| went for naught." New President Ray Marshall said he favors having
a proposal ready when the legislature reconvenes. "We can't really afford to wait
another year or even half a year without some kind of interim relief," he said.
"If there are people to talk to, we want to make it happen sooner rather than
later."
Asked if the bar would seek help from the Supreme Court again, Marshall said he will
"consider all avenues . . . We're pretty well committed to trying to get funding from
whatever source we can possibly find."
Asked if he would carry legislation for the bar again next session, Hertzberg said,
"It depends. If the leadership of the bar is rational and we get a new governor who
is rational, I'd be interested in doing it."
Hertzberg and bar officials had their first face-to-face negotiation about the dues
bill with Wilson on Thursday, Aug. 27. The governor vetoed the dues bill on Oct. 11, 1997.
"The governor's strategy in negotiation is to wait until the bitter end to put the
maximum amount of pressure on his opponents to win the greatest amount of
capitulation," Hertzberg said.
The strategy failed, he added, because the reforms the bar was willing to make
ultimately died when the governor tried to extract even more from the bar during the
last-minute negotiations.
Some observers charge that the bill really died on June 25--the night before nearly 500
State Bar employees were laid off--when the governor rejected essentially the same
provisions that were contained in the final version of the bill. Once the layoffs took
place, legislators no longer had the incentive of trying to save jobs as part of
supporting a reform bill, these observers say.
To Wilson's charges that Hertzberg was the one who finally blocked bar legislation, the
assemblyman responded that throughout the months of low-key negotiations, he never made a
move without consulting the governor's office and used Wilson's original veto message as
the blueprint for reform. |
