The Skinny

It must have just been an oversight. Assemblyman Joe Coto had a bill up on the Assembly floor last week that seemed to be headed for passage. The bill had cleared the Assembly Higher Education Committee after receiving the blessing of the committee chairman, Anthony Portantino. But Portantino’s support was conditional. He only agreed to vote for the measure after Coto promised to take some amendments to the bill that would have kept private some contractual information between banks and the University of California. One small problem: When the bill got to the Assembly floor last week, the bill still hadn’t been amended. Portantino spoke against the bill, admonishing Coto for not doing as he said he was going to do. A bloc of Democrats followed Portantino and refused to support Coto’s bill. Coto had the vote expunged from the record, and on Tuesday agreed to take the aforementioned amendments. …

Just asking, but why isn’t Tom Torlakson on the Budget Conference Committee? We thought it was tradition that the Budget chairman and vice-chairman in each house be appointed to the committee, along with both heads of the Appropriations committees. This year, the Assembly followed suit, naming Mark Leno, John Laird and Roger Niello to the panel. But the Senate opted for the lead Democrat and Republican on the Budget Committee: Denise Ducheny and Dennis Hollingsworth. But instead of Torlakson, Mike Machado was tapped for the gig. People with longer memories than ours, not to mention a better sense of nuance, inform us that while the Assembly traditionally follows the Budget-Approps pattern, it ain’t necessarily so on the Senate side. We must be misremembering. …

And we have had a Kevin Shelley sighting. The former SOS was seen at the retirement party for Caren Daniels-Meade, the longtime head of the political-reform division at the secretary of state’s office. Shelley is practicing law in San Francisco and consulting for Darius Anderson’s Platinum Advisors firm.