Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's administration has decided to postpone formally releasing the latest bad news in the ongoing state budget mess until it can pair it with a proposal to clean it up.
Administration officials had been set to release their formal estimate on the current size of the budget's gap between revenues and spending this afternoon.
But H.D. Palmer, a spokesman for the governor's Department of Finance, said the release would be postponed until next Wednesday, to coincide with Schwarzenegger calling the Legislature into special session to deal with the deficit - and the governor's unveiling of his proposals to close the gap.
"We decided we wanted to do it in one unified package, Palmer said, "the size of the problem and the scope of the solution."
The problem's size has been variously put at anywhere from $10 billion to $12.5 billion by various officials, including Schwarzenegger. That's triple the size of the deficit estimated by the administration a few weeks ago, when the state was issuing $5 billion in short-term borrowing notes.
In meetings with different interest groups this week, Schwarzenegger has indicated his proposed solution will be deep cuts in virtually every state-financed endeavor, from schools to prisons to health care, along with an increase in the sales tax rate.
Schwarzenegger has said he wants a special legislative session because the deficit is likely to grow larger the longer it takes to deal with it. But more than a quarter of the current Legislature's members will be termed out at the end of November, meaning that any solution determined by these lawmakers will have to be found by then. Assuming they don't work weekends or holidays, that gives them 12 business days this month to work on it.
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