The budget revision may be signed, but the fighting goes on.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger may be anxious to talk about something – make that anything – else, but when he decided to whack another $489 million from a spending agreement that took two months of strife to complete, he guaranteed that it will again be all budget, all the time when the Legislature gets back from its summer recess next month.
Speaking at the budget signing Tuesday, the governor said he had no other choice if he wanted to have a none-too-generous $500 million reserve fund in the 2009-10 budget. But Schwarzenegger stuck his thumb in the eye of the Legislature’s Democrats when he blue-penciled millions from health and welfare programs they had fought desperately to save.
And since he already had proposed most of the cuts in his original May revise, Schwarzenegger in essence told the Democrats “Thanks for your efforts, but I’ll take it from here.’’
That didn’t set well with Democrats, who complained that there was a reason the final budget deal didn’t include all the trims the governor had demanded.
“Most of these cuts were resoundingly rejected by the (budget) Conference Committee, after receiving days of input from the public,’’ fumed Democratic Assemblywoman Noreen Evans of Santa Rosa, who chaired that committee.
The legislators have only themselves to blame, Schwarzenegger said. When the Assembly refused to allow the state to “borrow” $1 billion from local government transportation funds and collect $100 million for new oil drilling rights off the Santa Barbara coast, there was no alternative but to slash deeper into the budget.
More cuts in things like child welfare services, the healthy families program and AIDS prevention efforts were tough but necessary, the governor said.
“Those are ugly cuts,’’ Schwarzenegger said. “And I’m the only one that really is responsible for those cuts because the legislators left (on vacation) and they didn’t want to make those cuts.’’
While the governor insisted that the cuts “are nothing to celebrate about,’’ there was a sense of satisfaction in his formal veto message. Time after time, he explained the new trims as “consistent with my May Revision proposals,’’ reminding legislators that he had told them these cuts would have to be made.
Democrats wasted no time in telling the governor that he was going to have a fight on his hands over the new reductions.
“We will fight to restore every dollar of additional cuts to health and human services,’’ Senate President pro Tem Darrell Steinberg said in a statement. “This is not the last word.’’
Democrats argue that the latest cuts are illegal, since the new spending plan approved by the Legislature merely revised the budget signed last February and didn’t include appropriations subject to Schwarzenegger’s line-item veto.
Not surprisingly, the governor disagrees, which is good news for the battalions of attorneys who will get to fight it out.
After a yearlong budget war, Schwarzenegger desperately wants to declare a truce so he can focus on issues like water and economic recovery.
But the bitterness behind the protests from Democrats, public employee unions and others slammed by the newest cuts make it unlikely any of them are going to let this slide by.
“People will suffer and die because of the cuts the governor made today,’’ Evans warned in her blog.
Even if all the interest groups were willing to forgive and forget, just about everyone in Sacramento knows that this revised budget provides at best a respite, not a solution. There’s still plenty of bad news to go around.
The governor’s final fixes include a $50 million loan from a state special fund that will have to be repaid. The state Department of Finance suggested Tuesday that deteriorating economic conditions could leave the state budget $8 billion in the red by the end of the fiscal year next June. Even Democrats like Steinberg are saying that the Legislature could be doing the whole deficit reduction dance again come January.
“We are not out of troubled waters yet,’’ the governor admitted. “We are ready, if our revenues drop further, to go and make the necessary cuts in order to live within our means.’’
And the battle begins anew.
John Wildermuth is a longtime writer on California politics.