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Sacramento Bee Columnist Daniel Weintraub

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February 28, 2006

Perata blasts preschool ads

State Senate Leader Don Perata says he believes it was wrong for a state commission headed by Hollywood director Rob Reiner to use public funds to promote universal preschool at the same time that Reiner was privately pushing a ballot measure that seeks to accomplish that goal.

“I think it’s a legitimate concern,” Perata told the Bee’s Capitol bureau this morning.

Perata joins several other politicians, mostly Republicans so far, who have questioned the $23 million ad campaign sponsored by the First Five Commission, which was created and funded by a 1998 initiative that increased tobacco taxes to pay for children’s programs.

Reiner was the major backer of that proposal and is now sponsoring Prop. 82 on the June ballot, which would raise taxes to pay for voluntary preschool for every 4-year-old in California. The ads paid for by the First Five commission started running just as Reiner's allies were hitting the streets to gather signatures for his preschool measure.

When he first saw the ads last fall, Perata said, he was suspicious because they employed the same tag phrase – preschool for all – that was the slogan for the initiative. He said he asked his staff at the time, “How can they get away with that?”

“It wasn’t even cleverly disguised. It was just blatant. I didn’t know then and I still don’t know how that happened, how was it allowed to happen…If I did that they would hang me by my thumbs.

“It was very troubling to me.”

Perata said the $23 million that was spent on the campaign could “do a lot of creative and important things for children.” He said he will consider backing efforts to try to redirect the money set aside for advertising by the initiative that created the commission to programs instead.

“There’s something wrong we should fix,” he said.

Separately, Perata said, he has all but decided to withdraw his endorsement of Prop. 82, which he said he made without doing an extensive enough review of the measure. He now believes it is “fatally flawed” because, lacking a means test, it would direct too many resources to families who already can afford preschool and not enough to the poor, and it has the potential to put out of business private and nonprofit preschools that are doing a good job.

Here is a link to the Bee's first story about the ads on Dec. 19 2005.