California's Constitution starts with the declaration that "all people are by nature free and independent and have inalienable rights."

It goes downhill from there.

Spanning 157 pages, the state constitution delves into such topics as permits for gill nets, licensing of alcoholic beverages and the hiring of private architects. By the time it gets to the final article that, among other things, bans the cloning of human beings, the constitution resembles a giant kielbasa stuffed with years of special-interest ballot amendments.

Serious consideration is now being given to scrapping this constitutional sausage, or at least seriously revamping it. Even before lawmakers and the governor produced the Budget Calamity of 2008, a San Francisco-based business group was advocating the creation of a constitutional convention that could help enact reforms to the budget process and general governance.

"Drastic times call for drastic measures," wrote Jim Wunderman, head of the Bay Area Council, in an Aug. 21 column in the San Francisco Chronicle that kicked off the debate. "It is our duty to declare that our California government is not only broken, it is destructive to our future."

Since penning his column, Wunderman and the Bay Area Council, which represents the CEOs of Google, Yahoo, Chevron and other Bay Area businesses, say they've been flooded with responses from concerned citizens. Many people sense that traditional routes of reform – going to the voters with single-topic ballot propositions – will only place Band-Aids on a government that produces late budgets and fiscal mismanagement. Stronger medicine is needed.

I sensed this populist spirit recently while visiting my community garden. Unprompted, a fellow gardener, Megan Fidell, stopped digging weeds and asked what I thought about a constitutional convention. Fidell said she'd read about the proposal and had since been chatting it up with friends and neighbors.

"We have to try something different," Fidell said. "The bind we are in is by adding things one at a time. I'm not sure that, by retracting things one at time, we can ever reverse our problems."

Although the idea seems radical to some, California's founding fathers spelled out provisions for a constitutional convention when they signed the constitution in 1849.

Article 18, Section 2 states that, upon a two-thirds vote, lawmakers "may submit at a general election the question whether to call a convention to revise the Constitution. If the majority vote yes on that question, within 6 months the Legislature shall provide for the convention."

Actually, there are several ways California could convene a constitutional convention. If lawmakers didn't want to place the proposal on the ballot, citizens could pass an initiative that would amend the constitution and allow a convention to be called directly. A subsequent initiative could then convene the convention and create a process for selecting delegates. Any proposed reforms that sprung from the convention would then go back to voters for ratification.

G. Alan Tarr, director of the Rutgers University Center for State Constitutional Studies, says that dozens of states have held constitutional conventions since the 1960s. Although none has convened them by popular vote, he said, "California is always on the forefront of this stuff."

According to Tarr, several states started revamping their constitutions in the 1960s after courts ruled that legislative districts needed to be roughly equal in population. In dealing with these "one man, one vote" rulings, states used conventions to enact other constitutional reforms. These ranged from addressing inequities in taxation to removing prohibitions on state lotteries.

In 1962, the California Legislature created a special commission to clean up some of the 330 amendments that voters and lawmakers had added to the state constitution since 1880.

The constitutional revision commission did some good work, streamlining a document that desperately needed nips and tucks. But after lawmakers disbanded the commission in 1974, the reform effort died. The revisions commission was briefly revived in 1994, but lawmakers didn't act on its recommended reforms.

Call associate editor Stuart Leavenworth, (916) 321-1185.