California’s effort to close its $26.3 billion budget gap is stalled, at least temporarily, in the Assembly this morning as lawmakers haggle over school funding and borrowing from local cities and counties.
But even when the revisions pass — and almost all of them will — it’s not likely the budget will stay balanced for long. Even those legislators who helped put the agreement together sounded resigned Thursday to doing this all over again before the fiscal year ends next June 30.
“We’re likely to have to come back, probably in January, to deal with wherever the economy takes the budget,’’ Democrat Darrell Steinberg, the state Senate leader, told reporters.
His Republican colleague, Senate Minority Leader Dennis Hollingsworth, sounded like a man with his fingers and toes crossed for luck when he spoke to the Senate before the budget vote.
The budget agreement solves the deficit “to the extent we know the problem,” he said. “We hope this lasts, we hope to finish out the fiscal year without having to take another look at the problem.”
The state Department of Finance has been revising the budget numbers downward every month and there’s no indication that’s going to change in a hurry. The new budget has a reserve of almost $1 billion, but a couple of bad months could drop that number to zero and below.
But, as Steinberg reminded senators Thursday, at least there’s a budget deal.
“As we proceed tonight, members should reflect with some pride that we are resolving this (budget deficit), at least for now,” he said.
It wasn’t quite that simple, as Steinberg quickly discovered. Despite the tentative budget agreement by the governor and the legislative leaders, there were still plenty of politics to play out in a session that continued long into the morning hours.
The bickering started early when the evening’s first measure, an omnibus budget bill that included a $1.2 billion cut in state prison funds, failed to immediately get the needed 27 votes.
While Republicans had complained that Democrats – and GOP Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger – wanted to make those cuts by granting early releases to some 27,000 inmates, it wasn’t the Republicans who stalled the vote.
Instead, it was Democrats, most notably Sen. Mark DeSaulnier of Concord, who wouldn’t support the bill.
In what won’t go down as a profile of political courage, DeSaulnier declined to vote even as Democrats looked desperately for someone to step up and do what was needed to pass the bill. After about an hour of delay and plenty of arm-twisting by Senate leaders, a pair of very conservative Southern California Republicans, George Runner and Tony Strickland, changed their “no” votes to “aye” to finally push the budget bill over the top.
As soon as it was clear his vote wouldn’t make a difference, DeSaulnier quickly voted “no.” It might just be a coincidence that DeSaulnier is in the middle of a tough primary battle for the East Bay congressional seat vacated by Ellen Tauscher, but ducking the prison vote lets him avoid being branded “soft on crime” in that special election.
There were plenty of other senators looking to score political points, even if it made a long night even longer. Republican Jeff Denham, for example, called for an amendment that would have barred any early release of prisoners, even after his own party’s leaders agreed to postpone the fight on the specifics of the prison deal until August.
Denham is running for lieutenant governor next year.
And other senators played the old political game of switching their vote after a bill passed with extra support. A number of Democrats, including Berkeley’s Loni Hancock, originally backed bills making cuts to health and social services, but changed their votes in protest once it was clear the bill could pass without them.
Those vote switches won’t make any difference to the state or the budget, but they are something to show supporters when the next election campaign rolls around, and that’s important to any politician.
John Wildermuth is a longtime writer on California politics.