“It’s understandable — if not forgivable — that the state Legislature would have such a hard time passing a budget. It’s tough to close a $15 billion deficit, especially when you need two-thirds of the politically polarized lawmakers to agree.

It’s baffling, however, that the Legislature would stumble over a simple bill that 99 percent of Californians would enthusiastically embrace.

Yet a measure that would allow volunteers to lend their Saturday mornings to helping build playgrounds, cut trails and clean up creeks has been hung up in committee. If the Legislature doesn’t act by the session’s end this weekend, agencies that allow volunteers on public projects would be breaking the law.

How could it be illegal to volunteer? Welcome to California. Under a bizarre interpretation of the state’s labor laws a few years back, any project using public money must pay prevailing wage even to church youth groups, service clubs and California Conservation Corps crews.

The legal risk isn’t hypothetical. The Redding-based Sacramento Watersheds Action Group was fined in 2004 over its use of student volunteers. That incident pushed the Legislature to exempt volunteers from prevailing-wage laws, but the law sunsets this year and needs renewal.

Recognizing the obvious — it happens, even in Sacramento — the state Assembly in May passed without dissent a bill, AB 2537, to extend the exemption until 2012. (It should have been made permanent, but that’s another story.)

A later Senate amendment, though, required a study of volunteers’ effects on public works projects. That study would cost money. Money’s tight. Thus the bill is on ice in the Senate Appropriations Committee.

The study is overkill anyway. Some unions fear that volunteers would steal paid jobs, or that employers might force workers to “volunteer” on projects. The first “problem” is nonsensical: The demand for public works far exceeds the money available, so the choice is not between doing a job with volunteers or with union labor, but between building a park or leaving a vacant lot in weeds. As for the potential strong-arming of volunteers, California’s labor laws already bar that kind of treatment.

No, this prevailing-wage rule wouldn’t protect workers. It would simply stand in the way of community projects like the March construction of a playground by volunteers at Redding’s Alta Mesa Park.

There’s an easy solution here: Drop the needless and costly study and simply extend the volunteer exemption. Community-minded Californians deserve no less.

And if our lawmakers can’t manage that job, it shouldn’t be hard to find a few volunteers who can.”

Of course, this is the SEIU, the same union that fought off attempts when its own office staff attempted to, you guessed it, form a local a join a union.