Olive Avenue Confidential

For anyone who appreciates the outdoors or breathing clean air, Proposition 23 — which would mainly benefit Big Oil and other polluters by suspending state air-pollution and greenhouse-gas controls — is a definite no-go.

We haven't heard all that much about Proposition 25, but it's hugely important.

California's a mess largely because the Legislature historically can't manage to reach the state's unusual two-thirds requirement to pass a budget — Sacramento's only been on-time five of the past 30 years, according to the state Secretary of State's Office.

Proposition 25 would reduce the two-thirds requirement to a simple majority, which promises to restore a bit of sanity to the process.

Proposition 26 sounds at first like a good counterbalance to Proposition 25 — if it's easier for legislators to pass a budget, maybe it should be harder for them to increase fees — but in the end, it's just another giveaway to Big Oil and Big Tobacco.

The measure would redefine corporate payments for environmental damage and other impacts on public health as taxes, which, like the budget today, require two-thirds legislative approval.

We all know how that'll turn out: Taxpayers like you and I will wind up paying billions for environmental cleanups instead of those who did the damage in the first place.

And that's why every vote counts.

JOE PIASECKI is an Annenberg Fellow with USC's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and a contributing editor for the Pasadena Weekly. He can be reached at piasecki@usc.edu.