When last we spoke with Dianna Aguilar, she was worried. Aguilar runs the American River Parkway Foundation, a nonprofit organization that uses hundreds of volunteers to clean trash and debris from the public greenbelt that follows the river from Folsom to where it joins the Sacramento about two miles from the state Capitol.

Now, Aguilar has gone from worried to deeply concerned. Panic might be next. She simply can't believe what she's seeing — or not seeing — from the California Legislature.

Unless the Legislature acts by the end of its session next week, Aguilar's foundation will have to start paying its volunteers a state-mandated wage Jan. 1. And if that happens, the Great American River Clean Up scheduled for Sept. 20 will probably be the last of its kind.

Aguilar is expecting 1,200 volunteers to come out for the fall cleanup. She will provide them with trash bags, gloves, hand sanitizer, T-shirts and water. But no money.

"If they were all to be paid," Aguilar says of her volunteers, "we would have to close our doors. There is no way we could survive." The same would be true for groups all over California that rely on volunteers and get some of their funding from the government. But so far, there is no sign that lawmakers are taking the issue seriously.

This might sound like a bureaucratic mix-up. People want to volunteer their time, but the state says they must be paid, so they can't work at all.

But this is no screw-up. It is the intended result of policies adopted by the Democrats who control the Legislature, lawmakers who are more concerned about union politics than the communities they are supposed to represent.

Aguilar is a Democrat. But she says she can't believe how shortsighted the legislators from her party have become.

"I'm flabbergasted," she told me last week. "I think we are forgetting the whole point of volunteering."

The problem stems from a state law that requires all employees on public works projects to be paid what is known as the "prevailing wage," which usually means the union wage for a particular trade in the region where the job is being done.

A few years ago, the Legislature and then-Gov. Gray Davis broadened the definition of "public works" to include not just big projects such as highways and prisons but any project that receives any public money.

Soon, unions around the state started filing complaints alleging that it was a violation of this law for nonprofits that got government grants to use volunteers. Anyone who worked on those projects, the unions claimed, would have to be paid the prevailing wage, even if they wanted to work for free.

The state's workplace regulators agreed. A Redding nonprofit was fined for using student volunteers to help clear a streambed of debris; the students had received class credit instead of wages. Other groups around the state were put on notice: Use volunteers at your peril.

In 2004, the Legislature stepped in. After much debate about the definition of a "volunteer," lawmakers passed an exemption that covered the truly public-spirited while protecting laborers who might, hypothetically, be coerced by their employers to work some hours for nothing. But that exemption expires at the end of this year. If it is not extended, volunteers and the groups that rely on them will be back in legal jeopardy.

Earlier this year, a Senate committee killed a bill that would have extended the volunteer exemption indefinitely. An alternative measure that would grant another three-year reprieve is pending. But opponents insisted that the bill include a study to determine if groups are abusing the volunteer exemption or if employers are using the exemption as a loophole to cut labor costs.

The state agency that would be in charge of that study estimated that it would cost $4 million to complete. Nobody believes that, but because of the state's precarious fiscal condition, the Senate is giving special scrutiny to any proposal that would cost more than $50,000.

So, the volunteers bill, Assembly Bill 2537, has been shelved in the Senate Appropriations Committee with no further action scheduled.

Daniel Curtin, a union official and director of the California Council of Carpenters, believes the state has the legal leeway to exempt volunteers from the wage law without legislation. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's lawyers disagree, but Curtin has written to the governor urging him to overrule the lawyers and fix the problem himself.

Clearly, it would be better if the Legislature did it, since that would end any doubt about the matter. But if lawmakers fail to do the right thing, Schwarzenegger should take Curtin's advice and order his appointees to exempt volunteers from the rule. Then he should dare the unions to sue him and the groups that are trying to use public-spirited citizens to do good works for their communities.

— Daniel Weintraub writes for the Sacramento Bee. E-mail him at dweintraub@sacbee.com.