http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/13/us/california-today-state-legislature-proposition-54.html 2016-10-13 15:18:02 California Today: Shining a Light on Lawmakers Monday: Openness in the Capitol, a scathing review for San Francisco’s police force, and a look back at the Hoover Dam’s role in remaking Los Angeles. === Good morning. (Want to get California Today by email? Let’s turn it over to Is the State Legislature transparent enough? That’s the question voters are being asked to consider with Proposition 54. If approved, the measure would require that any bill in the Legislature be posted online for three days before going up for a vote. In addition, it would require the Legislature to record all of its public sessions online and make the video archives available. The measure was placed on the ballot by Charles Munger Jr., a wealthy Republican donor from the Bay Area, and has the While most legislation in Sacramento is debated for months, there are instances when the majority can simply waive the rules and push through bills at the last minute. In final days of the annual session, new bills can pop up and be rushed to a vote before the public has much of a chance to weigh in. “It leaves people in the dark,” said Kathay Feng, executive director of California Common Cause, a nonpartisan government watchdog group that is backing the measure. “Legislators are asked to vote on things where there hasn’t even really been an open discussion.” But “Every once in a while they have to do the sausage making behind closed doors,” Mr. Maviglio said. “Because on certain tougher bills if they did it out in the open all the lobbyists would realize their oxes are being gored and they come unglued. They just come out of the woodwork to stop something from happening.” Mr. Maviglio pointed to the 2009 budget agreement, reached when the state was still reeling from the Great Recession. If the all the final negotiations had been made in the open, he said, the budget deal would have quickly fallen apart. “It’s a difficult thing to sell to the public, but that’s not the way things work sometimes,” he said. See reporting in The Times on the Nov. 8 ballot initiatives: And dig into analyses of all 17 statewide measures by the • The Justice Department criticized • The family of a man killed by the police in El Cajon appeared with the • Dozens of striking tenants are facing eviction in Highland Park, the latest • The scandal involving sham accounts at • Many states, including California, saw large increases in online • Momentum can mean everything for • • • Gail Berman, Hollywood’s queen of reinvention, is taking on “ Los Angeles is embracing The move wouldn’t be the first time the city undertook a radical shift in its relationship with energy. It was this week in 1936 that the world’s biggest dam of its time began sending power into Southern California. The Hoover Dam, Its concrete wall was erected to control floods and capture a water supply for the booming, but arid, Southwest and California. The dam would also harness the water’s power using turbines to create electricity. To get it to Los Angeles, On Oct. 9, the electricity was transmitted for the first time. That evening, The city pointed beams of light into the night sky over Broadway, where a parade was held. “A tumult of yelling and whistling and screaming greeted the giant with an exuberance and spontaneous feeling that has not been observed since the demonstration the day the World War ended,” wrote Thomas Treanor in the Los Angeles Times. In its early years, the Hoover Dam provided roughly three quarters of Los Angeles’s electricity. Over time, historians say, its energy and water fueled the tremendous growth that transformed Los Angeles and other cities across the American Southwest. California Today goes live at 6 a.m. Pacific time weekdays. Tell us what you want to see: The California Today columnist, Mike McPhate, is a third-generation Californian — born outside Sacramento and raised in San Juan Capistrano. He lives in Davis. California Today is edited by Julie Bloom, who grew up in Los Angeles and attended U.C. Berkeley.