When Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts, seen as a swing vote on the court, shifted his allegiance and rendered the deciding vote to uphold the constitutionality of a state minimum wage law in the court’s 1937 West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish decision, it was known as “The switch in time that saved nine,” a clever twist on the saying, “A stitch in time saves nine.”
The decision marked a stark change from the court’s 32-year-long Lochner era protections of the liberty of contract under the 14th Amendment, and happened to come just as President Franklin D. Roosevelt, frustrated that the court had repeatedly struck down his grandiose government programs as unconstitutional, was pushing a “court-packing plan” that would have allowed him to appoint up to six additional justices to the Supreme Court (hence, the saying’s reference to saving the court’s existing nine justices).
Now something similar seems to be afoot with Senate Bill 1387, introduced by state Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de León, D-Los Angeles, which would allow the state to appoint three additional members to the governing board of the South Coast Air Quality Management District, the air pollution control agency covering all of Orange County and the urban regions of Los Angeles, Riverside and San Bernardino counties.
The current SCAQMD board has 13 members, including 10 city and county elected officials and three state appointees — one appointed by the governor, one by the speaker of the Assembly and one by the Senate Rules Committee. SB1387 would double the number of state appointees, allowing them to comprise 37.5 percent of the board, and require that the new appointees “be representatives of bona fide nonprofit environmental justice organizations,” according to an Assembly Appropriations Committee bill analysis.
“It’s an egregious overreach of state government,” Tracy Hernandez, founding CEO of the Los Angeles County Business Federation, part of a coalition of more than 100 organizations that is opposing the measure, told us. “Why have any regional boards at any level of government?” if the state can simply override their decisions by packing the boards, she asked.
Fontana Mayor Acquanetta Warren has also been highly critical of the legislation. “SB1387 is emblematic of a growing and deeply troubling trend in Sacramento — the belief that local elected officials are incapable of governing the communities we were elected to represent, and that Sacramento knows best,” she wrote in a guest commentary in late July. “The importance of local government cannot, and should not, be casually swept aside by overtly political concerns. … If we allow Sacramento politicians to systematically strip local elected officials of the ability to represent our communities and replace us with unaccountable political appointees, democracy suffers.”
SB1387 is clearly a politically motivated effort to use state government to dilute or override the decisions of a regional board. The implications are stark for other local or regional bodies, from transportation agencies to water districts. This board-packing scheme would reduce accountability and local control. Rejecting it would be a breath of fresh air.
