Author: John Wildermuth

Backers of a new state Constitutional Convention have apparently decided that California’s voters can’t be trusted to decide what’s best for the state.

After nearly a year of pitching a convention as a chance for grassroots Californians to make the hard choices politicians won’t, the Bay Area Council has decided those average citizens shouldn’t have a chance to discuss whether the state needs more taxes.

“There are a whole bunch of reforms we can get to without touching tax increases,’’ John Grubb, a spokesman for the council, told the Capitol Weekly Monday.

In a convention, hundreds of people from across the state would get together to discuss ways to reform state government, hopefully coming up with solutions that would bring California’s government into the 21st century.

As a measure to change the rules for ballot initiatives wends its way through the Legislature, its supporters should remember that in politics, as in medicine, the most important rule is always, “First, do no harm.”

Although California’s $24.3 billion budget problem is still a long way from being solved, people across the state are trying to figure out who’s to blame for the financial mess and what can be done to stop it from happening again.

Everyone has a preferred group of villains and most of them are old favorites.

Republicans, for example, like to target those big-spending liberals and greedy unions for pushing the state budget into the red. Democrats would rather talk about those conservative budget slashers and their penchant for giving tax breaks to their buddies in the business community.

At the end of Tuesday’s final session of the Budget Conference Committee, Democratic Assemblywoman Noreen Evans of Santa Rosa thanked everyone but the cooks in the Capitol cafeteria for the fine job they’d done over the nearly four weeks of hearings on ways to close the $24.3 billion hole in next year’s state budget.

The six Democrats and four Republicans on the committee worked well together, she said, even through a “lively and comprehensive debate” on budget issues.

And what did all this bonhomie accomplish? Well, by the time the committee adjourned just after 7 p.m. last night, we had learned that one, the Legislature’s Republicans aren’t going to vote for taxes to close the budget gap and two, that Democrats are going to propose them anyway.

If 12 months ago you had told California legislators that by today they’d have a state budget passed and signed by the governor, it would have been deafening cheers and high fives all around.

After all, while the state Constitution calls for a balanced budget to be approved by the Legislature and sent to the governor by June 15, it hasn’t happened since 1986. Until this year.

But the celebrations are on hold as legislators and the governor wrangle over that 2009-10 budget in a financial fracas that threatens to be every bit as ugly as the battles that have filled Sacramento summers in years past.

For the tealeaf readers in the capital, the omens aren’t good for a quick solution to the $24.3 billion shortfall already forecast for the coming year.

For the glass-half-full crowd, there is a bit of good budget news coming out of Sacramento.

Buried in the red meat for the party faithful about raiding the planned budget reserve to save welfare, college scholarships and children’s health insurance, Darrell Steinberg, the Democratic leader in the state Senate, also said his caucus is willing to go along with $13 billion of the budget cuts proposed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

When you add that to the governor’s $8 billion in smoke and mirror funding (increased income tax withholding, a boost in estimated tax payments, various funding shifts and the like) that the Democrats never had any real problem with, you get a total of $21 billion in cuts.

Sure, that’s short of the estimated $24.3 billion hole in the 2009-10 budget, but it would go a long way toward solving the fiscal problem that’s threatening California’s financial future.

When Darrell Steinberg meets this morning with reporters to talk about the state budget, it might be the first time ever that a legislative leader was relieved to take questions from the press.

As tough as the questions may get, it’s still got to be a relief from the pasting the state Senate’s Democratic leader is taking from his erstwhile allies.

With the state facing a $24.3 billion hole in next year’s budget, Steinberg and Assembly Speaker Karen Bass face the no-fun-at-all job of convincing Democrats that the only way to keep the state out of the fiscal dumper is by slashing the very programs the party has fought for for years.

So far, it hasn’t gone well.

Well, that didn’t take long.

On Tuesday, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vowed that he wouldn’t take a dollar from education, health care, public safety or state parks “without first cutting the Waste Management Board.”

On Wednesday, Democrats on a joint legislative budget committee instead suggested boosting the waste board’s clout by giving it authority over a couple of environmental agencies that now report directly to the governor.

Just like that, the old Sacramento game of tit-for-tat, “if you cut my program, I’ll cut yours,” is back in operation. While it can be a good time for legislators – and governors – looking to score political points, it doesn’t solve California’s money problems very quickly, as the past few years of overdue budgets and unending partisan squabbling have shown.

On Wednesday, just couple of days after it was revealed that Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa was dating yet another local TV newscaster – this one a former Miss USA – the mayor told reporters that Californians don’t have any real interest in his personal life and that it won’t have any influence on whether or not he runs for governor next year.

The reporter, Lu Parker of KTLA-TV in Los Angeles, isn’t talking and a spokesman for the mayor’s office says there won’t be any comment on what the mayor does in his private time.

You know, just like the cops at a traffic accident: “Move along, move along, nothing to see here.’’

And yet people still stop and stare.

Does anyone really believe that when the final budget deals are signed, California is going to eliminate all welfare payments? What about red-penciling Cal Grant college scholarships? Or eliminating health insurance for low-income children?

Well, to listen to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s plans to close the state’s yawning $24 billion budget gap, he’s looking for the Legislature to make all those trims and more and get it done by the end of the month, please.

But does the governor really expect these particular cuts to be made, or is he trying to raise to raise a clamor from outraged Californians to show legislators just how grim the state’s budget situation really is?