And now the fun really begins.

The Legislature returns from a month-long summer recess this week with hundreds of bills, many of them highly controversial, still awaiting action before the Sept. 9 adjournment.

The recess itself was unusual, since in recent years the Legislature has remained in session through the summer due to budget stalemates. This year, with a budget – albeit a very shaky one – in place, the Capitol's denizens can concentrate on bills.

That means renewing traditional end-of-session follies. Hundreds of lobbyists will battle over high- dollar issues, and legislators will cash in with fundraising events – an average of at least five every working day.

Fittingly, perhaps, the Legislature's return coincides with the supposedly final vote of the new Citizens Redistricting Commission on legislative and congressional maps for the 2012 elections and beyond.

New maps mean some incumbents will be fighting for their political lives next year while others will be maneuvering to ascend the political food chain, thus making late-session campaign fundraising even more frantic than usual.

Late-session bills tend to be controversial and/or involve taking money from someone and giving it to someone else, which is fertile ground for political fundraising.

Take, for example, Assembly Bill 52, which may be the single most contentious of the hundreds of still- pending measures – subjecting the multibillion-dollar health insurance industry's premiums to direct regulation by the state insurance commissioner.

Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones, backed by labor and liberal groups, is pushing the measure. Assemblyman Mike Feuer, D-Los Angeles, has moved the bill through the Assembly and one Senate committee but still has a ways to go. The health insurance industry, with help from employers and business groups, is trying to kill it. Both factions are prodigious campaign contributors.

AB 52 typifies many of the late-session clashes, which tend to pit Democratic constituent groups, such as unions, trial lawyers, consumer activists and environmentalists, against business interests, which often label the former's measures as "job killers."

Other measures of the genre would affect workers' compensation payments, workplace rules (such as requiring hotels to use fitted sheets) and land use (such as inhibiting Wal-Mart's expansion). But there are also controversies that don't fit into that category, such as Assembly Speaker John A. Pérez's measure to disincorporate Vernon, a tiny city in his district that he says is consumed by corruption.

But those are only the bills now on the agenda. Lurking in the background are measures that will suddenly appear, as if by magic, in the final days, such as an environmental exemption for a new professional football arena in downtown Los Angeles.

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Call The Bee's Dan Walters, (916) 321-1195. Back columns, www.sacbee.com/walters

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