Chris Smith | San Francisco Magazine | May 2010
Timing is everything, they say—and depending on how you look at it, Jeff Lustig’s is either awful or exquisite. Lustig, a professor of government at Sacramento State, edited Remaking California (due out this month), a collection of essays that argue that a constitutional convention is the only real solution to California’s worsening freefall. A “con-con,” supporters say, offers what piecemeal reform cannot: the chance to cut away, in one fell swoop, decades of legislative scar tissue that has gotten us to this sorry place (e.g., the two-thirds majority requirement for raising taxes or approving a budget). Sadly, though, the ballot initiative calling for just such a convention, initiated by a consortium of Bay Area CEOs, died on the vine as Lustig’s book was going to press. Depressing? Sure. But even though he dedicated the book to his grandkids, with an apology for “the condition of the state we’re leaving you,” Lustig thinks there’s hope for the Golden State—and for his prescient-to-a-fault book—yet.