From the final applicant pool culled by a panel of auditors, State Auditor Elaine Howle will randomly select eight commissioners by July 5, 2020. Then those eight choose six more.
Margarita Fernandez, a spokesperson for the State Auditor’s office said she expects a surge in applicants the final week before the deadline. The office has led online workshops to help applicants through the process. She said hundreds of viewers have tuned in to navigate the next step.
Political consultant Paul Michell of Political Data Inc. acknowledged that the process can be daunting. Nonetheless, he likes it better than the alternatives in other states.
“The process does make it hard to game the system. It would be nearly impossible for you to get any kind of significant number of commissioners in there that just happen to be the brother-in-law of the Speaker of the Assembly, or the sister-in-law of the president of the Senate or the cousin of the fundraiser for the governor,” said Mitchell. “That’s the kind of thing we see in commissions around the country. The way the process works and the independence of it from our politicians in California is kind of the greatest feature within this process.”
To Mitchell, the drop in applicants was to be expected, especially as the novelty of a brand new, shiny commission wears off. And the state’s extension of the first deadline, he said, triggered a domino effect that made an extension necessary for the second phase.
People now know what they’re getting into, said Stan Forbes, a Sacramento bookstore owner and member of the 2010 commission.
“If you have a paper due in college, how many people turned it in early? Nobody,” he said. “So when it gets to be two days before the deadline, then I might get more nervous. But at this point it’s just human nature.”
Forbes said his own cynicism about politics motivated him to serve on the commission, despite the fact that his day job forces him to work long hours seven days a week.
“You just can’t let politicians draw their own lines. There’s too much self-interest,” he said. “They’re simply incapable of not exercising that self-interest.”