The Legislature sent eight budget bills last week to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger as part of an emergency session to deal with the state's $19.9 billion deficit. Democrats say their entire package would cut the deficit by $5 billion, while Republicans charge that it would have substantially less impact.
The Senate on Thursday is scheduled to consider a major piece of their solution, a complex $1.8 billion gas-tax swap. Democrats removed provisions scaling back corporate tax breaks in hopes of getting the governor's signature.
Assembly Republicans have criticized one bill in particular -- Assembly Bill X8 2, the omnibus spending reduction bill that the Legislature sent to the governor. Democrats say it saves the state $2.2 billion, but Republicans disagree. (Nearly all Republicans voted against the bill, primarily because it contained cuts to corrections.)
The problem is that the bill spells out unallocated cuts in a 2010-11 budget that does not yet exist. Because you cannot cut spending without approving spending first, the bill serves as a marker for what the Legislature wants to do once it actually approves a budget plan. But it won't change how a single dime is spent until the 2010-11 budget is enacted.
Republicans have derided it as an "intent" bill that does not actually slash the budget. Indeed, the committee analysis states that the bill "stipulates to reduce expenditures by $2.2 billion," rather than enacts or reduces, while the left-leaning California Budget Project says the bill "adopted 'intent' language" on prison reductions.
"I don't think you can call that anything but an intent bill," said Assemblyman Roger Niello, R-Fair Oaks, a former Assembly budget committee vice chairman.
Assemblywoman Noreen Evans, D-Santa Rosa, chairwoman of the Assembly Budget Committee, said last week that Democrats wanted to approve cuts now without adopting the entire budget. She acknowledged that the bill itself doesn't cut spending, although she said it stakes out where the Legislature has predetermined that reductions will occur.
"We cannot make cuts to a budget that hasn't been adopted," Evans said last week. "But we can state what we want those cuts to be. ... This starts to take a big bite out of the $20 billion deficit. It also sends a message to California residents and the markets that we're serious about taking care of this deficit and tells people reliant on these services to plan ahead."
A secondary issue is how legitimate the solutions in the bill are. We already have pointed out that the governor has no intention of commuting the number of sentences of illegal immigrants that would save the state $182 million. Yet AB X8 2 assumes that he will do so.
The bill also assumes an $811 million cut in prison health care costs. The federal receiver for prison health care, J. Clark Kelso, suggested last week that the $811 million figure is only a "target."
Kelso said he would provide more details in the coming weeks, but he thinks he can save money through tighter management of overtime, managing care and improved technology. He acknowledged that he doesn't know how close the efficiencies will get to the $811 million target. That figure is more of a working backward number, since the governor set the target based on average per inmate costs in New York and is now asking the receiver to find ways to hit it.
Finally, everyone agrees that the budget package the Legislature is considering now does very little to resolve the $6.6 billion deficit the state faces in the current 2009-10 fiscal year, which ends June 30. But there essentially has been a cease-fire in the Capitol on resolving the current-year deficit in the current year.
Schwarzenegger's own budget would have resolved only $1 billion in the current fiscal year, mostly through a controversial education spending cut that Democrats will not take up. The governor's plan still would have left a $5.6 billion deficit at the end of June.
Democrats say they want to wait until the governor's May revision before they consider substantial cuts to education, health and social services. And Republicans? Their caucuses have not publicly proposed specific spending cuts, and the Assembly GOP budget vice chairman backed off a threat last week to seek cuts in the current fiscal year.
Latest posts:
About Comments
Reader comments on Sacbee.com are the opinions of the writer, not The Sacramento Bee. If you see an objectionable comment, click the "report abuse" button below it. We will delete comments containing inappropriate links, obscenities, hate speech, and personal attacks. Flagrant or repeat violators will be banned. See more about comments here.