It’s 3 days later after the bonds were approved for the November ballot and we still don’t know what the language is that will be in them. But I’m sure further ‘tweaking’ will make them just right, that all the dollars for levees will go to levees and transportation money will go for roads. The silver lining 
of the whole event in the early Friday hours was the element of Pay-As-You-Go that made it through, concerning levees. This will be controlled by the Governor through DWR and I’m confident that this 1/2 Billion dollar appropriation will go well under their oversight, unlike the unknown that will occur when the flood bond dollars will have to be appropriated by this Legislature as projects move along. I can only imagine the priorities besides actual levee work This Body will spend it on.
We all know there is a bunch of money, unexpected ‘new revenue’ under this current budget cycle, [due to things like holding the line on taxes and regulations, improved workers comp costs, letting people spend their own car tax dollars themselves how they like, that have helped this economy flourish under this Governor] $3, maybe $4 billion of available dollars that can carry into next budget year and solve some of our debt.
So why the huge rush to pass this $37 billion of bond debt in the wee hours? Again, no deadline to worry about. The May budget Revise is due out this week though, with an update of the spending plan proposal for 06-07. Could it be that this Legislature wanted to get all this infrastructure stuff done with all bonding, move the issue out of the way, and save the ‘new cash’ for new pet spending?
Hmmm. When you have debt and new ‘one time’ money it’s kinda smart to do one time things with it.
Currently we owe the Prop 42 gas tax fund more than $2 billion for past borrowing. What if we pay that off first with this newfound money?
It would be a double positive. We would eliminate a chunk of debt hovering over us and our credit rating and put a huge kickstart of interest free dollars, [coupled with no new borrowing/stealing of Prop 42 dollars], into transportation projects that are now waiting in the pipeline and maybe even a few new ones. We can’t spend it any faster than that in the nearterm because of the time it takes to get projects going. Looks like we don’t need quite so much bond so soon…do we? The Pay As You Go approach would work beautifully.
So again, why the hurry for the bonds that still have not been fleshed out with language so we know what we actually voted on? We could still be working on bonds for the out-year spending for transportation and levees through this summer and get it right.
On the way down to the Capitol this morning, at one of the stoplights in the district, there were four chickens [symbolically, one for each bond?] They actually seemed to wait for the light to change green going their way and then clucked across to the other side safely. Maybe we could’ve waited for the green light on this commitment of 30+ years that will nearly double state debt, and done so safely.
We’ll see after the numbers come out of the May Revise when the cackling for new spending with all the ‘new money’ starts anew since all the infrastructure stuff is now ‘solved’!