Sep 21, 2008 10:23 pm US/Pacific
Schwarzenegger To Sign State Budget Monday
SACRAMENTO (CBS 5 / AP) ―
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Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger speaks about the state budget with reporters in Sacramento Friday.
CBS
California's budget stalemate was set to end Monday with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's signing of a compromise $143 billion plan into law.
Though it handily passed both the state Assembly and Senate on Friday night, lawmakers agree it does little to address the state's long-term fiscal problems.
Throughout the state's record-setting budget impasse, Schwarzenegger often said his goal was to bring structural reform to California so elected officials don't simply keep "kicking the can down the alley."
They kicked the can anyway.
After three months of debate over tax increases, elected officials this year are resorting to accounting tricks and cuts to health care and education to fill the state's $15.2 billion shortfall. The result means partisan fighting will resume in January when the governor unveils the 2009-10 budget.
"Within 100 days we have to roll out another budget," said Assembly Minority Leader Mike Villines, R-Clovis.
Lawmakers on Friday gave in to Schwarzenegger's demands for a more robust rainy day fund and removed a provision to borrow from working Californians.
In a Saturday radio address, Schwarzenegger said the $143 billion budget he has agreed to sign next week accomplishes great things in delivering a stronger savings mechanism and granting the governor authority to make cuts when revenues drop unexpectedly.
Still, the compromise budget left in questionable maneuvers used to inflate state receipts.
And it remains uncertain if voters will agree to let the state borrow $10 billion from future lottery revenues in the face of a national credit crunch. Under the compromise plan, the state would use that money to help bridge future deficits.
Schwarzenegger said that both the $10 billion lottery plan and changes to the state's rainy day fund will likely be placed before voters in June.
If the lottery ballot measure doesn't pass, "we start next year with about an $8 billion hole," Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata, D-Oakland, said. "And there's just no way to fill that without revenue."
The impasse dragged on because of partisan ideology. Republicans opposed any tax increase, while Democrats sought to combine budget cuts with higher taxes on corporations and the wealthiest Californians. Schwarzenegger proposed a temporary 1 percent increase in the state sales tax that would fall below the current rate after three years.
During negotiations, the administration said Republicans tried to borrowing their way out. In the past, lawmakers have looked to borrowing rather than address California's boom-and-bust revenue cycle, in which cash flows can fluctuate wildly from year to year because a large portion of income is from capital gains taxes.
This year, Schwarzenegger publicly stated that he refused to borrow from cities and counties, public transportation projects or take from people's paychecks. However, legislative leaders said the administration had agreed in private negotiations to some of that borrowing in the plan the governor threatened to veto.
In the end, the budget largely avoided borrowing from local government and transportation but replaced the money with revenue the state hopes to collect from early tax collections.
"Unfortunately, the Legislature was not able to make the hard decisions to end our structural deficit and I will continue working with them on that problem until we get that done," Schwarzenegger said in his radio address.
The Republican governor lamented that this year's record budget impasse was exacerbated by the fact that GOP lawmakers didn't want to raise taxes in an election year.
"There were legislators that have admitted yes, we need to go and increase ... taxes, but we can't go back to our districts because there's an election coming up," Schwarzenegger said.
Republicans are now declaring victory in the fight against tax increases. They expressed confidence they will be able to navigate next year's multibillion dollar shortfall without asking businesses and taxpayers for money.
"Let's reopen some of that waste, fraud and abuse," Villines said. "Can we find that? Can we restructure? Can we maybe think about offshore royalties that businesses and oil companies would pay?"
Villines suggested the state could collect on oil production profits if the state allowed offshore drilling a proposal Schwarzenegger has opposed despite his support for Republican presidential candidate John McCain, who supports offshore drilling.
Meanwhile, Democrats, who hold a majority in both houses of the Legislature, renewed calls for lowering the state's two-thirds vote for passing budgets. California, Arkansas and Rhode Island are the only three states in the nation with such a high threshold. Assembly Speaker Karen Bass said she hoped to form a tax commission to review the state's antiquated tax system.
At the end of the fight, Schwarzenegger and lawmakers agreed the result isn't pretty.
Schwarzenegger got lawmakers to remove a plan to collect an extra 10 percent of workers' income tax in advance and repay it in 2010, but he allowed them to leave a similar proposal for taxpayers who file quarterly to pay more in the first half of the year. The budget will also collect from high-wage earners and corporations early.
The budget also changes accounting rules so that the state could count $1.9 billion of next year's tax revenue toward the current fiscal year.
Analysts have called the lottery proposal flawed because it assumes that the state can dramatically increase ticket sales in a few years by increasing prize payouts and modernizing the game. Under the current plan, lottery revenues would no longer go to toward education, but used to help pay down state debt.
"The administration makes overly optimistic estimates about the potential growth in lottery sales and profits," the Legislative Analyst's Office wrote in May, when the governor introduced the idea.
Health care advocates also expressed concern that the rainy day proposal will lead to further cuts for low-income families, seniors and the disabled.
Anthony Wright, executive director of Health Access California, a statewide health care consumer advocacy coalition, said in a statement: "This rainy day fund will siphon funds from existing services like health and education, making the budget squeeze even worse."
(© 2009 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)