Why Coronado Got the Bridge… John Alessio Wanted It

Under today’s rules, after the two houses of the California Legislature have each passed a budget bill for the coming year, the differences between them are resolved by referring one or the other of them to a conference committee made up of three members of each house. A conference committee may not put in the final form of the bill any expenditure that was not included in either bill. That was not true in 1961. Those committees used to meet behind closed doors in total secrecy until they agreed on a version of the bill. Then a conference committee could put anything it wanted to in the final bill, and no one would have any advance notice of what had been done until the committee report was presented on the floor of the two houses for enactment. Jesse Unruh was then the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee of the Assembly, so he was the chairman of the conference committee. When he presented the amended bill to the lower house for a final vote, he reported all the compromises the conference committee had worked out to settle the differences between the bills passed by the two houses. Then he said that the conference committee had added a few hundred thousand dollars to cover the cost of preparing and issuing a bond issue to investors to finance the design and construction of a bridge across the bay from Downtown San Diego to Coronado. Read the entire San Diego Metropolitan Magazine article here.