One of California’s new ‘trailer bills’ has origins in Capitol’s long history of closed-door politics

As required by law, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s budget staff this week posted initial drafts of 59 bills they say would be needed to implement the 2025-26 state budget that Newsom proposed a few weeks ago.

That’s a polite fiction.

While many of the bills do relate to the budget, others have little or no connection but are designated as “trailer bills” merely to make them easier to enact. Those should properly be studied and debated on their own, rather than be secreted in the budget package.

One proposed measure that needs explanation and examination would delay for four years a crackdown on street racing, so-called “sideshows” and other forms of extreme driving that police officials say pose a serious threat to roadway safety. The Legislature approved the tougher penalties on dangerous drivers almost unanimously in 2021, and they were to take effect this year.

If the trailer bill is enacted, the law would be delayed until 2029.

Another proposed trailer bill, while quite innocuous in its effect, has an interesting and seamy backstory. It would extend a long-standing program of providing special devices that allow deaf people to use telephones for another nine years, financed by adding a few pennies to telephone bills each month.

Few would quarrel with a program aimed at overcoming the isolation that deaf and hard-of-hearing people may experience, but its creation nearly a half-century ago illustrates the wheeling and self-dealing that dominated the Capitol in the 1970s and 1980s.

Terry Goggin, a Democratic assemblyman from San Bernardino, carried legislation to create the program but it sounded fishy to Vic Pollard, a reporter for the San Bernardino Sun who had often written about Goggin’s many schemes.

Pollard revealed that the seemingly benign legislation benefited Goggin’s longtime friend and sometime business partner, Dennis Krieger, who was underwriting a stock sale for a company that made the only devices Goggin’s legislation would finance. After Pollard reported on that connection, Goggin was fined by the Fair Political Practices Commission.

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I also added a chapter to the Goggin saga. At one point in the late ’70s, during one of California’s periodic gasoline supply crises, Goggin introduced a bill to prohibit oil companies from owning service stations. I reported for the Sacramento Union that his measure exempted one company that had employed Goggin’s father and Krieger’s father as top executives.

After my story published, Goggin dropped the bill.

Pollard later revealed to me that Goggin, who lost his Assembly seat in 1984, had once told him, “Somebody is going to make money off of everything we do up here, and it might as well be our friends.”

Pollard added, “He also tried once to hire me to get me off his back.”

Goggin’s political defeat was not the end of his saga, however.

After his old friend, Willie Brown, the legendary speaker of the state Assembly in the 1980s and 1990s, became mayor of San Francisco in 1996, Goggin moved to the city and began practicing law and lobbying city government. Eight years later, after Brown’s mayoralty ended, he and Goggin teamed up to propose a multimillion-dollar lobbying campaign for the state’s bullet train project.

That gambit fell through and Goggin went into the coffee shop business, operating four concessions in Bay Area Rapid Transit stations while seeking investors to expand the chain.

That also backfired when federal prosecutors alleged that he had lied to potential investors about finances of the chain, which later went bankrupt. Then 78 years old, he pleaded guilty in 2019 to money laundering and two years later was sentenced to one year and one day behind bars.