OP-ED: Supervisor Jeffries Praises Passage of Prop 54 Transparency Act

Submitted for publication by the office of Kevin Jeffries:

On Election Night, Riverside County Supervisor Kevin Jeffries (1st District) celebrated the passage of Proposition 54, which will prohibit the Legislature from passing any bill unless published on the Internet for 72 hours before vote.

“This is a great victory for residents throughout California, and a perfect example of why the initiative process is necessary” said Jeffries. “I introduced legislation to require bills to be publicly available 72 hours before any vote in each of the three terms I served in the State Assembly, and those in power ensured I didn’t get a single actual vote on my bills, despite support from newspapers and good government organizations statewide.”

“It was clearly not in the best interests of the Sacramento leadership and the special interest groups who write their bills to allow the public to have the opportunity to review their legislation before it came to a vote, and they were definitely not going to curtail their own power to keep the public in the dark,” explained the Supervisor.

Proposition 54 was put on the statewide ballot by California Forward and a host of other advocates for open government in California, including Common Cause, the League of Women Voters, the First Amendment Coalition, and the Sunlight Foundation.

Supervisor Jeffries praised the work of the organizations, saying “Only through the hard work of outside organizations without a direct financial stake in these reforms was passage of this law possible. The initiative process was created to give the people of the State of California the ability to make changes that those in power refuse to make themselves, and passage of Proposition 54 shows that the system can still work.”

72 hour requirement bills introduced by then-Assemblyman Kevin Jeffries were ACA 17 (’07-’08), ACA 8 (’08-’09), and ACA 1 (’11-’12), none of which received a single vote in committee.

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The 1st District includes about 450,000 residents and encompasses the cities of Wildomar, Lake Elsinore, Canyon Lake and most of the City of Riverside. The district also covers the unincorporated communities of DeLuz, Gavilan Hills, Good Hope, Lake Hills, Lake Mathews, LaCresta, Mead Valley, Meadowbrook, Spring Hills, Temescal Valley, Tenaja, Warm Springs, and Woodcrest, among others

(Patch file photo by Alexander Nguyen)