Although the governor called his budget compromise with the Legislature "sound" and "well thought-out," he added in a statement: "Yet, the work never ends and in the coming months we'll have to manage our resources with the utmost prudence and find more adequate funding for our roads and health care programs."

In the proclamation calling for the extraordinary session, Brown said it was needed to focus on "fixing California's roads, highways and other infrastructure." The governor's announcement noted that the state's fuel tax for transportation, which hasn't been raised since the 1990s, "is sufficient to fund only $2.3 billion of work -- leaving $5.7 billion in unfunded repairs each year."

The prominence of the word "roads" over the more generic term "transportation" in the governor's announcement was significant, given that in previous years he has favored rail, transit and other alternative modes of transportation over cars and trucks. A controversial high-speed rail project, for example, garnered the lion's share of "cap and trade" pollution credit funds while roads received relatively paltry sums.

Legislators, including Assembly Speaker Toni Atkins, D-San Diego, have been making bold pronouncements about the need to fix transportation funding, but so far no consensus plan has emerged from the statehouse. Elected officials seem hesitant to raise the gas tax for fear that voters will punish them at the polls. To counter that fear, transportation advocacy groups have been putting out information indicating that nearly 90 percent of elected officials who vote for additional transportation funding are re-elected.  

"Just because we are a bureaucracy doesn't mean we have to be bureaucratic."