There have been a lot of questions raised since Governor Schwarzenegger introduced his proposed 2007-2008 budget last week. First and foremost, the Governor is to be firmly commended for coming out of the gate with a verbal commitment not to raise taxes to deal with the huge overspending problem facing California state government. As most FR readers know, the Governor directed his agency and department heads to work on a state budget that cuts state spending across the board by 10% (well, actually, it was really a 10% decrease in what the anticipated budget would have been… I know, it’s confusing.)
When the proposal was unveiled, it contained in it some very "high profile" cuts that would be very impactful on Californians — two that immediately come to mind are the closing of a great number of state parks, and everyone has heard about the Governor’s proposal to grant an early releases to tens of thousands of "non-violent" felons. It was all very dramatic when announced, and definitely drove home the message that Californians all around the state were going to be negatively impacted by the "austerity plan" of the Governor.
As soon as the budget was released, I started to receive emails and calls from folks on the GOP side of things, complaining about the across-the-board style of cuts. "Things that should be cut more are not, and things that shouldn’t be cut, are being cut," said one Assemblymember to whom I spoke. To all of those people, I pushed back, saying that if the Governor was proposing a 10% across-the-board cut, Republicans need to be there. I said that I understood the politics and using the KISS technique ("keep it simple, stupid") to market the cuts.
I started to get a few suggestions from folks about alternative cuts within agencies than the ones proposed by the Governor, and thought to myself, that’s a good approach. If we could make suggestions, within the Governor’s preferred framework of the across-the-board cuts, we could strive to get the Governor and legislative Republicans, at least, on the same page.
I spoke at length with Dan Dunmoyer, the Governor’s Cabinet Secretary, a few days ago on this subject. The Governor’s office is fully committed to their 10% across the board budget. Dunmoyer told me that, "The door is open for at least hearing creative ideas on how to make 10% cuts in each department and agency as long as they achieve the same bottom line."
This is a good thing, because when I read our featured column today from Assemblyman Sam Blakeslee, which is filled with suggestions about ways to trim the State Parks budget without closing a whole slew of parks, I thought, "These make a lot of sense."
Now I am not a fiscal policy expert by any sense, but it seems that some of these alternative solutions are proving so easy for legislators to figure out that it is giving some credence to the idea that when these Departments and Agencies were pushed by the Governor’s office to come up with cuts, they found higher profile ones, that would generate more "push back" than other potential cuts that aren’t as impactful.
It seems to me that if the Republican "team" concept was working optimally, then our Republican leadership in the legislature would have been brought in to give their ideas BEFORE the introduction of the budget to the legislature. But it didn’t happen that way. (To be fair, there is apparently a time-honored tradition, which should be changed, where Governor’s do not solicit input from legislators, even of their own party, until after the initial budget is introduced.)
So now we are in this awkward position. The Governor introduces cuts to the legislature, but with many that are probably offered up by bureaucrats in order to create friction. Republican legislators now are forced to give public "push back" to the Governor of their own party, encouraging him to make changes in his proposal. In the meantime, you have the Democrat legislators who likely will nuke any meaningful cuts of government programs anyways (well, they are pro-criminal so they might like the idea of releasing non-violent felons early).
At this point, it is my hope that the Governor’s finance team takes to heart Assemblyman Blakeslee’s suggestions today, as well as others that are coming down the pike.
If we can get the Republican Governor and our Republican legislators all on one page in terms of advocating the same 10% across-the-board cuts, then we can have a real dialogue in Sacramento, highlighting the distinct differences between the two political parties. Until then, the budget mess will be extremely hard to sort through by a political expert, let alone a lay person.
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