committee in 1913. In the same year, a Committee on Libraries to review matters concerning local libraries was established. The Municipal Corporations Committee, the County Government Committee and the Libraries Committee continued to operate until 1943 when the Assembly formed the Municipal and County Government Committee in their places. It was "assigned the subject matter in the Government Code relating to the government of cities, counties, cities and counties, districts, and other political subdivisions of the state, uncodified laws relating there to, and other matters relating to municipal and county government (HR438, July 11, 1968, Assembly Journal, p. 5709).

In 1969, the committee was renamed the Assembly Local Government Committee but kept its original scope of addressing all matters "relating to local government" (HR 414, August 4, 1969, Assembly Journal, p. 7394). They were specifically excluded from addressing the boundaries of school districts.

As both the Municipal and County Government and later as the Local Government Committee, the committee had some distinctive characteristics in comparison to other standing committees in the Assembly. In the opinion of its members and its staff, the committee was seen as less important than other committees. John Knox, chair of the committee from 1963 to 1975, called the committee the "worst in the house" for a member to be appointed. Thomas Willoughby, principal staff analyst from 1961-1977, observed, "it wasn't that the committee was unimportant, it was just that the issues it deal with didn't have a lot of political sex appeal" (Willoughby Oral History, p. 6; see related collections). Another unique quality was the continuity and effectiveness of its staff. Thomas Willoughby (fifteen years) and his successor Julie Castelli Nauman (eleven years) provided the committee with expert assistance in evaluating measures. In addition, John Knox was the first chair in the Assembly to ask his staff to prepare bill analyses that were distributed to all members of the committee. This practice eventually spread to all committees in the legislature (Willoughby Oral History, p. 6).

Most notably, the committee was different because the committee's scope meant that it did not have a single major state agency with which it worked closely. Instead, its main advisors were officials in local government, as well as the professional associations and lobbyists that represented them. Close relationships were common between committee members and staff and such groups as the League of California Cities, the California Association of Local Agency Formation, and the County Supervisors Association of California. Often, the committee arranged to hold hearings at the same time as annual meetings of such groups.

Though the official scope of the committee has stayed consistent since the creation of the Municipal and Country Government Committee in 1943, certain measures and social changes have resulted in new areas of investigations. As a result of recommendations from Governor Pat Brown's Commission on Metropolitan Area Problems, the Knox-Nisbet Act (AB1662 and SB861) was passed and chaptered in 1963 (Thomas Willoughby to Editor, CALAFCO Newsletter, September 18, 1975, Assembly Local Government Records, LP327:431). The broad goal of the bill was the "discouragement of urban sprawl" and "the orderly formation" of local government; its main mechanism was the creation of Local Agency Formation Committees (known as LAFCos) in every county "to regulate the expansion, reorganization, creation, dissolution of cities and special districts." Because these were new local governmental organizations with some power to regulate the actions of other local government, in the wake of their creation, committee constantly evaluated subsequent bills seeking to clarify distinct responsibilities for each form of local government. At the same time, the committee increasingly returned to the issues of development, growth, and sprawl that had originally inspired the Knox-Nisbet Act. In the 1970s, this concern was at times made more difficult because of the overlap in responsibilities between the Local Government Committee and the Assembly Planning, Land Use and Energy Committee. By the early 1980s, the Local Government Committee had secured primary review authority over local planning issues (John T. Knox to Leo T. McCarthy, July 15, 1974, Assembly Local Government Records, LP327:430; Robert C. Frazee to Willie L. Brown, January 27, 1981, Assembly Local Government Records, LP327:448).

The committee also played an important role in creating the guidelines for the original California Environmental Quality Act of 1970 (AB2045). After the California Supreme Court ruled that its measures applied to private as well as public projects, the committee helped developed provisions to apply this widen scope and to reconcile the measure with federal requirements for similar environmental impact statements.

No political shift had more impact on the committee than the series of efforts to control property taxes in California. The ratification by the voters of the Property Tax Initiative (Proposition 13) in 1978 resulted in new concerns for the committee. In its wake, many measures considered by the committee focused on how local governments could finance projects under the new fiscal constraints imposed by the measure. The following year the passage of the Gann Initiative (Proposition 4) further limited the ability of local governments to increase their budgets through new forms of assessments. In the wake of both measures, the Committee considered various measures to make up for these strict budget limitations. The Mello-Roos Community Facility Act of 1982 (AB3564 and SB2001) was one such measure that allowed local governments to impose fees on developers of new subdivisions to pay for community facilities in the areas. With fiscal constraints on local government, the issue of state mandates for local government without adequate state funding became a constant source of discussion and legislation. Because the committee dealt with a variety of local governments, it often found itself considering measures that resulted in face-offs between counties, school districts, special districts, and cities, all competing for parts of limited revenues. Such debates, alongside the perennial questions of local vs. state governmental scope, the integrity of local governments, and the need for special legislation for specific areas, will continue to keep the Assembly Local Government Committee busy in the 21st century.

Available at the California State Archives is Appendix A that lists the names of the chairs of the Municipal and County Government and the Local Government Committees from 1943 to 2002.

From the guide to the California State Assembly Local Government Committee records, 1940-1996, (California State Archives)