Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger wielded his veto pen to find $489 million more in cuts before signing the budget. The governor argued that he needed to create a half-billion dollar reserve, small by any standards for an $84 billion budget. The legislature had presented him with a negative reserve when it passed the budget.
Among the vetoed cuts was an additional $6.2 million to the state park system. On top of earlier reductions to the parks budget, approximately 100 of the state’s 279 parks will close after Labor Day.
It is possible some parks will not be shuttered if sponsors or partners step forward from local governments or the private sector. But corporate sponsors might force the park system and environmentalists to swallow hard in accepting such a deal. Bearing signs such as Calaveras Big Trees State Park brought to you by Blank Corporation (fill in the blank with your favorite example) may be hard for some to take. However, under such circumstances, the park would remain open.
Ironically, the parks could have benefited had the measure to allow offshore oil drilling been approved. As part of the budget package negotiated by the governor and party leaders, a forty-year ban on offshore oil drilling would have been lifted to explore oil fields off the Santa Barbara coast, producing $100 million in new revenue for the state. As reported by Timm Herdt in the Ventura County Star, environmentalists in the Santa Barbara area actually supported the oil lease measure seeing the drilling plan as temporary while achieving some long-term goals.
In the short term, the $100 million or so from the offshore oil drilling would have been available for the parks, or more importantly, for eliminating other cuts the governor made with his vetoes to health and welfare programs.
All this leads to the larger notion of re-thinking the means to meet government’s goals. The means to the ends do not have to be traditional avenues. Re-thinking government and its structure is a wise policy. The governor’s California Performance Review was on that road when it was scuttled. It’s time to bring that kind of thinking back. Mixed with some pragmatic solutions and trade-offs, California can escape from its budget hole.
UPDATE & CORRECTION: The proposal would not lift a ban on offshore drilling but would "take advantage of a specific exemption that allows for new leases if oil is leaking from an existing state field into an actively producing federal field, which is occurring in this instance."