CSUN University News Clippings

Last-ditch effort fails to pass state budget

(November 26, 2008)

By Jim Sanders and Kevin Yamamura

The California Legislature’s outgoing class debated, complained and pointed fingers of blame Tuesday – but in the end, it did nothing about the state’s massive budget gap.

A last-gasp effort to ease a projected $27.8 billion shortfall over 19 months ended with a whimper as both houses, voting largely along party lines, killed a $17 billion Democratic package of tax hikes and budget cuts.

California’s car tax would have tripled under the proposal, to 2 percent, reigniting a hotly controversial issue that helped spark the 2003 recall of former Gov. Gray Davis.

Funding for schools and colleges would have been sliced under the Democratic package, as would money for CalWORKs and many of the state’s neediest residents – including the aged, blind and disabled.

The lame-duck Legislature’s failure to act leaves the budget problem to the next class of lawmakers, which takes over Monday. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger plans to declare a fiscal emergency that same day, setting in motion a new special session with a 45-day deadline.

State leaders recognized their job will become all the more difficult as California budget gap widens each day, putting the state at risk of running out of cash as soon as late February.

“Of course I’m disappointed,” Assembly Speaker Karen Bass said after adjournment. “I was hoping that in the last few days of the session my (GOP) colleagues would have taken a very courageous vote.”

But Assembly Republican leader Mike Villines said the proposal voted upon Tuesday was pushed by Democrats and lacked any state spending cap, economic stimulus or adequate long-term cuts.

“All we’re saying is, if we’re going to solve the problem, let’s do the whole problem,” Villines said.

Schwarzenegger emerged from his first-floor Capitol office immediately after the Legislature adjourned and declared both parties at fault.

“There was a total failure on the Legislature’s part, and you could see it’s like a kindergarten up there, where they point fingers at each other – ‘I told you this, I told you that,’ ” Schwarzenegger said. “They did not live up to the challenge of what they ought to do.”

Tuesday’s Assembly session lasted nearly three hours, but the outcome was never in doubt – and the two bills voted upon lacked the necessary supermajority by 13 and 14 votes, respectively.

The Senate spent two hours debating and did not even vote until after the Assembly had adjourned, essentially rendering their actions symbolic. The upper house passed on a bipartisan basis two bills to cut spending for education, transit and social services.

But a third Senate bill to raise income and car taxes failed to receive a supermajority on a mostly party-line vote, canceling out the two spending-cut proposals.

Schwarzenegger said that he would not have signed the bills anyway because they did not contain an economic stimulus component. The Republican governor called for accelerated public works spending and a relaxation of certain labor laws, among other ideas, earlier this month.

Two Assembly Democrats, Julia Brownley of Santa Monica and Mike Eng of Monterey Park, had not yet returned to California from trips overseas. Three other Assembly members also were absent. In the Senate, Republican Jim Battin and Democrat Ed Vincent, both termed out, also did not attend.

The governor, who signed a $103 billion general-fund budget in September that is projected to be more than $11 billion out of balance, had harsh words for lawmakers who took international trips in the last month.

“So I’m disappointed that they never took it seriously from the beginning,” he said. “We could see that they never came home from their vacations to get in there and study.”

While Schwarzenegger tried to pin blame on the Legislature, Senate President Pro Tem-elect Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, suggested the governor also bore responsibility for the lack of a deal.

“Look, I don’t want to take big shots at the governor because I do think the governor is at least willing to try to solve the problem, but the fact of the matter is his relationship with the Republican Legislature is pretty well known,” Steinberg said. “He can’t get any votes out of them. That’s just a fact of life.”

Much of Tuesday’s debate featured Democrats accusing the GOP of lacking backbone and playing politics with empty rhetoric. Republicans fired back that Democrats were proposing to fuel the fiscal crisis by raising taxes and making insufficient cuts.

This year’s legislative session does not officially end until midnight Sunday, but Bass said she does not expect to call the outgoing class back to the floor.

The proposal Tuesday by Democrats called for $8.1 billion in tax increases, $8.1 billion in budget cuts and about $800 million in other solutions, such as fund transfers.

State workers would not necessarily have been furloughed. The proposal called for $657 million in compensation reductions over two years, but left the specifics to collective bargaining.

Schwarzenegger campaigned against the car tax in 2003 and reduced it to its former level, 0.65 percent, as one of his first acts upon taking office. Besides the car tax, projected to raise $5.7 billion from now until July 2010, the Democrats proposed to raise an additional $2.4 billion by temporarily freezing the state’s income tax tables.

Cuts proposed by the package included $4 billion to California schools over the next 19 months, including $100 million to community colleges during the current fiscal year.

Publication: Sacramento Bee