The 377 pages of Governor Schwarzenegger’s calendar that were released Wednesday paint a picture of a governor in high demand, but the documents still leave a lot of questions about who actually met with him, and why.

The documents that chronicle his meetings and appointments were released to the California First Amendment Coalition (CFAC), which had filed a request for them after the expansion of public records law sparked by Prop 59 last month.

CFAC executive director Peter Scheer says he credits the governor for the release, but says that there are a lot of follow-up questions to be asked. That’s because many of the entries are vague.

Some highlights of what can be discerned about Schwarzenegger’s meetings in his first year:

* There were numerous meetings with the presidents and CEOs of major corporations, including Wal-Mart, Target, Bank of America, and Safeway.

* There were also meetings that will raise some eyebrows about connections to fundraising. The governor met with Stanley Zax, chairman of Zenith Insurance Company, just two days before Zenith sent the governor a $100,000 campaign check. Zenith is also one of California’s largest workers comp insurance companies. Schwarzenegger also met with the CEO of ChevronTexaco, Dave O’Reilly, a few weeks after the company sent in its own $100,000 check.

* There are a lot of PR-type appointments and meetings, including some to film campaign commercials and others for national TV appearances.

* And a small, but interesting, anecdote: the only meeting ever recorded in the calendar between the governor and the second-in-command, Lt. Governor Cruz Bustamante, was on October 23, 2003. Is it possible the two men have never met since?

For years, the Capitol community has jumped into budget season each January with two documents: a lengthy overview of the governor’s budget (known as the summary or the “A-pages”), and the actual budget itself, some 1400 pages at last count.

Well, not any longer. In January, Governor Schwarzenegger’s budget will be released only on the Internet.

This morning, budget staffers and the web-design company hired to make this all happen sat down with members of the Capitol press corps to show how it will all work. This is the second year of weaning policy wonks off the big print document; last year, only the Budget Summary was published, with a CD-ROM of the entire budget inside the back cover.

The governor’s team says the old print versions cost some $600,000 a year. And while the startup of the cyber-budget won’t be much cheaper this year (about $450,000), it’s estimated that the savings will increase in the next couple of years, cutting the cost by about two-thirds.

The facts were all well and fine with reporters this morning. But most of us simply wanted to know this: will the state website be so overloaded by the public on the day of the budget release that we won’t be able to write our stories?

As they say, stay tuned. Some of this will be about whether the technology really works. But other parts of this debate will be about dragging some of us in the news business into a brave new world…

A new state audit of how Caltrans has handled the replacement of portions of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge points the finger of blame squarely back at the state agency itself.

State Auditor Elaine Howle concludes that total cost estimates on all seismic retrofit bridge projects (statewide) have increased $3.2 billion since April 2001.

A full $930 million of that cost overrun is due to efforts for the so-called “signature design” of the Bay Bridge’s eastern span.

You’ll remember that last week, the Schwarzenegger administration moved to scrap that design, and replace it with a simple– and some would say less visually exciting– design, which they say will lessen the cost of the project.

You can read the auditor’s new report for yourself on her website, and my colleague at KQED, Erika Kelly, will be reporting on this later today and tomorrow morning on The California Report.

Some highlights of the new audit:

* Caltrans did not have a risk management plan for the Bay Bridge project, and had no way to adequately track problems when they arose

* Caltrans failed to keep both the Legislature and federal highway officials apprised of the financial problems with the Bay Bridge project, even when the auditor says they “should have known that the program was over budget.”

Arnold Schwarzenegger appears ready to hand over what every governor since George Deukemejian has fought to keep private: his daily schedule of meetings and appointments.

If you haven’t followed this closely, some background is in order: a legal battle that ended in the California Supreme Court in 1991 has effectively kept the media, and the public at large, from seeing the governor’s calendar for years. But after the passage of Proposition 59 last month, the California First Amendment Coalition (CFAC) filed a formal request with Schwarzenegger, claiming the new law removed any legal barrier to public access.

Schwarzenegger and his advisers seemingly agreed. Now, the CFAC’s executive director, Peter Scheer, says the governor’s office has informed him the documents will be released this Wednesday.

Scheer says he’s been told there are some 1,000 pages being turned over, documents that reportedly will also be made available for Capitol reporters to review in Sacramento (though the governor’s press office hasn’t responded to a request for confirmation of this).

So what will we glean from Schwarzenegger’s calendar? No one really knows. It may go a long way toward answering the question of which interest groups have the governor’s ear on any given day… and it could provide a glimpse into how the state’s most powerful elected official spends his time.

Those are the words of the governor’s new director of finance, Tom Campbell, who started an hourlong session with several reporters this afternoon by sharing this bit of honesty: he now projects the coming year’s deficit at $8.1 billion dollars.

If you’re keeping score, that’s higher than the projection made just last month by Legislative Analyst Elizabeth Hill, who put the shortfall at $6.7 billion.

Campbell’s wide-ranging discussion of the budget and the state’s financial problems was noteworthy for its candor and thoughtfulness, but also for how the former legislator was careful not to get out in front of Governor Schwarzenegger, who Campbell says still hasn’t made the final call on many issues.

The former legislator and business school dean pledged to avoid a budget rife with “gimmicks”, though some may still take exception with his definition (example: he does not consider borrowing money from Proposition 42’s transportation funds a gimmick).

Some of the other highlights of Campbell’s peek into the budget, and into the way Schwarzenegger works:

* His larger-than-expected deficit number is partly based on the new lawsuit challenging plans to borrow money for the payment to state worker’s pension plans.

* The governor’s budget will likely include “restrictions” on the rate of growth of many state programs. And he is proposing, at least for now, that all state agencies take an equal cut in money they receive from the General Fund.

* Discussions are still underway with education leaders about whether more than $1 billion of unanticipated education money should be diverted. This, by the way, has the potential to be a major flashpoint in early budget battles. Campbell says the governor has not made a final decision on what to do.

* What has surprised him the most after 2 weeks on the job? “What I most was surprised about was the autopilot [nature of the budget], the fact that so much of what is spent is programmed by formulas.”

* Since taking the job, Campbell has spent 3-4 hours a day with Schwarzenegger going over budget issues and ideas. He says the governor is a man with a “great interest in detail.” And in a lighthearted moment, he described how a budget staffer came in on her birthday, how everyone sang “Happy Birthday”, and how the governor asked if there was a cake from the Finance Department. Campbell said, somewhat sheepishly, there was one… right after that.

Republican Steve Poizner spent more than $7 million dollars in a losing race for the state Assembly. And much of it was the Silicon Valley’s tech executive’s own money.

That was the end of the story, until now.

Governor Schwarzenegger has just announced that on January 1st, he will appoint the 47-year-old Poizner to the state Public Utilities Commission. The PUC has been, and will continue to be, at the epicenter of battles over the state’s energy policy.

The resume for Poizner released by the governor’s office is long on accomplishments in the high-tech industry, but virtually silent on Poizner’s experience in energy policy, or knowledge of California’s ongoing energy problems.

In contrast, Schwarzenegger also announced the appointment of Democrat Dian Grueneich of Berkeley, who is described as having 25 years of experience in “energy efficiency and environmental policy and law.”

Critics will likely raise questions as to whether it’s coincidence that one of the GOP legislative candidates the governor campaigned for the hardest is now being given a political appointment.

The first formal investigation into allegations of wrongdoing hovering by Secretary of State Kevin Shelley is complete.

Today’s report from State Auditor Elaine Howle focuses on where Shelley spent millions of dollars in federal election reform money, money from the Help America Vote (HAVA) program. You can read Howle’s audit yourself on her website. The bottom line: Howle says Shelley was responsible for “poor management” of the grants, and she confirms that some of the money was paid to consultants to attend, or participate in, partisan political events.

The report is the subject of much chatter at the state Capitol, and the new chairperson of the Joint Legislative Audit Committee, Assemblymember Nicole Parra, now says she will convene a formal hearing into the Shelley/HAVA matter on January 11th.

We’ll have a full report on the audit, and what happens next, on Friday morning’s edition of The California Report.

That’s how many Californians voted on November 2nd… the largest number of voters in California history, according to final figures from the office of Secretary of State Kevin Shelley.

That total, almost 12.6 million voters, equates into 76.04% of the state’s registered voters. Officials say, however, it’s not a record percentage-wise; in 1980, 77.24% of registered voters turned out as former governor Ronald Reagan defeated incumbent President Jimmy Carter.

Final election results can be seen later today on the Secretary of State’s website. Also of note in the final tallies: the rising influence of independent voters, those registered as “decline to state.” While Democrats still are on top (43% of registered voters versus 34.7% registered as Republican), decline-to-states are now 17.7% of the registered electorate. That’s up almost five percent since 1999.

It appears the Schwarzenegger administration will now have to answer one of the legal questions left over from the Gray Davis budget plan: can the state sell bonds to cover the annual amount it pays into worker pension funds without a vote of the people?

At issue are $929 million in pension obligation bonds. The bonds would be a way to save money in the short-term by borrowing the cash for the state’s annual contribution to the pension funds.

In 2003, the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association sued the Davis administration, arguing that the California Constitution forbids the state from borrowing more than $300,000 for current operating expenses without a vote of the people.

The Jarvis group, however, dropped the lawsuit last year. And at least one critic, GOP Senator Tom McClintock, accused them at the time of cozying up to the popular governor… at the expense of the state’s Constitution.

Today, the Pacific Legal Foundation and the Fullerton Association of Concerned Taxpayers picked up the fight with a lawsuit filed in Sacramento. They say that even though the governor reworked the bond deal first pitched by Davis, the bonds are still illegal.

Schwarzenegger’s budget spokesman, H.D. Palmer, disagrees. He says the problem with the Davis bonds was that they were being paid back with actual bond proceeds, whereas the Schwarzenegger bonds will be paid back from the state’s General Fund.

Nonetheless, the legal challenge leaves some very big questions over a large chunk of money needed to fill the state’s still-deep deficit hole.

While California’s debate over gay marriage will begin in earnest next month with proposed legislation at the Capitol, the state’s political watchdog has already weighed in.

The state Fair Political Practices Commission (FPPC) ruled this morning that as far as campaign finance laws are concerned, registered domestic partners are, in fact, “spouses” when it comes to the state’s Political Reform Act.

In summary, the issue arose after a candidate for the Solana Beach City Council (San Diego County) wanted to know the impact of the soon-to-be-enforced state law expanding the rights and obligations of domestic partners. Candidates and campaigns often must disclose exactly who’s related to whom when it comes to where money goes, and where it came from… thus the need to know whether a domestic partner was, in these cases, also a “spouse.”

This morning, the FPPC voted 4-1 to include domestic partners as “spouses”. This, of course, does nothing to answer the question in the larger battle over gay marriage… but expect much to be made of it, by both sides, in the coming days.