SF Chronicle: California's Center for Governmental Studies to close

California’s landmark Center for Governmental Studies to close — victim of “polarized” politics, economy

By: Carla Marinucci, Oct 13 at 3:47 pm

The San Francisco Chronicle

Citing a lagging economy and “dramatically polarized political environment,” the head of California’s pioneering Center for Governmental Studies –  which has provided research and analysis on Golden State governance and campaign finance for nearly three decades — says it will close Oct. 20, according to emails obtained by the Chronicle.

The organization,  headed by president Bob Stern and CEO Tracy Westen,  forged a solid reputation for bringing together political leaders from both parties — often with wildly divergent viewpoints — in numerous projects that influenced legislation, campaign finance reporting and political discourse in the Golden State.

An email sent out Oct. 13 by CGS’s chair Steven Rountree — and obtained by the Chronicle –  specifically cited both the lagging economy and a “dramatically polarized political environment” as taking a toll on the center’s funding and support.

Rountree said Westen ”plans to continue his work on governance reform and online democracy,” and Stern will ”continue work as an expert consultant, public speaker and political commentator.”
Stern, contacted by the Chronicle, declined to comment on the matter Thursday.

But former San Francisco Mayor Art Agnos, a board member of CGS who resigned this week in advance of the closure, confirmed the closure. He called it “a major loss for anyone who cares about good government and getting the kind of independent analysis that can lead to good decisions – whether it’s at the local state or federal level…particularly in the areas of public finance, ethics, and the use of modern technology.”

For decades, CGS “was a place where you saw the kind of bipartisanship that you desperately need in these days,” he said. “You saw conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats like me working together to solve governmental problems.”

Agnos, in a telephone interview with the Chronicle, said ”the good news is that the information (the organization has compiled over decades) will not be lost because the two outstanding co-directors…will figure out a way to continue what has been an extraordinary record of public service to this state.”

In his email, Rountree said:

“We have come to the end of the road with the Center for Governmental Studies.  As we have discussed in recent board meetings, foundation support for the work of CGS has simply dried up; this despite over two decades of incredible work on behalf of our democracy.  In my view this is the result of the impact of the recession on foundation but, more than that, the consequence of our dramatically polarized political environment and court rulings that have tended to gut laws and regulations aimed at making the democratic process fairer.   I believe that foundations have given up hope of meaningful reform in this climate.”

Rountree also outlined negotiations now in the works for ”Bob and Tracy (to) have a base for future operations at Claremont Graduate University, where they will serve on the faculty, teach, consult, carry on research and, we hope, oversee the transition of the Policy Archive and other data bases to a stable new home.”   
 In a recent memo, Stern and Westen outlined many of the accomplishments of the center which had long been a treasure trove of information, analysis and data on key political issues for journalists, academics and California voters.

Among them, he said, the center “drafted the model laws which became Propositions 68 and 208 on the 1988 and 1996 state ballots, and published the most comprehensive set of ballot initiative reforms in the nation.”
   
CGS also helped create the California Citizens Budget Commission, which in 1995 and 1998 “recommended dozens of state budget reforms”; the California Citizens Commission on Higher Education, which studied solving California’s debilitating “boom-and-bust” cycle of funding for higher education; and the California Channel (www.CalChannel.com), “the nation’s largest satellite-fed, public affairs cable television channel, now serving close to six million homes with gavel-to-gavel coverage of the state legislature’s floor sessions and committee hearings, governor’s press conferences and occasional California supreme Court oral arguments, and operated 24 hours a day by the California Cable Television Association.
        
Stern said in his memo that CGS has also “published over 70 books and reports “on a wide range of campaign finance and governance topics, including in-depth studies of laws in California, Florida, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, North Carolina (judicial) and Wisconsin, as well as local governments Albuquerque, Los Angeles (city and judicial), New York, Portland, San Francisco, Suffolk County, New York, Tucson and 15 other local California jurisdictions.”
   
Aside from the lagging economy, Agnos also blamed what he called  ”the short-sightedness of foundations” for the CGS demise. Increasingly, funders of such think tanks are “always looking for new trends,” he lamented – oftentimes “at the expense of fundamental expertise.”