Jul 18, 2008 7:17 am US/Pacific
Gov's Office Responds To 'Time Off' Report
SACRAMENTO (CBS13) ―
Records obtained by CBS13 reveal how little time Governor Schwarzenegger spent in Sacramento last year. Now the Governor's aides are coming to his defense.
On Thursday, the Governor's press secretary called Governor Schwarzenegger the hardest working governor in the history of California.
"The Governor never takes a day off. Every single morning he gets on his exercise bike. He reads the news clips. He reads his briefing. He's calling us. We're calling him. So I can tell you by experience of working every Saturday and Sunday for this administration that he also works every day," the Governor's Press Secretary Aaron McClear told CBS13 News.
But records obtained by CBS13 show that in 2007 Governor Schwarzenegger took a healthy number of personal days and very rarely spent a full day in Sacramento.
The Governor's calendar shows that between January and November of 2007, in a 10 month period, the Governor was in Sacramento just seven full days. He was in Sacramento 103 partial days. And in those 10 months, Gov. Schwarzenegger took 92 personal days.
The governor's aides are defending his schedule. They say in those 10 months, Schwarzenegger spent more than 1300 hours in Sacramento and attended more than 200 meetings here.
They say the Governor, like many Californians, is a commuter. They say he boards his private jet in Southern California in the morning, flies to Sacramento, works in his office in the Capitol then gets back on his plane and flies home to be with his family. That, they say, is one reason why he doesn't spend more time here.
"The Governor prides himself that he's not stuck behind a desk here at the capitol everyday; that's not his thing. He loves the action. The action is elsewhere, it's not behind his desk," explained McClear.
The Governor's spokesman also said the numbers in the CBS13 report were "made up."
For the record, those numbers came directly from the Governor's official calendar, and they were tabulated and reviewed by three members of the CBS13 research team.
RE Graswich first reported this story in "The Scoop."
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