State Senate budget panel makes first cuts of 2010
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Democratic state senators unveiled and pushed through committee a series of stopgap budget fixes Wednesday, including slicing state worker payroll costs by 5% and cutting hundreds of millions from the prisons’ healthcare budget.
However, the package would push back the toughest decisions – how much and where to cut from California’s schools and social services, the state’s biggest programs – until summer budget negotiations.
“This is kind of like the easy part,” said Sen. Bob Dutton (R-Rancho Cucamonga), the vice chairman of the budget panel, after the hearing.
The votes Wednesday were the first budget action since Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger called a special session to address California’s roughly $20-billion deficit last month. The actions taken represented political maneuvering as much as policymaking. They were not negotiated with the governor and were crafted to require only Democratic support, excluding legislative Republicans from the discussion.
Democrats counted $182 million in savings by asking Schwarzenegger again to commute the sentences of certain illegal immigrant inmates in order to have them deported to Mexico. Schwarzenegger was granted that authority last year, and his administration said he could save the state $182 million by doing so. But those commutations – and the savings – have not materialized. Sen. Denise Moreno Ducheny (D-San Diego), chairwoman of the budget panel, said members wanted to “hold the governor’s feet to the fire.”
Republicans balked at the plan, citing California’s “porous” border. “They’ll just be back here,” said Sen. Bob Huff (R-Diamond Bar).
Lawmakers also adopted an $811-million cut to the prisons’ healthcare budget. Health services in California’s prisons are already under control of a federal receiver, after judges ruled that the level of care provided was constitutionally inadequate.
Among the other actions taken, senators ratified a Schwarzenegger executive order last month to slice 5% from employee payroll costs, saving the state about $580 million through June 2011. And for the second year in a row, lawmakers approved suspending a slew of local programs required by the state, to save more than $230 million.
A second budget panel hearing is scheduled for Thursday. Democrats are then expected to take up the centerpiece of their midyear budget proposals: a complex gas-tax swap that would simultaneously eliminate the existing sales tax on gasoline and raise the per-gallon excise tax.
Under a plan by Schwarzenegger, drivers would pay five cents less at the pump and mass transit funding from the state would be eliminated. The Senate Democrats’ plan, details of which are still being drafted behind closed doors, would keep the price at the pump the same, while preserving some transit funding. They would do so by not eliminating the existing sales tax on diesel fuel.
-- Shane Goldmacher