Today was marked up to be a day of running through the principle Executive Offices of California - the Governors Office and the Attorney Generals Office, which is a good supplement following two days of Legislative activities. The plans changed a bit due to the busy nature of some key individuals, so we met with Governor Brown's External Affair Coordinator, Elizabeth Norvell who gave us a basic run-down of the Governors office, and a brief comparison between him and the previous Governor - "The Governator" Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Afterwards, we were able to sit in on a Senate Education Committee meeting where several pieces of legislation were read and voted on. The first was Senate Bill (SB) 334 concerning pupil nutrition, in this case k-12 student access to clean and chilled drinking water on school grounds. There was concern from many legislators and various school organizations that many students don't have adequate access to clean water, where either there are not enough water fountains per students or that there is a substantial risk of lead poisoning from old, lead pipes that have been outlawed but still remain. The Bill had overwhelming support, and the opposition was mainly concerned with resources related to implementing this bill, or the lack thereof.
The next Bill of note, was SB 373 - which aimed at increasing the amount of full time professors at Community Colleges from 25% to 75%. This would be beneficial to both the professors who lack job security and continuity, and the towards students who would have increased access to their professors. This Bill too had overwhelming support, and the opposition was entirely concerned with a lack of resources allocated in the Bill to make this possible. The opposition was in agreeance with the authors and proponents of the Bill on the premise of it and all the main talking points, however they felt that this was "handled poorly" as it would seemingly force Community Colleges to simply hire more permanent staff without giving them the funding nor means to do so.
Due to a changing schedule we were rushed for lunch, and on the way back to the building saw a massive influx of demonstrators of the anti-vaccination crowd, who opposed the controversial bill, SB 277 - compulsory vaccination of California children. The opposition resists this bill saying that it is a gross overstep of the state - that personal choice and parental rights are threatened by this Bill. The Bill however, is concerned with children who's parents wish them to join public education/ day care, where they will be in contact with other children, thus being at risk of contracting and/or transmitting disease- which sparks a debate about personal rights vs public safety. This dynamic is seemingly ignored by the opposition, who are concerned only with the principle of personal choice.
To conclude the afternoon, we had an excellent meeting with the Principle Consultant of Senator Hannah Beth Jackson, Chris Reefe who went into as much detail as possible about the various subject matters we are working on for our papers. It was this kind of attentive and diligent question answering and elaboration that we had hoped to get from the Governors office.
Finally we visited the Attorney Generals Office where we met with the heads of Three divisions of the office - Government Law, Appeals Writs and Trials and Legislative Affairs. Here too we were given great detail and depth concerning the Attorney General, her/his role in state politics and the inner-workings of it all. The three officials did an excellent job in explaining what they felt was important and answering questions, which shined a lot of light on my moderate interest in pursuing law and surely was illuminating for others as well.
No comments:
Post a Comment