Mr. President:

This bill is opposable on many grounds, but I want to focus on the provisions related to the state’s practice of looting safe deposit boxes and retirement and college funds under the pretense that they are abandoned solely because their owners have set them aside for three years.

The federal district court has issued an injunction ordering the state Controller to cease this practice.

Despite the injunction and despite the clear instructions of the federal district court to redesign the program to comply with the due process clause of the Bill of Rights, the administration makes it very clear through this budget that it intends to continue looting and pillaging the property of Californians to the tune of $709 million this year.

The Controller maintains that he needs an appropriation to fulfill the mandate of the court to notify rightful owners that their property is being seized and liquidated. Funny, the Controller has had no trouble – without any appropriation by the legislature – to pay private bounty hunters tens of millions of dollars to seize private property directly out of the unclaimed properties fund – but he won’t spend a penny to locate the rightful owners without an additional appropriation.

So the appropriation in this bill is unnecessary. And it is a tiny fraction of the tens of millions of dollars that are being paid out every year to seize people’s property.

But that’s not the big problem. The big problem is -- and I’m directly quoting from documents filed by plaintiffs in the lawsuit just five days ago –

SB 86 makes no “provision for publication notice in the form prescribed by the United States Supreme Court.”

Here is what the attorney for the plaintiffs said in a filing with the district Court on Thursday, referring specifically to the legislation now before us: “Because any such measure must be approved by this Court in an adversarial proceeding in which the Plaintiffs would have an opportunity to object, I expected the Defendants to work with me to craft regulations that I could support before this Court. But despite the passage of two and one half months since the Injunction Order issued June 1, 2007, counsel for Defendants have never contacted me to seek my input or cooperation in correcting the program….. and the Controller declined to provide a copy of draft legislation to the Northern District Court or to discuss the specifics of how the legislation will render the Controller’s administration of the UPL Constitutional.”

I’ll put it more simply: This measure is a sham. The fact that the budget anticipates collecting $709 million this budget year from looting safe deposit boxes makes it obvious that the state has no intention of complying with the court order.

The administration is in a Catch 22 position with respect to this program and the budget: the more the state complies with the due process clause of the Constitution and the federal court order enforcing the Constitution, the less money the state takes in. It is obvious from their own numbers in this budget and their own behavior in the wake of the federal court injunction that they have no intention of seriously reforming this looting of the heirlooms and life savings of Californians.