By Timm Herdt, Ventura County Star, Calif.
Lawmakers on Monday sent a $117.5 billion spending plan to Gov. Jerry Brown, but acknowledged their work on the state budget won’t be complete until they negotiate a compromise the governor can accept.
By approving a balanced budget on straight party-line votes, members of the Assembly and Senate met their constitutional deadline to do so by June 15 — a deadline that, if missed, forces them to forfeit their pay until a budget is passed.
"We are fulfilling our constitutional obligation by submitting our vision of our budget to the executive branch," said Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de León, D-Los Angeles. "This is how our constitutional system works. This is not a monarchy."
The Legislature’s budget is based on the revenue estimates of the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office, which are about $2.3 billion higher than the estimates from Brown’s Department of Finance. As a result, the budget approved Monday includes more funding for schools, more savings and more debt repayment than does Brown’s proposal — and also about $800 million in spending on programs the governor says the state cannot afford.
De León said he and Assembly Speaker Toni Atkins, D-San Diego, met with Brown on Sunday and were scheduled to continue talks late Monday. He described the discussions as "very constructive," and predicted the budget process "will be finished very, very soon."
The key issues of contention are spending on human services programs and higher education that is not included in Brown’s budget plan. They include $409 million on child-care and preschool programs, $95 million on higher education, and increases in provider rates for long-term care facilities and developmental care centers.
Lawmakers on Monday stressed the importance of beefing up support for both early childhood education and higher education.
They said supplemental spending is especially critical for the 23-campus California State University system, which de León described as "the workhorse" of higher education in the state, which over the years has awarded bachelor’s degrees to more than 3 million Californians.
Brown’s revised budget proposes a $96 million increase over his initial plan for the University of California — a concession that caused UC officials to rescind a planned increase in tuition in each of the next three years, beginning in the fall.
But the governor proposed no additional money for CSU.
The Legislature’s plan calls for a $70 million increase for CSU that would accommodate an enrollment increase of 10,400 California students. It also calls an additional $25 million to UC, conditioned on it increasing enrollment of California students by 5,000 and freezing tuition for the next two school years.
Assemblyman Das Williams, D-Carpinteria, said that while it was important to avert the planned UC tuition increases, the result of CSU’s planned action to limit enrollment if it does not receive more money would be "more evil."
"The reality is that in the past couple years, 20,000 to 30,000 students have been turned away each year who qualify for admission under the higher education master plan," he said. "For the first time in history, we’re not admitting as many students as we made a covenant to do a generation ago."
Democratic lawmakers sought to play down the differences between the two spending plans, as Senate Budget Committee Chairman Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, noted that spending on programs other than schools between the plans is about 0.8 percent of total spending — "which is by definition a rounding error."
Leno noted the legislative analyst’s revenue forecast for the current year’s budget was also more than $2 billion higher than the governor’s forecast upon which the budget was based, but was still $3 billion short of what the actual revenues turned out to be.
Republicans lawmakers took the side of the Democratic governor. Senate Budget Committee Vice Chairman Jim Nielsen, R-Gerber, said that as GOP lawmakers considered the spending plan, "again and again and again we found ourselves as Republicans agreeing with the governor."
Sen. Jeff Stone, R-Temecula, noted that Monday’s vote was likely meaningless given that no agreement has been reached with Brown, and asked whether what he was being asked to vote upon was "a sham budget."
Leno said to suggest the Legislature’s budget is a sham is "100 percent inaccurate."
"It is real, it is true, it is constitutional," he said. "I challenge anyone to suggest otherwise."
The new fiscal year begins July 1, which means that as a practical matter Democratic legislative leaders and Brown have about 10 days to reach an agreement. If that happens, legislative budget experts said lawmakers will likely pass a second bill that will amend the one approved on Monday, allowing Brown to sign both bills to enact the coming year’s budget.
Although Brown has line-item veto authority, he could not fashion a workable plan simply by taking a blue pencil to the plan approved Monday, budget experts said. That is because its higher revenue estimates trigger constitutional provisions that would require more than $1 billion more be spent on schools and deposits into the rainy-day fund than Brown proposes, which is spending that could not be stricken with a line-item veto.
©2015 Ventura County Star (Camarillo, Calif.) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
