The California Legislature has an unfortunate habit of writing major legislation with multibillion-dollar consequences in the final hours of its annual session -- unfortunate because these sweeping decrees often backfire.

The most infamous example occurred in 1996 when an enormous overhaul of the way electric power was to be generated, priced and distributed -- the misnamed utility "deregulation" bill -- was presented to the Legislature as a fait accompli and enacted without a dissenting vote.

While its provisions satisfied special-interest "stakeholders," the bill was imbalanced and ultimately unworkable, and it led directly to a power crisis in 2000 and 2001 that pushed utilities into insolvency and left California consumers with tens of billions of dollars in extra energy costs.

Having experienced what happens with legislation that sprouts, like a mushroom, in the dark of night, politicians should be doubly wary of repeating the process. But the final days of the 2003 session are seeing frantic efforts to overhaul the workers' compensation system, whose employer-borne costs have been skyrocketing, and to bring health insurance coverage to a million or more low-income Californians.

The two issues are politically intertwined, both are incredibly complicated in political and technical terms, both are connected to the Oct. 7 recall election directed at Gov. Gray Davis, and both have multibillion-dollar impacts, especially for employers.

Tuesday was the deadline, under legislative rules, for two-house conference committees to complete their work on the two matters and present their final products, but final versions of the bills, drafted in private by a very few Democratic lawmakers, their staffs and lobbyists for favored groups, were not revealed until very late in the day. The health care legislation was approved in minutes on a straight party-line vote late in the afternoon, but the multi-bill workers' comp package wasn't released until just before 10 p.m. Dozens of lobbyists frantically leafed through thick sheaves of amendments, trying to fathom what was happening, but the package cleared its committee with only perfunctory discussion. "It was done literally in the dead of night," Sen. Charles Poochigian, R-Fresno, complained.

The politics are as complicated as the legislation itself. Democratic leaders said their workers' comp plan pares at least $5 billion a year in costs from the system that finances medical treatment and support payments for workers with job-related illnesses and injuries, and thus forestalls even greater insurance premium increases already in the works. But those whose pieces of the $25 billion-plus workers' comp pie are being threatened, especially medical care providers, are lobbying furiously to block action.

The question that looms over the workers' comp issue is whether legislators can satisfy the increasingly strident demands of employers for relief -- especially since the health care legislation would impose potentially billions of dollars in new costs on those same employers by requiring them to cover their workers, and several billion more dollars in payroll costs are on the horizon to bail out the nearly bankrupt state unemployment insurance fund. Health care costs and new unemployment insurance taxes could reach $10 billion a year.

Nor are workers' comp and health care isolated examples of the near-panic atmosphere gripping the Capitol this week. With Davis' fate uncertain, any group with a commitment from Davis to sign its priority legislation is pushing hard for enactment, even if it means drafting entirely new bills and attaching them to unrelated pieces of pending legislation.

Dozens of "gut and amend" measures are surfacing this week and one of them, ironically, echoes the infamous 1996 utility measure. It would, like the 1996 bill, promise to reduce the utility bills of Pacific Gas and Electric Co. customers as the utility emerges from bankruptcy protection through the issuance of special bonds that would have to be repaid by those same customers with interest. It's a very questionable piece of legislation that's being sprung on lawmakers by Assemblywoman Sarah Reyes, D-Fresno, and Sen. Debra Bowen, D-Marina Del Rey, without any of the usual public exposure or hearings.