Second in a series
Re “Mornings with Sebastian Are Lessons in Learning Politics”
[img]1987|right|Sebastian Ridley-Thomas||no_popup[/img]Befitting a four-month-old member of the state Legislature, Assemblyman Sebastian Ridley-Thomas (D-Culver City) struck an upbeat and enthusiastic mood last Friday morning when he addressed a Chamber of Commerce Eggs and Issues breakfast at the DoubleTree Hotel.
An ambitious new, young, richly schooled member of the lodge, he sees sunshine rather than ominous, debt-ridden shadows in both the state’s immediate and its long-range outlooks.
“We already have hit the ground running,” Mr. Ridley-Thomas, “and we have moved in a new (optimistic) direction. We are not quite singing ‘Happy Days Are Here Again’ in Sacramento. But we are pointing toward a future of growth, a future of prosperity, and we need to be disciplined to sustain this.”
For the next 22 minutes, he resembled a gracefully Rhetorically, Mr. Ridley-Thomas streaked forth and back, across a wide and deep stage.
Without signaling any special area of concentration, he deftly, insightfully touched on a complex of issues that suggested he has been a quick study since his Dec. 3 election.
Never sounding like a 27-yearold freshman, he waystopped at least 10 different times to examine issues of interest to participatory stakeholders in the breakfast setting. All of those factors, he said, contributed to California’s recent and welcome fiscal well-being.
Unlike his most recent predecessors, Mr. Ridley-Thomas has made Culver City a central address without slighting the wider Crenshaw/Baldwin Hills communities. His predecessors were rare and light-footed visitors who seldom were here long enough to leave a footprint.
Calling Culver City “ground zero for the jobs renaissance,” Mr. Ridley-Thomas led off with the restoration of a simple majority vote on budget decisions. “That has made an extreme difference from the past,” he said.
“The (former) two-thirds (required) vote doesn’t mean as much because we are not trying to tax everybody out of existence. But we are trying to make sure we can get a state spending plan on an on-time basis. You know the new fiscal year begins on July 1. We need to have the budget enacted by June 15 and signed by the governor by June 30.
“The second part that is quite important is Prop. 30, passed in 2012, is doing very well,” Mr. Ridley-Thomas said. “State controller John Chung has posted a tracker on his website to show exactly where the funding is going.”
(To be continued)
