SACRAMENTO, Calif. (CN) — California's 2016 legislative session wrapped up early Thursday morning with the Legislature failing to pass a bill allowing the state bar to collect its yearly dues.
Neither chamber of the statehouse could agree on reform measures tied to the regulatory body's ability to collect membership fees even after months of negotiations between the heads of each judiciary committee and California Supreme Court Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye, and rival dues bills died in each house.
The state Senate sent AB 2878 to the Assembly, but it was not taken up and died when the Assembly floor session ended at 2:30 a.m. Thursday.
Though SB 846 was passed by the Assembly and sent to the Senate, it didn't make it out of committee and died without receiving a public hearing.
In an interview, Assemblyman Mark Stone, D-Scotts Valley, said the Assembly ran out of time to discuss the Senate's version of the bill, since it wasn't finalized until 11:50 p.m., while the Assembly's version stalled in the Senate Rules Committee.
"We got it 10 minutes prior to the deadline. Now they're saying it's dead because the Assembly wouldn't take it up," Stone said. "They had an appropriate vehicle sitting in their rules committee for days. They knew what was going to happen, and they seemed to not want a bar bill. It's just nuts."
In a statement, state Senate Judiciary Committee chair Hannah-Beth Jackson, D-Santa Barbara, said, "Last night, despite agreement on a host of reforms and the vast majority of issues, the Assembly refused to take up and vote on the state bar dues bill that had the support of the chief justice, choosing to bypass an opportunity for meaningful reform and compromise.
"While I am disappointed in that missed opportunity, the public and the legal community should be assured that the state bar will continue to operate. I look forward to resuming more productive and positive discussions in coming months."
The bar's annual and typically unremarkable dues legislation sparked a deep ideological divide over how much oversight the Legislature should have over the agency, in light of a series of recent controversies that include two highly critical audits and multiple whistleblower lawsuits stemming from a backlog of attorney discipline cases.
"I think the bar has taken the Legislature for granted for a really long time and in some sense rightly so, because there wasn't any pushback. The Legislature turned a blind eye. You're seeing that this committee is different," Assemblyman Brian Maienschein, R-San Diego, said at an Assembly Judiciary Committee hearing last week. At the hearing, lawmakers excoriated state bar executive director Elizabeth Rindskopf Parker over her agency's seeming inability to get its house in order.
The Assembly threw its weight behind AB 2878, a bill originally authored by Stone, who chairs the Assembly Judiciary Committee. The bill made dues conditional on structural reforms, including a non-lawyer majority board of trustees and the potential splitting up of its trade organization and regulatory functions. Stone said the bar had become distracted from its primary job of disciplining delinquent attorneys and protecting the public.
Stone watered down his bill in talks with Jackson and Cantil-Sakauye, and those two strong reform measures were eventually taken out. Deunification was dropped, along with the non-attorney majority board intended to keep the bar's decisions in check.